237
Illustration 13
HISTORICAL GROUP-FANTASIES
Psychoclass
and Personality Type |
Major
Group - Fantasy |
Central
Purification Ritual |
Group
Id Projection |
"My
soul would be quiet if only everyone could..." |
Infanticidal
(Schizoid) |
Kinship
Magic |
Magical Sacrifice
to ancestors relieves infanticidal fears |
Into magical objects
and ghosts |
"...obey Family
laws regulating sex andviolence." |
Abandoning
(Autistic) |
Feudal
Hierarchy |
Feudal bonding and
church ritual deny abandonment fears |
Into your lord |
"...be closely
tied to his lord and his God." |
Ambivalent
(Depressive) |
Paternalistic
Absolutism |
Obeisance to ideal
paternal monarch defends against ambivalent mother. |
Into ruling dynasties |
"...obey a
King who is a good father." |
Intrusive
(Compulsive) |
Racist
Nationalism |
Control of national
boundary and control of other races reverses intrusive parenting |
Into other "races"
and nations |
"...keep all
bad things out of our pure nation." |
Socializing
(Anxiety) |
Erotic
Materialism |
Purchase of goods relieves castration
anxieties |
Into upper or lower economic
classes |
"...buy endless material
goods." |
238
death of the infant through symbolic sacrifice and rebirth. From
antiquity through late medieval times, abandoning mode childhood produced
a psychoclass of what I term autistic personalities-roughly equivalent
to what contemporary psychoanalysts have come to call the "borderline"
personalities-identified by their feelings of isolation, easy regression
into and out of psychotic states, tenuous hold on reality, emotional
clinging, helplessness in the absence of authority, lack of impulse
controls and narcissistic grandiosity and overidealization. Because
the medieval personalities use primitive splitting and projection
less, they are not primarily magical, and they organize their historical
group-fantasies around Ceudal Hierarchical rather than kinship structures.
The feudal bond-or other personal bonds where the formal system of
feudalism was less developed-is a way of undoing, through clinging,
the abandonment of childhood, and most of the rituals of both Church
and State revolve primarily around refusion fantasies, organized around
clinging groups, both feudal and monastic. By the Renaissance, ambivalent
mode parent-ing allowed enough consistency of caretaking to allow
the growing child to heal the severe splitting of the mother into
idealized (Mary) and evil (Eve) part-objects, and therefore allow
people to feel, for the first time, real guilt toward a whole-object
mother (Klein's achievement of the depressive position, the end of
Mariolatry by Protestantism). This produces a depressive personality
who, for the first time in history, really internalizes conflicts
in his personal life, represses rather than projects thus making the
Puritan the first modern man.
From here on, the task of the evolution of historical personality
changes from that of internalizing projected parts of oneself to that
of reducing intrapsychic conflict. The major group-fantasy style for
this period is organized around Paternalistic Absolutism, as an absolutist
king is first historically invented as an idealized father who will
allow separation from the ambivalent mother, allow growth, and treat
all children equally-on threat of being replaced by revolutionary
action. By the eighteenth century, overcontrolling intrusive mode
parenting and the invention of early toilet training could produce
the anal-compulsive personality, which is less focused on idealized
leaders (dynasties) than on group-boundaries (nations), so that only
by this period do Racist Nationalist group-fantasies form. In these,
the national boundary substitutes for the self-boundary, and racist
fantasies of "group purity" attempt to undo early anal intrusiveness.
Finally, socializing childhood of the kind now generally predominant
in the West allows the various types of anxiety personalities to drop
most concerns with racial purity and shift their group-fantasies to
the economic sphere, so that class war-fare Organizes most social
thinking (Erotic Materialism).
Even from this sketchy outline, one can begin to see how differing
styles of personalities form different historical group-fantasies.
All
239
groups, for instance, may displace oral fears into their historical
group-fantasy, but the infanticidal psychoclass imagines the giant
biting monster as a magical ghost, the abandoning psychoclass as Devil
or witch, the ambivalent psychoclass as Antichrist, the intrusive
psychoclass as Jew or Black, and the socializing psychoclass as Communist
or Capitalist. Most of the cartoons seen in newspapers today label
biting monsters "INFLATION," reflecting Erotic Materialism's
central fantasy that what is making us all unhappy today is simply
a vast shortage of goods.
