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The Roots of Violence

Ghosts From the Nursery: Tracing the Roots of Violence. Robin Karr-Morse and Meredith S. Wiley. New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997.

John Fanton
The Journal of Psychohistory V. 26, N. 3, Winter 1999

Psychohistorically distinguished work must include not only how early traumas are made better or worse by caregivers, families and society, but also how the constructive or destructive restaging of these traumas in later life is formative to the emotional well-being of their psychoclass. This book accomplishes both tasks, while establishing itself as being "in touch" with the prevailing group-fantasies surrounding its creation. Drawing extensively from the recent scientific literature and work of prominent child advocates of the past several decades, Karr-Morse and Wiley have summarized the salient features from these growing volumes of knowledge. They convincingly demonstrate in both abstract text and compassionate case histories how the most violent amongst us have suffered innumerable preventable injuries during their most neurobiologically and behaviorally vulnerable years: the first three years of life.

Written in assertive and nonaccusatory language, their work has many virtues of psychohistorical merit. Specifically, they earn praise for elucidating how the degree to which we all are protected from fetal, birth, infantile, and toddler traumas to our extraordinarily active and growing young brains is unequivocally essential to determining the degree to which we then become capable of protecting ourselves, families and communities from the violent repetition of these early traumas. Definitive and accurate conclusions are made from numerous discussions of the most recent sociodemographic statistics on the epidemiology of violence, with relevance to the data and observations made within the emerging disciplines of developmental and behavioral pediatrics, psychopathology and neurophysiology, pre- and perinatal psychology, evolutionary biology and psychology, and child neuropsychiatry and neuropsychology. Using their analogy, too many of us are indifferent to the pervasive poisons threatening children, making them insensitive or indifferent as adults to whether or not our species threatens the existence of all living creatures, including our own.

In graphic detail, the opening chapter is introduced with significant details on how an impulsive youth in the early 1990's was unable to inhibit his violent tendencies, which caused him to contribute to the assault of an innocent eighty-four-year-old man who died months after his severe beating. Chapter by chapter, this youth's developmental history is explained. The details include how the combination of his fetal exposure to alcohol, marijuana, nicotine, prenatal violence and maternal depression, along with early childhood experience of physical abuse, maternal rejection, and emotional neglect, all synergistically promoted his hyperactive, impulsive, angry, fearful and violent behaviors that, owing to their neurological irreversibility, caused him to bludgeon a harmless elderly man. Following chapters detail developmental histories of other violent youths. Besides the obvious marketing reasons for providing graphic accounts of how youths have murdered and maimed the innocent, the additional details offered about the first three years of life experienced by many of these homicidal children illustrate the authors' central point. Our scientific understanding is now capable of convincingly demonstrating the truth of the old proverb, "the child is the father to the man." In all adults, then, are the "ghosts" of the children and babies they once were.

This work is of intangible value to anyone who wishes to appreciate in rich detail the relevant findings and inferences made by the scientific community in recent years that correlate the understanding gained in developmental neurobiology and neuropsychology to the many myriad forms of juvenile and adult psychopathology. The authors summarize the most noteworthy discoveries in chapters 2 through 8. They also give many of the profound implications these discoveries suggest, including how the vast majority of these children's traumas ought to have been prevented. Particularly relevant to the psychohistorical value of this work is the authors' generous devotion to carefully explaining basic early brain anatomy, physiology and architecture as it has come to be understood in the last twenty years. The first three years are characterized by a never-to-be-realized-again amount of brain formation and activity, including the exponential growth of neurons and synaptic interconnecting maturation of neurons, plus organization of these connections dependent upon epigenetic phenomena. These epigenetic phenomena essentially are characterized by the degree caregivers stimulate and love the exquisitely sensitive fetus and infant, whose brain selectively determines which neuronal network connections become and remain integrated as opposed to being "pruned" owing to relative disuse (nonstimulation). Our orbito-frontal cortex is specifically mentioned by the authors as being strategically located within the neocortex to have mediating influence and control over lower brain functions, especially that of the emotionally concerned limbic system. Essentially, then, it is the development (or not) of this cortex which gives us all our "humanness." Direct connections with somatic and visceral sensory pathways permit the orbito-frontal cortex to associate and distinguish external and internal sensations, thus making this the portion of the neocortex responsible for the higher cognitive functions and feelings of attachment, empathy, and love. With reference to Schore's landmark work, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, the authors explain how the amygdala and limbic system can, in moments of elevated arousal, bypass this aspect of the neocortex, thereby explaining neuroanatomically how emotions may "override" our higher faculties. In children who are already biologically challenged (from genetic or environmental prenatal, perinatal and/or postnatal traumas), as well as denied their innate ability to fully develop their orbito-frontal cortices because of familial injuries suffered, the brain is unable to inhibit the "fight or flight" responses of the hypersensitized limbic system, and they find themselves propelled into impulsive action over and over again, too often with violent consequences. The authors explain in simple and compelling arguments how in the long-neglected development of the fetal and infantile mind/brain are the real "roots of violence."

Critical psychohistorical review may find fault with the authors' assumption that mothers, and not the fetal placenta, are the antecedent foundation to all future love/hate relations; or with their failure to seriously conclude that our society has its emotional, largely unconscious needs met by sacrificing so many children in violent circumstances. But no fault can be attributed to their efforts to argue that our collective well-being will be determined by our future abilities to appreciate these complicated issues and improve upon them with the development of each member of successive generations. Their outlook is more pessimistic than that offered by Dr. McFarland and the participants of the National Parenting Conference, who recognize that much more can be done in each locale to extend appropriate concerns for its children and future adults (though they do list a useful appendix of many nationally organized institutions dedicated to improving child rearing). Home visiting is mentioned in their work, but explained only as a footnote; and nothing is said about the virtues of creating low-budget community parenting centers to help reduce maternal despair and isolation (both of these methods have been shown in this journal to have had significant impact on the level and quality of child rearing).

Though their text is well written with clear, uncomplicated prose, the findings and implications are not oversimplified by the authors. The origins of violent behavior are complicated but traceable, and the efforts made here to avoid inaccurate, reductionistic, simplistic or splitting arguments are commendable. Addressing complex issues with equally complex proposals for solutions, Karr-Morse and Wiley have written a fine psychohistorical text that should be read by anyone who suspects that the majority of our adult behaviors, especially violent ones, have their origins in the "ghosts" of who we once were. Additionally, the authors are psychohistorically "in touch" with the present emotional life of our nation. On page 296, as they warn about all the costs of continuing the unprecedented rate of incarceration we are currently experiencing, they acknowledge the manic mood of the country. In reference to our national mood, and at least six months before the release of a film about another manic period in history (which became the largest grossing commercial production ever), the authors wrote: "The Titanic is on its course." This clearly demonstrates that the authors have an appreciation for the powerful influence of group-fantasies and therefore deserve to be read by psychohistorians. But perhaps by gaining widespread acceptance and understanding from everyone, the "ghosts," as representative of obscured memories of our earliest developmental beginnings, may be brought to conscious awareness, and we all then can become closer to waking up from the "nightmare" of childhood history.

John Fanton is a senior medical student at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and can be reached at 531 Potomac Avenue, Buffalo, NY 14222.

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