by Hugh Manatee Wins » Tue May 16, 2006 4:18 am
*(No wonder our species is barely beginning to climb out of the barbarism pit. Children barely survive family abuse in much of the world. I just read that 90% of those diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder are women. Probably due to fathers and male relatives molesting them, I'd guess. History suggest so, too.<br>Much more at this site that must be read by Jeff and the RI regulars to see that Nazi-CIA MKUltra mind control tactics have old old roots based in gender and family roles. Which is why I say<br>'fascism is a male domination cult.'<br>-HMW)*<br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://psychohistory.com/htm/05_history.html">psychohistory.com/htm/05_history.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr> In several hundred studies published by myself and my associates in The Journal of Psychohistory, we have provided extensive evidence that the history of childhood has been a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes--and the further away from the West one gets--the more massive the neglect and cruelty one finds and the more likely children are to have been killed, rejected, beaten, terrorized and sexually abused by their caretakers.<br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Indeed, my conclusion from a lifetime of psychohistorical study of childhood and society is that the history of humanity is founded upon the abuse of children. </strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->Just as family therapists today find that child abuse often functions to hold families together as a way of solving their emotional problems, so, too, the routine assault of children has been society's most effective way of maintaining its collective emotional homeostasis. Most historical families once practiced infanticide, erotic beating and incest. Most states sacrificed and mutilated their children to relieve the guilt of adults. Even today, we continue to arrange the daily killing, maiming, molestation and starvation of children through our social, military and economic activities. <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>I would like to summarize here some of the evidence I have found as to why child abuse has been humanity's most powerful and most successful ritual, why it has been the cause of war and social violence, and why the eradication of child abuse and neglect is the most important social task we face today.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br>THE CHILD AS POISON CONTAINER<br>The main psychological mechanism that operates in all child abuse involves using children as what I have termed poison containers--receptacles into which adults project disowned parts of their psyches, so they can control these feelings in another body without danger to themselves.<br>....<br>In fact, I have found that rather than the incest taboo being universal--as anthropologists claim--it is incest itself that has been universal for most children in most cultures in most times. A childhood more or less free from adult sexual use is in fact a very late historical achievement, limited to a few fortunate children in a few modern nations. To give you some idea of the extensive evidence I have gathered for such an unlikely conclusion, I would like to begin by summarizing the evidence which exists for the sexual abuse of children around the world today.<br><br>THE SEXUAL ABUSE OF CHILDREN TODAY<br>In America, the most accurate scientific studies, based on lengthy interviews, report that 30 percent of men and 40 percent of women remember having been sexually molested during childhood---defining "molestation" as actual genital contact, not just exposure. About half of these are directly incestuous, with the family members, the other half usually being with others, but with the complicity of caretakers in at least 80 percent of the cases. These experiences of seduction are not just pieced together from fragmentary memories, but are remembered in detail, are usually for an extended period of time and have been confirmed by follow-up reliability studies in 83 percent of the cases, so they are unlikely to have been fantasies. The seductions occurred at much earlier ages than had been previously assumed, with 81 percent occurring before puberty and an astonishing 42 percent under age 7. As high as these molestation rates seem, however, they represent only a portion of the true rates, not only because those interviewed do not include populations that have been shown to have extremely high rates---such as criminals, prostitutes, juveniles in shelters, psychotics, etc.--but also because only conscious memories were counted, and the earliest seductions of children are almost never remembered except during psychotherapy. Adjusting statistically for what is known about these additional factors, I have concluded that the real sexual abuse rate for America is 60 percent for girls and 45 percent for boys, about half of these directly incestuous.<br><br>Other Western nations have made fewer careful studies. A recent Canadian study by Gallup of 2,000 adults has produced incidence rates almost exactly the same as those found in the United States. Latin American family sexual activity--particularly widespread pederasty as part of macho sexuality--is considered even more widespread. In England, a recent BBC "ChildWatch" program asked its female listeners--a large though admittedly biased sample--if they remembered sexual molestation, and, of the 2,530 replies analyzed, 83 percent remembered someone touching their genitals, 62 percent recalling actual intercourse. In Germany, the Institut für Kindheit has recently concluded a survey asking West Berlin schoolchildren about their sexual experiences, and 80 percent reported having been molested.<br><br>Outside the West, the sexual molestation of children is a routine practice in most families. Childhood in India begins, according to observers, with the child being regularly masturbated by the mother, the girl "to make her sleep well," the boy "to make him manly." The child sleeps in the family bed, witnesses and most likely takes part in sexual intercourse between the parents. The child is often "borrowed" to sleep with other members of the extended household, leading to the Indian proverb that "For a girl to be a virgin at ten years old, she must have neither brothers nor cousin nor father." <br>....<br>Clearly, different groups have moved different distances up the ladder of psychological evolution, since some contemporary groups still practice brain-eating as our Paleolithic ancestors did, and different subgroups of our more advanced nations still terrorize and abuse their children in ways identical to those that were commonplace centuries ago, producing the "historical fossils" (early "psychoclasses") we now call borderline personalities and other severe character disorders. Your neighbor is as likely to be a result of medieval parenting as of modern parenting, so modern societies contain a full range of childrearing modes and psychoclasses. The "generational pressure" for psychological change is not only an independent historical force--originating in inborn adult-child striving for relationship--it occurs independent of social and technological change, and can be found even in periods of economic stagnation. <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>My "psychogenic theory of history" posits that a society's childrearing practices are not just one item in a list of cultural traits, but--because all other traits must be passed down from generation to generation through the narrow funnel of childhood--instead makes childrearing the very basis for the transmission and development of all other cultural traits, placing definite limits on what can be achieved in the material spheres of history.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> The main source of childhood evolution is, I believe, the process I call psychogenesis, by which parents--mainly the mother for most of history--revisit a second time around the stages of childhood and undo to some extent the traumas they themselves endured. It is in this sense that history is like a psychotherapy of the generations, undoing trauma and giving historical personality a chance at a new start with every baby born. Only humans have brain networks that allow this miracle to take place. All cultural changes in the past 100,000 years of Homo sapiens sapiens are epigenetic, not genetic. Regardless of changes in the environment, it is only when changes in childhood occur that epigenetic changes in the brain can occur and societies can begin to progress and move in unpredictable new directions that are more adaptive. That more individuated and loving individuals are ultimately more adaptive is understandable--because they are less under the pressures of infantile traumas and are therefore more rational in reaching their goals. But that this childhood evolution--and therefore all social evolution--is terribly uneven is also understandable, given the varying conditions under which parents all over the world have to conduct their childrearing tasks. <hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br> <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=hughmanateewins>Hugh Manatee Wins</A> at: 5/16/06 2:25 am<br></i>
