THE EVOLUTION
OF CHILDHOOD

Do ye hear the children weeping,
Oh my brothers . . .
The Cry of the Children
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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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. It is our task here to see how much of this childhood history can be recaptured from the evidence that remains to us.

That this pattern has not previously been noticed by historians is because serious history has long been considered a record of public not private events. Historians have concentrated so much on the noisy sand-box of history, with its fantastic castles and magnificent battles, that they have generally ignored what is going on in the homes around the playground. And where historians usually look to the sandbox battles of yesterday for the causes of those of today, we instead ask how each generation of parents and children creates those issues which are later acted out in the arena of public life.

At first glance, this lack of interest in the lives of children seems odd. Historians have been traditionally committed to explaining continuity

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and change over time, and ever since Plato it has been known that child-hood is a key to this understanding. The importance of parent-child relations for social change was hardly discovered by Freud; St. Augustine's cry, "Give me other mothers and I will give you another world," has been echoed by major thinkers for fifteen centuries without affecting historical writing. Since Freud, of course, our view of childhood has acquired a new dimension, and in the past half century the study of childhood has become routine for the psychologist, the sociologist, and the anthropologist. It is only beginning for the historian. Such determined avoidance requires an explanation.

Historians usually blame the paucity of the sources for the lack of serious study of childhood in the past. Peter Laslett wonders why the "crowds and crowds of little children are strangely missing from the written record. . . . There is something mysterious about the silence of all these multitudes of babes in arms, toddlers and adolescents in the statements men made at the time about their own experience. . . . We cannot say whether fathers helped in the tending of infants. . . . No-thing can as yet be said on what is called by the psychologists toilet training. . . . It is in fact an effort of mind to remember all the time that children were always present in such numbers in the traditional world, nearly half the whole community living in a condition of semi-obliteration."(1) As the family sociologist James Bossard puts it: "Unfortunately, the history of childhood has never been written, and there is some doubt whether it ever can be written [because] of the dearth of historical data bearing on childhood."(2)

This conviction is so strong among historians that it is not surprising that this book began not in the field of history at all but in applied psychoanalysis. Five years ago, I was engaged in writing a book on a psychoanalytic theory of historical change, and, in reviewing the results of half a century of applied psychoanalysis, it seemed to me that it had failed to become a science mainly because it had not become evolutionary. Since the repetition compulsion, by definition, cannot explain historical change, every attempt by Freud, Roheim, Kardiner, and others to develop a theory of change ultimately ended in a sterile chicken-or-egg dispute about whether child-rearing depends on cultural traits or the other way around. That child-rearing practices are the basis for adult personality was proven again and again. Where they originated stumped every psychoanalyst who raised the question.(3)

In a paper given in 1968 before the Association for Applied Psychoanalysis, I outlined an evolutionary theory of historical change in parent-child relations, and proposed that since historians had not as yet begun the job of writing childhood history, the Association should sponsor a team of historians who would dig back into the sources to un-

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cover the major stages of child-rearing in the West since antiquity. This essay is the outcome of that project.

The "psychogenic theory of history" outlined in my project pro-posal began with a comprehensive theory of historical change. It posited that the central force for change in history is neither technology nor economics, but the "psychogenic" changes in personality occurring be-cause of successive generations of parent-child interactions. This theory involved several hypotheses, each subject to proof or disproof by empirical historical evidence:

1. That the evolution of parent-child relations constitutes an independent source of historical change. The origin of this evolution lies in the ability of successive generations of parents to regress to the psychic age of their children and work through the anxieties of that age in a better manner the second time they encounter them than they did during their own childhood. The process is similar to that of psychoanalysis, which also involves regression and a second chance to face childhood anxieties.
2. That this "generational pressure" for psychic change is not only spontaneous, originating in the adult's need to regress and in the child's striving for relationship, but also occurs independent of social and technological change. It therefore can be found even in periods of social and technological stagnation.
3. That the history of childhood is a series of closer approaches between adult and child, with each closing of psychic distance producing fresh anxiety. The reduction of this adult anxiety is the main source of the child-rearing practices of each age.
4. That the obverse of the hypothesis that history involves a general improvement in child care is that the further back one goes in history, the less effective parents are in meeting the developing needs of the child. This would indicate, for instance, that if today in America there are less than a million abused children,(4) there would be a point back in history where most children were what we would now consider abused.
5. That because psychic structure must always be passed from generation to generation through the narrow funnel of childhood, a society's child-rearing 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 cultural elements, and place definite limits on what can be achieved in all other spheres of history. Specific childhood experiences must occur to sustain specific cultural traits, and once these experiences no longer occur the trait disappears.

The evidence for the evolution of childhood will be examined in this essay, and the remainder of the psychogenic theory will be spelled out in the rest of this book.

