From misc.activism.progressive Tue Mar 28 12:45:52 1995
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Subject: Political Consequences of Child Abuse
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http://www.geocities.com/kidhistory/politica.htm

The Political Consequences of Child Abuse by Alice Miller

The Journal of Psychohistory V. 26, N. 2, Fall 1998

Although centuries of novels and autobiographies have dealt with
the subject of child abuse in all its forms, society has been slow
in recognizing the frequency with which this assault is committed.
Only in the last twenty years has there been any real progress in
this respect, and most of it is due to the efforts of a small number
of researchers and above all to the media. Still underestimated and
sometimes contested are the consequences very early abuse will have
for the victims in their adult lives. The issues involved have been
largely ignored, and there is correspondingly little mention of
them in historical and anthropological studies. Thus sociologist
Wolfgang Sovsky is able to write an otherwise impressive work on
forms of violence without making one single reference to the childhood
dimension. He gives very considerable space to the willful infliction
of suffering, calling it "mysterious," although it is readily
explicable once we countenance the idea that the bodies of the
executioners, torturers and the orchestrators of organized manhunts
may have learned their fateful lessons very early and thus very
effectively.

Also Goldhagen restricts himself to a phenomenological discussion
of the people who volunteered to torture and humiliate others,
without giving any consideration to their childhood. He does devote
much attention to the emotions of the perpetrators, a subject
hitherto largely ignored, but without the background of their early
upbringing their behavior still remains mysterious. The reader seeks
in vain for an explanation. What made respected members of society
suddenly act like monsters? How could a former teacher like Klaus
Barbie, and other men described by their daughters as kind, caring
fathers, have innocent people tortured or indeed do the torturing
themselves? Goldhagen does not address this question. He is obviously
convinced that references to traditional anti--Semitism in Germany
provide a satisfactory answer. They do not.

The hypothesis that German anti--Semitism was the real reason for
the Holocaust has been rightly criticized by urging a comparison
with the First World War. At that time anti--Semitism was just as
strong in Germany but no organized genocide resulted. And why no
Holocaust in the other anti--Semitic countriesPoland, Russia and
other parts of Europe? The argument that in the Weimar Republic
unemployment and poverty caused immense general frustration that
was discharged via the mass murder of the Jews is hardly convincing,
given that Hitler was quickly successful in getting unemployment
under control.

There must have been other factors at play which have hitherto been
ignored, factors going some way to explaining why the Holocaust
happened in Germany and why it happened at this particular time
rather than another. In my view, one possible operative factor is
the destructive child--rearing style practiced widely on infants
around the turn of the century in Germany, a style I have no
hesitation in referring to as a universal abuse of infants.

Of course children in other countries have been and still are
mistreated in the name of upbringing or caregiving, but hardly
already as babies and hardly with the systematic thoroughness
characteristic of the Prussian pedagogy. In the two generations
before Hitler's rise to power, the implementation of this method
was brought to a high degree of perfection in Germany. With this
foundation to build on, Hitler finally achieved what he wanted: "My
ideal of education is hard. Whatever is weak must be hammered away.
In the fortresses of my militant order a generation of young people
will grow to strike fear into the heart of the world. Violent,
masterful, unafraid, cruel youth is what I want. Young people must
be all that. They must withstand pain. There must be nothing weak
or tender about them. The free--magnificent predator must flash
from their eyes again. I want them strong and beautiful...That way
I can fashion things anew." This education program revolving on the
extermination of everything life--giving was the forerunner of
Hitler's plans for the extermination of an entire nation. Indeed
it was the prerequisite for the ultimate success of his designs.

