This
version was orignally in:
The Journal of Psychohistory
V. 25, N. 2, Fall 1997
"Trauma demands repetition."
-Selma Fraiberg
Social scientists have rarely been interested in psychology. Using the model of Newtonian physics, they have usually depicted individuals as opaque billiard balls bouncing off each other. That individuals might have their own complex internal motivations for the way they act in society-that they have emotions that affect their social behavior-has rarely been acknowledged. The most interesting question about any group, one which we asked even as children-"Why are they doing that?"-is rarely asked in academia. Durkheim, in fact, founded sociology with studies of suicide and incest that claimed these very private acts were wholly without individual psychological causes, claiming that understanding individual motivations is irrelevant to understanding society. 1 By eliminating psychology from the social sciences, Durkheim laid down the principle followed by most social theorists today: "The determining cause of a social fact should be sought among the social facts preceding it and not among the states of individual consciousness." 2
THE DENIAL OF PSYCHOLOGY IN THE STUDY OF SOCIETY
Sociologists still echo Durkheim's bias against psychology. Most
agree with the sociologist C. Wright Mills, who advised me when I
was his research assistant at Columbia University, "Study
enough psychology to make sure you can answer the bastards when
they attack you." Sociologist Thomas Scheff agrees:
"There is a strong tradition in modern scholarship in the
human sciences of ignoring emotions as causes." 3 Political
scientists follow the same assumptions: "Political attitudes
are generally assumed to be the result of a rational, reflective
process." 4 Most anthropologists concur; as Murdock summed
up their view, "The science of culture is independent of the
laws of biology and psychology." 5 Those anthropologists,
from Roheim, Deveraux and LaBarre to Whiting, Munroe and Spiro, 6
who began studying the effects of childhood on culture have been
grossly ignored by other anthropological theorists. In fact, most
anthropologists today are so opposed to psychological analysis of
cultures the distinguished series The Psychoanalytic Study of
Society has recently been terminated for lack of interest, the
number of psychoanalytic anthropologists having dwindled in
recent years. Anthropology, says Clifford Geertz, isn't even a
"hard science;" 7 it's more like literature it's
telling stories. Even those few anthropologists who belong to the
Society for Psychological Anthropology have managed to avoid
emotional life so completely that their journal, Ethos, which
does contain psychological articles, recently had to remind
anthropologists that "culture consists of ideas in people,
not meanings in tokens." 8
Unfortunately, the anthropologist's central concept that "culture determines social behavior" is simply a tautology. Since "culture" only means "the total pattern of human behavior" (Webster), to say "culture is what makes a group do such and such" is merely stating that a group's behavior causes its behavior. Even if culture is restricted to "shared beliefs," it is purely tautological to then speak of "cultural causation," since all this could mean is "a group of individuals believe something because they all believe it." Culture is explanandum, not explanans. Ever since Kroeber launched cultural determinism as the central anthropological theory early in the century, 9 tautological explanations have dominated the social sciences as is apparent in Lowie's claim that culture is "a thing sui generis, the formula being omnia cultura ex cultura." 10 That this tautological circularity has made anthropological evolutionary theory sterile is slowly becoming evident. In fact, according to Tooby and Cosmides, the Standard Social Science Model of cultural determinism has recently collapsed. This model, they say, states that "the cultural and social elements that mold the individual precede the individual and are external to the individual. The mind did not create them; they created the mind," 11 a theory that turns out, they say, to explain nothing:
A large and rapidly growing body of research from a diversity of disciplines has shown that...the Standard Social Science Model is...impossible...It could not have evolved; it requires an incoherent developmental biology; it cannot account for the observed problem-solving abilities of humans or the functional dimension of human behavior...it has repeatedly been empirically falsified; and it cannot even explain how humans learn their culture or their language. 12 Most historians, too, have assiduously avoided psychology, going along with Paul Veyne in believing that history "consists in saying what happened," little more 13 or trying to explain history by "impersonal structural forces," as though such a passionate human enterprise as history could be "impersonal." The result is that I have at least a hundred books on war on my shelf, and I don't recall seeing the word "anger" in any of them. Nor does the word "love" appear very often in any of the hundreds of books of history, sociology or political science on my shelves, though most of history has origins in problems of insufficient human love and all of its derivatives. Most historians are a priori relativists, avoiding any attempt to see personal meaning in historical events, agreeing with Hayden White, history's leading theoretician, in claiming "there are no grounds to be found in the historical record itself for preferring one way of construing its meaning over another." 14 Only the recent disciplines of political psychology and psychohistory have begun to consider inner meanings and motivations as the focus of causation in social theory. 15
This passionate denial of the influence of individual developmental psychology on society has been at the center of the social sciences since their beginnings. The actions of individuals in society have a priori been assumed by social philosophers from Hobbes to Marx to be determined by pure self-interest, "a war of every man against every man," based on an assumed selfish nature of humanity. 16 The same is true of economics. As one economist puts it, "Economic man must be both rational and greedy." 17 In fact, Hobbesian models have been accepted by John Locke, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Edmund Burke, Karl Marx and all their contemporary followers-their theories differ only in the arrangements of social institutions suggested by the authors to handle this basic rational selfishness.
Social behavior, using these models, cannot therefore be (a) irrational (because all men use only reason to achieve their goals), (b) empathic (because empathy for others would not be totally self-interested), (c) self-destructive (because no one can rationally ever want to hurt themselves), nor (d) sadistic (because people don't waste their resources just to harm others). At most, people might be shortsighted or uninformed in their social behavior, but not unreasonable, benevolent, suicidal or vicious-i.e., not human.
The exclusion of the most powerful human feelings other than greed from social and political theory plus the elimination of irrationality and self-destructiveness from models of society explains why the social sciences have such a dismal record in providing any historical theories worth studying. As long as "social structure" and "culture" are deemed to lie outside human psyches, motivations are bound to be considered secondary, reactive solely to outside conditions rather than themselves being determinative for social behavior.
Nor have the few attempts by social and political theorists to use psychoanalytic theory to explain history been very successful. This is true whether the theorists have been sociologists, like Marcuse or Parsons, or psychoanalysts, like Freud or Róheim. 18 Outside of a handful of psychoanalytic anthropologists, most rely on the same basic Hobbesian model of society, with selfish individuals remorselessly fighting each other for utilitarian goals, rather than analyzing how individuals actually relate in groups in history. The reason for this failure of social and political theory bears some scrutiny, as it will allow us to move away from an ahistorical, drive-based psychology to a historical, trauma-based psychology that can be used in understanding historical change. But first we will have to know something about the effects of childrearing on adult personality.
