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Book Reviews
The Journal of Psychohistory V. 26, N. 3, Winter 1999
For the better part of my adult life, I have been a child welfare worker dealing with emotionally disturbed, often sexually and physically abused, teenagers. I routinely deal with the emotional sequelae of abuse; thus, I see first hand, in my efforts to help them, how traumatic it can often be for children and what the after effects can do to them emotionally. In my work, I routinely experience tragedy, pain, and horror that sometimes defies imagination, but I also occasionally come across bravery that speaks to the best in the human spirit. Once I had a case of two sisters who had, for many years, been sexually abused by an older male relative. When he would come looking for the younger one, the older sister would, at times, be able to hide her in a suitcase and say to him - "Take me." I have since been told that such protectiveness among abused siblings is not that uncommon. Maybe so, but think about what it takes for someone age six or seven to do that, little sister or not....
So when I recently came across Erotic Innocence in a book store, it aroused my interest and I bought it. When I found that Kincaid's argument had its genesis in Child Loving I went out and got that as well. His subject is pedophilia and why our culture seems to invest so much interest in it. After devoting two big books to finding answers to this legitimate question, we are left by the author with a few good ideas, a major amount of confusion about the issues involved, and no really convincing answers or solutions.
Kincaid never really defines pedophilia or its dynamics, partially because, as he correctly notes, there is a lot of confusion about what the term means. While this serves to obscure the issues for apologists, I found a definition, with more clarity than he offers, in a ten minute random search of material in my own personal library. Pedophilia may be defined as "consensual intergenerational sexual relationships" ("Statement of Purpose," p. 2). Dynamics are fairly clear - "the adult identifies himself with the child. The eroticism is derived from the knowledge [or fantasy] that the child is sexually innocent, and is being stimulated. It represents for the adult a psychological return to the sex life of his childhood. Another factor is the inferiority which these sexual deviates harbor in relation to the opposite sex. They feel less inferior in their sexual intimacies with children, as less is expected of them" (London and Capiro, p. 606). Kincaid tells us essentially the same thing in 750 pages. Then there is the question of consent. Consider this, which Kincaid would essentially agree with. "The child sexual abuse lobby doesn't see the child as sexual at all. By denying the child's sexuality they construct an image which is in itself, I think, abusive, namely that children have no sexual or sensual needs. And certainly they cannot make any decisions about their erotic lives. Yes, the child sexual abuse lobby abuses children by denying them any kind of sexuality, and in the process can cause them a lot of suffering" ("Interview: Kenneth Plummer," pp. 5-6). Just think about this a bit, before you read further....
Kincaid does have one good, even brilliant idea that manages to stay afloat in his sea of otherwise inconsistent, confusing verbiage - "the story." Beyond whatever truth/reality abuse may have, he holds that our culture is preoccupied with ever increasing lurid "stories" about its epidemic proportions, how our children are ever in danger from wily child molesters, how our culture is under siege from legions of monster/predators waiting to attack innocent prey, especially via the internet. He notes "that these stories are doing something for us: we wouldn't be telling this tale of the exploitation of the child's body if we did not wish to have it told - these stories - keep the subject hot so we can disown it while welcoming it in the backdoor. These stories are not told simply to solve a problem but - to keep it alive and before us. If the stories we tell about child molesting were designed to enlighten us or to attack the problem - they would extinguish themselves." But of course this never happens. The story seems a mystery without solution or ending. It is a gothic story "of monsters and purity, sunshine and darkness, of being chased by the beast." He spends much of Erotic Innocence detailing how, in his view, our culture revels in lurid, gothic monster stories of innocent children being defiled in every way imaginable by hopelessly evil molesters so far beyond the pale that they deserve no pity or rights, except perhaps to be murdered in prison by their fellow convicts. "We reject this monstrous activity with such automatic indignation that the indignation comes to be seen almost like pleasure."
From his discussion, even though he never explicitly says it, it seemed clear to me that "the story" seeks to hide forbidden feelings, the idea that we may all have hidden within our psyches elements of closet pedophilia. In Child Loving I noted one broader reference about what the story seeks to hide. "If all the problems can be reduced to perversion, personal illness, or evil - then larger issues can be ignored, issues like the perilous health of the family-as-institution, the pressure of large-scale economic and social realities, the stark failure of so many of us to provide to children and to one another not just love (which is clearly out of reach) but something more modest, perhaps what Thomas Hardy called "mere lovingkindness.'" Certainly something to think about.
I came to realize after awhile that what Kincaid was really talking about is the idea that what he calls "the story" is, in reality, what psychohistorians would call group fantasy. Any issue or event that evokes emotion or feeling in the minds of group members is bound to evoke some degree of group fantasy. This is true especially where intense feeling and emotion would be involved, such as with sexual abuse, pedophilia, and child molestation. Group fantasy allows us to project our hate and animosity onto the abuser, to make him a scapegoat, a poison container. It can allow us to project our own forbidden feelings onto these souls, so that we can vilify them without having to look too closely at ourselves. It allows us to confuse the reality of the event with our fantasies about it, so that we may seem more concerned than may actually be the case. Kincaid seems aware of this confusion, but seems to almost go out of his way to rub our noses in it rather than call attention to it and try to clearly discriminate between fantasy and what might be more real. He deserves praise for pointing out this problem (this is not as coincidental as it might appear; looking in his footnotes it is quite clear that he has read Lloyd deMause and many articles in The Journal of Psychohistory), but he deserves our condemnation for being taken in too much by the fantasy that he expended so much energy on trying to expose. For example, he goes on at some length about how the child is not really the innocent asexual being that we like to think. Pedophiles are, on the whole, not violent calculating predators. Sometimes kids want the sex just as much as they do. He also cites with relish the excesses that child protectors and law enforcement types can go to in their zeal to get the abuser and save the child, suggesting that these efforts may be more abusive than the original crime, if indeed one ever occurred.