The numerous and widely--read tracts by Dr. Daniel Gottlieb Moritz
Schreber, the inventor of the Schrebergrten (the German world for
small allotments) are of major interest here. Some of them ran to
as many as 40 editions, and their central concern was to instruct
parents in the systematic upbringing of infants from the very first
day of life. Many people motivated by what they thought to be the
best of intentions complied with the advice given them by Schreber
and other authors about how best to raise their children if they
wanted to make them into model subjects of the German Reich. They
did this without even remotely suspecting that they were exposing
their children to a systematic form of torture with long--term
effects. Germany sayings and catch--phrases like "Praise be to the
things that make us tough" and "What doesn't kill us will strengthen
us," still to be heard from educationists of the old school, probably
originated in this period.

Morton Schatzman, who quotes highly enlightening passages from
Schreber's writings, is of the opinion that here we are in the
presence not of child--raising methods but of systematic instruction
in child persecution. One of Schreber's convictions is that when
babies cry they should be made to desist by the use of "physically
perceptible admonitions," assuring his readers that "such a procedure
is only necessary one, or at the most twice, and then one is master
of the child for all time. From then on, one look, one single
threatening gesture will suffice to subjugate the child." Above
all, the newborn child should be drilled from the very first day
to obey and to refrain from crying.

Today, people who have been brought up in anything even remotely
approaching a humane way will hardly be able to imagine the rigor
and tenacity with which Schreber himself implemented this program.
Psychoanalyst Wilhelm G. Niederland quotes examples that cast light
on the everyday practical conduct of child--rearing in those
decadesfor example, recipes for inculcating the "art of self--denial"
into infants. "The method should be simple and effective: the child
is placed on the lap of its nanny while the latter is eating or
drinking whatever takes her fancy. However urgent the infant's oral
needs may become in this situation, they must not be gratified."

Niederland quotes an account by Schreber from his own family life.
A nanny eating pears while holding one of his children on her lap
was unable to resist the temptation of giving the infant a slice.
She was immediately dismissed. The news of this draconian measure
quickly spread to all the other nannies in Leipzig, and from that
time on, writes Schreber, he "never again encountered such
insubordination, neither with that child nor with any of the others
that came later."

Contrary to received opinion prevalent as recently as 15 years ago,
the human brain at birth is not fully developed. The abilities a
person's brain develops depend on experiences in the first three
years of life. Studies on abandoned and severely mistreated Romanian
children revealed striking lesions in certain areas of the brain
and marked emotional and cognitive insufficiencies in later life.
According to very recent neurobiological findings, repeated
traumatization leads to an increased release of stress hormones
that attack the sensitive tissue of the brain and destroy existing
neurons. Other studies of mistreated children have revealed that
the areas of the brain responsible for the "management" of emotions
are 20 to 30 percent smaller than in normal persons.

The children systematically subjected to obedience drill around the
turn of the century were not only exposed to corporal "correction"
but also to severe emotional deprivation. The upbringing manuals
of the day described physical demonstrations of affection such as
stroking, cuddling and kissing as indications of a doting, mollycoddling
attitude. Parents were warned of the disastrous effects of spoiling
their children, a form of indulgence entirely incompatible with the
prevalent ideal of rigor and severity. As a result, infants suffered
from the absence of direct loving contact with the parents. The
best they could hope for was to find some kind of substitute from
the servants, who in numerous cases used and exploited them as
objects of pleasure, thus frequently adding to the children's
emotional confusion.

Since the experiments conducted on monkeys by Dr. Harlow in the
Fifties, we know that animals raised by artificial "robot" mothers
later turned aggressive and showed no interest in their own offspring.
New research on macaque monkeys revealed that they kill even members
of their own species if they were brought up without appropriate
care. John Bowlby's studies on the absence of early attachment in
delinquents and Ren Spitz' descriptions of small children dying of
hospitalism following emotional neglect during hospitalization under
extremely hygienic conditions are indications that not only animal
but also human babies require reassuring sensory contact with their
parents if socialization is to take a normal course.

