The Origins of War in Child Abuse by Lloyd deMause
Chapter 1
The Killer Motherland
War is the mother of all things.
– Heraclitus
In the course of researching my book The Emotional Life of Nations, I discovered that just before and during wars the nation was regularly depicted as a Dangerous Woman. I collected thousands of magazine covers and political cartoons before wars to see if there were any visual patterns that could predict the moods that led to war, and routinely found images of dangerous, bloodthirsty women. Even the most popular movies before wars featured dangerous women, from The Wizard of Oz with its killing witches before WWII to All About Eve before the Korean War, Cleopatra before Vietnam, Fatal Attraction and Thelma and Louise before the Persian Gulf War and Laura Croft and Kill Bill at the start of the Iraqi War. War itself when personified was always shown as a Killer Woman, tempting young men with her attractiveness. I called the Killer Woman a Marie Antoinette syndrome, after the group-fantasy of the French during the Revolution that she was a “ferocious panther who devoured the French” despite the fact that she was actually a rather sweet person. When the war starts, the terrors in the media that Dangerous Women are abroad demanding blood are projected into some Enemy who agrees to engage in mutual killing, and oddly enough the Enemy also assumes the Killer Woman imagery, as, for instance, in the Persian Gulf War when Saddam Hussein was depicted as a dangerous pregnant mother with a nuclear bomb in her womb or as the mother of a death-baby.
That wars are seen emotionally as led by dangerous Killer Mothers, with war goddesses from Athena to Freyja and from Brittania to Marianne depicted as devouring, raping and ripping apart her children, is one of my most unexpected findings during the three decades I have studied war psychohistorically. The further back in history one goes, the more wars are openly considered as being fought for Killer Goddesses, from Tiamat, Ishtar, Inanna, Isis and Kali to the Aztec mother-goddess Huitzilopochtli, who had “mouths all over her body” that cried out to be fed the blood of her soldiers.1 Before wars, there is a precise moment when the Killer Mother image gets split into the Good Motherland and the Bad Motherland, and the warrior clings to the Good Mother even when she sends him to die and be “buried in her bosom” and kills and rapes Enemy women without guilt. Soldiers often say they are willing to die “peacefully” for a beloved “Motherland…like a baby falling asleep” in Her womb, wrapped in a maternal dress/flag.2 Wars are from their beginning experienced as direct repetitions of the birth struggle, begun when nations are “smothered and unable to draw a breath,” continuing until they can “see the light at the end of the tunnel” and even “aborted” if ended too soon.3 As the German proverb puts it, “Germany is never so happy as when she is pregnant with war.”4 Even the nuclear bomb is seen as part of a rebirth ritual. The Hiroshima bomb, named “Little Boy” and dropped from the belly of a plane named after the pilot’s mother, was announced as successful by General Groves who cabled President Truman: “The baby was born.”5
Wars are thought of as being fought mainly by men against men, but most wars kill more women and children than men—today for every soldier who dies in war, ten civilians die, about half of them children.6 Most war leaders and most soldiers are male and somewhat more women than men oppose going to war.7 Women are far more likely to be the victims of violence than men: in the U.S. in 1980, “one of every two women experiences some form of battering, one of four experiences incest, one of four is raped, 97 percent of all male-female violence is against females.”8 If, as feminists of all stripes contend, violence and militarism are simply patriarchy writ large, why are Motherlands the central focus of emotional group-fantasies about war? The answer is clear: all these “Dangerous Women” and Killer Motherland fantasies are mainly those of men. It is mainly men who kill under the delusion that “We have laid ourselves over the body of the motherland in order to revive her”9 or “We are to die so that the motherland may live; for while we live the motherland is dying.”10 It was men on WWI battlefields who called their cannons “Mother” and referred to themselves as children waiting upon and feeding Her.11 It is men who as officers refer to themselves as the “company mother” or as “the mother hen watching the other guys like they was my children.”12 It is men who join the military to appeal to women as brave heroes who will save them, who respond to recruiting posters saying “Women of Britain Say ‘GO!”, who claim “all women like to hear of men fighting and facing danger”13 and who go to their death in battle with one word, “Mom,” on their lips. Mothers today may not send their sons forth to battle with the adjuration “Come back with your shield or on it” as did Spartan mothers, but in fantasy many soldiers still hear the inner voices of their mothers saying to them: “Grow up and be a MAN”—i.e., kill or be killed.14
War leaders know the Killer Motherland group-fantasy that moves men to war, and repeat it endlessly before and during wars. Hitler spoke of German devotion to their Mutterland thousands of times in his speeches, saying “I promise you the sacrifice of 10 million German youth” to Germania. Hitler said he was literally married to Germania: “Marriage is not for me and never will be. My only bride is my Motherland,”15 and this is the reason he did not marry any other woman. (This was an old idea for the military—before modern mass armies, soldiers were usually prohibited from marrying, since they were considered as wed to their Motherlands and units.)16 Goebbels confirmed that “the entire people loves him because it feels safe in his hands like a child in the arms of a mother.” Hitler’s conviction that he got his power from his mother was so literal that he kept pictures near his desks of both his actual mother, Klara, and of Medusa, whose gaze turned people into stone. Hitler said of the painting of Medusa, “They are the eyes of my mother!”17 Medusa was so deadly that one look from her could kill you. Hitler endlessly practiced before a mirror so his eyes would be killing “mother-eyes” like those of his own deeply depressed mother.
Staring at his Nazi soldiers, Hitler could empower them also to be fused with the powerful Killer Mother, saying, “I want to see again in the eyes of youth the gleam of the beast!” KILLER MOTHERS OF TERRORISTS Even if groups such as terrorists who do not have Motherlands to fuse with and die for, they still do have real mothers who play that role. Islamic terrorists today regularly report their mothers brought them up to be a suicide bomber, a martyr, even picking which son should die and which must remain alive to support her in her old age.18 One mother of a Palestinian suicide bomber who had blown himself to bits told the reporter “with resolutely cheerful countenance,” “I was very happy when I heard. To be a martyr, that’s something. Very few people can do it. I prayed to thank God. I know my son is close to me.”19 Since he had been about to graduate from the university—that is, about to separate from his mother, to be independent, the mother felt she was about to “lose” him and preferred that he be “with” her in memory, and he himself felt “If I blow myself up and become a martyr, I’ll finally be loved by my mother.” They consciously think suicide will finally give them love from Allah, but they unconsciously think it will give them love from Mother.20 All the other Killer Motherland devices mentioned above for warriors are paralleled in terrorists. Explosive devices to kill themselves and innocent civilians are called “Mothers of Satan.” In Gaza, a mother of three Hamas suicide bombers videotaped their paths to suicide, saying she wished she had 100 sons to sacrifice rather than three, and was made famous as “The Mother of Martyrs.”21 Mothers often dress their little children in pretend explosives to encourage their suicide.
Terrorists often drag themselves after being shot to their mothers, saying, “O my mother, I have been martyred,” or “You bore me to die.”22 Witnesses report that “When at last her son is martyred, she is said to be overjoyed to hear the news and emits a zaghrada (a high-pitched wailing sound made by women on happy occasions such as the entrance of a bride and groom at their wedding), sometimes even expressing the wish that all her sons will thus be taken.”23 What kind of mothers are these who not only tell their children they should commit suicide for Allah but let them watch daily TV messages in between cartoons that say they should kill themselves and even give them suicide belts to march around to practice their suicides?24 Like mothers everywhere, when they inflict abuse on their children they are simply repeating abuse that was committed on them when they were little girls. That terrorist cultures treat females horribly is well known. When a girl baby is being born, Islamist cultures traditionally dig a hole next to the birthing bed in case it is female and might be infanticided. A large majority of all girls in Islamist cultures are raped, and are even often blamed for their rape, since it is assumed that “those who don’t ask to be raped will never be raped.”25 Most girls have their genitals painfully mutilated around 6 years of age by their mothers, who as they chop off their clitoris and labia joyfully chant: “Today I am the master, for I am a man. Look—I have the knife in my hand…Your clitoris, I will cut it off and throw it away for today I am a man.”26 Genital mutilation is practiced by Islamist families from 40 countries; a recent survey of Egyptian girls and women, for instance, showed 97 percent of uneducated families and 66 percent of educated families still practiced female genital mutilation.27 As girls grow up they are treated as polluted beings, veiled, and routinely beaten by their mothers and husbands.28 It is no wonder that Physicians for Human Rights found that 97 percent of women they surveyed in Islamic areas suffered from severe depression.29 Such life-long painful physical and sexual abuse surely does not help a woman give love to her children; she passes on her beating, burning, cutting, kicking, and stabbing to the next generation.
KILLER MOTHERLANDS IN EARLIER STATES Long before there were Islamic terrorists, of course, there were terrorists fighting for and against early states, and they were also shown killing under the orders of a Killing Woman. Even when the monarch was a male, “monarchy” was usually depicted as “a woman richly clad, seated on a throne, crowned with the sun’s rays and holding a scepter in her hand…leaning on a lion, the symbol of domination.”30 Even when The Terror is called “La Patrie,” the one who kills is always depicted as a Killer Woman (plus of course the word “la patrie” is feminine, since its Indo-European root pa means to feed). Traitors to France were killed by having their heads cut off by a guillotine situated before a Killer Woman statue of Liberty, with patriots declaring, “The guillotine is hungry; it is ages since She had something to eat.” The Revolutionary War was fantasized as being started by a bloodthirsty Marie Antoinette, and soldiers fighting for France (enfants de la patrie) were shown as being led by the war goddess Marianne. That real French mothers at the time of the Revolution were actually killers is a well-hidden secret of most historians. Maternal infanticide was called “the most common crime in Western Europe from the Middle Ages down to the end of the eighteenth century,”31 and my own extensive research on historical infanticide rates as revealed by boy/girl sex ratios from census and other sources showed about a third more boys than girls were allowed to live, meaning most children growing up watched their mothers strangle and throw into the outhouse at least two of her newborn babies, embedding in their psyches a clear picture of their Killer Mother.32 Since the wealthy killed their children at even higher rates than the poor, the high infanticide rates were not mainly due to poverty, but reflected real attitudes toward children. Newborn were killed because daughters were less preferred, because devils or demons had told them to kill the baby, because the baby was needed as a “foundation sacrifice” and sealed into a new building or bridge to ward off angry spirits, or dozens of other rationalizations. Mothers who allowed their newborn to live usually shipped them off to wet nurses. At the time of the French Revolution and throughout the 19th century, mothers in Paris deported to distant parts of the countryside 90% of their newborn, usually in appalling conditions, and seldom inquired about their survival; they were called “angelmakers” because they so often let the child die. Only about a quarter of the children lived to be returned, strangers to their parents. 33Mothers who refused to nurse their babies did not mince words: “It bores me, and I have better things to do,” “It is too messy,” “I don’t want to ruin my figure,” etc.34 During their time at wet nurse, “the child is left to himself, drowning in his own excrement, bound like a criminal (in tight swaddling bands], devoured by mosquitoes [and lice].”35 Since the children were not returned to their parents for four or five years, and since they were sent to other families as servants at six or seven, few parents actually “raised” their children in history until recently. One can understand Talleyrand’s statement that he “had never slept under the same roof with his father and mother.”3
Mothers agreed during Christian times that their infants were so evil they were “inclined in their hearts to adultery, fornication, impure desires, anger, gluttony, hatred and more,” so this meant they had to be tightly bound in yards of swaddling bands and brutally beaten daily beginning as babies.37 Thus it is not surprising to find illustrations of going to war as a process of offering up your evil children’s lives to the Killer Motherland. When the children were growing up, they were threatened by images and even actual dummies dressed up as Evil Witches who if they were not totally obedient to the mother would tear them to pieces, suck their blood and eat them up.38 These Evil Witches are the earliest forms of the Killer Motherland who demands your blood and your life in war. The use of masked devouring figures to frighten children goes back to antiquity; it was said by Dio Chrysostom that “terrifying images deter children when they want food or play.”39 One nurse reported making up “a huge figure with frightful staring eyes and an enormous mouth, and placed it at the foot of the bed where the little innocent child was fast asleep.” When she returned, “the little girl was sitting up in her bed, staring in an agony of terror at the fearful monster before her…She was stone dead!” That children who have experienced all these kinds of severe early traumas relive them in group-fantasies of wars as adults is hardly surprising.
The religious wars of the Middle Ages were fought by warriors who put the Virgin Mary on their shields and prayed to “Mary, Mother of our Saviour, obtain for us, your children, the grace of a happy death so that, in union with you, we may enjoy the bliss of Heaven forever. Amen.”40 Icons of Mary in Byzantium depicted Her as a general who fights the enemy by sending Her trusted warriors into battle and Herself killing them outright.41 All of Europe begged the Pope to allow them to take part in the Crusades because they were promised that if they died in battle they would earn remission of their sins and be fused in unio mystica with Killer Mother Mary or with “Jesus-our-Mother,” a popular medieval fantasy.42 Constantine even made Jesus a soldier who fought for the Roman empire,43 and many Popes thereafter spoke of “soldiers of Christ” or “knights of Christ in His army” who earned salvation by killing infidels for Christ.44 Knights were full-time warriors, killing whoever happened to be nearby in ravaging bands of killers, and the knights in their bloody tournaments were always watched by an audience of adoring females who urge their men to kill for imagined slights to their honor.45 Mothers in particular were expected to urge the knights on to kill.
These medieval duels often restaged the maternal traumas of childhood. For instance, mothers in medieval times often squeezed the penis of their boys to toilet train them, so knights traditionally considered a squeeze of their noses to indicate a challenge to a duel. The knight’s costume repeated the brilliant colors, feathers and swishing cloth of their mothers, and, as one scholar put it, “For centuries European war was an odd spectacle of men dressed in fancy clothes trying to kill one another.”46 Some knights actually wore a helmet in tournaments that had his Lady sculptured on them, like the “Lady Venus” helmet of the famous 13th-century knight Ulrich von Liechtenstein portrayed above. The question “Why fight?” which haunts the senseless battles of knights is again answered by “For the Killer Mother,” who in Icelandic sagas and Germanic epics viciously berates the men for not plunging into battles or feuds more quickly and avidly.
THE KILLER GODDESS IN EARLY CIVILIZATIONS
Wars in early civilizations are fought on behalf of and against Killer Goddesses, bloodthirsty mothers like Tiamat, Ishtar, Inanna, Isis or Kali. Typical is the Aztec mother-goddess Hiutzilopochtli, who had “mouths all over her body” that cried out to be fed the blood of soldiers.47 Scholars of antiquity conclude: “The oldest deities of warfare and destruction were feminine, not masculine.”48 Jungian analysts called her the Terrible Mother archetype, a Dragon-Mother with “a mouth bristling with teeth…so that it may devour us.”49 Ovid captures the mother of antiquity by picturing Pentheus crying out “Oh Mother, gaze at me! She screamed at him, and shook her flying hair. Then Agave ripped his head from fallen shoulders, raised it up [and] cried, ‘Here is my work, my victory.’”50
Jung—like most psychoanalysts since Melanie Klein—blames Terrible Mother fears on the child, who must “throw the burden upon her” since everyone knows most mothers are not in fact abusive (a recent poll of British doctors concluded that child abuse in England was less than one percent, while actual statistics for the U.K. and U.S. find over half the children are still being battered and used sexually.51) Childhood in early civilizations was far worse than today. Census figures from antiquity show boy/girl ratios as high as 400/100, meaning most girls and perhaps half of the boys were infanticided (Poseidippos admitted that “even a rich man always exposes a daughter.”52) No early society ever punished infanticide; everyone knew places where exposed children were dumped by their mothers to be eaten by beasts.53 “Killing wet-nurses” were given newborn and expected to do away with them promptly. Children were widely sacrificed in antiquity: decapitated infant sacrifices to the Goddess were found at Jericho, in Carthage, in the stone circles of Britain, in India, in Aztec cities.54 The constant imagery of sacrifices and wars being conducted under the leadership of Killer Goddesses were repetitions of familiar everyday sights to children growing up in early societies, not to mention routine pederasty of young boys, widespread rape of girls, and universal beatings, burnings and mutilations. It is not a coincidence that there were female witches but no sorcerers in Greek folklore, that statues of Fear were always of a Mother, and that in the heart of battle it is a War Goddess, Ishtar, who boasts “I stand in the midst of the battle, I am the heart of the battle, the arm of the warriors.”55 Fused with the powerful Mother Goddess, the warrior becomes a Hero who saves his own brutal mother from his projected rage against her so she can finally be imagined to love him as her Savior. Greeks in battle emblazoned a terrifying disembodied Medusa head on their shields; Egyptian soldiers marched off to battle holding the actual maternal placenta of the King, which was saved from his birth and put on a standard like a flag. Wars were the personal province of Mother Goddesses, as personal violence was the province of female witches, both representations of the Devouring Mother of infancy who “existed not to be loved but to be placated.”56 These goddesses were termed “mistresses of battle,” and her own soldiers killed in battle were also sacrifices to her bloodthirsty appetite: “She drinks the blood of the victims who were formerly her children.”57 Actual war leaders are usually male, of course (Queen Boadicea, Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth and Margaret Thatcher being macho exceptions), but the war leaders worshipped the Killer Mother: “As a goddess of war, Venus appeared in Caesar’s dreams inspiring him to conquer Gaul…on the eve of battle, Caesar offered sacrifices to Mars and to his grandmother….The next morning he led his troops into the fray with shouts of ‘Venus Victrix!’”58
To understand why it is the mother and not the father who is associated with childhood, one must realize that the caretaker for the earliest years was always feminine: the mother or her replacement. Fathers in Greece, for instance, usually slept with their pederastic victims in a separate house or area from their gynarchic family. Even in early modern times homes had a separate women’s area that held the mother, grandmother, slave nurses, aunts and children; Solon suggested that a man should visit his family “not less than three times a month;” Plutarch wrote: “Genuine love has no connections whatsoever with the women’s quarters.”59 Herodotus bluntly confirms this fact: “a boy is not seen by his father before he is five years old.”60
Mothers and grandmothers are not, of course, inhuman, and if given half a chance can be loving toward their children. Yet, as I summarized my three decades of research on the evolution of childrearing: “The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes, the lower the level of child care, and the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorized, and sexually abused.”61 The simple fact is that girls were brought up with worse childhoods than boys, more likely to be raped and prostituted by their family, more likely to be mutilated, rarely respected or educated or given a chance to develop an individual self. That as mothers they were post-partum depressed, required to plow and sew and work as well as care for children, and were constantly accused of sinfulness just by being female is widely documented. That she took out her pains on the only beings in her charge, her children, is unsurprising. There are good reasons why Medea, Procne and other mothers in Greek mythology killed their own children to spite their husbands for their infidelity. It should tell us something when one reads an historian calmly report: “Of 600 families from the second century B.C., only 1 percent reared two daughters.”62 It is only when one recognizes the mother’s own severe abuse and neglect from birth that one can begin to understand why they routinely killed, abused, tied up and neglected their own children. What is miraculous is that each new generation of mothers has tried to give more love and care to their children than they themselves had, so childrearing has progressively evolved over the centuries—albeit unevenly around the world.
FUSING WITH THE AZTEC WAR GODDESS
Aztec religious myths portrayed many bloodthirsty War Goddesses who needed to be fed human blood each day for the sun to come up. Central were Earth-Mother goddesses, like Teteoinnan. Each year, a female Aztec victim was killed and her skin was flayed, removed, and donned by the head warrior so he could become the War Goddess and acquire Her dangerous powers. Her mana.63 Warriors went into battle totally fused with their powerful War Goddess, and Aztec leaders made certain there were plenty of wars for them to experience this fusion and satisfy the bloodthirst of the Goddess, even if it meant dividing their own army into two sides and fighting a “Flower War” among themselves to revitalize them as they kill each other in berserk trance states.64 So bloodthirsty were Aztec Goddesses that they had to be daily fed their favorite nectar, human blood, in the form of fresh human hearts, in order to get the sun to come up each morning and in order for the Aztecs to prevent the Goddess from devouring Her children, themselves. So powerful is the trance state and desire to be fused with the War Goddess that warriors are said to “long for death” in order to sacrifice themselves to attempt to renew their disintegrated selves.
Real Aztec mothers were unbelievably cruel toward their children. At birth, most were infanticided, killed for the Goddess, or burned in the hearth as baptism, tightly tied up in endless swaddling bands on a board and left most of the day to starve for both food and attention.65 The mothers routinely pierced their children’s stomachs, arms, lips and genitals, pulling knotted cords through their wounds to get more blood to feed the Goddess.66 Aztec females were treated even worse than Islamic females, so they were so needy as mothers that they felt they would die if their children did not devote themselves to their needs—thus forming the childhood basis for all the myths that the sun could not come up in the morning unless She was fed humans. Goddesses were deemed killers because real children not only watched their mothers strangle later-born siblings, they also watched nobles actually eat their children or drown them as sacrificial victims.67 When the boys become adolescents, their mothers force them to become warriors and publicly insult and deride them if they did not kill and be killed in battle. In fact, the sons were sometimes killed by their own parents if they were suspected of being not sufficiently warlike, saying “You have been sent into warfare. War is your desert, your task. You shall give drink, nourishment, food to the Sun.” But most warriors openly desired death, held it to be sweet, thought of dying as becoming fused with their War Goddess and so in battle longed for itzmiquiztli, death by the warknife, a repetition of the traumatic memory of their actual mothers cutting their genitals as little children.68 Aztecs so desperately feared their real Killer Mommies that they early on imprinted Her into their unconscious and then as adults regularly reported experiencing nightmares and night terrors of Our Mother (Tonantzin) crying out to be fed blood.69 That war and other sacrificial rituals act out the killing of the son by the mother is made clear by myths such as how Inanna brought about the death of Tammuz, even when the dying son is made into his mother’s Hero by “reviving” Her (from the real mother’s endless depression.)70 That wars and sacrifices also act out the child’s revenge against the mother can be seen in the details of the sacrifice of women (about a third of all the sacrifices), where female victims first make a prodigious show of their female power, then are laid down on their backs and their breasts cut open and their bodies torn apart.71 The two aspects of the Killer Goddess are demonstrated when the Aztec warrior takes the sword that he had used to behead the Goddess victim and “terrifies and annihilates our enemies with it.”72
TRIBAL WARS FOR MATERNAL SPIRITS
Anthropologists often idealize their tribal personalities, claiming they have no war now and that war in Paoleolithic times was unknown. These claims have been thoroughly disproven recently.73 Just because fortifications were not found prior to 7,500 B.C. only proves large-scale defensive wars were not common earlier on. The kind of war that tribal groups engaged in was more like gang warfare, conducted by entranced kinship groups thinking they hear maternal spirits say “kill the sorcerer...The audience becomes caught up in escalating rounds of whooping, hollering, and joking, amid which the medium’s spirits may present plans for the attack…the men go out to stage the ambush….The suspect is shot with arrows or clubbed to death then butchered [and] cooked and eaten.”74
The anthropologists generally conclude when they see these gang killings that homicide has occurred, not wars. Surveys of adult men find about two-thirds of adult men in tribal groups have committed one or more murders for tribal spirits; as one anthropologist put it, “There was not a single grown man who had not been involved in a killing…”75 Multiple burials which are potentially indicative of organized raids are common in the Paleolithic.76 So-called “Peaceful Societies” have enormously high gang-induced “homicide” rates, or they are previously warlike tribes like the !Kung or Mbuti who are now policed by nearby Western military units. Their inability to organize wars against large tribes nearby is due to their unconscious distrust of their own leadership: they are called “unsegmented societies” because they lack a sense of group responsibility, not because they are “egalitarian,” as is often claimed.77 As their childrearing improves, they move more into segmented bands and conduct preplanned raids on other groups, not so much as over resources since most of them admit “there is plenty of food,” but for demonstration of power over “evil” enemies.78 As one tribe put it: “Every stranger was regarded as a ‘bad Indian’ endeavoring to work evil [witchcraft], and as such [was] to be slain from ambush before he could do any harm. When two unacquainted hunters approached, unless they greeted each other from beyond arrow range, they endeavored to kill each other.”79
Tribal groups, like nations, get into their killing moods by fusing with a maternal spirit. Most, like the !Kung bushmen, describe this fusion openly as obtaining Maternal Power: One warrior tells how he got his fighting power, his “hot !num”: “when I was a tiny thing, sucking at my mother’s breasts, I took n/um, I drank n/um…I was about three or four years old. I would cry, and cry, and cry…I was afraid of the n/um. N/um was hot and hurt.”80 The fusion experience is similar to a temporal lobe epileptic seizure, and like these seizures, it provides the person experiencing it with convulsive tremors and feelings of powerful violence: “As the master of n/um continues his energetic dance, the n/um heats up and rises up the spine, to a point approximately at the base of the skull, at which time !kia results…’I pick up n/um, it explodes and throws me up in the air…bursting open, like a ripe pod,’ “ and then they go out to kill anyone they encounter.81 Whether this “surge of power” fusion is with a spirit or witch or ghost, they all betray possession by early maternal beings.82 That the maternal being is a Killer Mother is clear from the violence unleashed: “The Jivaro man… feels a surge of power in his body [and] believes that he is a superhuman. He is seized with an overwhelming desire to kill and joins a killing expedition. When his war party has surrounded a victim’s house, each member of the group ceremonially releases his arutam soul into the forest before proceeding with the killing. If they fail they must immediately find another victim, or they will die. Each time they kill they must capture a new arutam…Arutams give protection from violence, poison, witchcraft, or war, so that a man who has killed repeatedly is considered invulnerable.”83 So entranced are tribal warriors that they often conduct surprise attacks on enemy groups for no particular reason whose purpose it is to annihilate them. Surprise attacks on civilians by tribal warriors often killed 10 or 15 percent of the villagers, leading Keeley to conclude: “the proportion of war casualties in primitive societies almost always exceeds that suffered by even the most bellicose or war-torn modern states.”84
The infanticidal childrearing of tribal societies is generally downplayed by anthropologists, who have idealized tribal mothering as badly as historians have idealized mothers before the 20th century.85 Most academics by now are familiar with how Margaret Mead left out how Samoan girls were routinely raped—which she represented as being “sexually free.”86 But until my Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology began to be published and until my book The Emotional Life of Nations came out, few realized how much anthropologists distorted mothering in their tribes. Infanticide was so widespread that few children grew up without seeing several of their siblings killed by their mother at birth. Mead kept infanticide out of her published reports, but wrote in her letters home “we’ve had one corpse float by, a newborn infant; they are always throwing away infants here.”87 What is more, in many tribes the mothers ate every other newborn out of “baby hunger,” and forced their other children to eat parts of their siblings too. When I wondered how the anthropologist, Roheim, could report this and still insist on calling them good mothers, he insisted that they were really “good mothers [who] eat their own children.”88 Mothers say they kill their newborn because “children are too much trouble,” because they are “demon children,” because they were “angry at their husbands,” or “because the baby might turn out to be a sorcerer.”89 Sometimes the mothers even implicate older children in their infanticide, as in one !Kung woman’s memory of her mother telling her when she was four that she had to help bury her newborn brother so she can continue to nurse.90 Although nursing for four or five years is routine for tribal mothers, and this is usually put forth by anthropologists as evidence of affection, in fact endless nursing and sleeping naked against the child are, like overt maternal incest, only evidence of how the mothers need to cling to and sensuously use their children for the mother’s needs. The Editor of my Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology, Arthur Hippler, points out the idealization of the Alaskan Eskimos he worked with as pure “ethnographic bias. Infanticide was till recently routine, as was giving away children, killing them, neglecting their physical needs and refusing substantial emotional interaction. All this is done so smilingly and with such denial of reality that apparently only the most psychiatrically sophisticated observers noted it. Instead of the smiling, friendly, non-aggressive mask presented, Eskimo life in reality is a seething cauldron of angers and violences, emotional abandonments and impulsive acting out” within their families.91 Tribal mothers routinely kill, abandon, starve, batter, kick, burn, frighten with ghosts, use sexually and give away their children to strangers and anthropologists like Mead and Shostak still call them “devoted mothers.”92
One can clearly see an example of the bias anthropologists evidence against admitting maternal child abuse in the authoritative Growing Up: A Cross-Cultural Encyclopedia, which after dozens of anthropologists say they found “many examples of normative adult/child sexual contact” in each tribe including mothers masturbating children, but “This would not constitute ‘abuse’ if in that society the behavior was not proscribed” so they report “no sexual abuse” in the 87 cultures they examined where mothers stroke, masturbate and suck their child’s genitals because “This would not constitute ‘abuse’ if in that society the behavior was not proscribed.”93
When they become adults, they have of course internalized their infanticidal, abandoning, brutal mothers as flesh-devouring female witches or shamans, who direct their homicides and war raids to protect themselves from the spirits.94 The tribal leader is of course usually a male, since females are so little trusted, but his role is clear in the saying about a physically powerful leader: “When the chief’s breasts are full of milk, it is his people who drink.”95 They usually are a variety of schizoid personalities,96 moving easily back and forth from affection to attack, saying to their child, “Do you love your new baby brother? Why don’t you kill him?”97 As adults, they can be overly hospitable to you at one moment and then try to kill you the next with little cause, since to them you have suddenly turned into a witch. They are constantly in fear of fusing with their mothers’ menstruating vagina—which as children they were made part of during naked sleeping in the menstrual hut—so during tribal raids “warriors become the symbolic equivalent of menstruating women [since] both bloody warriors and menstruating women were charged with powerful destructive energy. Warriors’ bodies and weapons were decorated with designs marked in red hematite [and] they expropriated the destructive power of menstruating women [by] ritual nosebleeding or subincision [of their penises.]”98
Tribal myths often openly make the link between Killer Mothers and tribal wars. The Sambia say, “Numboolyu’s wife, Chenchi, killed her first male child….Because she killed the first male child, we now fight—war.”99 But even in tribes, it is mainly males who fight the wars and mainly males who lead their attacks. Why is this so across all cultures and across all of history? Are males really born more violent, as many claim? Or are males treated worse as they grow up, leading to more violent defenses later on? In the next chapter, we will examine the evidence for differential inheritance and differential early treatment of boys and girls, and then go on in further chapters to describe how common these early terrors of abuse and abandonment are, how they become imprinted into the emotional parts of the brain and under what conditions they emerge in adulthood to cause the fusion with the violence of the Killer Mother to be acted out in wars and terrorism.
Footnotes:
1 John Bierhorst, Ed., The Hungry Woman: Myths and Legends of the Aztecs. New York: William Morrow, 1984, p. 10. 2 Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, The Slave Soul of Russia: Moral Masochism and the Cult of Suffering. New York: New York University Press, 1995, p. 226. 3 For war as a fetal drama, see Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations. New York: Karnac, 2002, pp. 49-85. 4 Nancy Huston, “The Matrix of War: Mothers and Heroes.” In Susan Rubin Suleiman, The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986, p. 133. 5 Thomas Merton, Original Child Bomb. New York: New Directions, 1962. 6 Mary-Wynne Ashford and Guy Dauncey, Enough Blood Shed: 101 Solutions to Violence, Terror and War. Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2006, p. 3. 7 Pamela Johnston Conover, “Gender, Feminist Consciousness, and War.” American Journal of Political Science 37(1993): 1079; Mary E. Bendyna et al, “Gender Differences in Public Attitudes toward the Gulf War.” The Social Science Journals 33(1996): 1. 8 V. Spike Peterson, “Security and Sovereign States.” In V. Spike Peterson, Ed. Gendered States: Feminist (Re)Visions of International Relations Theory. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1992, p. 46. 9 Adam Zamoyski, Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries 1770-1871. New York: Viking, 2000, p. 23. 10 Ibid., p. 25. 11 Michael C. C. Adams, The Great Adventure: Male Desire and the Coming of World War I. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990, p. 33. 12 Henry Dicks, Licensed Mass Murder. New York: Basic Books, 1973, p. 220; Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare. New York: Basic Books, 1999, p. 133. 13 Daniel Pick, War Machine: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993, p. 70. 14 Linda Rennie Forcey, Mothers of Sons: Toward an Understanding of Responsibility. New York: Praeger, 1987, pp. 119-123. 15 Jerrold M. Post, “Leader Personality Assessments in Support of Government Policy.” In Jerrold M. Post, Ed., The Psychological Assessment of Political Leaders. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2003, p. 43. 16 Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003, p. 298. 17 George Victor, Hitler: The Pathology of Evil. New York: Potomac Books, 1999, p. 131. 18 Nicholas D. Kristof, “Kids With Bombs,” The New York Times Magazine, October 28, 2001, p. 50. 19 Joseph Lellyveld, “All Suicide Bombers Are Not Alike.” The New York Times Magazine, October 28, 2001, p. 50. 20 Lloyd deMause, “‘If I Blow Myself Up and Become a Martyr, I’ll Finally Be Loved.’” The Journal of Psychohistory 33(2006): 300-310. 21 The New York Times, February 2, 2005, p. A1. 22 Anne Marie Oliver and Paul F. Steinberg, The Road to Martyrs’ Square: A Journey Into the World of the Suicide Bomber.. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 100. 23 Ibid. 24 Ann Marie Oliver, The Road to Martyrs’ Square, p. xxiii. 25 S. Tamish, Misconceptions About Sexuality and Sexual Behavior in Palestinian Society. Ramallah: The Tamer Institute for Community Education, 1996. 26 Mona Al Munajjed, Women in Saudi Arabia Today. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997, p. 14. 27 Fran P. Hosken, The Hosken Report: Genital and Sexual Mutilation of Females. Lexington: Women’s International network News, 1993, pp. 27, 279-286; Nawal El Saadawi, The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World. Boston: Beacon Press, 1980, p. 34. 28 For more complete Islamist child abuse evidence, see Lloyd deMause, “The Childhood Origins of Terrorism.” The Journal of Psychohistory 29(2002): 340-348. 29 MSNBC, October 4, 2001. 30 Maurice Agulhon, Marianne Into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1789-1880. London: Cambridge University Press, 1981, p. 12. 31 Oscar H., Werner, The Unmarried Mother in German Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1917, p. 21. 32 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, pp. 301-307. 33 Elizabeth Badinter, Mother Love: Myth and Reality. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1981, p. 193. 34 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 189; Elizabeth Badinter, Mother Love, p. 67. 35 Elizabeth Badinter, Mother Love, p. 95. 36 Hippolyte Taine, The Ancient Regime. New York: Peter Smith, 1931, p. 136. 37 Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500. London: Longman, 1995, p. 49. 38 Lloyd deMause, Foundations of Psychohistory. New York: Creative Roots, 1982, p. 11. 39 Ibid., p. 13. 40
Chapter 2
Why Males Are More Violent
Virtually all of the warriors across history have been male, from tribal to modern times. Similarly, males have perpetrated most of the interpersonal violent crimes: in the U.S., 90% of murderers and 82% of other violent criminals are male. Males even commit suicide four times as often as females.1 The difference in male violence is usually ascribed to inherited biology—mainly to adult males having 20 times as much testosterone as females.2 The problem with this theory is that boys actually have the same testosterone levels as girls until they are about eight years old, whereas beginning in about their fourth year of life boys begin acting more violent and domineering than girls, forming structured dominance hierarchies rather than the smaller, more sharing networks formed by girls.3 Indeed, some studies—such as a recent one in Canada measuring hitting, biting and kicking—show little difference in boys and girls violent behaviors until the boys’ testosterone increases after ten years of age.4 However, careful studies have shown “no evidence of an association between testosterone and aggression in teenage boys.”5 Indeed, some studies have concluded that “testosterone efficiency is more often associated with aggression than is testosterone excess. When some men have had their testosterone lowered artificially or by castration, their aggression actually increases.”6 Indeed, testosterone levels actually plummet under stressful conditions, such as military combat.7 Goldstein summarizes the findings on testosterone: “The relative unimportance of testosterone in causing aggression is seen from the fact that differences in testosterone levels between individuals do not predict subsequent differences in their aggressive behavior—nor do short-term fluctuations in a man’s testosterone level predict changes in his levels of aggression."8 And Boyd simply concludes from his thorough study that there is “no relationship between testosterone levels and being of a violent disposition.”9
Nor do lower testosterone levels in adult women prevent them from voting for war leaders and favoring military solutions nearly as often as men—indeed, somewhat more women than men regarded the Soviet threat as requiring military response by the U.S.10 Although more men than women approved of the Gulf War, more women than men thought George Bush’s hyper-military policies in Iraq were a good way to protect the U.S. from terrorism, mainly because they were “Security Moms” who believed Bush would protect their children better.11 In America recently, there has been a gap of 36% separating married from single women, unmarried women having voted by a 25% margin for the Democratic candidate for President versus married women voting by a 11% margin for Bush.12 Even Nazi violence was backed by most German women, who “in fact voted for Hitler in even greater proportions than men.”13 Current studies of attitudes of boys and girls on whether they accept the necessity of war show almost no difference by sex.14 Still, men usually favor the use of military force more than women, and it is mainly boys who join the military and girls who praise them and cheer them on for being heroes who kill and die for their Motherland.15 Why the difference? And why the shared fantasy of boys killing and dying for a maternal symbol?
