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Thoughts on the
Cabbage Patch Kids

DAVID BEISEL
The Journal of Psychohistory. 12(1). Summer 1984

When the stores having them finally open, hundreds of parents, standing for hours scores deep in the freezing cold, storm through the doors toward the toy counters like armies of ravenous ants. Here and there a police uniform is seen in the crowd: there have been riots. In half an hour, the store's limited supplies are gobbled up.

A father from the American midwest flies to London and back in a single day, several secured tightly under his arm. Repeatedly interviewed on radio and television, he later tells a nationwide television audience about his experiences on Ted Koppel's Nigh time.

Anecdotes abound. The media are abuzz with rumors. Outrageous prices are paid: $5,000 for a single original.[1] Friends and neighbors-even strangers in our favorite supermarket-can't seem to talk about anything else.

Ugly or cute, cuddly or repulsive, (depending on whether parts of ourselves have been projected into them), the Cabbage Patch Kids have taken America by storm. The national phenomenon caught Coleco In-dustries, the manufacturer, flat-footed. And the experts were confound-ed too.

Dr. Joyce Brothers typified the efforts of thoughtful Americans who were trying to get a handle on the craze:

Mrs. Brothers said the Cabbage Patch Kids have strong appeal for children because of "the fact that it's your doll," complete with the owner's name. ''It's also a fantasy doll,'' she said. "It doesn't do anything, you do it." The doll's baby-faced features tug at the heartstrings, she said, "a characteristic that even in baby animals we find appeals."[2]

But, like the "analyses" of many others, Dr. Brothers' words seem a bit beside the point, applying as they do to many kinds of dolls and almost all children nearly all of the time. Accurate at the individual level, Dr. Brothers and other experts missed the mark at the group level. The Kids were a collective experience. And they were a collective experience at a particular time. Why these dolls? Why now? And what fantasies came with them?

First, they were as American as apple pie; few people abroad were af-fected. And although the Kids were the craze of Christmas 1983, it would be wrong to believe them to have been finished off by that season. As I write these words in mid-March 1984, an ad sits before me from the March 4, 1984 New Jersey section of the Sunday New York Times. It reads: "WE'RE BUYING -- Cabbage Patch Kids: Rowe-Manse still can't buy enough Cabbage Patch Kids to meet the demand! For those who want to sell, our Cabbage Patch Trading Post is in need. Prices will vary as supply and demand dictate.... Today's Prices: Buying.... $40; Selling.. $50. All prices subject to change without notice."[3] Hence, even though we don't think much of them, the Kids are still very much with us. It is just that the media's attention-our attention-has shifted elsewhere. Whatever collective acting out the Kids represent still goes on. What are we to make of it?

Like all crazes, this spasm of collective behavior can be, at base, labeled obsessive. Millions of adults spent large quantities of time, money, and energy in a single-minded pursuit of the Kids. They did so, of course, because their own children wanted them to. This suggests that the motives behind this collective phenomenon lie in part in the kind of parent-child interactions predominant in the United States today.

Those parent-child interactions have been labeled the socializing mode.[4] This kind of parenting manipulates kids to adapt to current social values mainly through humiliations and through the techniques of withholding love and instilling guilt. But such parenting works both ways. Since parents virtually always raise their kids as they were raised, they react to their own children as their own children react to them, and as they, as children, were taught to react to their own parents. Even Dr. Brothers caught hold of this dimension when she noted how parents feared they would "lose some status in the child's eyes"[5] if they did not provide their children with a Kid. What she was trying to get at was that socialization-mode parents could not tolerate the thought of their own children withholding love from them, nor could they tolerate the guilt they would feel if they did not obtain a Kid for their children.

Some parents in America simply refused to furnish their children with dolls. These people fall into two categories: older psychoclass parents who, for one reason or another wanted to hurt or "punish" their children A IA Mommy Dearest or those more advanced parents like the well-integrated father in his forties, a student of mine, who were strong enough to give their children a loving "no:" "There are too any people; the dolls are too expensive; and even if I stand in line there's no guarantee," he said. "After Christmas, yes."

But what has been said up to this point is not really new: it grows out of what some social observer or other always notes about every Christmas, how our orgy of spending somehow tries to make up for what we haven't given our children during the rest of the year. What this cur-rent analysis does is place this rather mundane observation in the context of the history of childhood. Even so, the questions remain: why this doll and why now?

We begin to answer that Psychohistorical question when we note what every observer has so far missed: the defensive fantasy that parents were somehow buying the dolls "for" their children. On one level, they were; on another level, they were buying them for themselves. Parents were also having the vicarious experience of bringing babies into the world. Why both adults and children wanted to possess Cabbage Patch Kids-that is, bring fantasy-babies into the world-at this moment in American history has to do with our current group-fantasy.