These findings presented by Bowlby and Spitz almost 40 years ago
are corroborated by recent neurobiological research. The studies
in question suggest that not only active battering but also the
absence of loving physical contact between child and parent will
cause certain areas of the brain, notably those responsible for the
emotions, to remain underdeveloped. Hence the children "subjugated
by looks" suffered emotional harm that was only to develop its full
destructive potential in the next generation.

Present--day neurobiological research makes it easier for us to
understand the way Nazis like Eichmann, Himmler, Hss and others
functioned. The rigorous obedience training they underwent in
earliest infancy stunted the development of such human capacities
as compassion and pity for the sufferings of others. They were
incapable of emotion in the face of misfortune, such feelings were
alien to them. Their total emotional atrophy enabled the perpetrators
of the most heinous crimes imaginable to function "normally" and
to continue to impress their environment with their efficiency in
the years after the war without the slightest remorse. Dr. Mengele
could perform the most cruel experiments on Jewish children in
Auschwitz and then live for 30 years like a "normal," well--adjusted
man.

In the absence of positive factors, affection and helping witnesses,
the only course open to the mistreated individual is the disavowal
of personal suffering and the idealization of cruelty with all its
devastating after--effects. Undergoing an exceedingly humiliating
and cruel upbringing at the preverbal stage, usually without helping
witnesses, may instill into the victim admiration of this cruelty
if there is no one in the immediate vicinity of the child to query
those methods and stand up for humane values. People subjected to
mistreatment in childhood may go on insisting all their lives that
beatings are harmless and corporal punishment is salutary although
there is overwhelming, indeed conclusive evidence to the contrary.
Vice versa, a child protected, loved and cherished from the outset
will thrive on that experience for a lifetime.

Binjamin Wilkomirski, the author of a harrowing and intensely
illuminating book about his childhood in the concentration camps,
once confided to me in a personal encounter some observations made
with the eyes of an imprisoned but extremely wide--awake child on
the behavior of the female camp guards. He said that it had taken
him 50 years to inquire who those "blokowas" really were, those
women who had so openly and unreservedly relished the job of
tormenting and humiliating Jewish children and subjecting them to
every conceivable variety of mental and physical cruelty.

To his astonishment, perusal of the trial records revealed that
most of the were young women between 19 and 21 who had formerly had
quite ordinary jobs as seamstresses or sales clerks and whose
biographies contained nothing in any way unusual. During the trial
they unanimously claimed that they had not been aware that Jewish
children were human beings. The conclusion that immediately suggests
itself is that ultimately propaganda and manipulation are sufficient
to transform people into sadistic executioners and mass murderers.

This is not an opinion I share. On the contrary. It is my belief
that only men and women who had experienced mental and physical
cruelty in the first weeks and months of life and had been shown
no love at all could possibly have let themselves be made into
Hitler's willing executioners. As Goldhagen's archive material
shows, they needed next to no ideological indoctrination because
their bodies knew exactly what they wanted to do as soon as they
were allowed to follow their inclinations. And as the Jews, young
or old, had been declared non--persons, there was nothing to stop
them indulging those inclinations. But no amount of indoctrination
alone, at school or wherever, will unleash hatred in a person who
has no preconditions in that direction. It is well known that there
were also Germans, like Karl Jaspers, Hermann Hesse or Thomas Mann,
who immediately recognized the declaration that Jews were non--persons
as an alarm signal and the rallying cry of untrammeled barbarism.

For people like the "blokowas," exposed to emotional confusion in
their early childhood, the declaration was a highly convenient
expedient. All they needed to do was refuse the children water to
wash themselves and that gave them sufficient reason to hate them
for being dirty and coal--black. They could toss lumps of sugar to
starving children and then despise them for the alacrity with which
they scrambled to pick them up. Those young women could turn the
children into precisely what they needed to feel powerful and could
thus vent on their victims the old, unconscious rage slumbering
within them.

However brutally these people were brought up, they showed no
immediate signs of the harm done to them. On the contrary. Many of
them grew up into seemingly well--adjusted young people. But sooner
or later, usually one generation later, when the tormented children
had themselves become parents, the former victims did the same with
their children as had been done to them, with no feelings of guilt.
It was the only thing they knew, after they had repressed and denied
their own pain.