THE PSYCHOBIOLOGY OF BOYS’ EARLY ATTACHMENTS
The only neurobiological condition inherited by boys that affects later violence is they have a smaller corpus callosum, the part of the brain that connects the right and the left hemisphere.16 The larger corpus callosum of infant girls allows them to work through trauma and neglect more easily than boys. Furthermore, boys who are abused had a 25 percent reduction in sections of the corpus callosum, while girls did not.17 This means boys actually need more love and caretaking than girls as they grow up. If they do not receive enough interpersonal attention from their caretakers they suffer from damaged prefrontal cortices (self control, empathy) and from hyperactive amygdalae (fear centers), their corpus callosum is reduced further, and they have reduced serotonin levels (calming ability) and increased corticosterone production (stress hormone). All these factors make them have weak selves, reduced empathy, less control over impulsive violence and far more fears than girls.18
The central psychobiological question, then, is this: Are boys given more love and attention than girls by their caretakers in order to help them offset their greater needs? The answer, of course, is just the opposite: boys are given less care and support, from everyone in the family and in society, and they are abused far more than girls, so by the time they are three years of age they become twice as violent as girls.19 Boys’ greater violence by this time, including their propensity to form dominance gangs and to endlessly “play war,” are the results of their greater abuse and distancing by adults and being subject to demands to “grow up” and “be manly” and “not be a crybaby” and not need attachments—attitudes taught by their parents, teachers and coaches. By age four boys’ play is full of provocations that test their self-worth: “At 4 years of age, girls’ insults to one another are infrequent and minor…Boy/boy insults, however, are numerous and tough.”20 The so-called “aggressiveness” usually ascribed to boys is in fact wholly defensive, as they try to ward off their greater feelings of insecurity and hopelessness.21 It isn’t “aggression” males display; it’s bravado—defensive testing and disproof of their fears.
The mother, of course, is the focal point of this widespread distancing and insecure attachment pattern. High levels of violence and of testosterone have been shown to be associated with poorer relationships with mothers, not fathers, since mothers are the primary caretakers in most families (even in America today, fathers spend only an average of eleven minutes a day with their children).22 It is not just genetics but more importantly maternal environment that Tronick and Weinberg blame when they see from their studies that “Infant boys are more emotionally reactive than girls. They display more positive as well as negative affect, focus more on the mother, and display more signals expressing escape and distress and demands for contact than do girls.”23 This is because from infancy boys are expected to “just grow up” and not need as much emotional care as girls—indeed, boys are regularly encouraged not to express any of their feelings, since this is seen as “weak” or “babyish” in boys.24 While mothers may sometimes dominate their little girls and expect them to share their emotional problems, they distance their boys by not making contact with them and expect them to “be a man.” This begins from birth: “Over the first three months of life, a baby girl’s skills in eye contact and mutual facial gazing will increase by over 400 percent, whereas facial gazing skills in a boy during this time will not increase at all.”25 Boys grow up with less attachment strengths because careful studies show that mothers look at their boys less, because both parents hit their boys two or three times as much as they do their girls, because boys are at much higher risk than girls for serious violence against them, and because boys are continuously told to be “tough,” not to be a “wimp” or a “weakling,” not to be “soft” or a “sissy.”26 As Tom Brown told his chum when he wanted him to appear more manly: “Don’t ever talk about home, or your mother and sisters…you’ll get bullied.”27 Real boys don’t admit they need their mothers. When William Pollack researched his book Real Boys’ Voices, he asked boys “Have you ever been called a ‘wuss,’ ‘wimp,’ or ‘fag’? ‘Oh, that,’ one boy said. ‘That happens every day. I thought it was just a part of being a boy!’” Another said, “Boys are just as sensitive as girls are, but we’re not allowed to show our feelings. We’re put in this narrow box and if we try to break out, we’re made fun of, or threatened.’”28 Pollack accurately shows boys are not more “aggressive”—they are just more often shamed if they show their feelings. He accurately says “bravado is a defense against shame…we too often mistake for ‘badness’ what is really covert sadness and frustration about having to fulfill an impossible test of self.”29 This intense sadness and rage at being abandoned is deeply unconscious, dissociated—what Garbarino terms “the emotional amnesia of lost boys.”30
The propensity of beating boys instead of understanding and caring for them is both cross-cultural and cross-historical. We are startled when we read how Aztecs routinely beat their boys bloody to make them good warriors and how Spartans often beat them to death in public “toughening” rituals. But when I spoke to an audience of psychotherapists in London recently and told them that “two-thirds of British mothers said they routinely hit their infants in the first year of their lives, about the same proportion as in the U.S., and that hardly anyone was never smacking their four-year-olds…and that hitting with implements was still used on 91% of boys and 59% of girls,” they found it hard to believe. Then, when I told them that a dozen European nations have now passed laws against hitting children for any reason, and that as a result in nations like Sweden only 6% of parents hit children—and with the additional result that approval of military ventures has also decreased dramatically—they promised me they would raise a protest meeting outside of Parliament and get a law against hitting children passed soon.31
Although historically mothers have played the main role in abusive families because they were expected to bring up their children virtually by themselves along with overwhelming other tasks, today in some nations some portion of fathers really play a major role in caring for their children and thereby produce far less violent and less sexist offspring. “When a boy is able from the earliest age to identify with his father, and when that identification includes loving, nurturing and feeling connected with others, he does not need to be contemptuous of women in order to solidify his identity as a man.”32 It is not that identification with a father is needed to be warm and empathic, as some say. In fact, both single mothers and single fathers have been studied and found “better in all areas” of emotional life.33 It is, rather, that when boys are raised with empathy, no matter what the sex of the caretaker(s), they grow up non-violent. As we will see in future chapters, childrearing is an evolutionary process, and in some countries a portion of both mothers and fathers now bring up their children without abuse or neglect.
In most of the world, however, the younger and more vulnerable children are, the more they are hit. When I gave the speech on British childrearing in London and told a British parent that even Tony Blair “smacked” his little baby, he said it was necessary: “Sure. They can’t talk, so you have to hit them to teach them obedience!” As Straus puts it in his book Beating the Devil Out of Them: “Hitting toddlers is just about universal.”34 By the time they are two or three years old, girls form groups that are built around mutuality, not dominance, whereas boys form defensive groups that use pretend or real violence to enforce rules and violent heroic action. They pretend that the group is itself like a mother’s body with whom they fuse to gain her power and toward whom they act as a savior, as a group “Hero.”35 Boys who have been distanced by mothers and others in their families in their first three years form defensive “toughness” by the time they are four, demonstrating they are not weak, not wimps, by being a Hero to their group and defeating the out-group’s Hero.36 In school, teachers repeat the differing gender patterns. “When girls aggress, nobody notices and nobody reacts. Teachers respond to boys when they scream, cry, or whine; they respond to girls when they use gestures, gentle touches, and speech.”37 Even in sports, boys are conditioned that violence and victory are good defenses against fears of weak selves, are effective in displaying bravado. Females—with their larger frontal lobes more equally distributed—are able to make friends and form groups based more on like interests, without their prefrontal cortices losing control to the overwhelming fears embedded in their amygdalae, as happens in males, and without the regular loss of empathy that abused, neglected and insecurely attached males experience.38
HOW BOYS EXTERNALIZE THEIR FEARS
Abuse and neglect produce equally damaging results in the brains of both boys and girls, but girls tend more to respond with dissociative internalizing symptoms (withdrawal, depressions, helplessness, dependence), while boys tend more to act out fight/flight responses (externalizing, impulsive, hyperactive). That boys act out in their play the abuse they experience is a common enough observation. But what is usually overlooked is that boys’ violence is also self-destructive, a real re-experiencing of the hurts and fears they have experienced. You are a “real boy” when you show you do not have fears, when you prove you are not weak: “The greater the risk the greater the proof of manhood. ‘We’ve all got scars,’ one boy proudly said as he rolled up his sleeves to show off his symbols of manhood.”39 This behavior is baffling to girls: “The girls could not understand what drove the boys to bruise their bodies on the playground so that they could acquire scars to prove their manhood.”40 But in “playing war” boys as often “fall down dead” as they “kill others.”41 Reenacting abuse is very much a masochistic self-destructive activity; wars are fought as much to die and to be mutilated—to be a hero for the Motherland—as they are to kill Bad Self enemies. Anything is better than being seen as weak, abandoned, unloved; better to take risks and court death. Taking unnecessary risks is why boys have four times as many “accidental” deaths as girls.42 Whereas girls who were unloved as children become depressed and sometimes cut themselves, unloved boys jump off dangerous barriers on their skateboards or become the bully of the neighborhood and get beat up by gangs. In analyzing violent men, Toch found they all had “been flooded all their life with strong feelings of being weak and insignificant, helpless and fearful.”43 James Gilligan found the violent criminals he spent his life analyzing as a prison psychiatrist told him they didn’t do it because they wanted to hurt people or to get money, but rather said, “I never got so much respect before in my life as I did when I first pointed a gun at somebody.”44 The same motivations apply to warriors: kill others rather than be seen as weak, fearful and unloved, even if—in fact, because—it is provocative and self-destructive, a re-enactment of the death fears of being a helpless, abandoned, misused child. Wars are in truth self-destructive activities, both in being a dead hero yourself and in killing a Bad Self enemy. Wars—like homicides and suicides—are extremely serious emotional disorders, inner emotional states rooted in the neurobiological consequences of child abuse and neglect. As Miedzien demonstrates, the reason why males rob, steal and kill with ten times the frequency as females is “I had to prove that I was a man,” and “involvement in war is a proof of manhood.”45
The propensity of boys to engage in violent, risky, self-destructive behaviors is increased by their often responding to maternal distancing by building defensive fantasies that they are encased in “autistic shells” that make them invulnerable to dangers and that “hide their tender parts” from their unresponsive parents.46 This is why boys are over ten times more likely to be afflicted with full-blown autism than girls,47 where they ignore the emotions of others and actually crawl inside boxes and cling to hard surfaces and mechanical devices in place of relating to caretakers.48 This fantasy “shell” is also the source of boys’ early fascination with cars and other encasing mechanical toys. Parents who warn boys against dangerous car driving know they often are wasting their time since boys know the activity is for the purpose of courting dangers. As Nietzsche proclaimed, “The secret to getting the most fun out of life is: to live dangerously.”49 But this overlooks that boys know at some level that they are far more likely to be seriously injured or killed in accidents, and that their engaging in risky behavior is actually designed to be self-destructive.
HOW BOYS ARE GIVEN LESS LOVE AND CARE THAN GIRLS
Perhaps because boys’ needs are greater than girls’, harried and often depressed mothers give them less love and attention from birth. Careful studies reveal that mothers look at and talk more with their daughters than with their sons, spend more time interacting with them, smile more at their daughters than at their sons, direct more orders and prohibitions toward their sons, and use more severe disciplinary styles and more shaming techniques toward them.50 The difference in how mothers see infants is demonstrated in studies that show when the babies are dressed in gender-neutral clothing they are seen as displaying “fear” when the mothers are told they are girls but “anger” when they are told they are boys.51 In the patriarchal ethos throughout history, mother-son separation is mandated and “overclose” mothers are disparaged. “By expecting our sons to cut off from us, we make sure that they do.”52 Abandoned, damaged, and abused males therefore become the violent men who fight wars “to save our Motherland,” to re-enact their abuse, and to punish any Bad Self “enemies” they can provoke. Fathers re-enforce the distancing by making their sons ashamed of being a “Mommy’s boy,” ashamed of having emotions, since “big boys don’t cry,” ashamed of their fears, since “being tough” is the goal of male life, as evidenced by the fact that most husbands in most societies across history beat their wives.53 Teachers re-enforce the harm by denying the fears of boys, in the classroom or in the playground, saying they don’t need more attention but just “more discipline.” Plus the textbooks teachers use to teach goals idealize their own nation and demonize others,54 in hyper-masculine language that makes most state violence “rational” and praises the “heroes who died for our Motherland,” even in quite unnecessary wars. And the media, television and cinema endlessly teach how being a warrior brings you respect and “honor” as a denial of your feelings of weakness.55
But the crucial variable is the distancing and lack of care given to boys by most mothers in all societies. Whether it is because mothers are female and can more closely identify with the needs of their girls or because the boys are male like their husbands and are blamed for their failings and lack of help in child care or any one of dozens of other reasons that we will examine in the next chapter, mothers teach their boys that “it is not enough to separate from her; he must make a total, wrenching split [and] exorcise any aspect of his mother from his own personality….The battle between establishing distance and clinging to dependence takes hold of a boy almost at the moment that he learns to differentiate himself from his mother or sister as a male, rather than a female.”56 The only way boys sometimes are allowed to get close to their mothers is when they are sick—times that are remembered by men as blissful since only then can they admit their desperate need for nurturing. In contrast, “over 80 percent of the men in my study remembered a recurring childhood nightmare of coming home from school and finding their mothers gone. With mounting terror, the little boy would run from room to room looking for his mother…most of the men described memories of a deep loneliness, feelings of being totally helpless.”57
Mothers may dominate their little girls and expect them to share their troubles, but domination has been found to be far less damaging to the child’s psyche than abandonment and routine distancing. Mothers throughout history simply give up on closeness to their sons at birth because they are expected to “say goodbye” almost immediately: “After the first few years a boy goes over to his father. And then he leaves home and that’s it….’A son is a son till he gets him a wife, a daughter’s a daughter the rest of her life.’” A daughter is seen as a companion, “a friend for life;” “boys soon say goodbye.”58 Boys become more emotionally needy than girls: “They…focus more on the mother, display more signals expressing escape and distress and demands for contact than do girls.”59 Sons are often encouraged to play the role of being a “bodyguard” to the mother, becoming “man of the house” or even “lover” in response to his father’s frequent absence, hoping to cheer up his depressed or beaten or alcoholic mother60—an important basis for his later fantasy that he must be a Hero who can save his Motherland. It is not surprising that careful studies have shown that in “the overwhelming majority (four out of five), mothers and daughters were closer than mothers and sons…As one mother put it, ‘When I look at my daughter, I see myself. When I look at my son, I see my son.’”61
HOW BOYS’ ABANDONMENT AND SHAME IS DEFENDED AGAINST BY GRANDIOSITY AND VIOLENCE
Pollack describes the results of boys’ more abandoning and abusive childrearing as “society’s shame-hardening process.”62 If they are ashamed of what their mothers have taught them they are and by their continuing need for her understanding, they “learn to suffer quietly, in retreat behind the mask of masculinity [and] cover up the more gentle, caring, vulnerable sides of themselves.”63 If, of course, they are brought up with love and care, like my sons—and probably like yours—they grow up neither violent nor war lovers. But abandoned and abused boys regularly hide their shame and fears behind a defensive fantasy of grandiosity, dominance and violent bravado.64 The violence they exhibit both kills other Bad Selves (called “enemies”), who like themselves are seen as both angry and weak, plus it provokes the violence of others, inviting self-destructive, suicidal responses. Confrontation, “carrying a chip on their shoulders,” is their defense against admitting that they feel weak, rejected and worthless.65 Even young boys play by forming hierarchies—not small networks like girls do—where they can fuse with a dominant, violent leader in order not to feel weak.66 Their feelings of weakness and their memories of their rejecting mother remain in dissociated modules and networks in the brain, embedded early on but unavailable to conscious modification as an adult. Girls in groups usually talk openly about any problems they have with their mothers, “criticizing them, hating them, loving them. But in interviewing boys I found they became reticent or evasive in a group, reluctant to talk about their mothers…If I asked them directly if they would want to change anything about their mothers, most would say, ‘No.’”67 Boys simply can’t be seen to criticize their moms (nor their Motherlands). As Ann Caron puts it: “Men’s perceptions of their mothers are idealized or out of focus…At an unconscious level, masculinity was organized around sustaining this fantasy of the mother.”68 In the next chapter, we will examine the psychobiology of how the abandonment and abuse of early childhood gets imprinted into the psyche and brain, and why men feel they must fuse with their Killer Motherland and go to war against their Bad Selves.
Footnotes:
1 Robert W. Firestone, Suicide and the Inner Voice. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1997, p. 68.
2 Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 144.
3 Kaj Bjoerkqvist, et al., “Do Girls Manipulate and Boys Fight?” Aggressive Behavior 18(117).
4 Willard W. Hartup, “The Development of Aggression: Where Do We Stand?” Richard E. Tremblay et al, Eds., Developmental Origins of Aggression. New York: The Guilford Press, 2005, p. 6; John Archer and Sylvana Cote, “Sex Differences in Aggressive Behavior: A Developmental and Evolutionary Perspective,” Ibid., p. 433.
5 Stephanie H. M. Van Goozen, “Hormones and the Developmental Origins of Aggression.” In Richard E. Tremblay et al, Eds., Developmental Origins of Aggression. New York: The Guilford Press, 2005, p. 287; J. Archer, “The Influence of Testosterone on Human Aggression,” British Journal of Psychology 82 (1991): 1-28.
6 Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity. New York: Knopf, 2003, p. 12.
7 Stephen J. Ducat, The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity. New York: Beacon Press, p. 178.
8 Goldstein, War and Gender, p. 149.
9 Neil Boyd, The Beast Within: Why Men Are Violent. New York: Greystone Books, 2000, p. 134.
10 Joshua S. Goldstein, The Real Price of War: How You Pay for the War on Terror. New York: New York University Press, 2004, p. 169. The so-called “gender gap” of married women in recent U.S. polls favoring less violent options seems to be caused by their responsibility for the safety of their children; see Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender, p. 129.
11 Mary E. Bendyna, et al., “Gender Differences in Public Attitudes toward the Gulf War.” The Social Science Journals 33(1996):1-22; “New Poll Shows Women’s Vote Critical in Final Days,” www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=512. Katherine Ellison, The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood Makes Us Smarter. New York: Basic Books, 2005, p. 34; for a conflicting viewpoint, see Pamela J. Conover, “Gender, Feminist Consciousness, and War.” American Journal of Political Science (37(1993): 1079-1099.
12 The Boston Globe, March 12, 2006, p. 12.
13 Renate Bridenthal et al., Eds., When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984, p. 34.
14 Howard Tolley, Jr., Children and War: Political Socialization to International Conflict. New York: Teachers College Press, 1973, p. 40.
15 Michael A. Milburn and Sheree D. Conrad, The Politics of Denial. London: The MIT Press, 1996, pp. 22, 55; Lawrence LeShan, The Psychology of War: Comprehending Its Mystique And Its Madness. New York: Helios Press, 2002, p. 91.
16 Robet H. Blank, Brain Policy: How the New Neuroscience Will Change Our Lives and Our Politics. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1999, p. 66.
17 Frederic Schiffer, Of Two Minds: The Revolutionary Science of Dual-Brain Psychology. New York: The Free Press, 1998, p. 91.
18 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, New York: Karnac,2002, pp. 145-146; William J. Cromie, “Childhood Abuse Hurts the Brain.” Harvard University Gazette. May 22, 2003; Deborah Blum, Sex on the Brain: The Biological Differences Between Men and Women. New York: Penguin, 1998, p. 180.
19 John Archer and Sylvana Cote, “Sex Differences in Aggressive Behavior: A Developmental and Evolutionary Perspective.” In Richard E. Tremblay, at al, Eds., Developmental Origins of Aggression, pp. 431-434.
20 Evelyn G. Pitcher, Boys and Girls at Play: The Development of Sex Roles. New York: Praeger, 1983, p. 51.
21 James F. Masterson, Search For The Real Self: Unmasking The Personality Disorders Of Our Age. New York: Free Press, 1990.
22 Alan Booth et al, “Testosterone and Child and Adolescent Adjustment: The Moderating Role of Parent-Child Relationships.” Developmental Psychology 39(2003): 85-98; Terrence Real, I Don’t Want To Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression. New York: Scribner, 1997, p. 143.
23 E. Z. Tronick and M. Katherine Weinberg, “Depressed Mothers and Infants: Failure to Form Dyadic States of Consciousness.” In Lynne Murray and Peter J. Cooper, Eds., Postpartum Depression and Child Development. New York: The Guilford Press, 1997, p. 61.
24 Eleanor E. Maccoby, The Two Sexes: Growing Up Apart, Coming Together. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1998, p. 139.
25 Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain. New York: Morgan Road Books, 2006, p. 15.
26 Murray A. Straus, Beating The Devil Out Of Them: Corporal Punishment in American Families and its Effects on Children. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2001; Gavin Nobes et al, “Physical Punishment by Mothers and Fathers in British Homes.” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 14(1999): 887-902.
27 Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s School Days. Philadelphia: Henry Altemus, 1895, p. 210.
28 William S. Pollack, Real Boys’ Voices. New York: Random House, 2000, p. 20.
29 Ibid., p. 36.
30 James Garbarino, Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them. New York: The Free Press, 1999, p. 43.
31 Peter Newell, Children Are People Too: The Case Against Physical Punishment. London: Bedford Square Press, 1989, p. 69; Lloyd deMause, “What the British Can Do To End Child Abuse,” The Journal of Psychohistory 34(1006): 2-15.
32 William S. Pollack, Real Boys’ Voices, p. 90.
33 Ibid., p. 104.
34 Murray A. Straus, Beating the Devil Out of Them, p. 23.
35Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, pp. 123-124.
36 Eleanor E. Maccoby, The Two Sexes: Growing Up Apart, Coming Together. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1998.
37 Anne Campbell, Men, Women and Aggression. New York: BasicBooks, 1993, p. 34.
38 Elkhonon Goldberg, The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 98; Louis Cozolino, The Neuroscience of Human Relationships: Attachment and the Developing Social Brain. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006, p. 273.
39 Myriam Miedzian, Boys Will Be Boys: Breaking the Link Between Masculinity and Violence. New York: Lantern Books, 2002, p. 92.
40 Ibid., p. 93.
41 Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 137.
42 Evelyn Silten Bassoff, Between Mothers and Sons: The Making of Vital and Loving Men. New York: Dutton, 1994, p. 34.
43 Sue Mansfield, The Gestalts of War: An Inquiry Into Its Origins and Meanings as a Social Institution. New York: Dial Press, 1982, p. 198.
44 James Gilligan, Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic. New York: Vintage Books, 1996, p. 109.
45 Myriam Miedzian, Boys Will Be Boys: Breaking the Link Between Masculinity and Violence. New York: Doubleday, 1991, p. 205.
46 Judith L. Mitrani, Ordinary People and Extra-Ordinary Protections: A Post-Kleinian Approach to the Treatment of Primitive Mental States. New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2001, p. 48.
47 Marc D. Hauser, “Knowing About Knowing.” Ann. N.Y. Acad.Sci. 1001(2003): 93.
48 Frances Tustin, Autism and Childhood Psychosis. New York: Hogarth Press, 1972.
49 Leonard Sax, Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know about the Emerging Science of Sex Differences. New York: Random House, 2005, pp. 42-43.
50 Bonnie Macmillan, Why Boys Are Different and How to Bring Out the Best in Them. London: Hamlyn, 2004, pp. 46, 55, 69, 73, 141, 143; Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson, Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys. New York: Ballantine Books, 1999, p. 53; Evelyn S. Bassoff, Between Mothers and Sons, pp. 53-54.
51 Cynthia Eller, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000, p. 70.
52 Andrea O’Reilly, Ed. Mothers & Sons: Feminism, Masculinity, and the Struggle to Raise Our Sons. New York: Routledge, 2001, p. 14.
53 Shelley E. Taylor, Tending Instinct: How Nurturing Is Essential for Who We Are and How We Live. New York: Times Books, 2002, p. 102.
54 Howard Zinn, Howard Zinn on War. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001.
55 James Bowman, Honor: A History. New York: Encounter Books, 2006.
56 Carole Klein, Mothers and Sons. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1984, pp. 50, 7.
57 Ibid., pp. 46-47.
58 Olga Silverstein and Beth Rashbaum, The Courage to Raise Good Men. New York: Viking, 1994, p. 7.
59 E. Z. Tronick and M. Katherine Weinberg, “Depressed Mothers and Infants: Failure to Form Dyadic States of Consciousness.” In Lynne Murray and Peter J. Cooper, Eds., Postpartum Depression and Child Development. New York: The Guilford Press, 1997, p. 69.
60 Ibid., p. 63; James Garbarino, Lost Boys, p. 56.
61 Louis Genevie and Evan Margolies, The Motherhood Report: How Women Feel about Being Mothers. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1987, p. 289.
62 William Pollack, Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1998, p. 11.
63 Ibid., p. 13.
64 Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You? Reconnecting Men and Women. New York: Scribner, 2002, p. 95.
65 Eleanor E. Maccoby, The Two Sexes, p. 130.
66 Dan Kindlon, Alpha Girls. New York: Rodale, 2006, p. 68.
67 Ann F. Caron, Strong Mothers, Strong Sons: Raising Adolescent Boys in the ‘90s. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1994, p. 66.
68 Ibid., p. 68.
Chapter 3
The Psychology and Neurobiology of Violence
In the past two decades over a hundred careful studies have shown that violence is the result of insecure/disorganized early attachments. Furthermore, in recent years major advances in neurobiological techniques have revealed how these early disordered attachments are embedded in the brain and are reenacted in later life in personal and social violence.
This book is based upon the premise that the evolution of amounts of interpersonal violence, terrorism and war is dependent upon the evolution of historical personality types, which I call “psychoclasses.” This evolution, in turn, depends upon the historical evolution of childrearing modes, as shown in the charts below. The evidence for the evolution of childrearing has been the subject of seven books and over eighty scholarly articles by myself published during the past four decades, backed up by the findings of over fifty psychohistorical colleagues which I have published in my scholarly journals, The Journal of Psychohistory and The Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology.1
The evolution of childrearing is an uneven historical process, both within societies and in different areas of the world, so each nation today has all six personality modes—which I term “psychoclasses”—within it, forming its various levels of political behavior from reactionary to progressive. Nevertheless, the evolution of childrearing modes and historical personalities—which I term “psychogenesis”—has improved personalities over the centuries in almost all areas of the globe, reducing the violence produced by abusive and abandoning parenting. This historical evolution of childrearing is reflected in the opening sentence of my 1974 book, The History of Childhood:
The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes, the lower the level of child care, and the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorized, and sexually abused.2
Since I will be showing in this book that childrearing is the origin of both personal violence and war, this improvement over the centuries in childhood in the most advanced societies should show a steady decrease in personal and group violence. The chart on page 40 demonstrates this decline in human violence, based upon actual rates of the various forms of violence as shown in the historical record. It reflects a steady decline of those dying from infanticide (infanticide is not usually counted as murder), homicide, suicide, war and democide (state killing of its own population) from about 75 percent in tribal groups to under 2 percent dying of violence in developed democratic societies today.3
As we will see in forthcoming chapters, the rate of childrearing evolution for most of history crucially depends upon the amount of love and support give to mothers, who have been the primary caretakers of children in their early years. Psychogenesis depends upon parents not reinflicting the damage done to them by their own families. It usually goes unrecorded in the historical record, occurring as mothers decide not to use her child erotically, not to tie it up so long in tight swaddling bands, not to turn her back or call the child “demanding” as the child tries to relate to her. A mother who was badly abused herself as a child, sexually, physically, emotionally, can hardly be expected to be able to give love and empathy to her own child—she is severely “post-partum depressed,” as most mothers were in history and as a third or more of mothers still
are today in more advanced nations (up to 80% have “baby blues.”)4 Mothers are human, after all, and since most females in history have been routinely tied up, genitally mutilated, beaten, raped and subjected to daily abuse (as for instance most Muslim women today still are),5 one can hardly be surprised that as mothers they are not able to be loving caretakers of their children. As we will see in later chapters, it is after historical periods when girls and women are given new rights and opportunities to grow that they improve childrearing and that when the next generation becomes adult it introduces new political freedoms and economic opportunities, changing society for the better as they become more independent of old ways.
THE FORMATION OF THE MIND AND BRAIN THROUGH ATTACHMENTS
The mind and therefore the emotional content of the brain are created in the first few years of life through the attachment bond between the infant and the primary caretaker. (Fathers can be perfectly effective primary caretakers too, of course, although few historically have chosen to do so.)6 From the very beginning, the mother’s emotionally expressive face and eyes are the most important objects in the infant’s world, and the infant’s wide pupils evoke the mother’s gaze and increase her oxytocin, stimulating her attachment and especially her empathy, as registered in her mirror neurons.7 (As we will soon see, loss of the ability of mirror neurons to feel empathy is crucial in the formation of violence in the brain.) A mother who is too depressed or too busy or too angry to respond to her child’s emotionally expressive face is laying down the foundation of all later violence. “The baby sees his own self when he looks at the mother’s face and what he sees there is vital for the feeling of ‘I am seen, so I exist, feel real, and my existence has been proved.’”8 It is mainly the right hemisphere of both mother and infant that regulates early emotional states and copes with stress.9 Romanian orphans put in cribs at birth and fed regularly but not smiled at or “sung to” usually die, since they have “black holes” in their brain scans rather than healthy, functioning right hemispheres.10 Even rhesus monkeys who are separated at birth from their mothers’ gaze grow up fearful and violently attack other monkeys.11 Insecurely attached children actually display nine times as much aggression as their securely attached peers.12 Obviously the degree of infant-maternal attachment crucially affects the amount of violence later acted out in adults.
In the first two months, the infant who is properly cared for experiences what Stern calls an “emergent sense of self,” during which the “looking into the eyes that are looking back into his is a central event around which everything turns…The baby’s brain is literally tuned by the caregiver’s brain to produce the correct neurotransmitters and hormones…The infant discovers that he or she has a mind and that other people have minds as well.”13 Experiments showing how depressed or angry mothers regularly produce insecurely attached infants who grow up to be violent adults—the so-called “Ainsworth studies” of emotional neglect in childhood—now run into the hundreds worldwide.14 Severe maternal neglect can be seen in most mothers who are post-partum depressed or who drink alcohol daily or smoke a lot or are maritally dissatisfied or who are lone caretakers (only one in six children see their father once or more a week in America, and the majority of American children today live their lives in homes without fathers).15 Insecure/disorganized attachments are “attempts by the child to resolve the paradox presented by a frightened/frightening attachment figure by assuming the role of the caregiver…[When the caregiver’s actions are designed] to humiliate him or her into submission…the child seems motivated to protect the parent by being excessively cheery, polite, or helpful.”16 It is this reaction to authoritarian/abandoning parenting which has been the rule during most of history that gets repeated so often in political behavior, where insecurely-parented nations cling to Punitive Parent Leaders in response to their demands for submission.
The infanticide, tying up, starving, battering, torture and rape of children that has been routine in history will be examined in more detail in later chapters of this book. Even today, however, most children in most nations are badly abused and neglected in their early years. This is denied by most people. A recent survey of British doctors, for instance, said they believed the child sexual abuse rate was “probably less than one percent,” while careful studies of U.K. childhood sexual assault showed two-thirds of girls and one-third of boys had been used sexually.17 The figures for the U.S. are about the same. Physical abuse is even more prevalent; two-thirds of British mothers said they routinely hit their infants in their first year of life, and in the next two years 97% said they hit their children “at least once a week…most a good deal more often,” using straps, belts, canes and sticks on the boys.18 Figures for less advanced societies are even higher, where, for instance, many Islamic societies still raping the majority of both girls and boys, and “infanticide, abandonment of babies, to beating, shaking, burning, cutting, poisoning” are found to be common.19 Since Islamic females traditionally have had their genitals painfully cut off as young girls,20 it is hard to be surprised that they grow up to be less than effective mothers.
Most mothers in history and a majority of mothers even today experience post-partum depression, which badly affects their ability to take care of and show love and empathy for their babies. It is bad enough that child care is itself so demanding: A study of 900 American mothers found that they most enjoyed “socializing, praying, eating, exercising, watching TV and cooking” more than “taking care of my children.”21 Even more crucial are the studies that show that 80 percent of mothers experience either (1) mild “baby blues” for months after birth, (2) postpartum depression for up to several years, or (3) puerperal psychosis: “They feel low, anxious, tearful, and irritable. They have rapid mood swings…feel hopeless…experience panic attacks...feel worthless, inadequate…have suicidal thoughts and thoughts of harming or killing their children.”22 They regularly think: “I had Holly in a carriage, going onto the escalator, and I remember thinking, ‘if I let go of this carriage, she’ll probably be dead at the end’ or ‘I could drop Jamie right in the lake and he’d be drowned.’”23 They confess they are “afraid to be alone with my baby.” Depressed mothers are “about 40 percent of the time unresponsive or disengaged, whilst much of the rest of the time they are angry, intrusive and rough with their babies.”24 Some psychiatrists call postpartum mood disorders “the biggest complication of birth today. Yet despite the epidemic proportions of such illnesses, they fail to receive the attention they deserve.”25 It is understandable that careful studies have found that “those children whose mothers had been depressed in the months after childbirth were more violent than other children.”26 And, since mothers are the main caretakers in the family, it is not surprising that mothers or mother substitutes are still today responsible for more of the cases of violent physical abuse of children than fathers or father substitutes.27
Although depression is recognized as usually caused by an overexcited amygdalan fear network and a reduction of the calming hormone serotonin, postpartum depression is not in fact caused by maternal hormone changes after birth.28 Abusive mothers are either depressed or angry, and the cortisol levels of both depressed and angry mothers are elevated both in the mother and in her child.29 There are two sources of depression, child abuse and neglect by parents: (1) the kind of parenting the parents themselves received in their own childhood, and (2) the lack of assistance they receive as parents from their families and societies in caring for the child.
The parents of the caretaker are still present as “ghosts in the nursery” when the child is born, in the form of dissociated persecutory alters (alternative personalities)—internal objects and voices that repeat the traumas and fears the caretaker experienced as a child, since “The hurtful parent was once a hurt child.”30 Parents often believe that when their babies cry they “sound just like my mother, complaining all the time” or “just like my father, a real tyrant!” They themselves repeat exactly the same words and feelings their own mothers always yelled at them: “You’re so selfish! You never think of me!”31 The mother experiences herself as the good, persecuted mother while the baby is seen as a primarily bad, utterly persecuting and justifiable object of hatred.32 The helpless, vulnerable child experiences this reenactment of maternal fear and hatred as ending in abandonment or death. As Joseph Rheingold says, “Most mothers do not murder or totally reject their children, but death pervades the relationship between mother and child.”33 These death fears become the basis for all later violence, both personal and social. Fay Weldon puts it succinctly: “Once you have children, you realize how wars start.”34
The second source of post-partum fear, anger and depression in the mother is the lack of assistance they get in caring for their children. When the mother must work and gets no help in caring for her children, when the father is violent toward her or demands constant attention, when there are deaths or severe illnesses in the family, when economic or military disruptions or dozens of other sources of maternal stress that are the norm in families throughout history occur, caretakers simply cannot offer the time and energy and love that are required to form secure attachments to their infants, so they grow up to be insecure, disorganized children who are irrational, out of control and violent later on.35 In European nations today like Austria where the government provides mothers three years of paid leave for each child plus other daycare help, mothers are far more able to be effective caretakers, and rates of youth homicide and suicide and drug abuse have declined dramatically.36
THE FEAR OF BEING KILLED BY YOUR MOTHER
Whether the mother is depressed and withdrawn or dominating and angry, the extremely vulnerable baby and young child fears being killed or abandoned by her, and this fear of imminent death is embedded in the brain in a dissociated alter in its right hemisphere, where it is unavailable for correction as the child grows up. Beginning with two path-breaking psychiatrists writing in the 1970s—Joseph Rheingold (The Mother, Anxiety, and Death: The Catastrophic Death Complex) and Dorothy Bloch (“So the Witch Won’t Eat Me”: Fantasy and the Child’s Fear of Infanticide)—psychoanalysts have begun to address the fact that many of their patients continue to fear and defend against early death-dealing Killer Mother alters that remain in a cut-off dissociated state in their psyches. Rheingold emphasizes the child’s terror of being violently killed by their mother who wishes him dead, and shows that he concludes that it must be because he is bad and that “by dying he appeases her and hopes to gain her affection.”37 Rheingold sees this as not only the source of suicide and other self-destructive behavior but as the ultimate source of religion in rebirth fantasies such as the Christian and Islamic wish to die and be merged with God/Allah, shouting “Allahu akbar,” “God is Great,” the Killer Mother is Great, where “mother’s love is the prize of death.”38 Rheingold reports on Despert’s studies of the dreams of preschool children, which are “almost always sadistic [and] concern being chased, bitten, and devoured [by beasts, identified with the mother] never pushed, hit, scratched, or kicked, all hostile acts that he might have actually encountered.”39 Even when Sylvia Anthony “asked normal children of 2 to 5 years of age to tell a story [of any kind, they told ones] of aggression, death and destruction and fears…of wild animals like lions, wolves, and gorillas, of ghosts and witches.”40 Rheingold’s work backed an earlier statement by Freud that he found a “surprising, yet regular, dread of being killed by the mother” in patients,41 a clinical finding that he soon explained away by positing an inherited “death instinct” rather than destructive mothering. Since children have little fear of normal dying of old age, Rheingold emphasizes that “the child does not fear to die; he fears being murdered…thoughts of punishment and death come readily to the minds of children.”42 Being unloved means being killed for being bad.