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PREVIOUS WORKS ON CHILDREN IN HISTORY

Although I think this essay is the first to examine seriously the history of childhood in the West, historians have undeniably been writing about children in past ages for some time.(5) Even so, I think that the study of the history of childhood is just beginning, since most of these works so badly distort the facts of childhood in the periods they cover. Official biographers are the worst offenders; childhood is generally idealized, and very few biographers give any useful information about the subject's earliest years. The historical sociologists manage to turn out theories explaining changes in childhood without ever bothering to examine a single family, past or present.(6) The literary historians, mistaking books for life, construct a fictional picture of childhood, as though one could know what really happened in the nineteenth-century American home by reading Tom Sawyer. (7)

But it is the social historian, whose job it is to dig out the reality of social conditions in the past, who defends himself most vigorously against the facts he turns up.(8) When one social historian finds wide-spread infanticide, he declares it "admirable and humane."(9) When another describes mothers who regularly beat their infants with sticks while still in the cradle, she comments, without a shred of evidence, that "if her discipline was stern, it was even and just and leavened with kindness."(10) When a third finds mothers who dunk their infants into ice water each morning to "strengthen" them, and the children die from the practice, she says that "they were not intentionally cruel," but simply "had read Rousseau and Locke.''(11) No practice in the past seems anything but benign to the social historian. When Laslett finds parents regularly sending their children, at age seven, to other homes as servants, while taking in other children to serve them, he says it was actually kindness, for it "shows that parents may have been unwilling to submit children of their own to the discipline of work at home. ,"(12) After admitting that severe whipping of young children with various instruments "at school and at home seems to have been as common in the seventeenth century as it was later," William Sloan feels compelled to add that "children, then as later, sometimes deserved whipping. "(13) When Philippe Aries comes up with so much evidence of open sexual molesting of children that he admits that "playing with children's privy parts formed part of a widespread tradition,"(14) he goes on to describe a "traditional" scene where a stranger throws himself on a little boy while riding in a train, "his hand brutally rummaging inside the child's fly," while the father smiles, and concludes: "All that was involved was a game whose scabrous nature we should beware of exaggerating."(15) Masses of evidence are hidden, distorted, softened, or ignored. The

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child's early years are played down, formal educational content is endlessly examined, and emotional content is avoided by stressing child legislation and avoiding the home. And if the nature of the author's book is such that the ubiquity of unpleasant facts cannot be ignored, the theory is invented that "good parents leave no traces in the records." When, for instance, Alan Valentine examines 600 years of letters from fathers to sons, and of 126 fathers is unable to find one who isn't insensitive, moralistic, and thoroughly self-centered, he concludes:

"Doubtless an infinite number of fathers have written to their sons letters that would warm and lift our hearts, if we only could find them. The happiest fathers leave no history, and it is the men who are not at their best with their children who are likely to write the heart-rending letters that survive."(16) Likewise, Anna Burr, covering 250 autobiographies, notes there are no happy memories of childhood, but carefully avoids drawing any conclusions.(17)

Of all the books on childhood in the past, Philippe Aries's book Centuries of Childhood is probably the best known; one historian notes the frequency with which it is "cited as Holy Writ. " (18) Aries's central thesis is the opposite of mine: he argues that while the traditional child was happy because he was free to mix with many classes and ages, a special condition known as childhood was "invented" in the early modern period, resulting in a tyrannical concept of the family which destroyed friendship and sociability and deprived children of freedom, inflicting upon them for the first time the birch and the prison cell.

To prove this thesis Aries uses two main arguments. He first says that a separate concept of childhood was unknown in the early Middle Ages. "Medieval art until about the twelfth century did not know childhood or did not attempt to portray it" because artists were "unable to depict a child except as a man on a smaller scale."(19) Not only does this leave the art of antiquity in limbo, but it ignores voluminous evidence that medieval artists could, indeed, paint realistic children.(20) His etymological argument for a separate concept of childhood being unknown is also untenable.(21) In any case, the notion of the "invention of childhood" is so fuzzy that it is surprising that so many historians have recently picked it up.(22) His second argument, that the modern family restricts the child's freedom and increases the severity of punishment, runs counter to all the evidence.

Far more reliable than Aries is a quartet of books, only one of them written by a professional historian: George Payne's The Child in Human Progress, G. Rattray Taylor's The Angel Makers, David Hunt's Parents and Children in History, and J. Louise Despert's The Emotionally Disturbed Child-Then and Now. Payne, writing in 1916, was the first to examine the wide extent of infanticide and brutality toward children in

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the past, particularly in antiquity. Taylor's book, rich in documentation, is a sophisticated psychoanalytic reading of childhood and personality in late eighteenth-century England. Hunt, like Aries, centers mostly on the unique seventeenth-century document, Heroard's diary of the childhood of Louis XIII, but does so with great psychological sensitivity and awareness of the psychohistorical implications of his findings, And Despert's psychiatric comparison of child mistreatment in the past and present surveys the range of emotional attitudes toward children since antiquity, expressing her growing horror as she uncovers a story of unremitting "heartlessness and cruelty."(23)

Yet despite these four books, the central questions of comparative childhood history remain to be asked, much less answered. In the next two sections of this chapter, I will cover some of the psychological principles that apply to adult-child relations in the past. The examples I use, while not untypical of child life in the past, are not drawn equally from all time periods, but are chosen as the clearest illustrations of the psychological principles being described. It is only in the three succeeding sections, where I provide an overview of the history of infanticide, abandonment, nursing, swaddling, beating, and sexual abuse, that I begin to examine how widespread the practice was in each period.

PSYCHOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES OF CHILDHOOD HISTORY:
PROJECTIVE AND REVERSAL REACTIONS

In studying childhood over many generations, it is most important to concentrate on those moments which most affect the psyche of the next generation: primarily, this means what happens when an adult is face to face with a child who needs something. The adult has, I believe, three major reactions available: [1] He can use the child as a vehicle for projection of the contents of his own unconscious (projective reaction); [2] he can use the child as a substitute for an adult figure important in his own childhood (reversal reaction); or [3] he can empathize with the child's needs and act to satisfy them (empathic reaction).