Studying child abuse confronts us with the astonishing fact that
parents will inflict the same punishment or neglect on their children
as they experienced themselves in their early lives. But as adults
they have no recollection of what they went through. In the case
of sexual assault on children, it is quite usual for the perpetrators
to have no conscious knowledge of their own early life--history or
at the least to be cut off from the attendant feelings aroused by
those experiences. It is not until they are in therapyalways supposing
they are given anythat it transpires that they have been reenacting
what they went through as children.

The sole explanation I can advance for this fact is that information
on the cruelty suffered in childhood remains stored in the brain
in the form of unconscious memories. For a child, conscious experience
of such treatment is impossible. If children are not to break down
completely under the pain and the fear, they must repress that
knowledge. But the unconscious memories drive them to reproduce
those repressed scenes over and over again in the attempt (and with
the false hope) to liberate themselves of the fears that cruelty
and abuse have left with them. The victims create situations in
which they can assume the active role in order to master the feeling
of helplessness and escape the unconscious anxieties.

But this liberation is a specious one because the effects of the
past don't change as long as they remain unnoticed. Over and over
again the perpetrator will go in search of new victims. As long as
one projects hatred and fear onto scapegoats, there is no way of
coming to terms with those feelings. Not until the cause has been
recognized and the natural reaction to wrongdoing understood can
the blind hatred wreaked on innocent victims be dissipated. The
function it performs, that of masking the truth, is no longer
necessary. Sex criminals who have worked through their lives in
therapy may no longer run the risk of a destructive reenactment of
their traumas.

What is hatred? As I see it, it is a possible consequence of the
rage and despair that cannot be consciously felt by a child which
has been neglected and mistreated even before he or she has learned
to speak. As long as the anger directed at a parent or other first
caregiver remains unconscious or disavowed, it cannot be dissipated.
It can only be taken out on oneself or stand--ins, on scapegoats
such as one's own children or alleged enemies. Sympathetic observation
of the cries of an infant brings home forcibly to the onlooker how
intense the feelings involved must be. The hatred can finally work
as a life--saving defense against the life--threatening powerlessness.

The studies at my disposal already in 1980 and referred to in my
book For Your Own Good confirmed my conjecture that, both in Nazi
Germany and among the professional American soldiers who voluntarily
served in Vietnam, brutally--raised children figured prominently
among the most vindictive war criminals. Further confirmation was
brought by study of the childhood biographies of those exceptional
people who in times of terror had the courage to rescue others from
extermination.

Why were there people brave enough to risk their lives to save Jews
from Nazi Persecution? Much scientific inquiry has been expended
on this question. The usual answers revolve around religious or
moral values such as Christian charity or a sense of responsibility
instilled in them by parents, teachers and other caregivers. But
there is no doubt that the active supporters of the extermination
and the passive hangers--on had usually also been given a religious
upbringing. So this can hardly furnish a sufficient explanation.

I was convinced that there must have been some special factor in
the childhood of the rescuers, in the prevailing atmosphere of their
childhood, that made it so fundamentally different from what the
war criminals had experienced, but at first I couldn't prove my
hypothesis. For years I sought in vain for a book that would give
this subject adequate coverage. Finally, thanks to Lloyd deMause's
help, I found an empirical study by the Oliners, The Altruistic
Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe, based on interviews
with more than 400 witnesses of those dark days. It confirmed my
hypothesis. The study concluded that the only factor distinguishing
the rescuers from the persecutors and hangers--on was the way they
had been brought up by their parents.