Dorothy Bloch is one of the first psychiatrists actually treating young children, and she was startled to find that her little patients constantly feared that she “or their parents—might kill them. That the fear of infanticide might be their central preoccupation? Absurd. As one child after another admitted me to his world of fantasy, however, I witnessed a terror of being killed that varied only in its intensity.”43 As she discovered that the world of little children “abounded in beasts of terrifying mien, in cruel witches and monsters who pursued their victims with unrelenting savagery,” she became convinced that “the identities behind these imaginary, terrifying figures are the child’s own parents… [Although] children’s fantasies appeared to concentrate on the fear of being killed, the displacement of terror onto monsters was obviously designed to preserve an idealized image of their parents.”44 And when the displacement onto monsters is investigated further, she found they picked up the mother doll and “stated with deep feeling, ‘She wants her child to die!’”45 And, of course, she regularly found the mother was violent toward the child or constantly said things like “I wish I never had you” or even that the parents were violent toward each other, with “the intensity of their fear depending upon…the degree of violence they have experienced.”46 Even maternal depression alone convinced the child that they were worthless; indeed, maternal withdrawal regularly produces more insecure attachments than maternal domination and anger.47 Bloch constantly found that her patient “idealized his parents [and] convinced himself that his parents wanted to and were capable of loving him, but that it was his worthlessness that made them hate and even want to destroy him. The investment in this distortion seemed universal.”48 After the child is convinced he is bad and deserving to be destroyed, every incident in his life becomes proof of his responsibility for unhappy events: “Is there a death in the family?—he’s a murderer. An accident?—he’s the secret perpetrator…His ‘badness’ causes his mother to leave him for a job…and drives his father to absent himself on business trips…he is the subject of every quarrel and the author of every disaster [even of] divorce.” And when boys regularly draw and play soldiers and warfare, they reveal their “concern with murder and annihilation” as their “response to their fear of infanticide.”49
Other psychoanalysts have picked up the themes of Rheingold and Bloch and shown by careful statistical studies that “securely attached individuals report less fear of death than insecurely attached individuals” and that the expectation of death as punishment for being “bad” is caused by insecure or disorganized attachments.50 Stern, Anthony and others have confirmed that “dreams are full of death symbolism” beginning at eight months of age when babies begin to experience pavor nocturnes attacks and nightmares when “sleep is interrupted by intense terror personified by an attacking monster.”51 Various Jungians have written on the child’s fears of the Terrible Mother or devouring Dragon Mother.52 Dozier’s book, entitled Fear Itself: The Origin and Nature of the Powerful Emotion That Shapes Our Lives and Our World, concludes: “From ages four to six, the fear of death and imaginary threats come to dominate the child’s mind [including] fears of monsters, ghosts, murderers, tigers, lions, or other predatory animals.”53 Rorschach and Thematic Apperception tests found that “children consistently identified death itself with punishment and violence.”54 Kahr found his patients in a British psychiatric hospital all told him their parents wanted to kill them and that furthermore he “soon discovered that many of my patients had experienced profound death threats and attempts on their lives in childhood and adolescence. The bodies of these patients remained alive, but the souls had suffered untold destruction.”55 And Masterson found children of borderline mothers felt that “the only way they could please their own mothers was to kill themselves” and that their mothers actually often told them “I’d be better off without you” and “I could kill you.”56
Least it be objected that most of these studies are from clinical populations, further studies must be cited to show that even in an advanced population, an upper middle class New York City area, most of the preschool children are full of fears of being killed by their parents. One study was conducted for several years by Stephen Joseph, and shows convincingly that “Young children are afraid most of the time, so afraid that they find it difficult to learn, to think, and to grow.”57 Joseph simply sat on a chair on one side of a nursery school, and told the children he was just there to talk to them, not supervise them. He found that although they generally tried to hide their real feelings, they were hourly “preoccupied with death and death games.”58 Monsters, ghosts and witches were constantly out to kill them, and when they weren’t actually fighting between themselves, “they played war games or cops and robbers…Most were battles between the good guys and the bad guys [with] constant ordering of alliances and coalitions…they seemed more like governments in world politics than children in nursery school.”59 They constantly looked for the answer to the question: “Will you ‘dead’ me, or kill me, if I act bad enough?”
When Joseph spoke privately to each of the children, they told him of their obsession with their fears: “When I tell people, ‘Some day I’m going to be dead,’ they say, ‘Now look, kid, stop making jokes. I know you won’t die.’ You see? I can’t tell anyone what I think about dying, because no one will listen to me!”60 Talking about death with parents or teachers was taboo. They revealed that they dreamed about being killed “hundreds of times.”61 They concluded that even thinking about death would make them crazy, or even make them dead. No one wants a “morbid, disturbed child.” So when Joseph told them “If you are thinking about death, I can try to answer some of your questions.” They responded, softly: “I think about it a lot.”
He found that whether the incidents children react to in their daily life with death fears consist of being hit at home or watching endless deaths on TV, they told him it raised the question, “If they punish me for something small, will they kill me for something big?”62 They were “obsessed with death as a punishment for not conforming, for daring to think, for asking questions, and for not obeying the authorities.” The children asked Joseph: “Why do grownups make up stories to scare kids, if they aren’t real?” They ganged up, teased, tormented and fought other children in games they called “The Monsters Kill the Children.” They told of nightmares of being killed that they had similar to the games that they played. God played a major role as Killer Monster, and those that went to church told him the wafer “tasted like a real body” when they ate it.63 Their parents and their society convinced them that death was not only real, it was imminent, and it was because they were bad.
FUSION WITH THE “KILLER MOTHER” ALTER AND SPLITTING OFF THE “BAD SELF” ALTER
Children who cannot depend upon their caretaker to work through their daily fears have to “swallow down whole” their deadly abusers and store their abusive personalities in their brains, in a dissociated part of the right hemisphere’s amygdalan network, a persecutory personality termed an alter.64 Its purpose is to hold the early terrors of abuse and abandonment in a split-off form that allows the child to not have to express his pain and humiliation to the parent (usually the mother) for fear of completely losing her and being killed. The alter allows the child to blame himself for the abuse, then splitting himself as victim into two additional internal alters: the Hero Self, who clings to his Killer Mother Alter and protects her, and the Bad Self, whom he must punish to avoid having the mother completely abandon and kill him.65 The dissociated alters being in the right hemisphere explains why “left-handed males [right hemisphere dominant] are disproportionately represented in delinquent and criminal groups.”66
The child from the first months of life is able to form dissociated alters. An example of just how early this splitting can take place can be found in the case of a fifteen-month-old baby girl, Sarah, whose babysitter took a series of pornographic photos of her. The photos were discovered, and showed her “naked and being touched by an erect, adult penis.” Three years later, Sarah draws pictures for her therapist of naked babies and says, “She’s my doll. She’s laying on the bed naked. I cover her up. I’m yelling at the doll. She was bad! I yell at my doll…’You! You bad thing!’”67 Even as a little child, Sarah blamed herself for her sexual abuse, then internalized and reenacted the abuse while feeling fused with the abuser.
Alters are the time bombs embedded in the right brain during childhood that are the sources of all later violence. Because they are dissociated modules, the adult can seem to be any personality mode, even passive or withdrawn, but when they act out the earlier hurts and fears and rages against a Bad Self victim they can become a murderer or terrorist or soldier massacring thousands without guilt. It is the dissociated aspect of social violence and war that allows so many psychologists to conclude that men like Goering or Auschwitz guards or bin Laden are “perfectly normal,” since their left-brain personalities are well organized, not “psychotic,” while their right-brain dissociated alter modules periodically take over and commit their violence.68
Violent alters are introjects present in most people throughout history as a result of their extremely abusive and neglectful childrearing, even though the concept has only recently begun to be investigated in connection with the inner voices of multiple personalities and schizophrenics. Because these alters are so well denied and defended against, we don’t recognize them as the voices of past abuses, accusations and humiliations that they really are. When psychoanalysts know about dissociated alters, they can often observe them as they are being formed in families. Richard Kluft, for instance, describes how he “observed mother and son together. Whenever mother switched into an angry alter the son switched into the ‘scared’ alter. The boy’s [conscious] personality denied being abused and could not believe his mother would beat him…suppressing his angry alter for fear of enduring even greater abuse.”69
Surveys of healthy people reveal 39 percent admit they hear ‘inner voices” regularly in their minds.70 One psychotherapist, Robert W. Firestone, practices what he terms “voice therapy” by getting them to access their “parental or child voices” and seeing how they affect their daily self-accusations. Firestone discovered that all his patients—and even his neighbors and fellow therapists in discussion groups—contain these voices. One way he recovers the angry voices is to ask the person to recall when during the previous week they became angry at themselves and what triggered the self-attack. They report feelings like “I’m such a failure,” or “I’m so incompetent at work” or “I’m so inconsiderate of my wife.” He then asks them to rephrase these self-accusations in the first person, such as “You’ll always be a failure!” or “You’re such a selfish person” or “You’re always so inconsiderate!” or even “Why don’t you just die!”—often in the voice of their mothers. They then realize where their fears and lack of attachments originate, and answer the voice, challenging its accusations.71 He finds his therapy works both with violent and self-destructive persons in limiting their acting out and with self-limiting people who “act as their own jailers…people at the mercy of the defense system that they originally constructed to protect themselves when they were little.”72 Only by breaking “the Fantasy Bond that originates as an illusion of fusion with the idealized mother” are patients able to be independent and innovative and empathic toward others.73
The alter created in fusion with the Killer Mother is not just simple “identification” or “internalization” as Freudian psychoanalytic theory imagines. It is a powerful defense against death fears—an act of desperation not love. It involves both the extreme idealization which is evident in nations or religious groups with a need to act out the original death fears by dying as a martyr for your grandiose Motherland or for your almighty God or Goddess. All violent groups are formed by the fusion of the Heroic Self alter with the Killer Mother alter, just as all suicidal behavior has been found to contain a “oneness fantasy” where “the individual believes that part of the self will survive [death] in a fusional relationship with an idealized mother.”74 The power of this fusion fantasy can be seen in a simple experiment that has been repeated over and over again by Silverman and his group. They showed subliminal messages to hundreds of people, and found that only one—”MOMMY AND I ARE ONE”—had an enormous emotional effect, reducing their anxieties and pathologies and their smoking and drinking addictions measurably.75 “Daddy and I are one” had no effect. The power of this fantasy from earliest childhood on can be seen from the fact that the majority of three-year-old boys said when they grew up they wanted to be mothers.76 It is a fear of revealing this basic need to be fused with the mother that is responsible for boys playing separately from girls from the age of four and for their fears that they might “change into a girl” and so must dominate girls (and women and enemy nations) to avoid becoming a “sissy,” a “wimp.”77 Yet the fusion with the Killer Mother fantasy continues, since, as Masterson puts it: “The patient’s feelings of infantile deprivation are so fundamental, so deep, and the feelings of abandonment so painful that he is willing in therapy, as he was as a child, to sacrifice anything to fulfill the fantasy of reunion.”78
Furthermore, as the Masterson group is nearly alone in emphasizing, it is during actual “experiences of psychosocial growth, including moves toward separation-individuation” that the fear of being abandoned by the mother are most powerfully re-experienced, producing a renewed “wish for reunion that relieves the feelings of abandonment.”79 It is, observes Masterson, when patients make good progress in therapy and in their lives that they suddenly find themselves “engulfed in a feeling of freedom” and then panic. Patients say: “Going beyond what my mother wanted me to be makes me feel like I’m falling apart, disintegrating, and sets off a minefield of attack, destruction, and killing.”80 They are experiencing what I have termed “growth panic”—fears of success and independence and new freedoms and challenges. Growth panic is experienced periodically in historical periods of progress and new political freedoms, leading to renewed needs for fusion with their Killer Motherland and a creation of Bad Self enemies, and finally then wars against any out-group that is willing to fight and die for their Killer Motherland.81 As we will see in the next chapter, it is growth panic that accounts for why nations go to war far more often after periods of success and social change than after periods of economic distress, as is often claimed.
That enemies—either personal or group—are Bad Self alters rather than just objects to hate to express an inherited “aggressive instinct” is not recognized by most students of violence. But none of the characteristics of a relationship with an enemy conform to the instinct notion. Enemies, like your Bad Self, are usually vulnerable. Neither bullies in a playground, who pick on the most helpless kids, nor war-prone leaders choose strong enemies to fight. They even speak of enemies with infantile images like “They’re stinky” or “They’re about to devour us” or they speak like their punitive mothers and, like George W. Bush, say “They only respect force” when starting wars. The Nazis first killed helpless German children in gas chambers, not Jews; over 70,000 “undesirable children who were late in being toilet trained or had used dirty words were deemed “undesirable bad babies” and gassed in 1939, before the Holocaust.82Enemies everywhere are tortured while naked, as if they were babies, from the naked torture rituals of antiquity to those of Abu Ghraib. For that matter, Greek soldiers in antiquity often fought while nearly naked as a baby, except for their shields—which had Athena embedded on it—as if they could only sacrifice themselves for their Killer Motherland while dressed as babies. Other examples of war enemies as babies are legion: the Turks for instance used to infantilize the Armenians by making them strip naked like helpless infants and march until they died. Furthermore, little boys recognize early on their need to be martyrs for their Killer Motherland. The majority of boys questioned in one study admitted openly that they were willing to die for America.83 Not die for any worthwhile American war goal—the study was done in 1974 when the Vietnam War was thoroughly unpopular. Just willing to die for America, their Motherland, to become martyrs, like Christ dying for his God. They need to die to renew the Killer Motherland: “The souls of nations are drinking renewal from the blood of fallen soldiers. [The soldier ] dies peacefully. He who has a Motherland dies in comfort…in her, like a baby falling asleep.”84
THE NEUROBIOLOGY OF HOW FEARS ARE STORED IN DISSOCIATED ALTERS
Schore, Le Doux and other neurobiologsts provide massive evidence that the neural circuitry of the infant’s fear system is located in the right brain in two main affect regulators: the prefrontal cortex (the regulator) and the amygdala (the fear system.)85 When children experience maternal abandonment fears and maternal abuse, they release cortisol, which shuts down their prefrontal cortex and makes their amygdala hyperactive, “indelibly imprinting, burning in” the memory of the threatening mother in their amygdalan module.86 “The role of the amygdala is to remember a threat, generalize it to other possible threats, and carry it into the future.”87 “Human subjects whose brains were electrically stimulated in the region of the amygdala reported a sense of being reprimanded by an authority.”88 Only major dangers imprint themselves in dissociated form in the amygdala.89 Amygdalae of insecurely attached children are hyperactive and larger than those of securely attached children, plus their prefrontal cortices are smaller, and so they are less able to control their fears, angers and other irrational emotional reactions in response to later interpersonal difficulties.90 As LeDoux puts it, “They are probably with us for life.”91
This early imprinting of dissociated alters in the right amygdala of humans is the main source of violence in later life. Brain scans reveal that “an enduring pattern, associated with destructive, defensive rage, is imprinted into an immature, inefficient orbitofrontal [cortical] system [and amygdala] during relational trauma in early childhood.”92 “The child uses the output of the mother’s emotion-regulating right cortex as a template for the imprinting of circuits in his own right cortex.” Later, “when adult human subjects are shown fearful or angry faces, it immediately depresses their right cortexes”93 and activates their right amygdalae—as when they are racially biased white subjects who are shown faces of African Americans.94 The right amygdala has been measured to be larger and more excitable in psychotics, depressives, anxiety disorders and murderers 95—plus, presumably, if they ever would allow us to measure them, in terrorists and war lovers. In addition, all these violence-prone products of early relational trauma suffer from elevated norepinephrine (acting-out neurotransmitter) levels and depressed serotonin (calming hormone) levels.96
Finally, one further important area of the brain becomes damaged during early stress: the insula, a deep area of the cortex that contains most of the “mirror neurons” that make people capable of empathy of the emotional states of others.97 It is the cutting off of access especially to the right insula that occurs when mass murderers switch into their violent alters that allows them to kill myriad numbers of strangers without guilt. And it is the cutting off of the empathic mirror neurons of the right insula that allows SS men to gather together French women and children, “hug them with tenderness” and treat them “with utmost kindness,” and then switch into their violent alters, put them in a church and set them afire and burn them to death.98 Indeed, the turning off of the empathic insula is responsible for all in-group/out-group splitting when people enter their violent alters in wars. Without this turning off of empathy in the war trance, mass violence is impossible. But when Hutu and Tutsi who have been friends living next to each other and intermarrying for decades switch into a war trance for internal emotional reasons and cut off the empathic mirror neurons in their right insula, they suddenly find themselves able to chop off their neighbors’ heads and arms without guilt.
Neuropsychiatrists have examined abused and neglected children with brain scans, and shown the damage done that affects their need for violence later on. Bruce Perry has published a huge number of studies showing abnormal brain development following neglect and abuse in little children, including significantly smaller brains, decreased activity in their prefrontal cortex, hippocampal damage and amygdaloid overexcitation that produces “electrical storms” similar to those experienced by patients with temporal lobe epilepsy, seizures that cause hallucinations and violent behavior.99 As we will see shortly, nations starting wars undergo emotions that are similar to individuals who are having epileptic fits, and violent religious leaders, like Mohammed, often experience actual epileptic seizures. Brain-wave abnormalities are found in both prefrontal and amygdalan areas in those who had been traumatized in childhood.100 The medial prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain just behind the eyes—which has been termed the site of the “moral-decision module” and the “sense of self,” is so damaged by early mistreatment that all impulses are released from control, both violent impulses and sexual impulses—which accounts for why soldiers on a rampage so often not only kill but also rape the innocent victims they encounter.101 As Konner puts it in his study of “Human Nature, Ethnic Violence and War”: “…child abuse [produces] frontal lobe damage that contributes to violent tendencies…epileptics…with seizures in the amygdala have aggressive outbursts. People with records of criminal aggression have more EEG abnormalities than others…reduced brain serotonin activity lowers the threshold for aggressive reactions to frustration…Impulsively violent and antisocial individuals have low levels [of serotonin].”102 In addition, a prefrontal cortex with low serotonin means the subject experiences delusions and hallucinations, which because of early structural damage means they cannot catch errors and correct them before they become violent in reacting to imaginary threats.103 This delusional outcome for neglected and abused children is very important in nations starting wars, which as we will see regularly begin with delusional threats from neighbors they imagine are about to attack. Since the brain damage done by withdrawal of the mother is even worse than that done by her anger, the effects of the universal swaddling and other abandonment practices throughout history—where the infant is left alone in its crib “to avoid it becoming a tyrant”—embed dissociated violent alters in their right hemispheres that make them profoundly violence-prone later in life.104
The defense of dissociation begins in insecure infants who “conceive of the parent’s mind as simply too terrifying” to relate to, “creating a defensive disruption of their capacity to depict thoughts and feelings in themselves and others.”105 It is effective in handling overwhelming fears: “Dissociation is a method of coping with inescapable stress [allowing] infants to enter into trance states and to ignore current sensory input.”106 Children then only recapture the traumatic images in nightmares (when the amygdala “lights up like a pinball machine”) and fears of ghosts and monsters that escape the imprinted violent parent alter. One describes his monster dreams that imprinted his fears of his punitive father that were imprinted in his brain:
I was down in the basement in bed sleeping and it was the terror of all terrors. I knew the ghost was around the corner…I finally decided I would just yell and let the ghost come out and get me. I sat up in bed and screamed as loud as I could. The ghost came roaring out of its hiding place and jumped all over me and attacked me…107
Traumatized children often108 access their terrifying alters by “depersonalizing, going numb, day dreaming, and staring off into space with a glazed look.” Because alters are not modified by later experience, “it is not unusual for a childhood dream symbol to continue intermittently for years or even decades.”109 They often appear as imaginary companions during self-induced “hypnoid” trance states, even as fully conscious alternate personalities.110 I myself as a child used to split off from myself and float to the ceiling when my father beat me with his razor strap. I was so certain I could really fly I told a friend to watch me jump from a second story window and fly down (I of course broke my ankle doing so.) The majority of children even today have invisible companions or selves that are actually alters.111
Alters are “activated by strong emotional experiences, whether intensely pleasurable or intensely painful.”112 Dreams and hypnotic states are “increased facilities in enhancing amygdaloid-hippocampal activity, resulting in increased theta wave production.”113 All adults increase their daydreams, reveries and fantasies in cycles of about 90 minutes during the day, as shown by increased EEG alpha wave activity, during which hypnotists find they can more easily reach dissociated alter material.114 In fact, hypnosis has been described as “controlled dissociation [and] dissociation as a form of self-hypnosis.”115 Children who have been abused are more easily hypnotizable by charismatic political leaders.116 The child’s behavior when re-experiencing the abuse of their punitive alters always contains a self-destructive aspect, even suicidal attempts, which often get acted out later on, since “adolescents themselves preferred death to exposing their abusive parents.”117 Violent criminals, according to Richard Rhodes, “consult ‘phantom communities’ [alters] in their heads who approve of their violent acts as revenges for past humiliations.”118 According to James Gilligan, a prison psychiatrist who has spent his life talking to violent criminals in prisons, reveals that they all were horribly abused as children:
As children, these men were shot, axed, scalded, beaten, strangled, tortured, drugged, starved, suffocated, set on fire, thrown out of windows, raped, or prostituted by mothers who were their ‘pimps.’ . . . Some people think armed robbers commit their crimes in order to get money. But when you sit down and talk with people who repeatedly commit such crimes, what you hear is, ‘I never got so much respect before in my life as I did when I first pointed a gun at somebody.’”119
Although violent assault rates in the U.S. today are under one percent of the population per year (with over 30 percent of the population of the U.S. being arrested at least once in their lives),120 the rates of murder earlier in history were far higher,121 especially if infanticide rates of up to 50 percent of newborn are considered murder, as they should be. Gilligan calls all interpersonal violence “an attempt to achieve justice” for the childhood harm done to them.122 Our justice system makes violent people more violent, since, as Gilligan has shown: “Punishment does not prevent violence, it causes it.”123 Murderers are full of shame, live in a constant state of hypervigilance and feel no empathy or attachments for anyone in their threatening world, all the result of the alters that remain embedded since their childhoods. Most when questioned say, like Kip Kinkel, who fired at his schoolmates and teachers: “Voices directed me to kill.”124 Bessel van der Kolk, the most famous expert on dissociated alters, concludes: “People with childhood histories of trauma, abuse and neglect make up almost the entire criminal justice population in the U.S. [with abusive childhoods causing] dissociative states.”125 And Robert Firestone reports all his suicidal patients hear parental voices telling them they should kill themselves.126
Most people, of course, consciously consult their punitive alters through prayer, with 90 percent of Americans saying they pray to their hyper-grandiose, demanding, punitive deity on a daily basis.127 Jeanette Good’s careful study of religious belief shows the amount of religious experience in life is correlated with the degree of corporal punishment and shame inflicted by caretakers in the believer’s childhood.128 Praying and other religious activities—like all alter experiences—aims at fusion with the idealized Killer Mother alter, the god who has abandoned one for one’s sinfulness, because you as a child were “bad.” And, of course, religions, like all in-groups, commit violence by projecting this Bad Self alter onto other believers and persecuting them.
THE PSYCHODYNAMICS OF SWITCHING INTO DISSOCIATED ALTERS
The psychodynamcs of having a nightmare, entering into a hypnotic trance, becoming possessed, murdering someone and starting a war are similar. They all are results of switching into dissociated violent right hemisphere alters, terror modules in the right amygdala that are embedded early in life and continue to relive the fears of early abuse and neglect.129 When young boys “play war,” they are practicing switching into their violent alters, practice fusing with their Killer Motherland, and practice the killing of Bad Self enemies. Nightmares and hypnotic states show increased right hemisphere EEGs,130 which is why hypnotists use “sleeping methods” to switch people into a trance.131 The switching process in tribal rites begins when the group proclaims individuals are “too successful...they must have stolen other person’s yams from their gardens by magic,” they must be sorcerers.132 Their “ghostly self” (alter) is then experienced as terrifying fear, and then, usually after frenzied dancing or other painful “driving” rites that produce tremors and hypoglycemia, they are able to achieve a state of fusion with their Killer Mother alter that feels like “ecstasy” and “awe,” since the fusion state releases endogenous opioids that are experienced as morphine-like mystical feelings of grandiosity. Over a third of Americans report they have experienced this feeling; the majority of tribal and earlier historical personalities are able to experience the fusion ecstasy of possession.133 During alter fusion the possessed person experiences unity with the Killer Mother alter which is often described as “love,” but the price of this delusional state is loss of personal self and a splitting off of Bad Self, which soon must be persecuted in some out-group under the command of alter “voices” demanding punishment. Eliade describes one spiritual possession of a shaman who was possessed by “a woman with one-half of her face black, and the other half red. [She first said] ‘I love you.’ [Then] If you will not obey me, I shall kill you.’”134
Bourguignon reported in her cross-cultural survey of 488 societies, that “ninety percent have one or more institutionalized, culturally patterned forms of altered states of consciousness,” what Crapanzano terms “possession trances.”135 Possession by alters is reported as beginning in childhood throughout history. In the Acts of Thomas, God himself advised Christians “to avoid having children [since] the majority of children [are] possessed by demons.”136 When fully into their possession alter, Christians often “speak in tongues,” repeating the meaningless sounds of early childhood, while trembling with fear.137 As we will examine more thoroughly in coming chapters, even Greek and Roman thinkers reported possession by alters felt as body parts that they talk to and are moved by “little men” voices like the thumos and kradie and psyche.138 Even more familiar are the states of possession of oracles, witches, shamans and others in people thought to be invaded by demons or spirits and who had to be exorcised or killed in order to be released from their possession state.139 Witches in particular were acknowledged as Killer Mothers: “Over and over again in the trial records, the accused women are addressed as ‘Mother’ …The witch is a monstrous mother.”140
The same process of switching into violent alters is necessary in order for tribes and states to begin wars. In the following chapters we will show that there are seven separate stages to complete this alter switch into a full fighting war trance. That the people who are most prone to the war trance are reactionaries who have had the worst, most authoritarian, most abusive childrearing is a truth that has many studies to back it up. These begin with a whole series of “authoritarianism” studies, beginning with The Authoritarian Personality by Theodore Adorno and others, which established a “Fascism Scale” that measured those who were uncritical toward authorities of the in-group, who believed in punishing those who violated conventional values, who were preoccupied with dominance-submission relationships and identified with “tough” power figures, and who had generalized hostility and destructiveness toward those who didn’t agree with them.141 All these traits have been shown to be results of resentment about the parents’ lack of love, displaced to fear and hatred of the out-group. Studies then followed by Etheredge, Tomkins, Alice Miller and myself that traced this authoritarian personality to what Miller termed “poisonous pedagogy” that acted out the kinds of harsh childrearing discipline that have been the cause of reactionary political behavior. Michael Milburn summarizes his extension of these findings in his asking undergraduates at the University of Massachusetts the following question:
“If you ruined an expensive toy…would your parents have spanked you, taken away privileges, scolded you, expressed disappointment, or not punished you?” …People who reported high levels of punishment…held significantly more punitive attitudes…more in favor of the death penalty, using military force, and were against abortion.142
Other authoritarianism studies found that reactionaries “venerated” their domineering parents and had a contempt for the weakness of others, that reactionaries fear death more than progressives, that mother-dominant families were more antisemitic than father-dominant, that parents whose children were “more basically secure” and who were raised with more empathy held more progressive political attitudes. Reactionaries have been shown to have greater death anxieties, entertain more apocalyptic fantasies, see children as sinful and needing punishment, fear femininity more, and are quick to feel humiliation and take vengeance, all results of having powerful dissociated alters.143 As will be detailed in the next chapter, modern nations switch into their alters about every 25 years in a self-destructive sacrificial ritual in which they act out in the slaughters of war the nightmares that were embedded like time bombs in their brains during their abusive childhoods.
Footnotes:
1 See Lloyd deMause, Ed., The History of Childhood. New York, Psychohistory Press, 1974 and Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations. New York: Karnac, 2002. Further extensive bibliography is on www.psychohistory.com.
2 Lloyd deMause, “The Evolution of Childhood.” In Lloyd deMause, Editor, The History of Childhood. New York: Psychohistory Press, 1974, p. 1.
3 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations. New York: Karnac, 2002, pp. 220-221.
4 Katherine Ellison, The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood Makes Us Smarter. New York: Basic Books, 2006, p. 21.
5 Lloyd deMause, “‘If I Blow Myself Up and Become a Martyr, I’ll Finally Be Loved’” The Journal of Psychohistory 33(2006): 300.
6 Brenda Geiger, Fathers As Primary Caregivers. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996.
7 Thomas R. Insel, “A Neurobiological Basis of Social Attachment.” American Journal of Psychiatry 154(1997): 733; Robin Karr-Morse and Meredith S. Wiley, Ghosts From the Nursery: Tracing the Roots of Violence. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997, p. 188.
8 Ofra Lubetzky, “Integrating Mind and Body: Mother-fetus-infant Relationships and the Maturation of the Right Hemisphere.” International Journal Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Medicine. 17(2005): 55.
9 Ibid., p. 49.
10 Chugani, H. et al, “Local brain functional activity following early deprivation: a study of post-institutionalized Romanian orphans.” Neuroimage 14(2001):1290-1301.
11 Jan Volavka, Neurobiology of Violence. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, 1995, p. 28.
12 Mark Zoccolillo et al, “The Intergenerational Transmission of Aggression and Antisocial Behavior”in Richard E. Tremblay et al, Eds. Developmental Origins of Aggression. New York: The Guilford Press, 2005, p. 358.
13 Ofra Lubetzky, “Integrating Mind and Body,” pp. 50-55.
14 Ellen Moss et al, “Attachment at Early School Age and Developmental Risk: Examining Family Contexts and Behavior Problems of Controlling-Caregiving, Controll-Punitive, and Behaviorally Disorganized Children.” Developmental Psychology 40(2004): 519-529; Peter Fonagy, Attachment Theory and Psychoanalysis. New York: Other Press, 2001; Bruce D. Perry, “Bonding and Attachment in Maltreated Children: Consequences of Emotional Neglect in Childhood” www.childtrauma.org.
15 Jan Volavka, Neurobiology of Violence, p. 61; Robin Karr-Morse and Meredith S. Wiley, Ghosts From the Nursery, p. 230.
16 Ellen Moss et al, “Attachment at Early School Age and Developmental Risk,” p. 520.
17 Brian Corby, Child Abuse: Towards a Knowledge Base. Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000, p. 98.
18 Lloyd deMause, “What the British Can Do To End Child Abuse,” The Journal of Psychohistory 34(2006): 5.
19 Lloyd deMause, “‘If I Blow Myself Up and Become a Martyr, I’ll Finally Be Loved.’” The Journal of Psychohistory 33(2006):302.
20 Nawal El Saadawi, Te Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World. Boston: Beacon Press, 1980, p. 34.
21 Time, January 17, 2005, p. A6.
22 Natasha S. Mauthner, The Darkest Days Of My Life: Stories of Postpartum Depression. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002, pp. 3-4; Katharina Dlton, Depression After Childbirth: How to Recognize, Treat, and Prevent Postnatal Depression. Third Ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 2; Paula Nicolson, Post-Natal Depression: Psychology, Science and the Transition to Motherhood. London: Routledge, 1998, p. 55.
23 Ibid, p. 176.
24 Sue Gerhardt, Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby’s Brain. Hove: Brunner-Routledge, 2004, p. 124.
25 Deborah Sichel and Jeanne Watson Driscoll, Women’s Moods: What Every Woman Must Know About Hormnes, The Brain, and Emotional Health. New York: William Morrow and Co., 1999, p. 222.
26 Dale F. Hay et al, “Pathways to Violence in the Children of Mothers Who Were Depressed Postpartum.” Developmental Psychology 39(2003):1091.
27 Anna Motz, The Psychology of Female Violence: Crimes Against the Body. New York: Brunner/Routledge, 2001, p. 92.
28 I. F. Brockington, Motherhood and Mental Health. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 151.
29 Robin Karr-Morse and Meredith S. Wiley, Ghosts From the Nursery, p. 215.
30 Dante Cicchetti and Sheree L. Toth, “Child Maltreatment and Attachment Organization.” In Susan Goldberg et al, Eds., Attachment Theory: Social, Developmental and Clinical Perspectives. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Analytic Press, 1955, p. 282.
31 Louis Fraiberg, Ed., Selected Writings of Selma Fraiberg. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987, p. 133.
32 Rozsika Parker, Mother Love/Mother Hate: The Power of Maternal Ambivalence. New York: BasicBooks, 1995, p. 20.
33 Joseph C. Rheingold, The Fear of Being a Woman, p. 143.
34 Rozsika Parker, Mother Love/Mother Hate, p. 5.
35 Judith Solomon and Carol George, “The Place of Disorganization in Attachment Theory.” In Judith Solomon and Carol George, Attachment Disorganization. New York: Guilford Press, 1999, pp. 6-9; Ellen Moss et al, “Attachment at Early School Age and Developmental Risk.” Developmental Psychology 40(2004): 519-532.
36 Lloyd deMause, “What the British Can Do to End Child Abuse,” p. 6.
37 Joseph C. Rheingold, The Mother, Anxiety, and Death: The Catastrophic Death Complex. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1967, p. 14.
38 Ibid., p. 15.
39 Ibid., p. 139; Joseph C. Rheingold, The Fear of Being a Woman: A Theory of Maternal Destructiveness. New York: Grune & Stratton, 1964, p. 136.
40 Joseph C. Rheingold, The Mother, Anxiety, and Death, p. 137.
41 Ibid., p. 110.
42 Ibid., pp. 139, 137, 140.
43 Dorothy Bloch, “So the Witch Won’t Eat Me”: Fantasy and the Child’s Fear of Infanticide. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1978, p. 1.
44 Ibid., pp. 2, 12.
45 Ibid., p. 45.
46 Ibid., p. 3.
47 Lynne Murray and Peter J. Cooper, Postpartum Depression and Child Development. New York: Guilford Press, 1997, p. 68.
48 Dorothy Bloch, “So the Witch Won’t Eat Me!”, p. 11.
49 Ibid., p. 80.
50 Tom Pyszczynski, et al, In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2002, p. 84.
51 Sylvia Anthony, The Child’s Discovery of Death: A Study in Child Psychology. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1940, p. 65; Max M. Stern, “Death and the Child.” In John E. Schowalter, et al, Eds., The Child and Death. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983, p. 21.
52 Marisa Dillon Weston, “Anorexia as a Symbol of an Empty Matrix Dominated by the Dragon Mother.” Group Analysis 32(1999): 71-85.
53 Rush W. Dozier, Jr., Fear Itself: The Origin and Nature of the Powerful Emotion That Shapes Our Lives and Our World. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998, p. 125.
54 James B. McCarthy, Death Anxiety: The Loss of the Self. New York: Gardner Press, 1980, p. 46.
55 Brett Kahr, “Ancient Infanticide and Modern Schizophrenia: The Clinical Uses of Psychohistorical Research.” The Journal of Psychohistory 20(1993): 269.
56 Christine Ann Lawson, Understanding the Borderline Mother: Helping Her Children Transcend the Intense, Unpredictable, and Volatile Relationship. Northvale, New Jersey: Jason Aronson, 2000, p. 170.
57 Stephen M. Joseph, Mommy! Daddy! I’m Afraid!: Help Your Children Overcome Fears That Hold Them Back in School and at Play. New York: Collier Books, 1974, p. xi.
58 Ibid., p. xiv.
59 Ibid., p. 9.
60 Ibid., p. 20.
61 Ibid., p. 129.
62 Ibid., p. 45.
63 Ibid., p. 127.
64 Doris Bryant et al, The Family Inside: Working with the Multiple. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1992; Lisa Goodman, et al, “Persecutory Alters and Ego States: Protectors, Friends, and Allies.” Dissociation 8(1995): 91-99. The amygdalan fear network includes extensions to the hippocampus and cortex; see Steven Johnson, Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life. New York: Scribner, 2004, p. 61.
65 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 93.
66 Arnold P. Goldstein, Delinquent Gangs: A Psychological Perspective. Champaign, Ill.: Research Press, 1991, p. 54.
67 Lenore Terr, Too Scared To Cry: Psychic Trauma in Childhood. New York: Harper & Row, 1990, p. 30.
68 Neil J. Kressel, Mass Hate: The Global Rise of Genocide ad Terror. Westview, Perseus Books, 2003, pp. 137, 138.
69 Richard P. Kluft, “Childhood Multiple Personality Disorder:” In Richard P. Kluft, Ed., Childhood Antecedents of Multiple Personality. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 1985, pp. 182, 175.
70 Daniel B. Smith, Muses, Madmen and Prophets: Rethinking the History, Science and Meaning of Auditory Hallucinations. New York: Penguin Press, 2007.
71 Robert W. Firestone, Voice Therapy: A Psychotherapeutic Approach to Self-Destructive Behavior. New York: Human Sciences Press, 1948, p. 34; Robert W. Firestone, The Fantasy Bond: Effects of Psychological Defenses on Interpersonal Relations. New York: Human Sciences Press, 1987, p. 304.
72 Ibid, p. 28.
73 Ibid, p. 21. For other therapists who recover fused alters see Arthur Janov, Primal Healing: Access the Incredible Power of Feelings to Improve Your Health. Franklin Lakes, New Jersey: New Page Books, 2006; Fredric Schiffer, Of Two Minds: The Revolutionary Science of Dual-Brain Psychology. New York: The Free Press, 1998; and Daniel B. Smith, “Can You Live With the Voices in Your Head?” The New York Times Magazine, March 25, 2007, pp. 49-53.