The projective reaction is, of course, familiar to psychoanalysts under terms which range from "projection" to "projective identification a more concrete, intrusive form of voiding feelings into others. The psychoanalyst, for instance, is thoroughly familiar with being used as a "toilet - lap"(24) for the massive projections of the patient. it is this condition of being used as a vehicle for projections which is usual for children in the past.

Likewise, the reversal reaction is familiar to students of battering parents.(25) Children exist only to satisfy parental needs, and it is always

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the failure of the child-as-parent to give love which triggers the actual battering. As one battering mother put it: "I have never felt loved all my life. When the baby was born, I thought he would love me. When he cried, it meant he didn't love me. So I hit him."

The third term, empathic reaction, is used here in a more limited sense than the dictionary definition. It is the adult's ability to regress to the level of a child's need and correctly identify it without an admixture of the adult's own projections. The adult must then be able to maintain enough distance from the need to be able to satisfy it. It is an ability identical to the use of the psychoanalyst's unconscious called "free-floating attention;' or, as Theodor Reik terms it, "listening with the third ear."(26)

Projective and reversal reactions often occurred simultaneously in parents in the past, producing an effect which I call the "double image," where the child was seen as both full of the adult's projected desires, hostilities, and sexual thoughts, and at the same moment as a mother or father figure. That is, it is both bad and loving. Furthermore, the further back in history one goes, the more "concretization" or reification one finds of these projective and reversal reactions, producing progressively more bizarre attitudes toward children, similar to those of contemporary parents of battered and schizophrenic children.

The first illustration of these closely interlocking concepts which we will examine is in an adult-child scene from the past. The year is 1739; the boy, Nicolas, is four years old. The incident is one he remembers and has had confirmed by his mother. His grandfather, who has been rather attentive to him the past few days, decides he has to "test" him, and says, "Nicolas, my son, you have many faults, and these grieve your mother. She is my daughter and has always obliged me; obey me too, and correct these, or I will whip you like a dog which is being trained." Nicolas, angry at the betrayal "from one who has been so kind to me," throws his toys into the fire. The grandfather seems pleased.

"Nicholas . . . I said that to test you. Did you really think that a grandpapa, who had been so kind to you yesterday and the day before, could treat you like a dog today? I thought you were intelligent ..."" I am not a beast like a dog." "No, but you are not as clever as I thought, or you would have understood that I was only teasing. It was just a jgke . . . Come to me." I threw myself into his arms. "That is not all," he continued, "I want to see you friends with your mother; you have grieved, deeply grieved her Nicolas, your father loves you; do you love him?" "Yes, grandpapa!" "Suppose he were in danger and to save him it was necessary to put your hand in the fire, would you do it? Would

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you put it . . there, if it was necessary?" "Yes grandpapa." "And for me?" "For you? . . . yes, yes." "And for your mother?" "For mamma? Both of them, both of them!" "We shall see if you are telling the truth, for your mother is in great need of your little help! If you love her, you must prove it." I made no answer; but, putting together all that had been said, I went to the fireplace and, while they were making signs to each other, put my right hand into the fire. The pain drew a deep sigh from me."(27)

What makes this sort of scene so typical of adult-child interaction in the past is the existence of so many contradictory attitudes on the adult's part without the least resolution. The child is loved and hated, rewarded and punished, bad and loving, all at once. That this puts the child in a "double bind" of conflicting signals [which Bateson(28) and others believe underlie schizophrenia], goes without saying. But the conflicting signals themselves come from adults who are striving to demonstrate that the child is both very bad (projective reaction) and very loving (reversal reaction). It is the child's function to reduce the adult's pressing anxieties; the child acts as the adult's defense.

It is also the projective and reversal reactions which make guilt impossible in the severe beatings which we so often encounter in the past. This is because it is not the actual child who is being beaten It is either the adult's own projections ("Look at her give you the eye! That's how she picks up men - she's a regular sexpot!" a motherr says of her battered daughter of two), or it is a product of reversal ("He thinks he's the boss - all the time trying to run things hut I showed him who is in charge around here!" a father says of his nine-month-old boy whose skull he has split).(29) One can often catch the merging of beaten and beater and therefore lack of guilt in the historical sources. An American father (1830) tells of horsewhipping his four-year-old boy for not being able to read something. The child is tied up naked in the cellar:

With him in this condition, and myself, the wife of my bosom, and the lady of my family, all of us in distress, and with hearts sinking within us, I commenced using the rod . . During this most unpleasant, self denying and disagreeable work, I made frequent stops, commanding and trying to persuade, silencing excuses, answering objections . . . I felt all the force of divine authority and express command that I ever felt in any case in all my life . . . But under the all controlling influence of such a degree of angry passion and obstinacy, as my son had manifested, no wonder he thought he "should beat me out," feeble and tremulous as I was; and knowing as he did that it made me almost sick to whip him. At that time he could neither pity me nor himslf.(30)

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It is this picture of the merging of father and son, with the father complaining that he himself is the one beaten and in need of pity, which we will encounter when we ask how beating could have been so wide-spread in the past. When a Renaissance pedagogue says you should tell the child when beating him, "you do the correction against your mind, compelled thereunto by conscience, and require them to put you no more unto such labour and pain. For if you do (say you) you must suffer part of the pain with me and therefore you shall now have experience and proof what pain it is unto both of us" we will not so easily miss the merging and mislabel it hypocrisy.(31)

Indeed, the parent sees the child as so full of portions of himself that even real accidents to the child are seen as injuries to the parent. Cotton Mather's daughter Nanny fell into the fire and burned herself badly, and he cried out, "Alas, for my sins the just God throws my child into the fire!"(32) He searched everything he himself had recently done wrong, but since he believed he was the one being punished, no guilt toward his child could be felt (say, for leaving her alone), and no corrective action could be taken. Soon two other daughters were badly burned. His reaction was to preach a sermon on "What use ought parents to make of disasters befallen their children."