THE QUESTION OF THE EFFECTS OF CHILD ABUSE
Ever since Jeffrey Masson wrote his book The Assault on the
Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory, 19 there has
been a widespread misconception that Freud backed down from
maintaining the reality of childhood sexual abuse. The truth is
exactly the opposite. Freud continued all his life to state that
sexual abuse of children in his society was widespread, insisting
in his final writings that "I cannot admit [that] I
exaggerated the frequency [of] seduction," that "most
analysts will have treated cases in which such [incestuous]
events were real and could be unimpeachably established,"
that "actual seduction...is common enough," that
"the sexual abuse of children is found with uncanny
frequency among school teachers and child attendants," and
that "phantasies of being seduced are of particular
interest, because so often they are not phantasies but real
memories." 20 What he actually "backed down" from
was his initial idea that hysteria could be caused by sexual
abuse, since, he said, "sexual assaults on small children
happen too often for them to have any aetiological
importance..." 21 That is, it was because children were so
commonly sexually abused in his society that Freud thought that
seduction could not be the cause of hysteria. Otherwise, nearly
everyone would be a hysteric! The only opinion he changed as he
gained clinical experience, Freud said, was that further
information now became available relating to people who had
remained normal, and this led to the unexpected finding that the
sexual history of their childhood did not necessarily differ in
essentials from that of neurotics, and, in particular, that the
part played by seduction was the same in both cases. 22
Even though the notion is now widely accepted that Freud "changed his mind" on the reality of widespread childhood sexual abuse in his society, this is not so. A few psychoanalysts recently have begun to read what Freud actually wrote and have discovered that "what Freud rejected was not patients' reports of incest and seduction but rather his reconstruction of fragments of the patient's memories that he initially inferred to indicate an earlier seduction...." 23 i.e., his guesses about the first three years of life. 24 He did not change his mind and call most seduction memories fantasy; in fact, as one psychoanalyst concludes, "Neither Freud nor other analysts have apparently ever published a case in which a patient told of a parental seduction that turned out to be a verifiable fantasy." 25
The truth is that Freud and most everyone else in his society knew very well what I have since confirmed by my research into the history of child assault: that the overwhelming majority of all children throughout history were sexually abused. 26 The sexual abuse of children today is still very widespread, though it is now less than in the past. A century ago, the majority of children were probably abused. In a paper called "The Universality of Incest," I have examined current surveys of child sexual abuse around the world-defined as actual genital contact, usually involving penetration-with figures of about 50 percent for America, Canada and England and much higher figures for the Near and Far East. 27 The percentages a century ago were likely even higher as I have documented in "The Evolution of Childhood" and as will be further documented in this book since most people thought having sex with children was harmless because "they soon forgot about it." Indeed, Freud said he himself was sexually seduced as a child by his "teacher in sexual matters," his childhood nursemaid. 28
A PREVIEW OF THE RECENT HISTORY OF CHILD ASSAULT
Both men and women have commonly used children sexually
throughout history. Mothers and other caretakers used their
children as erotic objects, and were often instructed by doctors
to masturbate their little boys "to make their penises grow
longer." 29 The author of the nineteenth century's standard
work on The Sexual Life of Children, Albert Moll, said he
observed that nursemaids and servants often carried out "all
sorts of sexual acts" on children "for fun." 30
Freud agreed, saying that "nursemaids, governesses and
domestic servants [were] guilty of [grave sexual] abuses,"
31 that "seduction is common...initiated...by someone in
charge of the child who wants to soothe it, or send it to sleep
or make it dependent on them" and that "nurses put
crying children to sleep by stroking their genitals." 32
Freud was straightforward about how common the erotic use of
children was by parents and others, referring to "the
'affection' shown by the child's parents and those who look after
him, which seldom fails to betray its erotic nature ('the child
is an erotic plaything')..." 33
Men throughout history have commonly raped little boys and girls, as far back as antiquity when pederasty was a regular part of every boy's life and the rape of little girls was so common that many doctors reported that intact hymens in girls were considered a rare abnormality. 34 By Freud's time, incest was still so widespread that doctors visiting homes of men who had venereal diseases often discovered that their children had the same disease on their anuses, mouths or genitals. 35 Doctors concluded that "sexual acts committed against children are very frequent," particularly by fathers. 36 Children including Freud, whose family lived in a one-room apartment 37 usually slept in their parents' or nursemaid's bed during childhood, which made them available for taking a part in the parent's sexual intercourse. 38 In working-class families, where seduction was less secretive, the sexual abuse of girls by their fathers and brothers was so widely acknowledged that they often joked about their babies being products of incestuous intercourse. 39 Most adults believed that until the age of 5 or so little children did not really remember what was done to them, so they could be sexually molested without consequences. 40 Child rape, including incest, was rarely prosecuted, for, as one man said coming out of a trial during which a man had been let go after raping a little girl, "What nonsense! Men should not be punished for a thing like that. It doesn't harm the child." 41 Incest even today is usually considered a minor felony, probation-eligible, similar to adultery; in fact, virtually all child sexual abuse today goes unpunished, because it is either undiscovered or unprosecuted or routinely plea-bargained. 42 Nor was the massive sexual use of children in Freud's time so hidden. Just as today there are 100 million child prostitutes around the world, 43 during the nineteenth century they were even more prevalent, since every city had child prostitutes available in quantity for any man who had a bit of available change. 44
Nor was the beating of children a practice to which most adults in history were addicted considered traumatic to the child by Freud and his contemporaries. Severe, routine beating under the guise of discipline has been the lot of most children in most times throughout history; the further back in history one goes, the more often adults hit children. 45 In Germany, a 1964 survey still showed 80 percent of parents beat their children with a panoply of instruments that included whips, canes, bundles of sticks, shovels and cats-o'-nine-tails. 46 These beatings began in infancy, continued as the daily reality of children's lives according to their autobiographies, 47 and were a regular practice in schools. 48 Freud nowhere mentioned beating as traumatic to children; his only paper that mentions beating says it is the child's wish to be beaten that causes emotional problems. 49 Nor does he mention swaddling, the universal practice common in his time of tying up infants for a year and longer so they continuously lived in their own urine and feces. 50 Likewise missing from his work was such regular practices as the use of enemas beginning in infancy 51 and the terrorizing of children with dummies to control them, 52 plus the continuous abandonment, terrorizing, betrayal, shaming and other traumatic emotional abuse that have been the common practices of most parents throughout history.