74 Rosine J. Perelberg, Ed., Psychoanalytic Understanding of Violence and Suicide. London: Routledge, 1999, p. 148.
75 Lloyd H. Silverman, et al, The Search for Oneness. New York: International Universities Press, 1982.
76 Stephen J. Ducat, The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity. New York: Beacon Press, 2005, p. 32.
77 Barrie Thorne, Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994, pp. 74, 88, 116; Stephen J. Ducat, The Wimp Factor.
78 James F. Masterson, Psychotherapy of the Borderline Adult: A Developmental Approach. New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1976, p. 109.
79 Ibid., pp. 62-63.
80 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 174.
81 Ibid., p. 94-96.
82 Ibid., p. 217.
83 Howard Tolley, Jr., Children and War: Political Socialization to International Conflict. New York: Teachers College Press, 1973, p. 34.
84 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 180.
85 Allan N. Schore, Affect Dysregulation & Disorders of the Self. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2003; Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.
86 Allan N. Schore, Affect Dysregulation & Disorders of the Self, p. 285.
87 Louis Cozolino, The Neuroscience of Human Relationships: Attachment and the Developing Social Brain. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006, p. 319.
88 Ibid., p. 251.
89 Joseph LeDoux, Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are. New York: Viking, 2002, p. 61.
90 Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain, p. 250.
91 Ibid., p. 252.
92 Allan N. Schore, Affect Dysregulation & Disorders of the Self, p. 294.
93 Ibid., p. 9.
94 Joseph LeDoux, Synaptic Self, p. 221.
95 Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, “The Amygdala in Brain Function: Basic and Clinical Approaches.” Vol. 985, 2003, p. 370-380; Allan N. Schore, Affect Dysregulation & Disorders of the Self, pp. 211, 299; Allan N. Schore, Affect Dysregulation & Disorders of the Self, p. 202.
96 Debra Niehoff, The Biology of Violence. New York: The Free Press, 1999, pp. 121-127.
97 “Humanity? Maybe It’s in the Wiring.” The New York Times, December 9, 2003, p. F1; Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. New York: Harcourt, 2003, p. 117; Marco Iacoboni, “Understanding Others: Imitation, Language, Empathy.” In Susan Hurley and Nick Chater, Eds., Perspectives on Imitation: From Mirror Neurons to Memes. Vol. I. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005.
98 Arno Gruen, The Insanity of Normality: Realism as Sickness: Toward Understanding Human Destructiveness. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1987, p. 58.
99 Bruce D. Perry, “Applying Principles of Neurodevelopment to Clinical Work with Maltreated and Traumatized Children.” In Nancy Boyd Webb, Ed., Traumatized Youth in Child Welfare. New York: Guilford Press, 2006, p. 93; John Read, Bruce Perry et al, “The Contribution of Early Traumatic Events to Schizophrenia…” Psychiatry 64(2001): 319-344.
100 Martin H. Teicher, “Scars That Won’t Heal: The Neurobiology of Child Abuse.” Scientific American, March 2002, pp. 68-75.
101 “Posing the Right Question: The Neurology of Morality Is Being Explored.” The Economist, March 24, 2007, p. 92.
102 Melvin Konner, “Human Nature, Ethnic Violence, and War.” In Mari Fitzduff and Chris E. Stout, Eds., The Psychology of Resolving Global Conflicts: From War to Peace. Vol. I. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Security International, 2006, pp. 12, 13.
103 Debra Niehoff, The Biology of Violence. New York: The Free Press, 1999, p. 199.
104 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 330.
105 Nicholas Midgley, “Child Dissociation and its ‘Roots’ in Adulthood.” In Valerie Sinason, Ed., Attachment, Trauma and Multiplicity: Working with Dissociative Identity Disorder. New ork: Brunner-Routledge, 2004, p. 42.
106 Bessel A. van der Kolk, Rita E. Fisler, “Childhood Abuse & Neglect and Loss of Self-Regulation.” Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic 58(1994): 234.
107 Alan Siegel and Kelly Bulkeley, Dreamcatching: Every Parent’s ˝uid to Exploring and Understanding Children’s Dreams and Nightmares. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1998, p. 73.
108 Bruce D. Perry, et al, “Childhood Trauma, the Neurobiology of Adaptation and Use-dependent Development of the Brain: How States Become Traits.” Infant Mental Health Journal 16(1995): 271.
109 Alan Siegel and Kelly Bulkeley, Dreamcatching, p. 10.
110 Eugene L. Bliss, Multiple Personality, Allied Disorders, and Hypnosis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 126.
111 Ibid., p. 126.
112 Peter Brown, The Hypnotic Brain: Hypnotherapy and Social Communication. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991, p. 118.
113 Ibid.
114 Ibid., pp. 94, 107.
115 Eric Vermetten at al, Eds. Traumatic Dissociation: Neurobiology and Treatment. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Publishing, 2007, p. xxi.
116 Jerrold Atlas, “Understanding the Correlation Between Childhood Punishment and Adult Hypnotizability as It Impacts on the Command Power of Modern ‘Charismatic’ Political Leaders.” The Journal of Psychohistory 17(1990): 309ff.
117 Dorothy Otnow Lewis, Guilty By Reason of Insanity: A Psychiatrist Explores the Minds of Killers. New York: Ballantine Publishing Group, 1998, p. 39.
118 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 146.
119 James Gilligan, Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic. New York: Vintage Books, 1996, pp. 45, 109.
120 Jan Volavka, Neurobiology of Violence. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 1995, p. 18, adjusted upward for unreported assaults; Adrian Raine, The Psychopathology of Crime: Criminal Behavior as a Clinical Disorder. San Diego: Academic Press, 1993, p. 5.
121 Eric A. Johnson and Eric H. Mnkkonen, The Civilizaion of Crime: Violence in Town and Country Since the Middle Ages. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996.
122 James Gilligan, Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, p. 11.
123 James Gilligan, Preventing Violence. New York: Thams & Hudson, 2001, p. 18.
124 Jonathan H. Pincus, Base Instincts: What Makes Killers Kill? New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2001, p. 9.
125 Bessel A. van der Kolk, “Developmental Trauma Disorder.” Psychiatric Annals 36(2006): 3.
126 Robert W. Firestone, Suicide and the Inner Voice: Risk Assessment, Treatment, and Case Management. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1997.
127 Bani Shorter, Susceptible to the Sacred: The Psychological Experience of Ritual. London: Routledge, 1996, p. 71; John F. Schumaker, The Corruption of Reality: A Unified Theory of Religion, Hypnosis, and Psychopathology. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1995, p. 146.
128 Jeanette Anderson Good, Shame, Images of God, and the Cycle of Violence in Adults Who Experienced Childhood Corporal Punishment. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1999, p. 141.
129 Joseph LeDoux, Synaptic Self, pp. 221, 222.
130 Tom Harris, “How Hypnosis Works,”
131 Margaret Brenman and Merton M. Gill, Hypnotherapy: A Survey of the Literature. New York: International Universities Press, 1947, p. 17.
132 Reo F. Fortune, Sorcerers of Dobu. London: Routledge, 1963, p. 150.
133 James McClenon, Wondrous Healing: Shamanism, Human Evolution, and the Origin of Religion. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002, p. 101; Sheila Walker, Ceremonial Spirit Possession in Africa and Afro-America. Leiden: Brill, 1972.
134 Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964. P. 72.
135 Erika Bourguignon, Possession. San Francisco: Chandler & Sharp, 1976; Vincent Crapanzano and Vivian Garrison, Eds. Case Studies in Spirit Possession. New York: John Wiley, 1977, p. 7.
136 Piero Camporesi, The Fear of Hell. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991, p. 344.
137 Felicitas D. Goodman, How About Demons? Possession and Exorcism in the Modern World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988, p. 3.
138 A. W. H. Adkins, From the Many to the One; A Study of Personality and Views of Human Nature in the Context of Ancient Greek Society, Values and Beliefs. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970; E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951, 11-16.
139 Adam Crabtree, Multiple Man: Explorations in Possession and Multiple Personality. New York: Praeger, 1985, p. 78.
140 Deborah Willis, Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995, p. 35.
141 T. W. Adorno et al, The Authoritarian Personality: Part One. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1964, p. 228.
142 Michael A. Milburn and S. D. Conrad, “The Politics of Denial.” The Journal of Psychohistory 23(1996): 244-245.
143 John J. Ray, “Conservatism, Authoritarianism, and Related Variables.” In Glenn D. Wilson, Ed., The Psychology of Conservatism. London: Academic Press, 1973, p. 30; Glenn D. Wilson, “The Factor Structure of the C-Scale.” In The Psychology of Conservatism, p. 193; George Lakoff, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. 2nd Ed., Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002, pp. 33 and 341; William F. Stone et al, Eds. Strength and Weakness: The Authoritarian Personality Today. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1993; Chris Hedges, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. New York: Free Press, 2006; David Lotto, “Some of My Best Friends Are Republicans: Toward a Psychohistorical Explanation of Political Conservatism.” The Journal of Psychohistory 32(2005): 240; Stephen J. Ducat, The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004, p. 12.
Chapter 4
War As A Sacrificial Ritual
Preventive war is like committing suicide for fear of death
– Otto von Bismarck
REALIST THEORIES OF WAR
Historians and political scientists agree that war is a realistic, rational, utilitarian activity. This is termed “the Realist paradigm that states are rational actors, carefully calculating costs of alternative courses of action and seeking to maximize their expected utility.”1 Rationality is simply assumed by Realists: “War is a rational process” and “leaders are rational expected-utility maximizers [who] never choose an action that is expected to produce less value—or utility—than some alternative policy.”2 Even when they admit that “aggression seldom succeeds; aggressor states usually are contained or destroyed,” this is only because “misperceptions are common.”3 Misperceptions are viewed as having no cause. They are unmotivated. Irrational, self-destructive motives are unthinkable. That would be “doing psychology”—a forbidden activity.
Realists therefore tend to accept the statements of war leaders when they claim to start wars for rational economic reasons. When Hitler, for instance, says he has to attack the Soviet Union and other Eastern European nations because Germany needs more territory to grow food (“Lebensraum”), Realists nod and accept his claim. They ignore the more bizarre emotional reasons nations really voice while slaughtering millions of their neighbors, such as they have to kill them because they might turn into lice who will poison their blood (Jews, Poles), or because they have longer noses than they do (Tutsis), or because they smoke different cigarettes (Bosnia), or because they hang a different colored rag from their homes (flag), or because someone in their religion insulted them thirteen centuries ago (Muslim sects). The emotional meaning of these statements is never investigated by Realists, nor do they affect their theory that wars are always about obtaining economic resources. After all, says one, “if we are to regard war as pathological, then all conflict must be similarly regarded.”4 Realists simply don't recognize the pathological portions of the right hemisphere.
Furthermore, Realists routinely overlook all the suicidal imagery that leaders voice as they actually make their decision to go to war. In the over a hundred wars I have researched in the past four decades, not one began by political or military leaders actually ever sitting down and adding up the economic costs and benefits of the war they are about to begin. More typically they voice suicidal, sacrificial motivations, like when Tojo called together his ministers before attacking Pearl Harbor and asked what would happen if Japan attacked the U.S. Each one forecast decisive defeat, so Tojo concluded: “There are times when we must jump off the Kiomizu Temple” [where Japanese regularly committed suicide].5 Hitler, who attempted suicide himself several times, said he would “not be in a position to hesitate because of the ten million young men I shall be sending to their death”6 as he took Germany to war against nations many times his size and potential power, even ordering that German cities should be entirely destroyed to no purpose as the war ended. The German people shared his suicidal motivations—in fact, the war ended with tens of thousands of Germans committing gratuitous suicide in 1945 in what Beisel calls the “largest mass suicide in history.”7 Beisel calls WWII “The Suicidal Embrace.”8 In fact, all wars are suicidal embraces. No mention of suicidal or sacrificial war motivations, however, can be found in Realist theories.
THE SELF-DESTRUCTIVE MOTIVATIONS FOR STARTING WARS
Nation-states go to war about every 25 years, as though each new generation must be thrown into the mouth of the bloodthirsty Killer Motherland to cleanse the accumulated sins of the people.9 The more economic progress achieved by the nation, the more likely it is to start a war to destroy it. Wars not only have occurred far more frequently after prosperous periods, but have been over ten times bigger during prosperity.10 Goldstein's studies have shown that wars are far more severe and more frequent when they occur during upward economic phases.11 In fact, no great-power European wars have been started during a depression for two centuries. LeShan summarizes his extensive research saying “We know conclusively that war destroys far more wealth than it produces.”12 Wars are in fact prosperity-reducing, sacrificial rituals. Group behavior guaranteed to provoke revenge is not “aggressive”—it is self-destructive.
Much of the problem of studying the true costs of going to war even in the unlikely event that the initiator wins is that “expected-utility” Realists routinely overlook all kinds of hidden but very real long-term costs of war.13 These include ignoring the costs of the hyperinflation and debt produced by war, the costs of gratuitous provocations of enemy allies, the costs of supposedly unmotivated “mistakes” that give other nations military advantages, the costs of maintaining troops in conquered nations (even producing net losses for empires), the loss of lifetime productivity of warriors and civilians killed and crippled during the war, the cost of interest on the money borrowed for the war, the costs of refugees, the increase in national product and trade often lost for decades, and so on.14 Add to these the costs of the usual crazy economic schemes that accompany wars, like the enormous costs of “purification” of Cambodia by the abolition of money and the forced deportation of the urban population by the Khmer Rouge.15 When some of these hidden costs are recognized—as when the U.S. invasion of Iraq is now estimated to eventually cost $2 trillion when some of the indirect costs are considered, four times the official cost estimate—it becomes obvious that there is no way the invasion could have been for “economic reasons.”16 Even though some individuals make obscene amounts of money from wars, states do not. Nor do states often start wars for the reasons they are alleged to do, “because they are falling behind in military strength.” In fact, “in each of the major wars from 1600 to 1945 war was initiated by a state with marked military superiority.”17 Actually, states that begin wars often do not win them: “No nation that began a major war in the 19th century emerged a winner.”18 So starting wars is a self-destructive activity when the real costs of war are included. That the U.S. currently spends over a half trillion dollars a year on its military—more than the rest of the world combined—is not a measure of its strength. It has the hidden purpose of making enemies worldwide, and of costing so much it makes the U.S. a debtor to the rest of the world.
The central failing of all Realist analysis of international relations is that they use a bizarre, totally backward theory of interpersonal relations. The arch-Realist Machiavelli stated it clearly in 1513: “If one has to choose between being loved and feared, it is better to be feared.”19 As a theory of interpersonal relations, it claims that everyone would be better off arming themselves with guns and knives so as they walk around the street or visit people or live in their families they will be feared. It only overlooks one thing: the slightest disagreement between individuals in a totally fearful world will provoke violence. This state of endless violence Machiavelli calls “better than a state of mutual love.” Realists agree with him on how to be successful in international relations: “The Realist paradox is that one must prepare for war to maintain peace; one must threaten war to avoid it and escalate a crisis to end it.”20 Realism is a theory proclaiming the wisdom of continuously escalating paranoid provocations. It is a theory that is self-destructive to its core, so it is not surprising that the tens of thousands of politicians who follow it blindly find themselves putting their nations constantly on the edge of self-destruction, rarely negotiating or talking to any other state, constantly preparing to initiate “preventive” wars so they can be constantly feared, constantly making alliances that have been shown to lead to war and make wars deadlier and longer rather than preventing it.21 Realism is a theory that declines respect and avoids cooperation, a theory guaranteeing international self-destructive policies. As Vasquez courageously puts it, “Realist practices make war more likely rather than less likely because they increase threat and insecurity rather than ameliorating them.”22 It is a theory maintained by people who have been abused as children and who are condemned to repeating this abuse on others and on themselves as adults.
WARS AS CLEANSING SACRIFICIAL RITUALS
As de Maistre pointed out: “Human sacrifice is a universal human institution. All human cultures believed in a universal guilt and the need for ceremonies of sacrifice to repair the broken relation between humanity and divinity…a voluntary sacrifice of the innocent who sacrifices himself to the divinity as a propitiatory victim.”23 As we have seen in Chapter One, the “innocent” who is sacrificed is the innocent child, who is sacrificed as a Bad Self to the abusive Killer Mother, the “divinity.” The innocent sacrificed victim is the scapegoat in every tribe, every religion, every early state, who serves to cleanse the group of sin, to purge the fears embedded in the mind during child abuse, to repeat the traumas inflicted by the family in early years. Whether the sacrifice is staged by witches or female shamans or male priests who dressed in maternal robes, Killer Mother representatives have restored group wholeness ever since the Paleolithic as groups switch into their dissociated violent alters and trance themselves into a religious frenzy while cutting themselves, murdering sacrificial victims, and going to war. The sacrificial war ritual is a wholly internal need.24 “Enemies” can always be found when needed for the ritual. When the Aztecs felt their bloodthirsty Killer Goddess needed victims, they said they “longed for death” and sacrificed themselves by becoming warriors and fighting anyone, even at times dividing themselves into two groups to kill each other or even simply committing suicide, in order to “renew” their Killer Mother Goddess and “rebirth” their society.25 The ritual repeated the horrible traumas they had endured as children, since Aztec children were routinely cut, bled, burned, battered and tortured for their Killer Goddess and told they would soon die, like the children they watched actually sacrificed and eaten by their parents.26 The innocence of their war victims was essential, since as children they were in fact innocent, even as their mothers regularly pierced their genitals and faces in order to “cleanse the world.” All enemies are chosen because they are innocent and helpless, like children, which is why most people who are killed in wars are civilians. Hutus slaughtered a half million Tutsis who for centuries had been innocent, friendly next-door neighbors. Easter Islanders had no neighbors, so they joyfully slaughtered each other until they had reduced the population of their island to 111 persons.27 Innocent children have been at the center of most early sacrifices in history, from the infants sacrificed to cleanse ancient Israel and Egypt to the little girls sacrificed at Woodhenge.28
The childhood innocence of sacrificial victims explains why “world wars begin with a major state intimidating or attacking a minor state…all of the wars that have expanded have involved minor states in their initial stages.”29 They were symbols of weak children. That these warrior states then provoked a second major power to oppose them is just a measure of their suicidal need to self-destruct. Leaders promise “sacrifice,” not gain, when starting wars; as John Adams said as the American Revolution began, war with England was the only way “to prevent luxury from producing effeminacy…”30 Individuals say they have to commit suicide to “find peace,” just as nations say they fight wars to “find peace”—peace from internal despair. As Korner declared during the Napoleonic Wars: “Happiness lies only in sacrificial death.”31
Shneidman's study of “The Suicidal Mind” shows they say that suicide solves the problem of stopping the unendurable pain inside them that comes from loss of love, either because someone close rejected them or because their inner parental alter rejected them as useless. They leave suicide messages like “I just cannot live without you. I might as well be dead. When you left me I died inside. I have this empty feeling inside me that is killing me. I just can't take it anymore.”32 Suicide promises “a great peace” that “reminds them of how small” they are—a child again—and how helpless, but “gives them the upper hand” in ending everything, making them “in control if I die.”33 Wars give the same feeling of being “in control” and triumphing over feelings of rejection and helplessness. Some military leaders admit the suicidal goal of war: as General Sir John Hackett put it: “The whole essence of being a soldier is not to slay but to be slain.”34
Studies of powerful politicians show that the sexual fantasy they most request of call girls is masochistic, being dominated and hurt, not sadistic.35 War leaders begin their nation's sacrificial ritual when their dissociated alters begin to call for mass suicidal and homicidal actions. Most of the people killed are actually their own citizens: Rummel shows that battle deaths in the twentieth century were 34 million, while over 170 million were civilians killed in the century by their own government.36 Robins and Post term the dissociated internal alter the “hidden executioner.” They show that “the pain of being under attack by an internal persecutor cannot be overstated. One solution is suicide…the hating introject calls out for the execution of the evil self…A solution for this intolerable burden is to disown the internal persecutor. This is what the paranoid does. He projects the internal persecutor onto an outside presence against which he must defend himself. It is rare that a paranoid openly commits suicide. More commonly he attacks his perceived enemy.”37 And that “perceived enemy” has all the characteristics of the Bad Self that was abused and neglected by the parents.
Are nations that start wars paranoid? Yes, every one of them entertains openly paranoid group-fantasies of being attacked by “enemies” who are in fact not about to attack. But the question of psychiatric designations of groups or leaders of groups is a tricky one. Psychiatrists have constructed a highly selective mental disorder list, DSM IV, that simply eliminates anything but select individual disorders, which is why every book I have read on leaders at war—even Hitler, even bin Laden—declare they are “normal.” Even when obviously pathological groups commit suicide in unison—like the 900 Jonestown religious individuals who killed themselves and their children at the direction of Jim Jones—psychiatrists proclaim them “not insane…they showed no signs of psychopathology.”38 Yet, given that those who are driven to individual violence are listed in DSM IV as “sociopaths,” might one conclude that those who need to commit mass violence should be considered “bellipaths”? Or “war addicts”? That people who slaughter harmless neighbors and sacrifice their own people by the millions are pathologically disturbed will some day become evident, even if they are not now listed in DSM IV.
It is useful to think of going to war as having similar motivations as other self-destructive activities, such as the self-cutting rituals that people do to relieve inner despairs. Self-cutters too are in pain from having lost the approval of an inner parental alter, and deliberately injure themselves by making shallow razor cuts to their forearms or thighs so they feel that they themselves are in control of their inner pain and loneliness. This produces a calming flow of opiates in the brain, which overpowers the inner sorrows.39 As wars start, one can see the “high” produced by this flow of opiates, making leaders fantasy that their nations are far more powerful than they are and that the war will be quickly won. Winston Churchill often noted the unwarranted optimism of leaders going to war for ephemeral reasons, with disastrous consequences to tens of millions of their citizens, saying: “Almost one might think the world wished to suffer.”40 Opiates work for a time. That is why suicide, homicide and anxiety disorder rates generally decrease during wars: the population is “high” in their war trance.41 Warriors throughout history regularly fantasy that they are about to suffer “not just a necessary but a noble and beautiful death” and they will achieve a “death that was a magnificent triumph over death,” a martyrdom precisely like that of the Japanese kamikaze pilots or the Islamic terrorists who imagined their deaths would finally give them the love of their deity (their rejecting caretakers).42 It is as sacrificial martyrs that both warriors and terrorists willingly die for their holy Motherland deities. They are responding to their inner maternal alter voice that continues to tell them “You are so selfish! You never think of ME! I wish I never had you!”
The self-destructive motivations for war are the reasons why most wars are initiated by “superpowers fearing decline.”43 Realists are puzzled by why the strongest states so regularly fear decline that they start “preventive wars” that they did not need to start, why they feared they were about to decline, and why they so regularly ended up losing.44 As Copeland puts it, “in every one of the thirteen major wars…covered in this book, conflict was initiated by a state fearing decline…All major wars…therefore must be preventive wars.”45 Copeland and other Realists never do explain why this should be, since they cannot “do psychology” and discover that even when states are superpowers that is a reality only for the more rational left hemisphere of their brain, but when before wars they switch into the right hemisphere's dissociated emotional alters they see themselves not as powerful at all, but as helpless children anticipating attack by the power of their Killer Mothers projected onto the enemy. The next chapter examines the psychodynamics of going to war, only this time not leaving out the self-destructive sacrificial motivations and activities involved in each of the seven phases that all wars exhibit.
Footnotes:
1 Stephen Van Evera, Causes of War: Power and the Roots of Conflict. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999, p. 7.
2 Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, The War Trap. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 19, 20, 29.
3 Stephen Van Evera, Causes of War, p. 9.
4 Michael Howard, The Causes of Wars and Other Essays. Second Edition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983, p. 11.
5 John Toland, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945. New York: Random House, 1970, p. 112.
6 Hermann Rauschning, The Voice of Destruction. New York: Putnam's, 1940, p. 80.
7 David R. Beisel, “The German Suicide, 1945.” The Journal of Psychohistory 34(2007): 303.
8 David R. Beisel, The Suicidal Embrace: Hitler, the Allies, and the Origins of the Second World War. Nyack, N.Y.: Circumstantial Productions, 2004.
9 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations. London: Karnac Press, 2002, p. 158.
10 Ibid., p. 141.
11 Jack S. Levy, “The Causes of War: A Review of Theories and Evidence.” In Philip E. Tetlock, et al, Eds. Behavior, Society, and Nuclear War: Vol. One. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 124.
12 Lawrence LeShan, The Psychology of War: Comprehending Its Mystique and Its Madness. New York: Helios Press, 2002, p. 33.
13 Ibid., p. 246.
14 Joshua S. Goldstein, Long Cycles: Prosperity and War in the Modern Age. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988; John Mueller, The Remnants of War. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004, p. 42; Joshua S. Goldstein, The Real Price of War: How You Pay for the War on Terror. New York: New York University Press, 2004; Peter Liberman, Does Conquest Pay?: The Exploitation of Occupied Industrial Societies. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
15 Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003, pp. 150-155.
16 Tom Regan, “Iraq War Costs Could Top $2 Trillion.” Christian Science Monitor, January 9, 2006, p. 1.
17 Dale C. Copeland, The Origins of Major War. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000, p. 236.
18 John G. Stoessinger, Why Nations Go To War: Second Ed., New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978, p. 223.
19 Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince. New York: Norton, 1964, p. 145.
20 Russell J. Leng, Interstate Crisis Behavior, 1816-1980: Realism Versus Reciprocity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 4.
21 John A. Vasquez, The War Puzzle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 159-163, 167.
22 Ibid, pp. 114-115.
23 Ivan Strenski, Contesting Sacrifice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, p. 39.
24 George Victor, “Scapegoating—A Rite of Purification.” The Journal of Psychohistory. 30(2003): 273-288.
25 Burr Cartwright Brundage, The Fifth Sun: Aztec Gods, Aztec World. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979
26 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 312.
27 John Keegan, A History of Warfare. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997, p. 26.
28 Patrick Tierny, The Highest Altar: Unveiling the Mystery of Human Sacrifice. London: Viking, 1989, p. 14.
29 John A. Vasquez, The War Puzzle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 230.
30 Michael C. C. Adams, The Great Adventure. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990, p. 51.
31 Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War. New York: Henry Holt, 1997, p. 18.
32 Edwin S. Shneidman, The Suicidal Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 15.
33 Ibid, p. 102.
34 Gwynne Dyer, War: The Lethal Custom. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2004, p. 129.
35 Sam Janus,et al, A Sexual Profile of Men in Power. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1977.
36 R. J. Rummel, Death By Government. New York:: Transactio Publishers, 1997, p. 57.
37 Robert S. Robins and Jerrold M. Post, Political Paranoia: The Psychopolitics of Hatred. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997, p. 79.
38 Ibid., p. 115.
39 Thomas Lewis et al, A General Theory of Love. New York: Vintage Books, 2000, p. 94.
40 Gabriel Kolko, Century of War: Politics, Conflicts, and Society Since 1914. New York: The New Press, 1994, p. 16.
41 Rush W. Dozier, Jr. Fear Itself: The Origin and Nature of the Powerful Emotion That Shapes Our Lives and Our World. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998, p. 106.
42 Lloyd deMause, “'If I Blow Myself Up and Become a Martyr, I'll Finally Be Loved.'” The Journal of Psychohistory 33(2006):300-307.
43 Dale C. Copeland, The Origins of Major War. p. 177.
44 John A. Vasquez, The War Puzzle, pp. 155ff.
45 Ibid, pp. 2, 12.
Chapter 5
The Seven Phases of Going to War
George Modelski’s considerable research into war patterns shows conclusively that wars most often occur after periods of innovation and prosperity, synchronized with the so-called Kondratieff cycles.1 Frank Klingberg and Jack Holmes show repeating patterns over the past two centuries of what they call “extrovert” (belligerent, reactionary) and “introvert” (peaceful, progressive) moods in American foreign policy imagery.2 Joshua Goldstein show “a clear association between long economic expansion periods and the severity of major intracore wars…Fatalities were approximately four times higher during long expansion periods than during stagnation periods.”3 Thompson and Zuk found that “wars are more likely to begin near the end of an expansion.”4 Obviously, economic and social progress throughout history have triggered the pathological emotional conditions that have periodically led to war—because of what I have termed “growth panic” fears.5 With each new generation, more evolved parenting with reduced child abuse (psychogenesis)6 in a minority of the population produces new historical personalities, new “psychoclasses,” who begin to create greater economic and social progress that involves greater challenges and more independence from the values and obedience patterns of their parents. This makes the majority of society—the earlier, more authoritarian psychoclasses—fear the nation has been guilty of hubris, of sinful freedom from parental values, and this fear of growth sends them down the path to sacrificial wars.
In my book The Emotional Life of Nations, I have described the psychodynamics of growth panic in psychoanalysis and in history—what Erich Fromm calls “the fear of freedom.”7 I show how psychoanalysts like Masterson and Socarides have described the origins of all fears of growth in child abuse and neglect. They describe in their patients how they reenact their early traumas when too much progress makes them feel “annihilation anxiety”—fears that they are being abandoned by the punitive parent embedded in their brains. “If we grow, we will never be what Mommy or Daddy wants us to be, and we will never get their love.”8 As Masterson interprets to his female patient: “The function of the mother in her head was to help her deal with the feelings of being alone; by fusing with the object, she defends against being alone.”9 Entire societies also react to innovative, progressive historical phases by defending against the loss of parental approval. They move toward war through seven phases, first splitting off both the Bad Motherland and their Bad Self and projecting them into “enemies,” who are then killed, sacrificed, because they have fused with an all-powerful Killer Motherland. As each phase is reached, the group switches further into a war trance. In remaining chapters I will examine historical societies from tribes to modern nations and show how all wars follow the same seven phases; each phase involves group-fantasies that can be analyzed and interrupted by peace advocates. I will also show that although mature democracies do not war against each other, states undergoing democratization are especially prone to start wars since they confront the most emotional growth—producing what Sagan terms “the paranoid position” of developing democracies.10
In this chapter, we will describe the emotional contents of the seven phases of going to war, which are:
I. FREEDOM: Increasing independence, innovations, growth of real self
II. FEAR: Growth panic, loss of parental approval, disintegration of real self
III. FISSION: Splitting into “in-group” and “out-group”
IV. FUSION: Merging with powerful punishing Killer Motherland
V. FRACTURE: Projection of Bad Self into helpless victim “enemy”
VI. FAKED PROVOCATION: Faking a provocative attack by an “enemy”
VII. FIGHT: Becoming the “Hero” of the Killer Motherland and being sacrificed for Her while killing the Bad Self “enemy”
PHASE ONE: FREEDOM
The lithograph below shows a typical group-fantasy of Phase One, “Freedom,” with the Motherland pregnant with promise for the future and a radiant Frankfurt behind her. Entitled “Schoenen, Guten Morgen, Germania!,” it reveals the hope that Germany could stand new ways of living, more political freedoms, new industries, more women’s rights, and greater personal happiness than it had enjoyed in more authoritarian traditional German culture. States in this Freedom Phase manage to settle their disagreements with other states without resorting to violence, and the increased cooperation and trade produces further economic progress.
Improvements in family interactions during the Freedom Phase become particularly powerful sources of fear to earlier, more reactionary psychoclasses. As men see their wives get new divorce and voting rights, as girls get more education and more access to jobs, the new freedoms blow the mind of the older generation of men, and reactionary attempts to turn back or limit women’s freedoms begin.
Looking at charts of economic growth reveals a clear picture of how closely major wars follow upon periods of prosperity.11 The powerful economic advances of the last half of the 19th century of over 5 percent, year after year—after centuries of economic growth of under 1 percent per annum—were the real causes of the huge carnage of the two world wars of the first half of the 20th century. Prosperity and liberal reforms before WWI made the reactionary psychoclasses wonder if “no more rank, titles or race [meant] all is mixed, confused and blurred [and] the end of the world seem nigh…[with] a decline of religiosity, a disintegration of the patriarchal family, and the decline of respect for authority.”12 Women at the end of the 19th century had new rights, and husbands began to fear their wives would soon become “oversexed wives who threatened her husband’s life with her insatiable erotic demands.”13 If women were to continue to get equal rights, men would soon become women. So wars are necessary, as Machiavelli claimed, to purge nations of “effeminato…the daily accretion of poisonous matter [caused by women’s] conspiracy to ‘poison’ manhood.”14 Only in war, men agreed, could males regain their endangered masculinity.
As early as the Freedom Phase, people began voicing their feeling that “materialism” (economic progress) should be opposed. A. J. P. Taylor notes “years before the war…men’s minds had become unconsciously weary of peace and security…they welcomed war as a relief from materialism.”15 Before WWI, “there was a feeling of approaching apocalypse…The world as it is now wants to die, wants to perish, and it will.” Only a sacrificial slaughter could cure Europe of the freedoms offered by cities: “infinite opportunities, but also rootlessness and loss of social ties…factory man is neurasthenic, bored, unable to endow any experience with value.”16 Being “bored” by change and challenges meant having your real-self feelings cut off by your dissociated punitive parent alter, whose authoritarian “culture” was opposed to innovation: “City life and Gesellschaft doom the common people to decay and death…the doom of culture itself,” i.e., individualism spells the doom of your parents’ authoritarian culture. All abused children assume it was their fault they were abused: “I must have deserved it; I must have been too selfish.” As Masterson puts it succinctly: “Self-activation leads to abandonment depression and death.”17
PHASE TWO: FEAR
The loss of approval by the internal dissociated parental alter means one is alone; as Masterson’s patient put it, “I’ve run up against a wall about Mother. When I was alone, I was afraid of death. Being alone was like being dead.”18 The inner attacking Mother is experienced as a voice inside: “The voice attacks me at every turn. Whenever I feel I’ve won, I’m attacked by the voice. It never stops.”19 Hanging on to the attacking voice inside is a way of holding on to the Mother, even if it means she is now a Killer Mother voice.20 The result is a total loss of self-esteem: “If your mother doesn’t like you, how can anyone else like you?”21
The attacking inner voice and the sense of despair of nations in their Fear Phase has nothing to do with the real condition of society. As we will see in the next chapter, Germany during the later Weimar period began feeling despair because “there was no respect for authority any more” and “everyone was arguing in the legislature,” so they voted more and more for Nazis, although this was actually a period of increasing economic prosperity and freedoms. Most theories of war posit “collective stress—such as economic crises”22 as triggering political fears and wars; only my psychohistorical theory connects shared fears to new freedoms and individuations.
The Killer Mother voice inside feeds into Killer Women group-fantasy images before all wars, in magazine covers, political cartoons and cinema.23 These fears of Killer Mothers are all essentially “flashbacks” to the central fears of early childhood: being devoured, starving to death, being chopped up, drowning, overpowered, etc., all the standard contents of early nightmares that were embedded in dissociated fearful alters. (In the extremely rare cases where the father is the major early caretaker it is a Killer Father alter.) These alters “carry” the memory of early abuse. They may be ascribed to other nations, who are imagined to be “encircling us” or “strangling us,” but the deadly encirclement is in fact the inner Killer Mother alter experienced as nations switch into their dissociated memories of the dangerous mother who is imagined by the infant to be about to “devour” him. (Some chimp mothers and some human tribal mothers actually do eat their babies.)24 That these fears are paranoid goes without saying, and books on war are filled with the paranoid group-fantasies that precede wars, from the “Great Fear” before the French Revolution to the “Saddam has WMD” fantasies of the U.S. before the Iraqi War. The group-fantasies have the same delusional contents as those of paranoid schizophrenics—as one describes them: “People are trying to kill me…I am especially bad…I am a piece of shit and I deserve to die…I can destroy cities with my mind and kill children…I must hurt myself…I think I’m dissolving…a monster keeps killing me…I must kill her…There are voices and commands…One must do what they say…”25 When the wars of the 20th century are described as enormous “head-long irrepressible rushes to death and destruction,”26 the motivations are clinically psychotic.
If the inner fears are particularly paranoid, the nation has apocalyptic fantasies that the world is about to end, destroyed for its sins by God. Again, the actual condition of the nation has no relationship to the apocalyptic fantasies. America was the strongest nation on earth with the highest personal income at any time in history when President Reagan was elected, but he saw himself as “under attack by an evil force that would extinguish the light we’ve been tending for 6,000 years” and chose as his Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger who said “the world is going to end as in the Book of Revelations…by an act of God…every day I think that time is running out.”27 The specifics of each of these apocalyptic group-fantasies reveal their origin in early Killer Mother fears, as in the current series of apocalyptic Left Behind novels (62 million in print) that show the monsters of the Apocalypse will have “faces like human faces, teeth like lions’ teeth, and hair like women’s hair.”28 By my on-going analysis of thousands of political cartoons and magazine covers, I predicted the coming of the Gulf War before it started by seeing an upsurge in dangerous women and sacrificed children images in the media.29
The neurobiology of switching into dissociated fearful alters is becoming clear from new studies of “alarm centers” in the brain. Particularly revealing is the work of Helen Mayberg on “area 25” of the medial prefrontal cortex, located just above the roof of the mouth, with rich connections to the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, which she saw in her brain scans as “hot,” hyperactive, during periods of depression and fear. In fact, she put electrodes into this area and calmed down the alarm condition, and found the depression and fearfulness disappeared!30 She ascribed the hyperactivity of area 25 to “like a gate left open…allowing negative emotions [from the amygdala] to overwhelm thinking and mood. Inserting the electrodes closed this gate and rapidly alleviated the depression…” It is likely that the Fear Phase of going to war is a result of the growing hyperactivity of what Mayberg terms the “alarm center” of the brain because of the reactivation of fearful memories of punishment and abandonment by the mother. Many clinical studies have confirmed that children of depressed mothers grow up more violent than other children.31 Going to war is a defense against and re-enactment of early “alarms,” early childhood traumas, early abandonments—especially those embedded in the first three years of life.32
PHASE THREE: FISSION
As nations realize that they feel their Motherland has rejected them as too independent, as bad, they begin to split the Motherland image into a Good Motherland and a Bad Motherland, dividing the world into “us” and “them,” with the “in-group” idealized as “clean, pure” and the “out-group” seen as “polluted, filthy.” When two or more states fission into idealized and disparaged groups, they increase their violent nationalism and enter into a hostile escalating spiral of military buildups and collection of allies. Fission is produced by fears of growing freedoms, creating “imaginary communities” that must be defended by the Killer Mother alters. When the fission takes place only within the state, a civil war or genocide results.