This matter of "accidents" to children is not to be taken lightly, for in it lies hidden the clue to why adults in the past were such poor parents. Leaving aside actual death wishes, which will be discussed later, accidents occurred in great numbers in the past because little children were so often left alone. Mather's daughter Nibby would have been burned to death but for "a person accidentally then passing by the window,"(33) because there was no one there to hear her cries. A colonial Boston experience is also typical:

"After they had supped, the mother put two children to bed in the room where they themselves did lie, and they went out to visit a neighbor. When they returned .. . the mother [went] to the bed, and not finding her youngest child (a daughter about five years of age), and after much search she found it drowned in a well in her cellar . . "(34)

The father blames the accident on his having worked on a holy day. The point is not only that it was common to leave little children alone right up to the twentieth century. More important is that parents cannot be concerned with preventing accidents if guilt is absent because it is the adult's own projections that they feel have been punished. Massive projectors don't invent safety stoves, nor often can they even see to it that their children are given the simplest of care. Their projection, unfortunately, insures repetition.

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The use of the child as a "toilet" for adult projections is behind the whole notion of original sin, and for eighteen hundred years adults were in general agreement that, as Richard Allestree (1676) puts it, "the new-born babe is full of the stains and pollution of sin, which it inherits from our first parents through our loins . . "(35) Baptism used to include actual exorcism of the Devil, and the belief that the child who cried at his christening was letting out the Devil long survived the formal omission of exorcism in the Reformation.(36) Even where formal religion did not stress the devil, it was there; here is a picture of a Polish Jew teaching in the nineteenth century:

He derived an intense joy from the agonies of the little victim trembling and shivering on the bench. And he used to administer the whippings coldly, slowly, deliberately . . . he asked the boy to let down his clothes, lie across the bench . . . and pitched in with the leathern thongs In every person there is a Good Spirit and an Evil Spirit. The Good Spirit has its own dwelling-place-which is the head, So has the Evil Spirit-and that is the place where you get the whipping."(37)

The child in the past was so charged with projections that he was often in danger of being considered a changeling if he cried too much or was otherwise too demanding. There is a large literature on change-lings,(38) but it is not generally realized that it was not only deformed children who were killed as changelings, but also those who, as St. Augustine puts it, "suffer from a demon . . . they are under the power of the Devil .. . some infants die in this vexation . . ." (39) Some church fathers declared that if a baby merely cried it was committing a sin.(40) Sprenger and Kramer, in their bible of witchhunting, Malleus Maleficarurn (1487), contend that you can recognize changelings because they "always howl most piteously and even if four or five mothers are set on to suckle them, they never grow." Luther agrees: "That is true: they often take the children of women in childbed and lay themselves down in their place and are more obnoxious than ten children with their crapping, eating, and screaming."(41) Guibert of Nogent, writing in the twelfth century, considers his mother saintly because she put up with the crying of an infant she had adopted:

. . . the baby so harassed my mother and all her servants by the madness of its wailing and crying at night-although by day it was very good, by turns playing and sleeping-that anyone in the same little room could get scarcely any sleep. I have heard the nurses whom she hired say that night after night they could not stop shaking the child's rattle, so naughty was he, not through his own fault, but made so by the Devil within, and that a woman's craft

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failed entirely to drive him out. The good woman was tormented by extreme pain; amid those shrill cries no contrivance relieved her aching brow. . . . Yet she never shut the child out of her house... (42)

The belief that infants were felt to be on the verge of turning into totally evil beings is one of the reasons why they were tied up, or swaddled, so long and so tightly. One feels the undertone in Bartholomaeus Anglicus (c. 1230): "And for tenderness the limbs of the child may easily and soon bow and bend and take diverse shapes. And therefore children's members and limbs are bound with lystes [bandages], and other covenable bonds, that they be not crooked nor evil shapen . . ."(43) It is the infant full of the parent's dangerous, evil projections that is swaddled. The reasons given for swaddling in the past are the same as those of present-day swaddlers in Eastern Europe: the baby has to be tied up or it will tear its ears off, scratch its eyes out, break its legs, or touch its genitals.(44) As we shall see shortly in the section on swaddling and restraints, this often includes binding up children in all kinds of corsets, stays, backboards, and puppet-strings, and even extends to tying them up in chairs to prevent them from crawling on the floor "like an animal."

Now if adults project all their own unacceptable feelings into the child, it is obvious that severe measures must be taken to keep this dangerous toilet-child" under control once swaddling bands are out-grown. I shall later examine various methods of control used by parents down through the centuries, but here I want to illustrate only one control device-frightening the child with ghosts-in order to discuss its projective character.