Even though there may be elements of truth in these assertions, Kincaid does not get the point! Child molestation has a reality; it is not just the shared fantasy that we construct about it for purposes of denial, projection, scapegoating, disbelief or whatever. Real children are abused, tortured, sexually violated, hurt, rejected, traumatized every day, in ways often beyond human imagination. If Kincaid had been a child welfare worker instead of an English professor, I doubt he could have written the same books. Reality would have gotten too much in the way. Perhaps shared fantasies help make something like this more manageable for most of us by putting it into a realm of unreality. Even in his attempts at exposure, Kincaid does this. For me, his conclusions also raised the subversive and very disturbing question of whether the confusion between shared fantasy and actual reality is so great, so intense, that we can never know anything with any certainty. But, wait a minute! While there is a certain validity to the question, it also sounds suspiciously reminiscent of the tactics followed by perpetrators with their child victims to be sure they are not believed.
As I said, there is a reality. Children are our future; they deserve to be cherished, loved, nurtured and protected, if for no other reason than because if we fail them they will grow up and remember. There are adults who, for whatever reason, abuse children, sexually and physically. The more extreme and brutal this abuse is the more traumatic it is; but make no mistake about it, all abuse is traumatic to some degree. Adults are supposed to value and respect children. To say that it is OK to have sexual relations with a child because the child wants to is fallacious reasoning, because it ignores that the adult has a responsibility to the child to protect and not exploit it. If a child wanted to commit suicide would you give it a gun? Why does the sexual partner automatically have to be an adult? Sexual abusers, irrespective of whatever justification they may attempt to offer for their conduct, act in the service of their own gratification above all else. They usually know they are doing wrong, which is a major reason why they will go to elaborate lengths to intimidate the children into silence, usually by a combination of threats and mind games that can make the child doubt what is real and what he knows. The child pays the price with any number of emotional problems ranging from depression to multiple personality. The more extreme and traumatic the physical and/or sexual abuse, usually the more serious the problems in functioning. You would be very mistaken to assume that I am saying all survivors of traumatic sexual and/physical abuse are automatically to be pitied as hopeless emotional cripples. Many of the abused young people I have known and worked with are, despite the horrors they have endured, brave people who truly embody the best of the human spirit. But what a legacy they carry....
In Kincaid's narratives, despite occasional expressions of concern and compassion, there is an over-concern with the fantasy, or "the story" as he calls it. The real abused child, the real child who suffers at the hands of the molester (even if he "wished" it), the real child who carries the legacy of what was done to it by adults it trusted and who betrayed that trust, the real child is somewhere else, thus allowing "the story" to go on. The reader should have gotten better; the abused child certainly deserves better. In different ways James Kincaid has failed them both.
SOURCES
"Interview: Kenneth Plummer," Paidika: The Journal
of Paedophilia, 2 #2 (Autumn 1990), 2-10.
London, Louis B. and Capiro, Frank S., Sexual Deviations.
Washington, DC: Linacre Press, 1950.
"Statement of Purpose," Paidika: The Journal of
Paedophilia, 1 #1 (Summer 1987), 2-3.
One of the best aspects of this far ranging collection of essays is the engagement with cultural diversity, shorn of the usual ideological trappings, hidden agendas and reflexive splitting into oppressor/victim, routinely produced by cultural studies.
It seems clear that the migratory impulse has been a factor in human history from time immemorial. The original Diaspora out-of-Africa, doubtless driven by changing climate and food supplies, led to further dispersions, racial mutations, and to the rise of distinct cultures. Migrations continue to thrive, only now they are fueled by complex mixtures of external forces and internal motives, culminating not in the creation of new cultures but in countless, often unforeseen blendings of existing ones. In one way or another, everyone is an immigrant or somehow tied into the process. The contributors to the volume seek to enhance our in-depth understanding of this complex continuing process on cultural, personal, and emotional levels.
Perhaps someday the editors will share the secrets of how they were able over such a wide spectrum to keep their contributors focused, succinct, and yet highly original. We can all be grateful for this rich tapestry of immigrant experiences to which so many skillful hands have contributed. This book is a work of seminal importance, to be read, cherished, reread, and confidently recommended.
Born of educated German parents before World War II, Peter Petschauer describes being boarded-out for health and safety reason during the war in the Tyrolean village of Afers, an experience akin in many ways to living in the 19th century. In this rural, somewhat matriarchal environment he underwent a degree of reparenting. Separated from his parents who were imprisoned for a time after the war, he attended monastery schools, and eventually came to New Jersey to live with a relative while struggling through the history program at NYU. He married a German women and reconnected with his parents. Eventually he settled in North Carolina to teach history, divorced, and married an American Southerner.