Unlike contemporary psychoanalysis, Freud did not say that the tying up (swaddling), beating and sexual molestation that his patients had all been subjected to as children by their caretakers was traumatic nor that these assaults were the cause of their neurosis. In fact, he sometimes said seduction was beneficial, as, for instance, when women seduce little boys, about which he wrote that "One can regularly observe in the circle of one's acquaintances that...men who have been seduced by women at an early age escape neurasthenia." 53 He nowhere described the molestation of children as painful or as a betrayal of trust or as intensely humiliating to the helpless child. He believed seduction presented problems only in the sense that it sometimes provided "unconsummated" excitation. 54 Sexual seductions, he said, "produced no effect on the child" 55 until a later event awakened the memory of the assault by "deferred action." 56 Even one of his biographers wondered why after Freud discussed the "precocious experience of sexual relations with actual excitement of the genitals resulting from sexual abuse [he] with an almost absurd lack of logic...claimed that the precocious sexual excitement had little or no effect on the child." 57 In fact, Freud concluded that because "sexual assaults on small children happen too often for them to have any aetiological importance, [hysteria] could not lie in the nature of the experiences, since other people remained healthy in spite of being exposed to the same precipitating causes [rape]." 58 Therefore, he said, when he discovered infantile sexuality, he decided he had "overrated the importance [note: not the incidence] of seduction" 59 and concluded that "the 'traumatic' element in the sexual experiences of childhood [he means seduction] lost its importance [since] obviously seduction is not required in order to arouse a child's sexual life." 60
DENIAL OF THE EFFECTS OF SEXUAL ABUSE
Freud was very much part of general opinion in considering the
seduction of children as harmless. Freud even sided with
perpetrators of seduction. In the case of Dora, for instance, who
was molested at age 14 by a friend of her father's, Freud said,
by a "kiss upon her lips [and] the pressure of his erect
member against her body," 61 Freud agreed with the father,
who said she should not have objected, since the molester was a
friend of his. Freud declared the girl was "hysterical"
because she complained about the assault on her: "I should
without question consider a person hysterical in whom an occasion
for sexual excitement elicited feelings that were preponderantly
or exclusively unpleasurable..." 62 He blamed the children
because their sensuousness provoked the sexual assaults by
adults: "The last word on the subject of traumatic etiology
[is] that the sexual constitution which is peculiar to children
is precisely calculated to provoke sexual experiences of a
particular kind namely traumas." 63 His psychoanalytic
colleagues often blamed the victim too. Karl Abraham called
sexual molestation of his patients by adults "desired by the
child unconsciously [because of an] abnormal psycho-sexual
constitution," 64 concluding they had "an abnormal
desire for obtaining sexual pleasure, and in consequence of this
undergo sexual traumas." 65 Many other psychoanalysts after
Freud continued to label patient reports of childhood sexual
abuse "wishes." 66 As one recalled, "I was taught
in my...early years in psychiatry, as most of us were, to look
very skeptically upon the incestuous sexual material described by
my patients....Any inclination on my part, or that of my
colleagues in the training situation, to look upon these
productions of the patient as having some reality basis was
scoffed at and was seen as evidence of our naiveté." 67
This has recently begun to change in a few institutes of
psychoanalysis in some countries.
Opinion has not really changed so much, unfortunately, in either academia or psychiatry. While many give lip service to the illegality of sexual abuse of children, real opinion is quite different, as I have found from having given many speeches on the history of child abuse to academic and mental health audiences in the past three decades. Academics who study human sexuality often agree with Kinsey ("It is difficult to understand why a child, except for its cultural conditioning, should be disturbed at having its genitalia touched...or disturbed at even more specific sexual contacts"), 68 his co-author Pomeroy ("incest between adults and younger children can...be a satisfying and enriching experience"), 69 sexual historians Edwardes and Masters ("there is no shame in being a...pederast or a rapist if one is satisfied"), 70 social worker LeRoy Schultz "[incest can be] a positive, healthy experience") 71 or any of the hundreds of others in anthropology, psychology and history who preach the pro-pedophile agenda in their fields today. 72 Scholarly academic journals have even published special issues praising pedophilia as "nurturant" and advocating abolishing all laws against sex with children. 73
The record of psychiatry is little better. When I gave an address at the American Psychiatric Association Convention in Philadelphia on the subject "The History of Child Assault," I gave extensive evidence showing that the majority of children today in the countries for which we have statistics were sexually abused. The audience eventually seemed to admit that what I said could be true. Then they discussed among themselves the following proposition: "If childhood sexual abuse has been so widespread for so long, then perhaps we are wrong, and we shouldn't be creating a conflict in children's minds. Since everyone does it, maybe sex between children and adults isn't wrong at all." In addition, they asked the question: "What might gentle incest be like? Might it not be OK?" I was not surprised when, a few months later, the American Psychiatric Association classified pedophilia as a disorder only if it bothered the pedophile, professing, according to one dissident psychiatrist, that "a person is no longer a pedophile simply because he molests children...He is a pedophile only if he feels bad or anxious about what he's doing." Otherwise, having sex with children can be healthy. 74
What becomes evident is that most people in every society including our own believe that sex between adults and children is not really traumatic and is not the cause of emotional problems. Freud was not the only person to completely deny the traumatic origin of the emotional problems his patients brought to him-they continue to be denied by most people even today. Because of this denial, it makes sense that so much clinical research during the past century into the causes of mental illness has consisted mainly of investigation of repressed unacceptable wishes rather than of dissociated traumatic memories of real events, ignoring the crucial fact that no one gets sick because of wishes alone without the traumas that are linked to them. This concentration on wishes rather than traumas also explains, I think, why depth psychology has failed to contribute much to social or political theory. For if the unconscious consists only of repressed wishes which have their source in drives, psyches and therefore societies cannot change, since these "drives," coming from virtually unchanged gene pools, must have stayed the same while our psyches and social patterns change over time. But if the unconscious is acknowledged to include both wishes and traumatic memories of abuse and neglect-memories of real events which change as the history of childhood evolves-we can explain social change for the first time.
Massive denial of the origin of humanity's problems in the traumatic abuse of children is, then, one and the same as the massive denial of the psychological origins of social behavior. They are two sides of the same historical coin. Both are rooted in the fact that our deepest fears are stored in a separate brain system that remains largely unexplored by science and that is the source of the restaging of these early traumas in social events. Only when the contents and psychodynamics of these dissociated traumatic memories are made fully conscious can we understand the waking nightmare that we call history.
To achieve this understanding, we must draw upon all the resources of neurobiology, experimental, clinical and evolutionary psychology, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, history and the other social sciences in order to provide a fully scientific theory of society. 75 To begin this synthesis, I will first review recent advances in the understanding of the neurobiology of trauma and its storage in separate neuronal networks in the brain.
THE NEUROBIOLOGY OF PSYCHOHISTORY
Although history is obviously not reducible to human biology, a psychohistorian cannot avoid contending with the hard facts of neurobiology, since the mind-and therefore the brain-is not, as Locke thought, a tabula rasa, but a highly complex, flawed end result of an extremely imperfect evolutionary process. What is more, society is the way it is partly because the brain is constructed the way it is, and this depends on the specific way the brain has evolved. 76 Societies are not constructed in the most logical or even most adaptive forms possible. Given the hominid brain we started with, even the most bizarre forms of society revealed by the historical record can be understood as the flawed products of evolving psyches and evolving brains. It is therefore essential that psychohistory understand the latest concepts in what has been called the "social neurosciences" 77 that are beginning to be able to understand the effects of early interpersonal experiences between parents and children on the neurobiological development of the brain.
