The Winter 1999 issue of The journal of Psychohistory is now out, featuring
an 82-page article by myself on "Childhood and Cultural Evolution," which
provides evidence that childhood has changed not because of genetic
evolution but because of "epigentic" evolution, changes in brain structure
rooted in enormous historical changes in parent-child relations. I would be
pleased to send a copy of this issue -- which also contains articles on
"German Childhood History" and other history of childhood topics -- to
anyone in any country who emails me their postal address.

Lloyd deMause
Editor, The Journal of Psychohistory
<[log in to unmask]>

Selection from "Childhood and Cultural Evolution" article:


THE EVOLUTION OF PARENTING
     Most parents through most of history relate to their children most of
the time as though the children were poison containers, receptacles into
which they project disowned parts of their psyches. In good parenting, the
child uses its caretaker as a poison container-as it earlier used its
mother's placenta to cleanse its poisonous blood-the good mother reacting
with calming behavior to the cries of her baby, helping it "detoxify" its
anxieties. But when an immature mother's baby cries, she cannot stand it,
and strikes out at the child. As one battering mother put it, "I have never
felt loved all my life. When my baby was born, I thought it would love me.
When it cried, it meant it didn't love me. So I hit him." The child is so
full of the parent's projections that it must be tightly tied up (swaddled
in bandages) for its first year to prevent it from "tearing its ears off,
scratching its eyes out, breaking its legs, or touching its genitals"
-i.e., to prevent it from acting out the violent and sexual projections of
the parents.
     The child historically is usually either experienced as a persecutory
parent ("When he screams he sounds just like my mother") or as a guilty
self ("He keeps wanting things all the time"). Either way, the child must
either be strictly controlled, hit or rejected, usually in ways that
restage the childrearing methods of the grandparent. Since the grandmother
is historically so often present in the home, strictly controlling the
childrearing, it is doubly difficult to break old patterns.
     Psychogenesis takes place when parents empathize with the needs of
their child and, instead of restaging their own traumatic childhood, invent
new ways of handling their anxieties so the child can grow and individuate
in his or her own way. When a mother regresses to be able to experience her
baby's discomfort and determine if it is hungry or wet or just wants to
crawl, she reexperiences her own infancy and her own mother's fears of
starving (for love) or wanting to explore and grow, and-given some support
by her husband-the mother can take the enormous step of making a space for
the child to crawl rather than tying it up in its swaddling bands. The
process is much like the process of psychotherapy: a regression to early
anxieties and a working through of them the second time around in a better
manner. Psychogenesis occurs at the interface between caretaker and child.
It is a private, joint process, a "psychotherapy of generations" that cures
parental anxiety about growth and reduces childhood traumas...when it
occurs. Psychogenesis isn't inevitable, so the psychogenic theory isn't
teleological. There are in all modern nations many parents who have not
evolved very much and who are still extremely abusive. In fact, there are
whole cultures that did not evolve in parenting, for reasons which we will
examine. But the "generational pressure" of psychogenesis-the ability of
human parents to innovate better ways of childrearing and for children to
strive for relationship and growth-is everywhere present, and is an
independent source of change in historical personality, allowing humans to
"bootstrap" new neuronal networks that are more evolved than those of our
ancestors.
     Because psychic structure must always be passed from generation to
generation through the narrow funnel of childhood, a society's childrearing
practices are not just one item in a list of cultural traits. They are the
very condition for the transmission and development of all other traits,
and place definite limits on what can be achieved in any culture. This is
explicitly denied by other theories of cultural change, which can be summed
up in Steward's dicta: "Personality is shaped by culture, but it has never
been shown that culture is affected by personality." The final three
chapters of this book will document how every political, religious and
social trait is sustained by specific childhood experiences and how changes
in personality through childrearing evolution determine the course of all
historical change.
     Progress in childrearing evolution may be extremely uneven, but the
trends are nonetheless unmistakable. The overall direction is from
projection to empathy, from discipline to self-regulation, from hitting to
explaining, from incest to love, from rejection to overcontrol and then to
independence. The result is a series of closer approaches between adult and
child, producing a healing of the splitting caused by extreme
traumas-historical personalities slowly evolving from schizoid mechanisms
and separate alters that are the results of earlier childrearing modes.
Thus unity of personality and individuation is a historical achievement,
only attained by some after thousands of generations of parents have slowly
evolved better ways of helping children grow.
     It should be possible to even measure quantitatively-in terms of hours
per day, in terms of money, in terms of some more meaningful measure-the
amount and even the quality of parenting effort a society devotes to its
children. Just the sheer cost of raising a child in dollars has been going
up so fast that it now costs a middle-class American family $1.5 million
for each child to be raised to age 22 years, up 20 percent in the past
three decades. The families I know in my section of Manhattan easily devote
over half of their spare time and at least half their disposable income to
their children. Compare this to the small fraction of parents' time and
money given over to children in earlier centuries-with children even
spending most of their lives working for adults in various ways-and one can
begin to comprehend the overall direction of childrearing evolution. Even
today, child abuse is highly correlated with income, with children in homes
with incomes below $15,000 being 22 times more likely to be physically
abused, 18 times more likely to be sexually abused, and 56 times more
likely to be neglected than those with family incomes exceeding $30,000.
     Because psychogenesis is such a private process, it is rarely recorded
in historical documents. Most of the documentation of what it feels like to
go beyond one's own childrearing is found in mothers' letters and diaries
beginning in the early modern period. Until then, it had been the habit of
most mothers who could afford it to send their children to wetnurse, where
they were left for several years:

                     Parents of any position saw little of their children,
who were taken from
                     their mother at birth and given in charge of a
foster-mother till the age of
                     five, when they were sent to college or to a convent
until marriage was
                     arranged.

     It was in England and America where well-to-do mothers first began to
experiment with nursing their own children, being well aware that most
children died at nurse because of lack of care and poor conditions. These
mothers wrote to each other letters about the joys of doing the nursing
themselves, how babies during breastfeeding "kisseth [the mother], strokes
her haire, nose and eares [causing] an affection" to grow between mother
and infant. If the husband objects, saying his wife's breast belongs to
him, he should be asked to hold the baby and he'll be delighted too. In
France, by contrast, the police chief of Paris estimated as late as 1780
that only 700 out of the 21,000 children born each year in his city were
nursed by their mothers, most being sent out to French wetnurses, termed
"professional feeders and professional killers." As early as the
seventeenth century, a Frenchman observed: "They have an extraordinary
regard in England for young children, always flattering, always caressing,
always applauding what they do; at least it seems so to us French folks..."
Since England led the rest of Europe in ending swaddling, wetnursing and
battering their children, it is no accident that soon after it also led the
world in science, political democracy and industrialization.






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