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Psychoanalysis, child abuse and war Ian Lee Doucet BA DipM
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Medical Educational Trust , 601 Holloway Road, London, N19 4DJ Published online: 22 Oct 2007.
To cite this article: Ian Lee Doucet BA DipM (1992) Psychoanalysis, child abuse and war, Medicine and War, 8:4, 282-293, DOI: 10.1080/07488009208409062 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07488009208409062
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CONFERENCE REPORT
Psychoanalysis, Child Abuse and War IAN LEE DOUCET BA DipM
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Medical Educational Trust, 601 Holloway Road, London Nl 9 4DJ This conference, organized by the British Institute for Psychohistory and held at Regent's College in London on 28 April 1992, explored the behaviour of nations in terms of group and individual psychology. Radical views of abusive child-rearing and its social causes and consequences were presented, and the psychological processes involved in national behaviour, in particular war, were examined. What is now termed psychohistory is part of a long tradition, said Brett Karr, Director of the British Institute for Psychohistory, introducing the conference. Even before Freud there was a tradition of 'pathobiography' in European culture, in which the history of pathological personalities (wellknown artists, politicians, etc.) was recorded, usually in a descriptive and diagnostic manner, by such as Krafft-Ebing. Members of Freud's Vienna circle wrote psychobiographic studies, but of individuals rather divorced from their social context. Freud wrote psychoanalytically about famous people to illustrate his theories of individual psychology, but also went beyond description and individual diagnosis to look at how people in positions of power function and their influence on large groups. Many psychoanalysts after Freud set their innovations concerning individual psychology in much fuller understandings of family and social context, while thinkers such as Wilfred Bion focused more directly on the dynamics of group psychology. Lloyd deMause, of the Institute for Psychohistory based in New York and one of the conference speakers, continues this development. His work focuses, firstly, on the abusive nature of child-rearing historically and how the consequences of this create the societies in which we live and parent. Secondly, this leads to understanding large groups, such as nations, in terms of the individual, by analogy but also more directly, since our unconscious psychic life is lived out in group behaviour. For example, as Brett Karr explained, national leaders may act as 'infantile delegates for the split off and disowned parts of our personalities'. Society and Abusive Parent-Child Interactions Lloyd deMause described the thesis of his first paper, 'The History of Child Assault', as 'not difficult to understand but hard to believe'. It is that'... the MEDICINE AND WAR, VOL. 8,282-293 (1992)
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history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to emerge', and that each generation of parents and children creates issues which are later acted out in the arena of public life. He gave examples of abusive child-rearing through history (which are documented much more fully in 'The History of Childhood'.1) Historians have concentrated so much on 'the noisy sandbox of history, with all its magnificent battles' that they have generally ignored what went on in the homes of the protagonists and populace. What went on, in different phases, was widespread infanticide (including use as sacrificial victims), abandonment (including child-sale and use as hostages or as security for debt), physical abuse, emotional terrorization, and sexual use of children by parents and other adults. Such abuses were accepted child-rearing practices of the time, and seldom seen as aberrational. deMause quoted the eighteenthcentury paediatrician William Buchan as saying '... almost one half of the human species perish in infancy by improper management or neglect'. The extent and severity of child abuse has slowly moderated until today, when surveys show that about 30 per cent of men and 40 per cent of women remember sexual molestation as children; these survey-populations exclude adults who were in care as children, and prostitutes and criminals, groups which would tend to increase the amount of child abuse reported. Data from BBC Childwatch hotlines are similar, he said. And what is remembered is not the total incidence of child abuse, because the earlier the abuse the less likely it is to be remembered. Behind these forms of child abuse are common parent-child interactions. Faced with a child who needs something, an adult can respond in three different ways: 1. S/he can use the child as a vehicle for the projection of his or her own unconscious, which deMause terms projective reaction. 2. S/he can use the child as a substitute for an adult figure important in the adult's own childhood, which deMause calls reversal reaction. 3. S/he can empathize with the child's needs yet experience them as separate and different from his or her own needs, and act to satisfy the child's needs; this is termed an empathic reaction.
The first two reactions typify the history of childhood. Either the child is used as a 'poison container', receiving the uncomfortable and disowned parts of the adult which are projected out and seen as existing only in the child, or the child is seen as existing to meet parental needs, which is abusive of the child's needs, and further abusive when the child is punished in some way for failing to meet those parental needs. In both cases it becomes the child's function to reduce the adult's pressing anxieties (arising from his/her dysfunctional childhood); the child is made to act as the adult's psychological defence. Adults who have been so treated as children have great difficulty later in not relating to their own children from the abused and dysfunctional parts of their personalities. In contrast, a 'properly loved child can act more freely and
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has a wider choice of actions' as an adult. It is the adult's ability to regress to the level of the child's need and correctly identify it without an admixture of the adult's own projections and needs which allows proper loving or parenting. deMause set out stages in the development of parental/social attitudes to children, emphasizing that these are approximate and schematic:
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1. Infanticidal Stage (antiquity to fourth century AD) The prevalence of this arose not from economic necessity but from parents' infanticidal wishes, to resolve massive projection of 'evil' feelings into children. The image for this stage is Medea. Widespread reversal reaction also resulted in the common sodomisation and other sexual use of surviving children. 2. Abandonment Stage (fourth to thirteenth century) Once parents commonly accepted that children have souls, the only way to escape the dangers of their own projections was by abandonment (to a wet nurse, a monastery or nunnery, a foster family, or by severe emotional abandonment in the parents' home). Projection continued to be massive, since the child was still full of evil and needed to be beaten to become good. But reversal reaction lessened, which is reflected in the reduction in child sodomization. The image for this stage might be Griselda, who abandoned her children for her husband. 3. Ambivalent Stage (fourteenth to seventeenth centuries) Because the child, when it entered the parents' emotional life, was still a container for dangerous projections, their task was to mould it into shape. Children were seen as soft wax, plaster or clay, to be formed into a virtuous adulthood. Instead of the killing or physical and sexual abuse of Stage 1, or the abandonment abuses of Stage 2, here abusive practices took the form of severe training and control, with enemas, purgatives, very early toilet training, etc., to induce rigorous self-control. The parental ambivalence was between the tender feelings which such a view of the pliability of children allows, and the parental force needed to beat them into adult shape. 4. Intrusive Stage (eighteenth century) The great reduction in projection and virtual disappearance of reversal reaction was reflected in this century's great transition in parent-child relations. Since the child was no longer so full of (projected) evil, the parents need not purge its dirty insides via enemas and purgatives. Instead, they could intrude further, to conquer its rebellious will and bend it to theirs. The child was prayed with but not played with, hit but no longer regularly whipped, punished for masturbation, and made to obey every parental command promptly and unquestioningly - and manipulated or punished most often
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with guilt. As the child viewed and treated thus was so much less threatening, some empathy was possible, and increasing care for its material and spiritual welfare. This was reflected in improving levels of material care, the growth of paediatrics and reduced child mortality which allowed the demographic transition of this century.