With these admittedly brief observations on differing styles of historical
group-fantasies through the ages, I will end this essay, the last
in a series of seven written over the past decade, as attempts to
outline a theoretically consistent and empirically verifiable psychogenic
theory of history. It is my hope that with the conceptual tools I
have fashioned, I can now complete my Psychohistory of the West, which
details for each period in Western history all the available evidence
on childhood, on historical personalities - including dreams and psychosexual
development - and on major historical institutions and group-fantasies.
Hopefully, I will be able to show convincingly how the latter emerged
from the former. While historical personalities cover a wide range
within any period, still it is no more difficult to write about the
dynamics of the range of medieval personalities than it is for psychoanalysts
to write on dynamics common to a range of borderline personalities
(indeed, I believe the two are identical). And while major historical
group-fantasies are not easy to decode, the task of unraveling the
unconscious meaning of Christianity, of nationalism or capitalism,
becomes a great deal easier to accomplish once one has gathered a
mass of information on the child-hoods, dreams and love lives of the
people who need these group-fantasies. But then, as with all of psychohistory,
the most exciting tasks lie before us. With time, we may yet come
to know consciously the historical group-fantasies we unconsciously
share, communicate, and act upon together - a first step, one would
think, in decreasing their delusional hold upon us.
REFERENCES
[I KNOW - L's are 1 and too many
places have ~ in them - Okay so I didn't go over these at all = all
I did was scan them CLEANED SOME OF THE FORMATTING and pasted them
into this web page - - WELL I DID DO THE PAGE BRAKES LIKE ELSE WHERE
IN THIS TRANSCRIPTION! .Like it says at the bottom: "To report
errors in this electronic transcription please contact: peace3@juno.com " Thank you - I'll get to 'cleaning up' the reference pages
once I have done the whole text. - course if some other kind person
wants to . . . go a head! - Eric Heimstadt.]
1. The concept of historical group-fantasies is introduced
in Lloyd deMause, "The Independence of Psychohistory," in
deMause, editor, The New Psychohistory. New York: Psychohistory Press,
1975; deMause, "The Formation of The American Personality Through
Psychospeciation," The Journal of Psychohistory 4 (t976): t-30;
deMause, "The Psychogenic Theory of History," The Journal
of Psychohistory 4 (1977): 253-267; deMause, "Jimmy Carter and
American Fantasy," in deMause and Henry Ebel, eds. Jimmy Carter
and American Fantasy. new York: Psychohistory Press, 1977, pp.9-31.
240
2. Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition, Vol. Xl, pp.63-136.
3. Reuben Fine, "Search for Love" in Arthur Burton &
Associates, Twelve Therapists. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1972, p.232.
4. Frederich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and
the State. London, 1884. Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians. New
York, 1966. For the most recent bibliography, see Fraser Harrison,
The Dark Angel: Aspects Of Victorian Sexuality. New York, 1978.
5. For an introduction to the anthropological literature, see Kenclm
Burridge, New Heaven, New Earth: A Study QfMillenarian Activities.
New York: Schocken Books, 1969. For the best psychoanalytic interpretation,
see Weston La Barre, The Ghost Dance: The Origins of Religion. New
York: Dell, 1972
6. Rudolph Binion, Hitler Among the Germans. New York: Flsevier, 1976,
p.80.
7. Ibid., pp.80-81.
8. For contradictions in interpretations of the cause of the Korean
War, see I. F. Stone, The Hidden History of the Korean War, New York,
1952, pp. 1-72. For the at-mosphere of Washington on the day U.S.
troops were sent in, see Bert Coehran, Harry Truman and the Crisis
Presidenqy. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1973, p. 316.
9 The closest attempt to envisioning history as being moved by psychoclass
is Glenn Davis, Childhood and History in America. New York: Psychohistory
Press, 1976. My forthcoming book, A Psychohistory of the West, will
present just such an analysis of psychoelass, tying together empirical
evidence for childrearing modes, historical personality types and
historical group-fantasies for each major period in Western history.