Any rationalization for the fission makes sense to people entering into the fission trance. As one observer of the Serbian-Croatian civil war notes: “I’m trying to figure out why neighbors should start killing each other. So I say I can’t tell Serbs and Croats apart. ‘What makes you think you’re so different?’ The man I’m talking to takes a cigarette pack out of his khaki jacket. ‘See this. These are Serbian cigarettes. Over there they smoke Croatian cigarettes.’ “But they’re both cigarettes, right?’ ‘You foreigners don’t understand anything.’ He shrugs and begins cleaning his Zastovo machine pistol….The two planes of consciousness—the political and the personal—just can’t confront each other. So they float around in his head.”33 They often occur more on opposite sides of the brain, the left one more rational, the right one containing the dissociated fears that split people into in-groups and out-groups, so-called “imagined communities.”34 The in-group is a place—a tribe, state or nation—where you store the grandiose fantasies of childhood, a place where you can re-experience the traumas and dominations and defenses of your formative period. The out-group is imagined to contain projected fears that were embedded in childhood in violent perpetrator alters: out-groups are “beasts” who will “devour us,” they “encircle us,” they have a “need to dominate us,” and so on. Out-groups are usually called names that are the same as the names parents called their children when they were resented, when they were “bad.” Abused and neglected children have been found clinically to be especially liable to externalizing their problems.35 Those who received constant love as children and were allowed to individuate do not need in-group and out-group splitting.
Since all the “Bad Mommy” traits are now contained in the polluted “enemy,” the in-group is felt to be “purified” by the fission process, and nations suddenly feel “cleansed.” I have previously described in detail how nations conduct “Purity Crusades” as they plan to go to war, closing down brothels, regulating dance halls, prohibiting obscene literature, opposing feminism, etc.36 The persecutors are products of loveless families; those they choose to persecute are the more loving psychoclasses. Persecutors are usually reactionary politically and look for an authoritarian leader who can be a container for their cleansing group-fantasies, a delegate for their punitive inner alter, the Killer Mother, the dissociated perpetrator alter in the brain that Maccoby calls the “Sacred Executioner.”37 Terror management theorists have shown experimentally that “reminders of death led to increased preference for charismatic political candidates.”38 War leaders “revel in victory and gore [like] Theodore Roosevelt [who] never felt more alive than when killing something.”39 Studies of the language used by hard-line political leaders show that those who scored highest in interpersonal dominance more often advocated the use of military force.40 War leaders were almost always raised by dominating mothers who used shame regularly to control their children.41 The war leader is himself a narcissistic, authoritarian, grandiose personality without empathy, who while he tries to restore his failed masculinity allows the populace under him to enjoy what Masterson terms “closet narcissism,”42 so that the nation feels “ecstasy” as “chosen ones” who are so strong they cannot be defeated. Nations going to war usually delegate decisions to dictators; even democracies like Britain suspend elections during wars.43 This authoritarianism soon leads to what Dominic Johnson calls “delusional overconfidence” in planning which nation to attack.44 Most wars begin with a self-destructive manic overconfidence, like Germany stating that World War I would just be a “short, cleansing thunderstorm.”45 As war experts show in great detail, “Excessive military optimism is frequently associated with the outbreak of war…undertaken with each side believing that it would win [since] God is on our side.”46
Usually the “dirty enemy” who must be cleansed includes parts of their own Motherland—whether the Jews in Germany who were “poisoning our blood” or the foreigners “contaminating” Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge cleansing or the “traitors” within nations when “patriots” move toward violence. Both Hitler and Pol Pot were “obsessed with ridding corporate and individual bodies of impurities, contaminants, filth,”47 reenacting their parents’ disgust with them as “dirty babies” that needed cleansing. Even though the nation knows the cleansing will be self-destructive, the fission process results in enormous relief, since it shows that the enemy is real and not just imagined. Designating “the enemy” always shows evidence of revenge toward the mother. Women are regularly tortured and killed in wars despite their innocence, from the Rape of Nanking to the torture, rape and twisting of women’s nipples with pliers by Ethiopian soldiers.48 There is a surge of not only opiates but also of adrenaline, dopamine and serotonin, as the dangerous maternal alter is put “out there.” What Volkan calls chosen glories are mythologized as collective victories and chosen traumas are imagined to be former injustices and humiliations that need to be revenged.49 The coming war is experienced as a “dreamlike, serene” manic high. As young Winston Churchill observed, war was always “exhilarating” to the nation and its warriors, felt to be “ecstatic” in the same sense as the original meaning of the term—namely, a state of being outside the self,”50 absorbed in the greater whole, fused into the maternal body. Ehrenreich shows that warriors of all kinds overcome any empathy toward “enemies” by being “swept up into a kind of ‘altered state’… Almost any drug or intoxicant has served to facilitate the transformation of man into warrior”51 and transforming entire nations into warrior states.
The fission process produces violence whenever groups switch into their dominating and subservient alters, even when there is no rational justification for enmity. This is the finding of the famous experiment of Philip Zimbardo, who randomly assigned college-age men to roles as prisoners or guards in the basement of a university building. The guards quickly developed tyrannical and abusive strategies for controlling their prisoners, forgetting that it was an experiment. They obviously switched into their violent early alters, turned off their empathy mirror neurons in their insulas and anterior cingulates and acted out their childhood traumas, just as warriors and terrorists do.52 The same switching can be seen in the much-cited experiment of Stanley Milgram, where volunteers followed “university experimenters” who inflicted seemingly harmful damage upon victims when asked to do so. The only time the experimenters refused to obey was when the university arranged an acting out of a group rebellion, breaking the alter-switching fission process.53 The experiment didn’t prove “obedience” as is usually claimed; if they had asked them to reach into their pockets and give others money rather than shocks, they would not have “obeyed.” Inner alters are always harmful, never beneficent.
PHASE FOUR: FUSION
It is the fusion with the power of the Killer Motherland that gives the war leader his charismatic “strength,” not any real strength he has. Hitler was a weak person physically and mentally, but was adored by Germans because he was fused with the Mutterland, with the Volk, a powerful mystical being utterly lacking in empathy. Money-Kyrle describes a Hitler rally: “The people seemed gradually to lose their individuality and become fused into a not very intelligent but immensely powerful monster, which was not quite sane and therefore capable of anything.”54 Wars begin in this fused state, claiming “Motherland in danger!”55 The nation fantasies it will lose its Motherland if it does not rescue her, even when there is no external enemy. Nations march off to war as heroes, “losing ourselves in ecstasy because we are conscious of a power outside us with which we can merge.”56 Warriors are the “favorites” of their Motherland, her “heroes,” as they always wished they could have been with their real mothers. Those who die in wars are said to “die peacefully. He who has a Motherland dies in comfort…in her, like a baby falling asleep.”57
War Leaders are exactly like tribal shamans who cure group despair by exorcising bad spirits through healing sacrifices. Leaders can be disobeyed whenever they do not interpret and carry out the group-fantasy of the internal fearful alter. They must make real the growing paranoia of the nation, saying “Let me help you by naming your persecutors…evil is out there, in the real world. And you thought it was all in your head!”58 The war leader is an expert in switching into his abusive parental alter, his war trance. Mussolini once told a visitor that “he is subject to periods of trance at which time he is inspired by influences outside his ordinary self.”59 The war trance has the same psychodynamics as the possession trance of tribal cultures; both are results of being taken over by dissociated inner perpetrator alters. Tribal warriors often eat the inner organs of their enemies; Cambodian fighters have been photographed smiling as they eat the livers of their enemies.60 Both are fused with the cruel nightmares implanted as inner alters in childhood. Because they killed as dissociated alters, psychiatrists can describe them as “normal…They could be you.”61
Only those who are fused with their inner violent perpetrator alters, “obeying the inner voice of the purified community,” are able to join in the worship of flags, parades and other group-fantasies.62 Volkan terms this fusion group-fantasy “blind trust.”63 Those fused with their Killer Motherlands are clinically paranoid, produce inner Terror campaigns in their in-group, and call all those who disagree with them “traitors.”64 War leaders are regularly abandoned by their parents as children; one study of British prime ministers discovered that over two-thirds of them had been orphaned in childhood, compared to about two percent of the general population.65 Fusion with the abandoning mother as a defense against the collapse of the self can be seen in the Hitchcock film “Psycho,” where Norman fuses with and dresses up like his Killer Mother and carries out terrorizing and killing people as if he were Her. Saying that Motherlands and war leaders are “loved” is quite inaccurate. People worship their Motherlands and war leaders, which reveals not love but unfulfilled infant needs. Fusion is needed as a defense against being abandoned (again). People “defend the honor of the Motherland” and “revenge insults to Her reputation” as defenses to avoid remembering their own rage against their rejecting, abandoning mothers.66 Going to war because you are fused with your Motherland is the opposite from defending your group out of empathy; it is a defensive need, a need to relive the dominations of your childhood. Warrior cultures value martyrdom—self-sacrifice, not self interest. To say that domination and power are the secrets of success in international relations is a delusion that began in families by abused children needing to restore their hope that they still have a Powerful Mother who will take care of them.67 And when Motherlands begin compulsive wars, war leaders regularly admit, like Churchill in 1914 (Churchill was regularly abandoned by his parents in infancy and later): “Everything tends towards catastrophe and collapse. I am interested, geared up and happy. Is it not horrible to be built like that?” And, during the war, he admitted: “I love this war. I know it’s smashing & shattering lives of thousands every moment—& yet—I enjoy every second of it.”68 Tocqueville puts the need for violence when fused with your in-group bluntly: “We have such a passionate taste for war that there is no enterprise so reckless or dangerous to the state but it is thought glorious to die for it with arms in one’s hands.”69
Neurobiologically, the Fusion Phase involves the same attenuation of death anxieties as when religious people experience God’s presence, which is also preceded by the fear of being killed. Persinger shows that both are “temporal lobe transients,” similar to the seizures of temporal lobe epileptics, and they can be easily recognized by their brain patterns that include “a release of the brain’s own opiates causing a narcotic high…these opiates are found within the amygdala.”70 Both patriotic highs and God highs represent fusion events, “revitalization movements…solutions to the anxiety generated by novelty, uncertainty and complexity.”71 The “voice of God” and the “voice of the Motherland” that are experienced in revitalization movements both come, says Persinger, from the release of “images and protosensations long locked within the old contexts of the temporal lobe [amygdala] of the infant self to which he or she has not had access for decades.”72 The most obvious of these revitalization movements is, of course, the millennialism that breaks before so many wars, a world-ending group-fantasy promising fusion with the Deity as a reward for the cleansing of sin.73
PHASE FIVE: FRACTURE
In order for the good child self to be loved, the bad child must die. That is why there are so many early societies like Carthage where tens of thousands of jars have been found with charred bones of sacrificed children and inscriptions saying they had been killed by their parents to cleanse the world of their sinfulness.74 Once the Bad Self is fractured off and projected into an “enemy”—located either inside or outside the society—empathy is entirely lost because the punitive parental alter in the amygdala cuts off all contact with the mirror neurons in the insula and anterior cingulate.
The poster above illustrates this projection of the Bad Self dramatically. It shows a Nazi view of “A crippled idiot. Bound forever to his bed,” which, in the 1930s, rather than eliciting sympathy from other Germans instead was intended to incite disgust at helpless German children who contributed nothing to the Volk and who were in fact murdered by the thousands with approval of their parents. As we will see in the next chapter, the gassing of “useless eaters”—a phrase often used by German parents for their own children—actually preceded the gassing of Jews and others in the Holocaust.
Epithets that enemies are called invariably repeat epithets that originally were used by parents for their children. Usually it is obvious, since it is the intent of the war leader to act out the violent parental alters of the people, as when Wilson called Latin Americans “naughty children who are exercising all the privileges and rights of grown-ups and require a stiff hand, an authoritative hand.”75 Or enemies are shown to be just greedy babies, as when the Bush representative told Larry King “You can’t sit down and talk to North Koreans—they’ll want cookies, then more cookies, always more cookies.” Or when George W. Bush himself regularly repeats the injunction “You’ve got to hit them hard to teach them a lesson! They only respect force!”—a phrase that was used on him by his mother. Ehrenreich details admirably how nations regularly go to war against enemies who are children who must be “taught a lesson.”76 Often enemies are even called “dirty” or “they stink,” as though they are babies left by mothers in their excrement. When an American soldier kills a North Vietnamese soldier and “balances a large piece of shit on his head,” he says he laughed77—the real reason being because he had killed his shitty “Bad Baby Self.” Americans regularly refer to the need to “get the Bad Guys” as if enemies were playground bullies or “we’ll get those little bastards” as if they were illegitimate children. War itself is filled with references to children’s games, like “dominoes falling,” “the checkerboard of war” or “the iron dice about to be rolled.” The clinical term for all these returns to dissociated childhood alters is “flashbacks.” The enemy is always the helpless victim self, the “bad child,” and when Nazis or Tutsis smash babies’ heads against walls they are doing so fused with the Killer Mothers of their early nightmares. Killing babies is certainly not a contribution to the winning of wars, but it always occurs because it is your own “Bad Baby Self” who you blame for your losing your mother’s love, who she screamed at when furious with her life, “I wish I never had you!” Humiliation by the parent is always repeated toward the out-groups, so that humiliation and counter-humiliation become the central tasks of international affairs.78
The creation of the “Bad Self enemy” is purely a group-fantasy, and often is created out of whole cloth. “In the Soviet Union, so-called kulaks were killed without guilt, despite the fact that before the revolution “we were just neighbors…Now we are bedniaki, seredniaki, kulaks and we are supposed to have class war…One against the other, you understand?” The same thing happened in Cambodia where “anyone with an education [became] subhuman ‘new people.’”79 Finding an “enemy” to kill carries out the paranoid position begun when fusing with the Killer Motherland.
Unfortunately, the projection of the childhood Bad Self into an “enemy” who is either inside your own nation or is in a neighboring nation does not rid one of the problem. Since national growth and progress continue, the Motherland alter voice continues to hate the Bad Self alter, and even peaceful minorities and neighbors seem to be growing more and more threatening. Thus Germany started two World Wars with their more peaceful neighbors because they fantasized that Germany had to strike first, saying “the future belongs to Russia which grows and grows and becomes an even greater nightmare to us.”80 This is the essence of paranoia in international affairs, Germans agreeing that “If Germany does not rule the world, it will disappear from the map.”81 All major wars since antiquity have been imagined to be “preventive”—“We must kill them before they overpower us.” As France said when they attacked Austria during the French Revolution, “time only improves their position and makes ours deteriorate [so we must] make the stormcloud burst instead of letting it grow.”82
Because of the steady growth of the Bad Self projected into the enemy, it is a main task of a war leader to find a war-willing neighbor and invent a “Faked Provocation” for beginning the war in order to get their people to agree to eliminate them. Internal enemies are rather easy to find and invent threats from—even the most bizarre accusations are believed when the internal enemy is said to be an out-group, as when Jews were believed to be “lice that are poisoning German bloodstream” or when Tutsis were believed to be “cockroaches” killing Hutus. But the idea that nations regularly use faked provocations of other nations as war pretext incidents—as cassus belli—is less often admitted by international affairs experts.
PHASE SIX: FAKED PROVOCATION
A summary of many of the faked provocations used by the United States during he past two centuries reveals a pattern of lying in order to make it appear that an unprovoked attack or threatening condition makes war inevitable. Since most of the nation is in a war trance by Phase Six, they do not question the lie.
The cartoon below shows Saddam Hussein as a killer of children, one of the central fantasies that led to the Gulf War. Although Iraq was one of the best Middle Eastern nations for child care and education, the American media kept picturing him as a child abuser and baby killer, with U.S.-faked incidents like one where babies were supposedly being removed by Iraqis from their incubators and murdered.83 Initially, President Bush told his representative to tell Saddam: “We have no opinion on…your border disagreement with Kuwait” in order to give him a “green light” to invade.84 The entire war was a set-up because the U.S. needed a war to feel masculine (Bush was being shown in cartoons as a “wimp” who wore women’s dresses), and when Saddam said he would pull his troops out of Kuwait himself, the U.S. ignored him, Bush saying to his diplomats simply: “We have to have a war.”85
U.S. faked provocations have occurred in some form in every war it has entered,86 so that—as one psychiatrist puts it—“our paranoia switch is tripped.”87 The Mexican-American War was started by President Polk announcing he was about to declare war on Mexico even if they did not attack the U.S., then sending 3,500 American soldiers into Mexican territory so they could be accused of shedding American blood.88 The American Civil War began after the south was tricked into firing on Ft. Sumter.89 The Spanish-American War began when an interior explosion of the U.S.S. Maine caused by coal dust was claimed by U.S. authorities and a belligerent media as reason for war.90 The U.S. got into World War I supposedly because the British ship the Lusitania was sunk with Americans on board when it purposely was sent “at a considerably reduced speed into an area where a German U-boat was known to be waiting and with her escorts withdrawn,”91 thus carrying out Theodore Roosevelt’s earlier wish that “I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one.”92
Even World War II was started, according to the very well documented book by Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor, after President Franklin Roosevelt had set up a secret team assigned the task of getting Japan to attack the U.S. As Secretary of War Stimson wrote, “The question was: how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot.” The answer was by such provocations as sending U.S. submarines into Japanese waters, embargoing trade with Japan so they would run out of oil, putting the U.S. fleet into Pearl Harbor undefended, and not telling the Pearl Harbor commander that Japanese planes were on their way because FDR’s team had broken the Japanese secret code.93
The Korean War came about because Truman needed a war with a communist nation, and encouraged the U.S.-backed South Koreans to conduct over 400 border battles and military incursions into the north. Then John Foster Dulles promised Korean President Syngman Rhee “if he was ready to attack the communist North, the U.S. would lend help, through the U.N. [if he] persuaded the world that the ROK was attacked first.”94 This eventually provoked North Korean military into South Korean territory. The provocations continued when Truman permitted General MacArthur to “go north” toward the Chinese border despite Chinese warnings that they would respond militarily, producing a new war with China, resulting in an additional two million deaths.95
The Cold War continued in the Cuban provocations of the Soviets by John F. Kennedy. After making all kinds of plans for faking an attack by Cuba on U.S. citizens, after arranging the Bay of Pigs invasion over the objections of his military advisers that it would fail, after authorizing various assassination attempts of Castro, JFK sent 40,000 American troops to the Bahamas to begin practicing invading Cuba, which led Khrushchev to say: “An attack on Cuba is being prepared. And the only way to save Cuba is to put missiles there.”96 JFK concluded that “If Khrushchev wants to rub my nose in the dirt, it’s all over” and led a showdown with the Soviets that put American bombers armed with 1,300 nuclear bombs in the air ready to bomb Russia and start World War III.97 Americans were deep into their war trance too; although 60 percent of them thought Kennedy’s actions might lead to a nuclear WWIII—only 4 percent of them opposed the nuclear showdown.98
The Vietnam War was begun with a traditional faked provocation, when the U.S. send a destroyer into the Tonkin Gulf of Vietnam “primarily for provocation,”99 and then President Johnson lied and said it was attacked “in neutral waters,” when actually U.S. overhead patrol plans reported to him that there were no Vietnamese PT boats anywhere near the ship. LBJ thereby easily got his authorization from Congress to begin the war.100 And, of course, the Iraqi War was full of faked “evidence” on weapons of mass destruction and Saddam-Bin Laden contacts that were used to justify America’s attack on a sovereign nation. The invasion of Iraq will be discussed in more detail in a later chapter. Plus, there has recently been one extremely important provocation that the media has simply overlooked: Bush’s announcing in his National Security Strategy report that the U.S. would now for the first time allow themselves to make “first-strike” nuclear attacks against non-nuclear nations—a policy certain to cause many smaller nations to develop nuclear weapons in order to be able to show that they can strike back if attacked with a nuke.101 Nothing could be more provocative for future wars than announcing a “first-strike” nuclear policy. Bush has stated several times that this new pre-emptive nuclear war policy was needed “to rid the world of evil.”
PHASE SEVEN: FIGHT
With the switches into the war trance of the first six phases complete, the nation goes off to their sacrificial war ritual to kill and be killed. The nations involved now are controlled by their hyperactive “alarm centers” (area 25). Both trust and empathy are gone. The warriors on both sides are fully switched into their violent right hemisphere alters—their time bombs from early childhood—and are convinced that they are fully fused with their Killer Motherland and have Her power so they can kill and die as Her Heroes. In the drawing to the right, the Sumerian War Goddess, Innana, controls the death of Her heroes and enemies, even though the King may appear to be in charge of the battle.
In tribal wars, culture heroes are openly shown as “good children who do what their mothers want them to do: renew Her.102 In modern state wars, the aim is the same. As Paoli explained, “We have laid ourselves over the body of the motherland [Britannia] in order to revive her…I hope that she will soon recover entirely her vigour and her health.” Plutarch recounts a typical Greek mother as she was burying her son saying she had “good luck [for] I bore him that he might die for Sparta.”103 And soldiers in every century write home to their mothers letters like this one: “Darling Mama, I had always prayed to show my love by doing something famous for you, to justify what you called me when I got back from France, ‘my hero son.’”104 To show that they go to war fused with their mothers, warriors even wear symbols of her in wars—her feathers on their helmets, goddess pictures on their shields, swastikas (vaginal symbols) on their uniforms—and regularly display flags (maternal dresses, placental symbols)105 in their battles. Heroes are never ones who reduce violence. Heroes kill—kill innocent others and kill themselves, setting off their inner time bombs embedded in childhood—and thereby become “a martyr beloved by God [Killer Mother].” Partridge observed the mood of war as “one of ecstasy…heroism, taking part in great events or of victory…the sense of self-loss…of merger into some greater whole.”106 Dopamine is released; fantasies of grandiosity soar; nations dance in the streets. Bloody slaughter is often experienced as joyful: “As he watched pieces of men’s bodies fly up into the air…he wept with joy…like getting screwed the first time.”107 Furthermore, as Chris Hedges’ book title puts it, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,108 since those who did not receive love in childhood can develop no inner self that gives them meaning, and so as adults must fuse with their Killer Motherlands to achieve meaning.
Warriors are made by switching civilians into their early alters in basic training so they repeat the confrontations and fears between their fearsome mother and her helpless child. As one NCO explains: “I try to make soldiers of them. I give them hell from morning to sunset. They begin to curse me…Then they begin to curse together; and become a truly cohesive group—a fighting unit.”109 Everything is done “to take down your pride, make you feel small,”110 and to re-experience the death fears of early childhood that are embedded in your alter. As one military academy put it: “This is the place where you will learn how to die.”111 It is not easy to fully switch into these deadly early alters. Many soldiers do not succeed in switching into being killing warriors, since they received enough love in childhood to avoid having real killing alters. In the infantry in WWII, “only about one-seventh of the soldiers were willing to use their weapons” to kill, although “by the Vietnam War, with further modifications to the training, around 80 percent of American soldiers were shooting to kill.”112 Warriors often recognize that they have switched into alternative personalities in wars. As one American soldier put it, “No man in battle is really sane. The mindset of a soldier on the battlefield is a highly disturbed mind and this is an epidemic of insanity which affects everybody.”113 Another one described how he killed in a dissociated state: “I enjoyed the killing of the Viet Cong [it was like] watching myself in a movie. One part of me was doing something while the other part watched from a distance, shocked by the things it saw, yet powerless to stop them from happening.”114 Soldiers in combat often switch out of their violent alters often in “lightning emotional changes [that cause them to] act like lions and then like scared hares within the passage of a few minutes.”115 Killing takes its toll physically: a study of U.S. soldiers found they report “a violent pounding of the heart, shaking or trembling all over…over a quarter said they had vomited, and 21 percent said they had lost control of their bowels.”116 Over a third of U.S. military returning from Iraq show evidence of clinical Post Traumatic Distress Syndrome. But war is deemed worth it. “It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble…gives us purpose, meaning, a reasons for living…gives a sense that we can rise above our smallness…”117 Literally, another self, an alternative “smallness” personality, fused with the Killer Motherland, loved at last.
The alternate self of the warrior draws upon the same neurobiological states of mind as pre-psychotic and autistic children access, both conditions resulting from early amygdalan, prefrontal cortex and insula damage.118 Both autistics and military groups demonstrate the failure of autonomy. This can be seen concretely in all the odd actions that the military demonstrates that are similar to autistics. Autistics walk about with arched backs and stiff legs and arms, and so do soldiers (called marching). Autistics flap their arms and hit their heads and so do soldiers (saluting).119 Autistics avoid eye contact and don’t recognize you as they pass you, and neither do marching soldiers.120 Autistics don’t talk (troops in formation), love repetitive exercise (endless marching), retreat into their autistic shells to ward off expected attack (military armor), and are “fascinated by mechanical moving parts” (military vehicles).121 Autistics and troops march about to drums (like the shaman’s drum made of the Cosmic Tree of Heaven that induces trance) and wear costumes with metal ornaments (like shaman’s costume).122 All of these rituals explain why the military are called “infantry”—they feel infantile, like infants fearing death. They put themselves into their infantile war trance alters.
Why do nations go to war? Not because wars achieve any utilitarian return. The more than a trillion dollars a year the world now spends on their military is totally sacrificial, self-destructive. Nations say they go to war for emotional reasons, like “war is the greatest purifier to the race or nation” that can be achieved.123 Self-destructive wars are “purifying” because they can drown out all those terrible inner alters embedded in childhood. Behind the defensive group-fantasy need for purification is the accusation of dirtiness and badness: Mommy calls me a “stinky baby,” leaves me in my feces and urine, hates me for “making a mess,” for “being a mess.” I am even now bad, filthy, but I can be purified by war. I can “die young, clean, pure, fresh.”124 I can die as a “martyr to my Motherland,” and then I will be loved by Mommy instead of being hated. Becoming a warrior means not needing to live in despair; warriors control death, “choosing who lives and who dies because they pull the trigger.”125 All my early nightmares of death that still are in my head can be faced in reality, “outside my head,” in war, and I can then be sent back to join Mommy—dead, in a casket wrapped in Her dress, Her “living flag”—and I will finally be loved by Her, buried in Her bosom, forever.
Footnotes:
1 George Modelski, Long Cycles in World Politics. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1987.
2 Frank Klingberg, Cyclical Trends in American Foreign Policy Moods: The Unfolding of America’s World Role. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983; Jack E. Holmes, The Mood/Interest Theory of American Foreign Policy. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985; William R. Thompson, On Global War: Historical-Structural Approaches to World Politics. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988, p. 94; Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations. New York: Karnac, 2002, p. 160.
3 Terry Boswell, et al, “War in the Core of the World-System: Testing the Goldstein Thesis.” In Robert K. Schaeffer, Ed., War in the World-System. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989, p. 10.
4 Ibid., p. 13.
5 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, pp. 94-96.
6Ibid., pp. 242-254.
7 Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom. 2nd Ed. London: Routledge, 2001.
8 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 95.
9 James F. Masterson, The Emerging Self: A Developmental, Self, and Object Relations Approach to the Treatment of the Closet Narcissistic Disorder of the Self. New York: Bunner/Mazel, 1993, p. 92.
10 Eli Sagan, The Honey and the Hemlock: Democracy and Paranoia in Ancient Athens and Modern America. New York: BasicBooks, 1991, pp. 13-34.
11 Frank H. Denton and Warren Phillips, “Some Patterns in the History of Violence.” Conflict Resolution 12(1968): 193; William R. Thompson, On Global War.
12 Edward Ross Dickinson, The Politics of German Child Welfare from the Empire to the Federal Republic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996, p. 39.
13 Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle. London: Penguin Books, 1991, p. 180.
14 Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolo Machiavelli. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, pp. 25, 274.
15 Roland N. Stromberg, Redemption by War: The Intellectuals and 1914. Lawrence: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1982, p. 181.
16 Ibid., p. 92.
17 James F. Masterson, The Emerging Self: A Developmental, Self, and Object Relations Approach to the Treatment of the Closet Narcissistic Disorder of the Self, p. 116.
18 Ibid., p. 101.
19 Ibid., p. 168.
20 Ibid., p. 90. For a description of how Freud’s theory of the fear of the father moved to a later psychoanalytic theory of the earlier fear of the mother, see The Psychoanalytic Stuyd of the Child. Vol. 62. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2007. The key case study was that of “Little Hans,” whose rejecting, abandoning, battering mother threatened to have Hans’ penis cut off by a doctor, p. 24.
21 Ibid., p. 156.
22 Vamik Volkan, Blind Trust: Large Groups and Their Leaders in Times of Crisis and Terror. Charlottesville: Pitchstone Publishing, 2004, p. 37.
23 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, pp. 53-57; Hilary Neroni, The Violent Woman: Femininity, Narrative, and Violence in Contemporary American Cinema. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005.
24 Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection. New York: Pantheon Books, 199, p. 110; Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 261.
25 Eln R. Saks, The Center Cannot Hold. New York: Hyperion, 2007, pp. 3, 12, 29, 61, 85, 98, 99, 119.
26 Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007, p. 6.
27 Ronnie Dugger, On Reagan. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1983, p. 405.
28 Chris Hedges, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. New York: Free Press, 2006, p. 186.
29 Lloyd deMause, “The Gulf War as a Mental Disorder.” The Journal of Psychohistory 19(1991): 1-22. For “dangerous women group-fantasies,” see Chapter 4 of Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, pp. 53-57.
30 “Turning Off Depression.” Scientific American Mind, August/September 2006, pp. 26-31.
31 David F. Hay et al, “Pathways to Violence in the Children of Mothers Who Were Depressed Postpartum.” Developmental Psychology 39(2003): 1083-1094; Marian Radke-Yarrow, Children of Depressed Mothers: From Early Childhood to Maturity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
32 T. J. Gaensbauer, “Trauma in the Preverbal Period, Symptoms, Memories and Developmental Impact.” The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 50: 122-149.
33 Michael Ignatieff, “Nationalism and the Narcissism of Minor Differences.” In Ronald Beiner, Ed., Theorizing Nationalism. Albany: State University of New York Press, p. 91.
34 David Livingstone Smith, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007, p. 163.
35 Dorith Harari, et al, “Attachment, Disorganization, and Dissociation.” In eric Vermetten, Ed., Traumatic Dissociation: Neurobiology and Treatment. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Publishing, 2007, p. 36.
36 Lloyd deMause, “American Purity Crusades.” The Journal of Psychohistory 14 (1987): 346-347.
37 Hyam Maccoby, The Sacred Executioner: Human Sacrifice and the Legacy of Guilt. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1982.
38 Bassett, Jonathan F. “Psychological Defenses Against Death Anxiety: Integrating Terror Management Theory and Firestone’s Separation Theory.” Death Studies 31(2007): 744.
39 George Wills, “Gory Teddy.” Saturday Review, June, 1981, p. 49.
40 John A. Vasquez, The War Puzzle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 206.
41 Doug Wead, The Raising of a President: The Mothers and Fathers of Our Nation’s Leaders. New York: Atria Books, 2005, p. 17.
42 James F. Masterson, The Emerging Self: A Developmental, Self, and Object Relations Approach to the Treatment of the Closet Narcissistic Disorder of the Self.
43 Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, The War Trap. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981, p. 27.
44 Dominic D. P. Johnson, Overconfidence and War: The Havoc and Glory of Positive Illusions. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004; also see “False Optimism” chapter of Stephen Van Evera, Causes of War: Power and the Roots of Conflict. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999, pp. 14-33.
45 Fritz Fischer, War of Illusions: German Policies From 1911 to 1914. London: Chatto and Windus, 1975, p. 462.
46 Dominic D. P. Johnson, Overconfidence and War, pp. 3, 23.
47 Bruce W. Wilshire, Get ‘em All! Kill ‘em!: Genocide, Terrorism, Righteous Communities. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2005, p. xxiii.
48 “In Ethiopian Desert, Fear and Cries of Army Brutality.” The New York Times, June 18, 2007, p. 1.
49 Vamik Volkan, Killing in the Name of Identity: A Study of Bloody Conflicts. Pitchstone Publishing, 2006.
50 Fred Charles Ikle, Every War Must End. Second Rev. Ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, p. 9.
51 Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War. New York; Henry Holt and Co., 1997, p. 11.
52 Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect; Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. New York: Random House, 2007.
53 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, pp. 108-109.
54 Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites, p. 16.
55 Daniel Pick, War Machine: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993, p. 161.
56 Sue Mansfield, The Gestalts of War: An Inquiry Into Its Origins and Meanings as a Social Institution. New York: The Dial Press, 1982, p. 161.
57 Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, The Slave Soul of Russia: Moral Masochism and the Cult of Suffering. New York: New York University Press, 1995, p. 226.
58 Robert S. Robins and Jerrold M. Post, Political Paranoia: The Psychopolitics of Hatred. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997, p. 98.
59 J. Kenneth Brody, The Avoidable War: Pierre Laval & the Politics of Reality 1935-1936. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2000, p. 69.
60 David Livingstone Smith, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War, p. 2.
61 Ibid., p. 4.
62 Anthony D. Smith, National Identity. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1991, p. 77.
63 Vamik Volkan, Blind Trust, p. 67.
64 Eli Sagan, Citizens & Cannibals: The French Revolution, The Struggle for Modernity, and the Origins of Ideological Terror. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001, p. 91.
65 Micha Popper, Hypnotic Leadership: Leaders, Followers, and the Loss of Self. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2001, p. 26.
66 Barry O’Neill, Honor, Symbols, and War. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2001, p. 89.
67 Arno Gruen, The Insanity of Normality: Toward Understanding Human Destructiveness. Berkeley, Calif.: Human Development Books, p. 6.
68 M. Pottle, Ed., Champion Redoubtable. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998, p. 25.
69 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America. Garden City: Anchor Books, 1969, p. 194.
70 Michael A. Persinger, Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs. New York: Praeger, 1987, p. 31.
71 Ibid., p. 3.
72 Ibid., p. 39.
73 Catherine Wessinger, Ed., Millennialism, Persecution, and Violence: Historical Cases. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000.
74 Lloyd deMause, “The History of Child Assault.” The Journal of Psychohistory 18(1990): 16-18.
75 Ralph H. Gabriel, Main Currents in American History. New York: Appleton-Century Company, 1942, p. 47.
76 Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites, p. 138.
77 Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare. New York: Basic Books, 1999, p. 3.
78 Evelin Gerda Lindner, Making Enemies: Humiliation and International Conflict. Westport, Ct: Praeger Security International, 2006.
79 Benjamin A. Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004, p. 19.
80 Stephen Van Evera, Causes of War, p. 214.
81 Ibid., p. 203.
82 Ibid., p. 76.
83 Richard Knightly, The First Casualty. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2004, p. 487.
84 Lloyd deMause, “The Gulf War as a Mental Disorder.” The Journal of Psychohistory 19(1991):13.
85 Dan Reiter and Allan C. Stam, Democracies at War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002, p. 150.
86 Robert McFarland, “Provoking War: An American Repetition Compulsion.” The Journal of Psychohistory 35(2007):25-30; Richard Sanders, “How to Start a War: The American Use of War Pretext Incidents (1848-1989).”
87 Martha Stout, The Paranoia Switch: How Terror Rewires Our Brains and Reshapes Our Behavior—and How We Can Reclaim Our Courage. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
88 Eric Alterman, When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences. New York: Penguin Books, 2005, p. 16.
89 Robert Hendrickson, Sumter, The First Day of the Civil War. Chelsea, Mich., Scarborough House, 1990.
90 Hyman G. Rickover, How the Battleship Maine Was Destroyed. Washington: Dept. of the Navy, Naval History Division, 1976, pp. 94-106.
91 Richard Sanders, “How to Start a War,” p. 5.
92 Howard Zinn, The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1997, p. 230.
93 Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor. New York: The Free Press, 1999.
94 Channing Liem, The Korean War: An Unanswered Question. Pyongyang, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1993.
95 Dominic D. P. Johnson, Overconfidence and War, p. 33.
96 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 172.
97 Ibid., p. 173.
98 Harris Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings: Making Sense of the Sixties. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1980, p. 292.
99 Eric Alterman, When Presidents Lie, p. 211.
100 John G. Stoessinger, Why Nations Go to War. Fourth Ed., New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985, pp. 100-101.
101 Al Gore, The Assault on Reason. New York: Penguin Books, 2007, p. 170.
102 Sue Mansfield, The Gestalts of War, p. 62.
103 Plutarch, Moralia Vol. 3. London: W. Heinemann, 1976, p. 25.
104 Victor Goertzel and Mildred George Goertzel, Cradles of Eminence. Boston: Little, Brown, 1962, p. 229.
105 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, pp. 79-80.