Understanding how and why groups regress to earlier ways of thinking and feeling has become a major task for psychohistorians. Much is now known about that process, and most of the preceding essays have shown how primitive are some of the fantasies which have been unleashed in our current group regression. Accompanying these primitive fantasies of sacrifice, suicide, and wishes for death are longings for rebirth. Whatever the psychobiological foundations of fantasies of birth and rebirth might be, no one can deny their widespread existence in history. There is solid evidence that birth and rebirth fantasies cluster at a par-ticular time in a group's life.[6] They appear whenever group regression has reached the point at which its members' aggressive impulses are bubbling to the surface and the group is feeling the need to act them out.
Because America was at such a regressed point at the end of 1983, mass-produced Cabbage Patch Kids arrived in the nick of time. That they were connected to America's wish for symbolic rebirth is seen by what was simultaneously happening on Broadway. For weeks in late 1983 New Yorkers had been informed that "New York is expecting."

Then the musical Baby-about babies, being pregnant, and having them-opened to rave reviews. "A bouncing baby hit," "a Broadway blessed event," "a winning labor of love," cried the critics. Baby was "alive and kicking," "warm and bright and new," "a bundle of Broadway joy." It was, the ads informed us, "The Born Winner," and "On December 22 at 8 PM every visibly pregnant person will be admitted free of charge."[7 ]America's fantasies of birth - our collective wish for rebir-th-were being harmlessly enacted on Broadway and in the nationwide craze for Cabbage Patch Kids.

But that was not all, for the Kids were connected to yet a deeper, darker side of America's group-fantasy, one suggested by the second most popular doll for Christmas 1983, a doll which had been missing from stores for many years after the Vietnam War: I am speaking of G.I. Joe. Joe's sudden comeback, and the enormous popularity of the Kids, were both outcomes of the same fantasy process. Children were again "playing war," their parents were letting them, and somehow this was connected to the Cabbage Patch Kids.

Psychohistorians have argued that real wars are ways in which groups periodically discharge their rage. In addition, every twenty to twenty-five years or so a new generation of youth is sacrificed by their elders. It is what all wars have in common. Since in each generation, older men send younger men to their deaths, sociologist Gaston Bothoul labeled this process "delayed infanticide." Many have agreed with Bothoul,[8] and from these facts psychohistorians have argued that as group regression proceeds, and repressed infantile feelings begin flooding consciousness, individuals, seeking more and more desperately to rid themselves of these feelings, act them out by symbolically murdering the "child" within them-symbolically, by killing off young men. In a displaced way on the group level, this usually takes the form of military action. "Fate," for example, finally caught up with over 250 U.S. Marines who, along with their comrades, had been sitting ducks for months before October 23, 1983 when a truck bomb exploded in their Beirut compound. Two days later, more young American men died in Grenada. This, too, was a "planned" event.

And soon after Grenada the Cabbage Patch Kids became a "phenomenon." A central factor in their success, as every observer has noted, was that they came with adoption papers, as if they were orphans. I take this to mean that on one level they were the offspring of dead parents or the result of abandonment. (Since fantasies of abandonment do not play a large role in current American group-fantasy life, I downplay their contribution.) As had been analyzed elsewhere, America was at this time getting ready in its unconscious fantasy for a sacrifice of young men.[9] Additionally, in history, the orphan theme shows up in a group's fantasy from time to time.[10] It seems to me that these Kids were in fact our "war orphans" in fantasy, either by reference to the actually concluded group mini-sacrifices of Grenada and Beirut, or in anticipa-tion of more to come, perhaps in Central America.

 
 

At the same time, adopting the Kids was the flip side of G.I. Joe since it was also a desperate attempt to create the defensive group-fantasy that no infanticide was taking place or was about to take place. The federal government-and the first family personally-pitched in with their own contributions. For months the Reagan administration's efforts to block the parents of Baby Jane Doe from not giving their child "life-saving surgery" made national headlines, while Nancy Reagan returned from the East with two Korean children, who after free life-saving heart opera-tions sponsored by the Reagans, left the U.S. with goodbye gifts of Cab-bage Patch Kids handed to them by Mrs. Reagan. While the heart operations were indeed a generous and humanitarian gesture, it is their group-fantasy function which is my focus here, and throughout the episode we repeatedly heard how there were other thousands of Korean children (ourselves? our own children? our young men?) who would die if they did not have similar surgery.

