CHAPTER 1 continued
pages 23 - 41
back to pp. 1 - 22

TABLE OF CONTENTS
FOUNDATIONS OF
PSYCHOHISTORY
by LLOYD DEMAUSE

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The need of the parent for mothering placed an enormous burden on the growing child. It was sometimes even the cause of its death. One of the more frequent reasons given for infant death was "overlaying," or suffocation in bed, and although this was often just an excuse for infanticide, pediatricians admitted that when it was genuine it was due to the mother's refusal to put the child in a separate bed when she went to sleep; "not wanting to let go of the child, [she] holds him even tighter as she sleeps. Her breast closes off the nose of the child."(88) It was this reversal image of the child-as-security-blanket that was the reality behind the common medieval warning that parents must be careful not to coddle their children "like the ivy that certainly kills the tree encircled by it, or the ape that hugs her whelps to death with mere fondness."(89)

PSYCHOLOGICAL PRINCIPLE: THE DOUBLE IMAGE

The continuous shift between projection and reversal, between the child as devil and as adult, produces a "double image" that is responsible for much of the bizarre quality of childhood in the past. We have already seen how this shift from the adult image to the projected image is a precondition for battering. But we can see a richer picture of the double image by examining in some detail an actual childhood in the past. The most complete record of childhood prior to modern times is the diary of Heroard, doctor of Louis XIII, with almost daily entries about what he saw the child and those around him do and say. The diary often allows us to glimpse the shifting double image as it occurs in Heroard's own mind, as his picture of the baby shifts between projective and reversal images.

The diary opens with the dauphin's birth in 1601. Immediately, his adult qualities appear. He came out of the womb holding his umbilical cord "with such force that she had trouble getting it back from him." He was described as "strongly muscled," and his cry was so loud that "he didn't sound at all like a child." His penis was carefully examined, and he was declared "well provided for."(90) Since he was a dauphin, one skips over these first projections of adult qualities as simple pride in a new king, but soon the images begin piling up, and the double image of his being both an adult and a voracious child grows.

The day after his birth . . . his cries in general sound not at all like an infant's cries and they never did, and when he sucks at the

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breast it was with such mouthfuls, and he opens his jaws so wide, that he takes at one time as much as others do in three. Consequently, his nurse was almost always dry . . . He was never satisfied.(91)

The image of the week-old dauphin as alternately an infant Hercules, who strangled the snakes, and a Gargantua, who needed 17,913 cows to nurse him, is totally at odds with the actual sickly, weak, swaddled infant who emerges from Heroard's record. Despite the dozens of people who were assigned to care for him, no one was able to provide for his simplest needs for food and rest. There were constant unnecessary changes in wet-nurses and continuous outings and long trips.(92) By the time the dauphin was two months old he was close to death. Heroard's anxiety increased, and as a defense against the anxiety his reversal reaction became more pronounced:

Being asked by the wet-nurse, "Who is that man?" responds in his jargon and with pleasure, "Erouad!" [Heroard] One can see that his body is no longer developing or being nourished. The muscles in his chest are totally consumed, and the large fold that he had had before on his neck was now nothing but skin."(93)

When the dauphin was almost ten months old, leading-strings were tied to his robe. Leading-strings were supposed to be used to teach the infant to walk, but they were more often used to manipulate and con-trol the child like a puppet. This, combined with Heroard's projective reactions, makes it difficult to understand what was actually happening, and what is being manipulated by those around little Louis. For instance, when he was eleven months old he was said to enjoy fencing with Heroard, and liked it so much that "he pursues me laughing through the whole chamber." But a month later Heroard reported that he "begins to move along with sturdiness, held under the arms."(94) It is obvious he was being carried or swung along on leading-strings earlier when he was said to "pursue" Heroard. Indeed, since he could not speak sentences until much later, Heroard was actually hallucinating when he reports that someone came to see the fourteen-month-old dauphin, who "turns around and looks at all those who are lined up at the balustrade, goes to choose him and holds out his hand to him, which the prince then kisses. M. d'Haucourt enters and says he has come to kiss the robe of the dauphin; he turns around and says to him it isn't necessary to do that."(95)

During this same time he was pictured as being extremely active sexually. The projective basis of ascribing adult sexual behavior to the child is apparent in Heroard's descriptions: "the dauphin [at twelve months] calls the page back and with a 'Ho!' lifts up his shirt to show him his cock. . . he makes everyone kiss his cock. . . in the company of the little girl, he pulls up his shirt, shows her his cock with such ardor

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that he is completely beside himself."(96) And it is only when one remembers that the following is really a fifteen-month-old baby who is probably being manipulated by leading strings, that this scene can be untangled from Heroard's massive projections:

The dauphin goes after Mile. Mercier, who screams because M. de Montglat hit her on her buttocks with his hand; the dauphin screamed too. She fled to the bedside; M. de Montglat followed her, and wanted to smack her rear, she cries out very loudly; the dauphin hears it, takes to screaming loudly too; enjoys this and shakes his feet and his whole body with joy . . . they make his women come; he makes them dance, plays with the little Mar-guerite, kisses her, embraces her; throws her down, casts himself on her with quivering body and grinding teeth . .. nine o'clock . . . He strives to hit her on the buttocks with a birch rod. Mile. Belier asks him: "Monsieur, what did M. de Montglat do to Mercier?" He began suddenly to clap his hands together with a sweet smile, and warm himself in such a way that he was transported with joy, having been a good half-to-quarter hour laughing and clapping his hands, and throwing himself headlong on her, like a person who had understood the joke.(97)

Only rarely did Heroard reveal that the dauphin was actually passive in these sexual manipulations: "The marquise often puts her hand under his jacket; he has himself put into his bed by the nurse where she plays with him, often putting her hand under his coat."(98) More often, he was simply depicted as being stripped, taken to bed with the King, the Queen, or both, or with various servants, and involved in sexual manipulations from the time he was an infant until he was at least seven years old.

Another example of the double image was in circumcision. As is well known, Jews, Egyptians, Arabs, and others circumcised the foreskin of boys. The reasons given for this are manifold, but all of them can be covered by the double image of projection and reversal. To begin with, such mutilations of children by adults always involve projection and punishment to control projected passions. As Philo put it in the first century, circumcision was for "the excision of passions, which bind the mind. For since among all passions that of intercourse between man and woman is greatest, the lawgivers have commended that that instru-ment, which serves this intercourse, be mutilated, pointing out, that these powerful passions must be bridled, and thinking not only this, but all passions would be controlled through this one."(99) Moses Maimonides agrees:

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I believe one of the reasons for circumcision was the diminution of sexual intercourse and the weakening of the sexual organs; its purpose was to restrict the activities of this organ and to leave it at rest as much as possible. The true purpose of circumcision was to give the sexual organ that kind of physical pain as not to impair its natural function or the potency of the individual, but to lessen the power of passion and of too great desire. (100)

The reversal element in circumcision can be seen in the glans-as-nipple theme embedded in the details of one version of the ritual. The infant's penis is rubbed to make it erect, and the foreskin is split, either by the mother's fingernail or with a knife, and then torn all around the glans. Then the mother sucks the blood off the glans.(101) This is done for the same reason that everyone kissed little Louis's penis-because the penis, and more particularly the glans, is the mother's nipple returned, and the blood is her milk.(102) The idea of the child's blood as having magic-milk qualities is an old one, and underlies many sacrificial acts, but rather than examine this complex problem here I would like to concentrate on the main idea of circumcision as the coming-out of the glans-as-nipple. It is not generally known that the exposure of the glans was a problem for more than just the circumcising nations. To the Greeks and Romans, the glans was considered sacred; the sight of it "struck terror and wonder in the heart of man,"(103) and so they either tied up the prepuce with a string, which was called kynodesme, or else pinned it closed with a fibula, a clasp, which was called inflbulation.(104) Evidence of infibulation, both for "modesty" and "to restrain lust," can also be found in the Renaissance and modern times. (105)

When the foreskin wasn't sufficiently long to cover the glans, an operation was sometimes performed whereby the skin was cut around the base of the penis and the skin drawn forward.(106) In ancient art, the glans was usually shown covered, either with the penis coming to a point, or else clearly showing the tied foreskin, even when erect. I have only found two cases where the glans showed: either when it was meant to inspire awe, as in the representations of the phallus which were used to hang in doorways, or when the penis was shown being used in fellatio.(107) Thus, to Jew and Roman alike, the image of reversal was imbedded in their attitude toward the glans-as-nipple.

INFANTICIDE AND DEATH WISHES TOWARD CHILDREN

In a pair of books rich in clinical documentation, the psychoanalyst Joseph Rheingold examined the death wishes of mothers(108) toward their

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children, and found that they are not only far more widespread than is commonly realized, but also that they stem from a powerful attempt to "undo" motherhood in order to escape the punishment they imagine their own mothers will wreak upon them. Rheingold shows us mothers giving birth and begging their own mothers not to kill them, and traces the origin of both infanticidal wishes and post-partum depression states as not due to hostility toward the child itself, but rather to the need to sacrifice the child to propitiate their own mothers. Hospital staffs are well aware of these widespread infanticidal wishes, and often allow no contact between the mother and child for some time. Rheingold's findings, seconded by Block, Zilboorg, and others,(109) are complex and have far-reaching implications; here we can only point out that filicidal impulses of contemporary mothers are enormously widespread, with fantasies of stabbing, mutilation, abuse, decapitation, and strangulation common in mothers in psychoanalysis. I believe that the further back in history one goes, the more filicidal impulses are acted out by parents.