Nobuko Yoshizawa Meadows, a Japanese-American psychoanalyst, helps us via her story to more clearly conceptualize the changes that Peter went through. She offers a three-phase description of the process: an "initial immersion in the new culture" she calls "Survival of Identity;" followed by a straddling, back-and-forth, conflictual process called "Bicultural Identity;" culminating in an integration of both cultures called "Transcultural Identity." Although the person who chooses to migrate may be less susceptible to trauma than the refugee, "all immigrants come with various conflicts." They "share the trauma of separation and loss and its attendant psychological consequences such as depression, anxiety, and disorientation of the self."
Danielle Knafo and Ariella Yaari examine issues among Israelis who have emigrated to America. They define four phases: Planning, Adjustment, Mourning, Acceptance/Assimilation. Mourning, which mediates the idealization of the past as well as moderating the magical appeal of the adopted culture, is crucial for working through the experience of loss. Their final phase involves retention of "firmly grounded aspects of the original identity," reducing ambivalence, healing, and assimilating elements of both cultures into a newly integrated whole. As Paul Elovitz notes in his Introduction, immigration is not just adjustment, it is an adaptation - a re-inventing of the self.
Olga Marlin, who came from Prague, completed her psychoanalytic training in New York, and recently went back to her homeland. She expands on fantasies felt by many immigrants about a "land of milk and honey, of love and peace, and of freedom and happiness," a lost paradise projected from idyllic childhood fantasy onto a magically gratifying new land. Her odyssey echoes major themes of this study.
For Indian immigrants, Bindignavle Ramanujam observes a three-stage process of euphoria, followed by disenchantment, and - insofar as issues are resolved - a morre objective position of equanimity. Alan Roland examines the miscues and dissonances these immigrants' more inclusive "we-self" may encounter in America, where intimacy is often subordinated to autonomy and self-advancement.
John McInerney is acutely sensitized to the distinctive inner conflicts of Irish immigrants. Ones leaving the original community - cohesive but often suffocatingly insular - is felt by many Irish to be a self-inflicted punishment, a self-banishment. Somewhat analogous to the tightly communal cohesion of Ireland is the Zionism of Israel: to join the community is to ascend; to leave is to descend. Thus many Israelis in America cannot come to terms with their separation from the "motherland who cannot afford to lose her offspring," and subsist for years "out of their suitcase" abroad.
"I became a historian to discover my family secrets," writes Paul Elovitz. He may also want to avoid discovering such secrets, since history, along with all intellectual pursuits, can serve as displacement, sublimation, and compromise formation. He seems to be suggesting that psychohistory aims to uncover history's secrets and, in the process, our own. His compelling narrative shows how the immigrant baggage of parents can evolve into the child's burdens, the parents' story his and his story theirs.
Though frequently evoked in positive terms, the ideal of assimilation has had ominous significance for Jews, who have historically faced dilemmas of assimilation or forced exile, of conversion or death. Thus, as Roberta Ann Shechter writes, a once nomadic people can be marginalized into permanent immigrants by anti-Semitism. Even among other immigrant groups, Jews have been scapegoated; thus the price for preservation of ethnic identity may be purchased with the currency of masochism. But a "tolerance for pain" can have a positive side, because the seductive appeal to assimilate may be based on flight from a beleaguered family.
Charlotte Kahn contributes two essays. The first, about cross-cultural marriages, concludes that such unions "might be viewed as the building blocks of a multicultural society." Her second piece on the reunification of Germany is more engaging. She convincingly shows how reunification turned East Germans into anxious, ambivalent immigrants without their having to move.
The overall effect of the material in the book is dual: the importance of factoring in culture sub species immigration is an invaluable resource for understanding individual personality; yet, at the same time, a psychologically-attuned approach reveals how individuals use the old and new cultures' uniquely personal ways to represent, defend against, and occasionally to resolve inner conflicts.
I read Victor's powerful book in lovely Umbria. It is in two parts: the first deals with Hitler's early development while the second examines his rise to power and the war years. Victor sensibly asserts that there has been a tendency among scholars not to try and understand Hitler's early life as it could lead to a sympathetic reading. Not so, for me. Umbria's rustic atmosphere was not enough to counteract a very personal reaction of disgust and revulsion when considering Hitler's upbringing. To preserve my equilibrium, I interspersed other reading with Victor, including some chapters from the touching book, Tuesdays with Morrie.
Hitler was an abused child. His father, Alois, beat his son brutally and often, for reasons never really clear. Indiscriminate violence was an important organizing factor in Hitler's emotional development, and definitely played a role in his later political expressions. There can be no sympathy for Hitler in this context because the reader knows what is to follow. In contrast to his father, Hitler was very close to his mother, Klara, reportedly being her favorite. One might think Hitler capable of some degree of compassion; Victor notes only one incident. Klara had breast cancer and was treated well by a Jewish doctor named Bloch. In appreciation, when Hitler ordered the annihilation of all Jewish doctors, he spared Dr. Bloch. So much for mother love.
The idea that Hitler was so consumed with wanting to purify the German blood that this actually took precedence over trying to win the war is a key thesis developed by Victor. He made many battle decisions which only prolonged the war. Victor holds that Hitler needed the war to pursue his major aim - the Holocaust. He often chose battles of destruction rather than considering peaceful solutions. Hitler was filled with self-hatred, resulting in part from his father's many beatings. He also thought, rightly or wrongly, that his paternal grandfather had Jewish blood, which was experienced as impure and defiling. Such beliefs certainly contributed to his paranoid delusions regarding the creation of a master race. Later, Hitler attempted to erase all records of his past and create his own "family romance." Not only Hitler, but Eichmann, Goebbels, Himmler, and other high ranking Nazis, all thought as children that they had Jewish ancestry. This was an expression of inferiority/self-hatred and lent support to their involvement in the Holocaust. The Aryan was tall, blond and Nordic, whereas many of the Nazi leaders, including Hitler, were short and dark like stereotypical Jews.
