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The Role of Adaptation and Selection In Psychohistorical Evolution

  by: Lloyd deMause
The Journal of Psychohistory, 16(4). Spring 1989

Adaptation is a term used in evolutionary biology designating an a posteriori statement about the statistical chances of reproductive success of the owner of an adaptive trait.

Although most examples usually given of biological adaptation concern the enhanced ability to obtain food or defend against predators -- the familiar "survival of the fittest" -- additional adaptive mechanisms have been discovered in such areas as sexual selection, altruistic behavior, homeostatic regulation of the organism and the development of other internal systems equally important to survival but unrelated to food supply or defense. These new concepts should allow the psychohistorian to avoid reducing the use of the concept of adaptation to social Darwinist simplicities.

The question I wish to address in this essay is what is the role of the Darwinian principles of adaptation and natural selection in the evolutionof the human psyche?

Sociobiologists have written, of course, about how psychological traits must be adaptive in order for their carriers to survive. Any group, for instance(1) that produces only celibates would die out for lack of children, any group that produces only pacifists would be wiped out by more aggressive neighbors, and any group that produces only psychopaths would soon wipe itself out through its high homicide rates.

Yet, these limits notwithstanding, groups manage to persist for long periods of time with traits that are only a bit less extreme than those men-tioned. For instance, many cultures for long periods of time have produced celibates in great quantities, even though they have no chance of reproducing. In addition, although psychopathy, like celibacy, would seem to be a non-adaptive trait, there is growing evidence that many contemporary hunting/gathering groups maintain extremely high homicide rates without being placed at an adaptive disadvantage.' In fact, evidence has begun to accumulate that there may have been very high homicide rates for much of the past million years, which have only slowly diminished in the last ten thousand years of Psychohistorical evolution. This is certainly true if infanticide is included as homicide, as it should be.(2) But even without considering infanticide, the earliest reliable figures, from thirteenth-century England, reveal much higher homicide rates than today.(3)

One must be very cautious, therefore, in ascribing "obvious" adaptive qualities to adult human traits. War, for instance, ceased being an adaptive trait long ago without having diminished its frequency in the least. In fact, some studies show war may never have been an effective adaptive trait.(4) It is therefore necessary to ask quite specifically: To what environmental conditions-not just natural environmental conditions but also human group conditions-is the adaptation beneficial at the specific time it is successful The requirements for being a successful pederast in an early civilization, for instance, - might have been quite maladaptive in a hunting/gathering group. One must also ask: Who is adapting, the adult or the child? Only by being very specific can one avoid superficial truisms and begin to forge a truly evolutionary psychohistory.

So far, anthropologists and historians, when using the concept of adaptation, do so in a pre-Darwinian, Lamarckian sense..' As Mayr has pointed out,' Lamarek believed that changes in the environment produced changes in the individual which were then passed down to offspring. Darwin's evolutionary theory instead posited random variation in individuals first, and only then natural selection by changing environments. Variation was not caused by the environment either directly or indirectly.

Social scientists are Lamarckian insofar as they believe that the source of variation is the reaction of the population to a changing environment - changes in climate producing changes in hunting behavior, changes in environmental and demographic conditions producing sedentary farmers, and so on. Just as Lamarck believed that changes in environment have called forth changes in organs (producing legs on fish, etc.), so, too, social scientists today believe that changes in environment have called forth changes in behavior. Harris sums up the Lamarckian assumptions of anthropology when he says that "hominid cultures tended to evolve along essentially similar paths when they were confronted with similar techno-environmental situations."(7) That similar environmental changes did not in fact produce behavioral changes in many times and places - that Europe and America, despite their similar environments, evolved quite differently - seems not to present an objection to the theory of cultural adaptation.(8) Nor is it embarrassing to cultural evolutionists that demographic pressures can rarely be shown to have led to the kinds of cultural changes their theories require - for instance, that early complex civilizations actually rose out of populations that were not of particularly high density.(9)

The Lamarckianism of cultural evolutionists should be rigorously avoided because environmental change has never been shown to have produced cultural change any more than it has produced genetic change. In psychohistory as in evolutionary biology, the environment is the occasion for selection, not the source of variation. At the same time, by making the individual psyche rather than the culture the unit of evolution -- just as Darwin made the individual organism rather than the species the unit of biological evolution -- evolutionary psychohistory should be based upon a radical disjoining of psychological and cultural evolution. Technological levels of groups, for instance, differ widely from their psychological levels, especially when there has been extensive culture contact. Groups like the Japanese, Chinese and Russians, for instance, began industrialization while most of their populations were still in the infanticidal mode of childrearing, a level most of the West achieved in antiquity, two millennia prior to industrialization. Conversely, some Polynesian groups may have reached more empathic childrearing levels while remaining technologically simple. The precise relationship between technology and psyche is a complex one, still awaiting investigation - both because childrearing has been so poorly observed by anthropologists and historians alike(10) and because culture contact has enormously complicated their relationship.

In what follows, I assume that adaptation occurs on two quite distinct levels: [1] on the childhood level, programming what will become the adult psyche while adapting to caretaker conditions, and [2] on the adult level, leading to selection of reproducing adults while adapting to human and environmental conditions.