Still, despite our best collective efforts to cover up group-infanticidal impulses by defensive strategies such as adopting Cabbage Patch Kids, our real unconscious intent was revealed by fantasies of sadistic attacks on the Kids themselves. One caller to a radio talk-show in New York expressed the very primitive cannibalistic fantasies current in deep group regressions that abounded at the end of 1983: he informed listeners that he was going to deal with his recalcitrant Cabbage Patch Kid by "tearing it limb from limb, putting the pieces through the grinder to make cole slaw, and feeding the cole slaw to my pet tarantula." He thus con-tributed another variant to the cannibalistic fantasies attached to the original Kids, who had been introduced by Coleco as if they were made of real cabbage, were "born" in an actual cabbage patch by people dressed as doctors, and, after going on to a "maternity ward," were to be sold to their child-"parents."[11] The Washington Post even ran a satirical story which stated that a cauliflower variant of the Kids were supposed to be eaten if its owners were so inclined, while in New York Cabbage Patch Bread Dolls were baked and sold at the St. Honore' Patisserie.[12] These fantasies should not be startling since the connection between cannibalistic fears and infanticidal fantasies has most recently been studied by Dorothy Block whose book, "So The Witch Won 't Ear Me, "[13] explores children's fears of infanticidal wishes in parents.

Infanticidal intent is also revealed by perhaps the best known story of the Kids' craze:

In Milwaukee on Tuesday, two dozen people showed up in freezing weather after two radio disk jockeys' gag that a B-29 bomber would be dropping Cabbage Patch Kids into a parking lot. All you had to do, they said, was bring a catcher's mitt and hold up your American Express card so the plane crew could take a picture of it.[14]

Much can be made of this "practical joke." But what leaps out from the rich Psychohistorical materials in this anecdote is a clear statement of in-fanticidal intent carried out by military means.

Other sadistic Cabbage Patch Kid "jokes" made the rounds. Some came from America's favorite late night host, Johnny Carson, who told his Tonight Show audience in mid-January 1984 how his writers came to him the week before with a Cabbage Patch Kid and a series of hatchets, saws, chisels, and other devices with which he was to hack the doll apart on national television. This being a much too obvious expression of group-fantasy wishes, Carson decided instead to modify their suggestion by holding the doll up to demonstrate its other uses. The hair, for exam-ple, could be used as a duster. No audience laughter. Another attempt at a joke. Again, no laughter. "What my writers wanted me to do, but I won't," Carson said, "was say: Cut off the head and use it for an ashtray." Wild cheers, applause. Encouraged, Carson went on to another sadistic "joke." More applause. Thus, by audience prompting, Carson did the sadistic amputation routine he claimed he was not going to do. America loved it.

The infanticidal fantasies which were being expressed began to cause others to act out counter-fantasies of salvation. A local newspaper reported:

With shoppers rioting for Cabbage Patch dolls, it was inevitable that desperadoes would try to kidnap one. Orangetown's first kid-napping took place on Thursday, when one of the popular dolls, named Deborah, was snatched from a parked car at Dominican College.

Moments later, Our Town and Orangetown Police were notified of the kidnapping. Perpetrators, calling themselves The Cole Slaw Gang, contacted this newspaper, and left photos for the detectives showing the bound and gagged doll.

"We mean business and will carry out our threats," a guttural voice rasped. "If anyone hopes to see the doll again, follow our instructions exactly."

A spokesman for the gang told Our Town that members resented the actions of an organization at Dominican which offered to raffle off a Cabbage Patch doll, complete with birth certificate. Dolls have been in short supply in the area, creating a black market in which prices have soared to $100 or more.

One of the conditions imposed by the gang was that Our Town publish their statement setting the reasons for the kidnapping. Here is that statement:

"If Deborah is going to have new parents, they must go through the proper procedures and file the adoption papers provided with her, and not obtain her through profit making measures such as a raffle for the benefit of others."

"We also demand total and irreversible amnesty from persecu-tion or punishment of any sort, whether on the part of police, Dominican College, or any other authority."

"In addition, the rights of Cabbage Patch People must be secured and guaranteed, just as for any other citizen of the United States."