Almost all rescuers interviewed reported that their parents had
attempted to discipline them with arguments rather than punishment.
They were only rarely subjected to corporal punishment, and if they
were it was invariably in connection with some misdemeanor and never
because their parents had felt the need to discharge some uncontrollable
and inexplicable feeling of rage on them. One man recalled that he
had once been spanked for taking smaller children out onto a frozen
lake and endangering their lives. Another reported that his father
had only ever hit him once and apologized afterwards. Many of the
statements might be paraphrased thus: "My mother always tried to
explain what was wrong about whatever it was I had done. My father
also spent a lot of time talking to me. I was impressed by what he
had to say."

What a different picture we get from the reports of the persecutors
and hangers--on: "When my father was drunk he took the whip to me.
I never knew what I was being beaten for. Often it was for something
I had done months before. And when mother was in a temper she tore
into anyone who got in her way, including me."

Unlike such uncontrolled affective discharges subjectively felt to
be justified, explaining what the parent feels is wrong is synonymous
with trust in the otherwise good intentions of the child. Such a
course is motivated by respect and faith in the child's ability to
develop and change its behavior for the better.

People given early affection and support are quick to emulate the
sympathetic and autonomous natures of their parents. Common to all
the rescuers were self--confidence, the ability to take immediate
decisions and the capacity for empathy and compassion with others.
Seventy percent of them said that it only took them a matter of
minutes to decide they wanted to intervene. Eighty percent said
they did not consult anyone else. "I had to do it, I could never
have stood idle and watched injustice being done."

This attitude, prized in all cultures as "noble," is not something
instilled in children with fine words. If the behavior actually
displayed by caretakers is such as to contradict their own words,
if children are spanked in the name of lofty ideals, as is still
the custom in some parochial schools, then those elevated sentiments
are doomed to go unheard or even to provoke rage and violence. The
children may end up aping those high--minded phrases and mouthing
them in later life, but they will never put them into practice
because they have no example to emulate.

Martin Luther, for example, was an intelligent and educated man,
but he hated all Jews and he encouraged parents to beat their
children. He was no perverted sadist like Hitler's executioners.
But 400 years before Hitler he was disseminating this kind of
destructive counsel. According to Eric Ericson's biography, his
mother beat him severely before he was treated this way by his
father and his teacher. He believed this punishment had "done him
good" and was therefore justified. The conviction stored in his
body that if parents do it then it must be right to torment someone
weaker than yourself left a much more lasting impression on him
than the divine commandments and the Christian exhortations to love
your neighbor and be compassionate toward the weak.

Similar cases are discussed by Philip Greven in his highly informative
book, Spare the Child. He quotes various American men and women of
the church recommending cruel beatings for infants in the first few
months of life as a way of ensuring that the lesson thus learnt
remains indelibly impressed on them for the rest of their lives.
Unfortunately they were only too right. These terrible destructive
texts which have misled so many parents are the conclusive proof
of the long--lasting effect of beating. They could only have been
written by people who were exposed to merciless beatings as children
and later glorified what they had been through. Fortunately, these
books were not published in 40 editions in the USA.

An animal will respond to attack with "fight or flight." Neither
course is open to an infant exposed to aggression from immediate
family members. Thus the natural reaction remains spent up, sometimes
for decades, until it can be taken out on a weaker object. Then the
repressed emotions are unleashed against minorities. The targets
vary from country to country. But the reasons for that hatred are
probably identical the world over.

We know that as a boy Hitler was tormented, humiliated and mocked
by his father, without the slightest protection from his mother.
We also know that he denied his true feelings toward his father.
The real sources of his hatred thus become obvious. I had gone in
search of the true motives not only for Hitler's mental make--up
but also that of many other dictators. In all of them I identified
the effects of hatred of a parent that remained unconscious not
only because hating one's father was strictly prohibited but also
because it was in the interests of the child's self--preservation
to maintain the illusion of having a good father. Only in the form
of a deflection onto others was hatred permitted, and then it could
flow freely. Hitler would hardly have found so much support if the
"caregiving" patterns he had been exposed to and their detrimental
after--effects had not been so widespread in Germany and Austria.