Childhood adaptation proceeds according to principles quite different from adult adaptation, principles that have rarely been studied by anthropologists or historians. A typical example would be the case of the present day Guatemalan town of Peten, which the demographers Cowgill and Hutchinson recently studied,(11) reporting that all the girls were very flirtatious with the grown men, often overtly sexual even as very young girls. When they looked for the reasons why, they found a very high boy/girl ratio and noticed that girls were regularly allowed to die off - through giving them less food and by other neglect - if they did not appeal sexually to the men around them. Even though this meant very high sexual abuse rates for young girls and severe sexual problems for them as women, the girls' flirtatious traits were adaptive to the growing child in that particular group environment at that stage of evolution. What is adaptive for the child is often maladaptive for the adult.

Adult adaptation seems a more obvious concept. For example, no group can produce solely exclusive homosexuals for more than one generation; groups that produce very passive personalities tend to become supplanted by more aggressive groups during severe environmental changes; groups that produce individuals so full of primitive envy that they cannot stand any private ownership tend to become supplanted at advanced stages of evolution by those that do allow private ownership; and so on. Yet even in these cases, often the less adapted group continues to exist in diminished form by finding a psychological niche wherein their adult personalities could continue to function, often as scapegoats for a more advanced group.

Now Darwinian biological evolution is a two-step process. The first step is the production of variation, through such mechanisms as mutation, genetic drift, recombination, etc. These provide the source of new genotypes out of which the second step, natural selection, chooses those traits which are adaptive to the phenotype. New genotypes are not "forward-looking"; they are randomly produced, and are usually maladaptive. Mutating genes don't know whether they will later be useful to the organism or not. Neither does the infant/caretaker pair know if the programs they are laying down during the period when the infant's brain is most plastic will be adaptive to an adult environment or not. The common notion that historical parents do this or that emo-tionally to children in order to "prepare" them for adult life is mostly the ethnographer's fantasy. Since the selection of adaptations is always only an a posteriori result of past events, there can be no teleology in either biological or psychological evolution.

The first requirement for an evolutionary psychohistory should be to remove teleological concepts from current explanations by cultural evolutionists. Kroeber's dicta that "the causality of history is teleological [since] the Methods of biological, psychological or natural science do not exist for history"(12) is the kind of error responsible for the sterility of cultural theory. Since variations in child-rearing are as randomly produc-ed as genetic variations and do not "look forward" to their effects on adult personalities and on group adaptation, they are often maladaptive in terms of adult adaptation to environment - although they are always adaptive to the caretakers' personalities. Genital mutilation, for instance, is quite maladaptive for adults, even though it is adaptive in the family setting, since mutilating a child's genitals resolves so many sexual problems of the child's caretakers.(13)

Therefore, a theory of Psychohistorical evolution must also be a two-step process, with psychological variations first being produced during childhood (including its fetal phase) and with the second step of selection occurring during adult life. Such a theory would turn both Hegel and Marx upside down, since instead of excluding the family from history(14) it would make the family the ultimate source of all historical change.

The main hypotheses of a robust theory of Psychohistorical evolution should include the following: [1] that the individual, not the culture, is the locus of evolution; [2] that childhood adaptations provide the source of all variations; [3] that adult adaptations furnish the occasion for group and environmental selection; [4] that the selected personality types and therefore cultural practices are highly dependent upon the peculiar evolutionary history of the group; [5] that cultural traits and historical movements contain shared defenses constructed to handle the abandon-ment depression resulting from lack of parental love; and [6] that these defenses have periodically moved from rage directed outwards to self-destructiveness directed inward, from intergroup belligerence to sacrifice, from war to economic depression.

The aim of such a theory would be to be rigorously selectionist-that is, to eliminate all vitalism from evolutionary processes, paralleling and building upon Edelman's neural Darwinism,(15) a theory that is also con-cerned with the evolution of brain organization as a selective process. Under this new theoretical perspective, "will," "desire" and other vitalist concepts will be eliminated as evolutionary categories, since the difference between those groups that have rapidly evolved and those that haven't has nothing to do with their wishes.

The historical production of variations in the psyche and brain through the adaptation of the growing fetus and child to its human and non-human environment is so far terra incognita and will be the subject of the first chapter of my book, Psychohistorical Evolution. What follows is a summary of some of the principles for which I will there provide detailed evidence from anthropology and history.

Darwin's first step forward in the discovery of the concept of natural selection was to reject essentialist thinking and adopt populationist concepts - that is, to realize that species do not contain hidden "essences," but are simply populations of unique individuals with a wide range of variations.

Similarly, all childhood populations, even in the smallest and most homogeneous groups, contain a wide range of variations, due to such factors as (a) genetic variations, (b) variations in prenatal conditions, (c) variations in personalities and life histories of caretakers, and (d) variations in group history that affect the other three factors.