The Cole Slaw Gang [15]

The Psychohistorical meaning of this "gag" is clear enough, and we might note in passing that even efforts at "saving" one of the Kids had to be coupled with the sadistic fantasies of having it bound, gagged, and abducted-reminiscent of the "hostages" of Teheran and Grenada. For some young people in America, these infanticidal and delayed infanticidal messages of the media proved fatal. A rash of teen suicides broke out in Westchester county as those whose intrapsychic structures made them susceptible acted out group commands. Teen-Suicide Prevention Task Forces began visiting high schools in the New York metropolitan area, CBS News informed us that teen suicide was on the rise, and the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta announced the creation of a group to study the problem. "Specialists," unable to see any connection bet-ween this and the group-fantasy, explained the phenomenon as "peer hysteria" and the acting out of a few teenagers who were "at the edge." No one saw in it any relationship to the by now well-known story of the child who sent back a damaged Cabbage Patch Kid, and, expecting a repaired doll in return, received a death certificate instead.

Like many symbols in the unconscious, the Kids defensively masked the group-fantasies they defended against while permitting us to enact them. We may wonder if this kind of symbolic acting out with typical American playfulness-has sufficiently discharged America's pent up group anger, or whether G.l. Joe will have to come to life again for the next few years. Perhaps, as you read these words, you will already know the answer.

David R. Beisel, Ph.D., teaches history and psychohistory at Rockland Community College, State University of New York, and is the editor of this journal.

. (Refrances below)

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Refrences for this article

1. Rockland County Journal News, December 12,1983, p. B11, in the Classified be-tween an offer for the sale of a Brother correcto-writer and announcement of a Christmas Church Sale, we find: "Cabbage Patch Kids. 2 Original 'Little People.' Each Hand Signed and Stamped by Xavier Roberts. Mint Cond. $5,000 ea."

2. Associated Press wire story in the Rockland Country Journal News, December 2, 1983, p.3.

3. Sunday New York Times, March 4, 1984. New Jersey Section, p.15.

4. Lloyd deMause, ed., The History of Childhood (New York: The Psychohistory Press, 1973).

5. AP story on Dr. Brothers, op cit.

6. See David R. Beisel, "Ten Year Index to The Journal of Psychohistory," The Journal of Psychohistory, Vol.11, No.2, 133-162; also, David R. Beisel, "Thoughts Concer-ning Some Objections to Group-Fantasy Analysis," The Journal of Psychohistory vol.9, No.2, 237-240. Evidence for birth and rebirth fantasies in history is best found in Lloyd deMause, Foundations of Psychohistory (New York: Creative Roots, 1983).

7, From the full page advertisement in the Sunday New York Times, December 11, 1983, Entertainment section, p.5.

8. The most accessible form of Routhoul's work for English readers is Franco Fornari's adaptation and elaboration, The Psychoanalysis of War (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1974); see also, Jon Corelis, "Kent State Reconsidered as Nightmare," The Journal of Psychohistory Vol.8, No.2, 137-147; and David R. Beisel, "Toward a Psychohistory of the Vietnam War," (forthcoming in this journal).

9. Especially in the recent work of Casper G. Schmidt, "The Use of the Gallup Poll As A Psychohistorical Tool," The Journal of Psychohistory, Vol.10, No.2, 141-162; "A Differential Poison Index from the Gallup Poll," The Journal of Psychohistory, Vol.10, No.4, 524-532; and "Two Specific Forms of Trial Action," The Journal of Psychohistory, Vol.11, No.2, 209-224.

10. Paul Monaco, Cinema and Society: France and Germany During the Twenties (New York: Elsevier, 1976) identifies the orphan theme in French film after World War I.

11. Susan M. Duffy, "Coleco in the Cabbage Patch," Barron's, December 5, 1983, p.8: "The style of their introduction made the Cabbage Patch Kids the talk of the trade's February 119831 toy show. Behind the glass of a simulated hospital delivery room, masked and gowned 'doctors' frenetically delivered the dolls from-get this-cabbage heads. Some were placed in incubators; others in cribs-ready for adoption. It was quite a scene. .

12. Tony Kornheiser, "Melancholy Babies," The Washington Post, December 3, 1983, Style Section, pp. 1,7. "1 made my dolls out of the right stuff-the real stuff: cauliflower. So you could play with 'em for a while and then eat 'em if the mood struck you;" Georgia Dullea, "Metropolitan Diary," New York Times, December 14, 1983, c2: "press your little nose against the glass.. .and wait for the baby breads to pop out of the oven.... Each Cabbage Patch Bread Doll is holding out his or her little bread arms, pleading to be adopted. And each doll comes with a name, birth certificate and adoption papers. The pastry chef christens them the minute they emerge from the oven.... You can take them home and spread jam on them."

13. Dorothy Block, "So the Witch Won't Eat Me:" Fantasy and the Child's Fear of infanticide (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978).

14. Rockland County Journal News, December 4, 1983, p. B2.

15. Our Town (a Weekly Newspaper, Rockland County, New York), December 14, 1983, pp.1, 4.

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