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5. Socialization Stage (nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries) As adult projection continued to lessen, child-rearing became less a process of conquering its will than of guiding it into proper paths, i.e. socialization. Here, the father started to play a more active role. Today, this is still commonly regarded as the only model for child-care; it underpins psychological models of development from Freud's 'channelling of impulses' to Skinner's behaviourism. 6. Helping Stage (from mid-twentieth century) The child knows better than the parent what it needs at each phase of development. The parents' role is to empathize and fulfil its evolving needs, without attempting to train the child, form its habits, or coerce by physical or verbal or emotional/moral means (e.g. guilt). In responding creatively to the child's demands, a great deal of time, energy and commitment is needed by both parents. The aim is 'to empower the child to realise the innate power of love, and to allow this to survive into adulthood'. The question then arises, how does change occur from more to less abusive child-rearing practices? deMause sees the long evolution in parent-child relations as arising from 'the ability of successive generations of parents to regress to the psychic age of their children and work through the anxieties of that age in a better manner the second time they encounter them than they did during their own childhood'. This inter-generational process is analogous to psychoanalysis, which also involves regression and a second chance to face childhood trauma. Thus the history of childhood is a series of closer approaches between adult and child. Each closing of the psychic distance produces fresh anxiety, and how this adult anxiety is reduced forms the childrearing practices of that time. deMause's 'psychogenic theory of history' identifies the changes in personality occurring because of successive generations of parent-child interactions as a central force in historical development. He spoke of the 'narrow funnel of childhood': a society's child-rearing practices are the prime conduit for the transmission of all other cultural elements. Specific childhood experiences must occur to sustain specific cultural traits and social practices; the latter can and will change as the former do. War as Reliving Trauma
Dr Sandra Bloom, from the North-Western Institute of Psychiatry, USA, spoke on 'Trauma and War: The Need to Relive Traumatic Events'. Her two
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papers, combined in this report, had quite a different tone from those of deMause and gave a fuller theoretical basis for deMause's psychohistory. Her opening statement was: The innate defence against the overwhelming nature of psychological stress is dissociation - the ability to segregate certain mental processes from the rest of the psychic apparatus. This mechanism allows the traumatized individual to split off the overwhelming affect from the experience itself, thus permitting the person to continue to function and defend himself without being paralysed by the emotion... This separation of mental contents, however, is unstable ... the dissociated memories, thoughts and effects press for reintegration into the main body of consciousness. This conflict manifests through the ... compulsion to repeat trauma [which is] ... usually in highly symbolic and disguised form ... the traumatic re-enactment varies ... but always involves perpetration, either against the self, against the other, or both.... Because we are all inextricably socially connected, war with the self inevitably becomes war against the other as well... In order to overcome the dissociation, the person must defy his own built-in, biologically-based injunction to keep those mental contents separated .. .2 Dr Bloom suggested that, as trauma frequently becomes the organising principle in the psyche of the individual, so also in the psyche of a group or nation trauma can become a central organising principle. She described first an individual case history illustrating these points, then discussed similar processes occurring for an entire nation of people, in the following terms. The United States was created by immigrants, from every cultural, ethnic and racial background. They brought with them the traumatic effects of a wide range of abusive child-rearing practices. And, since immigration was often forced, following persecution and poverty, and left behind family members and traditional ways of life, they also brought with them those traumata - profound feelings of loss, grief, shame, anger, from which they had to dissociate in order to establish a new life and survive. As with any survivor of trauma, emotional processing does not occur until physical safety is achieved. This has continued with successive waves of immigration, through the United States' brief history. It is left to subsequent generations to resolve the underlying dissociated pain arising from loss of an entire way of life, often with ruptures in family relations as a result. 'No nation can better serve as a metaphor for multiple personality disorder than America', said Dr Bloom. And 'virtually all Americans can trace their heritage to experiences of profound loss and separation'. Much of the American way of life can be understood as traumatic reenactment: the perpetual restlessness, mobility and lack of social support structure, an irrational preoccupation with the need to protect oneself with weapons, the fear of making commitments, the abandonment of old people
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(who hold secrets too painful to be around), over-emphasis on individualism, and the 'impenetrable sense of loneliness'. 'Like patients who avoid situations which could trigger memories of the trauma, we avoid looking at our national history because of the danger of dissociated feelings re-entering conscious life.' There is much evidence of dissociation on a national level: how historically ignorant and apolitical most Americans are, yet how badly the government and economy works, and the deteriorating quality of life; how the highest social ideals (enshrined in the Constitution) sit beside realities of poverty, social division, decay and alienation; how a widespread antiabortion sentiment exists while child welfare programmes are cut and 'millions of children are being beaten, raped, starved, abandoned and neglected'; how Americans see themselves as a peaceful people whilst being fascinated with violence and weaponry; and how individualism is held as an ideal whilst there are powerful forces of conformity and intolerance of difference, leading to persecution and scapegoating. Dr Bloom said that the more confusing behaviour of nations can often be explained in terms of developmental arrests or regressions - in the case of the United States, in terms of adolescence. Most victims of childhood trauma show little external symptomatology in their early years, analogous to the first-generation immigrants who settle, work hard and succeed, appearing relatively symptom-free. It is in adolescence that symptoms emerge, which are then either unsuccessfully defended against, so appearing as overt symptoms of dysfunction, or are dissociated and repressed to allow what appears a relatively normal adulthood (but is in fact a semi-permanent internal division and lack of integration). Adolescents must accomplish many tasks on the way to full adult maturity, which are implied in the dysfunctional forms noted below. Adults who are traumatized as children are developmentally trapped in adolescence. Dr Bloom gave examples from American life (including the Gulf War and the Thomas/Hill affair) which fitted the characteristics of adolescent dysfunction: • •
•
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poor gender identity often manifests as rigid and exclusive concepts of masculine and feminine which are continually and harshly defended; impaired capacity for full and healthy sexual relationships; difficulty in modulating aggressive impulses; occupying one position from fear of the other, i.e. the extreme passivity of victimization or the extreme aggression of violent perpetration, often gender-related; poor problem-solving ability and limited tolerance of ambivalence and internal conflict, with destructive acting-out or repression; immature sense of personal responsibility, with either projection, blaming and inability to make commitments or assumption of too much responsibility, self-blaming and acceptance of abuse, often gender-related; poor capacity for self-observation and modulation of affect through
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I. LEE DOUCET intellectual processes; instead peer-group influence dominates with insistence on conformity; dissociation between impulses, intellect and moral standards, allowing acts contrary to values and reasoning processes but not perceived as such; arrested development of a philosophy of life, with depression, alienation and purposelessness leading to suicidal acting-out, substance abuse and all manner of self-destructive behaviour.
