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varied by area and date. In Crete and Boeotia, pederastic marriages and honeymoons were common. Abuse was less frequent among aristocratic boys in Rome, but sexual use of children was everywhere evident in some form.(239) Boy brothels flourished in every city, and one could even contract for the use of a rent-a-boy service in Athens. Even where homosexuality with free boys was discouraged by law, men kept slave boys to abuse, so that even free-born children saw their fathers sleeping with boys. Children were sometimes sold into concubinage; Musonius Rufus wondered whether such a boy would be justified in resisting being abused: "I knew a father so depraved that, having a son conspicuous for youthful beauty, he sold him into a life of shame. If, now, that lad who was sold and sent into such a life by his father had refused and would not go, should we say that he was disobedient ..."(24O) Aristotle's main objection to Plato's idea that children should be held in common was that when men had sex with boys they wouldn't know if they were their own sons, which Aristotle says would be "most unseemly."(241) Plutarch said the reason why freeborn Roman boys wore a gold ball around their necks when they were very young was so men could tell which boys it was not proper to use sexually when they found a group in the nude.(242)

Plutarch's statement was only one among many which indicate that the sexual abuse of boys was not limited to those over 11 or 12 years of age, as most scholars assume. Sexual abuse by pedagogues and teachers of smaller children may have been common throughout antiquity. Although all sorts of laws were passed to try to limit sexual attacks on school children by adults, the long heavy sticks carried by pedagogues and teachers were often used to threaten them. Quintillian, after many years of teaching in Rome, warned parents against the frequency of sexual abuse by teachers, and made this the basis of his disapproval of beating in schools:

When children are beaten, pain or fear frequently have results of which it is not pleasant to speak and which are likely to be a source of shame, a shame which unnerves and depresses the mind and leads the child to shun and loathe the light. Further, if inadequate care is taken in the choices of respectable governors and instructors, I blush to mention the shameful abuse which scoundrels sometimes make of their right to administer corporal punishment or the opportunity not infrequently offered to others by the fear thus caused in the victims. I will not linger on this subject; it is more than enough if I have made my meaning clear.(243)

Aesehines quotes some of the Athenian laws which attempted to limit sexual attacks on schoolchildren:

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. . . consider the case of the teachers . . it is plain that the law-giver distrusts them . . . He forbids the teacher to open the school-room, or the gymnastics trainer the wrestling school, before sunrise, and he commands them to close the doors before sunset; for he is exceeding suspicious of their being alone with a boy, or in the dark with him.(244)

Aeschines, when prosecuting Timarchus for having hired himself out as a boy prostitute, put several men on the stand who admitted having paid to sodomize Timarchus. Aeschines admitted that many, including himself, were used sexually when they were children, but not for pay, which would have made it illegal. (245)

The evidence from literature and art confirms this picture of the sexual abuse of smaller children. Petronius loves depicting adults feeling the "immature little tool" of boys, and his description of the rape of a seven-year-old girl, with women clapping in a long line around the bed, suggests that women were not exempt from playing a role in the process.(246) Aristotle said homosexuality often becomes habitual in "those who are abused from childhood." It has been assumed that the small nude children seen on vases waiting on adults in erotic scenes are servants, but in view of the usual role of noble children as waiters, we

Illustration 15 - Children Waiting on Adults During Orgy.
Greek drawing of symposium feast.

should consider the possibility that they may be children of the house. For, as Quintillian said about noble Roman children: "We rejoice if they say something over-free, and words which we should not tolerate from the lips even of an Alexandrian page are greeted with laughter and a kiss . . . they hear us use such words, they see our mistresses and

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minions; every dinner party is loud with foul songs, and things are presented to their eyes of which we should blush to speak. "(247)

Even the Jews, who tried to stamp out adult homosexuality with severe punishments, were more lenient in the case of young boys. Despite Moses's injunction against corrupting children, the penalty for sodomy with children over 9 years of age was death by stoning, but copulation with younger children was not considered a sexual act, and was punishable only by a whipping, "as a matter of public discipline."(248)

It must be remembered that widespread sexual abuse of children can only occur with at least the unconscious complicity of the child's parents. Children in the past were under the fullest control of their parents, who had to agree to give them over to their abusers. Plutarch muses on how important this decision was for fathers:

I am loathe to introduce the subject, loathe too to turn away from it . . . whether we should permit the suitors of our boys to associate with them and pass their time with them, or whether the opposite policy of excluding them and shooing them away from intimacy with our boys is correct. Whenever I look at blunt-spoken fathers of the austere and astringent type who regard intimacy with lovers as an intolerable outrage upon their sons, I am circumspect about showing myself a sponsor and advocate of the practice. [Yet Plato] declares that men who have proven their worth should be permitted to caress any fair lad they please. Lovers who lust only for physical beauty, then, it is right to drive away; but free access should be granted to lovers of the soul.(249)

Like the adults we have previously seen around little Louis XIII, the Greeks and Romans couldn't keep their hands off children. I have only turned up one piece of evidence that this practice extended, like Louis's abuse, back into infancy. Suetonius condemned Tiberius because he "taught children of the most tender years, whom he called his little fishes, to play between his legs while he was in his bath. Those which had not yet been weaned, but were strong and hearty, he set at fellatio." Suetonius may or may not have made up the story, yet he obviously had reason to think his readers would believe him. So, apparently, did Tacitus, who told the same story.(250)

The favorite sexual use of children, however, was not fellatio, but anal intercourse. Martial said one should, while buggering a boy, "refrain from stirring the groin with poking hand . . . Nature has separated the male: one part has been produced for girls, one for men. Use your own part." This, he said, was because the masturbating of boys would "hasten manhood," an observation Aristotle made some time before him. Whenever a pre-pubertal boy was shown being used sexually on erotic vases, the penis was never shown erect.(251) For men of antiquity

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were not really homosexuals as we know them today, but a much lower psychic mode, which I think should be termed "ambisexual" (they themselves used the term "ambidextrous"). While the homosexual runs to men as a retreat from women, as a defense against the oedipal conflict, the ambisexual has never really reached the oedipal level, and uses boys and women almost without distinction.(252) In fact, as psychoanalyst Joan McDougall observes, the main purpose of this kind of perversion is to demonstrate that "there is no difference between the sexes." She says that it is an attempt to control childhood sexual traumata by reversal, with the adult now putting another child in the helpless position, and also an attempt to handle castration anxiety by proving that "castration does not hurt and in fact is the very condition of erotic arousal."(253) This well describes the man of antiquity. Intercourse with castrated children was often spoken of as being especially arousing, castrated boys were favorite "voluptates" in imperial Rome, and infants were castrated "in the cradle" to be used in brothels by men who liked buggering young castrated boys. When Domitian passed a law prohibit-ing castration of infants for brothels,Martial praised him: "Boys loved thee before . . . but now infants, too, love thee, Caesar."(254) Paulus Aegineta described the standard method used in castrating small boys:

Since we are sometimes compelled against our will by persons of high rank to perform the operation . . . by compression [it] is thus performed; children, still of a tender age, are placed in a vessel of hot water, and then when the parts are softened in the bath, the testicles are to be squeezed with the fingers until they disappear.

The alternative, he said, was to put them on a bench and cut their testicles out. Many doctors in antiquity mentioned the operation, and Juvenal said they were often called upon to perform it.(255)

Signs of castration surrounded the child in antiquity. In every field and garden he saw a Priapus, with a large erect penis and a sickle, which was supposed to symbolize castration. His pedagogue and his teacher might be castrated, castrated prisoners were everywhere, and his parents' servants would often be castrated. St. Jerome wrote that some people had wondered whether letting young girls bathe with eunuchs was a wise practice. And although Constantine passed a law against castrators, the practice grew so rapidly under his successors that soon even noble parents mutilated their sons to further their political advancement. Boys were also castrated as a "cure" for various diseases and Ambroise Pard complained how many unscrupulous "Gelders," greedy to get children's testicles for magical purposes, persuaded parents to let them castrate their children.(256)

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Christianity introduced a new concept into the discussion - - childhood innocence. As Clement of Alexandria said, when Christ advised people to "become as little children" in order to enter into Heaven, one should not foolishly mistake his meaning. We are not little ones in the. sense that we roll on the floor or crawl on the ground as snakes do." What Christ means was that people should become as "uncontaminated" as children, pure, without sexual knowledge.(257) Christians throughout the Middle Ages began to stress the idea that children were totally innocent of all notions of pleasure and pain. A child "has not tasted sensual pleasures, and has no conception of the impulses of manhood . . . one becomes as a child in respect of anger; and is as the child in relation to his grief, so that sometimes he laughs and plays at the very time that his father or mother or brother is dead . . ."(258) Unfortunately, the idea that children are innocent and cannot be corrupted is a common defense by child molesters against admitting that their abuse is harming the child, so the medieval fiction that the child is innocent only makes our sources less revealing, and proves nothing about what really went on. Abbot Guibert of Nogent said children were blessed to be without sexual thoughts or capacities; one wonders what he then was referring to when he confessed to "the wickedness I did in childhood . . . "(259) Mostly, servants are blamed for abusing children; even a washerwoman could "work wickedness." Servants often "show lewd tricks . . . in the presence of children [and] corrupt the chief parts of infants." Nurses should not be young girls, "for many such have aroused the fire of passion prematurely as true accounts relate and, I venture to say, experience proves."(260)