To illustrate just the last-mentioned factor, two kinds of historical events might be mentioned, one productive of new variations and one tending to restrict variations in future generations. A simple example of an event that encourages new variations is culture contact with another group that prohibits incest or infanticide or severe child beating or any other detrimental childrearing practice. An example of an event that restricts variations in future generations would be the establishment of practices like footbinding or clitoridectomy, which, by crippling young girls, make it much more difficult for them to try new ways of mothering when they have grown up, thus "poisoning" the source of new variations for many generations and "freezing" to a considerable degree historical change. For example, although China was ahead of the West in many ways in the pre-Christian era, it became "frozen" and fell far behind the West in evolutionary change after it adopted the painful practice of foot-binding young girls as a sexual perversion." The same kind of cultural arrest can be traced to the widespread circum-Mediterranean practice of cutting off little girls' clitorises and labia.(17)

In order to understand the role of variation and selection in child-rearing, some preliminary comments are necessary about the general evolutionary directions child care has taken in the past 200,000 years, i.e., since evolution of the psyche has replaced genotype evolution as the main engine of behavioral change. The evidence for this has been drawn both from historical records (infanticide, child sacrifice, ritual cannibalism, puberty rites and many other childrearing practices have even left evidence in the archeological record) and from the testimony of contemporary groups (even though the childrearing of contemporary nonliterate groups cannot automatically be equated with the childrearing of earlier historical groups on the same technological level, valid inferences about childhood in the past can be made about groups whose cultures were quite similar to those of contemporary groups).

One of the conclusions of my research on the history of childhood is that there is a general tendency toward the reduction of parent-child symbiosis and the increase of individuation throughout history. Another way to say this is that evolution tends to move from a situation where the caretakers use the child as a "poison container" (container for injection of dangerous emotions) to one where the child is able to use his or her caretakers as containers and thereby individuate and not need to use poison containers as an adult. This evolutionary tendency to move from need to love and from symbiosis to individuation is usually selected for because individuated personalities are more reality-based than symbiotic personalities and therefore more adaptive to changing conditions-in those groups where conditions are in fact changing. (Of course, where conditions are not changing, the less symbiotic personalities could be maladaptive.) As individual parents become able to encourage an emergent self in their children, they produce a new generation of adults who need less acting out and less magical thinking in their cultural traits - traits based upon constructing a malevolent world of dangerous gods and spirits and magically manipulating fetishes as defenses against reexperiencing the terribly painful abandonment depression that was felt in childhood in the face of emotionally unavailable parents. Those parents who manage to go beyond this early symbiotic infanticidal childrearing mode must to some extent be able to overcome the depres-sion, rage, hopelessness and guilt regarding separation they experienced in their own childhoods. In some environmental circumstances, these new personality types are then selected for and new kinds of cultures come into being. In other environmental circumstances, the more individuated personalities are maladaptive and selected out, eliminated as effective caretakers by the magical-thinking, immature adults around them.

My observations about improvements in childrearing," by the way, do not depend upon a "progressive" teleology, as is usually claimed by critics," any more than does the evolutionary biologist's observation that the record of speciation shows that evolution generally tends toward greater complexity of organisms and greater "openness" of their programming. There is nothing inevitable in either biological or psychohistorical evolution. The biological world is filled with unevolved, earlier life forms, and the human world is filled with borderline personalities who have not evolved (or have devolved) from the "normal" borderline personalities of earlier times.

Anything, then, that lends itself to the reduction of parent-child symbiosis should produce more adaptive adults in an evolving group, adults who then, under certain conditions still to be investigated, reproduce not only themselves but also their new childrearing triode more frequently. I have lately begun to suspect that early parent-child relations may in fact have been so symbiotic that they were actually directly or indirectly incestuous (direct incest being parents sexually molesting their children and indirect incest being adults first exchanging their children with their neighbors' children and then molesting them). Anthropologists are so convinced, without any historical evidence whatsoever, that "the prohibition of incest can be found at the dawn of culture" (Levi-Strauss)(20) that no one has ever considered the opposite hypothesis: that incest was practiced for a long time before it began to become prohibited in some ways. Other primates are often incestuous - certainly in terms of the erotic use of young by related adults, even if not as often in the primatologist's sense of producing offspring. For humans, historically, the best evidence is that the sexual molestation of children by relatives and neighbors has been present from the earliest records to the present time for most cultures.(21)

Early hominid evolution may have favored incestuous mothers for at least three reasons: [1] the loss of body hair, [2] the assumption of bipedal posture and [3] the increase in infantile dependency. These developments, which occurred for other evolutionary reasons, meant that the ability of the infant to bond to the mother was decreased, since it could no longer hold on by itself to her hair nor ride on her back. This in turn meant that those mothers who consistently hung on to their infants (which other primates don't regularly do) were favored, giving a selective advantage to those who used their infants for sensual satisfaction. This may also explain the adaptive value of continuous sexual arousal in the human female -- still a puzzle to biologists -- a unique trait that may have less importance to the question of increased impregnation by the male than it does to the use of erotic pleasure for cementing mother-infant symbiosis. The same may be true of the evolutionary development of the larger, more erogenous female breast, which would have been selected because with it infants would more often be cathected as erotic objects (hunting/gathering mothers often become quite aroused sexually while nursing their infants, caressing their penises and vaginas).(22) In any case, the result of this early biological evolution is that, as in the example of the seductive girls given above, children who can be used sexually are most likely to survive, because they are more likely to be clung to by their non-hairy, upright mothers and fathers. The importance of erotic bonding thus gives both incestuous parents and children a major selective ad-vantage in hominid evolution. Furthermore, because of the lengthening of childhood dependency in humans compared to other primates, the mechanism of expulsion prior to sexual maturity cannot be used to avoid incest, as it is with other primates. Primate grooming may have evolved into the erotic use of children in early hominids as their body hair was lost. All of these seven factors -- loss of hair, development of erect posture, substitution of erotic clinging for grooming, development of continuous sexual arousal in the female, development of the more erotic breast, greater infantile helplessness and the inability to use expulsion because of lengthening dependency-point in the same evolutionary direction: the increase in selection of erotic bonding of parents and children.