It is clear from individual psychology that dissociated psychic material presses for reintegration, bringing about situations which re-enact the original trauma and allow the opportunity for better outcomes. This is the force in individuals which pushes for growth and development, similar to deMause's psychogenesis - the deeply ingrained desire for the better survival of one's offspring and, ultimately, the species. According to Dr Bloom: This innate power or force for positive integration and change is a source of inspiration when working with individual victims of trauma. With proper guidance and support, the perseverance and courage with which survivors will push for their own internal integration is, at times, awe-inspiring. It is optimistic, but may not be unrealistic, to assume that similar resources may lay within the psyche of the nation as a whole.2 What is needed for the equivalent of individual healing to happen on a national level ? The individual victim of trauma, still trapped in the pain of the past, has an impaired capacity to imagine a different future and a compulsion to repeat the past. When people decide to change, they must first learn to hold still. They must decide to stop acting-out and start using their head ... If a nation is to heal, it too will have to hold still, stop acting-out, inhibit its compulsive behaviours and experience its dissociated thoughts, feelings and memories. We have become increasingly alienated from each other because we are afraid to feel, afraid to tolerate the affect that is all around us ... The price for ending dissociation is that the patient (and therefore the nation) cannot go on hiding behind psychiatric symptoms. He must take responsibility for his actions and must become morally committed to social change, so that the cycle of victimisation is ended.2 When an individual decides to inhibit compulsive self-destructive behaviour, including the impulse to use other people as 'poison containers', s/he has to learn to tolerate all the unpleasant feelings which have been dissociated. This leads to sadness, despair, depression, anger, guilt, remorse, shame. As in the individual, large numbers of people voluntarily inhibiting compulsive behaviours will steadily increase the level of discomfort experienced communally and nationally. For the individual, this work cannot be done inadequately supported; such feelings were dissociated originally because they were unbearable. Without adequate support to change the outcome, re-
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experiencing them will simply be retraumatizing. The individual needs a 'holding environment' and skilled supporters (therapists but also friends, family, colleagues to some degree) who are empathetic but maintain clearly distinct boundaries. The group or nation needs something equivalent, though this may have to be more in the form of self-help communities. This self-help and mutual holding can be facilitated by spreading information about the effects of trauma, addiction to trauma, scapegoating, re-enactment, etc. All the psychological understanding which at present is the resource of a few 'should be as readily available and as widely known as reading, writing and arithmetic'. Leaders are needed who have confronted their own disowned feelings and integrated them, instead of subconsciously acting them out; self-honesty and a whole self-acceptance from which a genuine compassion can spring must be the cardinal virtues. This requires those who have power to humble themselves and listen both to the powerless in society and the disowned voices inside each powerful person; 'active listening to the voice of the victim is a painful and demanding engagement'. Finally, there are also 'hope, trust, faith, belief, courage, moral fortitude, compassion, playfulness, laughter, beauty, truth, and love ... these are unfashionable words ... not because they hold no meaning but because they hold too much meaning — and they arouse too much feeling'. Ultimately it is not psychotherapy or self-help groups which heal people, but love. Quoting Vaclav Havel and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Dr Bloom concluded: We can continue to be uncomfortable and embarrassed by this concept as long as we want to prolong our misery, but it is the fundamental nature of human beings to desire to be loved and, without that love, life has no meaning or purpose, and we will destroy ourselves and each other... The power of love, as the basis for a State, has never been tried.2 The Gulf War
The second paper presented by Lloyd deMause examined the behaviour of nations, in particular the United States at the time of the Gulf War, from a psychohistorical perspective. His approach is based on an understanding of individual psychological development (which is also reflected in the psychogenesis thesis outlined above). When the upbringing of a child is optimal, all of his or her experiences are integrated to form a whole personality. Since every need and impulse was responded to appropriately, s/he has not been forced to split off and disown certain impulses, such as anger or joy. As a result, such a (lucky, rare!) child and adult has a clear boundary between him/herself and others. The child responded to abusively, in contrast, has had to split off and disown those parts which were not acceptable to or exploited by his/her parents or other adults. Those parts are buried in the unconscious (at a continuing in effort and in the impoverishment of conscious life); this
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produces inner splits and conflicts. Those disowned parts are seen only in others (projection) or are turned against oneself, so that the boundaries between oneself and others are not entirely clear. deMause, and others, argue that those split-off, disowned and unintegrated parts of ourselves take on a life external to ourselves, in our families and other social groups, and in nations. Thus our group and national life re-enacts the struggles of our childhood, with those parts of ourselves which we have disowned given freer rein, the more so the less we as individuals 'own' them. Indeed, group and national behaviour consists largely of the playing out of these unintegrated parts of ourselves. deMause examined what appeared in the media before and during the Gulf War, to reveal the 'American psyche' (an account of this has been published elsewhere.3) What appears in the national media may be analysed to reveal the conscious and unconscious life of the nation, as an individual's verbal and other expression is analysed to reveal what is going on in that individual which is usually more than s/he is aware of. Visual material in particular, such as newspaper political cartoons, seems to reveal the fantasy or dream life of the nation, perhaps because it is non-verbal without pretence to rationality. Concentrating on American rather than Iraqi portrayals of the war because of greater ease of access, he saw the war as a 'shared emotional disorder', with diagnostic symptoms and psychodynamics similar to an individual disorder, and with its origins in the abusive parenting and developmental disorders of many individuals. After the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, the American media portrayed Saddam Hussein as a 'terrifying parent, a child abuser intent on hurting the children in his care', with the complementary image of 'the hurt child'. deMause showed examples of Saddam as an evil-looking pregnant mother with a nuclear bomb in his womb, a baby-killer, and as a childmolestor. Accompanying news stories concentrated on alleged events, such as Iraqi troops executing children before their parents' eyes and ripping infants from incubators (widely believed at the time but later found to be false). Although there was some reality to this aspect of the Iraqi invasion, it is significant that child abuse among all other aspects of the invasion provided the symbolic focus for the crisis, and, before the invasion, that was already the national mood of the United States. deMause said such images had been appearing in the media for the previous year, giving a common theme to diverse news stories which might well have been portrayed otherwise, for example: reduced college admissions in the United States in (image: a youth in agony, pierced by a pennant), the divorce of multimillionaire Donald and Ivana Trump (Ivana as the 'castrating wife'), tax evasion by the owner of a hotel chain (Leona Hemsley as the 'greedy bitch/witch'), and Madonna as 'vampire whore'. There was also a flurry of cartoons showing people going off cliffs and other suicidal themes. At the same time, the media wrote that 'People are incredibly depressed. In the past month there has been a distinct odor of collapse and doom in the city ..." and, in the Washington Post:
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'America is in an ugly spasm of guilt, dread and nostalgia. Once more, America is depressed.' This constituted a case of national post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to deMause. If a patient walked into a psychiatric clinic suffering from intrusive images of terrifying figures torturing children, severe depression and suicidal wishes, PTSD would be suspected. Such intrusive images occur commonly in PTSD, as flashbacks of earlier trauma inflicted on the sufferers. They also tend to develop fears, panic reactions, hypervigilance and other defensive manoeuvres to prevent similar overwhelming terror in their present lives - all characteristics which appeared in American life in the period before the Gulf War. What often triggers such states in individuals are periods of rapid change and new expectations, such as marriage, a birth, promotion or new wealth. Shared national feelings similar to PTSD are also usually experienced after periods of rapid change and prosperity. Statistically, most wars occur after periods of economic prosperity and social change. This is confirmed by psychohistorical studies of the periods prior to wars, when there is a shared view that the nation has somehow become too sinful, materialistic, prosperous or promiscuous. deMause said that this 'sinful nation awaiting retribution' fantasy was 'omnipresent in the months prior to the Gulf War' in the United States. (The lead taken by the United States in forming the UN-sanctioned anti-Iraq coalition, and the various reluctances and reservations of the other nations involved, would then reflect differences between the emotional states of the various nations). As individuals suffering from PTSD often achieve temporary relief from their emotional stress by hurting themselves or others, large groups also achieve considerable catharsis and 'regain their emotional homeostasis through periodic group healing rituals'. War re-enacts the terrible humiliation and degradation of the child during the original trauma, and provides an opportunity to renew one's individual or national self-belief. Trauma demands repetition, with the aim of finding a better solution than the relatively powerless child was able to find. Thus, said deMause, cartoons early in the Gulf crisis portrayed George Bush as a humiliated child or wimp (often with a woman's purse on his limp wrist), before he was able to regain his masculine adulthood through war. Because the trauma-repetition which is war relives the sinful, depressed feelings of the nation by inflicting traumatic violence on others, as sacrificial victims, there was a tremendous emotional relief at the outbreak of war, as there is usually. The tension of holding within ourselves (individually and nationally) the conflicting impulses towards to war and peace is suddenly relieved. No longer do we have to contain good and evil - all evil is suddenly out there in the Enemy. Notwithstanding our knowledge of the horror of war, a new national vigour in 'getting on with the job' replaces the 'crippling emotional disorder that had paralysed' the United States over the previous year. Much of the visual and verbal description of the war made of it explicitly a 'sacred combat between Good and Evil'. Much of the language was religious
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and mythic, and developed rebirth/revitalization/purification themes. This was true of both American and Iraqi portrayals of the war. In the process, the reality of warfare was lost; the 'cosmic battle killed only representatives of Evil'. Reporters sharing the national mood helped to dissociate the actual carnage inflicted on a largely conscripted army and civilian population. Since the war's formula was 'do unto others as (you feel) was done unto you', the war could only end when enough people had been killed 'to satisfy the Terrifying Parent in our heads'. deMause had an optimistic conclusion: 'it is because childhood is in fact slowly improving that fewer people are enthusiastic about going to war each decade... Polls consistently show that the younger the age of those polled, the less people are found to be in favour of war... Women - who received far less physical punishment than boys a generation ago - opposed the Gulf War by 73 to 22 per cent... while men were split down the middle' (statistically; psychically?). Discussion Questioners developed several points in response to these papers. Generally, descriptions of war refer to childhood trauma, including birth. Before a war, leaders talk of confinement (being squeezed in, trapped, bled dry, strangled, held back); war is heralded by rupture of diplomatic relations, and is characterized as a bloody ordeal to be endured as one fights one's way free; post-war, there is a mixture of exhaustion, relief and celebration—or grieving over the outcome. Perhaps one significance of abusive parenting is that it prevents the child healing the trauma of its birth; and all later crises are experienced as traumatic births in which the individual or nation's struggle is to produce a different outcome, including by making other people suffer instead and resisting or taking revenge against the mother. Much of the American media portrayal of Saddam and 'the threat' revealed a fear of women, as destroyers or vengeful parents, and as all-powerful beings who can only be overcome at great and bloody cost. This seems grossly at odds with the reality of power in political life and in war, but fits the power relationship in childbirth and infancy, as experienced by the child. Questioners at the conference also suggested that the 'shared national emotional state' which deMause explored was based on essentially masculine experience and mediated primarily through males (cartoonists, illustrators, reporters, politicians; on this argument, any women reporters or politicians are said to be operating by virtue of and on behalf of a male ethos). deMause resisted this point, but not convincingly (to this report's writer). His psychohistorical theses either misrepresent essentially masculine psychology as a universal human experience or attach little psychological significance to gender differences, which is at odds with much other theory and observation of developmental psychology. The tone of Dr Bloom's comments in discussion, as well as in her papers, seemed in agreement with this criticism of
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deMause's work. To the extent that the parenting of males is at the root of psychological dysfunction on individual and national levels, the more responsible parenting of boys by fathers and grandfathers may provide a healthier developmental context and social outcome.
References
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1. deMause L, ed. The History of Childhood. London: Bellew, 1991: 1-73. 2. Bloom S. Trauma and War: The Need to Relive Traumatic Events. 28 April 1992. Private communication. 3. deMause L. From childhood abuse to international conflicts: the Gulf War. Psychologos, International Review of Psychology 1992; 2: 71-8. (5 August 1992)
Abstract
War-related Stress: Addressing the Stress of War and Other Traumatic Events by the Task Force on War-Related Stress, American Psychological Society, and Applied Psychology Center, Kent State University, USA. American Psychologist 1991, August, 848-55. The task force recommended methods for prevention and treatment of psychological disorders associated with the Persian Gulf War and other extreme stressors facing communities, concentrating on the return home, reunion and reintegration of service personnel with their families and work. Most at risk are those exposed to the greatest loss or threat of loss, and with least coping resources. War-related stress may add to other recent stressors or reawaken prior trauma. Typical stress reactions and unsuccessful coping modes were outlined, with suggestions for monitoring and treatment of post-traumatic stress syndrome. But the most effective sources of support and help vary greatly between individuals, great latitude should be allowed in their coping methods, and careful note should be taken of gender, cultural and developmental differences. Special attention was given to children, how their reactions to stress and their needs differ from adults. Adjustment of families and personnel is not a shortterm process, and 'outreach' on many levels is necessary. ILD
Medicine and War Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fmcs19
Psychoanalysis, child abuse and war Ian Lee Doucet BA DipM
a
a
Medical Educational Trust , 601 Holloway Road, London, N19 4DJ Published online: 22 Oct 2007.