The number of ghost-like figures used to frighten children through-out history is legion, and their regular use by adults was common until quite recently. The ancients had their Lamia and Striga, who, like their Hebrew prototype Lilith, ate children raw, and who, along with Mormo, Canida, Poine, Sybaris, Acco, Empusa, Gorgon, and Ephialtes, were invented for a child's benefit to make it less rash and according to Dio Chrysostom. (45) Most ancients agreed that it was good to have the images of these witches constantly before children, to let them feel the terror of waiting up at night for ghosts to steal them away, eat them, tear them to pieces, and suck their blood or their bone marrow. By medieval times, of course, witches and devils took front stage, with an occasional Jew thrown in as a cutter of babies' throats, along with hoards of other monsters and bogies "such as those [with] which nurses love to terrify them."(46) After the Reformation, God himself, who "holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire,"(47) was the major bogeyman used to terrify children, and tracts were written in baby talk describing the tortures God had in store for children in Hell: "The little child is in this

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red-hot oven. Hear how it screams to come out . . . It stamps its little feet on the floor. . ."(48)

When religion was no longer the focus of the terrorizing campaign, figures closer to home were used: the werewolf will gulp you down, Blue Beard will chop you up, Boney (Bonaparte) will eat your flesh, the black man or the chimney sweep will steal you away at night.(49) These practices came under attack only in the nineteenth century. One English parent said in 1810 that "the custom once prevalent of terrifying young minds with stories of ghosts, is now universally reprobated, in consequence of the increasing stock of national good sense. But many yet living can place fears of supernatural agency, and of darkness, among the real miseries of childhood . . . (50) Yet even today, in many villages of Europe, children continue to be threatened by parents with the loup-garou (werewolf), the barbu (bearded man), or the rarnoneur (chimney sweep), or told they will be put in the basement to let the rats gnaw on them.(51)

This need to personify punitive figures was so powerful that, follow-ing the principle of "concretization," adults actually dressed up Katchina- like dummies to use in frightening children. One English writer, in 1748, while explaining how terror originated with nurses who frightened infants with stories of "raw-head and bloody-bones," said:

The nurse takes a fancy to quiet the peevish child, and with this intent, dresses up an uncouth figure, makes it come in, and roar and scream at the child in ugly disagreeable notes, which grate upon the tender organs of the ear, and at the same time, by its gesture and near approach, makes as if it would swallow the infant up.(52)

These fearful figures were also the favorites of nurses who wanted to keep children in bed while they went off at night. Susan Sib bald remembered ghosts as a real part of her eighteenth-century childhood:

Ghosts making their appearance were a very common occurrence. . . I remember perfectly when both the nursery maids at Fowey wished to leave the nursery one evening . . . we were silenced by hearing the most dismal groanings and scratchings outside the partition next the stairs. The door was thrown open, and oh! horrors, there came in a figure, tall and dressed in white, with fire coming out of its eyes, nose and mouth it seemed. We were almost thrown into convulsions, and were not well for days, but dared not tell.(53)

The terrorized children were not always as old as Susan and Betsey. One American mother in 1882 told of a friend's two-year-old girl whose nurse, wanting to enjoy herself for the evening with the other servants while the parents were out, assured herself she wouldn't be disturbed by telling the little girl that a

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horrible Black Man . . . was hidden in the room to catch her the moment she left her bed or made the slightest noise . . to make double sure that she should not be interrupted during the evening's enjoyment. She made a huge figure of a black man with frightful staring eyes and an enormous mouth, and placed it at the foot of the bed where the little innocent child was fast asleep. As soon as the evening was over in the servant's hall, the nurse went back to her charge. Opening the door quietly, she beheld the little girl sitting up in her bed, staring in an agony of terror at the fearful monster before her, and both hands convulsively grasping her fair hair. She was stone dead!(54)

There is some evidence that this use of masked figures to frighten children goes back to antiquity.(55) The subject of children being frightened by masks is a favorite of artists from the Roman frescos to the prints of Jacques Stella (1657), but since these early traumatic events

Illustration 1 - Children Playing With Terror - Mask.
(Jacques Stella, 1657.}

were subject to the deepest repression, I have not yet been able to establish their precise ancient forms. It was said by Dio Chrysostom that "terrifying images deter children when they want food or play or anything else unseasonable" and theories were discussed on their most effective use: "I believe each youngster fears some bogey peculiar to himself and is wont to be terrified by this-of course, lads who are naturally timid cry out no matter what you produce to scare them. . ." (56)

Now when infants are terrorized with masked figures when they merely cry, want food, or want to play, the amount of projection, and the adult's need to control it, has reached massive proportions only found in overtly psychotic adults today. The exact frequency of use

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of such concrete figures in the past cannot as yet be determined, although they were often spoken of as common. Many forms, however, can be shown to be customary. For instance, in Germany until recently there would appear in shops before Christmas time stacks of stick brooms, tied in the middle, and making a stiff brush at both ends. These were used to beat children; during the first week in December, adults would dress up in terrifying costumes and pretend to be a messenger of Christ, called the Pelz-nickel, who would punish children and tell them if they would get Christmas presents or not.(57)

It is only when one sees the struggle which parents go through to give up this practice of concretizing frightening images that the strength of their need to do so is revealed. One of the earliest defenders of childhood in nineteenth-century Germany was Jean Paul Richter. In his popular book Levanna, he condemned parents who kept children in order "by images of terror," claiming medical evidence that they "frequently fall victims to insanity." Yet his own compulsion to repeat the traumas of his own childhood was so great that he was forced to invent lesser versions for his own son:

As a person can be terrified only once by the same thing, I think it possible to spare children the reality by sportive representations of alarming circumstances. For instance: I go with my little nine-year-old Paul to walk in the thick wood. Suddenly three blackened and armed ruffians rush out and fall upon us, because I had hired them for the adventure with a small thieves' premium the day before. We two are only provided with sticks, but the band of robbers are armed with swords and a pistol without bullets . . . I turn away the pistol, so that it may miss me, and strike the dagger out of one of the thieves' hand with my stick. . . But (I add in this second edition) all such games are of doubtful advantage . . . although similar cloak and dagger pieces . . . might be tried advantageously in the night, in order to bring the fancies, inspired by a belief in ghosts, to common everyday light.(58)

Another whole area of concretization of this need to terrorize children involves the use of corpses. Many are familiar with the scenes in Mrs. Sherwood's novel, History of the Fairchild Family,(59) in which the children are taken on visits to the gibbet to inspect rotting corpses hanging there, while being told moral stories. What is not often realized is that these scenes are taken from real life and formed an important part of childhood in the past. Classes used to be taken out of school to hangings, and parents would often take their children to hangings and then whip them when they returned home to make them remember what they had seen.(60) Even a humanist educator such as Mafio Vegio, who wrote books to protest the beating of children, had to admit that

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"to let them witness a public execution is sometimes not at all a bad thing. "(61)

The effect on the children of this continuous corpse-viewing was of course massive. One little girl, after her mother showed her the fresh corpse of her nine-year-old friend as an example, went around saying "They will put daughter in the deep hole, and what will mother do?"(62) Another boy woke at night screaming after seeing hangings, and "practiced hanging his own cat."(63) Eleven-year-old Harriet Spencer recorded in her diary seeing dead bodies everywhere on gibbets and broken on the wheel. Her father took her to see hundreds of corpses which had been dug up to make room for more.

. . . Papa says it is foolish and superstitious to be afraid of seeing dead bodies, so I followed him down a dark narrow steep stair-case that wound round and round a long way, till they opened a door into a great cavern. It was lit by a lamp hanging down in the middle, and the friar carried a torch in his hand. At first I could not see, and when I could I hardly dared look, for on every side there were horrid black ghastly figures, some grinning, some pointing at us, or seeming in pain, in all sorts of postures, and so horrid I could hardly help screaming, and I thought they all moved. When Papa saw how uncomfortable I was, he was not angry but very kind, and said I must conquer it and go and touch one of them, which was very shocking. Their skin was all dark brown and quite dried up on the bones, and quite hard and felt like marble.(64)

This picture of the kindly father helping his daughter overcome her fear of corpses is an example of what I term "projective care," to distinguish it from true empathic care which is the result of the empathic reaction. Projective care always requires the first step of projection of the adult's own unconscious into the child, and can be distinguished from empathic care by being either inappropriate or insufficient to the child's actual needs. The mother who responds to her child's every discomfort by nursing it, the mother who gives great attention to her infant's clothes as she sends it away to the wet-nurse, and the mother who takes a full hour to tie up a child properly in swaddling clothes are all examples of projective care.

Projective care is, however, sufficient to raise children to adulthood. Indeed, it is what is often called "good care" by anthropologists studying primitive childhood, and it is not until a psychoanalytically-trained anthropologist re-studies the same tribe that one can see that projection and not true empathy is being measured. For example, studies of the Apache(65) always give them the highest ratings on the "oral satisfaction"

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scale so important for the development of feelings of security. The Apache, like many primitive tribes, feeds on demand for two years, and this is what the rating was based upon. But only when psychoanalytic anthropologist L. Bryce Boyer visited them was the true projective basis of this care revealed:

The care afforded infants by Apache mothers nowadays is startlingly inconsistent. They are usually very tender and considerate in the physical relationships with their babies. There is much bodily contact. Nursing times are generally determined by the baby's cry, and every distress is greeted first by the nipple of a breast or a bottle. At the same time, mothers have a very limited sense of responsibility so far as child care is concerned, and the impression gained is that the mother's tenderness for her baby is based upon her bestowing upon the infant care she herself desires as an adult. A great many mothers abandon or give away children-babies they had been nursing lovingly only a week before. Apaches very accurately name this practice "throwing the baby away." Not only do they feel scant conscious guilt for this behavior, but at times they are overtly delighted to have been able to rid themselves of the burden. In some instances, mothers who have given children away, "forget" they ever had them. The usual Apache mother believes physical care is all an infant requires. She has little or no compunction about leaving her baby with just anyone at all while she impulsively leaves to gossip, shop, gamble or drink and "fool around." Ideally, the mother entrusts her baby to a sister or older female relative. In aboriginal times, such an arrangement was almost always possible.(66)

Even such a simple act as empathizing with children who were beaten was difficult for adults in the past. Those few educators who, prior to modern times, advised that children should not be beaten generally argued that it would have bad consequences rather than that it would hurt the child. Yet without this element of empathy, the advice had no effect whatsoever, and children continued to be beaten as before. Mothers who sent their infants to wet-nurses for three years were genuinely distressed that their children then didn't want to return to them, yet they had no capacity to locate the reason. A hundred generations of mothers tied up their infants in swaddling bands and impassively watched them scream in protest because they lacked the psychic mechanism necessary to empathize with them. Only when the slow historical process of parent-child evolution finally established this faculty through successive generations of parent-child interaction did it become obvious that swaddling was totally unnecessary. Here is Richard Steele in The Tatler in 1706 describing how he thought an infant felt after being born:

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I lay very quiet; but the witch, for no manner of reason or provocation in the world, takes me and binds my head as hard as she possibly could; then ties up both my legs and makes me swallow down an horrid mixture. I thought it an harsh entrance into life, to begin with taking physic. When I was thus dressed, I was carried to a bedside where a fine young lady (my mother, I wot) had like to have me hugged to death . . . and threw me into a girl's arms that was taken in to tend me. The girl was very proud of the womanly employment of a nurse, and took upon her to strip and dress me anew, because I made a noise, to see what ailed me; she did so and stuck a pin in every joint about. I still cried, upon which, she lays me on my face in her lap; and, to quiet me, fell to nailing in all the pins, by clapping me on the back and screaming a lullaby...(67)

I have not found a description with this degree of empathy in any century prior to the eighteenth. It was not long thereafter that two thousand years of swaddling came to an end.

One imagines that there would be all kinds of places to look to find this missing empathic faculty in the past. The first place to look, of course, is the Bible; certainly here one should find empathy toward children's needs, for isn't Jesus always pictured holding little children? Yet when one actually reads each of the over two thousand references to children listed in the Complete Concordance to the Bible, these gentle images are missing. You find lots on child sacrifice, on stoning children, on beating them, on their strict obedience, on their love for their parents, and on their role as carriers of the family name, but not a single one that reveals any empathy with their needs. Even the well-known saying, "Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me" turns out to be the customary Near Eastern practice of exorcising by laying on of hands, which many holy men did to remove the evil in-herent in children: "Then there were brought unto him little children, that he should put his hands on them, and pray... he laid his hands on them, and departed thence." (Mat. 19.13.)

All of this is not to say that parents didn't love their children in the past, for they did. Even contemporary child-beaters are not sadists; they love their children, at times, and in their own way, and are sometimes capable of expressing tender feelings, particularly when the children are non-demanding. The same was true for the parent in the past; expressions of tenderness toward children occur most often when the child is non-demanding, especially when the child is either asleep or dead. Homer's "as a mother drives away a fly from her child when it lies in sweet sleep" can be paired with Martial's epitaph:

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Let not the sod too stiffly stretch its girth
Above those tender limbs, erstwhile so free;
Press lightly on her form, dear mother Earth,
Her little footsteps lightly fell on thee.(68)

It is only at the moment of death that the parent, unable to empathize before, cries out to himself, with Morelli (1400): "You loved him but never used your love to make him happy; you treated him more like a stranger than a son; you never gave him an hour of rest . . . You never kissed him when he wanted it; you wore him out at school and with many harsh blows."(69)

It is, of course, not love which the parent of the past lacked, but rather the emotional maturity needed to see the child as a person separate from himself. It is difficult to estimate what proportion of today's parents achieve with any consistency the empathic level. Once I took an informal poll of a dozen psychotherapists and asked them how many of their patients at the beginning of analysis were able to sustain images of their children as individuals separate from their own projected needs; they all said that very few had that ability. As one, Amos Gunsberg, put it: "This doesn't occur until some way along in their analysis, always at a specific moment when they arrive at an image of themselves as separate from their own all-enveloping mother."

Running parallel to the projective reaction is the reversal reaction, with the parent and child reversing roles, often producing quite bizarre results. Reversal begins long before the child is born-it is the source of the very powerful desire for children one sees in the past, which is always expressed in terms of what children can give the parent, and never what the parent can give them. Medea's complaint before committing infanticide is that by killing her children she won't have anyone to look after her:

What was the purpose, children, for which I reared you?
For all my travail, and wearing myself away?
They were sterile, those pains I had in the bearing of you.
Oh surely once the hopes I had, poor me,
Were high ones; you would look after me in old age,
And when I died would deck me well with your own hands;
A thing which all would have done. Oh but it is gone,
That lovely thought.(70)

Once born, the child becomes the mother's and father's own parent, in either positive or negative aspect, totally out of keeping with the child's actual age. The child, regardless of sex, is often dressed in the style of clothes similar to that worn by the parent's mother, that is, not only in a long dress, but in one out of date by at least a generation. (71)

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The mother is literally reborn in the child; children are not just dressed as "miniature adults" but quite clearly as miniature women, often complete with decollate'.

The idea that the grandparent is actually reborn in the baby is a common one in antiquity,(72) and the closeness between the word "baby" and the various words for grandmother (baba, Babe) hints at similar belief.(73) But evidence exists for more concrete reversals in the past, ones that are virtually hallucinatory. For instance, the breasts of little infants were often kissed or sucked on by adults. Little Louis XIII often had both his penis and nipples kissed by people around him. Even though Heroard, his diarist, always made him the active one (at thirteen months "he makes M. de Souvre, M. de Termes, M. de Liancourt, and M. Zamet kiss his cock")(74), it later becomes evident that he was being passively manipulated: "He never wants to let the Marquise touch his nipples, his nurse had said to him: 'Sir, do not let anyone touch your nipples or your cock; they'll cut them off.' "(75) Yet the adults still couldn't keep their hands and lips off his penis and nipples. Both were the mother's breast returned.