106 Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites, p. 14.
107 David Livingstone Smith, The Most Dangerous Animal, p. 214.
108 Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. New York: Public Affairs, 2002.
109 Gwynne Dyer, War: The Lethal Custom.. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2004, p. 32.
110 Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing, p. 68.
111 Emilio Willems, A Way of Life and Death. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1986, p. 78.
112 Gwynne Dyer, War: The Lethal Custom, pp. 58, 61.
113 Ibid., p. 103.
114 David Livingstone Smith, The Most Dangerous Animal, p. 159.
115 Gywnne Dyer, War: The Lethal Custom, p. 27.
116 Ibid., p. 21.
117 Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, pp. 3, 7.
118 Kevin Pephrey et al, “Neuroanatomical Subsrates of Social Cognition Dysfunction in Autism.” Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Research Reviews 10(2005): 259-271; David Dobbs, “A Revealing Reflection.” Scientific American Mind April/May 2006, p. 26.
119 Louis Cozolino, The Neuroscience of Human Relationships: Attachment and the Developing Social Brain. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006, p. 213.
120 Stephen Briggs, “Observing When Infants Are at Potential Risk.” In Susan Reid, Ed., Developments in Infant Observation: The Tavistock Model. London: Routledge, 1997, pp. 213-216, 220.
121 Frances Tustin, Autistic Barriers in Neurotic Patients. London: Karnac Books, 1986, p. 68.
122 Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Arkana: Penguin Books, 2064, p. 149.
123 Michael C. C. Adams, The Great Adventure: Male Desire and the Coming of World War I. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990, p. 84.
124 Ibid., 84.
125 Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing, p. 38.
Chapter 6
The Childhood Origins of World War II and the Holocaust
World War II and the Holocaust have been studied by historians and political scientists more than any war in history. Their conclusions about what caused them are that Germans were simply obeying Hitler, a case of “mass hypnosis” by one man: “Historians are, rightly, nearly unanimous that…the causes of the Second World War were the personality and the aims of Adolf Hitler” [F. H. Hinsley]; “the war Hitler started was one which he alone wanted” [William Manchester]; “only one European really wanted war—Adolf Hitler” [John Keegan]; “no Hitler, no Holocaust” [Klaus Fischer].1 Psychiatrists have usually followed the lead of historians, claiming for instance that they could find no psychopathology in the Nazi leaders who were given Rorschach tests at Nuremberg—they were “all too normal” people, and their mass murders were committed by “well-integrated, productive and secure personalities”2 who were merely “obeying orders.” That a theory which posits millions of people choose a leader who promises them they can kill millions of other people only because they were “following orders” is a pure tautology never occurs to them. When Eichman bragged “I laughed that I have killed five million Jews” and psychiatrists claim his statement was “normal,” it demonstrates not “the banality of evil” but the banality of psychiatry.
When states go to war because they re-enact the nightmares of child abuse that are embedded like time bombs in their brains in violent alters, and if they usually do so when they experience growth panic following an historical period of dangerous new freedom and growth, then each phase of going to war should betray historical evidence of real childhood traumas being re-experienced. In order to understand the traumatic nightmares being acted out in World War II and the Holocaust, we will have to first understand in detail the nightmarish terrors of German, Austrian and Japanese childrearing at the beginning of the 20th century. Because more psychohistorical research has been done on Central European childrearing than on Japanese, we will begin with a detailed description of early childrearing in Germany and Austria. We will then more briefly describe Japanese childrearing and finally show how both nations went to war in the seven group-fantasy phases described above, aided by similar sacrificial actions by the Allies that helped produce the war and genocide.
LATE 19TH-CENTURY GERMAN AND AUSTRIAN CHILDREARING
The first decision German and Austrian parents had to make when an infant was born was whether it should be killed. Newborn were not in most cases considered human since they did not yet have a soul, and so could be “killed in a kind of late abortion.”3 Mothers often “had their babies in the privy, and treated the birth as an evacuation…a bowel movement…killing their children by smashing their heads like poultry.”4 Even the underestimated figures given by officials showed German infanticide at the end of the twentieth century as 20 percent, half again higher than France and England.5 Infant mortality in Bavaria, where breastfeeding was rare, was given as 58% and was probably closer to 75%, which means almost every child watched their mothers strangle or otherwise kill their siblings when born.6 Mothers were described as being without remorse as they killed their newborn.7 Children routinely saw dead babies in sewers, on roads and in streams as they played.8 From early childhood on, German children experienced in direct form the terror of seeing babies killed without remorse by their Killer Mothers, imagining that “the babies must have been bad” to deserve their fate, and embedded in their amygdalan networks both a Killer Mother alter and a Bad Baby alter, vowing to always obey their parents and any other authority so they would not also be killed. Dicks found that Nazis had “particularly destructive mother images,” and the Oliners found German rescuers of Jews had families that showed them more love and respect than Nazi parents.9 Polls of Germans of the time show the majority were also routinely beaten by their fathers, and considered him “absolute law in the family…we feared him more than we loved him.”10
That real mothers regularly killed their newborn infants saying they were “unworthy of living” formed the main source of later German delusions that Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Russians, French, British, American and other neighbors were “unworthy of living” and must be killed by the millions—fifty million in fact—an act embedded in their right brains as they watched their Killer Mothers murder their siblings.11 When Hitler said that “France, the mortal enemy of our nation, inexorably strangles us,”12 he was not, as most historians assume, just being colorful; he was expressing his and his fellow German’s experience of actually seeing their Killer Mothers strangling their infant siblings. Most of Germany agreed with him that their 1939 attack on Poland that started WWII was “defensive,” since they were “faced with the harsh alternatives of striking or of certain annihilation.”13 The Killer Mother memory may have been totally in their heads rather than in reality, but it seemed more real than anything outside could be. And that Jews were for centuries really Killer Mothers was proven by German convictions since the thirteenth century that Jews drained children’s blood and killed them, called “the Blood Libel” by historians. Luther reflected the widespread German group-fantasy by calling Jews “thirsty bloodhounds and murderers [of] children.”14 And German Social Darwinists revealed the maternal model for the murder of millions by saying they were only “imitating Mother Nature who weeds out the weakest ones,” again a description of the actual German mothers who “weeded out” some of her newborn infants.
It should not be thought that the killing of newborn was mainly a result of poverty. In fact, my lengthy study of boy/girl ratios as a revealing index of infanticide (since little girl babies were more unworthy of living than boys) shows more infanticide in wealthier families, and visitors to Germany in the late nineteenth century reported” “It is extremely rare for a German lady to nourish her own children” and “It would have been very astonishing indeed if a well-to-do mother had suggested suckling her own baby,” saying “it is too messy” or “they didn’t want to ruin their figures” or “breast-feeding was inconvenient.”15 Wetnurses were commonly given the newborn, and more often than not they were “killing nurses”—termed Engelmcherin, “angelmakers”—who were paid to kill off the children sent to them. The children of the wetnurse would watch their mother briefly give the new baby her breast, saying “Poor, poor little one…soon you will go, soon, soon” and see the child was dead by morning.16 German children who watched their parents send their newborn siblings off to wetnurse implanted this image in their violent alters and repeated their actions in the “resettlement” of millions of Jews and Poles and others when they became adults.
Even if the mother breastfed her baby, it was only a few times a day, and the rest of the time it was abandoned to the cradle in a dark room, wrapped in tight swaddling bandages, with their mouths stuffed with a Zulp, a linen bag filled with bread and alcohol, so those dying of neglect and starvation ranged from a quarter to half in their first year of life.17 Infants were so routinely hungry that “one rarely encounters a German infant who is fully breast-fed…those poor worms get their mouths stuffed with a dirty rag containing chewed bread so that they cannot scream.”18 Children simply were not felt to be human like adults. Even when they were infants and little children, their parents constantly told them they were just “useless mouths to feed…rarely could we eat a piece of bread without hearing father’s comment that we did not merit it.”19 Indeed, fathers were competitors to their babies for their wives’ breasts. In Bavaria, for instance, where breastfeeding by the mother was uncommon, a man married a woman from northern Germany, and when she had her baby the jealous father told her that nursing her child was “swinish and filthy” and he himself “would not eat if she did not give up this disgusting habit.”20
The phrase applied to children—“useless mouths to feed”—was widely repeated before and during WWII to apply to the wish of Germans and Austrians to kill 30 to 50 million “useless mouths” in Europe, from Jews to any outside enemy who was attacked. Their need had nothing to do with anything economic; as Hermann Goering put it in 1941, “This year 20 to 30 million people will starve in Russia. Perhaps this is for the best, since certain nations must be decimated.”21 The same infantile starvation fantasy was evident in many other Nazi notions, such as their supposed need to kill others to obtain more Lebensraum, more room to grow food to prevent imminent starvation, a situation that simply did not apply to Central Europe, which had plenty of resources to increase their supply of food. Hitler’s conviction that Mother Germany did not have enough Lebensraum to properly feed the nation came directly from his memory of his infantile hunger, since mothers in Braunau where he was raised rarely breastfed their infants.
The shortage of Lebensraum (room to live) had a second source in childhood. Upon birth, “the wretched new-born little thing was wound up in ells of bandages, from the feet right, and tight, up to the neck; as if it were intended to be embalmed as a mummy…babies are loathsome, foetid things, offensive to the last degree with their excreta…”22 Babies simply could not move for their first year of life. A visitor from England described the German baby as “a piteous object; it is pinioned and bound up like a mummy in yards of bandages…it is never bathed…Its head is never touched with soap and water until it is eight or ten months old.”23 Their feces and urine was so regularly left on their bodies that they were covered with lice and other vermin attracted to their excreta, and since the swaddling bandages were very tight and covered their arms as well as their bodies, they could not prevent the vermin from drinking their blood. Their parents considered them so disgusting they called them “filthy lice-covered babies,” and often put them, swaddled, in a bag, which they hung on the wall or on a tree while the mothers did other tasks.24 The fear of being poisoned by lice was daily embedded in the fearful alter of the baby, and was as an adult re-experienced as a fear of Jews being “filthy lice who attempted to infect the pure German blood and who had to be exterminated to cleanse the German bloodstream.”25 Germany, Hitler said, had to restore its 1914 borders “to get an influx of fresh blood [because] the Polish Corridor is a national wound that bleeds continuously.” Infancy in swaddling bands was re-experienced: “Poisonous bacilli” were “sucking out our blood [and injecting] a continuous stream of poison into our blood vessels.”26
Nazi “housecleaning of the unfit” began early on with 800,000 children having their blood taken to analyze its purity, and over 70,000 “useless eater” children were exterminated in the first gas chambers and crematorium ovens before any Jews were sent to gas chambers—to “cleanse and disinfect” the nation.27 Eventually, Jews and other “useless eaters” were sent to gas chambers, run by doctors, claiming they were “filthy lice who attempted to infect the pure German blood” who had to be exterminated to “cleanse the bacteria that brought about infection.”28 Himmler explained the childhood origins of the Jewish bacteria delusion as follows: “Anti-semitism is exactly like delousing. The removal of lice is not an ideological question, but a matter of hygiene.”29 Hitler himself used to watch for hours as his own blood was being sucked by leeches “to rid it of poison.”30 Jews were rounded up and made into “Bad Selves”—shit-babies—putting them into overcrowded death camps and telling them: “You’ll be eaten by lice, you’ll rot in your own shit…All are going to die.”31 Jews were called “pestiferous bacillus carriers,” made to live like lice-covered babies, forced to lie in barracks like they themselves were forced to live in their swaddling bands, “awash with urine and feces, forced to eat their own feces, and finally dying in showers covered with their excrement.”32 Repeating their parents’ curses at them as shit-babies, their guards told them “You’ll be eaten by lice; you’ll rot in your own shit, you filthy shitface.”33 As they killed Jews, guards told them what they imagined their mothers felt as they killed their newborn siblings: “Because you’re dirty you have to die.”34 They were all Bad Shit-Babies. They had to die. If they were not killed, Nazis said they would “gobble up the breast of Germany!”35
The abandonment of children was not limited to sending them to wetnurses. Children were given away and even sold to relatives, neighbors, foundling homes, even “traveling scholars” to be used as beggars, with the rationalization that this was so they could be “drilled for hard work” and “learn discipline.”36
If a German newborn was allowed to live, it was then subjected to the most horrifying traumatic tortures that can be inflicted upon children, every detail of which became indelibly imprinted on their early amygdalan fear system and then re-inflicted upon “enemies” during the war and the Holocaust. The restrictions of the first year of tight swaddling were continued in subsequent years by putting them in various restraint devices, steel-stayed corsets worn by both sexes, steel collars and backboards strapped to the waist, all to ensure they would not become “tyrants.”37 The endless encirclement fears of childhood were implanted in German alters and re-experienced in the constant fears of Germany itself being encircled by enemies, even when, as with the British and Soviets in the interwar period, they “continually denied all charges of encirclement.”38 Hitler from the first used swaddling/restraint language all the time to describe Germany’s emotional plight: “Germany is bound head and foot by Peace Treaties” and they must go to war in order to “breathe more freely.”39 Restrictive, abandoning German childrearing guaranteed sacrificial war when they were adults—even monkeys who are reared in isolation and restriction grow up vicious and self-mutilating.40
The traditional German obsession with children’s feces continued after swaddling ended by the regular use of enemas as a maternal domination device, “a fetish object often wielded by the mother or nurse in daily rituals that resembled sexual assaults on the anus, sometimes including tying the child up in leather straps as though the mother were a dominatrix, inserting the two-foot-long enema tube over and over again as punishment for ‘accidents.’ There were special enema stores that German children would be taken to in order to be ‘fitted’ for their proper size of enemas. Mothers had “an intensive fear of the notorious smell of the small child” which made them give daily enemas “to prevent them from becoming a relentless house tyrant.”41 The ritual ‘stab in the back’ was a central fear of German children well into the twentieth century, and they learned ‘never to speak of it, but always to think about it.’”42 Enema fears, of course, were re-experienced in the “stab in the back” group-fantasy that Germans kept referring to when they imagined the Versailles Treaty was agreed to by German socialists without Germany ever having been defeated in WWI.
Sexual molestation of children was routine and considered normal. When infants were removed from their cribs, they usually slept in the family bed and either were made part of the sexual act or regularly witnessed it close up. Bloch reported the seduction of children in Germany was “very widespread,” and German doctors reported “nursemaids and other servants carry out all sorts of sexual acts on the children entrusted to their care, sometimes merely in order to quiet the children, sometimes ‘for fun.’”43 Freud’s patients (and Freud himself) said they were seduced by their nurses, who “put crying children to sleep by stroking their genitals.”44 “Little Hans” slept with his mother for four years, and told Freud his mother said if he touched his penis she would cut it off.45 Priests used children for sex then too.46 Both boys and girls regularly were raped in schools, by teachers and older students, and there were even special schools espousing “pedagogical Eros”—the benefits of teachers using students for sex “to help learning.”47 Plus, of course, most young girls and boys were sexually assaulted as servants and apprentices.48
There were all kinds of “obedience rituals” in German families that were designed to make the child “always good” that were commented upon by outsiders at the time as being particularly violent. Kind words were rare in German homes, and most Germans remembered “no tender word, no caresses, only fear” during childhood.49Children were regularly placed on a red-hot iron stove if obstinate, tied to their bed-posts for days, thrown into cold water or snow to “harden” them, forced to kneel for hours every day against the wall on a log while the parents ate and read, and frightened by parents dressing up in terrifying ghost costumes (the so-called Knecht Ruprecht) and pretending to eat up and kill them for their transgressions.50
Scheck sums up the effects of these terrifying devices: “most children had been so deeply frightened that their ‘demons of childhood’ persecuted them at night and in feverish dreams for their whole lives.”51 The apocalyptic group-fantasies of Nazism were direct results of these childhood nightmares.
It was brutal beating, beginning in infancy, that visitors to Germany most commented upon at the beginning of the twentieth century, with the mother far more often the main beater than the father. Luther’s statement that “I would rather have a dead son than a disobedient one”52 is misleading, since it implies disobedience only was the occasion for beatings, whereas mere crying or even just needing something usually resulted in being punished. “Dr. Schreber said the earlier one begins beatings the better…One must look at the moods of the little ones which are announced by screaming without reason and crying [inflicting] bodily admonishments consistently repeated until the child calms down or falls asleep…one is master of the child forever. From now on a glance, a word, a single threatening gesture, is sufficient to rule the child.”53 Havernick found 89 percent of parents admitted beating little children at the beginning of the twentieth century, over half with canes, whips, or sticks.54 The motto of German parents for centuries was “Children can never get enough beatings.”55 They were not just spankings; they were beatings with instruments or whippings like Hitler’s daily whippings with a dog whip, which often put him into a coma.56 (As Fuehrer, Hitler used to carry a dog whip with him as he gave orders to be carried out.) It is not surprising that German childhood suicides were three to five times higher than other Western European nations at the end of the nineteenth century, fears of beatings by parents being the reason cited by children for their suicides.57 No one spoke up for the children; newspapers wrote: “ boy who commits suicide because of a box on the ears has earned his fate.”58 The beatings continued at school, where “we were beaten until our skin smoked.”59 Children could be heard screaming on the streets each morning as they were being dragged to school by their mothers.60 The schoolmaster who boasted he had given “911,527 strokes with the stick and 124,000 lashes with the whip” to students was not that unusual for the time.61 Comparisons of German and French childhoods in the late nineteenth century found “no bright moment, no sunbeam, no hint of a comfortable home [with] mother love and care” in the German ones, with “sexual molestation and beatings at home and at school consistently worse in the German accounts.”62 Ende’s massive study of German autobiographies of the time found “infant mortality, corporal punishment, and cruelties against children” were so brutal he had to apologize “for not dealing with the ‘brighter side’ of German childhood because it turns out that there is no ‘bright side.’”63 Other studies found most Germans remembered “no tender word, no caresses, only fear” with childhood “so joyless, so immeasurably sad that you could not fathom it.”64 When Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that “the German people today lies broken and defenseless, exposed to the kicks of all the world”65 both he and his reading audience read this not as political metaphor but as the real kicks of their parents and teachers and real memories of lying broken and defenseless. The tortures of childhood were far more traumatic and constant than the later studies of “authoritarianism” ever imagined. There was a good reason that Germans and Austrians spoke so often about their Kinderfeindlichkeit (rage toward children), and it is this rage that is embedded in the early violent amygdalan alters which is inflicted upon others in World War II and the Holocaust. The child-hitting hand was even the symbol of Nazi obedience, since the Nazi salute endlessly displayed the open palm of their beating parents as they fused with them, flush with opioids. “Ghosts from the nursery” embedded by extremely insecurely attached children were displayed everywhere in Nazi Germany. To imagine tens of millions of people “just obeying Hitler” as though there were no inner compulsion to inflict their nightmarish earlier childhood tortures on others is simply absurd.
JAPANESE CHILDREARING BEFORE WWII
All of the routine child abuse described above for Central European families was common in Japan at the turn of the twentieth century. Infanticide was so common it was accepted “as a form of family planning,” killing either boy or girl newborn babies in murders called “thinning out.”66 As siblings watched their mothers bury the newborn, they like the Germans imagined it was because they were weak “bad babies,” embedded this fear in their alters, and revived the fear of being killed by enemies when their society was changing so fast during their industrial and cultural expansion. Despite the fact that Japan had grown economically three times as fast as the U.S. during the interwar period, they claimed before attacking Pearl Harbor that the attack was necessary because “Japan is getting weaker [and] the enemy is getting strong…we won’t be able to survive” unless we attack.67 Even though no nation was threatening to conquer Japan in 1941, their amygdalan fearful alter memory of watching their mothers commit infanticide by the millions told them, as they put it, “the very existence” of weak little Japan [was now] a matter of life and death” and they were about to be “strangled.”68
Japanese babies at birth were wrapped with a futon and encased in a restrictive ejoko box, so they could not move, and kept tied up in it much of the time for three or four years as late as the early twentieth century69—producing constant fears of being restricted and encircled identical to those of Germans and Austrians. All the other abuses described above were in constant use by Japanese parents: beating and burning of incense (moxa) on the skin as routine punishments,70 cruel bowel training with constant enemas,71 frightening children with ghosts (o-bake), “kicking, hanging by the feet, giving cold showers, strangling, driving a needle into the body, cutting off a finger joint,” putting the child outside the house at night, “dressing up as a ghost” to frighten the child, and telling visitors to “take this child away—we don’t want it!”72
But it is in the practice of the sexual use of children that earlier Japanese excelled even more than Germans and Austrians. Imperial incest was common, and Japanese fathers until recently would often marry their daughters after the death of their wives, considering incest a “praiseworthy” practice.73 Samurai warriors, priests and other elite historically favored using young boys for anal pederastic sex, finding them preferable to sex with their subordinated wives.74 Boy geishas and prostitutes were rife until recently.75 Because Japanese husbands so rarely come home at night—going to geisha or other women for sex—the mothers are desperately lonely, and so routinely co-sleeping with their children “skin to skin” (nude, dakine) and co-bathing until they were grown up.76 Even today, many Japanese mothers masturbate their children in public, in bed “to put them to sleep” and during co-bathing, sometimes promising to let them have intercourse with them if they do well on their next school test.77 Childhood sexual abuse, I have found, leads nations more to self-destructive than just the violent behavior instilled by beatings.
Japanese childhood, therefore, contained at least as much abuse and neglect as Central European, and as these two areas contained the most powerful democratizing political nations in the world in the 1920s, they experienced the most fearful growth panic by their populace in reaction to the democratic freedoms introduced by their “transitional democracies”78 and reacted by fusing with their Killer Motherlands and going to war. In the following sections, we will first explain in detail the seven group-fantasy phases of going to war and creating the Holocaust for Germany and Austria, then more briefly for Japan, and then watch the rest of the world both contribute to and defend itself in the most deadly sacrificial war in history.
AMERICAN AND BRITISH CHILD ABUSE BEFORE WWII
Although of course America and England had almost entirely given up infanticide and tight swaddling, their child abuse rates for the people raised in 1900–1920 who fought WWII were still considerable. The overwhelming majority of toddlers were beaten, with hard objects, and teachers flogged children daily. I detail the historical evidence for this physical abuse in my book, The Emotional Life of Nations,79 but there is one aspect of child abuse that was routine in the early 20th century that must be estimated from current abuse figures: the sexual use of children. The best U.S. studies today are those of Wyatt and Russell, based on recent face-to-face interviews, which found 38 percent and 45 percent respectively of women and 30 percent of men had memories of serious sexual abuse during their childhoods. U.K. figures for today are even higher, with 59 percent of women and 27 percent of college men admitting to being sexually abused.80 Two-thirds of British parents today still hit their helpless infants in their first year, and the majority are still smacking their four-year-olds several times a week.81 In addition, the routine sexual use and brutal beating of children in British schools in the 20th century are well documented. All these U.S. and U.K. child abuse rates must have been much higher in the 1900–1920 period for those who fought WWII, so that one must conclude that the majority of people in these nations were seriously abused as children and then like the Germans precipitated and fought the war for internal emotional motivations.
PHASES ONE AND TWO: WEIMAR FREEDOMS AND FEARS
By the end of the nineteenth century, Germany and Austria began to achieve a new surge of industrialization and the beginnings of a democratic political system that were the result of improving childrearing in a minority of their families to produce a new more advanced psychoclass—in particular in cities where working class and Jewish families concentrated. German Jewish families “constituted one of the most spectacular social leaps in European history [and] produced some of the most fiercely independent minds” in Europe.82 In the Weimar phases, therefore, Jews and workers were the most progressive in childrearing and politically, and were therefore the target of the reactionary majority in political activity. This reactionary majority attacked progressive parliamentary activities and whatever the authoritarian alters saw as threatening to the rigid systems of domination that their parents practiced: civil rights, free press, “materialism,” “arguing with each other” in political parties, and women’s rights. Scholars like Goldhagen have assumed without evidence that anti-Semitism was somehow passed on in German genes from one generation to another83—or they say anti-Semitism was somehow “in German society,” which is just a tautological way of saying “it is common because it is common.” The most convincing study of Weimar attitudes toward Jews is Johnson and Reuband’s interviews with 3,000 Germans asking about prejudice in the 1920s and 1930s. They were surprised to find German Jews felt rather safe until quite late in the Nazi period, that they felt “love and gratitude” toward Germany and “were fanatical patriots” who were “totally assimilated” because “there is no Jewish race…[only] German citizens of Jewish belief.”84 Hitler himself told his staff in the 1920s and early 1930s to keep their violence toward Jews at a minimum even after his takeover in 1933, so that “only 3 percent [of Jews said] that their families had unfriendly or mostly unfriendly relations” with their non-Jewish neighbors until after 1935.85 As we will see shortly, when Germans and Austrians needed “internal enemies” in 1936 during Phase 5 and the majority switched into their violent alters and began shipping Jews to concentration camps, Jews said “it came to us as a tremendous shock that this anti-Semitic policy was introduced. It took us such a long time to grasp this new direction. It was unthinkable. Because we were so utterly German.”86
Most German group-fantasies during the Weimar years centered on inner emotional threats from the progress of a new generation (new psychoclass), such as from women’s liberation. Because women could vote and many even held professional jobs, Germans began what I have elsewhere termed a “Purity Crusade”87 against the “New Woman,” pictured in many Garbo and Dietrich films as phallic vampires (“vamps,” “flappers”), “dressed in unisex clothing [with] her hair cropped short” and threatening men’s masculinity.88 Women in Europe began saying they had rights to sexual pleasure, even before marriage.89 Hitler spelled out his fear of sensuality in Mein Kampf when he declared “Theater, art, literature, cinema, press, posters and window displays [in Wiemar Germany] must be cleansed.”90 Males who were dominated by Killer Mothers in childhood had to dominate women as adults or they risked becoming “helpless children bound to predatory women” again, so as women gained new freedoms during Weimar men felt weak again.91 “Modernity was almost always represented as a woman” in political cartoons.92 Hitler called modern cities “abscesses on the body of the people—places where all evils, vices and sicknesses appear to unite.”93 Nazis were not supposed to allow their wives to work,94 and they dominated them like they dominated other threatening enemies, blaming “the weak males of modern society who had abdicated their responsibility to rule their women with an iron fist [for being] infected by effeminate humanism.”95
Peter Gay portrays Weimar culture as producing “exuberant creativity and experimentation” but also as producing “anxiety, fear and a rising sense of doom,” what Erich Fromm termed “fear of freedom”96 and what Mahler terms “separation and individuation anxiety.”97 Democracy was seen as “a beast of a thousand heads” and Weimar Purity Crusades called for “emancipation from emancipation,” “a restoration of authoritarian rule,” a “rebirth of Germany” that would “unify and cleanse” them, “a national enema” that purged them of their more progressive “Bad Selves.”98 The conquest of Germany by the Nazis had nothing to do with reactions to economic distress. In 1930 election, after the Depression hit, the Nazis only polled 18% of the votes. The poor and unemployed actually voted less for Hitler than the middle class and the wealthy.99 Merkly’s study of Nazi storm troopers found that “those who grew up in poverty showed the least prejudice” against Jews.100 In fact, the Nazis received their highest vote return before the Depression hit. Hitler was thoroughly disinterested in economics. Germany both in the late 1920s and 1930s enjoyed a higher standard of living than any other European nation. Economics were secondary in the Nazi takeover. German problems in the 19th and 20th centuries were those of all democratizing nations101—a lagging psychoclass majority that was driven to pathological authoritarianism by too much independence. Even the Pope backed Hitler’s takeover.102 It was only as Germans experienced too much freedom and their growth panic took over late in the 1920s and then occurred again during the 1930s recovery that all the “ghosts from the nursery” began to return and they plunged further and further into their need for self-destructive sacrificial wars and genocidal racism. They built new highways in Germany under Hitler and invented the Volkswagen, both of which could have produced new freedoms, new trade, new prosperity—so to avoid this dangerous individuation they instead took the money people paid down for their VWs and built tanks in the VW factories and then used the new highways to go to the borders and provoke self-destructive wars.
PHASES THREE AND FOUR: FISSION AND FUSION
As Germany’s Purity Crusade successfully halted women’s rights and reversed political, social and sexual freedoms, other nations began to be split off and portrayed as Killer Motherlands and an all-powerful Killer Germania began to be seen as fused with a group-fantasy. The source of the new violent nationalism was the growing inner feelings of disintegration due to too much freedom and independence, needing the defense of fusion with and clinging to the Killer Motherland.103 “You are nothing; the Volk is everything” became the central Nazi fantasy,104 and the fusion with Germania, the Killer Mutterland, was so powerful that when Goebbels asked the Germans, “Do you want total war?” they screamed “Yes! Yes!”105
Nazi plans for war with fissioned-off neighboring states preceded by years his unleashing of the genocide upon Jews. Although both sadists and masochists dominated in Nazi quarters, sadists dominated at first, then the more self-destructive actions of the masochists who killed German Jews.106 At first, only “bad” children, the handicapped, the sick, and other “weak babies” and “useless eaters” were sent to the first gas chambers and killed by doctors “to cleanse the German national body.”107 By 1933 the Nazis seized power by carrying out their first faked incident—the fire in the Reichstag started by a lone Dutch syndicalist—by throwing all the leading German Communists into prison, suspending civil liberties, and passing the Enabling Act that created Hitler’s dictatorship.108 Jews were not made the target of violence, since when Goebbels called for a nationwide boycott of Jewish shops he had to call it off after a few days because “it had failed to arouse popular enthusiasm.”109 The initial central task of the Nazis was not persecuting Jews; it was creating a powerful Killer Mutterland, a Volk that made Germans feel they were fused with the Killer Mother alters in their heads. This fused state was termed Gleichschaltung, a “total national unity.” Within a year of Hitler’s assuming power, there were six times as many storm troopers, numbering over four million warriors, dwarfing the German armed forces restricted to a mere 100,000 by the Treaty of Versailles.
Hitler himself of course shared all the deadly child abuse described above prevalent in German and Austrian families. Most biographies of Hitler follow Binion’s statement that although “breastfeeding was rare in Braunau” where he was born, his mother must have “overfed, overprotected and overindulged Adolf” making him a “spoiled mother’s darling.”110 Neither Binion nor the over fifty other historians who claim Hitler was overfed and overindulged gave a single historical citation to back their claims. That he was tightly swaddled is historically accurate and that his father regularly kicked and whipped him “until he lost consciousness”111 no doubt formed the childhood imprinting incidents for his fears that “Germans are exposed to the kicks of all the world” and of course for the physical kicking and whipping of his enemies. But that Hitler was regularly starved as he lay tightly bound in his swaddling bands, like other Bavarian infants of the time, and that this was imprinted on his life-long delusional fears of imminent German starvation is denied. Hitler’s words about the need to go to war revealed his and his nation’s bizarre fears of starvation: as early as in Mein Kampf he explained that the reason that they “needed to expand the motherland” was “so that the Germanic mother might nourish her offspring sufficiently,” a fear reaching back to all those starving swaddled babies and to the ones killed because the mother didn’t feel like nursing them. The source of his violent political program in infancy is obvious in his choice of imagery: “How can we feed the nation? [The answer lies in] the cradle…The child does not ask, when it drinks, whether the mother’s breast is being tortured.”112
The notion that Adolf was “overly nursed” and “overindulged” by his mother is without a shred of evidence. Like all war leaders, he was fused with her—claiming “My only bride is my Mutterland”—and he personally acted like a usual German/Austrian mother while speaking to his audience, screaming and bounding on tables and threatening others with death. One German who knew Hitler said, “Hitler is the most profoundly feminine man he has ever met, and there are moments when he becomes almost effeminate.”113 His listeners knew him as a perfect representative of their own Killer Mothers, Goebbels saying they “felt like a child in the arms of a mother” with him. As we pointed out earlier, Hitler saw his mother as a death-dealing Medusa, keeping both his mother’s and Medusa’s pictures near his desk, and saying of the painting of Medusa: “Those are the eyes of my mother!”114 That he was fused with her deadly eyes is shown by his practice of rehearsing in front of a mirror his own death-dealing stare that he believed was, like his mother’s, all-powerful, and that everyone remarked was “hypnotizing.” Even sexual abuse was likely for Hitler. Like other Bavarian children, he slept in his mother’s bed—at least for his first six years—and witnessed the sexual intercourse she had when his father was home.115 I consider it likely that he experienced maternal incest, since his father was away so much and since his mother was so lonely. He was often afraid his sperm would poison the blood of his female partner, he heard voices telling him to “rescue his Mutterland from the Jews who had violated her,”116 he was said to “talk by the hour about depraved sexual customs,”117 and he asked his female partners to “undress and squat down over his face where he could examine her at close range [so she could] urinate on him.”118
The fusion of Germans and Austrians with their Killer Mutterland was aided by the fact that at the end of World War I they were not invaded and occupied by the Allies, so they could retain the group-fantasy that they were still fused with their powerful, grandiose Killer Mother.119 This was one basis of their objection to the Versailles Treaty’s penalties, since emotionally they felt they had not lost the war.120 Even the terms of the Armistice, “which required rapid German withdrawal behind the Rhine, had the unanticipated effect of tightening the German army’s grip on the nascent Weimar republic,”121 strengthening their delusional fusion. The projection of the Killer Motherland into other nations, even those that were not unfriendly, was everywhere evident, as in Heidegger’s declaration that Germany under Nazi rule could at last “save the world from annihilation [by] America and Russia.”122 The fission of all “Bad Mother” qualities onto neighboring nations left Hitler as Germania’s savior.123 People felt “We all really loved him. We felt that he could do no wrong. He had the image of a savior. [We were] ecstatic when Hitler came to power.”124 German mothers marched through the streets chanting “We have donated a child to the Fuehrer” and Hitler Youth sang: “We are born to die for Germany.”125 They longed to “return to the bosom of the Mutterland” in death, saying as they went to war: “If I die, mother, your pride will conquer your pain because you have the privilege of offering a sacrifice.”126 Fusion with Germania made one “freed from all sins, no longer a single suffering man, one with the Volk.”127 And fusion with an all-powerful Germania was necessary because their childrearing made them feel so weak that they had to switch into their alter trance and die as Nazi soldiers to prove they were stronger and more devoted to Her than anyone else. They were “heroes” who—like “enemies”—became sacrificial victims to the Killer Motherland.