Since, as the neurobiologist Gerald Edelman has put it, "The likelihood of guessing how the brain works without looking at its structure seems slim," 78 we will begin with a brief overview of brain structure. The brain is composed of over 100 billion neurons, with trillions of connections, dendrites, which are branching extensions from the body of the neuron that pass stimuli received by axons on to other neurons through synapses, the specialized connections between neurons. Since this synaptic activity is either excitatory or inhibitory, much of mental life and therefore also of the social life is either manic or depressive, and one of the main tasks of leaders, as also of psychiatrists, is to adjust through social projects the level of excitation of the brain. Memorization is thought to occur through repeated stimulation of synapses, making them grow bigger and stronger, as neurotransmitters are released across synaptic gaps. 79 Specific memories are stored all over the brain, in a much more fractured way than a computer stores memory in many files. As with a computer, however, the crucial task is retrieval of the memory, using neural networks or brain modules that serve as "indexes" for the fractured memories. As discussed in the previous chapter, early emotional memories are indexed in a network centering in the amygdala, while the conscious self system is indexed more in the hippocampus and orbital prefrontal cortex, 80 giving the brain the ability to retrieve information stored elsewhere and providing a "working memory" system that receives emotional signals from the amygdala. 81 A PET scan of the brain, for instance, made during "free association" shows increased blood flow in this orbitofrontal area, thus showing why the psychoanalytic process can tap into uncensored private thoughts. 82
The amygdala is predominantly excitatory, stimulating externally oriented behavior, and the hippocampus is predominantly inhibitory, comparing current information with existing knowledge. In current situations of danger, the amygdalan system is the first to make your muscles tense and heart beat faster, while the hippocampal-prefrontal cortical system will remember whom you were with and what you were doing during the danger, so as to be able to avoid it in the future. 83 It is the growth of the hippocampus, prefrontal cortex and related areas that represents the main evolutionary development of self consciousness (beyond simple growth of cortical storage areas), allowing Homo sapiens sapiens to delay responses while comparing them to past experience and self concepts. When one dreams, one's amygdala lights up in the brain scanner like a pinball machine, as powerful early emotional memories are accessed and incorporated by the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex with current daily events into long-term personality modules. The hippocampal-prefrontal cortical and amygdalan memory systems are, in fact, the real "two brains" that dissociate more rational conscious self systems from unconscious emotional memories-not a simple "right-brain," "left-brain" split. The earliest regulation of emotion in a specialized amygdalan-prefrontal-orbital network first occurs during the mother-infant mutual gaze dialogues:
The common involvement [in infants] of orbital, temporal, and amygdala neurons in the processing of sensory (particularly visual) information of emotional significance has suggested that they 'may form part of a specialized neural system for the processing of social stimuli.'..The furthest terminus of this circuit, the orbitofrontal cortex, represents the hierarchical apex of this system. This is functionally expressed in its unique capacity to categorize, abstract, store, and regulate the practicing infant's emotional responses to the face of the attachment figure. 84
When emotional memories are traumatic either because the trauma was so early that the hippocampus was not yet functional or because it was so powerful that the hippocampal-prefrontal cortical system couldn't fully register it-they become permanent, dissociated fears of anything that might resemble the traumatic situation. Traumas that are inescapable because of helplessness can actually severely damage the hippocampus, killing neurons. Survivors of severe childhood abuse and veterans with post-traumatic stress syndrome are found to have smaller hippocampal volumes than other patients. 85 This damage is caused by the release during traumatization of a cascade of cortisol, adrenaline and other stress hormones that not only damage brain cells and impair memory but also set in motion a long-lasting disregulation of the brain's biochemistry. Animals that are traumatized when they are young grow up to be cowardly bullies, with less vasopressin, which regulates aggression, and serotonin, the calming neurotransmitter, which has been shown to be low in delinquents and in children who have been regularly beaten by their parents. 86 Low serotonin is the most important marker for violence in animals and humans, and has been correlated with high rates of homicide, suicide, arson, antisocial disorders, self-mutilation, and other disorders of aggression. 87 Early emotional abandonment by the mother or significant family members regularly lowers the serotonin level of children. Harlow's motherless monkeys who became extremely fearful and socially violent as adults like Coleman's eleven-month-old patient whose serotonin level dropped by half following the death of his sister, demonstrate the dramatic effects of trauma on serotonin levels. 88 Imbalances in neurotransmitter levels resulting from trauma can last for decades in post-traumatic stress disorders and even in Holocaust survivors. 89
Consciousness which Llinás believes 90 is a 40-hertz oscillation in the entire brain network that binds together cortical and limbic systems is present during wakefulness and dream (REM) sleep. Dreaming is a sort of "down-time" for current experience, when daily memories are evaluated against early amygdalan emotional memories, processed into long-term memory and stored in the neocortex. 91 But traumatic stress seriously interferes with the processing of these memories and their accessibility to consciousness. The fears, anxieties and hypervigilance of traumatic stress sets off a cascade of hormones and neurotransmitters that disrupts hippocampal functioning, leaving memories to be stored as dissociated affective states or body memories that are incapable of being retrieved through normal hippocampal indexing. 92 Van der Kolk believes that often these memories are dissociated because they were never really stored in consciousness in the first place. 93 Moreover, the "lack of secure attachments may produce the most devastating effects," he says, "because consistent external support appears to be a necessary condition in learning how to regulate internal affective states....Dissociation is a method of coping with inescapable stress [allowing] infants to enter into trance states and to ignore current sensory input..." 94 As Eigen puts it in his book, The Psychotic Core, "The aggression perpetrated on the young in the name of upbringing is often tinged with or masks madness. Both parent and child live out this madness in a trancelike state akin to dreaming." 95 It is these early trance states that are repeated in the social trances of history.
THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF RESTAGING
The massive secretion of norepinephrine and dopamine, serotonin
and endogenous opioids that follows inescapable trauma is
followed by a subsequent depletion of hormones, presumably
because utilization exceeds synthesis. Eventually receptors
become hypersensitive, leading to excessive responsiveness to
even the possibility of trauma in later life. 96 It is this
massive "false-alarm system" that leads to reenactments
and then to restagings of trauma reenactments with new
anxiety-reducing elements that is at the heart of social behavior
in humans.
Depletion of neurotransmitters after traumatic flooding results in hyperalertness to any situations that seem to indicate they may lead to reexperiencing the trauma. This, of course, is true of all animals, and they later simply avoid the dangers in the future. But humans are unique in possessing a developed hippocampal-prefrontal cortical-centered consciousness whose task it is to inhibit action so as to avoid potentially traumatic situations. When trauma occurs-even very early trauma-humans are unique in believing they are responsible for the trauma. It is astonishing how early and consistently this is seen in clinical practice. Lenore Terr tells of a girl playing with dolls and repeating her sexual molestion by pornographers that happened when she was 15 months old. 97 She was dissociated from any conscious memories of the events, but accurately repeated being penetrated by an erect penis the same way she had been in the pornographic films, which had been retrieved by the police. The accuracy of her body memories is amazing enough, but what was most astonishing was what she said as she restaged the raping scene: "Who is this? My doll. She's laying on the bed naked. I cover her up....I'm yelling at the doll. She was bad! I yell at my doll...'You! You bad thing! Get to bed, you!'" She felt guilty about her own rape!