Victor documents the struggles of Hitler in late adolescence. At one point he was homeless, a beggar, a reject from art school, a lost soul. It is not hard to think "what if." My friend George Chajet, a last minute escapee from the Nazis, mentioned that he sometimes fantasized that Hitler was a better artist and therefore accepted by the Vienna Academy of Arts. What if!
The author might have done more with Hitler's reported recurrent nightmare "in which a Jew menaced a women and Adolph failed to intervene, feeling humiliated." Victor describes the dream in the context of young Hitler seeing his father beat his mother and feeling unable to help her. This makes good sense, but surely there are further dynamics involved. In the dream the woman is hurt. Hitler's idealization of his mother and several other women in later years might mask an underlying hatred and desire to hurt and humiliate them. Victor offers numerous examples of laws enacted that debased and humiliated Germany's young, single, non-Jewish females. I suspect that Hitler's identifications are within this recurrent dream; he is simultaneously the impotent boy, the masochistic mother, and the brute father.
Victor employs a psychoanalytic approach to the understanding of Hitler's life and its consequences for so much of the world. The book is well written and well documented. It is a truly worthwhile psychohistorical document. Just do not read it on your next vacation.
Robert Waite's earlier book, The Psychopathic God: Adolph Hitler, was an excellent psychobiographical study. In this book, he compares Hitler and Kaiser Wilhelm and finds a striking number of similarities between the two men.
Though Hitler rose to power at the head of a mass movement and the Kaiser inherited his throne, the two men were alike in their pathological egotism and belief that Germany existed for their own aggrandizement. Both men considered themselves incapable of change. As adults they clung to playing childish games, e.g. the Kaiser enjoyed playing tag on his private yacht, and Hitler liked riding through Berlin yelling "Beaver" every time he saw a man with a beard. Both were fierce racists and anti-Semites. They enjoyed humiliating others, and spent extensive time traveling in order to avoid work. Both dragged Germany into destructive World Wars for which they were quick to blame others.
Waite reminds us that Hitler's fear that his father may have been part Jewish probably contributed to his anti-Semitism. Likewise the Anglophobic Kaiser had an English mother, with whom he had a poor relationship. She was a believer in the pedagogical doctrines of Daniel Moritz Schreber, designer of sadistic devices to improve children's posture and father of Paul Schreber, the chief inspiration for Freud's theory of paranoia.
Waite is aware of the limitations of psychobiography, but the use of two subjects allows Kaiser and FŸhrer to shed light on recent German history in general. Waite concludes that German history displays much continuity. The paranoid chauvinism of the Nazi era had strong roots in the Hohenzollern period. It was Weimar democracy rather than Nazi tyranny which was the aberration.
Though this book has many strengths, it is too speculative about Hitler's relationship with his long suffering mother. Did she, as Waite thinks, do something terrible to her son that aroused his intense, but concealed hate? Or did the hate stem from identification with his brutal, abusive father, who regularly beat his wife, Adolph, the dog, and everyone else in sight?
Waite also speculates that Hitler's niece, Geli Raubal, committed suicide as did several other women in his life. But looking at Raubal's "suicide" note raises doubts about this. It seems more plausible that Hitler might have had her murdered so that she would not talk about his coprophilia.
Waite has given us a thoroughly researched, intellectually stimulating account of two men who managed to inflict on the world the sufferings they experienced as children. Kaiser and FŸhrer represents an original and fruitful approach to psychobiography and psychohistory. At the same time, it shows that even at this late date, there are still many questions about Adolph Hitler that have yet to be answered.
I must start my review of Mrs. Loffl-Haag's book with a preliminary remark about its title. The History of Childhood, edited by Lloyd deMause, has the German title Hšrt ihr die Kinder weinen, which means: Do you hear the children weeping? Whoever invented the title of Mrs. Loffl-Haag's book clearly intends to turn around, repress, make ridiculous and negate the important work of deMause. She starts her book with some comments about Aris and deMause, repeating Arnold's claim that deMause's Evolution of Childhood is "downright nonsense," which is just not true. Loffl-Haag calls Arnold a "renowned (well-known) historian" and obviously accepts his misreadings as a valid critique. This close connection of Mrs. Loffl-Haag with Arnold is an underlying leitmotiv of her book. It is immediately clear that Loffl-Haag's book fails to show a historical child that "laughed." Nor can one get a definite sense of the scholarly questions that Loffl-Haag wants to answer. She starts with some general historical comments, moves to infant care, child education, toys and play of children and legal aspects of historical childhood. Because it is seldom clear what she wants to prove or disprove, her examination of sources remains impressionistic, linked only by Arnold's general assumption against any historical change concerning emotional qualities of childhood.
