CHAPTER 1 continued
pages 45 - 50
back to pp. 42 - 44

TABLE OF CONTENTS
FOUNDATIONS OF
PSYCHOHISTORY
by LLOYD DEMAUSE

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. . . there are stools for children to stand in, in which they can turn around any way, when mothers or nurses see them in it, then they care no more for the child, let it alone, go about their own business, supposing the child to be well provided, but they little think on the pain and misery the poor child is in . . . the poor child . . . must stand maybe many hours, whereas half an hour standing is too long . . . I wish that all such standing stools were burned. . . (214)

TOILET TRAINING, DISCIPLINE, AND SEX

Although chairs with chamber pots underneath have existed since antiquity, there is no evidence for toilet training in the earliest months of the infant's life prior to the eighteenth century. Although parents often complained, like Luther, of their children's "befouling the corners," and although doctors prescribed remedies, including whipping, for "pissing in the bed" (children generally slept with adults), the struggle between parent and child for control in infancy of urine and feces is an eighteenth-century invention, the product of a late psychogenic stage.(215)

Children, of course, have always been identified with their excrements; newborn infants were called ecreme, and the Latin merda, excrement, was the source of the French merdeux, little child.(216) But it was the enema and the purge, not the potty, which were the central devices for relating to the inside of the child's body prior to the eighteen century. Children were given suppositories, enemas, and oral purges in sickness and in health. One seventeenth-century authority said infants should be purged before each nursing so the milk wouldn't get mixed up with the feces.(217) Heroard's diary of Louis XIII is filled with minute


Illustration 12 - Enema Scene.
Typical 18th-century German portrait of baby being given regular enema.

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descriptions of what goes into and comes out of Louis's body, and he was given literally thousands of purges, suppositories, and enemas during his childhood. The urine and feces of infants were often examined in order to determine the inner state of the child. David Hunt's description of this process clearly reveals the projective origin for what I have termed the "toilet-child":

The bowels of children were thought to harbor matter which spoke to the adult world insolently, threateningly, with malice and insubordination. The fact that the child's excrement looked and smelled unpleasant meant that the child himself was somewhere deep down inside badly disposed. No matter how placid and cooperative he might appear, the excrement which was regularly washed out of him was regarded as the insulting message of an inner demon, indicating the "bad humors" which lurked within.(218)

It was not until the eighteenth century that the main focus moved from the enema to the potty. Not only was toilet training begun at an earlier age, partly as a result of diminished use of swaddling bands, but the whole process of having the child control its body products was invested with an emotional importance previously unknown. Wrestling with an infant's will in his first few months was a measure of the strength of involvement by parents with their children, and represented a psychological advance over the reign of the enema.(219) By the nineteenth century, parents generally began toilet training in earnest in the earliest months of life, and their demands for cleanliness became so severe by the end of the century that the ideal child was described as one "who cannot bear to have any dirt on his body or dress or in his surrounding for even the briefest time."(220) Even today, most English and German parents begin toilet training prior to six months; the average in America is more like nine months, and the range is greater.(221)

The evidence which I have collected on methods of disciplining children leads me to believe that a very large percentage of the children born prior to the eighteenth century were what would today be termed "battered children." Of over two hundred statements of advice on child-rearing prior to the eighteenth century which I have examined, most approved of beating children severely, and all allowed beating in varying circumstances except three, Plutarch, Palmieri, and Sadoleto, and these were addressed to fathers and teachers, and did not mention mothers.(222) Of the seventy children prior to the eighteenth century whose lives I have found, all were beaten except one: Montaigne's daughter. Unfortunately, Montaigne's essays on children are so full of inconsistencies that one is uncertain whether to believe even this one

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statement. lie is most famous for his claim that his father was so kind to him that he hired a musician to play an instrument every morning to awaken him so that his delicate brain wouldn't be startled. If true, this unusual home life could only have lasted two or three years, however, for he was actually sent at birth to a wet-nurse in another village, and kept there for several years, and was sent to school in another town from age 6 to 13 because his father found him "sluggish, slow and unretentive." When he made the statement that his daughter was "over six years old now, and has never been guided or punished for her childish faults . . . by anything but words . . .," she was, in fact, 11 years old. He elsewhere admitted of his children, "I have not willingly suffered them to be brought up near me."(223) So perhaps we ought to reserve judgment on this, our one unbeaten child. [Peiper's extensive survey of the literature on beating reaches similar conclusions to mine.](224)

Beating instruments included whips of all kinds, including the cat-o'-nine-tails, shovels, canes, iron and wooden rods, bundles of sticks, the discipline (a whip made of small chains), and special school instruments like the flapper, which had a pear-shaped end and a round hole to raise blisters. Their comparative frequency of use may be indicated by the categories of the German schoolmaster who reckoned he had given 911,527 strokes with the stick, 124,000 lashes with the whip, 136,715 slaps with the hand, and 1,115,800 boxes on the ear. (225) The beatings described in the sources were generally severe, involved bruising and bloodying of the body, began early, and were a regular part of the child's life.