The history of infanticide in the West has yet to be written, and I shall not attempt it here. But enough is already known to establish that, contrary to the usual assumption that it is an Eastern rather than a Western problem, infanticide of both legitimate and illegitimate children was a regular practice of antiquity, that the killing of legitimate children was only slowly reduced during the Middle Ages, and that illegitimate children continued regularly to be killed right up into the nineteenth century.(110)

Infanticide during antiquity has usually been played down despite literally hundreds of clear references by ancient writers that it was an accepted, everyday occurrence. Children were thrown into rivers, flung into dung-heaps and cess trenches, "potted" in jars to starve to death, and exposed on every hill and roadside, "a prey for birds, food for wild beasts to rend" (Euripides, Ion, 504). To begin with, any child that was not perfect in shape and size, or cried too little or too much, or was otherwise than is described in the gynecological writings on "How to Recognize the Newborn That is Worth Rearing,"(111) was generally killed. Beyond this, the first-born was usually allowed to live,(112) especially if it was a boy. Girls were, of course, valued little, and the instructions of Hilarion to his wife Alis (1 B.C.) are typical of the open way these things were discussed: "If, as may well happen, you give birth to a child, if it is a boy let it live; if it is a girl, expose it."(113) The result was a large imbalance of males over females which was typical of the West until well into the Middle Ages, when the killing of legitimate children was probably much reduced. (The killing of illegitimate children does not affect the sex ratio, since both sexes are generally killed.) Available statistics for antiquity show large surpluses of boys over girls; for in-

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stance, out of 79 families who gained Milesian citizenship about 228-220 B.C., there were 118 sons and 28 daughters; 32 families had one child, 31 had two. As Jack Lindsay puts it:

Two sons are not uncommon, three occur now and then, but more than one daughter was practically never reared. Poseidippos stated, "even a rich man always exposes a daughter" . . . Of 600 families from second-century inscriptions at Delphi, one per cent raised two daughters. (114)

The killing of legitimate children even by wealthy parents was so common that Polybius blamed it for the depopulation of Greece:

In our own time the whole of Greece has been subject to a low birth-rate and a general decrease of the population, owing to which cities have become deserted and the land has ceased to yield fruit, although there have neither been continuous wars nor epidemics . . . as men had fallen into such a state of pretentiousness, avarice and indolence that they did not wish to marry, or if they married to rear the children born to them, or at most as a rule but one or two of them. . . (115)

Until the fourth century A.D., neither law nor public opinion found infanticide wrong in either Greece or Rome. The great philosophers agreed. Those few passages which classicists consider as a condemnation of infanticide seem to me to indicate just the opposite, such as Aristotle's "As to exposing or rearing the children born, let there be a law that no deformed child shall be reared; but on the ground of number of children, if the regular customs hinder any of those born being exposed, there must be a limit filed to the procreation of offspring." Similarly, Musonius Rufus, sometimes called "The Roman Socrates," is often quoted as opposing infanticide, but his piece "Should Every Child That Is Born Be Raised?" quite clearly only says that since brothers are very useful they should not be killed.(116) But more ancient writers openly approved of infanticide, saying, like Aristippus, that a man could do what he wants with his children, for "do we not cast away from us our spittle, lice and such like, as things unprofitable, which nevertheless are en-gendered and bred even out of our own selves."(117) Or like Seneca, they pretend only sickly infants are involved:

Mad dogs we knock on the head; the fierce and savage ox we slay; sickly sheep we put to the knife to keep them from infecting the flock; unnatural progeny we destroy; we drown even children who at birth are weakly and abnormal. Yet it is not anger, but reason that separates the harmful from the sound.(118)

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The theme of exposure loomed large in myth, tragedy, and the New Comedy, which is often built around the subject of how funny infanticide is. In Menander's Girl from Samos, much fun is made of a man trying to chop up and roast a baby. In his comedy The Arbitrants, a shepherd picks up an exposed infant, considers raising it, then changes his mind, saying, "What have I to do with the rearing of children and the trouble." He gives it to another man, but has a fight over who got the baby's necklace (119)

It must be noted, however, that infanticide was probably common since prehistoric times. Henri Vallois, who tabulated all the prehistoric fossils dug up from the Pithecanthropines to the Mesolithic peoples, found a sex ratio of 148 to 100 in favor of men.(120) The Greeks and Romans were actually an island of enlightenment in a sea of nations still in an earlier stage of sacrificing children to gods, a practice which the Romans tried in vain to stop. The best documented is Carthaginian child sacrifice, which Plutarch describes:

. . . with full knowledge and understanding they themselves offered up their own children, and those who had no children would buy little ones from poor people and cut their throats as if they were so many lambs or young birds; meanwhile the mother stood by without a tear or moan; but should she utter a single moan or let fall a single tear, she had to forfeit the money, and her child was sacrificed nevertheless; and the whole area before the statue was filled with a loud noise of flutes and drums so that the cries of wailing should not reach the ears of the people. (121)