But Hitler's specific problems with the Jews can in fact be traced
back to the period before his birth. In her youth, his paternal
grandmother had been employed in a Jewish merchant's household in
Graz. After her return home to the Austrian village of Braunau, she
gave birth to a son, Alois, later to become Hitler's father, and
received child--support payments from the family in Graz for 14
years. This story, which is recounted in many biographies of Hitler,
represented a dilemma for the Hitler family. They had an interest
in denying that the young woman had been left with child either by
the Jewish merchant or his son. On the other hand, it was impossible
to assert that a Jew would pay alimony for so long without good
reason. Such generosity on the part of a Jew would have been
inconceivable for the inhabitants of an Austrian village. Thus the
Hitler family was faced with the insoluble dilemma of devising a
version that would serve to nullify their "disgrace."

For Alois Hitler the suspicion that he might be of Jewish descent
was insufferable in the context of the anti--Jewish environment he
grew up in. All the plaudits he earned himself as a customs officer
were insufficient to liberate him from the latent rage at the
disgrace and humiliation visited on him through no fault of his
own. The only thing he could do with impunity was to take out this
rage on his son Adolf. According to the reports of his daughter of
his former marriage, Angela, he beat his son mercilessly every day.
In an attempt to exorcise his childhood fears, his son nurtured the
maniac delusion that it was up to him to free not only himself of
Jewish blood but also all Germany and later the whole world. Right
up to his death in the bunker, Hitler remained a victim of this
delusion because all his life his fear of his half--Jewish father
had remained locked in his unconscious mind.

I have set out these ideas in greater detail in my book, For Your
Own Good. Many people have told me that they found them highly
unsettling and in no way sufficient to explain Hitler's actions.
Not all his actions, perhaps, but certainly his delusions. And those
delusions are at the very least the foundation of his actions. I
can certainly picture the boy Hitler swearing vengeance on "the
Jews," those monstrous fantasy--figures of an already diseased
imagination. Consciously, he probably thought he could have led a
happy life if "the Jew" had not plunged his grandmother into the
disgrace that he and his family had to live with. And it was this
that in his eyes served to excuse the batterings he received from
his father, who after all was himself a victim of the evil and
omnipotent Jew. In the mind of an angry, seriously confused child,
it is only a short step from there to the idea that all Jews should
be exterminated.

Not only Jews. In the household of Hitler's family lived for years
the very unpredictable schizophrenic aunt Johanna whose behavior
is reported to be very frightening to the child. As an adult, Hitler
ordered to kill every handicapped and psychotic person to free
Germany society from this burden. Germany seemed for him to symbolize
the innocent child who had to be saved. Consequently, Hitler wanted
to protect his nation from the dangers he himself had had to face.
Absurd? Not at all. For an unconscious mind, this kind of symbolization
might sound very normal and logical.

Besides the sources of his fears connected with father and aunt,
there was his early relationship with his very intimidated mother
who lived in constant fear of her husband's violent outbursts and
beatings. She called him "Uncle Alois" and endured patiently his
humiliating treatment without any protest. Adolf's mother had lost
the first three children due to an illness, and Adolf was her first
child to survive infancy. We can easily imagine that the milk he
drank from his mother was in a way "poisoned" by her own fear. He
drank her milk together with her fears, but was of course unable
to understand nor to integrate them. These irrational fearsthat an
outside, watching his speeches on videos can easily recognizestayed
unrecognized and unconscious to Hitler until the end of his life.
Stored up in his body, they drove him constantly to new destructive
actions, in his endless attempt to find an outcome.

