"The child feels the drive of the Life
Force...
you cannot feel it for him. " ----George Bernard Shaw
Since nearly all of the cultural evolution of Homo sapiens sapiens has taken place during the past 100,000 years-only about 5,000 generations-and since this time span is too short to allow the human gene pool to mutate very much, epigenetic evolution of the psyche-the evolution of the architecture of the brain occurring during development in the womb and during early childhood-must be the central source of cultural change, rather than genetic evolution. Just as one can lift a newborn out of a contemporary cannibal culture and bring it up in one's own culture without noticing any personality difference, one could also, presumably, raise a Cro-Magnon baby in a modern family without noticing any differences. After decades of sociobiologists' claims that "social structures and culture are but more elaborate vessels or survivor machines for ensuring that genes can maximize their fitness," 1 there still is not a shred of evidence that any cultural change is due to natural selection of random variations affecting human gene pools during the past 100,000 years. The short stature of Pygmies may have been selected for during millions of years of biological evolution as an adaptation to the heat of the tropics, 2 but even the most ardent sociobiologists have not claimed to show that beliefs in witches or divine leaders found in every environment have been selected for by any environmental condition, 3 since these cultural traits are solutions to emotional, not environmental, problems. One recent study of approximately 100 major genetic human traits concluded that "no absolute differences between populations of primitive and civilized humans are known..." 4 Unfortunately, this means that the laws of the psychological and cultural evolution of Homo sapiens sapiens remain a total mystery.
Since neo-Darwinian theory of differential genetic replication requires massive extinctions for the robust selection and retention of random mutations, the lack of evidence for many mass extinctions during the past 100,000 years means neo-Darwinian theory of differential reproductive rates has little value in explaining the relatively rapid evolution of the psyche and culture of Homo sapiens sapiens. In addition, the trillions of neural connections in the brain are simply far too numerous to be determined by the limited number of genes in the gamete, so most brain structure must be determined by epigenetic events. As Ernst Mayr puts it, "The brain of 100,000 years ago is the same brain that is now able to design computers....All the achievements of the human intellect were reached with brains not specifically selected for these tasks by the neo-Darwinian process." 5 Since environmental selection of random genetic variations is not the central mechanism for evolution in modern human neural networks, the question is what non-Darwinian processes have been responsible for the enormous evolution of brain networks and cultures in modern humans?
THE FAILURE OF ENVIRONMENTAL DETERMINISM OF CULTURAL EVOLUTION
That so many social scientists remain environmental determinists
is puzzling. It certainly is not because the method has any
empirical verification environment is simply assumed causal in
culture change because historical advances in human nature are so
often a priori assumed impossible. As Leslie White once put it,
since it is assumed that human nature cannot change, "we see
no reason why cultural systems of 50,000 B.C....could not have
been capable of originating agriculture as well as systems in
8,000 B.C....We must look, then, to environmental [factors] for
the answers to these questions." 6 For instance, most social
scientists agree with Johnson and Earle that "the primary
motor for cultural evolution is population growth"
determined by environmental conditions, 7 overlooking that
population growth relies upon the reduction of infanticide (both
from murder at birth and from later neglect) and the growth of
the ability to cooperate and devise ways to produce more food,
both psychological traits dependent upon childrearing practices.
In fact, recent empirical studies have rejected simple population
growth as the mainspring of evolution, pointing out, for
instance, that many advanced chiefdoms form in areas of quite low
population density. 8 As Hallpike put it, "there are many
societies with sufficient population density but which have
nevertheless not developed the state...population density is
merely an index of the abundance of a vital raw material people
and has by itself no power to determine how that raw material
will be used." 9 Hayden summarized recent empirical studies
testing environmental factors in evolution by saying
"neither population pressure nor circumscription appears to
have played a significant role in creating inequality or
complexity." 10 Hallpike rightly concluded his survey of
supposed environmental causes of cultural evolution by stating,
"The materialist belief that the environment simply causes
social adaptation is therefore quite unfounded...there are many
different ways of accommodating to the environment...." 11
Environments are also opportunities, not just straightjackets. As
Kirch and Yen conclude, "men reach out to embrace and create
their ecosystems, rather than the reverse proposition." 12
It is when early childrearing experiences are impaired that
children are forced to reduce their behavioral flexibility and
are therefore as adults unable to improve their environments and
experience cultural stagnation.
The psychogenic theory sees environments as presenting both the constraints and the opportunities for cultural evolution, while the evolution of psychological development during the fetal and childhood period determines how these challenges are met. Since humans far more than other species construct their environments, 13 their creative use to fulfill human needs is crucially determined by the degree of innovation that is allowed by the level of childhood evolution attained.
This of course does not mean that environment counts for nothing. Jared Diamond has convincingly shown how environmental differences have raised and lowered the steepness of the ladder of cultural evolution, demonstrating that the availability of a few good plant and animal domesticates crucially determines the rates of evolution of cultures in different parts of the world, with those areas which have domesticable grains and cattle being able to evolve faster than those that did not. 14 But the evolutionary problem isn't only about the availability of environmental resources. Obviously one cannot develop much agriculture in the Arctic, and obviously tropical regions have too many insects and parasites and too severe floods and droughts that hinder their economic development. 15 But environment is only part of the answer to evolutionary differences. Environmental change cannot explain cultural evolution since culture has often evolved while the ecology has devolved because of soil exhaustion. The point is that the degree of steepness of the environmental ladder doesn't determine whether people chose to climb it you still must want to climb and you must be innovative enough to invent or adopt ways to conquer each rung, whether the base of the ladder is planted in the snow, in a rain forest or in the milder climate of Western Europe. The secret as to why England and not France or Germany spawned the Industrial Revolution first goes back to England's advanced childrearing in its smaller medieval households, not to any ecological advantage. 16 English political freedom, religious tolerance, industry and innovation were all psychoclass achievements, dependent upon childrearing evolution. The most important unsolved question in cultural evolution is therefore to explain the rate of innovation and adoption of new techniques of exploiting what resources exist-factors that depend crucially upon the local rate of evolution of childrearing.
Despite their advocacy of unicausal environmental determinism, anthropologists have regularly demonstrated that similar environments have produced quite different psyches and cultures. Even though most follow Whiting's paradigm that environment determines childhood, personality and culture, 17 others take great delight in describing quite different personalities and cultures coming out of identical environments-one tribe that is gentle, loving and peaceful and the other composed of fierce headhunting cannibals-but then leave the cause of their stark differences as unexplained as if the two groups were dropped down on earth from two different planets. 18 Obversely, others describe quite similar cultures developing in wholly different environments. In Polynesia, for instance, Goldman concludes that "societies can be similar in basic culture whether they occupy atolls or high islands, relatively rich habitats or barren islands; they cannot be regarded as having been molded by their different material environments." 19 But then he is puzzled that he cannot explain how people in such different environments could have evolved such similar cultures. Deprived by their evidence of their theories of environmental determinism, anthropologists discover that the sources of cultural evolution are simply inexplicable.