Child sacrifice is, of course, the most concrete acting out of Rheingold's thesis of filicide as sacrifice to the mother of the parents. It was practiced by the Irish Celts, the Gauls, the Scandinavians, the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the Moabites, the Ammonites, and, in certain periods, the Israelites.(122) Thousands of bones of sacrificed children have been dug up by archeologists, often with inscriptions identifying the victims as first-born sons of noble families, reaching in time all the way back to the Jericho of 7,000 B.C.(123) Sealing children in walls, foundations of buildings, and bridges to strengthen the structure was also common from the building of the wall of Jericho to as late as 1843 in Germany. (124) To this day, when children play "London Bridge is Falling Down," they are acting out a sacrifice to a river goddess when they catch the child at the end of the game. (125)

Even in Rome, sacrifice of children led an underground existence. Dio said Julianus "killed many boys as a magic rite;" Suetonius said because of a portent the Senate "decreed that no male born that year should be reared;" and Pliny the Elder spoke of men who "seek to secure the leg-marrow and the brain of infants."(126) More frequent was the

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practice of killing your enemy's children, often in great numbers,(127) so that noble children not only witnessed infanticide in the streets but were themselves under continual threat of death depending on the political fortunes of their fathers.

Philo was the first person I have found who spoke out clearly against the horrors of infanticide:

Some of them do the deed with their own hands; with monstrous cruelty and barbarity they stifle and throttle the first breath which the infants draw or throw them into a river or into the depths of the sea, after attaching some heavy substance to make them sink more quickly under its weight. Others take them to be exposed in some desert place, hoping, they themselves say, that they may be saved, but leaving them in actual truth to suffer the most distressing fate. For all the beasts that feed in human flesh visit the spot and feast unhindered on the infants, a fine banquet provided by their sole guardians, those who above all others should keep them safe, theft fathers and mothers. Carnivorous birds, too, come flying down and gobble up the fragments (128)

Although in the two centuries after Augustus, some attempts were made to pay parents to keep children alive in order to replenish the dwindling Roman population,(129) it was not until the fourth century that real change was apparent. The law began to consider killing an infant murder only in 374 A.D.(130) Yet even the opposition to infanticide by the Church Fathers often seemed to be based more on their concern for the parent's soul than with the child's life. This attitude can be seen in Saint Justin Martyr's statement that the reason a Christian shouldn't expose his children is to avoid later meeting them in a brothel: "Lest we molest anyone or commit sin ourselves, we have been taught that it is wicked to expose even newly-born children, first be-cause we see that almost all those who are exposed (not only girls, but boys) are raised in prostitution."(131) When the Christians themselves were accused of killing babies in secret rites, however, they were quick enough to reply: "How many, do you suppose, of those here present who stand panting for the blood of Christians -- how many, even, of you magistrates who are so righteous against us -- want me to touch their consciences for putting their own offspring to death?"(132)

After the Council of Vaison (442 A.D.), the finding of abandoned children was supposed to be announced in church, and by 787 A.D., Dateo of Milan founded the first asylum solely for abandoned infants.(133) Other countries followed much the same pattern of evolution. (134) Despite much literary evidence, however, the continued existence of wide-

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spread infanticide in the Middle Ages is usually denied by medievalists, since it is not evident in church records and other quantitative sources. But if sex ratios of 156 to 100 (c. 801 AD.) and 172 to 100 (1391 A.D.) are any indication of the extent of the killing of legitimate girls,(135) and if illegitimate were usually killed regardless of sex, the real rate of infanticide could have been substantial in the Middle Ages. Certainly, when Innocent III began the hospital of the Santo Spirito in Rome at the end of the twelfth century he was fully aware of the number of women throwing their babies into the Tiber. As late as 1527, one priest admitted that "the latrines resound with the cries of children who have been plunged into them."(136) Detailed studies are just beginning, but it is possible that infanticide may have been only sporadically punished prior to the sixteenth century. (137) Certainly when Vincent of Beauvais wrote in the thirteenth century that a father was always worrying about his daughter "suffocating her offspring," when doctors complained of all the children "found in the frost or in the streets, cast away by a wicked mother," and when we find that in Anglo-Saxon


Illustration 4 - Children Being Cooked.
Parental infanricidal acts were usually projected onto Jews
or witches, as here in Guazzo's Compendium Malificarum.

England the legal presumption was that infants who died had been murdered if not proved otherwise, we should take these clues as a signal for the most vigorous sort of research into medieval infanticide. (138) And just because formal records show few illegitimate births, we certainly shouldn't be satisfied with assuming that "in traditional society people remained continent until marriage," since many girls managed to hide

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their pregnancies from their own mothers who slept beside them,(139) and they certainly can be suspected of hiding them from the church.