Giovanni Dominici, writing in 1405, tried to set some limits to the convenient "innocence" of childhood; he said children after the age of three years shouldn't be allowed to see nude adults. For in a child "granted that there will not take place any thought or natural movement before the age of five, yet, without precaution, growing up in such acts he becomes accustomed to that act of which later he is not ashamed . . ." That parents themselves are often doing the molesting can be seen in the language he used:

He should sleep clothed with a night shirt reaching below the knee, taking care as much as possible that he may not remain uncovered. Let not the mother nor the father, much less any other person, touch him. Not to be tedious in writing so fully of this, I simply mention the history of the ancients who made full use of this doctrine to bring up children well, not slaves of the flesh.(261)

That some change in the sexual use of children was going on in the Renaissance can be seen not only in the rising number of moralists who

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warned against it (Jean Gerson, like Louis XIII's nurse, said it was the child's duty to prevent others from molesting him), but also in the art of the time. Not only were Renaissance paintings full of nude putti, or cupids taking off blindfolds in front of nude women, but in addition real children were shown more and more often chucking the chin of the mother, or slinging one of their legs over hers, both conventional iconographic signs for sexual love, and the mother was often painted with her hand very near the genital area of the child.(262)

The campaign against the sexual use of children continued through the seventeenth century, but in the eighteenth century it took an entirely new twist: punishing the little boy or girl for touching its own genitals. That this, like early toilet-training, was a late psychogenic stage is suggested by the fact that prohibitions against childhood masturbation are found in none of the primitive societies surveyed by Whiting and Child.(263) The attitude of most people toward childhood masturbation prior to the eighteenth century can be seen in Fallopius's counsel for parents to "be zealous in infancy to enlarge the penis of the boy."(264)

Illustration 16 - Christ's Grandmother Playing
With His Penis. As Hans Baldung Grien's 1511 picture
of Anna selbdritt shows, grandmothers were expected
to masturbate their grandchildren.

Although masturbation in adults was a minor sin, medieval penitentials rarely extended the prohibition to childhood; adult homosexuality, not masturbation, was the main obsession of premodern sexual regulation.

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As late as the fifteenth century Gerson complains how adults tell him they never heard that masturbation was sinful, and he instructs confessors to ask adults directly: "Friend, do you touch or do you rub your rod as children have the habit of doing?"(265)

But it was not until the beginning of the eighteenth century, as a climax of the effort to bring child abuse under control, that parents began severely punishing their children for masturbation, and doctors began to spread the myth that it would cause insanity, epilepsy, blindness, and death. By the nineteenth century, this campaign reached an unbelievable frenzy. Doctors and parents sometimes appeared before the child armed with knives and scissors, threatening to cut off the child's genitals; circumcision, clitoridectomy, and infibulation were sometimes used as punishment; and all sorts of restraint devices, including plaster casts and cages with spikes, were prescribed. Circumcision became especially widespread; as one American child psychologist put it, when a child of two rubs his nose and can't be still for a moment,

Illustration 17 - Metal Anti-Masturbation Devices.
French (G. Jalade-Lafond, 1818) and German (W Scheinlein, 1831.)

only circumcision works. Another doctor, whose book was the bible of many an American nineteenth-century home, recommended that little boys be closely watched for signs of masturbation, and brought in to

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invariably cured them. Spitz's graphs on different advice given for masturbation, based on 559 volumes surveyed, show a peak in surgical intervention in 1850-1879,

Illustration 18 - Penis-Rings. Put on boys at
night in bed to prevent erections while sleeping.

and in restraint devices in 1880-1904. By 1925, these methods had almost completely died out, after two centuries of brutal and totally un-necessary assault on children's genitals.(266)