Archeologists used to accept anthropologists' theories of environmental determinism, but now most admit that their best evidence has turned out to be solidly against it. Social complexity and inequality used to be thought caused by the invention or adoption of farming and herding; but the evidence turns out to show that complexity and inequality preceded agriculture rather than followed it: "Permanently settled communities of more complex hunter-gatherers appear to be the norm in many areas in the late Pleistocene..." 20 Apparently first people changed, then they managed to change their cultures and technologies. Price asks: "what caused the adoption of agriculture?" His answer is the one more and more archeologists are beginning to agree with: "questions about the transition to agriculture clearly have more to do with internal social relations than with external events involving climate and the growth of human population." 21 The "driving force behind food production," Price says, is the appearance of new kinds of people, ones he calls "accumulators," who "emerge" and engage in competitive feasts that require more food production. 22 Johnson and Earle agree, speaking of "a new attitude toward change" that appears in history, "though the reason for it remains obscure." 23 Discovering what causes these new kinds of people and new attitudes toward change to mysteriously "emerge" throughout history (or, as often, not to "emerge") is therefore a central task of the psychogenic theory of evolution.
DIFFERENCES BETWEEN HISTORICAL AND NEO-DARWINIAN EVOLUTION
Problems of explaining evolution are central to all sciences,
including the social sciences. Just as nothing in biology makes
complete sense except in the light of [genetic] evolution,
nothing in human history makes complete sense except in the light
of epigenetic (psychogenic) evolution. Neo-Darwinian theory of
biological evolution explains all behavioral change in animals as
resulting from the accretion of random variations produced by
mutation, recombination and genetic drift selected as better
adaptations to changing environments. But what is usually
overlooked is that genetic evolution only provides the capacity
for adult behavioral variations assuming a specific developmental
environment. 24 The road from genotype to phenotype is a long
one. What trait actually appears in the mature individual depends
upon the actual course of epigentic development, beginning in the
womb and continuing throughout childhood an extraordinarily
complex and variable journey for each individual. The most
important environments are the mother's body and behavior, and
the most important competition for survival not in the sperm or
ovum but at the neural level, in the brain, with the mother
acting as the "agent of natural selection." 25
What is little recognized is that recent revolutionary discoveries in molecular biology by Gottlieb, Lipton and others have begun to show that early environments actually change genetic structure. 26 Maternal prenatal environment and even early parental care can actually be passed down to succeeding generations through the genes, contrary to traditional biological theory. Genes cannot turn themselves on or off, they need a signal from their environment, so genetic structure is wide open to environmental changes, rather than being wholly immune from environmental input as has been thought to date. This isn't Lamarckianism; Lamarck didn't know about gene behavior. What has changed is the discovery that cells contain receptors that respond and adapt to environmental signals-the mother being the main controller of genetic accessing. 27 In addition, it has been discovered that only 10 percent of nuclear genes are used to code human expression, while the remaining 90 percent-previously thought of as useless baggage and referred to as "junk DNA"-contains extra DNA that can rewrite genetic messages, create new gene expression and new behavior. 28 Even maternal emotions can be passed to fetal genes and then to the next generation. Gottlieb has prenatally stressed mice, who are as adults found to be more aggressive, and then taken the male mice and mated them with other females and found that their grandsons were also more aggressive than non-stressed males-thus showing how environmental stress can be passed down genetically. Perry and others have shown dramatically how stressed children "change from being victims to being victimizers" because of imbalanced noradrenaline and serotonin levels, which then can be passed down through both genetic and epigenetic changes. 29 Indeed, the ability of the genome to respond to its environment means evolutionary change takes place both by environmental selection of random variations and by epigenetic inheritance systems. 30 Thus a drought that starves mothers and their fetuses or an increase in wife-beating in a society can effect not only the first but succeeding generations' psyches and behavior through changes in genetic structure and gene accessing.
The laws of historical evolution are quite different from the laws of neo-Darwinism. The central hypothesis of the psychogenic theory of historical evolution is that epigenetic neuronal variations originating in changing interpersonal relationships with caretakers rather than only through genetic variations originating through natural selections are the primary source of the evolution of the psyche and society. "The more evolved the species is...the greater the role of epigenetic mechanisms in the structure of the nervous system." 31 The fundamental evolutionary direction in Homo sapiens sapiens is towards better interpersonal relationships, not just the satisfaction of biological instincts. While adaptation to the natural environment is the key to genetic evolution, relationship to the human environment is the key to psychological evolution, to the evolution of "human nature." Psychogenesis is also the key to cultural evolution, since the range of evolution of childrearing in every society puts inevitable limits upon what it can accomplish-politically, economically and socially.
Developmental changes in the three-pound, trillion-celled human brain have completely overwhelmed purely genetic changes as causes of psychological and cultural evolution in the past 100,000 years. The causal mechanisms for the evolution of human psyche and culture have more and more decoupled from the neo-Darwinian causal mechanisms that depend solely upon outbreeding success. 32 The psychogenic theory of evolution is based not upon Spencer and Darwin's "survival of the fittest" products of the most ruthless parents but upon the "survival of the most innovative and cooperative" products of the most loving parents. The processes of historical evolution, based upon the very slow growth of love and cooperation, are therefore the exact opposite from those of neo-Darwinian natural selection, based overwhelmingly upon conflict and competition. They include:
(1) The production of variations through psychogenesis is by creating through more love different early epigenetic environments-more advanced fetal and early childhood developmental paths-not through random genetic mutations and recombinations-i.e., through variations in the structures of neuronal groups achieved during post-genetic development after inception, not through mutations in DNA prior to inception;
(2) the vehicles of transmission include neuronal groups in the brains of individual parents and children, not solely genes in the sexual organs of parents;
(3) the selection of variations is accomplished through changes in a very narrow part of the human environment-the family, the main organizer of emotional symbols, particularly the mother-rather than simply through changes in the ecology;
(4) the preservation of emergent variations in some individuals is often prevented from being swamped by the less developed childrearing practices of the rest of the culture via the psychogenic pump effects of migration;
(5) the limitations to emergent variations (psychogenic devolution) occurs either because of conditions adverse to childrearing-such as wars, plagues or droughts-or because sudden increased social freedom for adults creates excessive growth panic, anxieties which are turned against children as poison containers, thereby producing devolution in childrearing in a portion of a given society;
(6) the main locus of epigenetic variations is the slow evolution of the individual conscious self that looks forward to its future and creates its own extended present, a self that evolves mainly through the growth of love in the parent-child relationship;
(7) the rate of innovation in cultural evolution is determined by the conditions for parental love and therefore increase in individual self-assertion in each society, all cultural evolutions being preceded by a childrearing evolution; and
(8) the locus of psychogenic evolution has historically been affected far more by maternal than paternal influence-indeed, entirely maternal in the crucial first nine months of life-rather than males and females each contributing half of the genetic information as occurs in neo-Darwinian evolution.
