CHAPTER 6
|
TABLE
OF CONTENTS FOUNDATIONS OF PSYCHOHISTORY by LLOYD DEMAUSE |
237
Psychoclass and Personality Type |
Major Group - Fantasy |
Central Purification Ritual |
Group Id Projection |
"My soul would be quiet if only everyone could..." |
---|---|---|---|---|
Infanticidal (Schizoid) |
Kinship Magic |
Magical Sacrifice to ancestors relieves infanticidal fears | Into magical objects and ghosts | "...obey Family laws regulating sex andviolence." |
Abandoning (Autistic) |
Feudal Hierarchy |
Feudal bonding and church ritual deny abandonment fears | Into your lord | "...be closely tied to his lord and his God." |
Ambivalent (Depressive) |
Paternalistic Absolutism |
Obeisance to ideal paternal monarch defends against ambivalent mother. | Into ruling dynasties | "...obey a King who is a good father." |
Intrusive (Compulsive) |
Racist Nationalism |
Control of national boundary and control of other races reverses intrusive parenting | Into other "races" and nations | "...keep all bad things out of our pure nation." |
Socializing (Anxiety) |
Erotic Materialism |
Purchase of goods relieves castration anxieties | Into upper or lower economic classes | "...buy endless material goods." |
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death of the infant through symbolic sacrifice and rebirth. From antiquity through late medieval times, abandoning mode childhood produced a psychoclass of what I term autistic personalities-roughly equivalent to what contemporary psychoanalysts have come to call the "borderline" personalities-identified by their feelings of isolation, easy regression into and out of psychotic states, tenuous hold on reality, emotional clinging, helplessness in the absence of authority, lack of impulse controls and narcissistic grandiosity and overidealization. Because the medieval personalities use primitive splitting and projection less, they are not primarily magical, and they organize their historical group-fantasies around Ceudal Hierarchical rather than kinship structures. The feudal bond-or other personal bonds where the formal system of feudalism was less developed-is a way of undoing, through clinging, the abandonment of childhood, and most of the rituals of both Church and State revolve primarily around refusion fantasies, organized around clinging groups, both feudal and monastic. By the Renaissance, ambivalent mode parent-ing allowed enough consistency of caretaking to allow the growing child to heal the severe splitting of the mother into idealized (Mary) and evil (Eve) part-objects, and therefore allow people to feel, for the first time, real guilt toward a whole-object mother (Klein's achievement of the depressive position, the end of Mariolatry by Protestantism). This produces a depressive personality who, for the first time in history, really internalizes conflicts in his personal life, represses rather than projects thus making the Puritan the first modern man.
From here on, the task of the evolution of historical personality changes from that of internalizing projected parts of oneself to that of reducing intrapsychic conflict. The major group-fantasy style for this period is organized around Paternalistic Absolutism, as an absolutist king is first historically invented as an idealized father who will allow separation from the ambivalent mother, allow growth, and treat all children equally-on threat of being replaced by revolutionary action. By the eighteenth century, overcontrolling intrusive mode parenting and the invention of early toilet training could produce the anal-compulsive personality, which is less focused on idealized leaders (dynasties) than on group-boundaries (nations), so that only by this period do Racist Nationalist group-fantasies form. In these, the national boundary substitutes for the self-boundary, and racist fantasies of "group purity" attempt to undo early anal intrusiveness. Finally, socializing childhood of the kind now generally predominant in the West allows the various types of anxiety personalities to drop most concerns with racial purity and shift their group-fantasies to the economic sphere, so that class war-fare Organizes most social thinking (Erotic Materialism).
Even from this sketchy outline, one can begin to see how differing styles of personalities form different historical group-fantasies. All
239
groups, for instance, may displace oral fears into their historical group-fantasy, but the infanticidal psychoclass imagines the giant biting monster as a magical ghost, the abandoning psychoclass as Devil or witch, the ambivalent psychoclass as Antichrist, the intrusive psychoclass as Jew or Black, and the socializing psychoclass as Communist or Capitalist. Most of the cartoons seen in newspapers today label biting monsters "INFLATION," reflecting Erotic Materialism's central fantasy that what is making us all unhappy today is simply a vast shortage of goods.
