List members will be interested in reading the chapter "Childhood and
Cultural Evolution" from my book "Childhood and History" which is posted on
our website <www.psychohistory.com> A selection from it introducing the
concept of "hopeful daughters" follows.
Lloyd deMause
"The task of fathering-of playing a real role in forming a child's
psyche-is in fact a very late historical invention. Most fathers among our
closest ape relatives don't have much to do with their children, and a
nurturing role during early childhood for the human father turns out to be
a far more recent historical innovation than has heretofore been assumed.
The major epigenetic changes in the structures of the brain, therefore,
have mainly been evolved by females, not males. Fathers until recently have
affected their children's psyches mainly through family provisioning and by
establishing some of the conditions for mothering, but it has mainly been
the mothers who have produced epigenetic novelty; so to discover the laws
of cultural evolution one must "follow the mothers" through history. This
is why only the psychogenic theory posits that for most of history women
and children are the ultimate source of historical change.
THE "HOPEFUL DAUGHTER" AND THE PSYCHOGENIC CUL-DE-SAC
Since for most of history mothers raise boys who then go off and
hunt, farm, build things and fight wars rather than directly contributing
much new to the psyche of the next generation, the course of evolution of
the psyche has overwhelmingly been dependent upon the way mothers have
treated their daughters, who become the next generation of mothers. Since
early emotional relationships organize the entire range of human behavior,
all cultural traits do not equally affect the evolution of the psyche-those
that affect the daughter's psyche represent the main narrow bottleneck
through which all other cultural traits must pass. The study of the
evolution of the psyche depends more on developing a maternal ecology than
on studying variations in the physical environment.
The evolution of the psyche and culture has been crucially
dependent upon turning the weak bonds between mother and daughter of apes
and early humans into genuine love for daughters (and sons). This means
that historical societies that create optimal conditions for improving the
crucial mother-daughter relationship by surrounding the mother with support
and love soon begin to show psychological innovation and cultural advances
in the next generations-so that history begins to move in progressive new
directions. In contrast, societies that cripple the mother-daughter
emotional relationship experience psychogenic arrest and even psychogenic
devolution. Only in modern times have fathers, too, begun to contribute to
the evolutionary task of growing the young child's mind.
Paralleling the term "hopeful monster" that biologists use to
indicate speciating biological variations, the idea that the
mother-daughter emotional relationship is the focal point of epigentic
evolution and the main source of novelty in the psyche can be called the
"hopeful daughter" concept. When mothers love and support particularly
their daughters, a series of generations can develop new childrearing
practices that grow completely new neuronal networks, hormonal systems and
behavioral traits. If hopeful daughters are instead emotionally crippled by
a society, a psychogenic cul-de-sac is created, generations of mothers
cannot innovate, epigenetic arrest is experienced and meaningful cultural
evolution ends.
For instance, in China before the tenth century A.D. men began to
footbind little girls'feet as a sexual perversion, making them into sexual
fetishes, penis-substitutes which the men would suck on and masturbate
against during sex play. Chinese literature reports the screaming cries of
the five-year-old girl as she hobbles about the house for years to do her
tasks while her feet are bound, because in order to make her foot tiny, her
foot bones are broken and the flesh deteriorates. She loses several toes as
they are bent under her foot, to emphasize the big toe as a female penis.
This practice was added to the many brutal practices of what was perhaps
the world's most anti-daughter culture, where over half the little girls
were murdered at birth without remorse and special girl-drowning pools were
legion, where beating little girls until bloody was a common parental
practice, and where girl rape and sex slavery were rampant. This vicious
anti-daughter emotional atmosphere-extreme even for a time that was
generally cruel and unfeeling towards daughters-was obviously not conducive
to mothers producing innovations in childrearing when the little girls grew
up. Therefore China-which was culturally ahead of the West in many ways at
the time of the introduction of footbinding-became culturally and
politically "frozen" until the twentieth century, when footbinding was
stopped and boy-girl sex ratios in many areas dropped from 200/100 to near
equality. The result was that whereas for much of its history China
punished all novelty, during the twentieth century rapid cultural,
political and economic evolution could resume. Japan, which shared much of
Chinese culture but did not adopt footbinding of daughters, avoided the
psychogenic arrest of China and could therefore share in the scientific and
industrial revolution as it occurred in the West.
The same kind of epigenetic arrest can be seen in the damage caused
by genital mutilation of girls among circum-Mediterranean peoples that
began thousands of years ago and continues today. Since "hopeful daughters"
do not thrive on the chopping off of their clitorises and labias, the
present cultural and political problems of those groups who still mutilate
their daughters' genitals are very much a direct result of this psychogenic
arrest. Much of the remainder of this chapter will analyze the conditions
for psychogenic arrest, when childrearing has failed to evolve and culture
remains in a psychogenic cul-de-sac, static for millennia.
The historical evolution of the psyche is a process that mainly
involves removing developmental distortions, so that each psyche can
develop in its own way optimally. The evolution of childhood, as will be
extensively documented, mainly consists of parents slowly giving up
killing, abandoning, mutilating, battering, terrorizing, sexually abusing
and using their children for their own emotional needs and instead creating
loving conditions for growth of the self. The evolution of the psyche is
first of all accomplished by removing terrible abuses of children and their
resulting developmental distortions, allowing the psyche to produce
historical novelty and achieve its own inherent human growth path.
Civilization is not, as everyone including Freud has assumed, a historical
"taming of the instincts." Nor does "the evolution of mankind proceed from
bad to worse," as Roheim thought, with early societies being "indulgent"
toward their children and modern societies more often abusive. It will be
the burden of the remainder of this book to provide evidence that just the
reverse is true, that culture evolves through the increase of love and
freedom for children, so that when they grow up they can invent more
adaptive and happier ways of living. Because we were all children before we
were adults, childhood evolution must precede social evolution,
psychogenesis must precede sociogenesis."
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