Lloyd deMause
American thinker (1931–2020)
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Lloyd deMause (pronounced de-Moss; September 19, 1931 – April 23, 2020) was an American lay psychoanalyst and social historian, best known for his pioneering work in the field of psychohistory.
Lloyd deMause | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | September 19, 1931 Detroit, Michigan, U.S. |
| Died | April 23, 2020 (aged 88) |
| Occupation | Psychohistorian |
He graduated from Columbia College and did graduate work in political science at Columbia University and later trained as a psychoanalyst. He taught psychohistory at the City University of New York. He is the founder of the Association for Psychohistory,[1] which publishes the Journal of Psychohistory.
Psychohistory
Beginning in the 1970s, DeMause began conceiving of psychohistory, a field of study of the psychological motivations of historical events, and their associated patterns of behavior. It seeks to understand the emotional origin of the social and political behavior of groups and nations—past and present—by analyzing events in childhood and the family, especially child abuse.
Psychogenic Modes Proposed by Lloyd deMause
DeMause proposed a taxonomy of six historical childrearing styles, which he termed psychogenic modes, arguing that parental capacity for empathy has increased progressively over the course of history and that these shifts have produced corresponding changes in psychological development and social behavior.[2] Each mode, in deMause's framework, produces a distinct psychoclass, a type of personality formed by a particular childrearing environment and transmitted to subsequent generations through parenting practices.[3] In the opening paragraph of "The Evolution of Childhood," the lead chapter of The History of Childhood (1974),[4] deMause wrote:
The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes, the lower the level of childcare, and the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorized and sexually abused.
The six modes, in deMause's chronological sequence from earliest to most recent, are as follows
| Mode | Childrearing characteristics | Historical manifestations (per deMause) |
|---|---|---|
| Infanticidal | Ritual sacrifice of children; high infanticide rates; incest; bodily mutilation; rape of children. Selective killing of female newborns prominent. | Documented, in deMause's account, among tribal societies, Mesoamerican civilizations, and the Inca; in Assyrian and Canaanite religious practice; and among Phoenicians, Carthaginians, and other early states. deMause distinguished a "late" variant, associated with classical Greeks and Romans, in which outright infanticide gave way to selective exposure of unwanted newborns. |
| Abandoning | Routine infanticide replaced by abandonment; prolonged swaddling; wet-nursing; children placed in monasteries or apprenticeships; fosterage. | Associated by deMause with early Christian societies; he argued that the theological concept of original sin functionally displaced sacrificial practice while leaving children exposed to sexual abuse in monastic and domestic settings.[5] |
| Ambivalent | Children permitted to survive but frequently rejected emotionally; early child-instruction manuals appeared; rudimentary child- protection laws introduced; children treated as erotic objects by adults. | Associated with the later Middle Ages; deMause linked the emergence of this mode to the generation immediately preceding the Renaissance.[3] |
| Intrusive | Parents attempted to control rather than abandon children; early toilet training; repression of child sexuality; swaddling and wet- nursing declined; Puritan and Calvinist disciplinary literature proliferated.[3] | Associated with sixteenth-century Europe, particularly England. deMause argued that the decline of swaddling and wet-nursing in this period contributed to accelerated scientific development. |
| Socializing | Parents sought to instill internalized values and obedience rather than to control the body directly; guilt, humiliation, and compulsory schooling employed; corporal punishment with objects and religious hellfire threats diminished; fathers began to participate in younger children's upbringing. | Associated with the eighteenth century onward. deMause identified this as the dominant model of child-rearing in North America and Western Europe as of the early 1970s.[3] |
| Helping | Parents adopted a role of supporting children toward the child's own developmental goals rather than socializing them into fulfilling parental expectations; physical punishment absent; unconditional expression of affection emphasized. | Associated by deMause with a minority of parents in Western societies from the mid-twentieth century. Correlated in his account with the children's rights movement, natural childbirth, attachment parenting, and related practices.[3] |
deMause presented the sequence as applying to what he characterized as the most advanced Western nations, while noting that earlier modes persist alongside later ones in all societies. He cited reports of selective abandonment and exposure of female infants in parts of Asia and North Africa as evidence that infanticidal- mode practices remained active as of the 1970s.[2] deMause argued that the five modes preceding the helping mode are associated with the development of psychological disorders ranging from psychoses to neuroses.[3]
The psychogenic mode sequence is illustrated in Foundations of Psychohistory with the chart shown above. The chart visualizes the estimated chronological emergence of each mode in what deMause termed the most advanced nations, derived from contemporary accounts in historical records.[3]
deMause argued that if the helping mode were to become universal, interpersonal violence, war, and magical thinking would diminish correspondingly, as the psychological conflicts generated by abusive childrearing would cease to be transmitted across generations.[3]
The Concept of Group Fantasy
Alongside his childhood history framework, deMause developed the concept of group fantasy — a collective psychological phenomenon in which a psychoclass's shared childhood experiences and the conflicts arising from them are expressed in political behavior, religious practice, and other aspects of social life. deMause treated group fantasy as the mechanism linking childhood psychology to historical events at the level of nations and movements.[3]
Publications
DeMause published over 90 scholarly articles and several books.
Books
- DeMause, Lloyd (1974). The History of Childhood. New York: Harper and Row. ISBN 0061318485.
- DeMause, Lloyd (1975). A Bibliography of Psychohistory. Vol. 2. New York: Garland Pub. pp. 517–62. ISBN 9780824099992. PMID 11614558.
{{cite book}}:|journal=ignored (help) - DeMause, Lloyd (1975). The New Psychohistory. New York: Psychohistory Press. ISBN 0-914434-01-2.
- Ebel, Henry; DeMause, Lloyd (1977). Jimmy Carter and American Fantasy: Psychohistorical Explorations. New York: Two Continents. ISBN 0-8467-0363-7.
- DeMause, Lloyd (1982). Foundations of Psychohistory. New York: Creative Roots. ISBN 0-940508-01-X.
- DeMause, Lloyd (1984). Reagan's America. New York: Creative Roots. ISBN 0-940508-02-8.
- DeMause, Lloyd (1995). The History of Childhood (reprint). Northvale, New Jersey: Jason Aronson. ISBN 1-56821-551-7.
- DeMause, Lloyd (2002). The Emotional Life of Nations. New York: Karnac. ISBN 1-892746-98-0.
- DeMause, Lloyd (2010). The Origins of War in Child Abuse. The Institute for Psychohistory.
Articles (selection)
- DeMause, Lloyd (1974): The Evolution of Childhood. In: History of Childhood Quarterly: The Journal of Psychohistory, 1 (4), p. 503-575. (Comments and reply: p. 576-606)
- DeMause, Lloyd (1987): The History of Childhood in Japan. In: The Journal of Psychohistory, 15 (2), p. 147-151.
- DeMause, Lloyd (1988): On Writing Childhood History. In: The Journal of Psychohistory, 16 (2), p. 35-71.
- DeMause, Lloyd (1989): The Role of Adaptation and Selection in Psychohistorical Evolution. In: The Journal of Psychohistory, 16 (4), p. 355-372 (Comments and reply: p. S. 372–404).
- DeMause, Lloyd (1990): The History of Child Assault. In: The Journal of Psychohistory, 18 (1), p. 1-29.
- DeMause, Lloyd (1991): The Universality of Incest. In: The Journal of Psychohistory, 19 (1), p. 123-164.
- DeMause, Lloyd (1997): The Psychogenic Theory of History. In: The Journal of Psychohistory, 25 (1), p. 112-183.