In her chapter on infant care, Loffl-Haag concentrates on sources about the role of midwives, with some additions from the source part of Arnold's book (reviewed below). She does not analyze these latter sources in toto, but simply cites the small parts published by Arnold. Loffl-Haag takes published material at face value, without serious examination of primary sources. She describes the written rules and punishments for midwives, and concludes on the basis of written rules alone that children were adequately treated. But do swaddling, the obviously fantastical proofing of breasts of wet nurses, the use of magic by midwives, etc. really point to adequate care for historical babies?
Loffl-Haag notes how often historical educators associated children with dirt, bad mood and bad behavior. Beating of children was common. Babies were routinely swaddled. Nonetheless she maintains that the child lived "well cared for and integrated into the family" and presents a picture of a swaddled child with parents as proof. She seems to pay little, if any, attention to context. Loffl-Haag writes that Medieval literature said that a child could "reach the heart of a murderer and prevent the potential perpetrators from committing their crime." Without any interpretation of these fantasies she adds: "What may not be overlooked is the entertainment function and the entertainment value for adults, that both became attributed to the children." When she cites a source such as the one that tells of a city decree prohibiting begging by children older than 8 years without voicing any conclusion, what more needs to be said?
Extensive proof is offered to show that children of the Middle Ages had toys and sometimes played with them. But what does this really show us about the emotional reality of children? While it may be interesting to know that Felix Platter had a "wooden little man, that fenced if one pulled a string" it does not tell us about his father beating him in school, or that his father took his 9-year-old son to executions, that Felix developed enormous anxieties concerning castration fantasies and suffered from a ring phobia that prevented him from even touching rings. Nor does it tell us that he was raised by maidens and probably never nursed by his mother (Platter (1976), 54, 81, 98, 101). His father Thomas also had toys, but he was given away in early childhood, lived as a street kid for years, was beaten by relatives, exploited by uncles, and pulled up in the air by his hair at the hands of a relative who was a priest! (Thomas Platter (1911), 20-21, 26, 31, 47, 58). Unfortunately, there is little effort to use the source material presented to actually improve our understanding.
Certainly, there were some rights for pregnant women and children, but who denies this? Of course, an adult could be punished if he murdered a child or beat his pregnant woman so that she lost her child. But what else would have been expected? And again: What does this force us to conclude about the relation between historical parents and children and the "laughing" of the latter? But Fehr (1912) points out that there were no laws against child punishment (at least in some regions) and that there were no laws against abuse or physical mutilation of children.
Everything about this book is bad, even its German! There is no evidence of even a single "laughing" child in the whole book. Because Loffl-Haag makes such use of Arnold's book, even though it was reviewed in this journal some years ago (Petschauer (1984), 259-61), I want to offer some additional criticism. Arnold's dismissal of deMause's work as "downright nonsense," while deserving of consideration, has unfortunately been uncritically picked up by other writers such as Renggli (1992).
Arnold begins his book by interpreting sources and approaches to the history of childhood; in the last half he delivers excerpts from various sources on childhood, with no interpretation. Even though he presents an incomplete selection of sources it is still a useful compilation. My critique will focus on Arnold's attempts at interpreting historical sources, especially concerning the affective qualities of historical childhood and parent-child relations.
I assume that Arnold was attempting to disprove the psychogenic theory by compiling primary material that would present positive reactions of historical adults towards children. His approach can be paraphrased as follows: If there are positive and negative aspects of childhood in the past, then there is no such thing as an evolution of parent-child relations. He claims that:
Through the centuries of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Times (Renaissance) the child had its firm place in the society; it was simply there. In the family, on the streets and plazas, everywhere were children. They became loved and were supposed to be seen as annoying sometimes by their parents, as in all times; light and shadow accompanied their existence like today.
Clearly Arnold does not want to develop a new theoretical approach concerning the history of childhood. He intends - without the use of any psychological, sociological or any other social-scientific theory - to see childhood in its emotional aspects as a totally unchanging phenomenon. His guiding assumption seems to be that parent-child relations can be split into terms of success or failure, which he apparently believes to be homogenous. Against that, the psychogenic approach postulates structure types (Strukturtypen) of parent-child relations. The psychogenic scheme (from infanticide to helping mode) allows for comparative analysis of the emotional qualities in historical parent-child relations. Though Arnold has no real understanding of this central theoretical feature of the psychogenic approach, other authors believe that he has effectively shown the weaknesses of the psychogenic hypotheses (e.g. Neumann (1993), 199). This is not right at all. Unfortunately, Arnold has achieved an undeserved importance in Germany among those who study childhood history. Seidler (1984) calls Arnold's book "exemplary" for newer childhood research, while calling Aris, deMause, Shorter and Badinter "problematic" (458). Lšhmer (1989) claims that Arnold corrects the "distortion of interpretation" in Aris and deMause (10).
I want to examine Arnold's arguments in greater detail. Some of his statements confirm psychogenic assumptions, despite his denials. He calls the giving of 8-year-old boys in Iceland, Wales and Ireland to other households a "principle of education." In psychogenic terms, such a practice is called abandonment. The abandonment of 7-year-old children to monasteries is, for Arnold, an example of "parental religious conviction and enthusiasm." The labor of children in the "agriculturally determined world of the Middle Ages" is not exploitation, but facilitation of the child's "early integration into the world of labor of adults." The autobiography of Thomas Platter (1911) offers a clear picture of the reality of this exploitation that Arnold seems to ignore. There are several studies which clearly show the hardships of the agrarian world, especially for children. Ilien and Jeggle (1978), for example, have shown that the practice of crippling one of the peasant's daughters in order to prevent her from marrying and force her to stay as a cheap helper in the parental household existed until most recently (76).