The response by Germany’s neighbors to Nazi plans to go to war was highly influenced by the kinds of childrearing they each had experienced. Eastern European nations, including the Soviet Union, have been shown by Puhar and Dervin to have had even more abusive and abandoning mothers than Germany, including tight swaddling, routine starving, incest, beating, submissiveness and humiliations.128 The result was that these Eastern nations (plus of course Austria and Italy) at bottom admired the Nazis for their violence and even joined them in their violent ventures. Lenin and Stalin’s “Red Terror” produced even more millions of deaths “to clean Russia of all vermin, fleas, and bugs”129 than Hitler’s genocide of Jews. The French had somewhat less abusive childhoods, but one central childhood factor determined what they were to re-enact in World War II: the majority were sent at birth to a wetnurse, whether the parents were rich or poor, abandoned and rarely visited, for years at a time. Like German wetnurses, French wetnurses were called “killer nurses,” since a majority of infants sent to them died from mistreatment. French films between the wars were filled with themes of abandonment,130 and France’s reaction to Germany’s threats during this time was to create their own abandonment by other nations who might have been willing to join them in military defensive moves, plus cutting French defense expenditures rather than rearming when they saw the German military expanding. Daladier even admitted that only a firm military policy could stop Hitler, “but was at a loss how to do it,” since he and the French were acting out their infantile abandonment. Hitler responded to French self-isolation as if it were an invitation to Germany to invade. As one historian put it: “If a military alliance had been constructed in 1936 instead of 1939, a European war might have been averted,” and Hitler himself admitted to Speer: “If the French had taken any action, we would have been easily defeated.”131
British childrearing early in the 20th century had evolved beyond German and French, so that swaddling and sending to outside wetnurses were not common. Yet if the mothers could afford nannies and governesses, they turned the little children over to them to raise, and before long sent them to public schools where they were “fagged”—made slaves of older boys, including even sexual slaves—and “starved and bullied into subjection.”132 Beating for “discipline” rather than outright abandonment was the focus of British childrearing, beginning in infancy. British discipline was actually constant training in being humiliated, by bully parents, bully nannies and bully schoolmates, who “fragged” them and used them sexually. So when Hitler, the bully dictator, appeared on the international scene and threatened to beat them up once more, “Halifax praised Nazi Germany as the bulwark of Europe,” and, as Beisel summed up the period, “Britons came to admire Hitler and Nazism’s authoritarianism.”133 Halifax met Hitler and thought he was “absolutely fantastic.”134 In the House of Commons, Lord Winterton said: “The German nation possesses a mental and physical virility seldom exceeded in the world’s history.” Churchill admired Hitler—surely the most clinically grandiose narcissistic leader on earth—calling him “an indomitable champion [who could] restore our courage.”135 Hitler returned the praise, saying he admired England’s ability to kill and dominate, vowing: “What India was for England, the territories of Russia will be for us.”136 Britain chose Chamberlain—“who was badly bullied as a boy”—as their leader, who was “compelled to arrange for Britons to be humiliated [and] badly bullied by the Germans ‘who are,’ he said, ‘bullies by nature.’”137 They had been trained to “take it”—to consider themselves courageous to be bullied without defending themselves—and even conducted a Peace Ballot before the war in which half the nation voted not to defend themselves if attacked militarily by another nation.138 A majority of Oxford students even passed a resolution that they would “in no circumstances fight for King and Country,” and over 100,000 British men signed a pledge “to renounce participation in any war” to defend Britain.139 The Labour Party leader George Lansbury promised “to disband the Army and disarm the Air Force”140 in case of war. Stanley Baldwin declared it was time for Britain to “proceed with unilateral disarmament,” and Anthony Eden visited Hitler in Berlin with a plan to allow Germany to triple their army and build hitherto forbidden tanks and artillery.141 Unbelievably, Eden thought France not Germany was a threat to peace, saying it was essential that “we must discourage any military action by France against Germany.”142 As British historian A. L. Rowse put it: “We were doing Hitler’s work for him.” As early as 1931, Chamberlain said “the whole of Europe is…locked in a suicidal embrace which will probably drown the lot of us,” and he proceeded to help carry out that suicidal embrace.143 At Munich, when Hitler was handed over the western part of Czechoslovakia, England gave him tens of thousands more Jews to persecute. Since “the German Army was still unprepared for war, during the Sudeten negotiations, German generals offered to rebel against Hitler if the British would not sign the [Munich] agreement. But the British were not interested…”144 Hitler was the delegate of every nation in Europe; “they all became Hitler, by identifying with him and encouraging his aggression. He was their delegate, the out of control raging child in them…”145 Kagan summarizes the effects of the period before the war: “Had the democracies not disarmed both materially and psychologically but remained responsible and alert, Hitler’s plans of conquest would have been ludicrous. Neither he nor any other German leader could have posed a danger so long as France and Britain chose to prevent it.”146
Beisel captures the motivations behind Britain’s policy of appeasement: “Millions liked what they saw, and could participate in Nazi militarism and Hitler’s arrogance by proxy.”147 Hitler of course took the British support as an invitation to rearm and move toward war. “Britain’s actions in reaching out its hand to Germans were surely elements in Hitler’s decision to strike.”148 As Churchill said, “If ever there was an avoidable war, it was the Second World War.”149 The outer circumstances of Europe did not require war, the inner alters of European psyches did. When England guaranteed Poland’s frontiers and then had to carry out their promise to go to war, Chamberlain at first backed down, then reluctantly declared Britain at war with Germany only because, as Beisel puts it: “The British had gotten a war they unconsciously wanted. It would allow them to discharge their own aggressive feelings…which had been driven by an unconscious need to relive earlier childhood humiliations.”150
PHASE FIVE: FRACTURING OFF OF “BAD SELF” ENEMIES
As noted above, children—not Jews—were for several years the central scapegoats killed by the Nazis as “Bad Self” enemies. As early as 1929, Hitler mused that “if a million children a year are born in Germany and 700-800,000 of the weakest are eliminated the end result might be an increase in strength.”151 He was listening to his inner alter reflecting fearfully upon the families he saw around him killing off their “useless eaters” (and his own mother?—she lost four of her little children). He set his personal doctor, Theo Morell, to study the euthanasia of children, and Morell reported back advising the killing of handicapped children because they were “disgusting.” Children were sterilized as early as 1937 as part of the racial sterilization of Gypsies and others, in all about 400,000 sterilized as “worthless.” By 1939, long before Jews were being killed in quantity, “disinfection, cleansing” of “unfit” children—those born with deformities, those late in being toilet trained, those who were “slow learners,” began in what was called a euthanasia program, which gave lethal injections of gas in gas chambers and injected chemical warfare agents into the hearts to thousands of children “to cleanse the German national body.”152 Parents or guardians of the children often gave their consent to the murder of these “bad children,” and there was even a popular movie made of how wonderful their murder was for Germania.153 The more “Bad Self” children were murdered, the more fused Germans felt with their Killer Mutterland. By the end of the 1930s, the designation of Bad Self enemies spread from children to Jews and other “useless eaters.” The economic downturn had long ago disappeared, thus disproving the theories that it was economic distress that caused the war and the genocide. Germans in the middle 1930s were feeling the grandiose “high” of fusion with their Killer Mutterland: “At a time when no foreign danger threatened and the national economy was robust…Hitler fulminated about hostile foreign powers and spineless liberals [but] said barely a word about Jewry [although] militant Nazis felt empowered to persecute Jews at will.”154 Although Streicher’s Der Sturmer tabloid called for the “annihilation” of Jews during the 1930s, Rudolf Hess insisted in 1935: “Lawless outbursts against Jew must cease at once! The Fuehrer forbids Nazi Party members from undertaking unauthorized actions against individual Jews.”155 In the 1930s, Hitler called for Jewish “deportation,” and Himmler in 1940 even asserted that “the physical destruction of a people [was] un-German and impossible.”156 The problem was foreign nations didn’t want the Jews, so Nazis complained: “All we want to do is to get rid of our Jews. The difficulty is that no country wishes to receive them…[as the British senior officer said, ‘What shall I do with those million Jews? Where shall I put them?”]157 FDR turned Jews away as they tried to immigrate into the U.S.158 He wouldn’t even back a bill taking in Jewish refugee children, as the British did.159 Newspapers headlined: “Powers Slam Doors Against German Jews.”160
Eastern Europeans—also swaddled and horribly abused as children—split off their “Bad Selves” and projected them into “Bad Baby” Jews who were then senselessly murdered:
One day, in July 1941, half of the population of Jedwabne, Poland, murdered the other half—some 1,600 men, women, and children… They gouged out their eyes with kitchen knives, dismembered them… Infants were pitchforked in front of their mothers and thrown onto burning coals, all accompanied by the shrieks of delight, indeed the laughter, of their neighbors.161
The steady move from just resettlement to mass annihilation of Jews and other “Bad Selves” bubbled up from below during the 1940s as Germans, Austrians and others around the globe fused with their Killer Mutterland alters, turned off the empathy in their insulas, and heard the Mutterland’s voice demand death for all Bad Selves. Jews were more and more seen as the poisonous lice that they had been tormented with as swaddled children, lice that could poison their bloodstreams. As one little German boy said, looking at lice in a museum exhibition: “Jewish army, Jewish army!” Even though they were in no way threatened by any of their neighbors, and even though in 1938 the German Chief of Staff was opposed to starting any new war,162 by 1939 most Germans were certain that the “enemies” that “surrounded” them (they were really just in their brain alters) were about to strike. On August 22, 1939, as Van Evera put it: “Hitler explained to his generals that ‘We are faced with the harsh alternatives of striking or of certain annihilation sooner or later.’ I think he and his supporters believed this paranoid group-fantasy. Ten days later he launched his lightning war on Poland, triggering World War II.”163
PHASES SIX AND SEVEN: FAKING PROVOCATIONS AND FIGHTING
Germany faked many provocations in trying to justify their wars, from pretending that the single person who began the Reichstag fire in 1933 was the beginning of national revolution—jailing 100,000 Communists and Social Democrats—to blaming Jews in 1938 for a minor incident where a Pole shot a German diplomat in Paris—organizing the violence against Jews on “Crystal Night”—to putting Germans into Polish military uniforms in 1941 claiming they had attacked them—pretending this had provoked Germany into war.164 Goering put the need for faked attacks bluntly when he explained: “The people can always be brought to do the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked…”165 Hitler too was filled with claims about supposed “conspiracies to overthrow the Reich,” all versions of earlier internal alters shared by Germans, still wishing they could overthrow their Killer Mothers, still blaming scapegoats for their dissociated rebellious childhood wishes.
We will not list all these faked provocations here; any textbook about WWII can provide many examples. But the most important faked provocation in starting the war was Franklin Roosevelt’s provocations to encourage Japan “to strike first” with the hidden self-destructive goal that U.S. forces would be tied down in the Pacific rather than available to fight in Europe. Since Japan was already fighting a war with China, it was true that, as Admiral Nomura said in 1940, “There are few Japanese who want war with the United States.” Therefore, FDR had to take hidden actions to provoke Japan into attacking the U.S. There are by now over 40 excellent scholarly books detailing how Roosevelt chose a group of advisers who created an eight-step program to bring about the so-called “unprovoked attack” on Pearl Harbor.166 FDR’s program included embargoing oil trade to Japan—which got 80 percent of its oil from the U.S., and was about to run out in months—carrying out “pop-up” cruises in the territorial waters of Japan—which he said would “keep the Japs guessing” if the U.S. was about to attack—leaving the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor despite complaints from the U.S. fleet commander that it would leave them unprotected, hiding the fact that Japanese codes had been broken so the attack would appear as a “surprise,” and other faked provocations.167 It is no wonder that the Japanese openly spoke of “suicide” when they finally attacked Pearl Harbor, saying that it was “better to jump off Kiyomizu Temple” and “commit suicide” than be “starved to death” by the U.S. FDR and his White House advisers literally cheered when they heard their provocations had worked and the Japanese had been provoked to attack.168 FDR was cheered by Congress when he announced the new war, and forty-two percent of American soldiers said the U.S. should “wipe out all Japanese,” civilians as well as warriors.169 After the attack, Roosevelt still refused to ask Congress to declare war on Germany. Many Americans agreed with Sen. Harry Truman, who had earlier said after the German invasion of Russia: “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible.”170 Hitler, of course, was reported to be “in ecstasy” that the American military would be tied down for years in the Pacific.171
Meanwhile, Hitler and the Germans were busy committing suicide in their sacrificial war against every neighbor they could provoke, Hitler promising parents he would “sacrifice ten million German youth” as mothers held up their little ones over the heads of the enthusiastic crowd, as if they wanted to say: You belong to him!”172 German mothers marched through the streets chanting, “We have donated a child to the Fuhrer,” and Hitler Youth sang: “We are born to die for Germany.”173 Hitler avoided any peaceful concessions that might limit the blood sacrifices of war, telling his soldiers: “We want war. I am only afraid that some Schweinehund will make a proposal for mediation” like at Munich.174 Hitler’s speeches, says Beisel, were “filled with images of things collapsing, of “internal disruption,” “isolation,” “disintegration” and “sacrifice.”175 He overruled his military in launching a suicidal assault against the Soviets, saying they would “collapse within a month” and surrender, so that winter supplies were not even given to the troops.176 Grandiosity had overcome reality; powerful dopamine infusions of their basal ganglias made them feel “high,” extraordinarily powerful. Hitler told German officers that invading Russia “would be like a child’s game in a sandbox”177 although in fact Soviet tanks, artillery pieces and aircraft were at least three times as numerous as German.178 As one historian put it: “Because Hitler’s strategic ends were infinitely expansive, no military doctrine could keep up with his policy in the end.” The leading historian on Hitler, Ian Kershaw, simply called Hitler’s decision to attack so many powerful nations “sheer madness…a death-wish for himself and his nation.”179 Hitler had declared war on the U.S., Britain and the Soviet Union, whose combined productive ability was six to ten times that of Germany.180 Germans were simply re-enacting their embedded childhood feelings that they deserved being liquidated because they were “bad.” They were fully in their war trance, possessed by their inner childhood alters, solving their childhood despairs, their fears of dying, by choosing to die. Hitler was their tribal shaman; he would cure the inner despair of Germans by exorcising it through suicidal blood sacrifices. War was chosen by Germans as a massive suicidal ritual that would quiet their explosive inner voices.181
Hitler’s gratuitous declaration of war against the U.S. for no reason after Pearl Harbor was particularly suicidal. Before he invaded Poland, he gave orders that all the Germans who were inmates of mental hospitals should be exterminated.182 His speeches during the war contained more suicidal imagery: “Either we will be the master of Europe, or we will experience a complete liquidation and extermination.”183 When the end came, Hitler ordered Germany destroyed completely, ordering “it must disappear!” When German women and children sought refuge in Berlin subways, he ordered them flooded.184 Finally, the German people in April 1945 continued to carry out the suicidal intent of the war: “As the war wound down, a generalized suicidal mania rippled across Germany. Hundreds of thousands were gripped with thoughts and talk of suicide as tens of thousands killed themselves in perhaps the single largest mass suicide in history.”185
Footnotes:
1 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations. New York: Karnac, 2002, p. 183; John Mueller, The Remnants of War. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004, p. 54.
2 James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 64; Robert Gellately, Ed., The Nuremberg Interviews. New York: Vintage Books, 2004, p. xxvii.
3 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 411.
4 Regina Schulte, “Infanticide in Rural Bavaria in the Nineteenth Century.” In Hans Medick and David Warren Sabean, Eds., Interest and Emotion: Essays on the Study of Family and Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, p. 89.
5 Ann Taylor Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Germany. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991, p. 177.
6 Aurel Ende, “Battering and Neglect: Children In Germany, 1860-1978.” The Journal of Psychohistory 7(1980): 252.
7 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 188.
8 Aurel Ende, “Battering and Neglect,” p. 253.
9 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 202.
10 Arno Gruen, “The Hitler Myth.” The Journal of Psychohistory 29(2002): 319.
11 Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, 1986.
12 Donald Kagan, On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace. New York: Doubleday, 1995, p. 337.
13 Stephen Van Evera, Causes of War: Power and the Roots of Conflict.” Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999, p. 77.
14 Stanley Rosenman, “The Blood Libel: A Study in Dehumanization, Torture, and Immolation.” The Journal of Psychohistory 30(2002): 79.
15 Lloyd deMause, Foundations of Psychohistory, New York: Creative Roots, 1982, pp. 117-123; Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 189.
16 Louis Adamic, Cradle of Life: The Story of One Man’s Beginnings. New York: Harper, 1936, pp. 45, 48.
17 Aurel Ende, “The Psychohistorian’s Childhood And The History of Childhood.” The Journal of Psychohistory 9(1981):175.
18 Ibid, p. 174.
19 Raffael Scheck, “Childhood in German Autobiographical Writings, 1740-1820.” The Journal of Psychohistory 15(1987): 403.
20 John Knodel and Etienne Van de Walle, “Breast Feeding, Fertility and Infant Mortality: An Analysis of Some Early German Data.” Population Studies 21(1967): 120.
21 Goetz Aly and Susanne Heim, Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002, p. 234.
22 Henry Mayhew, German Life and Manners as Seen in Saxony at the Present Day. London: William H. Allen, 1864, p. 490.
23 Alan Dundes, “Life is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder: A Study of German National Character Through Folklore.” The Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology 4(1981): 325.
24 Sigrid Chamberlain, “The Nurture and Care of the Future Master Race.” The Journal of Psychohistory 31(2004): 378.
25 James M. Glass, “Life Unworthy of Life”: Racial Phobia and Mass Murder in Hitler’s Germany. New York: Basic Books, 1997, p. 8.
26 Richard A. Koenigsberg, Hitler’s Ideology: A Study in Psychoanalytic Sociology. New York: The Library of Social Science, 1975, pp. 6, 19, 24.
27 Ibid., p. 61.
28 Lloyd deMause, “The Childhood Origins of the Holocaust.” The Journal of Psychohistory 33(2005): 217-218.
29 Ibid., p. 218.
30 George Victor, Hitler: The Pathology of Evil. Washington: Brassey’s, 1998, p. 123.
31 James M. Glass, “Life Unworthy of Life,” p. 24.
32 Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. New York: Pocket Books, 1977, p. 58.
33 David Beisel, “Europe’s Killing Frenzy.” The Journal of Psychohistory 25(1997): 207.
34 Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors, p. 183.
35 Goetz Aly and Susanne Heim, Architects of Annihilation, p. 6.
36 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 191.
37 Lloyd deMause, “Schreber and the History of Childhood.” The Journal of Psychohistory 15(1987): 427; Katharina Ritschky, Deutsche Kinder-Chronik. Koeln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1983, p. 16.
38 David R. Beisel, The Suicidal Embrace: Hitler, the Allies, and the Origins of the Second World War. Nyack: Circumstantial Productions, 2003, p. 138.
39 Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007, p. 561.
40 Thomas Lewis, et al, A General Theory of Love. New York: Vintage Books, 2000, p. 88; F. Lamprecht et al, “Rat Fighting Behavior.” Brain Research 525(1990): 285-293.
41 Sigrid Chamberlain, “The Nurture and Care of the Future Master Race,” pp. 376, 378.
42 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 196; Friedrich von Zglinicki, Geschichte des Klistiers: Das Klistier in der Geschichte der Medizin, Kunst under Literatur. Frankfurt: Viola Press, n.d.
43 Iwan Bloch, The Sexual Life of Our Time. New York: Rebman, 1980, p. 631; Albert Moll, The Sexual Life of the Child. New York: Macmillan, 1913, p. 219.
44 Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. III, p. 164, Vol. VII, p. 180.
45 Harold P. Blum, “Little Hans: A Contemporary Overview.” The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. Vol. 62. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007, pp. 44-60.
46 Hans-Georg Behr, Almost a Childhood: Growing Up Among the Nazis. London: Granta Books, 2005, pp. 262-3.
47 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 199.
48 Mary Jo Maynes, “Adolescent Sexuality and Social Identity in French and German Lower-Class Autobiography.” Journal of Family History 17(1992): 407; Regina Schulte, “Infanticide in Rural Bavaria,” p. 85.
49 Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961, p. 5.
50 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, pp. 195-196; Sigrid Chamberlain, “The Nurture and Care of the Future Master Race,” p. 368; Aurel Ende, “Battering and Neglect,” p. 259; Peter Petschauer, “Children of Afers, or ‘Evolution of Childhood’ Revisited.” The Journal of Psychohistory 1(1985): 138.
51 Raffael Scheck, “Childhood in German Autobiographical Writings,” p. 406.
52 Ewarld M. Plass, comp., What Luther Says: An Anthology. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1949, p. 145.
53 Morton Schatzman, “Paranoia or Persecution: The Case of Schreber.” History of Childhood Quarterly: The Journal of Psychohistory 1(1973): 75.
54 Walter Havernick, “Schlage” als Strafe: Ein Bestandteil der heutigen Familiensitte in volkskundlicher Sicht. Hamburg: Museum fuer Hamburgische Geschichte, 1964, p. 102.
55 Raffael Scheck, “Childhood in German Autobiographical Writings, 1740-1820,” p. 304.
56 George Victor, Hitler: The Pathology of Evil. Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1998, p. 29.
57 Aurel Ende, “Battering and Neglect,” pp. 259-260.
58 Herman Baartman, “Child Suicide and Harsh Punishment in Germany at the Turn of the Last Century.” Paedagogica Historica 30(1994): pp. 852, 857.
59 Katharina Rutschky, Deutsche Kinder-Chronik, p. 167.
60 Raffael Scheck, “Childhood in German Autobiographical Writings, 1740-1820,” p. 412.
61 Preserved Smith, A History of Modern Culture, Vol. 2. New York: H. Holt & Co., 1934, p. 423.
62 M. J. Maynes, “Childhood Memories, Political Visions, and Working-Class Formation in Imperial Germany: Some Comparative Observations.” In Geoff Eley, Ed., Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870-1930. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997, p. 157.
63 Aurel Ende, “Battering and Neglect,” p. 250.
64 Adelheid Popp, Jungend einer Arbeiterin. Berlin: Verlag Dietz Nachf, 1977, p. 1f; Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961, p. 5.
65 Thomas J. Scheff and Suzanne M. Retzinger, Emotions and Violence: Shame and Rage in Destructive Conflicts. Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1991, p. 154.
66 Japan Forum, “Kokeshi and Japanese Infanticide.”
67 Nobutaka Ike, Japan’s Decision for War: Records of the 1941 Policy Conferences. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967, p. 131.The Journal of Psychohistory 25(1997): 41.
68 Robert J. C. Botow, Tojo and the Coming of the War. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960, pp. 224, 203; Kenneth Alan Adams, “The Familial Origins of Japanese Child Abuse.” The Journal of Psychohistory 33(2005): 167-170.
69 Michio Kitahara, “Childhood in Japanese Culture.” The Journal of Psychohistory 17(1989): 44.
70 Kenneth Alan Adams and Lester Hill, Jr., “The Phallic Female in Japanese Group-Fantasy.” The Journal of Psychohistory 25(1997): 41.
71 Stanley Rosenman, “The Spawning Grounds of the Japanese Rapists of Nanking.” The Journal of Psychohistory 28(2000): 10.
72 Michio Kitahara, “Childhood in Japanese Culture,” p. 49; Kenneth Alan Adams and Lester Hill, Jr., “The Phallic Female,” p. 41; Kenneth Alan Adams, “The Familial Origins of Japanese Child Abuse.” The Journal of Psychohistory 33(2005): 161.
73 Kenneth Alan Adams, “The Sexual Abuse of Children in Contemporary Japanese Families.” The Journal of Psychohistory 34(2007): 180.
74 Gregory M. Pfugfelder, Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600-1950. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
75 Michio Kitahara, “Childhood in Japanese Culture,” p. 58.
76 Kenneth Alan Adams, “The Sexual Abuse of Children,” p. 190.
77 Ibid., p. 195; Lloyd deMause, “The Evolution of Childrearing,” The Journal of Psychohistory 28(2001): 425.
78 Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder, Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go To War. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005.
79 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, pp. 338-340.
80 Lloyd deMause, “What the British Can Do To End Child Abuse.” The Journal of Psychohistory 34(2006): 4-5.
81 Ibid, pp. 5-6.
82 Fritz Stern, Dreams and Delusions: The Drama of German History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987, pp. 105, 110.
83 Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Knopf, 1996.
84 Eric A. Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany: An Oral History. New York: Basic Books, 2005, p. 264.
85 Ibid., p. 272.
86 Ibid., p. 264.
87 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, pp. 163-165.
88 Patrice Pero, Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989, p. 23; Jans B. Wager, Dangerous Dames: Women and Representation in the Weimar Street Film and Film Noir. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999; Bram Dikstra, Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Culture. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1996.
89 Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage. New York: Viking, 2005, p. 203.
90 Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf. Trans. Ralph Manheim. London: Hutchinson, 199, p. 231.
91 Vibeke R. Petersen, Women and Modernity in Weimar Germany: Reality and Its Representation in Popular Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
92 Ibid., p. 40.
93 Henry Turner, Reappraisals of Fascism. New York: New Viewpoints, 1975, p. 136.
94 Eric A. Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband, What We Knew, p. 143.
95 Bram Dikstra, Evil Sisters, p. 421.
96 Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2001, p. xiv; Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975.
97 Margaret Mahler, et al, The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant. New York: Basic Books, 1975; also see Eli Sagan, At the Dawn of Tyranny: The Origins of Individualism, Political Oppression, and the State. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985, p. 358.
98 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, pp. 203-204.
99 Peter Fritzsche, Germans Into Nazis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998, p. 206.
100 Peter H. Merkl, The Making of a Stormtrooper. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980, p. 228.
101 Jack Snyder, From Voting to Violence: Democratization and National Conflict. New York: Norton, 2000.
102 Edgar A. Mowrer, Triumph and Turmoil: A Personal History of Our Time. New York: Weybright and Talle, 1968, p. 209.
103 Violent nationalism is not just a trick played upon people by elites so they can keep power despite democratization, as Snyder claims. It is an internal fission state produced in the people themselves by fears of freedom.
104 Jay Y. Gonen, The Roots of Nazi Psychology: Hitler’s Utopian Barbarism. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2000, p. 144.
105 Eric A. Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband, What We Knew, p. 161.
106 Peter H. Merkl, Political Violence Under the Swastika: 581 Early Nazis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974, p. 548.
107 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations. p. 209.
108 Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power: 1933-1939, pp. 11-12.
109 Ibid., p. 15.
110 Rudolph Binion, “Hitler’s Concept of Lebensraum: The Psychological Basis.” History of Childhood Quarterly: The Journal of Psychohistory 1(1973):28; Rudolph Binion, Hitler Among the Germans. New York: Elsevier, 1976, p. 56.
111 David Beisel, The Suicidal Embrace, p. 81.
112 Rudolph Binion, Past Impersonal: Group Process in Human History. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005, p. 55.
113 Harold Nicolson, The War Years, 1939-1945: Diaries and Letters, Vol. 2. New York: Athenaeum, 1967, p. 39.
114 Robert G. L. Waite, The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler. New York: Da Capo Press, 1977, p. 157.
115 Fredrick C. Redlich, Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 13-14.
116 John Toland, Adolf Hitler. New York: Doubleday, 1976, p. 281.
117 Ibid., p. 176.
118 Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil. New York: Random House, 1998, p. 134.
119 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, pp. 318-319.
120 Sally Marks, The Illusion of Peace: International Relations in Europe 1918-1933. New York: St. Martins Press, 1976, p. 16.
121 Ibid., p. 3.
122 Noam Chomsky, Interventions. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2007, p. 142.
123 Peter S. Fisher, Fantasy and Politics: Visions of the Future in the Weimar Republic. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1991, pp. 6, 220.
124 Eric Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband, What We Knew, pp. 149, 388.
125 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 211.
126 Jay W. Baird, To Die for Germany: Heroes in the Nazi Pantheon. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990, pp. 97, 233.
127 Hans Kohn, Prelude to Nation States: The French and German Experience. Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1967, p. 261.
128 Alenka Puhar, “Childhood in Nineteenth-Century Slovenia.” The Journal of Psychohistory 12(1985): 291-312; Dan Dervin, “Childrearing in Central and Eastern Europe: A Psychohistorical Synthesis.” The Journal of Psychohistory, forthcoming.
129 Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, pp. 61, 583.
130 David Beisel, The Suicidal Embrace, p. 161.
131 Ibid., p. 151.
132 Ibid., p. 49.
133 David Beisel, The Suicidal Embrace, p. 50.
134 Henry Channon, Chips: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channonj. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1967, p. 141.
135 Anthony P. Adamthwaite, The Making of the Second World War. New York: Routledge, 1977, p. 43.
136 Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007, p. 432.
137 Ibid., p. 64.
138 J. Kenneth Brody, The Avoidable War: Lord Cecil & the Policy of Principle. 1933-1935. Vol. 2. London: Transaction Publishers, 1999, p. 6.
139 Ibid., p. 154.
140 Donald Kagan, On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace. New York: Doubleday, 1995, p. 341.
141 J. Kenneth Brody, The Avoidable War: Vol. 2., pp. 96, 114.
sup> 142 Ibid., Vol. 1, p. 229.
143 David Beisel, The Suicidal Embrace, p. 1.
144 Frank Chalk & Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990, p. 344.
145 Paul Elovitz and David Beisel, “A Conversation on Europe’s Suicidal Embrace With Hitler.” The Journal of Psychohistory 34(2007): 256.
146 Donald Kagan, On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace, p. 417.
147 David Beisel, The Suicidal Embrace, p. 52.
148 J. Kenneth Brody, The Avoidable War, p. 205.
149 Ibid, p. 5.
150 David Beisel, The Suicidal Embrace, p. 60.
151 Lynn H. Nicholas, Cruel World: The Children of Europe in the Nazi Web. New York: Knopf, 2005, p. 40.
152 Goetz Ally, “Final Solution”: Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews. London: Arnold, 1999, pp. 30, 46; Goetz Aly et al, Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, pp. 29, 46.
153 James M. Glass, Life Unworthy of Life, pp. 61-63.
154 Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003, pp. 15, 31.
155 Ibid., p. 160.
156 Benjamin A. Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004, p. 175.
157 George M. Kren and Leon Rappoport, The Holocaust and the Crisis of Human Behavior. Rev. Ed., New York: Holmes & Meier, 1994, p. 104.
158 Simon Schuster, 2008, p. 9; Klaus P. Fischer, The History of an Obsession: German Judeophobia and the Holocaust. New York: Continuum, 1998, p. 288.
159 Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke, p. 125.
160 New York Herald Tribune, July 8, 1938.
161 Willard Gaylin, Hatred: The Psychological Descent Into Violence. New York: PublicAffairs, 2003, p. 1.
162 Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke, p. 92.
163 Stephen Van Evera, Causes of War, p. 96.
164 Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power 1933-1939. New York: Penguin Press, 2005, pp. 11, 584.
165 Martha Stout, The Paranoia Switch: How Terror Rewires Our Brains and Reshapes Our Behavior—and How We Can Reclaim Our Courage. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007, p. 91.
166 Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor. New York: Free Press, 1999; Robert Theobald, The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor: The Washington Contribution to the Japanese Attack. New York: Devin-Adair, 1954; Robert Smith Thompson, A Time for War: Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Path to Pearl Harbor. New York: Prentice Hall Press, 1991; for a complete list, see bibliography at end of Frederic L. Borch and Daniel Martinez, Kimmel, Short, and Pearl Harbor: The Final Report Revealed. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2005.
167 Michael Gannon, Pearl Harbor Betrayed: The True Story of a Man and a Nation Under Attack. New York: Henry Holt and Co., p. 80; Robert Smith Thompson, A Time for War, pp. 399-401; Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit.
168 Robert B. McFarland, “A Psychohistorical Comparison of the Pearl Harbor and September 11 Attacks.” The Journal of Psychohistory 31(2003): 75.
169 Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing, Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare. New York: Basic Books, 1999, p. 146.
170 Dan Reiter and Allan C. Stam, Democracies at War, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002, p. 147.
171 Ian Kershaw, Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World,1940-1941. New York: Penguin Press, 2007, p. 386.
172 David Beisel, The Suicidal Embrace, p. 142.
173 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 211.
174 Ibid.
175 David Beisel, The Suicidal Embrace, p. 137.
176 Dominic D. P. Johnson, Overconfidence and War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, p. 106.
177 Stephen Van Evera, Causes of War, p. 21.
178 Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, p. 430.
179 Ian Kershaw, Fateful Choices, p. 54.
180 James J. Sheehan, Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? The Transformation of Modern Europe. Boson: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2008, p. 127.
181 Ira Brenner, Dissociation of Trauma: Theory, Phenomenology, and Technique. Madison, Conn.: International Universities Press, 2001, p. 116.
182 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973, p. 326.
183 Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, p. 526.
184 George Victor, Hitler: The Pathology of Evil, p. 214.
185 David Beisel, “The German Suicide, 1945.” The Journal of Psychohistory 34(2007): 303.
Chapter 7
Child Abuse, Homicide and Raids in Tribes
Each generation of parents commits atrocities
against their children which by God’s
decree remain invisible to the rest to the world.
– John Updike
The next four chapters will describe the slow, uneven evolution of childrearing from the fearful insecure attachments of tribes to the more loving secure attachments of modern fully democratic nations. These historical improvements in childrearing will be shown to decrease the implantation in children of delusional violent alters and increase the achievement of the real self and thereby reduce the amount of homicide, raids and wars.
I discovered evidence of the dependence of historical cultural evolution upon increasingly secure attachments of children four decades ago in my book The History of Childhood1 and have devoted my life since then in seven books and over a hundred scholarly articles to documenting how this psychogenesis took place. I have also published hundreds of additional articles by fellow scholars in my two scholarly journals, The Journal of Psychohistory and The Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology in the past 36 years documenting childhood and personality evolution in other times and cultures. That psychogenic parenting evolution rather than genetic evolution is the central source of historical change is a brand new theory, replacing theories that claim that “survival of the fittest” (the most aggressive) is what determines which groups survive and claiming instead that “survival of the most cooperative” (the most secure, the most attached) is what actually counts historically, and that those who had the most loving caretaking as children became the most cooperative and culturally evolved as adults.2
IDEALIZATION BY ANTHROPOLOGISTS OF TRIBAL CHILDREARING
Anthropologists have written extensively about childhood in tribal cultures. Typical of their conclusions is Rohner’s, commenting from his cross-cultural review of parenting from the Human Relations Area Files that tribal mothers were “warm and nurturant toward their children” and that “the more complex a socio-cultural system is, the less warm parents in general tend to be.”3 Their evidence for this is mainly based on the continuous skin contact between nursing mothers and infants, even when the nursing was forced because of maternal need for erotic stimulation and was accompanied by constant genital manipulation of the infant by the mother. The masturbation by mothers of their children, Korbin found in her large cross-cultural sample of tribes, is widespread, but, as was mentioned previously, she concludes sex with children is not abusive because the society itself doesn’t call it abuse, saying “children’s genitals being fondled does not constitute ‘abuse’ if in that society the behavior was not proscribed.”4 Maternal incest is what is behind the cross-cultural finding by anthropologists that “where the mother sleeps closer to the baby than to the father and uses the baby as a substitute spouse, there is more homicide and a higher frequency of war.”5 After all, another cross-cultural study of adult-child sexual relations finds, experts believe that there is “no reason to believe that sexual contact between an adult and child is inherently wrong or harmful.”6 Such “experts” as, for instance, Kinsey and Pomeroy, who claimed that “incest between adults and younger children can be satisfying and enriching.”7 Or as all the anthropological books on cross-cultural childrearing that say “although mothers masturbating children is widespread [it] does not constitute ‘abuse’ if in that society the behavior was not proscribed.”8 The anthropologists report routine “incessant fondling of infants, masturbation by mothers kissing the boy’s penis, women passing baby boys back and forth over their heads, taking turns sucking the penis, lying on sons in the male position and freely masturbating them at night,” practices they call “nurturant.”9
Idealization of other cultures is the rule in anthropology, we found in publishing The Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology, by leaving out crucial details—as did Margaret Mead in her portrayal of the ubiquitous raping gangs of Samoa as an example of “sexual freedom” that we should emulate.10 As I discovered when I took classes with Mead at Columbia University, she routinely idealizes tribal childhood as “spoiled and pampered.”11 Most anthropologists do not just idealize childrearing, they baldly state without evidence that tribal mothers are “rarely abusive,” as when they say that children who are forced to eat every second sibling “are the favored ones who started life with no oral trauma,” and that eating one’s siblings believed to be demons “doesn’t seem to have affected their personality development.”12 Dozens more statements as bizarre as this are analyzed in the forty issues of my Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology.
MURDER, RAPE AND TORTURE OF NEW GUINEA CHILDREN
Because our task in this chapter is to determine what childhood and war were like in early historical tribes—which of course have left no records other than those archeologists have uncovered—we will concentrate on more recent observations of tribal cultures before they were much affected by contact with the West. We will therefore begin by discussing childhood in New Guinean, Australian aboriginal and African tribal cultures that were among the last to be explored and changed by Western cultures.
Infanticide rates were enormous in New Guinea, with the first missionaries estimating that two-thirds of the children were murdered by their parents.13 As in other tribal cultures, abstinence and abortion were well known, but infanticide was mainly what was the practice,14 so growing children were routinely traumatized while they watched their mothers strangle or otherwise murder their siblings. Margaret Mead said of her tribe “they are always throwing away infants here”15 and not because of lack of resources to feed them. When tribal mothers were asked why they killed their infants, they stated it was because they were “demon children,” because “children are too much trouble,” because “it was a girl and must be killed,” or “because her husband would go to another woman” for sex if she had to nurse the infant.16 Children watched their mothers bury their siblings live, eat them, or toss them to sows to devour—or else they would force the grown-up children to help them kill their siblings or even sometimes make them kill live infants purchased for murdering from other tribes.17 Mothers who ate their children are described as “overcome by frightful hunger for baby meat”—again, not because of lack of food, but because of an inner need to re-incorporate infants after losing them at birth. New Guinea infanticide rates are similar to the 50 percent rates estimated for small-scale societies around the world today.18 Some tribes kill so many newborn that they regularly have to buy children from neighboring tribes so their tribe won’t disappear.19 Differential infanticide (killing more girl babies) is the rule in tribes all the way back to the child sacrifice of infants to Beast-Goddesses that took place in Paleolithic caves, Jericho and Stonehenge.20 The children who watched their mothers killing or eating babies “suddenly avoided their parents, shrieked in their presence, or expressed unusual fear of them…recounting dreams about animal-man beings with the faces of parents smeared with blood.”21 The fears and dreams get stored in their inner alters as time bombs to be exploded later in life.