This last point will only become fully evident in the next chapter, where it will be documented that the task of "fathering"-of playing a real role in forming a child's psyche-is in fact a very late historical invention. Most fathers among our closest ape relatives don't have much to do with their children, 33 and a nurturing role during early childhood for the human father turns out to be a far more recent historical innovation than has heretofore been assumed. The major epigenetic changes in the structures of the brain, therefore, have mainly been evolved by females, not males. Fathers until recently have affected their children's psyches mainly through family provisioning and by establishing some of the conditions for mothering, but it has mainly been the mothers who have produced epigenetic novelty; so to discover the laws of cultural evolution one must "follow the mothers" through history. This is why only the psychogenic theory posits that for most of history women and children are the ultimate source of historical change.
THE "HOPEFUL DAUGHTER" AND THE PSYCHOGENIC
CUL-DE-SAC
Since for most of history mothers raise boys who then go off and
hunt, farm, build things and fight wars rather than directly
contributing much new to the psyche of the next generation, the
course of evolution of the psyche has overwhelmingly been
dependent upon the way mothers have treated their daughters, who
become the next generation of mothers. Since early emotional
relationships organize the entire range of human behavior, all
cultural traits do not equally affect the evolution of the
psyche-those that affect the daughter's psyche represent the main
narrow bottleneck through which all other cultural traits must
pass. The study of the evolution of the psyche depends more on
developing a maternal ecology than on studying variations in the
physical environment.
The evolution of the psyche and culture has been crucially dependent upon turning the weak bonds between mother and daughter of apes and early humans 34 into genuine love for daughters (and sons). This means that historical societies that create optimal conditions for improving the crucial mother-daughter relationship by surrounding the mother with support and love soon begin to show psychological innovation and cultural advances in the next generations-so that history begins to move in progressive new directions. In contrast, societies that cripple the mother-daughter emotional relationship experience psychogenic arrest and even psychogenic devolution. Only in modern times have fathers, too, begun to contribute to the evolutionary task of growing the young child's mind.
Paralleling the term "hopeful monster" that biologists use to indicate speciating biological variations, 35 the idea that the mother-daughter emotional relationship is the focal point of epigentic evolution and the main source of novelty in the psyche can be called the "hopeful daughter" concept. When mothers love and support particularly their daughters, a series of generations can develop new childrearing practices that grow completely new neural networks, hormonal systems and behavioral traits. If hopeful daughters are instead emotionally crippled by a society, a psychogenic cul-de-sac is created, generations of mothers cannot innovate, epigenetic arrest is experienced and meaningful cultural evolution ends. 36
For instance, in China before the tenth century A.D. men began to footbind little girls'feet as a sexual perversion, making them into sexual fetishes, penis-substitutes which the men would suck on and masturbate against during sex play. 37 Chinese literature reports the screaming cries of the five-year-old girl as she hobbles about the house for years to do her tasks while her feet are bound, because in order to make her foot tiny, her foot bones are broken and the flesh deteriorates. She loses several toes as they are bent under her foot, to emphasize the big toe as a female penis. This practice was added to the many brutal practices of what was perhaps the world's most anti-daughter culture, where over half the little girls were murdered at birth without remorse and special girl-drowning pools were legion, where beating little girls until bloody was a common parental practice, and where girl rape and sex slavery were rampant. 38 This vicious anti-daughter emotional atmosphere extreme even for a time that was generally cruel and unfeeling towards daughters was obviously not conducive to mothers producing innovations in childrearing when the little girls grew up. Therefore China which was culturally ahead of the West in many ways at the time of the introduction of footbinding-became culturally and politically "frozen" until the twentieth century, when footbinding was stopped and boy-girl sex ratios in many areas dropped from 200/100 to near equality. 39 The result was that whereas for much of its history China punished all novelty, 40 during the twentieth century rapid cultural, political and economic evolution could resume. Japan, which shared much of Chinese culture but did not adopt footbinding of daughters, avoided the psychogenic arrest of China and could therefore share in the scientific and industrial revolution as it occurred in the West.
The same kind of epigenetic arrest can be seen in the damage caused by genital mutilation of girls among circum-Mediterranean peoples that began thousands of years ago and continues today. Since "hopeful daughters" do not thrive on the chopping off of their clitorises and labias, the present cultural and political problems of those groups who still mutilate their daughters' genitals are very much a direct result of this psychogenic arrest. 41 Much of the remainder of this chapter will analyze the conditions for psychogenic arrest, when childrearing has failed to evolve and culture remains in a psychogenic cul-de-sac, static for millennia.
The historical evolution of the psyche is a process that mainly involves removing developmental distortions, so that each psyche can develop in its own way optimally. The evolution of childhood, as will be extensively documented, mainly consists of parents slowly giving up killing, abandoning, mutilating, battering, terrorizing, sexually abusing and using their children for their own emotional needs and instead creating loving conditions for growth of the self. The evolution of the psyche is first of all accomplished by removing terrible abuses of children and their resulting developmental distortions, allowing the psyche to produce historical novelty and achieve its own inherent human growth path. Civilization is not, as everyone including Freud has assumed, a historical "taming of the instincts." Nor does "the evolution of mankind proceed from bad to worse," as Roheim thought, 42 with early societies being "indulgent" toward their children and modern societies more often abusive. It will be the burden of the remainder of this book to provide evidence that just the reverse is true, that culture evolves through the increase of love and freedom for children, so that when they grow up they can invent more adaptive and happier ways of living. Because we were all children before we were adults, childhood evolution must precede social evolution, psychogenesis must precede sociogenesis.
LOVE AND FREEDOM-NOT COMPLEXITY-THE MEASURE OF EVOLUTIONARY
PROGRESS
The measure of the evolution of psyche and culture is actually
quite different from that assumed by most social theories. Social
evolution is usually defined simply as the degree of
complexity-as measured by population or social hierarchy or
technology 43 with such elements as the increasing amounts of
knowledge causing cultures to grow more complex. 44 But there is
no evidence that modern brains contain more knowledge than those
of foragers of 100,000 years ago. What has evolved is the
self-located in the hippocampal-prefrontal networks-not simply
the amount of knowledge stored in the cortex. 45 Contemporary
foragers, for instance, know an enormous amount of ecological
information the forager who knows hundreds of species of plants
and animals and their characteristics probably has as many
neurons in his cortex storing knowledge as most Westerners.
Similarly, their cultural system cannot be said to be less
complex, since it usually contains some of the most complicated
kinship, belief systems and languages extant. What is less
evolved is their childhoods and the personality systems dependent
upon this childrearing. Societies with poor childrearing produce
historical personalities-psychoclasses-that have too much anxiety
and conflict to maintain good object relations, so they tend to
deny their real needs-for love, for freedom, for achievement-and
their cultures oppose change and do not evolve.