But children usually feel guilty about being traumatized. "I must have been too noisy, because mommy left me" was my sincere belief when my mother left my father. I also believed I deserved my father's strappings because I wasn't obedient enough. This is why children set up a separate, internal self as a "protector" to try to stop themselves from ever being noisy, pushy, sexual, demanding, in fact, to stop them from growing and thus reexperiencing trauma. At first, these internal "protectors" are friendly; sometimes they are represented as imaginary playmates or even as protective alters if the traumas are severe or repetitive. 98 Later, particularly when adolescence brings on opportunities for greater exploration and especially dating, these protective selves become persecutory selves that "have had it" with the host self and actually try to harm it. 99 The persecutory self says, "It's not happening to me, it's happening to her, and she deserves it!" Rather than take a chance that the early trauma will once again catch one unaware and helpless, one might restage the trauma upon oneself or others, or both, at least controlling the timing and intensity of the trauma oneself. 100
Before adolescence, one will often restage traumas by identifying with the persecutor and triumphing rather than being the helpless one. Thus, the 8-year-old girl who had been hit by a truck when she was 18 months old would repeatedly charge into classmates, knocking them over as she restaged her accident. 101 Or a 7-year-old girl whose father strangled her mother would force her friends to play the "mommy game" where they played dead and she picked them up. 102 But after adolescence, the restaging more often includes self-persecution, bringing about the dreaded event oneself either through hypervigilant action or actual self-harm-as in the self-cutting or self-injury of those who were physically abused as children, the fights and anti-social activities of delinquents who were neglected as infants or the sexual promiscuity of young girls who had been seduced.
It is important to keep in mind that it is not "stress" or even "trauma" alone that causes restaging of early events. If the traumas are not dissociated, if they can be remembered by the conscious mind, they are not split off so they need not be repeated. For instance, 732 Jewish children who survived concentration camps after having gone through literal hell for three years, formed a club in England after their rescue. No greater amount of childhood trauma can be imagined that what they went through, yet, as they wrote in their newsletter later, "our greatest achievement and tremendous source of pride is that we can boast of having no delinquents, criminals, revenge-seekers and above all, none of us is consumed with hatred and venom." 103 Because Jews didn't blame themselves for their persecution, they could remember and didn't dissociate. So they didn't need to either revictimize themselves nor make others victims.
Revictimization is actually the central cause of anti-social behavior, and addiction to trauma is at its core. 104 It is not surprising that prison psychiatrists find violent criminals invariably repeat in their crime the emotional traumas, abuse and humiliation of their childhood, 105 or that women who have been sexually abused in childhood are more than twice as likely as others to be raped when they become adults. 106 As one prostitute who had been sexually victimized as a child said, "When I do it, I'm in control. I can control them through sex." 107 What Freud was puzzled by 108 when he coined the term "the repetition compulsion" puzzled because it violated the pleasure principle is actually a self-protective device, protective against being helpless against the overwhelming anxiety of unexpected trauma. Traumas are therefore restaged as a defense, with the persecutory self as the stage director. 109 Restaging as a defense against dissociated trauma is the crucial flaw in the evolution of the human mind understandable from the viewpoint of the individual as a way of maintaining sanity, but tragic in its effects upon society, since it means that early traumas will be magnified onto the historical stage into war, domination and self-destructive social behavior. And because we also restage by inflicting our childhood terrors upon our children, generation after generation, our addiction to the slaughterbench of history has been relentless.
FEARS OF INDIVIDUATION AND GROWTH PANIC
The crowning achievement of the human species-our
self-consciousness, the awareness of oneself as a private person
with a past history and future goals-has taken so long to evolve
and has been so uneven that humanity is a species with extremely
fragile selves. Chimpanzees barely have enough self-awareness to
recognize themselves in a mirror, 110 and early humans began to
evolve self-consciousness through slowly improving parenting,
resulting mainly from the mother's growing empathy toward her
child. Eigen observes from the disintegrating selves of
psychotics, "The way individuals are ripped apart by
psychotic processes brings home the realization that the
emergence of a viable sense of self and other must be counted as
one of the most creative achievements of humankind" 111 an
achievement, I will show, it has taken millenia to acomplish. As
Modell points out, 112 the emergent private self grows as the
child explores its environment with the regular help of its
caretakers. Therefore, children whose immature parents use them
for their own emotional needs, and who reject them when the
child's needs do not reflect their own, develop what Winnicott
calls a "false self," or even multiple selves, which
may conform to society but cannot improve upon it. It is because
of this that social evolution depends upon the evolution of the
viable self, which in turn is achieved solely through the slow
and uneven evolution of childrearing.
Traumas are defined as injuries to the private self, rather than just painful experiences, since non-painful injuries to the self such as parental genital manipulation or being told by a parent that they wished one would die are more traumatic to the self than, say, more painful accidents. 113 Without a well-developed, enduring private self, people feel threatened by all progress, all freedom, all new challenges, and then experience annihilation anxiety, fears that the fragile self is disintegrating, since situations that call for self-assertion trigger memories of maternal abandonment. Masterson calls this by the umbrella term "abandonment depression," beneath which, he says, "ride the Six Horsemen of the Psychic Apocalypse: Depression, Panic, Rage, Guilt, Helplessness (hopelessness), and Emptiness (void) [that] wreak havoc across the psychic landscape leaving pain and terror in their wake." 114 Whether the early traumas or rejections were because the mothers were openly abandoning, over-controlling and abusive, clinging, or just threatened by the child's emerging individuation, the results are much the same-the child learns to fear parts of his or her potential self that threatens the disapproval or loss of the mother. As Socarides has observed, 115 fears of growth, individuation and self assertion that carry hreatening feelings of disintegration lead to desires to merge with the omnipotent mother literally to crawl back into the womb desires which immediately turn into fears of maternal engulfment, since the merging would involve total loss of the self. When Socarides' patients make moves to individuate-like moving into their own apartment or getting a new job-they have dreams of being swallowed by whirlpools or devoured by monsters. The only salvation from these maternal engulfment wishes/fears is a "flight to external reality from internal reality," 116 a flight in which social institutions play a central role, as we shall shortly discover. Many people who have been in psychotherapy become conscious of this individuation panic and flight to external reality when they begin to grow, break free of old emotional patterns and start to feel their freedom. These fears can be characterized as an all-pervasion growth panic that traumatized individuals (nearly everyone) constantly carry around during their daily lives. Masterson quotes one of his patients:
I was walking down the street and suddenly I was engulfed in a feeling of absolute freedom. I could taste it. I knew I was capable of doing whatever I wanted. When I looked at other people, I really saw them without being concerned about how they were looking at me...I was just being myself and thought that I had uncovered the secret of life: being in touch with your own feelings and expressing them openly with others, not worrying so much about how others felt about you.