Examples of incestuous, symbiotic mothering, where the child is for up to seven years continuously carried naked, clung to all night and used as an erotic object during sexual intercourse, masturbated against, and sucked and masturbated genitally, are regularly found in contemporary
hunting-gathering groups by those ethnologists who bother looking for such behavior-all incestuous, symbiotic parenting traits even though the children usually end up getting high child care ratings as "orally indulged" by Whiting and Child because the mothers nurse their babies for so many years.(23)

The problem, however, is that once this incestuous symbiosis is established it is difficult to break. Typically, hunting-gathering mothers cling to and sleep with their children until they are seven or so, lugging them around for tens of thousands of miles rather than allowing individuation(24) and even carrying around their bodies for a year or so after they die,(25) not because they "love" them (they commit infanticide, abandon them and sometimes even eat them without guilt) but because they need them as poison containers for their bad feelings. (We don't always know if they all use them sexually; the ethnographers almost never ask the children nor try to observe their sexual experiences, other than noting the "closeness" of mothers during the long post-partum sexual taboo period, when the mothers have only the child as an erotic object. In groups where the ethnographers do ask, they usually find sexual molestation of children.) The best description of the use of children by mothers as poison containers for massive projective identification of their depressive, sexual and aggressive feelings is Parin's study of the Anyi.(26)

The incestuous use of children in early human history, though difficult to investigate, is nevertheless a legitimate hypothesis. The earliest records on childhood sexuality for such early civilizations as the Celtic, Germanic, Egyptian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Japanese, Indian and Chinese all show ritualized pederasty of the Australian and Melanesian type; i.e., boys beginning at seven to ten years of age were forced to submit to fellatio and anal intercourse under the belief that women were so powerful and men so weak that only in this way would the boys be able to grow sperm and attain manhood.(27) Thus, the origin of all rites de passage would be the need to cleanse, through rebirth ritual, the seven-year-old poison container from previous incestuous use by the mother and make him or her into a "clean container" for subsequent sexual and emotional use by the father and other men in the group. Circumcision and other genital mutilations were presumably initially the concrete signs of the new incestuous status of the child. This could explain why so many early Greek and other Indo-European "foundation myths," deriving from archaic rituals, describe pederastic initiation rites as crucial rites de passage which were necessary to the very foundation of society.(28) The concept of archaic pederastic initiation rites would also make more sense than the notion of "puberty rites" as an explanation for rites de passages, since they often in fact take place long before puberty.(29)

Assuming for the moment that incestuous, symbiotic clinging was the source of a polygynous, mainly endogomous extended family in latePaleolithic times,(30) when most groups averaged around 50 individuals, what could have led to change in some groups (but not all) from this ear-ly symbiotic clinging to greater individuation? What group and en-vironmental conditions may have favored less symbiotic caretakers? Assuming little change in the frequency of genotypes and phenotypes in the population, what, in a matter of a few hundred generations, could change the psychotypes (which I call "psychoelasses" in order to avoid social Darwinist overtones)?

The childrearing practices of the earliest infanticidal clinging psychoclass must have varied considerably, mother by mother. That is to say, the production of variation of new psyches has been continuous. Some babies inherit favorable genes, giving them constitutionally stronger egos. Some have very favorable fetal experiences, because the mother happens to be less depressed and more healthy than her neighbors during term and because of simple chance factors that affect fetal experience. And childhood-particularly caretaker-child interaction - even in small groups varies considerably, depending on such conditions as whether the mother has other opportunities to resolve her conflicts outside of the child, on to what degree she is cared for by her mate, on her sexual satisfactions other than with the child (including whether lengthy post-partum taboos on adult intercourse have been established), on her physical burdens, and so on. Even small groups contain sufficient variation in childrearing practices to provide material for adult selection and evolution of psychoclasses.

Yet many "aboriginal" parenting practices (and resulting cultural pat-terns, such as cannibalism and headhunting) may have continued un-changed in some groups for 200,000 years. What has happened to the variants in those groups that, for instance, still practice brain-eating as their Neanderthal ancestors did? Why wasn't childrearing diversity multiplied and selected for, as it was in those groups who moved up the evolutionary ladder?