The psychogenic theory defines progress in evolution as increases in self awareness, freedom, human potential, empathy, love, trust, self control and a preponderance of conscious decisions-rather than as an increase in technological, economic or political complexity. This means that some cultures on low technological levels 46 could actually be further evolved in human terms than others that are more complex technologically and politically. Because the psychogenic theory makes the individual psyche both the source of variation and the unit of selection, it posits that childhood is the central focal point of social evolution. The amount of time and resources any society devotes to its children's needs is far more likely to be an accurate index of its level of civilization than any of the anthropological indices of complexity or energy utilization.
The central direction of evolutionary progress, therefore, of Homo sapiens sapiens is from personal neediness to personal independence, from family enmeshment to family caregiving, from social dependency and violence to social dependability and empathy. Although this progress is extraordinarily uneven in different contemporary cultures and even in different family lines, the general progressive direction is evident. It will be the task of the remainder of this book to document the hypothesis that the evolution of childhood has been from incest to love and from abuse to empathy, and that progress in childrearing has regularly preceded social, political and technological progress. The main thrust of the psychogenic theory of cultural evolution is simple: The evolution of culture is ultimately determined by the amount of love, understanding and freedom experienced by its children, because only love produces the individuation needed for cultural innovation. Every abandonment, every betrayal, every hateful act towards children returns tenfold a few decades later upon the historical stage, while every empathic act that helps a child become what he or she wants to become, every expression of love toward children heals society and moves it in unexpected, wondrous new directions.
PSYCHOGENESIS-THE SOURCE OF EPIGENETIC VARIATION
Psychogenesis is the process of forming historically new brain
networks that develop the self and produce innovation. It is a
"bootstrapping" evolutionary process 47 that occurs in
the interpersonal relationships between generations. Babies begin
with the need to form intensely personal relationships with their
caretakers, who in turn respond with ambivalent needs to (a) use
the baby as a poison container for their projections, and (b) go
beyond their own childrearing and give the child what it actually
needs rather than what is being projected into it. The ability of
successive generations of parents to work through their own
childhood anxieties the second time around is a process much like
that of psychotherapy, which also involves a return to childhood
anxieties and, if successful, a reworking of them with support of
the therapist into new ways of looking at others and at one's
self. It is in this sense of the psychogenic process that history
can be said to be a "psychotherapy of generations,"
producing new epigenetic, developmental variation and-because
these early emotions organize the remainder of cognitive content
48 cultural evolution.
Psychogenesis is not a very robust process in caretakers. Most of the time, parents simply reinflict upon their children what had been done to them in their own childhood. The production of developmental variations can occur only in the silent, mostly unrecorded decisions by parents to go beyond the traumas they themselves endured. It happens each time a mother decides not to use her child as an erotic object, not to tie it up so long in swaddling bands, not to hit it when it cries. It happens each time a mother encourages her child's explorations and independence, each time she overcomes her own despair and neediness and gives her child a bit more of the love and empathy she herself didn't get. These private moments are rarely recorded for historians, and social scientists have completely overlooked their role in the production of cultural variation, yet they are nonetheless the ultimate sources of the evolution of the psyche and culture.
The generational pressure for epigenetic, developmental evolution does not occur in a vacuum, of course. Every social condition that impinges upon the parent-child relationship-in particular that disturbs the mother's ability to go beyond her own childrearing and give her child more love than she received-affects psychogenesis. Yet the crucial study of what social conditions have been responsible for the evolution, arrest or devolution of childrearing is a separate empirical task. One cannot simply conclude that the more complex societies become, the better (or worse) the conditions for parenting. Particularly crucial are the conditions favoring the survival of nascent variations in parent-child relationship across generations without being swamped, paralleling the problem in neo-Darwinian theory of the swamping of mutations by a large gene pool. The effects of other conditions upon childrearing are not all that obvious. Material conditions are not the most important of these; more crucial is the attitude of the society towards women and the overcoming of maternal despair. The various ways that family conditions, emotional attitudes, material factors, demographic factors, culture contact and a whole range of historical conditions change the ability of parents to achieve developmental evolution for a series of generations will be examined in detail from the historical and ethnographic record in the remainder of this book.
Cultural and psychological evolution is neither spontaneous nor inevitable, as anthropologists and historians have so often assumed. 49 One cannot simply posit a priori that "variation in individual cultural practices and perceptions exists in every community at all times, [forming] a pool of possibilities for what people will do in the immediate future." 50 There exist today many cultures whose members' personalities have not evolved very far and whose cultures have remained extraordinarily resistant to change for millennia. Because their ability to give mature love to their children has barely evolved in thousands of generations, their systems of consciousness are developmentally arrested, and they have remained headhunters, cannibals and fierce warriors as were our own ancestors in the Paleolithic. In fact, as we will shortly see, even modern nations consist of groups of individuals who are on all levels of psychogenic evolution-that is, each nation contains all psychoclasses-because individuals are endpoints of unique family histories of childrearing evolution and devolution over thousands of generations. Your next-door neighbors are therefore nearly as likely to be psychological fossils-because their parents used brutal medieval childrearing practices-as they are to be the results of loving, helping parenting. Those who are lucky enough to have had really loving, helping mode parents stand on the shoulders of thousands of individual emotional decisions of parents about how to care for their children.
Because childrearing evolution determines the evolution of the psyche and society, the causal arrows of all other social theories are reversed by the psychogenic theory. Rather than personal and family life being seen as dragged along in the wake of social, cultural, technological and economic change, society is instead viewed as the outcome of evolutionary changes that first occur in the psyche. Because the structure of the psyche changes from generation to generation within the narrow funnel of childhood, childrearing practices are not just one item in a list of cultural traits-they are the very condition for the transmission and further development of all other cultural elements, placing limits on what can be achieved in all other social areas. Indeed our social, religious and political behavior, like our personal life, is very much a part of our human search for love, so necessary for the development of our self. Childhood must therefore always first evolve before major social, cultural and economic innovation can occur. Little by little, adults must refrain from routinely murdering, neglecting, tying up, abandoning, raping, battering and torturing generation after generation of infinitely precious children and begin instead to empathize with their quest to grow up into independent, productive individuals.
THE EVOLUTION OF PARENTING
Most parents through most of history relate to their children
most of the time as 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" 51 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 the parent experiences the needs of the child and, instead of restaging their own traumatic childhood, invents new ways of handling their anxieties so the child can grow and individuate in their 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" 52 new neural 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 culture 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." 53 It is the purpose of the remainder of this book to document that every political, religious and social trait is sustained by specific childhood experiences and that changes in personality through childrearing evolution determine the course of all cultural 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 54 and separate alters that are the results of earlier childrearing modes. Thus unity of personality and individuation is an achievement only attained at the end of history, 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 over 22 years, up 20 percent in the past three decades. 55 The families I know in my section of Manhattan easily devote over half of their spare time and half their 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. 56
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. It was the habit of most mothers who could afford it to send their children to wetnurse, 57 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. 58
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 nursing themselves, how babies during breastfeeding "kisseth her, strokes her haire, nose and eares [causing] an affection" to grow between mother and infant. 59 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. By contrast, in France, as late as 1780 the police chief of Paris estimated that only 700 out of the 21,000 children born each year in his city were nursed by their mothers, 60 most being sent out to French wetnurses, termed "professional feeders and professional killers." 61 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.