Another instance of the "infant as mother" was the common belief that infants had milk in their breasts which had to be expelled. The fourteenth-century Italian balia (wet-nurse) was instructed to "be sure and press his breasts often - to get out any milk there because it bothers him."(76) There actually is a slight rationalization for this belief, since a newborn will on rare occasions show a drop of milky fluid on its breasts as a result of a carryover of female hormone from the mother. Yet there was a difference between this and "the unnatural but common practice of forcibly squeezing the delicate breasts of a newborn infant, by rough hand of the nurse, which is the most general cause of inflammation in these parts," as the American pediatrician Alexander Hamilton still had to write in l793.(77)

Kissing, sucking, and squeezing the breast are but a few of the uses to which the "child as breast" is put; one finds a variety of practices such as the one this pediatrician warned of at the beginning of the nineteenth century:

But a practice of the most injurious and disgusting nature, is that of many nursery maids, aunts and grandmothers, who suffer the child to suck their lips. I had an opportunity of observing the decay of a blooming infant, in consequence of having sucked the lips of its sickly grandmother for upwards of half a year. (78)

I have even found several references to parents "licking children." This, for instance, may be what George du Maurier was speaking of when he said of his newborn: "The Nurse brings her to me every morn-

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ing in bed, that I may lick it with 'the basting tongue' -- I enjoy the operation so much that I shall perservere till it reaches the age of discretion."(79)

One receives the impression that the perfect child would be one who literally breast-feeds the parent, and the ancients would agree. When-ever children were discussed, the story of Valerius Maximus was certain to come up, describing a "perfect" child. As Pliny tells it:

Of filial affection there have, it is true, been unlimited instances all over the world, but one at Rome with which the whole of the rest could not compare. A plebeian woman of low position who had just given birth to a child, had permission to visit her mother who had been shut up in prison as a punishment, and was always searched in advance by the doorkeeper to prevent her carrying in any food. She was detected giving her mother sustenance from her own breasts. In consequence of this marvel the daughter's pious affection was rewarded by the mother's release and both were awarded maintenance for life; and the place where it occurred was consecrated to the Goddess concerned, a temple dedicated to Filial Affection . . . (80)

The story was repeated throughout the ages as an object lesson. Peter Charron (1593) called it "turning the stream back again up to the fountainhead,"(81) and the theme was the topic of paintings by Rubens, Vermeer, and others.

Often the need to act out the image of "the child as mother" be-comes overpowering; here, in a typical incident, is a 'joke" played on a six-year-old girl in 1656 by Cardinal Mazarin and other adults:

One day as he made sport with her about some gallant that she said she had; at last he began to chide her, for being with child.
. . . They straightened her clothes from time to time, and made her believe that she was growing big. This continued as long as it was thought necessary to persuade her to the likelihood of her being with child . . . The time of her lying-in came, she found betwixt her sheets in the morning a child newborn. You cannot imagine the astonishment and grief she was in at this sight. "Such a thing," said she, "never happened to any but to the Virgin Mary and myself, for I never felt any kind of pain." The queen came to console her, and offered to be Godmother; many came to gossip with her, as newly brought to bed.(82)

Children have always taken care of adults in very concrete ways. Ever since Roman times, boys and girls waited on their parents at table, and in the Middle Ages all children except royalty acted as servants,

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Illustration 2 Elizabethan Family at Dinner.
Note smallest child stands to eat, older child serves family.

either at home or for others, often running home from school at noon to wait on their parents.(83) I will not discuss here the whole topic of children's work, but it should be remembered that children did much of the work of the world long before child labor became such an issue in the nineteenth century, generally from the age of four or five.

The reversal reaction is shown most clearly, however, in the emotional interaction between child and adult. Present day social workers who visit "battering" mothers are often astonished at how responsive little children are to the needs of their parents:

I remember watching an eighteen month old soothe her mother, who was in a high state of anxiety and tears. First she put down the bottle she was sucking. Then she moved about in such a way that she could approach, then touch, and eventually calm her mother down (something I had not been able to begin to do). When she sensed her mother was comfortable again, she walked across the floor, lay down, picked up her bottle, and started sucking it again.(84)

This role was frequently assumed by children in the past. One child was "never known to cry or be restless . . . frequently, when a babe in her mother's arms, at these seasons, would reach up her little hand and wipe the tears from her mother's cheek . . . Doctors used to try to entice mothers into nursing their infants themselves instead of sending

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them out to wet-nurse by promising that "in recompence whereof, he endeavors to show her a thousand delights . . . he kisses her, strokes her

Illustration 3 - The Child As Mother's Lover.
The usually stiff medieval mother-child portraits alternate
with a few like these which show the wish that the child be a
lover who would passionately embrace the mother.

hair, nose and ears, he flatters her . "(86) Along the same theme, I have catalogued over five hundred paintings of mothers and children from every country, and found that the paintings showed the child looking at, smiling at and caressing the mother at a date prior to the ones showing the mother looking at, smiling at and caressing the child, rare actions for a mother in any painting.

The child's facility in mothering adults was often its salvation. Mme. de Sevigne, in 1670, decided not to take her eighteen-month-old grand-daughter along with her on a trip which could have proven fatal to the child.

Mme. du Puy-du-Fou does not want me to take my grandchild. She says it would be exposing her to danger, and at last I surrender; I should not like to imperil the little lady-I am very fond of her. ... she does a hundred and one little things-she talks, fondles people, hits them, crosses herself, asks forgiveness, curtsies, kisses your hand, shrugs her shoulders, dances, coaxes, chucks you under the chin: in short, she is altogether lovely, I amuse myself with her for hours at a time. I do not want her to die.(87)

by: Lloyd deMause
The Institute for Psychohistory
140 Riverside Drive, NY NY 10024

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