I once asked Arthur Hippler what happened in an Athabascan Eskimo village - where he spent so much time observing the harsh, unloving mothering" - to the odd mother who was more loving to her child than was customary. He said the other mothers shunned and made fun of her and shut her out of activities, which could, at least prior to Western culture contact, have meant starvation, since food supply depended crucially on community activities. The resulting reduction of childrearing variants thus produced an extraordinary stability of adult personality and culture for millenia.

The difference between an evolutionary psychohistorical theory and the theories of cultural evolutionists is clear. Cultural evolutionists postulate, in Lamarckian fashion, that Eskimos adapted their behavior to the environment, evolving harsh childrearing in order to produce personalities that could withstand the harsh environment. In contrast, psychohistorical evolutionary theory would postulate, in Darwinian fashion, that as the Athabascan groups moved slowly across the land bridge from Asia to Alaska and down into the Northwest coast, the less harsh childrearing types moved on to warmer, more hospitable climates, while only the harsher. "frozen" parents remained in Alaska, where the harsh climate matched their masochistic, harsh personalities. There had to be, after all, some reason why some stuck it out in such an un-favorable environment while most moved on to far greener fields. Studies that show California Athabascan groups to have much warmer parenting than their Alaskan cousins confirm such a theoretical model. Thus, the correct evolutionary answer to the question of why Alaskan Athabascan parents are harsher to their children than Californian Athabascans are is not that "they are preparing them for their harsh environment" - as though they are aboriginal child psychologists -- but rather that "they found an ecological niche that selected for harsher parenting."

The same explanatory principle holds for all historical questions. The traditional historian gives only proximate events when asked for causes: the American Civil War was caused by "slavery" or "differential in-dustrialization" or "nineteenth-century political conditions," whatever adult event preceding the war which the historian wants to blame the war on. But the ultimate cause of the war between the States is none of these group events. The ultimate cause of the war is evolutionary. The North and South were settled by two quite different parenting types, two psychoclasses: the North mainly by Europe's most advanced psychoclass, intact families escaping from British religious persecution, and the South mainly by broken families, disinherited (latter-born) sons, servants, apprentices, convicts and others whose ambivalent mode childhood in no way matched the consistency of the intrusive mode Puritans and others who settled in the North.(32) This made the South unable to establish the kinds of educational institutions and urban developments that the North soon set up, thus delaying industrialization and establishing slavery instead. Because Southern whites were mainly ambivalent mode parents who were sexually and physically abused in childhood, they could not free the slaves without fears of being raped by blacks, who had become poison containers for feelings about their own abusive childhoods.(33) When the North made demands on the South, they were the same kinds of demands the intrusive psychoclass was to make of the ambivalent psychoclass all over the world at this stage of evolution. The Civil War was thus a psychoclass war, ultimately caused by differential parental migration patterns two centuries earlier.

Thus, different portions of groups experience different rates and direc-tions of childrearing evolution through various as yet unexplored - mechanisms.(34) Early groups stabilized their childrearing patterns in - various ways, paralleling some of the same principles of genetic homeostasis in biology. The question regarding the evolution of early hunting/gathering groups then poses itself: what is responsible for the destabilization of early symbiotic childrearing patterns in ways strong enough to upset the enormously powerful infanticidal clinging of the caretakers? And, equally importantly, what institutions become established that allow the new variants, the less symbiotic childrearing patterns, to reproduced themselves in future generations, so that new parenting types are not just sporadic "sports" that appear from time to time? What selective advantages do the less symbiotic patterns sometimes have that favor their reproduction and what environments favor their emergence and selection?

It was only after Darwin proposed his basic evolutionary paradigm that questions about the selective advantage of various traits could be answered by the historical and taxonomic record. During the last 100 years, evolutionary biologists have been slowly unraveling these and similar questions posed by the new paradigm, through empirical research programs from the evolutionary record that have formed the core tasks of the profession. Psychohistory has 100 years of work to do in searching the anthropological and historical record in order to begin to answer questions about the principles of psychological adaptation and selection. Let me briefly suggest some beginning observations.

Both the ethnographic and historical records show an interesting regularity as regards childrearing and political complexity (which I am here using as a crude index of evolutionary progress). If you measure variations in the practice of sending the child away for caretaking at about age seven you find that they correlate very well with political complexity. That is, in the earliest groups the young child is clung to and used sexually and emotionally by mothers and fathers and, as in the Australian and Melanesian pattern, is used sexually before puberty by older men under the guidance of the father. But as the group becomes more complex, the child is (a) given at around age seven to neighborhood relatives to work, or (b) sent away to relatives in nearby villages, or (c) sent to non-relatives in "fosterage" arrangements, or (d) sent to royal households as servants, and so on, moving up the level of political complexity. Furthermore, although the ethnographic record is spotty on this point, wherever facts can be gleaned it is apparent that the men in these fosterage and servant arrangements physically, sexually and emotionally abuse the children, boys as much as girls, as a once-removed extension of the abuse of children within the family.