THE SIX CHILDREARING MODES
In The History of Childhood, 62 I proposed six modes of
childrearing which societies unevenly evolve. As the graph below
indicates, most modern nations today contain all six stages in
varying proportions. Outside of moving the dates somewhat forward
when I found first evidence of the mode in the West, I continue
to feel that these modes are accurate. They have been empirically
confirmed by five book-length historical studies 63 in addition
to the over 100 scholarly articles on the history of childhood
during the past 26 years in The Journal of Psychohistory. 64 The
following chart summarizes the historical evidence on
childrearing modes presented in this and the next four chapters
of this book.
1a. Early Infanticidal Mode (small kinship groups): This mode is characterized by high infanticide rates, maternal incest, body mutilation, child rape, tortures and emotional abandonment by parents when the child is not useful as a an erotic object or as a poison container. The father is too immature to act as a real caretaker and is emotionally absent. Prepubertal marriage of little girls is common, similar to cults like The Children of God. 65 The schizoid personality structure of the infanticidal mode is dominated by alters, in which adults spend much of their time in ritual and magical projects, so they are not able to evolve beyond foraging and early horticultural economic levels nor beyond Big Men political organization. 66
1b. Late Infanticidal Mode (chiefdom to early states): Though infanticide rates remain high and child rape is still often routine-particularly royal and pedagogic pederasty 67 the young child is not as much rejected by the mother, and the father begins to be involved with instruction of the older child. Child sacrifice as a guilt-reducing device for social progress is found in early states as the use of children as poison containers became more socially organized. Infant restrictions devices such as swaddling and cradle boards begin, sibling caretakers replace child gangs and sibling incest is widespread. Various institutionalized schemes for care by others become popular, such as adoption, wetnursing, fosterage, and the use of the children of others as servants. 68 Beating is now less impulsive and used as discipline, and because the child is now closer emotionally and used more for farming chores, discipline becomes more controlling and brutal, leading to complex societies whose innovations are paid for by genocidal slaughter and the enslavement of women and children. 69
2. Abandoning Mode (beginning with early Christianity): Once the child is thought as having a soul at birth, routine infanticide becomes emotionally difficult. Early Christians were considered odd in antiquity: "they marry like everybody else, they have children, but they do not practice the exposure of new-born babes." 70 These Christians began Europe's two-millennia-long struggle against infanticide, replacing it with abandonment, from oblation of young children to monasteries, a more widespread use of swaddling, wetnurses if one could afford them, fosterage, wandering scholars and child servants. Child sacrifice was replaced by joining in the group-fantasy of the sacrifice of Christ, who was sent by his father as a poison container to be killed for the sins of others. Pederasty continued, especially in monasteries, and girl rape was widespread. The child was thought to be born full of evil, the parent's projections, so was beaten early and severely. Abusive child care was not mainly due to economics, since the rich as well as the poor during the middle ages had high infanticide, abandonment, sexual molestation and physical abuse rates. 71 The borderline personality structure of Christianity stresses clinging to authority figures as defense against emotional abandonment and constant warfare against enemies to punish others for their own imagined sinfulness for deserving abandonment. 72
3. Ambivalent Mode (beginning in the twelfth century): The twelfth century ended the oblation of children to monasteries, began child instruction manuals, began to punish child rape, expanded schooling, expanded pediatrics, saw child protection laws, and began to tolerate ambivalence-both love and hate-for the child, marking the beginnings of toleration of a child's independent rights. The child was seen less as a sinful poison container and more as soft wax or clay that could be beaten into whatever shape the parent wished. The reduction of splitting defenses of the late medieval narcissistic personality structure produced the advances in technology and the rise of cities associated with the period and eventually the rise of the early modern state. 73
4. Intrusive Mode (beginning in the sixteenth century): The intrusive parent began to unswaddle the child and even the wealthy began to bring up the infant themselves rather than sending it elsewhere or at least have the wetnurse come in to the home thus allowing closer emotional bonds with parents to form. The sixteenth century particularly in England represents a watershed in reduction of parental projections, when parents shifted from trying to stop childrens' growth to trying only to control it and make it "obedient." The freedom of being allowed to crawl around rather than being swaddled and hung on a peg and the individuation of separate child beds and separate child regimens meant parents approached closer to their children and could give them love as long as they controlled their minds, their insides, their anger, their lives. The child raised by intrusive parents was nursed by his or her mother, not swaddled, not given regular enemas but toilet trained early, prayed with but not played with, hit but not battered, punished for masturbation but not masturbated, taught and not sent out as servants to others and made to obey promptly with threats and guilt as often as physical means of punishment. 74 True empathy begins with intrusive mode parents, producing a general improvement in the level of care and reduced child mortality, leading to the early modern demographic transition to later marraige, fewer births and more investment in each child. The end of arranged marriages, the growth of married love and the decline of domestic violence also contributed to the child's ability to achieve emotional growth. 75 A healing of splitting and an increase in individuation produced the scientific, political and economic revolutions of the early modern period, so much so that some British and American parents were often called "strange" by visitors because they "pampered" their children so much and hit them so little. 76 Men didn't cling to their hypermasculine social alters as much and discovered they had a "private self" that was emotionally involved with their family life. 77
5. Socializing Mode (beginning in the eighteenth century): Obviously something new had entered the world when society could claim that "God planted this deep, this unquenchable love for her offspring in the mother's heart." 78 During this period the number of children most women had dropped from seven or eight to three or four, long before any medical discoveries were made in limiting reproduction, 79 because parents now wanted to be able to give more care to each child. Their aim, however, remained instilling their own goals into the child rather than producing individuation: "Is there not a strange fullness of joy in watching the reproduction of your traits, physical, mental and moral, in your child?" 80 The use of mainly psychological manipulation, along with spanking of little children, remains the most popular model of "socialization" of parents in Western European nations and the Americas today, training the child to assume its role in the parents' society. 81 The socializing mode built the modern world, and its values of nationalism and economic class-dominated representative democracy represent the social models of most people today. 82
6. Helping Mode (beginning mid-twentieth century): The helping mode involves acknowledging that the parents' main role is to help the child reach at each stage of its life its own goals, rather than being socialized into adult goals. Parents for the first time consider raising children not a chore but a joy. Both mother and father are equally involved with the child from infancy helping him or her become a self-directed person. Children are given unconditional love, are not struck and are apologized to if yelled at under stress. The helping mode involves a lot of time and energy by parents and other helpers during the child's early years, taking their cues from the child itself as it pursues its developmental course. Birth rates tend to drop below replacement as each child is recognized as requiring a great deal of attention. The helping psychoclass, though few in number today, is far more empathic toward others and less driven by material success than earlier generations. Though Dr. Spock's child care book was late socializing mode, 83 some of the "Spock generation" adolescents after the mid-century were actually products of helping mode parents and felt empowered to explore their own unique social roles and go beyond nationalism, war and economic inequality.