What is certain is that when our material becomes far fuller, by the(140) eighteenth century, there is no question that there was high incidence of infanticide in every country in Europe. As more foundling homes were opened in each country, babies poured in from all over, and the homes quickly ran out of room. Even though Thomas Coram opened his Foundling Hospital in 1741 because he couldn't bear to see the dying babies lying in the gutters and rotting on the dung-heaps of London, by the I 890s dead babies were still a common sight in London streets.(141) Late in the nineteenth century Louis Adamic described being brought up in an Eastern European village of "killing nurses," where mothers sent their infants to be done away with "by exposing them to cold air after a hot bath; feeding them something that caused convulsions in their stomachs and intestines; mixing gypsum in their milk, which literally plastered up their insides; suddenly stuffing them with food after not giving them anything to eat for two days . . ." Adamic was to have been killed as well, but for some reason his nurse spared him. His account of how he watched her do away with the other babies she received provides a picture of the emotional reality behind all those centuries of infanticide we have been reviewing.

In her own strange, helpless way, she loved them all . . . but when the luckless infants' parents or the latter's relatives could not or did not pay the customary small sum for their keep . . . she disposed of them. . . . One day she returned from the city with an elongated little bundle . . . a horrible suspicion seized me. The baby in the cradle was going to die! . . . when the baby cried, I heard her get up, and she nursed it in the dark, mumbling, "Poor, poor little one!" I have tried many times since to imagine how she must have felt holding to her breast a child she knew was fated to die by her hand . . . "You poor, poor little one!" She purposely spoke clearly so I would be sure to hear. " . . fruit of sin through no fault of your own, but sinless in yourself. . . soon you will go, soon, soon, my poor one . . . and, going now, you will not go to hell as you would if you lived and grew up and became a sinner." . . . The next morning the child was dead . (142)

Once the infant in the past was born, he was regularly surrounded by the aura of death and counter-measures against death. Since ancient times, exorcisms, purifications, and magic amulets have been thought necessary to rout the host of death-dealing powers felt to lurk about the child, and cold water, fire, blood, wine, salt, and urine were used on the baby and its surroundings. (143) Isolated Greek villages even today retain this atmosphere of warding off death:

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The new-born child sleeps tightly swaddled in a wooden rocking cradle which is enveloped from end to end in a blanket, so that he lies in a kind of dark airless tent. Mothers are fearful of the effects of cold air and evil spirits . . . the hut or house after dark is like a city under siege, with windows boarded, the door barred, and salt and incense at strategic points such as the threshold to repel any invasion of the Devil. (144)

Old women, symbols, according to Rheingold, of the grandmother whose death wishes were warded off, were thought to have an "evil eye," under whose gaze the child would die. Amulets, generally in the form of a penis or of phallus-shaped coral, are given the infant to ward off these death wishes. (145) As the child grew up, death wishes toward it kept breaking through. Epictetus said, "What harm is there if you whisper to yourself, at the very moment you are kissing your child, and say 'Tomorrow you will die?' (146) An Italian during the Renaissance would say, when a child does something clever, "that child is not meant to live."(147) Fathers of every age tell their sons, with Luther, "I would rather have a dead son than a disobedient one."(148) Fenelon says to ask a child questions such as, "Would you let your head be cut off in order to get into heaven?" (149) Walter Scott said his mother confessed she was "under a strong temptation of the Devil, to cut my throat with her scissors, and bury me in the moss."(150) Leopardi said of his mother, "When she saw the death of one of her infants approaching, she experienced a deep happiness, which she attempted to conceal only from those who were likely to blame her."(151) The sources are full of similar examples.

Urges to mutilate, burn, freeze, drown, shake, and throw the infant violently about were continuously acted out in the past. The Huns used to cut the cheeks of newborn males. Robert Pemell tells how in Italy and other countries during the Renaissance parents would "burn in the neck with a hot iron, or else drop a burning wax candle" on newborn babies to prevent "falling sickness." (152) In early modern times, the string underneath the newborn's tongue was usually cut, often with the midwife's fingernail, a sort of miniature circumcision. (153 )The mutilation of children throughout the ages has excited pity and laughter in adults, and was the basis for the widespread practice in every age of mutilating children for begging,(154) going back to Seneca's "Controversy," which concludes that mutilating exposed children was not wrong;

Look on the blind wandering about the streets leaning on their sticks, and those with crushed feet, and still again look on those with broken limbs. This one is without arms, that one has had his shoulders pulled down out of shape in order that his grotesqueries

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may excite laughter . . . Let us go to the origin of all those ills - a laboratory for the manufacture of human wrecks - a cavern filled with the limbs torn from living children . . . What wrong has been done to the Republic? On the contrary, have not these children been done a service inasmuch as their parents had cast them out? (155)

