by Dreams End » Mon Jan 16, 2006 12:43 pm
I would be interested if anyone has any well substantiated opinions about Lloyd DeMause. He created "psychohistory", looking at history through the lens of individual psychology. So far, I haven't been persuaded that there's nearly as much meat on THAT particular bone, but I'm just beginning to read some of his work. Here's a short essay: <!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.nospank.net/demause1.htm">www.nospank.net/demause1.htm</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>HOWEVER, the basis of his theory is that child abuse, sexual and physical, has been vastly understated...both in the present and throughout history. He makes a very good case with this side of his argument, finding all sorts of evidence that children have been treated horribly throughout history and finding optimism at the improvement (though limited...he's very particular to point out abuse rates to day as well.) I mean, he finds that in the past and even today, physical and sexual abuse is more likely present in a majority of families. <br><br>I was interested in his explanation about Freud, for example. (DeMause seems to operate from a Freudian perspective...but without the drawback that he addresses in this passage, namely, I'd always heard that Freud had found so many cases of patients' remembering sexual abuse that he simply had decided that they were "seduction fantasies." Well, that's not the way it went at all, according to Demause.)<br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>When Sigmund Freud discovered that eighteen of his hysterical pa-tients had conscious memories of childhood sexual seductions, mostly by family members, he faced a theoretical impasse.(16) Since he believed only repressed memories could produce hysterical symptoms, the easily accessible detailed memories of his patients could not be the real cause of their hysteria. He therefore concluded that there must in each case have been an earlier seduction, the memory of which was repressed, generally occurring between the ages of two and five and never later than eight. These early scenes had to be reconstructed from fantasies and dreams, and even when Freud pieced them together for the patient, he admitted, "they have no feeling of remembering the scenes."(17)<br><br>These earlier infantile reconstructions, Freud quite correctly decided in 1897, were "scenes of seduction [that] had never taken place. ..they were only phantasies which my patients had made up or which I myself had perhaps forced on them."(1<!--EZCODE EMOTICON START 8) --><img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/glasses.gif ALT="8)"><!--EZCODE EMOTICON END--> But the clear memories of seduction in later childhood and adolescence that his patients had spontaneously reported to him and about which they had strong reality feelings, he never doubted - contrary to the assertions of critics like Masson and Miller, who claim Freud lost his courage and denied that any incest had actually taken place.(19) The particular theory of hysteria which he admitted "broke down under the weight of its own improbability" (20) was the infantile seduction theory and did not imply any doubting of his patients' memories of real incest.<br><br>For the rest of his life, in fact, Freud reiterated his belief that these clear memories of incestuous attacks were real. In 1905 he wrote, "I can-not admit that in my paper on 'The Aetiology of Hysteria' I exaggerated the frequency or importance of.. the effects of seduction, which treats a child as a sexual object prematurely..." (21) Later, he repeatedly wrote such statements as that "the sexual abuse of children is found with uncanny frequency among school teachers and child attendants.. and phantasies of being seduced are of particular interest, because so often they are not phantasies but real memories." (22) Furthermore, he considered the incestuous memories of such patients as Katharina, Rosalia H., Elisabeth von R. and the Wolf Man as reality, not fantasy, saying of such traumatic child abuse "You must not suppose.. that sexual abuse of a child by its nearest male relatives belongs entirely to the realm of phan-tasy. Most analysts will have treated cases in which such events were real and could be unimpeachably established..."(23) He even called his own memories "genuine" of having been sexually molested as a little boy by his nurse, who had not only forced him to perform sexually and, he reported, "complained because I was clumsy," but also, he said, washed him in water that contained her own menstrual blood. (24)<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br>That quote is from a long piece about his trials trying to get his theories published and reviewed fairly: <!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/06a1_incest.html">www.psychohistory.com/htm...ncest.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>Basically, his thesis is that if we can "evolve" our child rearing, and he finds some hope that it is, in fact, evolving, social ills such as wars will go away. I think maybe this is a bit too simplistic. But I have been feeling that the "nightmare of childhood" as he terms it (primarily referring to humanity's long history of horrific treatment of children) is part of what lies beyond our "matrix". It has occurred to me that, if this stuff is really widespread as he says, (and so far, he hasn't gone much into organized networks or anything, primarily family and extended family abuse), and since there's not nearly so much indication of its existence at that level in our daily conversations, our media, our books...then it is part of a hidden ground, buried deeply by denial and "repression" that underlies much of our society. We are, individually and societally, shaped profoundly by a phenomenon that we refuse to acknowledge even exists.<br><br>I know we discuss all kinds of things about which society is in denial, and certainly this site gets into child abuse as one of those...but what about the idea that what we call child abuse is actually, especially in the past, but even now, actually "normal." Normal, here, I use without any moral content...just to express the idea that it's simply part of the experience of a very large percentage of society. <br><br>He also points out that, as far as pedophilia goes, it is the highly moralistic types who tend to get involved...which is why you get such abuse happening in church settings, etc. This adds to the amazing level of denial.<br><br>In fact, I'm almost more interested in the role denial plays in shaping society than the role played by the abuse.<br><br>Anyway, discuss if you have views. Is his estimate of the prevalence of abuse past and present too high? Is he full of crap? All opinions (if you've read anything by him) welcome.<br><br> <p></p><i></i>