These fosterage correlations with political complexity are well documented in Africa," and can be extended elsewhere. By the time groups reach the level of early civilizations - Germanic, Lithuanian, Celtic, Greek, Roman, Persian, Egyptian, Aztec, Hawaiian, Tahitian, Azande, Japanese, Indian, etc.(36) - the sexual and emotional use of children seven to sixteen or so has been institutionalized into the tradi-tional pederastic relationship familiar to the readers of Greek literature. Further evidence for this tendency is found in the fact that all of the 42 groups discovered to practice incestuous marriage (including sibling marriage among commoners, as in Roman Egypt)(37) are fairly complex civilizations.(38)

Therefore, one of the means by which the symbiosis of the early infan-ticidal mother is broken is clear: the father and, under his direction, other fathers at greater and greater distances tear the child away from the mother and use them as emotional and sexual poison containers themselves.

Whatever favored the separate use by the father of the child, then, helping break the symbiotic bond with the mother, favored selection of new childrearing modes and therefore of new psychoclasses. The question then becomes: What environments allow fosterage at greater and greater distances? Sometimes even small differences in environment can make a large difference in selective qualities. For instance, very small groups on islands or in deserts or tundras lack extensive other groups to combine with and form more complex political units, and would be less able to use fosterage as a symbiosis-breaker, thus explaining why so often "islands are evolutionary traps" in history as well as biology. On the other hand, isolation of groups for a time from their original homes can sometimes encourage the spread and development of incipient childrearing patterns, since - as in the case of isolation of biological groups - it prevents swamping by earlier psychoclasses, a process I have already documented as regards rapid changes in parenting in colonial New England.(39) The question of precisely what demographic and en-vironmental conditions favor and inhibit new variants is obviously a complicated one, only solved by massive evidence from the historical record.

Yet one cannot just remain on the level of environmental selection. Like evolutionary biologists, we must contend with other populations with whom the group is in contact, and with the niches most groups find that restrict their further adaptation and selection of variations. Many hunting/gathering groups may well have remained on the early infanticidal symbiotic level for so many millennia because they had found an ecological and emotional niche in symbiosis with larger, more advanced tribes around them, the emergence of less symbiotic mothers having been selected against through mechanisms as yet unexplored. Many hunting groups, for instance, have refused to absorb the herding cultures from larger groups adjacent to them, but have instead found a symbiotic niche within these more evolved groups. Instances of emotional niches can be multiplied and extended to the case of larger civilizations that create psychoclass arrest by forming slaves, castes and economic classes which they use as poison containers, upon whose mothers they heap impressive burdens as obstacles to childrearing success and whose children they use sexually and physically.

Finally, even beyond the parallels mentioned so far with mechanisms studied by evolutionary biologists, the evolutionary psyqhohistorian must study an entirely new level of interaction: the psychodynamic in-teraction between psyches within the family.

One of the greatest sources of psychological variation lies in the pro-cess of regression and reliving that the caretaker - mostly the mother - goes through in interaction with the child. This reliving is the main source of growth in psychoanalytic treatment and ultimately the source of new ways of living and relating in evolutionary psychohistory. When Freud emphasizes that psychoanalysis does not introduce something new into the psyche but rather liberates forces toward growth and new synthesis which are already there, he captures the same progressive force for growth which produces psychohistorical evolution, where the caretaker re-experience and struggles with past traumas, past attitudes, past temptations and past emotional decisions and-by confronting them anew while raising the child and with some support from those around her - resolves them a bit differently, a bit more maturely, a bit more realistically than her own mother did.

If parenthood is therefore a chance for therapeutic interaction with the child-both therapeutic for the parent and for the next generation of children-a psychohistorian must therefore also study the historical record to see what factors encourage incipient parenting modes. This has simply never been done - not by myself, not by other childhood historians, not by psychoanthropologists. The historical conditions favoring the emergence of new parenting modes, favoring the liberation of forces allowing insight, resolution, growth and individuation, should be one of the psychohistorian's first research goals.(40)

The social sciences have too long modeled themselves on the study of non-living matter, the physical sciences. As Mayr has pointed out," the principles of the biological sciences are quite different, since they are based on living matter, and are therefore far more complex, far more dependent on concepts than on laws, on historical record than on experiment, on evolutionary development than on systems analysis.

By shifting to a paradigm that is an extension of the life sciences, by thinking evolutionarily in terms of emerging modes of programming of the psyche, by asking "why" as well as "how" new historical personalities have been produced, psychohistory can, I think, begin to achieve the scientific basis for social science that has so far eluded it. (Refrances below)

Refrences for this article

These are in bad shape and have NOT been re-worked as yet - please contact me about problems [email protected].