Throwing the swaddled child about was sometimes practiced. A brother of Henri IV, while being passed for amusement from one window to another, was dropped and killed. (156) The same thing happened to the little Comte de MarIe: "One of the gentlemen-in-waiting and the nurse who was taking care of him amused themselves by tossing him back and forth across the sill of an open window . Sometimes they would pretend not to catch him . . . the little Comte de MarIe fell and hit a stone step below."(157) Doctors complained of parents who break the bones of their children in the "customary" tossing of infants. (158) Nurses often said that the stays children were encased in were necessary because otherwise they could not "be tossed about without them. And I remember an eminent surgeon say a child was brought to him with several of its ribs crushed inward by the hand of the person who had been tossing it about without its stays."(159) Doctors also denounced the customary violent rocking of infants, "which puts the babe into a dazed condition, in order that he may not trouble those that have the care of him."(160) This was the reason that cradles began to be attacked in the eighteenth century; Buchan said he was against cradles because of the common "ill-tempered nurse, who, instead of soothing the accidental uneasiness or indisposition to sleep of her baby, when laid down to rest, is often worked up to the highest pitch of rage; and, in the excess of her folly and brutality, endeavors, by loud, harsh threats, and the impetuous rattle of the cradle, to drown the infant's cries, and to force him into slumber."(161)

Infants were also sometimes nearly frozen through a variety of customs, ranging from baptism by lengthy dipping in ice-water and rolling in the snow, to the practice of the plunge-bath, which involved regular plunging of the infant over and over again in ice cold water over its head "with its mouth open and gasping for breath."(162) Elizabeth Grant remembers in the early nineteenth century that a "large, long tub stood in the kitchen court, the ice on the top of which often had to be broken before our horrid plunge into it . . . How I screamed, begged, prayed, entreated to be saved . . Nearly senseless I have been taken to the housekeeper's room . . ."(163) Going back to the ancient custom of the Germans, Scythians, Celts, and Spartans [though not Athenians, who used other hardening methods],(164) dipping in cold rivers used to be com-mon, and cold water dipping has since Roman times been considered

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therapeutic for children. (165) Even the putting of children to bed wrapped in cold wet towels was sometimes used both to harden and as therapy. 166 It is not surprising that the great eighteenth-century pediatrician William Buchan said "almost one half of the human species perish in infancy by improper management or neglect. "(167)

ABANDONMENT, NURSING AND SWADDLING

Although there were many exceptions to the general pattern, up to about the eighteenth century, the average child of wealthy parents spent his earliest years in the home of a wet-nurse, returned home to the care of other servants, and was sent out to service, apprenticeship, or school by age seven, so that the amount of time parents of means actually spent raising their children was minimal. The effects of these and other institutionalized abandonments by parents on the child have rarely been discussed.

The most extreme and oldest form of abandonment is the outright sale of children. Child sale was legal in Babylonian times, and may have been quite common among many nations in antiquity. 168 Although Solon tried to restrict the right of child sale by parents in Athens, it is unclear how effective the law was. 169 Herodas showed a beating scene where a boy was told "you're a bad boy, Kottalos, so bad that none could find a good word for you even were he selling you."(170) The church tried for centuries to stamp out child sale. Theodore, Arch-bishop of Canterbury in the seventh century, ruled a man might not sell his son into slavery after the age of 7. If Giraldus Cambrensis is to be believed, in the twelfth century the English had been selling their children to the Irish for slaves, and the Norman invasion was a punishment from God for this slave traffic. (171) In many areas, child sale continued sporadically into modern times, not being outlawed in Russia for instance, until the nineteenth century (172)

Another abandonment practice was the use of children as political hostages and security for debts, which also went back to Babylonian times. (173) Sidney Painter describes its medieval version, in which it was "quite customary to give young children as hostages to guarantee an
agreement, and equally so to make them suffer for their parents' bad faith. When Eustace de Breteuil, the husband of a natural daughter of Henry I, put out the eyes of the son of one of his vassals, the king allowed the enraged father to mutilate in the same way Eustace's daughter whom Henry held as hostage."(174) Similarly, John Marshall gave up his son William to King Stephen, saying he "cared little if William were hanged, for he had the anvils and hammers with which to forge still better sons," and Francis I, when taken prisoner by Charles V, exchanged

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his young sons for his own freedom, then promptly broke the bargain so that they were thrown in jail. (175) Indeed, it was often hard to distinguish the practice of sending one's children to serve as pages or servants in another noble household from the use of children as hostages.

Similar abandonment motives were behind the custom of fosterage, which was common among all classes of Welsh, Anglo-Saxons, and Scandinavians, wherein an infant was sent to another family to be reared to age 17, and then returned to the parents. This continued in Ireland until the seventeenth century, and the English often sent their children to be fostered by the Irish in medieval times.(176) Actually, this was just an extreme version of the medieval practice of sending noble children


Illustration 5 - Bad Parents Giving Their Children To The Devil.
Durer's fifteenth-century Ritter von Turn and sixteenth-century
woodcut from Agnes Sampson trial illustrate widespread theme of
parents who give the Devil the children they promised to him.

at the age of seven or earlier into the homes of others or to monasteries as servants, pages, ladies-in-waiting, oblates, or clerks, practices still common in early modern times.( 177) As with the equivalent lower class practice of apprenticeship,(178) the whole subject of the child as laborer in the homes of others is so vast and so poorly studied that it unfortunately cannot be much examined here, despite its obvious importance in the lives of children in the past.