Then just as suddenly as it came, it disappeared. I panicked and started thinking about the million things I had to do at the studio, of errands I needed to run after work. I began to feel nauseous and started sweating. I headed for my apartment, running most of the way. When I got in, I felt that I had been pursued. By what? Freedom, I guess. 117
It is this manic flight to action a flight that is a defense against growth panic that is the emotional source of much of social behavior. Manic acting-out in social activity is a universal addiction, similar in its effects to the dopamine agonistic effects of cocaine. That's why leaders so often take manic drugs, like John F. Kennedy during the Gulf Crisis (amphetamines) and George Bush during the Gulf War (Halcion). Like drugs, grandiose manic social activities such as war and political domination produce a temporary elation and a dopamine surge, but not the lasting joy of self-discovery and love.
HOW TRAUMATIC IS CHILDHOOD?
The incidence of trauma in childhood, past and present, will be a
central focus of the rest of this book. Some idea, however, of
the extent of childhood trauma would be useful in this chapter on
social and political theory. My overall conclusions have not
changed after three decades of additional research from what I
wrote in The History of Childhood:
The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes, the lower the level of child care, and the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorized, and sexually abused. 118
Childhood is still massively traumatic for the majority of the children in the world. For instance, one of the most often-cited facts of American life is the exposure of children to violence in urban communities-one recent study showed 40 percent of children surveyed reported exposure to a shooting or stabbing in the past year, 36 percent reported being threatened with physical harm in the past year and 74 percent reported feeling unsafe in their communities. 119 Various studies of violence in the home reveal that over 90 percent of American parents regularly hit their children, mostly with hair brushes, paddles or belts, 120 20 percent of them severely, with heavy instruments that endanger their lives. 121 Rates of child thrashing in European countries are rarely much lower than this. 122 And despite widespread denial by anthropologists of the high frequency of physical assault on children of other cultures, 123 most children elsewhere around the world today are still beaten unmercifully by their caretakers. 124 The most evolved country in the world today is Sweden, which passed a law in 1979 against hitting children, so that a new generation of parents now generally refrains from hitting their children. 125
Sexual molestation of children is still so widespread that in my world-wide survey of the subject, "The Universality of Incest," I concluded that the sexual abuse of children was likely to have been a universal practice for most people in most places at most times in history, and that children who had not been sexually molested by their caretakers were a recent historical achievement, experienced by only a minority of children in a few places in the world. 126 The most careful statistics of childhood seduction in America, using structured interview techniques that were able to acknowledge the resistances of the respondents and defining molestation as actual genital contact, found 38 percent (Russell) or 45 percent (Wyatt) of women and 30 percent of men (Landis) interviewed reported memories of sexual abuse during their childhood. 127 Adjusting these figures for such elements as the bias introduced by the population interviewed that eliminates criminals, prostitutes, juveniles in shelters and psychotics-all of whom have much higher molestation rate-plus the large percentage of people who refused to be interviewed and were likely more victimized, I concluded that the true rate of childhood molestation in America is about 60 percent for girls and 45 percent for boys.
A Gallup poll of Canadian childhood molestation reported about the same figures as in America. Though most European studies are decades behind those of the U.S., when a recent BBC "ChildWatch" program asked its female listeners if they could remember sexual molestation, 62 percent recalled actual intercourse. As was mentioned earlier, a recent Institut für Kindheit survey that interviewed Berlin schoolchildren in one neighborhood directly (direct interviews of children for any purpose are extremely rare) found 80 percent said they had been sexually molested. 128 Though surveys of childhood abuse are unknown in the rest of the world, my evidence showed even higher rates were likely in the East and Middle East, where boys and girls are masturbated and raped by the men in the family and others as a matter of course, and, as both Indian and Chinese proverbs have it, "For a girl to be a virgin at ten years old, she must have neither brothers nor cousin nor father." 129 This molestation by the family is further extended by such sexual assaults as the estimated 100 million child prostitutes worldwide and female genital mutilation, an extremely traumatic parental sexual assault, recently estimated at 74 million women in the circum-Mediterranean area. 130 Once these beating and sexual abuse figures are added to fetal traumas (one in three pregnant women in America are hit or kicked by their mates), 131 plus all the other abusive and accidental traumas that are commonly experienced by children, 132 and then added to all the neglect, rejection, brutal domination and other severe emotional tortures that are so common they aren't even measured, plus the horrible traumatic effects on children of wars, social violence, malnutrition and other common mass traumatic conditions of children in this world, one must conclude that childhood continues to be a nightmare for most children in most areas of the world today.
Indeed, my conclusion from a lifetime of study of the history of childhood is that society is founded upon the abuse of children, and that the further back in history one studies the subject the more likely children are to have been abused and neglected. 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, torture and domination of children has been society's most effective instrument of collective emotional homeostasis. Most historical families once practiced infanticide, incest, beating and mutilation of their children to relieve anxieties. We continue today to arrange the killing, maiming, molestation and starvation of our children through our military, social and economic institutions.
This is why domination and violence in history has such continuity: betrayal and abuse of children has been a consistent human trait since our species began. Each generation begins anew with fresh, eager, trusting faces of babies, ready to love and create a new world. And each generation of parents tortures, abuses, neglects and dominates its children until they become emotionally crippled adults who repeat in nearly exact detail the social violence and domination that existed in previous decades. Should a minority of parents decrease the amount of abuse and neglect of its children a bit and begin to provide somewhat more secure, loving early years that allow a bit more freedom and independence, history soon begins to move in surprising new directions and society changes in innovative ways. History needn't repeat itself; only the traumas demand repetition. 133
THE PSYCHOGENIC THEORY OF HISTORY
The psychogenic theory of history is a scientific, empirical,
falsifiable theory based upon a model that involves shared
restagings of dissociated memories of early traumas, the content
of which changes through the evolution of childhood. It is based
upon the conclusion of experimental and clinical psychology that
psychic content is organized by early emotional relationships, so
that psychic structure must be passed from generation to
generation through the narrow funnel of childhood. Thus a
society's childrearing practices are not just one item in a list
of cultural traints but are the very condition for the
transmission and development of all cultural elements.
Childrearing therefore is crucial because it organizes the
emotional structure that determines the transmission of all
culture and places definite limits on what can be achieved by
society. Specific childhoods sustain specific cultural traits,
and once these early experiences no longer occur the trait
disappears or is modified. It is the first social theory that
posits love as the central mechanism for historical change-not
because I happen to value love as an exemplary trait, but because
the clinical, experimental and social sciences of the past
century have shown that love produces the individuation needed
for human innovation-that is, for cultural evolution.