Parents from each of the six childrearing modes co-exist in modern nations today. Indeed, much of political conflict occurs because of the vastly different value systems and vastly different tolerance for freedom of the six psychoclasses. Cyclical swings between liberal and reactionary periods are an outcome of a process whereby more evolved psychoclasses introduce more innovation into the world than less evolved psychoclasses can tolerate. The latter try then to "turn the clock back" and reinstate less anxious social conditions to reduce their growth anxiety, and when this fails, the nation attempts to "cleanse the world of its sinfulness" through a war or depression.
THE PSYCHOGENIC PUMP
The psychogenic pump effect is how evolving parents can avoid the
swamping of variety in childrearing. A mother who wants to try to
leave her child unswaddled after only a few months rather than
after a full year finds her own mother and every other mother
around her is vigorously opposed to her innovation. Sometimes
opposition can actually be lethal. I once asked Arthur Hippler,
the Editor of my Journal of Psychological Anthropology, if he had
ever met a more evolved Athabascan mother than the generally
infanticidal mothers he had been interviewing in Alaska. He said
he had; she was far more empathic than the other mothers. He said
the other mothers shunned her and shut her out of activities,
which would in earlier times have been tantamount to death in
such a severe environment. But most more evolved Athabascans
migrated south, with the result that those who settled along the
northeast coast of America had better childrearing and more
advanced cultures than those that remained in Alaska. 84
The effects of the psychogenic pump in preserving variety can be seen in a variety of similar historical migration patterns of parents practicing more advanced childrearing modes:
1. The migration of colonists into New England contained more advanced parents and more numerous hopeful daughters than those in families who stayed behind, since the most advanced childrearing -the intrusive mode-was being practiced by the Puritans who were chased out of England or who emigrated to escape "unreasonable authority." 85 The result was, as Condorcet put it, Americans seemed to have "stepped out of history," because they had less infanticide, less wetnursing, shorter swaddling and better parent-child relations than European parents at the time. The psychogenic pump, however, mainly applied to New England parents those who migrated further south usually did not do so as intact families and contained far more bachelor latter-born sons, servants and others who were not escaping from religious persecution. 86 Therefore, the South lagged the North in their level of childrearing, a condition that eventually led to the American Civil War.
2. The migration of more advanced parents in Europe in general took place from east to west, as migrating farmer populations moved from Asia to Western Europe, 87 displaced foragers and tried innovative living arrangements compared to those that stayed behind. This is the ultimate reason why Eastern Europe even today remains far behind Western Europe and the United States in childrearing and in democracy and industrialization.
3. The same principle of "those who emigrate contain the more advanced parents" applies to why Central and South American Indians had more advanced childrearing and more evolved cultures than those of North America.
4. Jews who had immigrated into Europe were more advanced in childrearing, so much so that they had to be sacrificed in the Holocaust as representatives of too much innovation and growth. Jews since antiquity didn't just "disperse" (diaspora), they differentially migrated, with those with more advanced parenting modes striking out to new homes, where their success made them scapegoats for the growth fears of others.
5. The psychogenic pump favors extremities, peripherally isolated areas that capture late arrivals, the most innovative parents and the most hopeful daughters. (Biological speciation, too, favors peripherally isolated communities.) 88 The most advanced childrearing in Europe was in England and the most advanced in Asia was in Japan, both large islands at the extreme western and eastern ends of the Eurasian land mass, both settled late by immigrant farmers. Japan, in fact, developed agriculture extremely late, only two thousand years ago, 89 when the most advanced families in Asia migrated from Korea. "Those that stayed behind" in China, in Eastern Europe-were swamped by less evolved childrearing modes and were therefore more subject to psychogenic arrest or even devolution. In contrast, many of the world's most advanced cultures-such as the Hawaiians or the ancient Greeks-were products of late-arriving migrants, more advanced parenting styles, who turned unpromising peripheral evironments into distinctive, innovative civilizations.
PSYCHOGENIC DEVOLUTION
One of the hardest thing to understand in studying childhood
history is how parenting can stay the same for millennia or
sometimes even get worse. How can a Balkan peasant mother today
as in antiquity kill their newborn or tightly bind her baby to a
cradle and keep it isolated in a dark room for a year or more,
oblivious of its screams? 90 How can most fathers today still
batter their little kids? Is empathy for children so fragile? Why
does psychogenic evolution not take place, even devolve? Why have
a portion of parents in every society remained at the
infanticidal and abandoning modes? What happened in previous
generations that extinguished the evolution of parental love so
thoroughly?
People throughout history defend against their despair by finding poison containers to restage their early traumas. Men do so mainly by going to war and torturing, enslaving and killing sacrificial victims. But women only have their children to torture, enslave and kill. One thing is clear: the cause is not merely economic since the rich tortured and killed their children just as the poor did. Indeed, the most massive genocide in the world-never recognized as such because children are not considered human by historians-has been the parental holocaust, the killing, binding, battering, raping, mutilating and torturing of children throughout history, numbering billions not just millions of innocent, helpless human beings. It is this untold story of the genocide of a whole class of human beings that will be fully told for the first time in this book. But just as there are few good psychological studies of Nazis during the Jewish Holocaust-because it is so difficult to empathize enough with victimizers to understand their motives-so too there are few good studies of parents in history who murdered, beaten and tortured their children, since it is hard to identify enough with them to analyze their motives. Determining the psychodynamics of parents who have stayed the same for thousands of generations while others around them have been evolving is doubly difficult, since one must deal with both the paucity of the historical record of the parental cruelty and also the denial and anger stemming from one's own feelings.
The key to understanding psychogenic arrest and devolution must lie in comprehending the historical relationship of mothers to their daughters-a totally unresearched area, even for feminist historians. Sometimes men who oppose all social change instinctively recognize they must kill off all hopeful daughters-as today when Islamic fundamentalists drag out of class all the girls they find in schools and slaughter them. 91 The study of the multigenerational effects of trauma is just beginning. 92 But usually the conditions that maim the psyches of hopeful daughters are simply part of the cultural practices of the society and go unrecognized as crippling evolution. When thirty-year-old men in antiquity insisted on marrying prepubertal girls because they were afraid of women their own age, when medieval mothers prostituted their daughters either to the local priest or to the whole community, when mothers fed their daughters less or gave them less medical attention than boys because girls who grew up needed dowries, when brothers in Eastern European zadruga routinely used each others' daughters sexually, when Chinese men bound the feet of little girls to use as sexual objects or circum-Mediterranean mothers chopped off the genitals of their little girls, psychogenic devolution was the inevitable result.