With these admittedly brief observations on differing styles of historical group-fantasies through the ages, I will end this essay, the last in a series of seven written over the past decade, as attempts to outline a theoretically consistent and empirically verifiable psychogenic theory of history. It is my hope that with the conceptual tools I have fashioned, I can now complete my Psychohistory of the West, which details for each period in Western history all the available evidence on childhood, on historical personalities - including dreams and psychosexual development - and on major historical institutions and group-fantasies. Hopefully, I will be able to show convincingly how the latter emerged from the former. While historical personalities cover a wide range within any period, still it is no more difficult to write about the dynamics of the range of medieval personalities than it is for psychoanalysts to write on dynamics common to a range of borderline personalities (indeed, I believe the two are identical). And while major historical group-fantasies are not easy to decode, the task of unraveling the unconscious meaning of Christianity, of nationalism or capitalism, becomes a great deal easier to accomplish once one has gathered a mass of information on the child-hoods, dreams and love lives of the people who need these group-fantasies. But then, as with all of psychohistory, the most exciting tasks lie before us. With time, we may yet come to know consciously the historical group-fantasies we unconsciously share, communicate, and act upon together - a first step, one would think, in decreasing their delusional hold upon us.
[I KNOW - L's are 1 and too many places have ~ in them - Okay so I didn't go over these at all = all I did was scan them CLEANED SOME OF THE FORMATTING and pasted them into this web page - - WELL I DID DO THE PAGE BRAKES LIKE ELSE WHERE IN THIS TRANSCRIPTION! .Like it says at the bottom: "To report errors in this electronic transcription please contact: [email protected] " Thank you - I'll get to 'cleaning up' the reference pages once I have done the whole text. - course if some other kind person wants to . . . go a head! - Eric Heimstadt.]
1. The concept of historical group-fantasies is introduced in Lloyd deMause, "The Independence of Psychohistory," in deMause, editor, The New Psychohistory. New York: Psychohistory Press, 1975; deMause, "The Formation of The American Personality Through Psychospeciation," The Journal of Psychohistory 4 (t976): t-30; deMause, "The Psychogenic Theory of History," The Journal of Psychohistory 4 (1977): 253-267; deMause, "Jimmy Carter and American Fantasy," in deMause and Henry Ebel, eds. Jimmy Carter and American Fantasy. new York: Psychohistory Press, 1977, pp.9-31.
240
2. Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition, Vol. Xl, pp.63-136.
3. Reuben Fine, "Search for Love" in Arthur Burton
& Associates, Twelve Therapists. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,
1972, p.232.
4. Frederich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property,
and the State. London, 1884. Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians.
New York, 1966. For the most recent bibliography, see Fraser
Harrison, The Dark Angel: Aspects Of Victorian Sexuality. New
York, 1978.
5. For an introduction to the anthropological literature, see
Kenclm Burridge, New Heaven, New Earth: A Study QfMillenarian
Activities. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. For the best
psychoanalytic interpretation, see Weston La Barre, The Ghost
Dance: The Origins of Religion. New York: Dell, 1972
6. Rudolph Binion, Hitler Among the Germans. New York: Flsevier,
1976, p.80.
7. Ibid., pp.80-81.
8. For contradictions in interpretations of the cause of the
Korean War, see I. F. Stone, The Hidden History of the Korean
War, New York, 1952, pp. 1-72. For the at-mosphere of Washington
on the day U.S. troops were sent in, see Bert Coehran, Harry
Truman and the Crisis Presidenqy. New York: Funk and Wagnalls,
1973, p. 316.
9 The closest attempt to envisioning history as being moved by
psychoclass is Glenn Davis, Childhood and History in America. New
York: Psychohistory Press, 1976. My forthcoming book, A
Psychohistory of the West, will present just such an analysis of
psychoelass, tying together empirical evidence for childrearing
modes, historical personality types and historical
group-fantasies for each major period in Western history.