Females in New Guinea are treated brutally. Since they are routinely viewed as secretly being witches “who can kill simply by staring at a person”22 (Killer Mother alters), they are often killed simply because they are imagined to have poisoned people.23 Mothers in New Guinea are horribly abused as girls, being routinely raped by fathers, brothers, visitors, peers, gangs. When they become wives they are treated brutally by men and have suicide rates as high as 25 percent. Mothers are therefore post-partum depressed, and they use their children for sexual stimulation—repeating their own abuse—and then abandoning them emotionally, so they vary between masturbating them and hanging them up in a bag on a tree all day long. Since the men routinely beat up their wives, there is no evidence of spousal intimate love, so mothers are continuously in despair; if they are not forcibly breast-feeding their babies or masturbating them, sucking on their penises,24 the baby is useless to them as erotic objects and not fed regularly. Small children are routinely allowed to play with sharp knives and burning objects without adults paying any attention to them.25 Mothers hate themselves and consider themselves “bad” for having been raped as young girls26 and for having to endure loveless polygamous marriages. Maternal “mirroring” is lacking, so children do not become secure with others and do not develop an independent self.27 Children even recently are 90 percent malnourished in New Guinea, studies show, even when food is plentiful, because mothers only feed them a couple of times a day, and they die from starvation while the mothers are puzzled what is wrong with them.28 The mothers’ force-feeding during erotic nursing “becomes a battle in which the mother clutches the child, shaking it up and down with the nipple forced into its mouth until it must either suck or choke,” but when not used as an erotic object, they are badly neglected, often “thrown away,” so that abandonment rates run as high as 75 percent as they are sent out for adoption or fosterage.29 When not hung on a tree in a bag or basket, the toddler is “discouraged from walking and not allowed to crawl, [forced to] sit still for hours and make queer noises.”30 All this overstimulation plus abandonment produces extremely insecurely attached children in the infanticidal mode of childrearing who are schizoid personalities with dissociated alters embedded in their amygdalan networks to “carry” the pain of their abuse.31 Schizoid personalities—with their animistic delusional magical thinking processes—are the results of parents who simply are incapable of loving. As Masterson concludes: “The Schizoid child feels there is no pathway to the parents. [They live in] social isolation [with] an impossibility of an intimate relationship.”32 They have no inner Good Mother, so their inner attacking Mother is experienced as a deadly voice inside: “Feeling alone is feeling afraid of death.”33 Masterson calls schizoid patients “safety sensitive because of their twin fears of being controlled and of being hopelessly isolated.”34 In tribal families, there is no hope for forgiveness, only “eat Mommy or be eaten by her.” Yakut shamans hallucinate schizoid self-sacrifice to “a Bird-of-Prey-Mother, which is like a great bird with an iron beak, hooked claws and a long tail [who] cuts its body into bits and devours it.”35 Tribal schizoids then switch into dissociated alter trances and repeat their fears in spirit possession rituals.36
New Guinea mothers constantly “rub the penes of their infant sons [and] the little boys…have erections” while they sleep naked together at night. One boy described to Poole how whenever his mother was depressed or angry she often “pulled, pinched, rubbed, or flicked a fingernail against his penis” until he cried, afraid it might break off. “It hurts inside,” he said. “It bleeds in there and hurts when I pee…Mother not like my penis, wants to cut it off.”37 Males also masturbated and sucked children’s genitals, both sexes, using the child as a maternal breast as all pedophiles do.38 Mothers also masturbate and kiss the vagina of baby girls.39 Malinowski reports watching the widespread sucking of genitals and intercourse between children in Melanesia, encouraged by parents, so that most girls are raped by the time they are seven years old.40 New Guinea fathers rarely care for their little children, but when they do they mainly fondle their genitals, using the child as a breast-object “because they say they get sexually aroused when they watch them nurse.”41 Families in preliterate cultures usually have separate spaces for males “in which the husband and wife live with their respective mothers and at night the man ‘visits’ his wife in her house.”42 Physical contact with wives is avoided, and separate sleeping areas are maintained by husbands.43 A gynarchy composed of the grandmother, mother and other females, brings up the children, so the boys have little contact with males in their early years and are thoroughly ambiguous about their gender. Archeologists have even determined that “there were no Neanderthal families to begin with since women and children lived in separate areas from the males in caves.44 This arrangement was practiced historically from tribal cultures into early states; even in antiquity, “the women’s apartments [were] separated from the men’s quarters by a bolted door…[ancient] Greek couples do not eat together.”45
New Guinea mothers are so violent while using their children sexually that the children regularly blame themselves as they are hurt by them:
Mother twist penis, tight, tight…Hurt, hurt, inside. Cry, she not listen… Mother not like my penis, wants to cut it off… [Wounds himself with a sharp stick.] …Now it hurts here, outside, not in penis. Look, blood. Feels good… Good to be a girl, no penis.
Because of the constant brutal abuse, all schizoid tribal personalities are so insecurely attached they are extremely uncertain about their genders, and most of their adult lives replay the early gender anxieties produced by their parental incest/rejection experiences. New Guinea boys begin this replaying of embedded alters at seven, when men conduct fellatio on them, forcing their penises into the boys’ mouths and anuses the same way their mothers earlier used them both in incest and forced feeding. This oral rape begins by blaming mothers as “evil defilers” of the boys who have “polluted and weakened their sons” with their poisonous menstrual blood. This supposed pollution is countered by forcing the boys to suck the semen of men daily for years, saying, “It’s the same as your mother’s breast milk” but it will “make you a STRONG man” and will prevent them from growing into females.46 That raping boys orally can “make them hard” and “prevent them from being soft” may seem bizarre, but believed in wholeheartedly nonetheless.
Anthropologists sometimes state without evidence that the continuous oral rape by men of boys in New Guinea is “enthusiastically enjoyed” by the boys, who are “eager to suck” men’s penises, and that it has “a positive effect on the boy’s development.”47 The boys are also bled profusely by men by thrusting sharp leaves back and forth in their nostrils to remove the polluted mother-blood inside them, sometimes even subincising the penis, cutting it until it splits open, calling the cut a “boy’s vagina,” and having intercourse in it.48 Anthropologists describing this endless fellatio and genital mutilation of boys do not call it rape, stating instead that “the great majority of Sambia boys regularly engage in fellatio for years [because thereby they] learn how to be men, how to protect themselves from dangers of pollution.”49 Both men and women regularly fondle and mouth little boys’ penises.50 Girls, too, are routinely raped and often have their vaginas mutilated in tribal cultures—again because of extreme gender uncertainties, saying their clitoris must be removed because otherwise it would grow to be a foot long and they could then dominate men—plus it helps prevent girls from being “too sexual.”51 Older children routinely gang rape younger boys and girls, a practice reported by anthropologists with some neutral phrase like “they are typically initiated into intercourse by older and more experienced child,” a practice termed by one anthropologist as “healthy” because it gives the child “multiple experiences of sexual pleasure.”52
The inner alters embedded by all these extremely traumatic childrearing practices are called spirits or demons, and are the central focus of tribal cultural life. Children’s alters are usually called finiik, and they are said to “temporarily depart from the body to wander abroad…during trances, and children regularly tell how their witch alters possess their bodies and make them do things.”53 New Guinea natives can be warm and friendly and then suddenly switch into their alters and kill you because they think you are bewitching them.54 Trance possessions by alter spirits are found in all tribal cultures, in shamans, in witches and in others in the group during possession rituals as groups feel “power surges” and go out to conduct their killing raids.55 Drawings of alter-possessed shamans have been found on the walls of Ice Age “maternal caves.”56
The neurophysiology of possession trances have been well studied as “altered states of consciousness” that are entered into by various “driving” techniques that produce the hyperactivity, convulsive tremors and grandiose states that dominate those who are in a slow-wave electroencephalogram trance, insensible to pain, united with their spirit alters.57 Shamans are full-blown multiple personalities, becoming their alters, not just hearing them as internal voices. Their violent alters are those of the Killer Mother. Before raids, New Guinea shamans hallucinate that they are embedded with maternal spirits, and they call their war drums “the voice of their ancestor mother.”58
Boys in New Guinea are taught to always dominate rather than submit, and to beat up girls—adults urging them to take a branch and “stick it up her vagina.” To restore their masculinities, boys are encouraged to “sit facing each other, exchange endless sexual or personal insults” and then fight each other.59 Homicide rates are from sixty to a hundred times higher in tribal cultures than the current U.S. rate; one careful study of the Gebusi found 60 percent of all males admitted to having committed one or more homicides, almost all because they became sorcerers.60 All women are believed to be capable of becoming witches who can kill you by staring at you—delusional Killer Mother she-demons—so wife beating is nearly universal, female suicide rates are enormous (up to 25 percent of women’s deaths), gang rape of girls is practiced daily, and the torture and execution of women suspected of being witches who poison men is common. All this extreme misogyny is hardly an atmosphere that encourages maternal love and investment in the care of the next generation, so little improvement in childrearing and little evolution of personalities has been seen for thousands of years. Cultural evolution is ultimately psychogenic, not genetic—occurring as an increase in parent-child attachment, not as “the survival of the fittest.”
INTERPERSONAL VIOLENCE AND RAIDS IN NEW GUINEA
Since most infants were killed at birth and over half of male adults committed homicide, it is not surprising that deaths in raids, their version of wars, have been said to be minimal. Until recently, anthropologists promulgated the myth of the “peaceful savage,” until Keeley, LeBlanc and others actually demonstrated by voluminous evidence that both tribal societies today and early historical societies killed 10 to 30 times the proportion of people as even the most violent states in recent times. The archeological record is rich with evidence like the studies of Mesolithic hunter-gatherer burials that found over 40 percent of the men, women and children died violently.61 Plus Keeley found over 25 percent of adult males of unwesternized tribal societies died from raids, reaching over 60 percent for Amazonian tribes.62 Knauft estimated that murder accounted for the deaths of at least 35 percent of all New Guinea men and 29 percent of women. Despite anthropologists’ assertions that tribal violence is “adaptive” and that raids were fought for “scarce resources,”63 none of these deaths were over resources at all, all were solely emotional in origin, most of them being blamed on “sorcery” after imagining being insulted or humiliated.64 In fact, as we have previously noted, death inflicted by violence from others is always caused by the previous implantation of murderous “time bombs” in child abuse, and has declined from over 80 percent to under 2 percent even in the most bellicose nations in recent centuries as childrearing has slowly evolved.65 Homicide rates in New Guinea actually run sixty times the current U.S. rate.66 They are caused by the same “collapse of self-esteem” that Gilligan says U.S. murderers experience, where they “imagine themselves to be humiliated and shamed” as they routinely were as children.67
Tribal cultures are, as we have earlier said, also often mislabled as “egalitarian.” What is being referred to is their deep lack of trust in each other, coming from terribly insecure childhood attachments, which produces such overwhelming fear of the group and of authorities that true chiefs cannot be found, only “Big Men” who may be more violent than others but who cannot be trusted and therefore are only mediators, not real leaders.68 Even large tribes often find they cannot trust leaders or designate internal peacekeepers. Since in tribes “the mother is an eternal threat to self-individuation,” men do not securely attach to them and so also cannot bond to other men as their delegates, except in useless symbolic rituals where they cut their veins and smear their [maternal menstrual] blood on each other to form “blood brotherhoods.” In New Guinea, “they execute prominent individuals who overstep their prerogatives [and] Australian aborigines traditionally eliminated aggressive men who tried to dominate them.”69 Even ownership was looked upon by tribes with disfavor: “Those who acquired too much were expected to either engage in gift-exchange or destroy their surplus in cleansing sacrificial ceremonies,”70 so investment in new economic enterprises was missing.
Bloody raids are conducted in tribes by small groups when men fuse with their inner Killer Mother alters, who becomes the death-dealing witch-goddess of the raids, the warriors saying they are “charged with the powerful destructive energy of menstruating women.”71 They fuse with their warrior alters by “leaving their former self behind and becoming something entirely different…The change usually accomplished through ritual drumming, dancing, fasting and sexual abstinence…into a new warriorlike mode of being, denoted by special body paint, masks and headdresses.”72 Borguignon found nearly all tribes had trance induction rituals that reproduced early trauma and gave them the “high” of dopamine infusion that led to violence.73 New Guinea war myths are often based on maternal infanticide themes, as when the Sambia myth says: “Numboolyu’s wife, Chenchi, killed her first male child [so] we now fight—war.”74 Raids are rituals that establish masculinity for a time while being fused with the Killer Mother, as men go into their cult houses “like underneath the skirts of their mother,” replicate childbirth in rituals by male initiators called “mothers,” and go out to kill others in order to re-enact the killings and tortures of their childhoods.75
Most tribes engage in extensive raids at least once every two years. New Guinea tribes sometimes have dozens of raids a year.76 Raids since the Paleolithic have been seen as being conducted when possessed by “a mother-animal, the mistress of the dead, an old woman,” a Killer Mother alter.77 When warriors went out on their purifying headhunting raids, they switched into their killing alters by a “special magic, which placed the fighters in a trance-like state of dissociation in which they became capable of extreme, indiscriminate violence [which] made them capable of killing even their own wives and children.”78 Among the Hua, “it is feared that if a person fails to eat the corpse of his or her same-sex parent, that person will become stunted and weak.”79 New Guinea men often conduct all-night rituals where they are possessed by “spirit women” who tell them which of the many witches that surround them they should now kill.80 Warriors become fused with the powerful mother that masturbated them during menstruation; they then decorate themselves with menstrual blood-red paint so they can appropriate the fearful power of their Killer Mothers.81
Alters are often projected into the heads of the enemy, so head-hunting was endemic in New Guinea, “leading to endless intertribal feuds, and the slightest pretext is seized upon to begin a war to obtain the coveted trophies.”82 Chop off a head and you can capture the power of the Killer Mother. They believe they can restore their masculinity by eating the head or penis of an enemy “to absorb his strength.”83 New Guinea sorcerers continuously call upon their tribes to slaughter others. Knauft found two-thirds of a sample of Gebusi men had committed homicide.84 As Kelly puts it: “It is clear that homicide rates are considerably higher in simple foraging societies than in some sedentary agricultural societies with more developed forms of sociopolitical organization.85 In New Guinea, imaginary humiliations and magical sorcery attacks make immediate retribution necessary: “The assailants spring on their victim from ambush, brutally overpower him, jab poisons directly into his body, and sometimes twist or rip out organs.”86 Fathers help their small boys headhunt by holding his spear hand so he can kill and decapitate some acquaintance or relative.87 Little attempt is made to rationalize the homicides. “An angry man may attack or even kill another who is in no way related to the object or cause of his rage. This is true not only of violence against outsiders, but of violence within the village.”88
Murderous raids are fought when “growth panic” becomes excessive, when new tasks such as building houses or expanding gardens threatens too much personal growth and after initiations when adolescents “grow up” and leave their mothers. As the Mae Enga tribe says: “When times are good, the men of the clan spoil for a fight.”89 The men designate Big Men who find a rationalization for fighting (Faked Provocation Phase), and the warriors go out to meet their opponents with massed chanting, insults and challenges. When no other clan can be found to raid, they raid their own clansmen. That those killed are Bad Selves is everywhere apparent. When tribal raiding parties meet women with babies, they usually kill only the male infants, that is, themselves.90 Prisoners are rarely taken. The easiest raids are burning random houses and axing the families as they try to escape.91 Victims’ heads and penises are taken as trophies, reincorporating their own “strong” body parts. Evidence of the defleshing and cannibalization of “enemies” goes back 750,000 years to the earliest tribes, and most tribes say they collect the skulls so they can absorb the fighting strength of their enemies.92 Indeed, “It is good to have enemies, because they are good to kill and eat.”93 Many warriors even take the name of the victim they eat.94 Both sides often give gifts to the other side after the raids are over. When all the killing and victim-eating is finished, “the Big Men of each side make speeches…listing the dead [and] set the scene for future exchanges…The victors may profit only in terms of glory…they have no right to invade and occupy the losers’ territory…everyone hurries home, satisfied that he has vindicated his honor.”95
MURDER, RAPE AND TORTURE OF AUSTRIALIAN ABORIGINAL CHILDREN
The early infanticidal childrearing mode of Austrian Aboriginals has been arguably the most abusive and neglectful of all tribal cultures. It is possible that the poor environment of the Australian desert is partially responsible for their lack of progress in childrearing, though New Guinea was nearly as stuck as they are in early infanticidal mode childrearing and they have had a far better environment than Australia. The origins of the very violent personalities of Aboriginals are, of course, in no way caused by genetic differences, only developmental. Thousands of Aboriginals have been removed from their parents and brought up by modern city parents and they turn out to have personalities indistinguishable from others in their adoptive families.
The custom of raping Aboriginal children, eating “every second child” and making the older children also eat them is termed “a quite favorable picture” by Roheim.96 Mothers regularly forced their children to eat their newborn siblings “in the belief that the strength of the first child would be doubled by such a procedure.”97 Sometimes the fetus would be “pulled out by the head, roasted and eaten by the mother and the children” and sometimes “a big boy would be killed by the father by being beaten on the head” and given to the mother to eat.98 Since most newborns in the Pacific area, from Hawaii to Tahiti, were murdered by their mothers,99 and since their siblings were forced to participate in the killings, all adults had Killer Mother alters implanted in their amygdalan fear networks which they were compelled to reenact. Hippler says Australian children “attacked infants unceasingly” while “the mother rarely intervenes…Children’s attacks become so common that one often hears adults saying ‘Don’t kill the baby.’ But no one interferes and the child is increasingly made subject to violence and stress.”100 He also says “children are abused by their mother and others…routinely brutally…jerked roughly, slapped or shaken…verbally abusive using epithets such as ‘you shit’ [frightened by] a dangerous world full of demons, though in reality the real dangers are from his caretakers…children are terrified to leave the presence of their mothers.”101 Fusion with the Killer Mother is guaranteed by all these practices, plus the mother’s choking the infant with her milk during nursing, the constant masturbation by mother of her children’s penis and vagina while she lies on top of them, twisting and pinching them as we saw was the practice in New Guinea.102
The mutilation of young girls’ vaginas is also practiced by the Aboriginals, “in which old men roll emu feathers with a loop of hair. This device is put into the vagina and then removed, pulling away a large part of the womb. The rest of the womb is then cut horizontally and vertically with a stone knife. When this wound is healed, the girl is then circumcised and made to have intercourse with many young men. The mix of blood and semen is collected and given to frail tribesmen as a fortifying elixir.”103 Again, the fusion with the Killer Mother’s blood is imagined to increase the strength of the male who is uncertain of his masculinity. Males marry many wives and even rape their own daughters104 in order to fortify their masculinity, and fathers often have “boy-wives” to absorb some of their maleness.105 It is not surprising that with both boys and girls “almost their only, and certainly their supreme, game was coitus,” particularly “licking the vagina of girls” to increase their strength.106 Gang raping is constant among Aboriginals, as it is in all tribal cultures.107 Roheim calls the constant rape of Aboriginal children “far more ‘normal’ than the sexuality of the European male” since “their repression of sexuality need not be as deep as it is among Europeans.”108
The initial ritual of Aboriginal boys is accomplished by throwing them into a trench called “The Old Woman” with a bull-roarer called “The Mother” (her womb), repeating their birth by going through a birth tunnel with an umbilical rope attached, being covered by “the menstrual blood that can cause you to die,” and then sub-incising them with “a slit made on the underside of his penis” that is said to create a powerful vagina.109 The men then have intercourse in the split on the underside of the penis, “like a split-open frankfurter.”110 Equipped with a vagina and with the powerful blood of the “Old Serpent Woman” who roams the desert in search of people to eat, warriors go out to kill anyone they can find, living “in dread of enemies” who are Killer Mother serpents, creating Faked Provocations of some fancied wrongs that might justify the killing, either individually or in small groups. Many Australian tribes ate their dead enemies, including their neighbors, though “not for the sake of food.”111 Australian Aborigines also “never neglect to massacre all strangers who fall into their power.”112 “Men, women and children are massacred indiscriminately.”113 A majority of adult men are killed by homicide and over a quarter are killed in warfare.114 These patterns have not changed in millennia: “fighting scenes are extensively depicted in Aboriginal rock art dating back at least 10,000 years.”115 When childrearing doesn’t change, economies and cultures do not change.
INFANTICIDE, RAPE AND VIOLENCE IN AFRICAN TRIBES
When one turns on television news and hears that a quarter million people have died in Darfur, Africa as Muslim military gangs attacked the south, the motivation for this carnage is usually attributed to their Communist ideologies . . . until one learns that what they actually did was chop off the penises of little boys and rape little girls, hardly the stated goal of materialist Communism.116 But if one knows that Darfur boys are routinely genitally mutilated and little girls both genitally mutilated and raped, as most Africans were,117 the motivation for the violence becomes more obviously a re-infliction of childhood traumas upon others. The mutilation of boys is “a practice that serves as a core rite of passage for young men,” sometimes removing all the skin from the penis, the chopping off of girls’ genitals is practiced upon “ninety percent of all women in Darfur,” and the rape of girls is common in Africa.118
The core of these abuses lies in the widespread African practice of mutilating the genitals of African girls, a sadistic sexual assault that is said to be sexually arousing to those who attend the ceremony.119 Mothers, not men, insist on chopping off their daughters’ genitals, producing “horrendous pain, massive bleeding and raging infection.”120 It currently is found in 28 African countries, affecting about 130 million women—in 89 percent of Sudanese women and in 97 percent of uneducated Egyptian families and 66 percent of Egyptian educated families.121 It began historically thousands of years ago before the nations became Muslim, so it is not caused by Islamic beliefs. “Girls tremble as they hear about the experiences of other girls…first there is fear, and then the appalling memory of the experience. Sme girls live with a phobia that one or the other parent will kill them.”122 Also, most African tribal mothers still kill at least one of their children, sometimes as a child sacrifice to the gods.123
Most African tribes practice all the abusive and neglectful childrearing practices described above for New Guinea and Australian families. Infanticide of course is a routine practice in African tribes, as in tribal cultures around the world, with more girls than boys killed at birth.124 Even when food is easily available, African mothers are often described as giving them “a large share of cuffs and kicks, and not over-much food.”125 Overworked mothers rarely talk to or look at or praise or play with their children, hanging them as infants on trees. Girls are married off in their early teens to older men chosen by their parents, most mothers beat and cane their children from infancy, frighten them with dangerous spirits, abandon them because they believe them to be witches, and so on.126 Boys, too, are commonly raped by older men in much of Africa, both orally and anally—even boy wives are known—and fathers sell their boys to men for sex or to boy brothels.127 Boys are taught to hate their enemies, and because they are ambivalent about their masculinity to prepare for a life of fighting (anthropologists who report “peaceful” tribes like the San Bushmen have been disproven).128 In fact, many African tribes have been measured to have fifty times the homicide rate as modern nations, with the majority of males admitting to committing at least one homicide.129 As the !Kung explain it, they often go into alternate states (alters) when “the n/um lifts you in your belly and makes you tremble…you experience death, you give up who you are…you are reborn...the boy becomes a man, the man a hero.” and they go out and find someone to kill.130 Before violent outbursts, Africans are often possessed by their inner spirit selves, “indulging in filthy language and seized by a fit of rage punctuated by convulsions.”131 They feel they have lost their soul [arutam], and go out to kill others in raids to recover their soul—believing “if they fail to kill someone they would not be entitled to obtain new arutam souls and would die within weeks.” 132 Their leader, often a full Chief, is seen as a super-powerful Killing Mother with whom to fuse.133 Raids are for the purpose of killing and “securing as many human heads as possible” (among headhunters like the Jivaro), but “no case could be found of war being pursued to seize territory.”134 Throughout African history, slavery was rife, and “three men could not be sent on a journey together for fear two of them may combine and sell the third…[in some tribes] any man falling into their hands is killed and eaten.”135 With the development of slavery, kingship and the early state, we move to the next chapter on “Child Abuse and War in Early States.”
Footnotes:
1 Lloyd deMause, The History of Childhood. New York: Psychohistory Press, 1974.
2 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations. New York: Other Press, 2002, pp. 240-245.
3 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, p. 157.
4 Jill E. Korbin, “Child Sexual Abuse: Implications from the Cross-Cultural Record.” In Nancy Sheper-Hughes, Child Survival: Anthropological Perspectives on the Treatment and Maltreatment of Children. Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1987, p. 251.
5 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 124.
6 Claudia Konker, “Rethinking Child Sexual Abuse: An Anthropological Perspective.” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 62(1992): 148.
7 See evidence in Lloyd deMause, “The Universality of Incest.” The Journal of Psychohistory 19(1991): 123-164.
8 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 263.
9 Ibid., pp. 264-268.
10 Derek Freeman, The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of her Samoan Research. Boulder: Westview Press, 1999.
11 Margaret Mead, “The Ethnography of Childhood.” In Robert A. LeVine and Rebecca S. New, Eds. Anthropology and Child Development: A Cross-Cultural Reader. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2008, p. 23.
12 Geza Roheim, Psychoanalysis and Anthropology: Culture, Personality and the Unconscious. New York: International Universities Press, 1950, pp. 150 and 60.
13 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, pp. 258-260.
14 Nathan Miller, The Child in Primitive Society. New York: Brentano’s, 1928, pp. 27-50.
15 Margaret Mead, Letters From the Field, 1925-1975. New York: Harper and Row, 2001, p. 132.
16 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, pp. 259-260.
17 Ibid.; L. L. Langness, “Child Abuse and Cultural Values: The Case of New Guinea.” In Jill E. Korbin, Ed., Child Abuse and Neglect: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981, p. 15.
18 David Levinson, Family Violence in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1989, p. 25.
19 Larry S. Milner, Hardness of Heart/Hardness of Life: The Stain of Human Infanticide. Lanham: University Press of America, 2000, p. 143.
20 Lloyd deMause, Foundations of Psychohistory. New York: Creative Roots, 1982, pp. 277, 299.
21 Fitz John Porter Poole, “Cannibal, Tricksters, and Witches: Anthropophagic Images Among Binim-Kuskusmin.” In Paula Brown and Donald Tuzin, Eds., The Ethnography of Cannibalism. Washington, D.C.: Society for Psychological Anthropology, 1983, p. 13.
22 L. L. Langness, “Child Abuse and Cultural Values: The Case of New Guinea.” In Jill E. Korbin, Child Abuse and Neglect, p. 28.
23 Marie Reay, “The Magico-Religious Foundations of New Guinea Highlands Warfare.” In Michele Stephen, Ed., Sorcerer and Witch in Melanesia. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987, p. 144
24 Ibid.
25 John W. M. Whiting, Becoming a Kwoma: Teaching and Learning in a New Guinea Tribe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941, p. 25.
26 See Steven Levenkron, Stolen Tomorrows: Understanding and Treating Women’s Childhood Sexual Abuse. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2007.
27 James F. Masterson, Ed. The Personality Disorders Through the Lens of Attachment Theory…Phoenix: Zeig, Tucker & Theisen, 2006, pp. 168-178.
28 Patricia K. Townsend, The Situation of Children in Papua New Guinea. Port Moresby: Papua New Guinea Institute of Applied Social and Economic Research, 1985, pp. 17, 43.
29 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 270.
30 Ibid., p. 269.
31 Harry Guntrip, Schizoid Phenomena, Object-Relations and the Self. Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1968; James F. Masterson, The Emerging Self: A Developmental, Self, and Object Relations Approach to the Treatment of the Closet Narcissistic Disorder of the Self. New York: Bunner/Mazel, 1993, p. 41.
32 James F. Masterson, Ed., The Personality Disorders Through the Lens of Attachment Theory and the Neurobiologic Development of the Self. Phoenix: Zeig, Tucker & Theisen, 2005, pp. 170-171.
33 James F. Masterson, The Emerging Self: A Developmental, Self, and Object Relations Approach to the Treatment of the Closet Narcissistic Disorder of the Self. New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1993, p. 101.
34 James F. Masterson, Ed., The Personality Disorders, p. 124.
35 Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972, p. 36.
36 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, pp. 394-396.
37 Ibid., p. 265.
38 Charles W. Socarides, Preoedipal Origin and Psychoanalytic Therapy of Sexual Perversions. Madison: International Universities Press, 1988; Geza Roheim, Psychoanalysis and Anthropology, p. 160.
39 Gillian Gillison, Between Culture and Fantasy: A New Guinea Highlands Mythology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, p. 176.
40 Bronislaw Malinowski, The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia. London: George Routledge & Sons, 1929, pp. 44-51.
41 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 264.
42 Ibid., p. 287.
43 Bruce M. Knauft, Good Company and Violence: Sorcery and Social Action in a Lowland New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
44 James Shreeve, The Neanderthal Enigma: Solving the Mystery of Modern Human Origins. New York: William Morrow and Co., 1995, p. 163.
45 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 288-289.
46 Gilbert H. Herdt, Ed., Rituals of Manhood: Male Initiation in Papua New Guinea: Male Initiation in Papua New Guinea. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, p. 70
.
47 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 274.
48 Ibid., p. 276.
49 Roger M. Keesing, “Introduction.” In Gilbert H. Herdt, Ed., Rituals of Manhood: Male Initiation in Papua New Guinea, pp. 9, 71.
50 L. L. Langness, “Oedipus in the New Guinea Highlands?” Ethos 18(1990): 395.
51 Ibid., pp. 276, 308.
52 Ann Chowning, “Child Rearing and Socialization.” In Ian Hogbin, Anthropology in Papua New Guinea: Readings From The Encyclopedia of Papua and New Guinea. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1973, p. 76; Stanley N. Kurtz, “Polysexualization: A New Approach to Oedipus in the Trobriands.” Ethos 19(1991): 70.
53 Ibid., p. 254.
54 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 148.
55 Erika Bourguignon, Possession. San Francisco: Chandler & Sharp, 1976.
56 Alice Beck Kehoe, Shamans and Religion: An Anthopological Exploration in Critical Thinking. Prospect Heights: Waveland Press, 2000, p. 55; Robert E. Ryan, The Strong Eye of Shamanism: A Journey Into the Caves of Consciousness. Rochester: Inner Traditions, 1999, p. 49.
57 Sheila S. Walker, Ceremonial Spirit Possession in Africa and Afro-America. Leiden: Brill: 1972; Michael Winkelman, Shamanism: The Neural Ecology of Consciousness and Healing. Westport: Bergin & Garvey, 2000, p. 76.
58 Michael Ripinsky-Naxon, The Nature of Shamanism: Substance and Function of a Religious Metaphor. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993, p. 49.
59 L. L. Langness, “Child Abuse and Cultural Values: The Case of New Guinea.” In Jill E. Korbin, Ed., Child Abuse and Neglect, p. 16.
60 Bruce M. Knauft, Good Company and Violence, p. 55; John Craig, “Kindness and Killing.” Emory Magazine, October 1988, pp. 26, 3.
61 Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1997, p. 122.
62 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 219.
63 Jonathan Haas, The Anthropology of War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
64 Michael P. Ghiglieri, The Dark Side of Man. New York: Perseus Books, 2000, p. 140.
65 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 221
66 Ibid., p. 222.
67 James Gilligan, Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic. New York: Vintage Books, 1996, p. 45.
68 Eli Sagan, At the Dawn of Tyranny: The Origins of Individualism, Political Oppression, and the State. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985, p. 237.
69 Christopher Boehm, “Egalitarian Society and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy.” Current Anthropology 34 (1993): 236.
70 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 280.
71 David K. Jordan, Personality and the Cultural Construction of Society. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Pres, 1990, p. 175.
72 Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1997, p. 10.
73 Erika Bourguignon, “Dreams and Altered States of Consciousness in Anthropological Research.” In F. K. L. Hsu, Ed., Psychological Anthropology. 2nd Ed. Homewood: The Dorsey Press, 1972, p. 418.
74 Gilbert H. Herdt, Guardians of the Flutes: Idioms of Masculinity. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1981, p. 351.
75 Eric Kline Silverman, Masculinity, Motherhood and Mockery: Psychoanalyzing Culture and the Iatmul Naven Rite in New Guinea. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2001, pp. 79, 71, 38.
76 David Livingstone Smith, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007, p. 25.
77 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 252.
78 Simon Harrison, The Mask of War: Violence, Ritual and the Self in Melanesia. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993, p. 95.
79 Ann S. Meigs, Food, Sex and Pollution, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988, p. 110.
80 Gilbert Herdt and Michele Stephen, Eds. The Religious Imagination in New Guinea. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989.
81 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 401.
82 Maurice R. Davie, The Evolution of War: A Study of Its Role in Early Societies. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2003, p. 144.
83 Simon Harrison, Violence, Ritual and the Self in Melanesia. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993, p. 88.
84 Raymond C. Kelly, Warless Societies and the Origin of War. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000, p. 21.
85 Ibid., p. 21.
86 Leonard B. Glick, “Sorcery and Witchcraft.” In Ian Hogbin, Ed., Anthropology in Papua New Guinea, p. 183.
87 John W. M. Whiting, Becoming a Kwoma, p. 61.
88 Peter Birkett Huber, “Defending the Cosmos: Violence and Social Order Among the Anggor of New Guinea.” In Martin A. Nettleship et al, Eds. War, Its Causes and Correlates. The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1975, p. 647.
89 Mervyn Meggitt, Blood Is Their Argument: Warfare Among the Mae Enga Tribesmen of the New Guinea Highlands. Palo Alto: Mayfield Publishing Co., 1977, p. 18.
90 David Livingstone Smith, The Most Dangerous Animal, p. 15.
91 Ibid., p. 75.
92 Steven A. LeBlanc, Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage. New York: St. Martins Press, 2003, p. 95.
93 Simon Harrison, Violence, Ritual and the Self in Melanesia. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993, pp. 88 and 131.
94 Eli Sagan, Cannibalism: Human Aggression and Cultural Form. New York: Psychohistory Press, 1974, p. 20.
95 Mervyn Meggitt, Blood Is Their Argument, pp. 20, 21.
96 Geza Roheim, Children of the Desert: The Western Tribes of Central Australia. Vol. One. New York: Basic Books, 1974, p. 255.
97 Ibid., p. 71.
98 Ibid., p. 72.
99 Eli Sagan, At The Dawn Of Tyranny, pp. 75, 196-197, 200.
100 Arthur E. Hippler, “Culture and Personality Perspective of the Yolngu of Northeastern Arnhem Land: Part 1—Early Socialization.” Journal of Psychological Anthropology 1(1978): 221.
101 Ibid., pp. 229-244.
102 Ibid., pp. 235; Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, pp. 264-267.
103 Cathy Joseph, “Compassionate Accountability: An Embodied Consideration of Female Genital Mutilation.” The Journal of Psychohistory 24(1996, p. 12.
104 Geza Roheim, Children of the Desert, pp. 22, 54.
105 Ibid., p. 117; Edward Brongersma, Loving Boys. Vol. I. Elmhurst: Global Academic Publications, 1986, p. 89.
106 Ibid., pp. 119, 120, 102, 97.
107Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, pp. 699, 700.
108 Ibid., p. 255.
109 Ibid., p. 400; Robert Tonkinson, The Mardudjara Aborigines. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978, p. 23.
110 Rosalind Miles, The Women’s History of the World. Topsfield: Salem House, 1988, p. 38.
111 Maurice R. Davie, The Evolution of War: A Study of Its Role in Early Societies. Mineola: Dover Publications, 2003, p. 69.
112 Ibid., p. 13.
113 Azar Gat, War In Human Civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 22.
114 Richard J. Barnet, Roots of War. New York: Penguin, 1973, p. 93.
115 Azar Gat, War In Human Civilization, p. 18.
116 Frontline, WPBS, June 10, 2008.
117 Sarah LeVine and Robert LeVine, “Child Abuse and Neglect in Sub-Saharan Africa.”In Jill E. Korbin, Ed., Child Abuse and Neglect: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981, p. 38
118 “Male Circumcision,” http://forums.csis.org/Africa/?p90; “Male Circumcision In Africa,” http://www.circlist.com/rites/African.html; “Sudan: For Raped Women in Darfur,” http://www.refugeesinternational.org/content/article/detail/4260; Carol R. Horowitz and J. Carey Jackson, Journal of General Internal Medicine, 12(1997): 491; Ellen Gruenbaum, The Female Circumcision Controversy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000; “Kenya: Report on Female Genital Mutilation.” http://www.state.gov/g/wi/rls/rep/crfgm/10103.htm; Felix Bryk, Circumcision in Man and Woman; Its History, Psychology, and Ethnology. New York: American Ethnological Press, 1934, pp. 270-287.
119 Lloyd deMause, “The History of Child Abuse,” http://www.psychohistory.com/
htm/05_history.html; Lloyd deMause, “The History of Child Assault,” The Journal of Psychohistory 18(1990): 6; Pamela Paradis Tice, “Female Genital Mutilation,” The Journal of Psychohistory 30(2003): 310-313.
120 Hanny Lightfoot-Klein, Prisoners of Ritual: An Odyssey Into Female Genital Circumcision in Africa. Binghamton: Hawroth Press, 1989.
121 Esther K. Hicks, Infibulation: Female Mutilation in Islamic Northeastern Africa. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1993; Gerry Mackie, “A Way to End Female Genital Cutting.” http://www.nocirc.org/symposia/third/hanny3/html.
122 Efua Dorkenoo, Cutting the Rose. Female Genital Mutilation: The Practice and Its Prevention. London: Minority Rights Publications, 1994, p. 97.
123 Nathan Miller, “The Child in Primitive Society.” New York: Gale Research Co., 1975; Jon D. Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son. The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.
124 Larry S. Milner, Hardness of Heart/Hardness of Life, pp. 139-170.
125 Nathan Mill, The Child in Primitive Society, p. 119.
126 Robert A. LeVine, et al, Child Care and Culture: Lessons From Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994; Beatrice B. Whiting and Carolyn P. Edwards, Children of Different Worlds: The Formation of Social Behavior. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988; Paul Parin, et al, Fear Thy Neighbor As Thyself: Psychoanalysis and Society Among the Anyi of West Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980, p. 134; “Child ‘Witches’ in Africa.’ Guardian Unlimited http://www.guardian.co/uk/news/video/2007/dec/09/video.
127 Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe, Ed. Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies of African Homosexualities. New York: Palgrave Publishing, 1998.
128 Robert B. Edgerton, Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony. New York: The Free Press, 1992, pp. 5, 57.
129 Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 222.
130 Robert Katz, “Education for Transcendence.” In Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore, Ed. Kalahari Hunter-Gathers: Studies of the !Kung San and Their Neighbors. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976, p. 287.
131 Traugott K. Oesterreich, Possession and Exorcism Among Primitive Races, in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Modern Times. New York: Causeway Books, 1974, p. 264.
132 Bruce Lincoln, Death, War, and Sacrifice: Studies in Ideology and Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, p. 140.
133 Paul Parin, Fear They Neighbor As Thyself, p. 220; Eli Sagan, At the Dawn of Tyranny.
134 Ibid., p. 183.
135 Maurice R. Davie, The Solution of War: A Study of Its Role in Early Societies. Mineola: Dover Publications, 2003, p. 13.
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