To cite this article: Ian Lee Doucet BA DipM (1992) Psychoanalysis, child abuse and war, Medicine and War, 8:4, 282-293, DOI: 10.1080/07488009208409062 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07488009208409062
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CONFERENCE REPORT
Psychoanalysis, Child Abuse and War IAN LEE DOUCET BA DipM
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Medical Educational Trust, 601 Holloway Road, London Nl 9 4DJ This conference, organized by the British Institute for Psychohistory and held at Regent's College in London on 28 April 1992, explored the behaviour of nations in terms of group and individual psychology. Radical views of abusive child-rearing and its social causes and consequences were presented, and the psychological processes involved in national behaviour, in particular war, were examined. What is now termed psychohistory is part of a long tradition, said Brett Karr, Director of the British Institute for Psychohistory, introducing the conference. Even before Freud there was a tradition of 'pathobiography' in European culture, in which the history of pathological personalities (wellknown artists, politicians, etc.) was recorded, usually in a descriptive and diagnostic manner, by such as Krafft-Ebing. Members of Freud's Vienna circle wrote psychobiographic studies, but of individuals rather divorced from their social context. Freud wrote psychoanalytically about famous people to illustrate his theories of individual psychology, but also went beyond description and individual diagnosis to look at how people in positions of power function and their influence on large groups. Many psychoanalysts after Freud set their innovations concerning individual psychology in much fuller understandings of family and social context, while thinkers such as Wilfred Bion focused more directly on the dynamics of group psychology. Lloyd deMause, of the Institute for Psychohistory based in New York and one of the conference speakers, continues this development. His work focuses, firstly, on the abusive nature of child-rearing historically and how the consequences of this create the societies in which we live and parent. Secondly, this leads to understanding large groups, such as nations, in terms of the individual, by analogy but also more directly, since our unconscious psychic life is lived out in group behaviour. For example, as Brett Karr explained, national leaders may act as 'infantile delegates for the split off and disowned parts of our personalities'. Society and Abusive Parent-Child Interactions Lloyd deMause described the thesis of his first paper, 'The History of Child Assault', as 'not difficult to understand but hard to believe'. It is that'... the MEDICINE AND WAR, VOL. 8,282-293 (1992)
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history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to emerge', and that each generation of parents and children creates issues which are later acted out in the arena of public life. He gave examples of abusive child-rearing through history (which are documented much more fully in 'The History of Childhood'.1) Historians have concentrated so much on 'the noisy sandbox of history, with all its magnificent battles' that they have generally ignored what went on in the homes of the protagonists and populace. What went on, in different phases, was widespread infanticide (including use as sacrificial victims), abandonment (including child-sale and use as hostages or as security for debt), physical abuse, emotional terrorization, and sexual use of children by parents and other adults. Such abuses were accepted child-rearing practices of the time, and seldom seen as aberrational. deMause quoted the eighteenthcentury paediatrician William Buchan as saying '... almost one half of the human species perish in infancy by improper management or neglect'. The extent and severity of child abuse has slowly moderated until today, when surveys show that about 30 per cent of men and 40 per cent of women remember sexual molestation as children; these survey-populations exclude adults who were in care as children, and prostitutes and criminals, groups which would tend to increase the amount of child abuse reported. Data from BBC Childwatch hotlines are similar, he said. And what is remembered is not the total incidence of child abuse, because the earlier the abuse the less likely it is to be remembered. Behind these forms of child abuse are common parent-child interactions. Faced with a child who needs something, an adult can respond in three different ways: 1. S/he can use the child as a vehicle for the projection of his or her own unconscious, which deMause terms projective reaction. 2. S/he can use the child as a substitute for an adult figure important in the adult's own childhood, which deMause calls reversal reaction. 3. S/he can empathize with the child's needs yet experience them as separate and different from his or her own needs, and act to satisfy the child's needs; this is termed an empathic reaction.
The first two reactions typify the history of childhood. Either the child is used as a 'poison container', receiving the uncomfortable and disowned parts of the adult which are projected out and seen as existing only in the child, or the child is seen as existing to meet parental needs, which is abusive of the child's needs, and further abusive when the child is punished in some way for failing to meet those parental needs. In both cases it becomes the child's function to reduce the adult's pressing anxieties (arising from his/her dysfunctional childhood); the child is made to act as the adult's psychological defence. Adults who have been so treated as children have great difficulty later in not relating to their own children from the abused and dysfunctional parts of their personalities. In contrast, a 'properly loved child can act more freely and
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has a wider choice of actions' as an adult. It is the adult's ability to regress to the level of the child's need and correctly identify it without an admixture of the adult's own projections and needs which allows proper loving or parenting. deMause set out stages in the development of parental/social attitudes to children, emphasizing that these are approximate and schematic:
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1. Infanticidal Stage (antiquity to fourth century AD) The prevalence of this arose not from economic necessity but from parents' infanticidal wishes, to resolve massive projection of 'evil' feelings into children. The image for this stage is Medea. Widespread reversal reaction also resulted in the common sodomisation and other sexual use of surviving children. 2. Abandonment Stage (fourth to thirteenth century) Once parents commonly accepted that children have souls, the only way to escape the dangers of their own projections was by abandonment (to a wet nurse, a monastery or nunnery, a foster family, or by severe emotional abandonment in the parents' home). Projection continued to be massive, since the child was still full of evil and needed to be beaten to become good. But reversal reaction lessened, which is reflected in the reduction in child sodomization. The image for this stage might be Griselda, who abandoned her children for her husband. 3. Ambivalent Stage (fourteenth to seventeenth centuries) Because the child, when it entered the parents' emotional life, was still a container for dangerous projections, their task was to mould it into shape. Children were seen as soft wax, plaster or clay, to be formed into a virtuous adulthood. Instead of the killing or physical and sexual abuse of Stage 1, or the abandonment abuses of Stage 2, here abusive practices took the form of severe training and control, with enemas, purgatives, very early toilet training, etc., to induce rigorous self-control. The parental ambivalence was between the tender feelings which such a view of the pliability of children allows, and the parental force needed to beat them into adult shape. 4. Intrusive Stage (eighteenth century) The great reduction in projection and virtual disappearance of reversal reaction was reflected in this century's great transition in parent-child relations. Since the child was no longer so full of (projected) evil, the parents need not purge its dirty insides via enemas and purgatives. Instead, they could intrude further, to conquer its rebellious will and bend it to theirs. The child was prayed with but not played with, hit but no longer regularly whipped, punished for masturbation, and made to obey every parental command promptly and unquestioningly - and manipulated or punished most often
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with guilt. As the child viewed and treated thus was so much less threatening, some empathy was possible, and increasing care for its material and spiritual welfare. This was reflected in improving levels of material care, the growth of paediatrics and reduced child mortality which allowed the demographic transition of this century.