Using children as poison containers can reach intolerable limits, either as a result of intolerable conditions such as war or drought or even as a result of social progress, when parents react with extreme growth panic and use their children to relieve their anxieties. Sometimes historical tragedies like these are evident, as when children were abandoned by the millions in revolutionary Russia and were forced to live as prostitutes and criminals for decades after, many even today living abandoned in Russia's main cities. 93 Psychogenic devolution is often a result of attempts to "leap forward," as when China killed 30 million people as a result of the famine caused by the Great Leap Forward-in fact, some areas of China devolved so far that they regressed to cannibalism. 94 But sometimes the "war on children" resulting from too much change can be documented in more specific detail.
When serfdom ended in Hungary in the 1840s, women in rural areas responded by concluding that at last they were to be free. But, they feared, women cannot be free if they have so many children, so "there was a panic reaction and a brutal, drastic reduction of family size was put speedily into practice, first by simple infanticide and crude abortion techniques and later by the one-child system." 95 Although poverty was not a problem in the area, for a full century mothers became baby killers, so that "families shank into non-existence, leaving house and farm vacant" to adhere to a norm that "became irrational and, indeed, suicidal for entire families, villages and ethnic groups..." 96 In what has been called "a Terrible Matriarchy," killing mothers established a "dark belt of one-child-system villages," 97 by crude abortion techniques with sharp objects and winding ropes tightly around the mother's body and soaking them in water, by strangling or freezing babies, even by mothers-in-law "sleeping with the young couple to ensure they did not have intercourse..." 98
Growth panic from progress being turned against children is an everyday phenomena, only no one recognizes it because no one sees children as poison containers for adult anxieties. Times of prosperity and progress are often times when poor children are used as scapegoats. While the average income of the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans rose 72 percent between 1977 and 1994, and while the average income of the highest-earning 20 percent rose 25 percent, that of the poorest 25 percent shrank 16 percent, throwing millions more children under the poverty line while cutting welfare benefits. 99 Yet the question remains: why are some societies and some family lines so far behind in improving childrearing? To begin to answer this crucial question, we will first analyze what childhood is really like in simpler societies.
THE IDEALIZATION OF CHILDHOOD IN SIMPLE SOCIETIES
Unfortunately for the psychogenic theory, nearly all social
scientists currently agree that there is an inverse relationship
between childrearing and social evolution, with parents becoming
less loving and more abusive as cultures move from simple to
complex societies. 100 Agreeing with Rousseau and Freud, most
anthropologists today see civilization as being achieved at the
expense of childhood freedom and nurturance, with the quality of
child care going straight downhill and becoming more punitive and
less nurturing as societies become more complex. Rohner, for
instance, concludes from his cross-cultural review of parenting
from the Human Relations Area Files that virtually all mothers in
simpler societies are "warm and nurturant toward their
children,"101 so that "The more complex a sociocultural
system is, the less warm parents in general tend to be..."
102 Whiting analyzes the results of hundreds of anthropological
studies of childhood as follows: "children in simple
cultures are high on nurturance and low on egoism, whereas
children brought up in complex cultures are egoistic and not very
nurturant." 103 Stephens summarizes the current state of
academic opinion:
When one reads an ethnographic account of child rearing in a primitive society, one will usually find some statement to the effect that the people 'love their babies'...the ethnographer seems amazed at the amount of affection, care, attention, indulgence, and general 'fuss' lavished upon infants and young children... 104
Now when I first discovered, in the anthropology course I took with Margaret Mead at Columbia University over four decades ago, that anthropologists were unanimous in thinking that childhood had evolved from nurturant and loving to neglectful and abusive as the level of civilization increased, I was puzzled as to how anyone could at the same time think that childhood had any effect on adult personality, since this meant that the cannibals, headhunters and warriors I was studying had supposedly had wonderful loving, nurturant childhoods. I soon began to question the accuracy of all these cross-cultural studies of childrearing, and asked whether those who classified techniques of parenting 105 could have been actually coding the degrees of distortion and denial of the anthropologists rather than what was really happening to children.
When I found the same unanimity regarding loving childrearing in past times among historians, equally unsupported by careful historical evidence, I began combing primary sources myself to find out the truth about what it must have felt like to have been a child both in the past and in other cultures. With ethnological accounts, of course, I was wholly dependent upon the reports of the anthropologists, since I could not myself observe at first hand the childrearing practices of hundreds of cultures. So rather than relying on selective Human Relations Area File cards, I constructed my own more extensive files over the next three decades from reports of the ethnologists who had said anything about childrearing, being careful to separate their glowing adjectives from the descriptions of events they actually saw happen. I extended these files with personal contacts with many of the anthropologists in connection with my Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology.
When I began publishing the results of my research into both historical and cross-cultural childhoods, documenting how childhood both in the past and in other cultures had been massively idealized, both historians and anthropologists concluded that I surely must have been mad. As Melvin Konner put it in his book Childhood:
Lloyd deMause, then editor of the History of Childhood Quarterly, claimed that all past societies treated children brutally, and that all historical change in their treatment has been a fairly steady improvement toward the kind and gentle standards we now set and more or less meet. His 1974 book begins, "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."
Now anthropologists-and many historians as well-were slack-jawed and nearly speechless. Studies of parents, children, and the family in cultures on every inhabited continent had turned up not a single case-with one or two possible exceptions-of extant patterns of child care that corresponded to the brutal neglectful approach these historians were assigning to all the parents of the past.
On the contrary, serious students of the anthropology of childhood beginning with Margaret Mead have called attention to the pervasive love and care lavished on children in many traditional cultures. They even found much Westerners could admire and possibly emulate. 106
The only way to disprove this widespread opinion about parenting in traditional cultures is to examine what anthropologists have written and see whether their evidence actually shows something other than "pervasive love and care lavished on children." In order that the effects of culture contact with the West may be kept to a minimum, I will concentrate on New Guinea, with a few forays into nearby areas, because here Western contact was both late and minimal as compared with Africa and other areas.
THE INFANTICIDAL MODE OF CHILDREARING IN NEW GUINEA
I have termed 107 the earliest mode of childrearing the
infanticidal mode because parents who routinely resolve their
anxieties about taking care of their children by killing them
without remorse also convey this attitude to their other children
by demonstrating throughout their lives that their personal
existence is not important to them except as the children satisfy
the needs of the parents.