It is especially important to examine Arnold's efforts to show positive parental reactions or attitudes. Most of his evidence comes from examination of issues involved with dead children. He concludes from archeological findings of Medieval graves, that children were loved beings. This because they were buried in complete stone boxes, which he interprets as "a sign of love and esteem of children." To show that children were loved, he recounts the story of a butcher from Nuremburg who killed himself in 1468 because he was sad about the accidental death of his children. The obvious fact, that this butcher might have been mentally disturbed, is not even considered. Medieval chronicles tell many such stories but without delivering relevant context. Thus, it can be quite difficult to accurately interpret what such events really mean. Arnold also discusses pictorial evidence suggesting that the death of loved sons was analogous to God's test of Abraham. While this might have been a way for Medieval man to cope with such loss, one must ask: (1) What is it that he wants to prove, or disprove? (2) How are his interpretations to be judged? We are given no clear answers.
A critique of his interpretations is also difficult because it is never clear if Arnold wants to prove something through examination of sources or denounce the ideas of Aris and deMause. The dead (or ill) child does not stimulate projective reactions of parents in a way a healthy child expressing needs would do. The parental reaction to dead children is within the psychogenic approach explicitly described as an exception (deMause [1982], 18). In the case of Abraham and Isaac, the story deals with child sacrifice, and shows the necessity of analyzing impulse and defense while reconstructing historical (and contemporary) parents. While the Abraham-Isaac story speaks to the worth of the child (as Arnold repeatedly stresses), it is also very much the opposite. If one denies the existence of God in all this, then Abraham's vision of a divine wish to sacrifice Isaac might suggest how psychotic infanticidal impulses become displaced onto a ram - a prototypical compromise-formation. While this may indeed have to do with a certain amount of love for one's own son, it also speaks to extreme aggression in the father.
Finally, I want to consider the plausibility of Arnold's assessment of the ricordi of Giovanni di Pagolo Morelli (1371-1444). He claims that these diaries are a "unique document of pain and mourning, that a father has felt because of the death of his child." Arnold describes in detail how the father, Giovanni, experienced and mourned the illness of his 9-year-old son, Alberto. Morelli writes that he cannot forget the dying of his eldest son. Is this love of children? Richard Trexler (1975) notes that the family Morelli had a tradition of abandonment of children and that the fantastical dealing with this topic was central for the ricordi. Giovanni himself gave his son Alberto away to a balia (wet nurse), although he had sworn before to raise him on his own (deMause [1988]) Trexler (1975). is convincing about cruelties of the father against his living son and about extreme distortions and fantasy in his expressions of mourning the death of his other son (227). Trexler interprets how Morelli dealt with his feelings of guilt as follows:
One further, almost mortal conflict emerges from these motifs. Giovanni implicitly assumed that the relationship between father and son is a natural one of trust and unity. Yet on his son's death he found that he had not been a father to his son, but rather as alienated from the boy as an outsider. The father-son relationship, he discovered, was as open to vendettas as the relations in civil society. The evidence was persuasive: in death, Alberto avenged himself upon his father for the latter's indifference (227).
Arnold ignores this information that shows Morelli's paranoid, fantastically distorted dealing with his trauma, the abandonment of his son to the balia and the beating he had given to his son. Only by leaving out such descriptions can Arnold present evidence of supposedly positive attitudes toward children. Again, the details mentioned here show the necessity of fully depicting and closely analyzing impulses and their defense. This is the only way to develop an understanding of how historical parents really were towards their own children.
Arnold clearly suffers from severe theoretical and interpretative deficits that seriously compromise his interpretations. He leaves out crucial details from the sources that would show parental aggressiveness. While Petschauer is right to claim that the book is a "must" for those interested in the history of childhood, I must point out that the book covers up and defends against knowing the real emotion of the evidence. The book delivers some excerpts from primary material, but hardly qualifies as a new approach. The book has achieved importance among German contributions to the history of childhood that it does not deserve. Both Arnold and Loffl-Haag impressively demonstrate the weakness of drawing conclusions from the historical material about the psychic and emotional life of historical parents and children without knowing or considering any psychological theory.
SOURCES
DeMause, Lloyd, The Foundations of Psychohistory. New York:
Creative Roots, 1982.
______________, "On Writing Childhood History," Journal
of Psychohistory, 16 #2 (1998), 35-71.
Fehr, Hans, Die Rechtsstellung der Frau und der Kinder in den
WeistŸmern. Jena: Fischer, 1912.
Ilien, Albert, Jeggle, Utz, Leben auf dem Dorf: zur
Sozialgeschichte des Dorfes und zur Sozialpsychologie seiner
Bewohner. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1978.
Lšhmer, Cornelia, Die Welt der Kinder im fŸnfzehnten
Jahrhundert. Weinheim: Deutscher Studien Verlag, 1989.
Neumann, Karl, "Zum Wandel der Kindheit vom Ausgang des
Mittelalters bis an die Schwelle des 20. Jahrhunderts,"
191-205 in Manfred Markefka, Bernhard Nauck (Hg.), Handbuch der
Kindheitsforschung. Neuwied, Kriftel, Berlin: Luchterhand, 1993.