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5. Socialization Stage (nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries) As adult projection continued to lessen, child-rearing became less a process of conquering its will than of guiding it into proper paths, i.e. socialization. Here, the father started to play a more active role. Today, this is still commonly regarded as the only model for child-care; it underpins psychological models of development from Freud's 'channelling of impulses' to Skinner's behaviourism. 6. Helping Stage (from mid-twentieth century) The child knows better than the parent what it needs at each phase of development. The parents' role is to empathize and fulfil its evolving needs, without attempting to train the child, form its habits, or coerce by physical or verbal or emotional/moral means (e.g. guilt). In responding creatively to the child's demands, a great deal of time, energy and commitment is needed by both parents. The aim is 'to empower the child to realise the innate power of love, and to allow this to survive into adulthood'. The question then arises, how does change occur from more to less abusive child-rearing practices? deMause sees the long evolution in parent-child relations as arising from 'the ability of successive generations of parents to regress to the psychic age of their children and work through the anxieties of that age in a better manner the second time they encounter them than they did during their own childhood'. This inter-generational process is analogous to psychoanalysis, which also involves regression and a second chance to face childhood trauma. Thus the history of childhood is a series of closer approaches between adult and child. Each closing of the psychic distance produces fresh anxiety, and how this adult anxiety is reduced forms the childrearing practices of that time. deMause's 'psychogenic theory of history' identifies the changes in personality occurring because of successive generations of parent-child interactions as a central force in historical development. He spoke of the 'narrow funnel of childhood': a society's child-rearing practices are the prime conduit for the transmission of all other cultural elements. Specific childhood experiences must occur to sustain specific cultural traits and social practices; the latter can and will change as the former do. War as Reliving Trauma
Dr Sandra Bloom, from the North-Western Institute of Psychiatry, USA, spoke on 'Trauma and War: The Need to Relive Traumatic Events'. Her two
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papers, combined in this report, had quite a different tone from those of deMause and gave a fuller theoretical basis for deMause's psychohistory. Her opening statement was: The innate defence against the overwhelming nature of psychological stress is dissociation - the ability to segregate certain mental processes from the rest of the psychic apparatus. This mechanism allows the traumatized individual to split off the overwhelming affect from the experience itself, thus permitting the person to continue to function and defend himself without being paralysed by the emotion... This separation of mental contents, however, is unstable ... the dissociated memories, thoughts and effects press for reintegration into the main body of consciousness. This conflict manifests through the ... compulsion to repeat trauma [which is] ... usually in highly symbolic and disguised form ... the traumatic re-enactment varies ... but always involves perpetration, either against the self, against the other, or both.... Because we are all inextricably socially connected, war with the self inevitably becomes war against the other as well... In order to overcome the dissociation, the person must defy his own built-in, biologically-based injunction to keep those mental contents separated .. .2 Dr Bloom suggested that, as trauma frequently becomes the organising principle in the psyche of the individual, so also in the psyche of a group or nation trauma can become a central organising principle. She described first an individual case history illustrating these points, then discussed similar processes occurring for an entire nation of people, in the following terms. The United States was created by immigrants, from every cultural, ethnic and racial background. They brought with them the traumatic effects of a wide range of abusive child-rearing practices. And, since immigration was often forced, following persecution and poverty, and left behind family members and traditional ways of life, they also brought with them those traumata - profound feelings of loss, grief, shame, anger, from which they had to dissociate in order to establish a new life and survive. As with any survivor of trauma, emotional processing does not occur until physical safety is achieved. This has continued with successive waves of immigration, through the United States' brief history. It is left to subsequent generations to resolve the underlying dissociated pain arising from loss of an entire way of life, often with ruptures in family relations as a result. 'No nation can better serve as a metaphor for multiple personality disorder than America', said Dr Bloom. And 'virtually all Americans can trace their heritage to experiences of profound loss and separation'. Much of the American way of life can be understood as traumatic reenactment: the perpetual restlessness, mobility and lack of social support structure, an irrational preoccupation with the need to protect oneself with weapons, the fear of making commitments, the abandonment of old people
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(who hold secrets too painful to be around), over-emphasis on individualism, and the 'impenetrable sense of loneliness'. 'Like patients who avoid situations which could trigger memories of the trauma, we avoid looking at our national history because of the danger of dissociated feelings re-entering conscious life.' There is much evidence of dissociation on a national level: how historically ignorant and apolitical most Americans are, yet how badly the government and economy works, and the deteriorating quality of life; how the highest social ideals (enshrined in the Constitution) sit beside realities of poverty, social division, decay and alienation; how a widespread antiabortion sentiment exists while child welfare programmes are cut and 'millions of children are being beaten, raped, starved, abandoned and neglected'; how Americans see themselves as a peaceful people whilst being fascinated with violence and weaponry; and how individualism is held as an ideal whilst there are powerful forces of conformity and intolerance of difference, leading to persecution and scapegoating. Dr Bloom said that the more confusing behaviour of nations can often be explained in terms of developmental arrests or regressions - in the case of the United States, in terms of adolescence. Most victims of childhood trauma show little external symptomatology in their early years, analogous to the first-generation immigrants who settle, work hard and succeed, appearing relatively symptom-free. It is in adolescence that symptoms emerge, which are then either unsuccessfully defended against, so appearing as overt symptoms of dysfunction, or are dissociated and repressed to allow what appears a relatively normal adulthood (but is in fact a semi-permanent internal division and lack of integration). Adolescents must accomplish many tasks on the way to full adult maturity, which are implied in the dysfunctional forms noted below. Adults who are traumatized as children are developmentally trapped in adolescence. Dr Bloom gave examples from American life (including the Gulf War and the Thomas/Hill affair) which fitted the characteristics of adolescent dysfunction: • •
•
•
poor gender identity often manifests as rigid and exclusive concepts of masculine and feminine which are continually and harshly defended; impaired capacity for full and healthy sexual relationships; difficulty in modulating aggressive impulses; occupying one position from fear of the other, i.e. the extreme passivity of victimization or the extreme aggression of violent perpetration, often gender-related; poor problem-solving ability and limited tolerance of ambivalence and internal conflict, with destructive acting-out or repression; immature sense of personal responsibility, with either projection, blaming and inability to make commitments or assumption of too much responsibility, self-blaming and acceptance of abuse, often gender-related; poor capacity for self-observation and modulation of affect through
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I. LEE DOUCET intellectual processes; instead peer-group influence dominates with insistence on conformity; dissociation between impulses, intellect and moral standards, allowing acts contrary to values and reasoning processes but not perceived as such; arrested development of a philosophy of life, with depression, alienation and purposelessness leading to suicidal acting-out, substance abuse and all manner of self-destructive behaviour.