1. Donald Symons, The Etolution of Humnan Sexuality. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979, pp.144-53 has the beginning~ of i bibliography. Bruce M. Knauft9 begin-ning with his Gooti Co~rtpany and Violence: Sorcerv and Social Action in a Lowland New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985 and his "Reconsidering violence in Simple Human Societies; Homicide Among the Gebusi of New Guinea." Current Anthropology 28(1987), is studying the entire range of ethnographic evidence on homicide rates. His study of the Gebusi of New Guinea showed over 60 percent of men had killed someone, usually a relative, and sometimes also ate the victims; the Gebusi are also pederasts, confirming the statistical relation-ship in most countries between childhood sexual molestation and homicide. See also John Craig, "Kindness and Killing,'t Etnory Magazine, October 1988, pp.24-31.
2. Lloyd deMause, Foundations of Psychohktory. New York: Creative Roots, 1982, pp. 26-35, 117-123.
3. See James Brichanan Given, Sociely and Hotnicide in Thirteenth-Century England. Stanford: California University Press, 1977, Given, however, vastly underestimates the amount of homicide that never reached the courts.
4. Both Keith Otterbein, The Evolution of War. New Haven: HRAF Press, 1970, and Raoul Naroll and William T. Divale, "Natural Selection in Cultural Evolution: War-fare versus Peaceful Diffusion." Anrerican Ethnotogist 3(1976): 97-129 concludes that, as Naroll and Divale put it, there is "no real evidence at all in our sample that a society's success in warfare (as measured by territorial change) was substantially related to its level of cultural evolution."
5. Even when anthropologists specifically label their theories "Social Darwinist," as do Naroll and Divale, ujid., they are in fact Lamarckian, since their unit of evolution is the culture, not the individual. They, like all cultural evolutionists, cannot account for the production or variety at all, and so call "invention of new traits.. relatively unim-portant..." (p.99).
6. Ernst Mayr, Tire Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution and In-heritance. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982, p.354.
7. Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1968, p.683.
8. While it is true that the New World lacked large domesticates and metal tools, as pointed out by Alan Lomax and Conrad M. Arensberg, "A Worldwide Evolutionary Classification of Cultures by Subsistence Systems." Current Anthropok)gy 18(1977):
691, the question is why they did not, since horses and iron were available for plowing there as elsewhere.
9. See Lloyd deMause, "Reply to Paul, Halley, and Graber," The Journat of Psychoanalytic Anthropology 5(1982):481 -2.
10. For the study of childrearing by anthropologists, the vast literature by Whiting, Child, Bacon, Barry and others is too well known to cite here; much of it can be found sum-marired in Ronald P. Rohner, They Love Me, They Love Me Not: A Worldwide Study of the Effects of Parental Acceptance and Rejection. New Haven: HRAF Press, 1975. For a history of the beginnings of the study of historical childrearing, see Lloyd deMause, "On Writing Childhood History." The Journat of Psychohistory 16(1988):135-171.
11. Ursula M. Cowgill and G.E. Hutchinson, "Sex Ratio in Childhood and the Depopulation of the Peten, Guatemala." Hutnan Biology 35(1963):90-104.
12. Cited in Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory, p.326.
13. Armando R. Favazza, Bodies Under Siege: SdfMutitation in Culture and Psychiatry. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.
14. G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of History. New York: Dover, 1956.
15. Gerald M. Edelman, Neural Darwinisor: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. New York: Basic Books, 1987 and Topobiology: An Introduction to Molecular
Embryology. New York: Basic Books, 1989.
9
?6. Howard S. Levy, Chinese Footbinding: The History of a Curious Eroik Custotn.
London: Neville Spearman, n.d,
17. Franzeska P. Hosken, The Hosken Report: Genital/Sexual Mutilation of Females.Lexington, Mass: WIN News, 1979; Marie Bassili Assaad, "Female Circumcision in Egypt." Studies in Family Planning 11(1980): 3-16; Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem, "Genital Mutilation: 30 Million Women Are Victims." Ms., March 1980, pp. 65-67, 98, 100; Tol:'e Levin, "Unspeakable Atrocities"': The Psycho-Sexual Etiology of Female Genital Mutilation," The Journal of Mind and Behavior 1(1980): 197-210.
18. DeMause, Foundations of Psychohistory, pp.1-64.
19. Lloyd deMause, "On Writing Childhood History." The Journal of Psydrohistory16(1988): 135-171.
20. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Ainship. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969, p.43.
21. Lloyd deMause, "The Universality of Incest." The Journal of Psychohistor;w, for-thcoming.
22. As, for instance, described by Arthur E. Hippler, "Culture and Personality Pcrspec-tive of the Yolngu of Northeastern Arnhem Land: Part 1-Early Socialuation." Tire Journal of Psychological Anthropology 1(1978): 235.
23. John W.M. Whiting and Irvin L. Child. Child Training and Personality: A Crois-Cultural Study. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953.
24. See Jeanne Altmann, Baboon Mothers and Infants. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980, p. 165 for a graph of !Kung bushman mother-infant contact vs. three other primates, all of whom have much higher contact rates than Western mothers and infants.
25. Bronislaw Malinowski, The Family Among the Australian Aborigines: A Sociological Study. New York: Schocken Books, 1963, pp.23941.
26. Paul Parin, Fritz Morgenthaler and Goldy Parin-Matthey, Fear They Neighbor as Thysell': Psychoanalysis and Society Among the Anyi of West Afrka. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