Petschauer, Peter, "Review," Journal of Psychohistory,
12 #2 (1984), 259-261.
Platter, Felix, Tagebuch (Lebensbeschreibung) 1536-1567. Hrsg. v.
Valentin Lštscher. Basel; Stuttgart: Schwabe, 1976.
Platter, Thomas, Thomas und Felix Platters und Agrippa d'AubignŽs
Lebensbeschreibungen. Hrsg. v. Otto Fischer. MŸnchen: Mšrike,
1911.
Renggli, Franz, Selbstzerstšrung aus Verlassenheit: die Pest
als Ausbruch einer Massenpsychose im Mittelalter: zur Geschichte
der frŸhen Mutter-Kind-Beziehung. Hamburg: Rasch & Ršhring,
1992.
Seidler, Eduard, "Das leidende Kind," 457-471 in
Herbert Wendt, Norbert Loacker (Hg.), Kindlers EnzyklopŠdie:
Der Mensch. ZŸrich: Kindler, 1984.
Trexler, Richard C., "In Search of Father: The Experience of
Abandonment in the Recollections of Giovanni di Pagolo
Morelli," History of Childhood Quarterly, 3 #2 (1975),
225-252.
Stephan Pastenaci's book contains analyses of seven important German autobiographies of the 16th century (Sastrow, von Berlichingen, von Diesbach, Weinsberg, von Schweinichen, Thomas and Felix Platter). He offers interpretations of each of these autobiographies, starting with an examination of the purpose and (explicit) reasons for writing. Pastenaci does not remain at the surface of a certain text, but also manages to examine the hidden unconscious structures. This is quite clear in his interpretation of von Diesbach's (1452-1527) reasons for writing. Pastenaci lucidly shows that von Diesbach's reasons were closely related to the death of his first wife. He was affectively shuttered by her death, offering God two of his limbs in hope that God would return her to him. Pastenaci shows how the demanding of secrecy towards his heirs led to the expression of quite explicit emotional reactions, subjective and idiosyncratic fantasies, and open aggressiveness against God. This influence of secrecy holds for Weinsberg (in a completely different context) and von Schweinichen, as well. Pastenaci shows how the historical subject was able to produce, experience and act out private/public action structures and fantasy life, without being dominated or determined by the cultural context and public patterns of behaving and writing. He shows us the individual patterns of a living subject beyond the limitations of public expression, which prompted some historians to believe there was no individuality at all in certain historical epochs.
Pastenaci focuses strongly on how these writers describe their personalities and feelings. Although he analyzes adult feelings, he rarely examines the childhood origins of emotional life. There are some passages where Pastenaci does point out parent/child conflicts (e.g. his brilliant analysis of the symbolic character of Felix Platter's tearing of cushions meant as a present for his parents in a mood of despair and loneliness). But adult feelings rather than those of childhood are the main topic of the book. Pastenaci's study is definitely a kind of psychological/psychohistorical work and analyzes historical psyches in their environment and the cultural embedding that influenced the autobiographical writing.
Pastenaci's discussions of his interpretative steps, always closely related to the text and based on understandable argument, make his book one of the best examinations of historical German autobiographies. This is especially true in reference to methodology. It is unfortunate that the value of this book has not been adequately realized by the German scholarly community. So many German scholars are preoccupied by questions about which category a certain text belongs to (autobiography, chronicle, memoir, etc.). Pastenaci properly ignores such questions as long as it rests clear that the text stems from a certain author. Pastenaci's courage in transcending conventional disciplinary limits is to his credit. It helps achieve new and deeper levels of understanding about these texts and the men who wrote them.
For any scholar interested in understanding historical autobiographies and autobiographers, Pastenaci's well written book is stimulating and enriching reading.
The Enduring Effects of Prenatal
Experience: Echoes from the Womb, Ludwig Janus. Northvale, NJ:
Aronson, 1997. 264pp.
Reviewed by John C. Sonne, MD - Robert Wood Johnson School of
Medicine
University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey
In this remarkable and eminently readable book, Dr. Janus presents evidence from a variety of sources that documents the reality of preverbal, prenatal psychological life, and the enduring effects of prenatal experience later in life, so convincingly that even the most skeptical reader, be he scientist, philosopher, theologian, professional helper, parent or child, will come away from having read it forever changed. The reader reviews with Dr. Janus the facts that intrauterine life entails the experience of both bliss and danger, that birth inevitably involves both trauma and triumph, that all humans are born prematurely compared to other animals, and that both the unborn and the newborn need an all-too-often lacking compassionate social womb to soften their approach to and arrival into this world.
To read this book is in itself a therapeutic experience, both disturbing and exhilarating. It is impossible to immerse oneself in the massive information Dr. Janus presents without having one's own prenatal memories stirred, and without examining one's own assumptions and prejudices about prenatal experience. As one reads the material Dr. Janus presents documenting the deleterious consequences of primary trauma in individual dysfunction and in re-enactments in intimate relationships, one must also review how one's own prenatal experiences, and those of others, may have influenced one's own development, one's career, one's relationships with one's family of origin, and one's personal relationships in the larger society. Dr. Janus gives numerous examples to show how mankind has attempted to cope with the fears and wishes derivative from prenatal and perinatal trauma through myths, art, music, sacrifice, concepts of death and renewal, rites of passage, the hero, ideas of omnipotence, war, religion, and totalitarian government.