It is also the first theory that recognizes the values of methodological individualism-seeing properties of groups as a result of the actions of its individual members-yet that also recognizes group evolution, integrating the psychology of individuals and societies and recognizing that social behavior also has emotional sources. I call the theory "psychogenic" rather than "economic" or "political" because it views humans more as homo relatens than homo economicus or homo politicus-that is, as searching for relation, for love, more than just for money or power. The theory considers evolving psychoclasses-shared childrearing modes-as more central than economic classes or social classes for understanding history.
This psychogenic theory is contrasted with the sociogenic theory of all other social scientists which sees all individual change as merely a reflection of social change. It instead views adults as having developed new kinds of personalities due to new childrearing modes, and then as projecting onto the historical stage earlier traumas and feelings in such a manner that events appear to be happening to the group rather than being internal, creating shared dreams, group-fantasies, that are so intense and compelling that they take on a life of their own, a life that is imagined as happening in a dissociated sphere called "society"-the group-fantasy sandbox of adults.
Consider a typical example of a traumatized child growing up and joining others in fashioning a historical group-fantasy. Timothy McVeigh, one of the Oklahoma City bombers, experienced continuous maternal abandonment as a child, according to neighbors and relatives, as his restless mother, who regularly cheated on her husband, kept leaving the family for weeks at a time. 134 Timothy asked friends, "Is it something I did?" when trying to understand why his mother wasn't there. When he was ten, he became interested in guns and became a survivalist, collecting rifles in case Communists took over the country. When he was sixteen and his mother left him for good, he began to refer to her as "a bitch" and as "that no-good whore." Neighbors reported he was often like two people, "angry and screaming one minute, then switching to quite normal" for no apparent reason. In the army, when he failed the Green Beret test-another rejection-he quit in disgust and began hanging out with Right-wing militarists. After going to Waco to watch how the government had abandoned the children during the siege, he went to Oklahoma City to act out a scene in a Rightist novel where a group packed a truck with a homemade bomb and set it off at F.B.I. headquarters. But four months before he acted out this rage against authority (his mother), McVeigh visited the day care center in the building, pretending he had children he wanted to enroll. 135 Thus he picked out a site where children who had been left by their mothers would be blown up too, thus punishing abandoned children representatives of himself restaging his own abandonment and the carrying out the punishment he thought he deserved for his rage at his mother.
The raging part of Timothy McVeigh, elaborated by militia group-fantasies, often made him seem, said others, like two people. The process was similar to that observed in the creation of alters, or alternate personalities, in people who have Multiple Personality Disorders, a diagnosis recently renamed Dissociated Identity Disorders. Dissociation is defined as "a loss of the usual interrlationships between various groups of mental processes with resultant almost independent function of the one group that has been separated from the rest," 136 and is involved in such pathological syndromes as hypnosis, depersonalization, fugue, sleepwalking, possession and visionary experiences. 137 A Dissociated Identity Disorder has three criteria: (a) the personalities seem to be distinct and lasting, (b) the dominant personality at any particular time determines the individual's behavior, and (c) each personality is complex and organized with its own unique behavior patterns. 138 There are four possible core dissociative symptoms: amnesia, depersonalization, derealization and identity confusion. 139 Severe, repeated child abuse and neglect almost always lie behind the full D.I.D. disorder. Kluft says, "Most multiples, as children, have been physically brutalized, psychologically assaulted, sexually violated, and affectively overwhelmed." 140 As Ross puts it, a multiple personality disorder is a little girl imagining that the abuse is happening to someone else. The imaging is so intense and subjectively compelling, and is reinforced so many times by the ongoing trauma, that the created identities seem to take on a life of their own, though they are all parts of one person. 141
Alters often have different names, handwriting, voices, vocabularies, expressions, even EEG alpha rhythms, and are often amnesic of each other's activities, although sometimes one alter is co-conscious of the activities of another. 142 Sometimes an alter is frozen in time, stuck in the trauma that gave it birth, and child personalities will often expect to be sexually assaulted by the therapist, who is mistaken for the abuser from the past, and cower in the corner, fearing the inevitable rape. 143 In addition to the host personality, who is often depressed, masochistic, compulsively good and suffers from time losses, there are alters such as fearful children who recall the traumas, inner persecutors, containers of forbidden impulses, avengers, apologists for the abusers, idealized figures who deny dangers and so on. The formation of such alters is life-saving, allowing the host personality to defend against unbearable trauma and continue living. Their tragedy is that these alters restage their traumas in adult life, in what Kluft calls "revictimization behaviors" or "the sitting duck syndrome," during which they feel they are taking control of the abuse and ending the intolerable agony of waiting for it to happen. 144
In many multiples, one alter is found whose task it is to persecute the host personality or others who represent the guilty childhood self. "She should die, she deserves to die. She's a loser..." said one alter to her therapist, referring to her host personality. 145 These persecutory alters start out as protective alters, whose task it is to protect the host against re-experiencing early traumas and rejections. But usually some time around puberty, when the host begins to explore the world and have sexual feelings, the alter turns totally against the host and says, "She started becoming interested in boys and dates and all that...I didn't want any part of it...I'd hate her for letting that happen...so I'd cut her." 146 From that point on, the alter persecutes the host personality relentlessly. In this sense, persecutory alters continue to protect the host against repetition of trauma by punishing all growth-in themselves and in representatives of themselves.
SOCIAL ALTERS AND THE SOCIAL TRANCE
Although few people are diagnosed with dissociative disorders,
most people nevertheless have organized, dissociated persecutory
personalities whose function it is to punish themselves or
substitutes for themselves as "object lessons"-in order
to remind them that growth, pleasure and success are dangerous
and might precipitate trauma or rejection. Child psychologists
have recently suggested that perhaps "all children have
dissociative-like states" and that abuse and neglect leads
to the "establishment of centers of experience external to
the core self during transient hypnotic-like states" that
act as early alters. 147 As they grow up, these dissociated parts
of their psyche are organized into persecutory social scenarios
that are shared with others, which could be thought of as social
alters. McVeigh switched into and out of his angry, militarist
self, his social alter, each time he reexperienced further
evidence for abandonment by mother figures. It is a process we
all share to some extent with McVeigh. Rather than living our
lives wholly in our private selves, we choose to live partly in
our social alters, where ghosts of our past are disguised as
social roles in the present. Social alters of individuals collude
to produce the social trance and have five characteristics:
(1) they are separate neural networks that are repositories for feelings, images and scenarios connected with traumatic abuse and neglect, including the defensive fantasies that go with them;
(2) they are organized into dynamic structures containing an alternate set of goals, values and defenses from those of the main self, in order to help prevent the traumas from overwhelming one's life and to to defend against the reexperiencing of the humiliations and persecutions of childhood;
(3) they have the central task of organizing and carrying out both the idealizing and the persecutory fantasies in society that are the result of these traumas, the idealizing mainly toward male leaders (father-saviors), and the persecutory mainly toward women (persecuting mothers) and children (guilty self);
(4) they are co-conscious 148 of the central personality, yet
(5) they are split off by a seamless wall of denial, depersonalization, discontinuity of affect and disownership of responsibility that is maintained by collusion with others pretending the alters are normal; and
(6) they are shared and restaged in historical group-fantasies that are elaborated into political, religious and social institutions.