10. L. Kovar, "A Reconsideration of Paranoia." Psychiatry
29 (1966): 289-305.
11. W. W. Meissner, The ParanoidProcess. New York: Jason Aronson,
1978, pp.136-8.
12. See William Saffady's psychohistorical article "Fears of
Sexual License During the English Reformation," History of Childhood
Quarterly: The Journal of Psychohistory 1(1973): 89-97
13. See Robert Ashton, The English Civil War: Conservatism and Revolution
/603-1649. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971, p. 155; B. S. Carp,
The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth Century English Millenarianism.
Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1972.
14. George Lefebvre. The Great Fear of 1739. New York: Pantheon, 1973
15. For a detailed insight into the "sacrificial crisis"
of early societies, with concepts close to my "paranoid collapse"
concept, see Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: John
Hopkins Press, 1972.
16. The term "psychotic insight" is Arieti's; see especially
S. Arieti, "Introductory Notes on the Psychoanalytic Therapy
of Schizopbrenics" in A. Burton, ed., Psychotherapy of the Psychoses.
New York: Basic Books, 1961, pp.68-89.
17. 0. A. Will, "Process, Psychotherapy and Schizophrenia"
in A. Burton, ed. Psychotherapy of the Psychoses, New York: Basic
Books, 1961, p.18.
18. For "delegate groups," see Llyod DeMause, "The
Psychogenic Theory of History," The Journal of Psychohistory
4 (1977): 259.
19. Harry Stack Sullivan, Concepts of Modern Psychiatry. New York:
Norton, 1953.
20. Ole R. HoIst and Robert C. North. "The History of Human Conflict"
in Elton B. McNeil, ed. The Nature of Human Conflict. Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice-Hall, 1965.
21. Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Rack: A Persona/Account. New York,
1977, p.111.
22. Norman Cousins, "The Cuban Missile Crisis: An Anniversary,"
Saturday Review, October 15, 1977, p.4.
23. Steven Kelman, Push Comes to Shove: The Escalation of Student
Protest. Boston, 1970, p.60; Richard Nixon, The Memoirs of Richard
Nixon. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, p.404.
241
24. The White House Transcripts: Subotission of Recorded
Presidential Conversations to the Coototittee on the Judidary of the
House pf Representatives by President Nixon. New York: Bantam Books,
1974; also supplemented by changes found in U.S. Con-gress. "Hearings
Before the Committee on the Judiciary. House of Representatives, 93rd
Congress. Comparison of White House and Judiciary Committee Transcripts
of Fight Recorded Presidential Conversations." Washington: U.S.
Government Print-ing Office, 1974, ser. no.34.
25. New York Times, September 19,1962, p.3.
26. Edward Mezvins, A Term to Remember New York: Coward, McCann, Geoghegan,
1977, pp. 167-8.
27. Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, pp. 8ff.
28. Nixon, Meirtoirs, pp.768-9.
29. For the importance of the death of Nixon's brothers, see James
W. Hamilton, "Some Reflections on Richard Nixon in the Light
of His Resignation and Farewell Speeches," Journal of Psychohistory
4(1977): 491-511.
30. Alan B. Ruthenberg, "Why Nixon Taped Himself: Infantile Fantasies
Behind Watergate," Psychoanalytic Review 62 (1975): 201-223.
The role of individual per-sonality styles in contributing to developing
group-fantasy stages is particularly well studied in Richard D. Mann
et al., Interpersonal Styles and Group Development. New York: Wiley,
1967.
31. U.S. News and World Report, September 18, 1972, various headlines.
32. U.S. News and World Report, September 18, 1972, pp. 13-1 5.
33. U.S. News and World Report, October 2, 1972, pp.24-27
34. Public Papers of the Presidents of the Uoited States. Richard
Nixon. /972. Washington, D.C.: U. S. Government Printing Oftice, 1975.
35 Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States. Richard Nixon.
1973. Washington, D.C.: U. S. Government Printing Oflice, 1975.
36. Herbert Block, Herblock Special Report. New York: Norton, 1974.
37. Quoted in Rotbenberg, "Why Nixon Taped Himself," Psychoanalytic
Review 62 (1975): 202.