Meanwhile, sexual use of children after the eighteenth century was far more widespread among servants and other adults and adolescents than among parents, although when one reads of the number of parents who continued to let their children sleep with servants after previous servants had been found abusing them sexually, it is obvious that the conditions for child abuse still remained within the control of the parents. Cardinal Bernis, remembering being sexually molested as a child, warned parents that "nothing is so dangerous for morals and perhaps for health as to leave children too long under the care of chambermaids, or even of young ladies brought up in the chateaux. I will add that the best among them are not always the least dangerous. They dare with a child that which they would be ashamed to risk with a young man."(267) A German doctor said nursemaids and servants carried out "all sorts of sexual acts" on children "for fun." Even Freud said he was seduced by his nurse when he was two, and Ferenczj and other analysts since his time have thought unwise Freud's decision in 1897 to consider most reports by patients of early sexual seductions as only fantasy. As psycho-analyst Robert Fleiss puts it, "No one is ever made sick by his fantasies," and a large number of patients in analysis even today report using children sexually although only Fleiss builds this fact into his psycho-analytic theory. When one learns that as late as I 900 there were still people who believed venereal disease could be cured "by means of sexual intercourse with children," one begins to recognize the dimensions of the problem more fully.(268)

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It goes without saying that the effects on the child in the past of such severe physical and sexual abuse as I have described were immense. I would here like to indicate only two effects on the growing child, one psychological and one physical. The first is the enormous number of nightmares and hallucinations by children which I have found in the sources. Although written records by adults which indicate anything at all about a child's emotional life are rare at best, whenever discovered they usually reveal recurring nightmares and even outright hallucinations. Since antiquity, pediatric literature regularly had sections on how to cure children's "terrible dreams," and children were sometimes beaten for having nightmares. Children lay awake nights terrorized by imaginary ghosts, demons, "a witch on the pillow," "a large black dog under the bed," or "a crooked finger crawling across the room".(269) In addition, the history of witchcraft in the West is filled with reports of children's convulsive fits, loss of hearing or speech, loss of memory, hallucination of devils, confession of intercourse with devils, and accusations of

Illustration 19 - Girl Being Exorcised.
The frequent hysterical fits of children
could often be cured by exorcising the
Devil out of them, as in this 1520 painting
by Grunewald.

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witchcraft against adults, including their parents. And finally, even further back in the Middle Ages, we encounter children's dancing mania, children's crusades and child-pilgrimages, subjects which are simply too vast to discuss here.270

A final point I wish only to touch upon is the possibility that children in the past were actually retarded physically as a result of their poor care. Although swaddling by itself usually does not affect the physical development of primitive children, the combination of tight swaddling, neglect, and general abuse of children in the past seemed often to have produced what we would now regard as retarded children. One index of this retardation is that while most children today begin to walk by 10-12 months, children in the past generally walked later. The ages of first walking in Table 2 are all those I have found in the sources so far.

PERIODIZATION OF MODES OF PARENT-CHILD RELATIONS

Since some people still kill, beat, and sexually abuse children, any at-tempt to periodize modes of child rearing must first admit that psychogenic evolution proceeds at different rates in different family lines, and

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that many parents appear to be "stuck" in earlier historical modes. There are also class and area differences which are important, especially since modern times, when the upper classes stopped sending their infants to wet-nurses and began bringing them up themselves. The periodization below should be thought of as a designation of the modes of parent-child relations which were exhibited by the psychogenically most advanced part of the population in the most advanced countries, and the dates given are the first in which I found examples of that mode in the sources. The series of six modes represents a continuous sequence of closer approaches between parent and child as generation after generation of parents slowly overcame their anxieties and began to develop the capacity to identify and satisfy the needs of their children. I also believe the series provides a meaningful taxology of contemporary child-rearing modes.

1. Infanticidal Mode (Antiquity to Fourth Century AD.): The image of Medea hovers over childhood in antiquity, for myth here only reflects reality. Some facts are more important than others, and when parents routinely resolved their anxieties about taking care of children by killing them, it affected the surviving children profoundly. For those who were allowed to grow up, the projective reaction was paramount, and the concreteness of reversal was evident in the widespread sodomizing of the child.