10. L. Kovar, "A Reconsideration of Paranoia."
Psychiatry 29 (1966): 289-305.
11. W. W. Meissner, The ParanoidProcess. New York: Jason Aronson,
1978, pp.136-8.
12. See William Saffady's psychohistorical article "Fears of
Sexual License During the English Reformation," History of
Childhood Quarterly: The Journal of Psychohistory 1(1973): 89-97
13. See Robert Ashton, The English Civil War: Conservatism and
Revolution /603-1649. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971, p.
155; B. S. Carp, The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth
Century English Millenarianism. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and
Littlefield, 1972.
14. George Lefebvre. The Great Fear of 1739. New York: Pantheon,
1973
15. For a detailed insight into the "sacrificial
crisis" of early societies, with concepts close to my
"paranoid collapse" concept, see Rene Girard, Violence
and the Sacred. Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1972.
16. The term "psychotic insight" is Arieti's; see
especially S. Arieti, "Introductory Notes on the
Psychoanalytic Therapy of Schizopbrenics" in A. Burton, ed.,
Psychotherapy of the Psychoses. New York: Basic Books, 1961,
pp.68-89.
17. 0. A. Will, "Process, Psychotherapy and
Schizophrenia" in A. Burton, ed. Psychotherapy of the
Psychoses, New York: Basic Books, 1961, p.18.
18. For "delegate groups," see Llyod DeMause, "The
Psychogenic Theory of History," The Journal of Psychohistory
4 (1977): 259.
19. Harry Stack Sullivan, Concepts of Modern Psychiatry. New
York: Norton, 1953.
20. Ole R. HoIst and Robert C. North. "The History of Human
Conflict" in Elton B. McNeil, ed. The Nature of Human
Conflict. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1965.
21. Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Rack: A Persona/Account. New
York, 1977, p.111.
22. Norman Cousins, "The Cuban Missile Crisis: An
Anniversary," Saturday Review, October 15, 1977, p.4.
23. Steven Kelman, Push Comes to Shove: The Escalation of Student
Protest. Boston, 1970, p.60; Richard Nixon, The Memoirs of
Richard Nixon. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, p.404.
241
24. The White House Transcripts: Subotission of Recorded
Presidential Conversations to the Coototittee on the Judidary of
the House pf Representatives by President Nixon. New York: Bantam
Books, 1974; also supplemented by changes found in U.S.
Con-gress. "Hearings Before the Committee on the Judiciary.
House of Representatives, 93rd Congress. Comparison of White
House and Judiciary Committee Transcripts of Fight Recorded
Presidential Conversations." Washington: U.S. Government
Print-ing Office, 1974, ser. no.34.
25. New York Times, September 19,1962, p.3.
26. Edward Mezvins, A Term to Remember New York: Coward, McCann,
Geoghegan,
1977, pp. 167-8.
27. Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, pp. 8ff.
28. Nixon, Meirtoirs, pp.768-9.
29. For the importance of the death of Nixon's brothers, see
James W. Hamilton, "Some Reflections on Richard Nixon in the
Light of His Resignation and Farewell Speeches," Journal of
Psychohistory 4(1977): 491-511.
30. Alan B. Ruthenberg, "Why Nixon Taped Himself: Infantile
Fantasies Behind Watergate," Psychoanalytic Review 62
(1975): 201-223. The role of individual per-sonality styles in
contributing to developing group-fantasy stages is particularly
well studied in Richard D. Mann et al., Interpersonal Styles and
Group Development. New York: Wiley, 1967.
31. U.S. News and World Report, September 18, 1972, various
headlines.
32. U.S. News and World Report, September 18, 1972, pp. 13-1 5.
33. U.S. News and World Report, October 2, 1972, pp.24-27
34. Public Papers of the Presidents of the Uoited States. Richard
Nixon. /972. Washington, D.C.: U. S. Government Printing Oftice,
1975.
