In the Winter 2000 issue of The Journal of Psychohistory, German childhood
historian Ralph Frenken details the results of his examination of 70 German
medieval autobiographies in his article "Changes in German Parent-Child
Relations from the Fourteenth to the Middle of the Seventeenth Century."
Comments by noted medieval historians follow his article.
I have printed extra copies of this exciting and important issue for
history-child-family subscribers and would be pleased to send one gratis to
anyone who emailed me their postal address.
Lloyd deMause, Editor
The Journal of Psychohistory
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Website: <www.psychohistory.com>
An excerpt from the Frenken issue:
"AGE AT FIRST SEPARATION FROM THE FAMILY
This variable serves to illustrate the fact that children of
earlier times were much more frequently and at a much earlier time
separated from the family. The severity of an experience of abandonment
depends on several factors such as age of the child, length of separation,
psychological aspects of the parent surrogates, quality of institutions to
which the children are given, etc. Within the sample, "durable" means more
than 6 months. (For subjects No. 1-5, 8 and 12, separation means years or
abandonment forever). The experience of abandonment of the 10-year-old
Butzbach to a "traveling scholar" who used him as a beggar surely was much
harder than the experience of the 7-year-old Sibenhar, who was given to a
relative and got a good academic education there. These qualitative aspects
must be kept in mind while I use only a rough quantitative measurement
here. Only two autobiographers had no experience with abandonment or
separation from the family before the age of 14, respectively: Felix
Platter and Birken. The former was supposed to be given away, but the
surrogate father died.
Table 2 shows that abandonment has to do with or was facilitated in the
case of the death of a parent. This holds for four of the nine abandonment
cases (counting Soest as a special case). All the early abandonments
(before the age of 6 years) are combined with the loss of a parent.
Obviously, the emotional stress in connection with the death of a spouse,
and the remarriage that always happened very soon, led to the expulsion of
the children. This can be interpreted as a weak bonding to the child or a
refusal to have a relationship with it under stressful conditions,
respectively. This means that the trauma of loss becomes combined with the
trauma of abandonment."
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