2. Abandoning Mode (Fourth to Thirteenth Century A.D.): Once parents began to accept the child as having a soul, the only way they could escape the dangers of their own projections was by abandonment, whether to the wet nurse, to the monastery or nunnery, to foster families, to the homes of other nobles as servants or hostages, or by severe emotional abandonment at home. The symbol of this mode might be Griselda, who so willingly abandoned her children to prove her love for

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her husband. Or perhaps it would be any of those pictures so popular up to the thirteenth century of a rigid Mary stiffly holding the infant Jesus. Projection continued to be massive, since the child was still full of evil and needed always to be beaten, but as the reduction in child sodomizmg shows, reversal diminished considerably

3. Ambivalent Mode (Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries): Because the child, when it was allowed to enter into the parents' emotional life, was still a container for dangerous projections, it was their task to mold it into shape. From Dominici to Locke there was no image more popular than that of the physical molding of children, who were seen as soft wax, plaster, or clay to be beaten into shape. Enormous ambivalence marks this mode. The beginning of the period is approximately the fourteenth century, which shows an increase in the number of child instruction manuals, the expansion of the cults of Mary and the infant Jesus, and the proliferation in art of the "close-mother image."

4. Intrusive Mode (Eighteenth Century): A tremendous reduction in projection and the virtual disappearance of reversal was the accomplishment of the great transition for parent-child relations which appeared in the eighteenth century. The child was no longer so full of dangerous projections, and rather than just examine its insides with an enema, the parents approached even closer and attempted to conquer its mind, in order to control its insides, its anger, its needs, its masturbation, its very will. The child raised by intrusive parents was nursed by the mother, not swaddled, not given regular enemas, toilet trained early, prayed with but not played with, hit but not regularly whipped, punished for masturbation, and made to obey promptly with threats and guilt as often as with other methods of punishment. The child was so much less threatening that true empathy was possible, and pediatrics was born, which along with the general improvement in level of care by parents reduced infant mortality and provided the basis for the demographic transition of the eighteenth century.

5. Socializing Mode (Nineteenth to Mid-twentieth Centuries): As projections continued to diminish, the raising of a child became less a process of conquering its will than of training it, guiding it into proper paths, teaching it to conform, socializing it. The socializing mode is still thought of by most people as the only model within which discussion of child care can proceed, and it has been the source of all twentieth-century psychological models, from Freud's "channeling of impulses" to Skinner's behaviorism. It is most particularly the model of sociological functionalism. Also, in the nineteenth century, the father for the first time begins to take more than an occasional interest in the child, training it, and sometimes even relieving the mother of child-care chores.

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6. Helping Mode (Begins Mid-twentieth Century): The helping mode involves the proposition that the child knows better than the parent what it needs at each stage of its life, and fully involves both parents in the child's life as they work to empathize with and fulfill its expanding and particular needs. There is no attempt at all to discipline or form "habits." Children are neither struck nor scolded, and are apologized to if yelled at under stress. The helping mode involves an enormous amount of time, energy, and discussion on the part of both parents, especially in the first six years, for helping a young child reach its daily goals means continually responding to it, playing with it, tolerating its regressions, being its servant rather than the other way around, interpreting its emotional conflicts, and providing the objects specific to its evolving interests. Few parents have yet consistently attempted this kind of child care. From the books which describe children brought up according to the helping mode,(272) it is evident that it results in a child who is gentle, sincere, never depressed, never imitative or group-oriented, strong-willed, and unintimidated by authority.

PSYCHOGENIC THEORY; A NEW PARADIGM FOR HISTORY

Psychogenic theory can, I think, provide a genuinely new paradigm for the study of history.(273) It reverses the usual "mind as tabula rasa," and instead considers the "world as tabula rasa," with each generation born into a world of meaningless objects which are invested with mean-ing only if the child receives a certain kind of care.(274) As soon as the mode of care changes for enough children, all the books and artifacts in the world are brushed aside as irrelevant to the purposes of the new generation, and society begins to move in unpredictable directions. How historical change is connected with changing child-care modes we have yet to spell out.

If the measure of a theory's vitality is its ability to generate interesting problems, childhood history and psychogenic theory should have an exciting future. There is still a lot to learn about what growing up in the past was really like. One of our first tasks will be to investigate why childhood evolution proceeds at different rates in different countries and different class and family lines. Yet we already know enough to be able for the first time to answer some major questions on value and behavior change in Western history. First to benefit from the theory will be the history of witchcraft, magic, religious movements, and other irrational mass phenomena. Beyond this) psychogenic theory should eventually contribute to our understanding of why social organization, political form, and technology change in specific times and directions and not in others. Perhaps the addition of the childhood parameter to his-

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tory may even end the historian's century-long Durkheimian flight from psychology, and encourage us to resume the task of constructing a scientific history of human nature which was envisioned so long ago by John Stuart Mill as a "theory of the causes which determine the type of character belonging to a people or to an age. "(275)

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

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