Foundations of Psychohistory

by Lloyd DeMause

The basic principles of psychohistory, the study of historical motivation. Beginning with the author's famous study of "The Evolution of Childhood" and continuing through such studies as "Historical Group-Fantasies" and "The Fetal Origins of History," this pioneering book has become the standard text for most psychohistory courses around the world.

Genres: Psychology, History, Psychohistory, Nonfiction, Sociology

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

DeMause has made major contributions to the study of Psychohistory which is the study of the psychological motivations of historical events. It seeks to understand the emotional origin of the social and political behavior of groups and nations, past and present. Its subject matter is childhood and the family (especially child abuse), and psychological studies of anthropology and ethnology.

In a 1994 interview with deMause in The New Yorker, the interviewer wrote: "To buy into psychohistory, you have to subscribe to some fairly woolly assumptions [...], for instance, that a nations's child-rearing techniques affect its foreign policy".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd_de...

Reviews

[Kressel Housman · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I read this book for a college class, I bought the thesis hook, line, and sinker. I haven't read it since then, but life experience has modified my opinion somewhat. But even if this book isn't "absolute truth," there's more than just a grain of it here.

The thesis is this: people make history, and parenting makes people. Therefore, parenting styles have the single greatest effect on history than anything else. The kinds of economic and political conditions we create are a result of the kinds of people we are and not vice versa. And so history can be interpreted by the evolution of parenting trends.

Adulthood has shown me that there's much more of a give-and-take between the grand political scene and individual families than this book would have it, but it is a very interesting interpretation of history. Though the author comes from a Freudian model, he argues his case well, and it convinced me at a decently young age that the best thing I could do for world peace was to improve my own psyche, which I think was a valuable lesson. (Too bad I went about it the wrong way for so long.)

Warning: The first chapter of this book, "The History of Childhood," is one of the most disturbing things I've ever read. It might as well have been called "The History of Child Abuse."

[Ivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Considering that the book was written sometime between 1975 and 1978, his interpretations of the past events are amazingly accurate, in the scope of our actual knowledge. The image of calamitous childhood is, however, not without bias and the section dedicated to psychohistory isn't free of the responses to ad-hominem attacks against on the author, which I've found a little disappointing. I would very much like to see an updated version of the 'Foundations', and maybe read new psychohistorian research reports, based on evidence gathered or uncovered during 30 years of research and archaeological exploration, unlike the first chapters, founded upon Greek and Roman classics most entirely. It gives an interesting point of view without delving in pop-psychology and complete support of the obsolete Freudian views. Overall it raises more questions that it answers and, like many other research results makes our world comprehensible, but at the same time, frightening, because of the underlying irrational motivations of human societies and what those motivations mean to a less-than-sufficiently well-off average human of a latest psychoclass.

[Brad Acker]

Lloyd DeMause is a pioneering polymath in a field largely ignored by the departmental bueaucratic structures of major American universities. DeMause provides the lens by which we can view history from the private lives of individuals, especially their childhoods, and see how personal histories cause public stage catastrophes and violence. Whenever i read DeMause, i feel mentally stimulated and need to take a walk on the beach to reflect on my perspectives.

[Anna Biller · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this book, Lloyd DeMause documents the history of child rearing (read: abuse) throughout history, providing a forceful argument about how shockingly poorly children have been treated throughout history, and how the treatment of its children has a direct bearing on the violence (or inversely the progressiveness) of any given society. According to DeMause, Germany was considerably behind the rest of the world in its treatment of children prior to World War II, and America and Great Britain were considerably ahead (German parents regularly beating their children, and American parents regularly being indulgent towards them), and that this was partly the reason for the values of those countries and what they were willing to fight for during the war. DeMause lists many more examples, ancient and modern.

It's an interesting thesis, and one which I can't really comment on. But the knowledge of how badly children have historically been treated was really eye-opening, and although I read this book years ago it's something I have never forgotten and that I often ponder about, especially when I'm reading history books or old novels. For instance, the way children used to be swaddled so tightly they couldn't move their limbs at all, and then be thrown around like a football for sport, sometimes dropping to the floor to their deaths, and the way children (even royal princes) used to be regularly and openly sexually abused by anyone who wanted to. In other words, children were literally objects, not thought to have a consciousness or to be affected by anything that happened to them before they were able to defend themselves. You can imagine what types of adults this kind of treatment produced! This is what De Mause calls "Psychohistory."

[Lily Ribeiro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Groundbreaking