As in most simple cultures, New Guinea mothers can be considered infanticidal mode because they kill a third or more of their newborn-so that most mothers have killed one or more of their children. Though the practice is common, it is usually downplayed by anthropologists-Margaret Mead, for instance, kept infanticide out of her published reports, but wrote in her letters home such observations as "we've had one corpse float by, a newborn infant; they are always throwing away infants here..." 108 Some sense of its dimensions can be seen in the imbalance of males over females at birth, ratios which run from 120-160 to 100. 109 Since both male and female newborn are killed, this ratio obviously only reflects the amount of excess female infanticide, so the combined rate of infanticide is even higher. These high rates are common to the culture area; Birdsell, for instance, estimated that the Australian Aborigines destroyed as many as 50 percent of all infants 110 and the first missionaries in Polynesia estimated that two-thirds of the children were murdered by their parents." 111 Another study cites an average sex ratio of 159 to 100 for children 1-5 years, which means most families killed at least one child. 112 Anthropologists commonly pass over these statistics quickly, since high infanticide rates do not reflect well upon their "pervasive love" claim. For instance, Herdt claims that "Sambia love children, and it is hard to imagine that infanticide was done except in desperate circumstances." 113 He then says that "throughout New Guinea, males outnumber females at birth, often in high ratios...For Sambia, the birthrate ratio is 120 male births to 100 female births." Despite this out-of-balance birthrate ratio, Herdt claims "There was no female infanticide," 114 a biological impossibility.
Although anthropologists commonly excuse infanticide as required by "necessity" and don't count it as part of the homicide rate their informants themselves report otherwise when asked why they kill their infants, stating they killed them because "children are too much trouble," 115 because the mothers were angry at their husbands, 116 because they are "demon children," 117 because the baby "might turn out to be a sorcerer," 118 "because her husband would go to another woman" for sex if she had to nurse the infant, 119 because they didn't want babies to tie them down in their sexual liaisons, 120 because it was a female and must be killed because "they leave you in a little while" 121 or "they don't stay to look after us in our old age." 122 Infanticide by mothers can be thought of as an early form of post-partum depression. Siblings commonly watch their mothers kill their siblings and are sometimes forced to take part in the murder. In many tribes, the newborn is "tossed to the sows, who promptly devour it. The woman then takes one of the farrows belonging to the sow who first attacked her baby's corpse and nurses it at her breast." 123 Pigs, by the way, are commonly nursed by women at their breasts, 124 then often used for sacrificial purposes and discarded thus disproving the notion that infanticide is made necessary because of lack of breast milk. Even when the baby is buried, it is often found by other children: "the mother...buries it alive in a shallow hole that the baby's movements may be seen in the hole as it is suffocating and panting for breath; schoolchildren saw the movements of such a dying baby and wanted to take it out to save it. However, the mother stamped it deep in the ground and kept her foot on it..." 125
Anthropologists often report the infanticidal actions of New Guinea mothers without noticing what they are actually doing. As a typical instance, Willey reports in his book Assignment New Guinea that a group of mothers were gathered outside the police station to protest some government action, yelling, "Kill our children." Willey says, "One woman in the front line hurled her baby at the police, shouting, "'Go on, kill my child!' When the senior officer caught it and handed it back to the mother, she held it up and yelled, 'Kill my baby.'" 126 Invariably, these mothers are reported as very loving, not infanticidal.
In some parts of New Guinea and Australia, mothers are both child murderers and cannibals, who commonly kill both their own and others' children and feed them to their siblings. 127 The most complete description of the practice comes from Roheim:
It had been the custom for every second child to be eaten by the preceding child...When the Yumu, Pindupi, Ngali, or Nambutji were hungry, they ate small children with neither ceremonial nor animistic motives. Among the southern tribes, the Matuntara, Mularatara, or Pitjentara, every second child was eaten in the belief that the strength of the first child would be doubled...[My informants] had, each of them, eaten one of their brothers....They eat the head first, then the arms, feet, and finally the body. Jankitji, Uluru and Aldinga have all eaten their siblings....Daisy Bates writes: 'Baby cannibalism was rife among these central-western people...In one group...every woman who had a baby had killed and eaten it, dividing it with her sisters, who in turn killed their children at birth and returned the gift of food, so that the group had not preserved a single living child for some years. When the frightful hunger for baby meat overcame the mother before or at the birth of the baby, it was killed and cooked regardless of sex.'" 128
Roheim states with great conviction though providing no evidence that the children who were forced to eat their siblings "are the favored ones who started life with no oral trauma," 129 that eating one's siblings "doesn't seem to have affected the personality development" of these children, 130 and that "these are good mothers who eat their own children." 131 When I suggested in Foundations of Psychohistory 132 that it was doubtful that children remained unaffected by being forced to join in their mother's killing and eating of their siblings, a reviewer, Robert Paul, editor of Ethos, the journal of psychological anthropology, was adamant that no one may question Roheim's rosy conclusions:
Remember that the anthropologist in question here is Roheim himself, who can hardly be accused of being psychoanalytically unsophisticated, or of denying or resisting. Indeed, deMause readily accepts his reportage about the facts. Why does he question his conclusion? Roheim was nobody's fool. If deMause, sitting in New York, knows better than Roheim what is "aboriginal reality," then once again we are back in never-never land and not in the realm of empirical science. 133
Most ethnologists avoid describing how these children feel about participating in the killing or eating of their siblings. Lindenbaum simply says of the Fore tribe that "cannibalism was largely limited to adult women [and] to children of both sexes" 134 but doesn't mention that the mothers force the children to eat human flesh and doesn't say how they reacted to this. Gillison reports that Gimi mothers feed the flesh to their older children and say it is "the sweetest thing...'You are still a small boy,' my mother said to me, 'so let me give you this.' And she gave me some meat....A woman might have partaken of her own son, some women allowed, but she left the cutting to her co-wives, daughters, or daughters of her co-wives. 'His mother ate the penis,' one woman said..." 135 Only Poole actually reported the reaction of one group of New Guinea children to their witnessing of their parents eating some children:
Having witnessed their parents' mortuary anthropophagy, many of these children suddenly avoided their parents, shrieked in their presence, or expressed unusual fear of them. After such experiences, several children recounted dreams or constructed fantasies about animal-man beings with the faces or other features of particular parents who were smeared with blood and organs. 136
Since Poole's children had only witnessed their parents' cannibalism, those children who are forced to actually join in and help kill and then eat their siblings can be expected to show even more internalization of murderous monsters and life-long fears of devouring witches fears which, unsurprisingly, are common to most New Guinea cultures. These infanticidal societies are in fact identical to contemporary cults that force children to murder and even eat the flesh of babies, with profound life-long traumatic effects upon their psyches-cult rituals which in a series of articles in The Journal of Psychohistory have been demonstrated to be well-documented, eyewitnessed, brought to court and criminal convictions obtained from skeptical juries in a majority of the cases studied. 137
Individuals or groups who murder and eat babies are in fact severely schizoid personalities 138 who handle their own rage, engulfment fears and devouring emotional demands by either murdering children to wipe out the demands they project into them or by eating them in order to act out their identification with devouring internal alters. Indeed, anthropologists are only reflecting their own denial rather than looking at the evidence when they conclude that the ubiquitous infanticide in New Guinea is really a good thing for children because then "children are desired and highly valued [because] there is no such thing as an unwanted child." 139
As one step beyond their need to murder children, infanticidal societies are commonly found to treat children as erotic objects, again in a perverse attempt to deal with their own severe anxieties, repeatedly sexually abusing them in incest, pederasty and rape. It is to this sexual use of babies and older children in New Guinea that we will now turn.