It is clear from individual psychology that dissociated psychic material presses for reintegration, bringing about situations which re-enact the original trauma and allow the opportunity for better outcomes. This is the force in individuals which pushes for growth and development, similar to deMause's psychogenesis - the deeply ingrained desire for the better survival of one's offspring and, ultimately, the species. According to Dr Bloom: This innate power or force for positive integration and change is a source of inspiration when working with individual victims of trauma. With proper guidance and support, the perseverance and courage with which survivors will push for their own internal integration is, at times, awe-inspiring. It is optimistic, but may not be unrealistic, to assume that similar resources may lay within the psyche of the nation as a whole.2 What is needed for the equivalent of individual healing to happen on a national level ? The individual victim of trauma, still trapped in the pain of the past, has an impaired capacity to imagine a different future and a compulsion to repeat the past. When people decide to change, they must first learn to hold still. They must decide to stop acting-out and start using their head ... If a nation is to heal, it too will have to hold still, stop acting-out, inhibit its compulsive behaviours and experience its dissociated thoughts, feelings and memories. We have become increasingly alienated from each other because we are afraid to feel, afraid to tolerate the affect that is all around us ... The price for ending dissociation is that the patient (and therefore the nation) cannot go on hiding behind psychiatric symptoms. He must take responsibility for his actions and must become morally committed to social change, so that the cycle of victimisation is ended.2 When an individual decides to inhibit compulsive self-destructive behaviour, including the impulse to use other people as 'poison containers', s/he has to learn to tolerate all the unpleasant feelings which have been dissociated. This leads to sadness, despair, depression, anger, guilt, remorse, shame. As in the individual, large numbers of people voluntarily inhibiting compulsive behaviours will steadily increase the level of discomfort experienced communally and nationally. For the individual, this work cannot be done inadequately supported; such feelings were dissociated originally because they were unbearable. Without adequate support to change the outcome, re-
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experiencing them will simply be retraumatizing. The individual needs a 'holding environment' and skilled supporters (therapists but also friends, family, colleagues to some degree) who are empathetic but maintain clearly distinct boundaries. The group or nation needs something equivalent, though this may have to be more in the form of self-help communities. This self-help and mutual holding can be facilitated by spreading information about the effects of trauma, addiction to trauma, scapegoating, re-enactment, etc. All the psychological understanding which at present is the resource of a few 'should be as readily available and as widely known as reading, writing and arithmetic'. Leaders are needed who have confronted their own disowned feelings and integrated them, instead of subconsciously acting them out; self-honesty and a whole self-acceptance from which a genuine compassion can spring must be the cardinal virtues. This requires those who have power to humble themselves and listen both to the powerless in society and the disowned voices inside each powerful person; 'active listening to the voice of the victim is a painful and demanding engagement'. Finally, there are also 'hope, trust, faith, belief, courage, moral fortitude, compassion, playfulness, laughter, beauty, truth, and love ... these are unfashionable words ... not because they hold no meaning but because they hold too much meaning — and they arouse too much feeling'. Ultimately it is not psychotherapy or self-help groups which heal people, but love. Quoting Vaclav Havel and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Dr Bloom concluded: We can continue to be uncomfortable and embarrassed by this concept as long as we want to prolong our misery, but it is the fundamental nature of human beings to desire to be loved and, without that love, life has no meaning or purpose, and we will destroy ourselves and each other... The power of love, as the basis for a State, has never been tried.2 The Gulf War
The second paper presented by Lloyd deMause examined the behaviour of nations, in particular the United States at the time of the Gulf War, from a psychohistorical perspective. His approach is based on an understanding of individual psychological development (which is also reflected in the psychogenesis thesis outlined above). When the upbringing of a child is optimal, all of his or her experiences are integrated to form a whole personality. Since every need and impulse was responded to appropriately, s/he has not been forced to split off and disown certain impulses, such as anger or joy. As a result, such a (lucky, rare!) child and adult has a clear boundary between him/herself and others. The child responded to abusively, in contrast, has had to split off and disown those parts which were not acceptable to or exploited by his/her parents or other adults. Those parts are buried in the unconscious (at a continuing in effort and in the impoverishment of conscious life); this
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produces inner splits and conflicts. Those disowned parts are seen only in others (projection) or are turned against oneself, so that the boundaries between oneself and others are not entirely clear. deMause, and others, argue that those split-off, disowned and unintegrated parts of ourselves take on a life external to ourselves, in our families and other social groups, and in nations. Thus our group and national life re-enacts the struggles of our childhood, with those parts of ourselves which we have disowned given freer rein, the more so the less we as individuals 'own' them. Indeed, group and national behaviour consists largely of the playing out of these unintegrated parts of ourselves. deMause examined what appeared in the media before and during the Gulf War, to reveal the 'American psyche' (an account of this has been published elsewhere.3) What appears in the national media may be analysed to reveal the conscious and unconscious life of the nation, as an individual's verbal and other expression is analysed to reveal what is going on in that individual which is usually more than s/he is aware of. Visual material in particular, such as newspaper political cartoons, seems to reveal the fantasy or dream life of the nation, perhaps because it is non-verbal without pretence to rationality. Concentrating on American rather than Iraqi portrayals of the war because of greater ease of access, he saw the war as a 'shared emotional disorder', with diagnostic symptoms and psychodynamics similar to an individual disorder, and with its origins in the abusive parenting and developmental disorders of many individuals. After the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, the American media portrayed Saddam Hussein as a 'terrifying parent, a child abuser intent on hurting the children in his care', with the complementary image of 'the hurt child'. deMause showed examples of Saddam as an evil-looking pregnant mother with a nuclear bomb in his womb, a baby-killer, and as a childmolestor. Accompanying news stories concentrated on alleged events, such as Iraqi troops executing children before their parents' eyes and ripping infants from incubators (widely believed at the time but later found to be false). Although there was some reality to this aspect of the Iraqi invasion, it is significant that child abuse among all other aspects of the invasion provided the symbolic focus for the crisis, and, before the invasion, that was already the national mood of the United States. deMause said such images had been appearing in the media for the previous year, giving a common theme to diverse news stories which might well have been portrayed otherwise, for example: reduced college admissions in the United States in (image: a youth in agony, pierced by a pennant), the divorce of multimillionaire Donald and Ivana Trump (Ivana as the 'castrating wife'), tax evasion by the owner of a hotel chain (Leona Hemsley as the 'greedy bitch/witch'), and Madonna as 'vampire whore'. There was also a flurry of cartoons showing people going off cliffs and other suicidal themes. At the same time, the media wrote that 'People are incredibly depressed. In the past month there has been a distinct odor of collapse and doom in the city ..." and, in the Washington Post:
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'America is in an ugly spasm of guilt, dread and nostalgia. Once more, America is depressed.' This constituted a case of national post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to deMause. If a patient walked into a psychiatric clinic suffering from intrusive images of terrifying figures torturing children, severe depression and suicidal wishes, PTSD would be suspected. Such intrusive images occur commonly in PTSD, as flashbacks of earlier trauma inflicted on the sufferers. They also tend to develop fears, panic reactions, hypervigilance and other defensive manoeuvres to prevent similar overwhelming terror in their present lives - all characteristics which appeared in American life in the period before the Gulf War. What often triggers such states in individuals are periods of rapid change and new expectations, such as marriage, a birth, promotion or new wealth. Shared national feelings similar to PTSD are also usually experienced after periods of rapid change and prosperity. Statistically, most wars occur after periods of economic prosperity and social change. This is confirmed by psychohistorical studies of the periods prior to wars, when there is a shared view that the nation has somehow become too sinful, materialistic, prosperous or promiscuous. deMause said that this 'sinful nation awaiting retribution' fantasy was 'omnipresent in the months prior to the Gulf War' in the United States. (The lead taken by the United States in forming the UN-sanctioned anti-Iraq coalition, and the various reluctances and reservations of the other nations involved, would then reflect differences between the emotional states of the various nations). As individuals suffering from PTSD often achieve temporary relief from their emotional stress by hurting themselves or others, large groups also achieve considerable catharsis and 'regain their emotional homeostasis through periodic group healing rituals'. War re-enacts the terrible humiliation and degradation of the child during the original trauma, and provides an opportunity to renew one's individual or national self-belief. Trauma demands repetition, with the aim of finding a better solution than the relatively powerless child was able to find. Thus, said deMause, cartoons early in the Gulf crisis portrayed George Bush as a humiliated child or wimp (often with a woman's purse on his limp wrist), before he was able to regain his masculine adulthood through war. Because the trauma-repetition which is war relives the sinful, depressed feelings of the nation by inflicting traumatic violence on others, as sacrificial victims, there was a tremendous emotional relief at the outbreak of war, as there is usually. The tension of holding within ourselves (individually and nationally) the conflicting impulses towards to war and peace is suddenly relieved. No longer do we have to contain good and evil - all evil is suddenly out there in the Enemy. Notwithstanding our knowledge of the horror of war, a new national vigour in 'getting on with the job' replaces the 'crippling emotional disorder that had paralysed' the United States over the previous year. Much of the visual and verbal description of the war made of it explicitly a 'sacred combat between Good and Evil'. Much of the language was religious
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and mythic, and developed rebirth/revitalization/purification themes. This was true of both American and Iraqi portrayals of the war. In the process, the reality of warfare was lost; the 'cosmic battle killed only representatives of Evil'. Reporters sharing the national mood helped to dissociate the actual carnage inflicted on a largely conscripted army and civilian population. Since the war's formula was 'do unto others as (you feel) was done unto you', the war could only end when enough people had been killed 'to satisfy the Terrifying Parent in our heads'. deMause had an optimistic conclusion: 'it is because childhood is in fact slowly improving that fewer people are enthusiastic about going to war each decade... Polls consistently show that the younger the age of those polled, the less people are found to be in favour of war... Women - who received far less physical punishment than boys a generation ago - opposed the Gulf War by 73 to 22 per cent... while men were split down the middle' (statistically; psychically?). Discussion Questioners developed several points in response to these papers. Generally, descriptions of war refer to childhood trauma, including birth. Before a war, leaders talk of confinement (being squeezed in, trapped, bled dry, strangled, held back); war is heralded by rupture of diplomatic relations, and is characterized as a bloody ordeal to be endured as one fights one's way free; post-war, there is a mixture of exhaustion, relief and celebration—or grieving over the outcome. Perhaps one significance of abusive parenting is that it prevents the child healing the trauma of its birth; and all later crises are experienced as traumatic births in which the individual or nation's struggle is to produce a different outcome, including by making other people suffer instead and resisting or taking revenge against the mother. Much of the American media portrayal of Saddam and 'the threat' revealed a fear of women, as destroyers or vengeful parents, and as all-powerful beings who can only be overcome at great and bloody cost. This seems grossly at odds with the reality of power in political life and in war, but fits the power relationship in childbirth and infancy, as experienced by the child. Questioners at the conference also suggested that the 'shared national emotional state' which deMause explored was based on essentially masculine experience and mediated primarily through males (cartoonists, illustrators, reporters, politicians; on this argument, any women reporters or politicians are said to be operating by virtue of and on behalf of a male ethos). deMause resisted this point, but not convincingly (to this report's writer). His psychohistorical theses either misrepresent essentially masculine psychology as a universal human experience or attach little psychological significance to gender differences, which is at odds with much other theory and observation of developmental psychology. The tone of Dr Bloom's comments in discussion, as well as in her papers, seemed in agreement with this criticism of
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deMause's work. To the extent that the parenting of males is at the root of psychological dysfunction on individual and national levels, the more responsible parenting of boys by fathers and grandfathers may provide a healthier developmental context and social outcome.
References
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1. deMause L, ed. The History of Childhood. London: Bellew, 1991: 1-73. 2. Bloom S. Trauma and War: The Need to Relive Traumatic Events. 28 April 1992. Private communication. 3. deMause L. From childhood abuse to international conflicts: the Gulf War. Psychologos, International Review of Psychology 1992; 2: 71-8. (5 August 1992)
Abstract
War-related Stress: Addressing the Stress of War and Other Traumatic Events by the Task Force on War-Related Stress, American Psychological Society, and Applied Psychology Center, Kent State University, USA. American Psychologist 1991, August, 848-55. The task force recommended methods for prevention and treatment of psychological disorders associated with the Persian Gulf War and other extreme stressors facing communities, concentrating on the return home, reunion and reintegration of service personnel with their families and work. Most at risk are those exposed to the greatest loss or threat of loss, and with least coping resources. War-related stress may add to other recent stressors or reawaken prior trauma. Typical stress reactions and unsuccessful coping modes were outlined, with suggestions for monitoring and treatment of post-traumatic stress syndrome. But the most effective sources of support and help vary greatly between individuals, great latitude should be allowed in their coping methods, and careful note should be taken of gender, cultural and developmental differences. Special attention was given to children, how their reactions to stress and their needs differ from adults. Adjustment of families and personnel is not a shortterm process, and 'outreach' on many levels is necessary. ILD