Social alters contain memories of severe traumas and rejections and have their own repertoire of defensive behaviors. Experiments have shown that adults who were traumatized as children are more susceptible to hypnosis, to group suggestions, to hysterical religious behavior and to paranormal experiences. 149 Dissociative disorders are what Winnicott called "the psychosis hidden behind the neurosis." 150 More organized and dissociated than just "false selves," 151 social alters differ from alters of multiple personalities in that they replace the usual denial by amnesia with denial by dissociation of emotional connections, maintained through group collusion. Thus, even though one may be more or less conscious of the activities of one's social alter-knowing that the self that shoots a child who is an "enemy" is the same person that values one's own child-still, the emotional connections between the two selves are missing. Thus people can imagine they go to war or conduct a genocide because of the chance appearance of an enemy, never because of anything emotional happening in their own heads.
It is important to remember that a person's social alter is based upon a fetal matrix and depends upon the early amygdalan memory system, repository for our dissociated traumas. Social alters do not include the areas of the brain necessary for conscious empathy. 152 It is this missing capacity for empathy that allows violent acting-out in the social sphere people become so filled with our projections that it becomes impossible for one to "feel their feelings." You can observe this lack of empathy, the fetal matrix and the persecutory agenda by studying for instance the initiation rituals of some cultures, where boys, considered as polluted by female fluids, are sealed inside a ritual house with their bodily wastes, forced to put their heads out a vaginal window to recapitulated birth, and then beaten, smeared with blood taken from their penises and otherwise mutilated and tortured. 153 The adults who put the children through the ordeal are completely dissociated from the meaning of the events they enact. They cannot tell why they persecute the boys and cut their penises, and they feel no empathy for those they are torturing, since the boys are so full of the projections of the adults' own traumas.
Experimental evidence with social memories demonstrates that our brains actually store social feelings in separate modules by time period. We have all experienced how hearing, say, a familiar Beatles song can produce a cascade of emotional memories from the Sixties. One experiment showed that people can revisit these time-bound memory modules. A group of men over seventy years old was taken to a country retreat for five days in 1979 and exposed only to 1959 music, magazines, radio programs, clothes and activities. The men soon not only held conversations as though it were 1959, their biological markers-their hand grip, posture, hearing, etc.-actually became younger. They had switched into earlier memory modules and began accessing anew 1959 feelings simply by being immersed in earlier social material. 154 Apparently there is enough room in the hundred billion neurons in our brain to record social emotional states by specific periods.
Social alters are like suitcases into which we stuff our most traumatic split-off fears and rages, containing our continuing lives as traumatized children, abuser apologists, inner persecutors, heroic avengers and other consciously intolerable parts of ourselves, all organized into social postures. The social alter is based upon fantasies that are defenses against traumas, not upon present-day reality, even when it participates in present-day political or religious group activities. The defensive fantasies are unreal even when the entire society may agree upon their reality. When a group of men collects human heads, believing that this will increase their genital potency, or a group of women chop off their little girls' clitorises, believing that otherwise they might grow to be a foot long, these beliefs are obviously derived from defensive group-fantasies, not from experience. The same people can have an excellent knowledge of reality in their host personalities, with extensive hunting or agricultural skills based upon the real-life experiences of their group, but in their social alters they are nevertheless convinced of the efficacy of chopping off heads and clitorises.
Except for a few psychopaths and psychotics, most of us keep these suitcases for our social alters in the closet with the door locked, seemingly away from our daily lives-but then we lend the keys to group delegates whom we depend upon to act out their contents for us so we can deny ownership of the actions. Periodically, when the group and its leader are imagined to be collapsing-when our despair becomes too great, our social alters seem too distant so that we feel depleted of vital parts of ourselves, and our hypervigalence is at an unbearable peak-the contents of these suitcases begin to break loose, we enter a panic state, and our early fears and other emotional memories are restaged in wars or other forms of social violence.
All the accomplishments of our conscious personalities-self-awareness, the ablity to imagine the consequences of actions and learning from experience, the capability of feeling empathy for others, the awareness of the passage of time, the ability to construct a realistic future, responsibity for one's actions-are missing in our social alters, and are not part of the group-fantasies we act out in history. Depersonalization is experienced whenever we are in our social alters, and we enter into a trance-like state-what happens in "society" has a feeling of unreality or strangeness of self, a loss of affective response. Even though, as with other dissociative disorders, some reality testing remains intact, an absence of normal feelings and a disconnection from one's usual range of emotions are regularly felt when in one's social alter.
Even the language of group-fantasies is special, since social alters must communicate in elliptical form in order that their unacceptable true contents may remain hidden to our main selves. Therefore, group-fantasies are often conveyed by subliminal embedded messages rather than clear, overt language. We will shortly see how to decode these embedded messages through fantasy analysis. Groups speak this embedded language when they are in a social trance, 155 when they re-experience the same trance-like dissociation they felt during early traumas. Leaders of groups must therefore be adept at trance induction techniques in order to accomplish their delegated tasks. In fact, group-fantasies, like politics in general, are conducted in a trance atmosphere whose features are identical to the eight "Cognitive Distortions of Dissociation" that Fine found in her dissociated patients: catastrophizing, over- generalization, selective abstraction, dichotomous thinking, time distortion, misassessing causality, irresponsibility or excessive responsibility and circular thinking. 156
The social alter is the inheritor of earlier dissociated persecutory feelings and has as one of its roles the setting up of group punishments that are "object lessons" to us all. McVeigh's staging of the Oklahoma City explosion was carefully arranged to have "abandoned" children like himself punished along with the more conscious aim of punishing bad authorities. The formula for restaging early traumas is: (1) Fuse with your persecutory alter ("Terrifying Mommy"), (2) find a savior alter ("Grandiose Self") whom you follow to (3) kill the victim alter ("Bad Child"). Empathy for victim scapegoats is lost because they are so full of our negative projections and are seen as bad children-growing, striving, wanting too much. The larger the success and new freedoms a society must face-the more its progress overreaches its childrearing evolution-the larger the historical punishment it must stage. When an American Senator, voting for more nuclear weapons, said that even if a nuclear Holocaust was unleashed it wouldn't be too bad because we would "win" it ("If we have to start over with another Adam and Eve, I want them to be Americans"), the weird trance logic can only be understood if nuclear war is seen as an "object lesson," enabling us to "start afresh with a clean slate."
| Ch 5 Part 1 | Ch 5 Part 2 | Ch 5 Citations |
This
version was orignally in:
The Journal of Psychohistory
V. 25, N. 2, Fall 1997