Besides institutionalized abandonment practices, the informal abandoning of young children to other people by their parents occurred

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quite often right up to the nineteenth century. The parents gave every kind of rationalization for giving their children away: "to learn to speak" (Disraeli), "to cure timidness" (Clara Barton), for "health" (Edmund Burke, Mrs. Sherwood's daughter), or as payment for medical services rendered (patients of Jerome Cardan and William Douglas). Sometimes they admitted it was simply because they were not wanted (Richard Baxter, Johannes Butzbach, Richard Savage, Swift, Yeats, Augustus Hare, and so on). Mrs. Hare's mother expresses the general casualness of these abandonments: "Yes, certainly, the baby shall be sent as soon as it is weaned; and, if anyone else would like one, would you kindly recollect that we have others."(179) Boys were of course pre-ferred; one eighteenth-century woman wrote her brother asking for his next child: "If it is a boy, I claim it; if a girl, I will be content to stay for the next."(180)

However, it was the sending of children to wet-nurse which was the form of institutionalized abandonment most prevalent in the past. The wet-nurse is a familiar figure in the Bible, the Code of Hammurabi, the Egyptian papyri, and Greek and Roman literature, and they have been well organized ever since Roman wet-nurses gathered in the Colonna Lactaria to sell their services. (181) Doctors and moralists since Galen and Plutarch have denounced mothers for sending their children out to be wet-nursed rather than nursing them themselves. Their advice had little effect, however, for until the eighteenth century most parents who could afford it, and many who couldn't, sent their children to wet-nurse immediately after birth. Even poor mothers who could not afford sending their children out to nurse often refused to breast-feed them and gave them pap instead. Contrary to the assumptions of most historians, the custom of not breast-feeding infants at all reaches back in many areas of Europe at least as far as the fifteenth century. One mother, who had moved from an area in northern Germany where nursing infants was more common, was considered "swinish and filthy" by Bavarian women for nursing her child, and her husband threatened he would not eat if she did not give up this "disgusting habit."(182)

As for the rich, who actually abandoned their children for a period of years, even those experts who thought the practice bad usually did not use empathic terms in their treatises, but rather thought wet-nursing bad because "the dignity of a newborn human being [is] corrupted by the foreign and degenerate nourishment of another's milk."(183) That is, the blood of the lower-class wet-nurse entered the body of the upper-class baby, milk being thought to be blood frothed white.(184) Occasionally the moralists, all men of course, betrayed their own repressed resentment against their mothers for having sent them out to wet-nurse.

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Aulus Gellius complained: "When a child is given to another and removed from its mother's sight, the strength of maternal ardour is gradu-ally and little by little extinguished . . . and it is almost as completely forgotten as if it had been lost by death." (185) But usually repression won and the parent was praised. More important, repetition was assured. Though it was well known that infants died at a far higher rate while at wet-nurse than at home, parents continued to mourn their children's death, and then helplessly handed over their next infant as though the wet-nurse were a latter-day avenging goddess who required yet another


Illustration 6 Nursing Children: Fantasy and Reality.
The two typical Renaissance nursing scenes on the left show the fantasy of mothers nursing their own children - and the one on the right shows the reality - the baby sucks from the wet-nurse while the mother's breasts are reserved for the viewer (the father). Note in the two pictures on the left the artist seems uncertain where to place the mother's breasts, since he never actually nursed from them.

sacrifice.(186) Sir Simonds D'Ewes had already lost several sons at wet-nurse, yet he sent his next baby for two years to "a poor woman who had been much misused and almost starved by a wicked husband, being herself also naturally of a proud, fretting and wayward disposition; which together in the issue conduced to the final ruin and destruction of our most sweet and tender infant . . ."(187)

Except in those cases where the wet-nurse was brought in to live, children who were given to the wet-nurse were generally left there from 2 to 5 years. The conditions were similar in every country. Jacques Guillimeau described how the child at nurse might be "stifled, over-laid, be let fall, and so come to an untimely death; or else may be devoured, spoiled, or disfigured by some wild beast, wolf or dog, and then the nurse fearing to be punished for her negligence, may take another child into the place of it."(188) Robert Pemell reported the rector in his parish told him it was, when he first came to it, "filled with suckling in-

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fants from London and yet, in the space of one year, he buried them all except two."(189) Yet the practice continued inexorably until the eighteenth century in England and America, the nineteenth century in France, and into the twentieth century in Germany. (190) England was, in fact, so far in advance of the continent in nursing matters that quite wealthy mothers were often nursing their children as early as the seven-teenth century.(191) Nor was it simply a matter of the amorality of the rich; Robert Pemell complained in 1653 of the practice of "both high and low ladies of farming out their babies to irresponsible women in the country," and as late as 1780 the police chief of Paris estimated that of the 21,000 children born each year in his city, 17,000 were sent into the country to be wet-nursed, 2,000 or 3,000 were placed in nursery homes, 700 were wet-nursed at home and only 700 were nursed by their mothers. (192)

The actual length of nursing varied widely in every age and region. Table 1 lists the references I have been able to locate so far.