35 Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States. Richard
Nixon. 1973. Washington, D.C.: U. S. Government Printing Oflice,
1975.
36. Herbert Block, Herblock Special Report. New York: Norton,
1974.
37. Quoted in Rotbenberg, "Why Nixon Taped Himself,"
Psychoanalytic Review 62 (1975): 202.
38. Nixon, Memoirs, p.849.
39. Theodore J. Jacobs, paper given at the New York
Psychoanalytic Society, "Secrets, alliances and family
fictions: Some psychoanalytic observations." March 13,1979.
In fact, political cartoons since their beginnings have been
filled with anal material; see Herbert M. Atherton, Political
Prints in the Age of Hogarth: A Study in Ideographic
Representation of Politics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974.
40. Irving D. Harris, "The Psychologies of Presidents,"
History of Childhood Quarterly: The Journal of Psychohistory
3(1976): 337-350.
41. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States. Dwight
Eisenhower. /953. Washington, D.C.: U. S. Government Printing
Office, 1960, p.41.
42. Ibid., p.618.
43. Ibid.
44. Newsweek, June 7, 1954, p.41.
45. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States. Dwight
Eisenhower. /954. Washington, D.C.: U. S. Government Printing
Office, 1960, p.1075.
46. Peter Lyon, Eisenhower: Portrait of the Hero. Boston, Little,
Brown, 1974, p.639.
47. Ibid., p.640.
48. Newsweek, January31, 1955,p. 19;February7,
1955,p.26;Februaryl4, 1955,p. 19.
49. Newsweek, July 15, 1957, cover.
50. Newsweek, October 14, 1957, p.38.
51. William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream, Boston: Little,
Brown, 1973, p.789.
52. Newsweek, November 18, 1957, p.37.
242
53. Newsweek, January 20, 1958, cover; March 10, 1958, p.27.
54. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States. Dwight
Eisenhower. 1958. Washington, D.C.: U. S. Government Printing
Office, 1960, p.329.
55. Newsweek, May 26, 1958, p.23.
56. Newsweek, July 7, 1958, p.9; July 21,1958, cover.
57. Lyon, Eisenhower, p.773.
58. Newsweek, July 28,1958, pp.15, 24.
59. See Arthur Schlesinger, "Tides in American
Politics," Yale Review 29(1939): 217-30; Frank L. Klingberg,
"The Historical Alteration of Moods in American Foreign
Policy," World Politics 4 (1952): 239~273; also see the
discussion about the lawful historical relationship between
domestic active periods and war in David C. Mc-Clelland
"Love and Power: The Psychological Signals of War,"
Psychology Today, January 1975, pp.44-48.
60. Newsweek, October 2, 1961, cover; November 6, 1961, cover;
U.S. News and World Report, January 1, 1962, p.25; January 8,
1962, p.40.
61. U.S. News and World Report, January 29, 1962.
62. U.S. News and World Report, February 12, 1962, p.43.
63. Benjamin C. Bradlee, "Conversations with Kennedy"
Playboy, April, 1965, p. 176.
64. U.S. News and World Report, May 14, 1962, p.52.
65. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States. John F
Kennedy. 1962. Washington, D.C.: U. S. Government Printing
Office, 1963.
66. U.S. News and World Report, September 17, 1962, p.37
67. U.S. Congress. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and the
Committee on Armed Services. 87th Congress, 2nd session.
Situation in Cuba. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing
Office, 1962.
68. U.S. News and World Report, September 24,1962, pp.47-8.
69. David Detzer, The Orlak: Cuban Missile Crlsis, 1962. New
York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1979, p.97; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.,
A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House. Boston,
1965. pp.799-801.
70. William Whitworth, Naive Questions about War and Peace. New
York: W, W. Norton, 1970, p.24.
71. Barton J. Bernstein, "The Week We Almost Went to
War," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, February 1976, p.
17.