27. Gilbert H. Herdt, Ed., Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia. Berksley: University ~ of California Press, 1984.
28. Bernard Sergent, Homosexuality in Greek Myth. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984 and Bernard Sergent, L 'homosexualite initiatique dans I 'europe ancienne. Paris: Payot, 1986.
29. For a beginning bibliography on the subject, see the interesting paper and symposium on incest and initiation by James L. Brain, "Sex, Incest and Death: Initiation Rites Reconsidered." Current Anthropology 18(1977): 191-208. Hebraic infant circumci-sion, under this conceptualization, would be a post-natal cleansing of the infant of the mother's birth "poisons" so what the father could use him, emotionally and perhaps even sexually-an early patriarchal assertion which could help explain why Judaism broke so early from mother-goddesses and why Yehweh was initially a phallic deity; see George Ryley Scott, Phallic Worship: A History of Sex and Sex Rites in Relation to the Religions of All Races from Antiquity to the Present Day. London: Tor-chstream Books, 1941, pp.133-ISO and Allen Edwards, Erotica Judaka: A Sexual - < History of the Jews. New York: The Julian Press, 1967, pp.6-13.
30. As assumed by Robin Fox, The Red Lamp of Incest. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1980, J pp.13945.
31. Arthur E. Hippler, "The North Alaska Eskimos: A Culture and Personality Perspec-tive." American Ethnologist, l(1974):449469and "Patterns ofSexual Behavior: The Athabascans of Interior Alaska." Ethos 2(1974): 47-68.
32. DeMause, Foundations of Psychohistory, pp.62, 105-131.
33. Both North and South fantasied the South as "one vast brothel"; see Lloyd deMause, "American Purity Crusades." The Journal of Psychohistory 14 (1987): 345-9.
34. See deMause, Foundations of Psychohistory, pp. 105-131 for discussion of psychospeciation principles.
35. Esther N. Goody, Parenthood and Social Reproduction: Fostering and Occupational Roles in West Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. The regular ex-change of children extended as late as the early modern period; see Grant McCracken, "The Exchange of Children in Tudor England: An Anthropological Phenomenon in Historical Context." The Journal of Fatnily History 8(1983): 303-313, which, however, does not mention the sexual aspects of the practice.
36. The vast amount of evidence from primary sources available to back up this settlement will be contained in my paper "The Universality of Incest" and forthcoming book, Psychohistorical Evolution. However, a beginning bibliography on pedophilia can be found in Barry P. Adam, "Age, Structure, and Sexuality: Reflections on the Anthropological Evidence on Homosexual Relations." The Journal ofHomosexuali-ty 11(1985): 19-33; Bernard Sergent, Homosexuality in Greek Myth. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984 and L ',1o'riosexualiie initiatique dans l'europe ancienne. Paris: Payot, 1986; K. J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality. New York: Vintage Books, 1978; Robin Scroggs, The New Testament and Homosexuality: Contextual Background for Con-temporary Debate. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983; Eva C. Keuls, The Reign of the Phallits: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens. New York: Harper & Row, 1985; Arno Karlen, Sexuality and Homosexuality: A New View. New York: 1971; William Parker, "Homosexuality in History: An Annotated Bibliography." The Journal of Homosexuality 6(1980-81): 191-230; Paul Cartledge, "Politics of Spartan Pederasty." Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 207(n.s. 27) (1981): 17-36; Jan Bremmer, "An Enigmatic lndo-European Rite: Paederasty." Arethusa 13(1980) 279-98; Emiel Eyben, De Jonge Romein: Volgens de literaire bronnen. Brussels: Palacis der Academien, 1977; Beert C. Verstraete, Homosexuality in An-cient Greek and Roman Civilization: A Critical Bibliography with Supplement. Toronto: Canadian Gay Archives, 1982; Gisela Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg, Homosex-ualitaet: Die Geschichte emes Vorurteils. Frankfrut am Main: Fischer, 1981; Felix Buffiere, Eros Adolescent: La P;d6rastie dans Ia Grece Antique. Paris: Les Belles Let-tres, 1980; Vern Bullough, Homosexuality: A History. New York: American Library, 1979; Parker Rossman, Sexual Experience Between Men and Boys: Exploring the Pederast Underground. New York: Association, 1976; Amy Richlm, The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humor. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983; Eva C. Keuls, The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens. New York: Harper & Row, 1985; and David F. Greenberg, The Contruction of Homosexuality. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988.
37. Keith Hopkins, "Brother-Sister Marriage in Roman Egypt." Comparative Studies in Society and History 22(1980): 303-355.
38. John M. Goggin and William C. Sturtevant, "The Calusa: A Stratified, Nonagricultural Society (with Notes on Sibling Marriage)." In Ward H. Goodenough, Ed., Essays in Honor of George Peter Murdock. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964, pp. 179-219.
39. DeMause, Foundations of Psychohistory, pp.105-131.
40. One of the best psychoanalytic theorists of the conditions of individuation is James F. ~~-% Masterson; as, for instance, in his statement that the therapist land parenti "cannot
direct, order, flatter, dominate, threaten, coerce, seduce or otherwise force a patient to activate his real self or individuate. One can only create the conditions that make it possible. The patient must take it from there. Self-activation means exactly what it says." The Real Self A Developtnental, Self, and Object Relations Approach. New York: Brunner/Mazel Publishers, 1985, p.9.

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