The History of Childhood

Description

Possibly the heartless treatment of children, from the practice of infanticide and abandonment through to the neglect, the rigors of swaddling, the purposeful starving, the beatings, the solitary confinement, and so on, was and is only one aspect of the basic aggressiveness and cruelty of human nature, of the inbred disregard of the rights and feelings of others. Children, being physically unable to resist aggression, were the victims of forces over which they had no control, and they were abused in many imaginable and some almost unimaginable ways by way of expressing conscious or more commonly unconscious motives of their elders. . . The present volume abounds in evidence of all kinds, from all periods and peoples. The story is monotonously painful, but it is high time that it should be told and that it should be taken into account. . . "Brilliant . . . bold . . . challenging . . . heavily documented." —The New York Review Of Books "Crucial in understanding how the wounded child is archetypal of our time." —John Bradshaw "Neither history nor psychiatry can ever be the same again. A turning point in the integration of the social sciences." —Reuben Fine, Ph.D. "Lloyd deMause is probably the first scholar who has made a thorough study of the history of childhood without glossing over the facts." —Alice Miller Lloyd DeMause has made major contributions to the study of Psychohistory which is the study of the psychological motivations of historical events. It seeks to understand the emotional origin of the social and political behavior of groups and nations, past and present. Its subject matter is childhood and the family (especially child abuse), and psychological studies of anthropology and ethnology. In a 1994 interview with deMause in The New Yorker, the interviewer wrote: "To buy into psychohistory, you have to subscribe to some fairly woolly assumptions [...], for instance, that a nations's child-rearing techniques affect its foreign policy".