Particularly important is Dr. Janus' emphasis on the need to dissolve social and professional resistance to considering and examining prenatal and perinatal psychology so that destructive re-enactments, both individual and social, or fixations related to very early trauma can be avoided or remedied when they occur. Several examples illustrate the remarkable therapeutic results which have occurred when the principles of psychoanalysis were extended beyond the examination of early childhood into exploration of the underwater world of the unborn or half-born patient. As increasing knowledge of prenatal and perinatal psychology filters into the culture, it is helping parents and others to relate more intimately and respectfully to the unborn and the newborn. This knowledge has become part of a movement toward more aware relating to the unborn, more gentle birthing and more tender neonatal care. Hopefully, this will influence the development of a more loving, less defensive social structure and will decrease the likelihood of the effects of primal trauma being acted out on succeeding generations.
We all, no doubt, know the familiar (anthropomorphizing) story of the hammer that thought everything around was a nail and behaved accordingly (in Yiddish, the proper term is Schtick). The lesson is coercive constructivism built on projection and projective identification. What we see is how (and from where) we look, and why. We see largely what we "put" out there in reality. The history of all science, including psychohistory, is the recognition, withdrawal, and examination of what we project. The trouble is, we can only see via the instrument of projection. The question for science and history is what we do with what we project: do we turn it into empathetic understanding or defensive dogma?
Reviewer Leah Slivko sees Avner Falk as pathologizing most everything in the 5758 years of Jewish history. Time and time again, Falk attempts to account for Jewish history by failures of separation due to an inability to mourn historical losses. Where grief fails, narcissism triumphs - and repetition of trauma in the service of mastery is assured. What about reality - expulsions, exterminations? - Slivko rightly asks. What is the locus of reality in psychic reality? Should we not sometimes reverse Falk's causal explanatory sequence, she asks, and place the terrifying historic reality in the foreground and see the task of mourning as a consequence? Falk, by contrast, attempts to show how so many defeats, losses, and tragedies in Jewish history were at least in part seduced, provoked, so that there was some unconscious complicity that victimized the Jews. This would surely complicate the already difficult mourning.
Separation-individuation issues become contaminated by the compulsion to repeat, to attempt to undo past humiliations and catastrophes. Falk sees, for instance, in the State of Israel an attempted rebirth from the literal ashes of 20th century Jewish history. Jews, like everyone else, use social reality for unconscious purposes, just as reality events rekindle unconscious issues such as loss and separation. Reality, fantasy, wish, and defense are entwined: hence the need for a psycho-history.
The pathological thread of tragic continuity Falk sees recurring throughout Jewish history is the failure to separate: that is, to use my initial image, his "hammer" is pre-oedipal. He has spent a distinguished scholarly career examining the lives of key Jewish figures (e.g. Theodor Herzel, Moshe Dayan) from the viewpoint of the mother-child dyad and how it potentiates historical action.
Slivko emphasizes the crushing character of reality, and admires the resilience in Jewish adaptation. In her discussion of David ben Gurion, she stresses the "strengths and coping mechanisms of the man and how he was able to make positive use of his early (maternal) loss and give Ôbirth' to a new country." From a metapsychological viewpoint, one could say that Falk stresses the "genetic" (psychogenetic origins, causes) point of view, while Slivko stresses the "adaptive" point of view. To Falk, much of Jewish history and leadership is a study in pathography, while to Slivko it is more a study in the courage to cope creatively and go on.
In terms of explanatory schemes, Slivko argues from the large, cataclysmic event to the intrapsychic processing of the event. Falk proceeds from the intrapsychic world outward. I miss in either an emphasis on real, lived childhoods. What in fact, was the intersubjective ambiance, the quality, of the mother-infant relationship where human identity is first fed and housed? What kind of Jewish mother was first lost and re-found through one's rebirth in the prayerful wish for Zion, or in its actual rebuilding? Jews and everyone else in history come through historic eras, through some childhoods. How does what they bring to history intersect with what happens to them (any of them) in history? Falk tells us about the longing for and realization of mother-lands. I miss in his vast study, though, an attempt to weave into his analysis the place in Jewish history of real Jewish mothers (and fathers).
One wonders, then, whether - and when - different explanatory accounts complement one another, and when they conflict with one another; whether viewpoints can come to be used defensively, as resistance, so as to exclude crucial understandings. In our era of resurgent, brutal, nationalisms, what does it mean for a nation (or any other population) to be and have a "mother-land?" What exclusiveness and exclusions come with pre-oedipally and oedipally overdetermined "possession?" How do people think of themselves, and of various "others," when they experience themselves as endangered and entitled children of the mother-land?
A final thought: in identifying Falk as a secular Jew, Slivko may be technically correct, but Falk's sub-text is prophetic. His book deserves to be read alongside Abraham Joshua Heschel's, The Prophets (NY: Harper, 1969). The vast historic repentance Falk calls for is separation (in the sense of Margaret Mahler). Going beyond W.H. Auden's call that we love one another or die, Falk confronts us that we as Jews (or anyone else) must go through the painful separation work of grief so that we do not condemn ourselves and our children to repeat the past. If sometimes Falk uses pre-oedipal theory as a hammer, this flaw is minor in relation to his achievement in this study. He is an outstanding scholar, a prophetic Jew.
Reviewer Leah Slivko was offered the opportunity, but chose not to reply to Howard Stein's comments.
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