In the lives of all the tyrants I examined, I found without exception
paranoid trains of thought bound up with their biographies in early
childhood and the repression of the experiences they had been
through. Mao had been regularly whipped by his father and later
sent 30 million people to their deaths, but he hardly ever admitted
the full extent of the rage he must have felt toward his own father,
a very severe teacher who had tried through beatings to "make a
man" out of his son. Stalin caused millions to suffer and die because
even at the height of his power his actions were determined by
unconscious infantile fear of powerlessness. Apparently his father,
a poor cobbler from Georgia, attempted to drown his frustration
with liquor and whipped his son almost every day. His mother displayed
psychotic traits, was completely incapable of defending her son and
was usually away from home either praying in church or running the
priest's household. Stalin idealized his parents right up to the
end of his life and was constantly haunted by the fear of dangers
that had long since ceased to exist but were still present in his
deranged mind. The same might be true of many other tyrants. The
groups of people they singled out for persecution and the rationalization
mechanisms they employed were different in each case, but the
fundamental reason behind it was probably identical. They often
drew on ideologies to disguise the truth and their own paranoia.
And the masses chimed in enthusiastically because they were unaware
of the real motives, including those operative in their own
biographies. The infantile revenge fantasies of individuals would
be of no account if society did not regularly show such naive
alacrity in helping to make them come true.

Naturally, my references to Schreber and his methods are not
sufficient to explain the history of the Holocaust. Countless books
have been written about it, but the enormity of those crimes still
defies comprehension. Much more research needs to be done before
we can even start to truly understand. Given what we know today,
attempting to build an explanation around any one single factor
would result in crass over--simplification. It leaves too many other
things out of account. Also, such a monocausal explanation might
lead to an exoneration of the perpetrators, relieving them of their
responsibility by declaring them sick. No upbringing, however cruel,
is a license for murder. But blaming the whole thing on a defective
genetic blueprint is just as unsatisfactory. Why should there have
been so many people born 30 or 40 years before the Holocaust in
Germany with such a fateful genetic disposition? I do not know of
any gene researcher who would have tried to answer this question.

My references to the systematic humiliation of children around the
turn of the century and the torture small infants were exposed to
(tragically never recognized as such by the parents) seem to me,
however, to be an important element within the complex concatenation
of causes. Unfortunately it has yet to be given the attention it
deserves. The reasons for this neglect are probably closely connected
with the general taboo that has been imposed on the subject of
childhood. But for quite hard--headed pragmatic reasons, notably a
concern for the future, it is important to break with this taboo
and venture onto this largely unexplored territory.

The total neglect or trivialization of the childhood factor operative
in the context of violence and the way it evolves in early infancy
sometimes leads to explanations that are not only unconvincing and
abortive but actively deflect attention away from the genuine roots
of violence. The abstract term "anti--Semitism" contains an infinite
number of meanings and frequently only serves to blur the complicated
psychological processes involved, processes that need to be identified
and called by name. Only in this way can we hope to change anything.

In my view, a close comparison of parenting methods today and in
the past can bring about such a change. It can open up new vistas
and encourage the formation of new and healthier structures in
raising children. Many new enlightening books on parent--child
relations are instances of concrete help for parents in incorporating
the information at our disposal into the practice of childrearing.
Parents who are able to integrate this new information are likely
to find it easier to respect, encourage, understand and love their
children and to learn from them.

But working toward a better, more aware future cannot be done in
isolation from the ongoing attempt to understand our history in all
its facets, for us as individuals and as society. The work started
by Lloyd deMause and continued by him and other psychohistorians
is to my knowledge the first systematic research in this direction.
The history of childrearing might be more illuminating than many
others in illustrating the dangers for society at large attendant
on willful ignorance about child development. The ongoing research
on babies from birth to three might be helpful for eventually
overcoming this ignorance. It may enable some historians to raise
more frequently the question raised for the first time by Lloyd
deMause: what does it feel like to be an abused infant, without any
enlightened witness? Unfortunately, the early childhood of people
who recently mercilessly killed in Rwanda has not yet become an
issue for psychological or sociological investigation. But should
empathic psychohistorians once become interested in finding out and
describing the atmosphere of the first years of the killer's life,
they could probably be able to explain some of the events that still
seem inexplicable.