If this chart is any indication of general trends, it is possible that by early modern times, perhaps as a result of a reduction of projective care, very long nursing was becoming less common. It is also true that statements about weaning became more accurate as children were less often relegated to the wet-nurse; Roesslin, for example, says: "Avicen advises to give the child suck two years/how be it among us most commonly they suck but one year. . . "(194) Surely Alice Ryerson's statement that the "age of weaning was drastically reduced in actual practice in the period just preceding 1750" is too sweeping. (195) Although wet-nurses were expected to refrain from intercourse while nursing, they rarely did so, and weaning usually preceded the birth of the next child. Therefore, nursing for as much as two years might always have been exceptional in the West.

TABLE 1
AGE IN MONTHS AT FULL WEANING
Sourse (193) Months at Weaning Approx. Date Nationality
Wet-nurse Contract 24 367 B.C. Greek
Soranus 12-24 100 A.D. Roman
Marobius 35 400 Roman
Barerino 24 1314 Italian
Metlinger 10-24 1497 German
Jane Grey 18 1540 English
John Greene 9 1540 English
E. Roesslin 12 1540 German
Sabine Johnson 34 1540 English
John Dee 8-14 1550 English

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Source Months at Weaning Approx. Date Nationality
H. Mercurialis 15-30 1552 ltalian
John Jones 7-36 1579 English
Louis XIII 25 1603 French
John Evelyn 14 1620 English
Ralph Joesslin 12-19 1643-79 English
John Fechey 10-12 1697 English
James Nelson 34 1753 English
Nicholas Culpepper 12-48 1762 English
William Cadogan 4 1770 English
H. W. Tytler 6 1797 English
S. T. Coleridge 15 1807 English
Eliza Warren 12 1810 English
Caleb Tickner 10-42 1839 English
Mary Mallard 15 1859 American
German Statistical Study 1-6 1878-82 German

Feeding vessels of all kinds have been known since 2,000 B.C.; cows' and goats' milk were used when available, and often the infant would be put right to the teat of the animal to suck.(196) Pap, generally made of bread or meal mixed with water or milk, supplemented or replaced nursing from the earliest weeks, and sometimes was crammed down the child's throat until it vomited.(197) Any other food was first chewed by the wet-nurse, then given to the infant. (198) Opium and liquor were regularly given to infants throughout the ages to stop them from crying. The Ebers Papyrus says of the effectiveness for children of a mixture of poppy-seeds and fly-dung: "It acts at once!" Dr. Hume complained in 1799 of thousands of infants killed every year by nurses "forever pouring Godfrey's Cordial down their little throats, which is a strong opiate and in the end as fatal as arsenic. This they pretend they do to quiet the child-thus indeed many are forever quieted . . ." And daily doses of liquor were often "poured down the throat of a little being who is incapable of declining the portion, but who exhibit an abhhorence by struggling efforts and wry faces . . . "(199)

There are many indications in the sources that children as a general practice were given insufficient food. Children of the poor, of course, have often been hungry, but even children of the rich, especially girls, were supposed to be given very meager allowances of food, and little or no meat. Plutarch's description of the "starvation diet" of Spartan youth is well known, but from the number of references to scanty food, nursing babies only two or three times a day, fasts for children, and deprivation of food as discipline, one suspects that, like parents of con-

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temporary child abusers, parents in the past found it hard to see to it that their children were adequately fed.(200) Autobiographies from Augustine to Baxter have confessed to the sin of gluttony for stealing fruit as a child; no one has ever thought to ask if they did so because they were hungry.(201)

Tying the child up in various restraint devices was a near-universal practice. Swaddling was the central fact of the infant's earliest years. As we have noted, restraints were thought necessary because the child was so full of dangerous adult projections that if it were left free it would scratch its eyes out, tear its ears off, break its legs, distort its bones, be terrified by the sight of its own limbs, and even crawl about on all fours like an animal.(202) Traditional swaddling is much the same in every country and age; it "consists in entirely depriving the child of the use of its limbs, by enveloping them in an endless length bandage, so as to not unaptly resemble billets of wood; and by which, the skin is sometimes excoriated; the flesh compressed, almost to gangrene; the circulation nearly arrested; and the child without the slightest power of motion. Its little waist is surrounded by stays . . . Its head is compressed into the form the fancy of the midwife might suggest; and its shape maintained by properly adjusted pressure . .(203)

Swaddling was often so complicated it took up to two hours to dress an infant.(204) Its convenience to adults was enormous-they rarely had to


Illustration 7 - Swaddling The Child. English (1633).

pay any attention to infants once they were tied up. As a recent medical study of swaddling has shown, swaddled infants are extremely passive, their hearts slow down, they cry less, they sleep far more, and in general they are so withdrawn and inert that the doctors who did the study

FOUNDATIONS OF
PSYCHOHISTORY
TABLE OF CONTENTS
on to pages 42 - 44

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


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