Dear Lloyd,
I am *very* interested in seeing this issue, working as I am on childhood in
late-medieval England. My institutional address is:
Department of English
U of Alaska Anchorage
3211 Providence Drive
Anchorage, Alaska 99508
Thanks for your kind offer.
Dan Kline
U of Alaska Anchorage
Lloyd deMause wrote:
>
> 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
> Email: [log in to unmask]
> 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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