72. Detzer, The Brlnk, p.157.
73. Barton J. Bernstein, "Kennedy Brinkmanship,"
Inquiry, April 2, 1979, p.21.
74. H. R. Haldeman, The Ends of Power. New York: New York Times
Books, 1978, p. 93.
75. U.S. News and World Report, December 17, 1962, p.54.
76. U.S. News and World Report, February 25, 1963, p.31.
77. Daniel Schorr, "The Assassins," New York Review of
Books, October 13, 1977, pp. 14-21.
78. U.S. News and World Report, October 26,1964.
79. U.S. News and World Report, December 7, 1964, p.31.
80. William Shaweross, "Dr. Kissinger Goes to War,"
Harpers, April, 1979, p.40.
81. Lloyd deMause and Henry Fbel, eds., Jbumy Carter and
Auterican Fantasy. New York: Psychohistory Press, 1977
82. U.S. News and World Report, September 19,1977, p.25.
83. The New York Tiotes, September 16, 1977, p. A23.
84. Washington Post, September 25, 1977, p. C7.
85. Washington Post, October 9, 1977, p. A3.
86. Washington Post, October 10, 1977, p. A23.
87. The New Republic, December 17, 1977, p.1.
243
88. New York Times, November 9, 1977, p. A20.
89. U.S. News and World Report, December 2, 1977, p.23.
90. U.S. News and World Report, March 6, 1978, p.29.
91. New York Post, April21, 1978, p.19.
92. Vermont Royster, Wall Street Journal, March 1, 1978.
93. U.S. News and World Report, June 12, 1978, p. 19; Carl Rowan,
New York Post, June 5, 1978, p.23.
94. New York Times, May 26,1978, p. AlO.
95. I. F. Stone, "Carter, Africa and Salt," New York
Review of Rooks, June 12, 1978, pp.22-26.
96. New York Times, June 8, 1978, p. Al.
97. The Guardian, June 25,1978, p. 17.
98. The New Republic, September 30,1978, p.3.
99. Newsweek, October 2, 1978, pp. 110,, 22-23.
100. New York Post, March 15, 1979, p.23.
101. Frank H. Denton and Warren Phillips, "Some Patterns in
the History of Violence," Conflict Resolution 12 (1968):
182-195
102. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politic's
and Other Essays. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965, p.6.
103. The historiography of this controversy can be found in James
H. Hutson, "The American Revolution: The Triumph of a
Delusion?" in Frich Angcrmann, ed., New Wine in Old Skins.
Stuttgart, 1976, pp. 177-194.
104. Ibid., p.177
105. George B. Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: A
Psychological Joterpretation of Lincoln and His Age. New York: W.
W. Norton, 1979
106. Ibid., p.259.
107. B. S. Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men.' A Study in
Seventeenth-century English Millenarlanism. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman
and Littlefield, 1972.
108. For a perceptive psychological approach to America's Great
Awakenings, see William G. MeLoughlm, Revivals, Awakenings, and
Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in Amerlea,
1607-1977. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.
109. Nathan 0. Hatch, "The Origins of Civil Millennialism in
America: New England Clergymen, War with France, and the
Revolution," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 31(1974):
4070430.
110. John Mellen, The Duty of all to be ready for future
Joipending Events. Boston, 1756, pp.19-20.
111. Hatch, "Origins of Civil Millennialism," p.428.
112. Esmond Wright, Fabric of Freedom 1763-1800. Rev. Ed. N.Y.:
Hill and Wang, 1968, pp.96-102.
113. Hutson, "The American Revolution: The Triumph of a
Delusion?", p.188.
114. See especially Bradford Perkins, Prologue to War: England
and the United Stales 1805-1812. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1968.
115. Peter F. Walker, Moral Choices; Memory, Desire and
Jmagination in Nineteenth-Century American Abolitionism. Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978.
116. Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and
the Subjection of the Amerlcan Indian, New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1975, p.147.
FOUNDATIONS OF PSYCHOHISTORY TABLE OF CONTENTS |
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by: Lloyd deMause
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