Century after century of battered children grew up and in turn battered their own children. Public protest was rare. Even humanists and teachers who had a reputation for great gentleness, like Petrarch, Ascham, Comenius, and Pestalozzi, approved of beating children.(226) Milton's wife complained she hated to hear the cries of his nephews when he was beating them, and Beethoven whipped his pupils with a knitting needle and sometimes bit them.(227) Even royalty was not ex-empt from battering, as the childhood of Louis XIII confirms. A whip was at his father's side at table, and as early as 1 7 months of age, the dauphin knew enough not to cry when threatened with the whip. At 25 months regular whippings began, often on his bare skin. He had frequent nightmares about his whippings, which were administered in the morning when he awakened. When he was king he still awoke at night in terror, in expectation of his morning whipping. The day of his coronation, when he was eight, he was whipped, and said, "I would rather do without so much obeisance and honor if they wouldn't have me whipped."(228)

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Since infants who were not swaddled were in particular subjected to hardening practices, perhaps one function of swaddling was to reduce the parent's propensity for child abuse. I have not yet found an adult who beat a swaddled infant. However, the beating of the smallest of in-fants out of swaddling clothes occurred quite often, a sure sign of the "battering" syndrome. Susannah Wesley said of her babies; "When turned a year old (and some before), they were taught to fear the rod, and to cry softly." Giovanni Dominici said to give babies "frequent, yet not severe whippings Rousseau said that babies in their earliest days were often beaten to keep them quiet. One mother wrote of her first battle with her 4-month-old infant: "I whipped him til he was actually black and blue, and until I could not whip him any more, and he never gave up one single inch." The examples could easily be extended.(229)

One curious method of punishment, which was inflicted on the early medieval ecclesiastic Alcuin when he was an infant, was to cut or prick the soles of the feet with an instrument which resembled a cobbler's


Illustration 13 - "Horsing" A Student. These Roman (Herculaneum) and Medieval (1140 A.D.) school scenes illustrate one popular position for beating schoolchildren, called "horsing" in 19th-century English schools.

knife. This reminds one of the, Bishop of Ely's habit of pricking his young servants with a goad which he always held in one hand. When Jane Grey complained of her parents giving her "nips and bobs," and

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Thomas Tusser complained of "touzed ears, like baited bears,/ what bobbed lips, what jerks, what nips" it may have been the goad which was used. Should further research show that the goad was also used on children in antiquity, it would put a different light on Oedipus's killing of Laius on that lonely road, for he was literally "goaded" into it - Laius having struck him "full on the head with his two-pointed goad."(230)

Although the earliest sources are quite sketchy on the precise severity of discipline, there seems to be evidence of visible improvement in every period in the West. Antiquity is full of devices and practices un-known to later times, including shackles for the feet, handcuffs, gags, three months in "the block," and the bloody Spartan flagellation contests, which often involved whipping youths to death.(231) One Anglo-Saxon custom suggests the level of thought about children in earliest times. Thrupp says: "It was customary when it was wished to retain legal testimony of any ceremony, to have it witnessed by children, who then and there were flogged with unusual severity; which it was sup-posed would give additional weight to any evidence of the proceedings . .

References to detailed modes of discipline are even harder to find in the Middle Ages. One thirteenth-century law brought child-beating into the public domain: "If one beats a child until it bleeds, then it will remember, but if one beats it to death, the law applies."(233) Most medieval descriptions of beating were quite severe, although St. Anselm, as in so many things, was far in advance of his time by telling an abbot to beat children gently, for "Are they not human? Are they not flesh and blood like you?"(234) But it is only in the Renaissance that advice to temper childhood beatings began in earnest, although even then it was generally accompanied by approval for beatings judiciously applied. As Bartholomew Batty said, parents must "keep the golden mean, which is to say they should not "strike and buffet their children about the face and head, and to lace upon them like malt sacks with cudgels, staves, fork or fire shovel," for then they might die of the blows. The correct way was to "hit him upon the sides. . . with the rod, he shall not die thereof."(235)

Some attempts were made in the seventeenth century to limit the beating of children, but it was the eighteenth century which saw the biggest decrease. The earliest lives I have found of children who may not have been beaten at all date from 1690 to 1750.(236) It was not until the nineteenth century that the old-fashioned whipping began to go out of style in most of Europe and America, continuing longest in Germany, where 80% of German parents still admit to beating their children, a full 35% with canes.(237)

As beatings began to decrease, substitutes had to be found. For instance, shutting children up in the dark became quite popular in the

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eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Children were put in "dark closets, where they were sometimes forgotten for hours." One mother shut her 3-year-old boy up in a drawer. Another house was "a sort of little Bastille, in every closet of which was to be found a culprit - some were sobbing and repeating verbs, others eating their bread and water . . . " Children were sometimes left locked in rooms for days. One 5-year-old French boy, in looking at a new apartment with his mother, told her, "Oh no, mama, . . . it's impossible; there's no dark closet! Where could you put me when I'm naughty."(238)

The history of sex in childhood presents even more difficulty than usual in getting at the facts, for added to the reticence and repression of our sources is the unavailability of most of the books, manuscripts, and artifacts which form the basis for our research. Victorian attitudes towards sex still reign supreme among most librarians, and the bulk of works which relate to sex in history remain under lock and key in library storerooms and museum basements all over Europe, unavailable even to the historian. Even so, there is evidence enough in the sources so far available to us to indicate that the sexual abuse of children was far more common in the past than today, and that the severe punishment of children for their sexual desires in the last two hundred years was the product of a late psychogenic stage, in which the adult used the child to restrain, rather than act out, his own sexual fantasies. In sexual abuse, as in physical abuse, the child was only an incidental victim, a measure of the part it played in the defense system of the adult.

The child in antiquity lived his earliest years in an atmosphere of sexual abuse. Growing up in Greece and Rome often included being used sexually by older men. The exact form and frequency of the abuse


Illustration 14 - Greek Man Playing With Boy's Penis.

 

FOUNDATIONS OF
PSYCHOHISTORY
TABLE OF CONTENTS
on to page 51 - 64

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


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