38. Nixon, Memoirs, p.849.
39. Theodore J. Jacobs, paper given at the New York Psychoanalytic
Society, "Secrets, alliances and family fictions: Some psychoanalytic
observations." March 13,1979. In fact, political cartoons since
their beginnings have been filled with anal material; see Herbert
M. Atherton, Political Prints in the Age of Hogarth: A Study in Ideographic
Representation of Politics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974.
40. Irving D. Harris, "The Psychologies of Presidents,"
History of Childhood Quarterly: The Journal of Psychohistory 3(1976):
337-350.
41. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States. Dwight Eisenhower.
/953. Washington, D.C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1960, p.41.
42. Ibid., p.618.
43. Ibid.
44. Newsweek, June 7, 1954, p.41.
45. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States. Dwight Eisenhower.
/954. Washington, D.C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1960, p.1075.
46. Peter Lyon, Eisenhower: Portrait of the Hero. Boston, Little,
Brown, 1974, p.639.
47. Ibid., p.640.
48. Newsweek, January31, 1955,p. 19;February7, 1955,p.26;Februaryl4,
1955,p. 19.
49. Newsweek, July 15, 1957, cover.
50. Newsweek, October 14, 1957, p.38.
51. William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream, Boston: Little, Brown,
1973, p.789.
52. Newsweek, November 18, 1957, p.37.
242
53. Newsweek, January 20, 1958, cover; March 10, 1958,
p.27.
54. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States. Dwight Eisenhower.
1958. Washington, D.C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1960, p.329.
55. Newsweek, May 26, 1958, p.23.
56. Newsweek, July 7, 1958, p.9; July 21,1958, cover.
57. Lyon, Eisenhower, p.773.
58. Newsweek, July 28,1958, pp.15, 24.
59. See Arthur Schlesinger, "Tides in American Politics,"
Yale Review 29(1939): 217-30; Frank L. Klingberg, "The Historical
Alteration of Moods in American Foreign Policy," World Politics
4 (1952): 239~273; also see the discussion about the lawful historical
relationship between domestic active periods and war in David C. Mc-Clelland
"Love and Power: The Psychological Signals of War," Psychology
Today, January 1975, pp.44-48.
60. Newsweek, October 2, 1961, cover; November 6, 1961, cover; U.S.
News and World Report, January 1, 1962, p.25; January 8, 1962, p.40.
61. U.S. News and World Report, January 29, 1962.
62. U.S. News and World Report, February 12, 1962, p.43.
63. Benjamin C. Bradlee, "Conversations with Kennedy" Playboy,
April, 1965, p. 176.
64. U.S. News and World Report, May 14, 1962, p.52.
65. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States. John F Kennedy.
1962. Washington, D.C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1963.
66. U.S. News and World Report, September 17, 1962, p.37
67. U.S. Congress. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and the Committee
on Armed Services. 87th Congress, 2nd session. Situation in Cuba.
Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962.
68. U.S. News and World Report, September 24,1962, pp.47-8.
69. David Detzer, The Orlak: Cuban Missile Crlsis, 1962. New York:
Thomas Y. Crowell, 1979, p.97; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand
Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House. Boston, 1965. pp.799-801.
70. William Whitworth, Naive Questions about War and Peace. New York:
W, W. Norton, 1970, p.24.
71. Barton J. Bernstein, "The Week We Almost Went to War,"
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, February 1976, p. 17.
72. Detzer, The Brlnk, p.157.
73. Barton J. Bernstein, "Kennedy Brinkmanship," Inquiry,
April 2, 1979, p.21.
74. H. R. Haldeman, The Ends of Power. New York: New York Times Books,
1978, p. 93.
75. U.S. News and World Report, December 17, 1962, p.54.
76. U.S. News and World Report, February 25, 1963, p.31.
77. Daniel Schorr, "The Assassins," New York Review of Books,
October 13, 1977, pp. 14-21.
78. U.S. News and World Report, October 26,1964.
79. U.S. News and World Report, December 7, 1964, p.31.
80. William Shaweross, "Dr. Kissinger Goes to War," Harpers,
April, 1979, p.40.
81. Lloyd deMause and Henry Fbel, eds., Jbumy Carter and Auterican
Fantasy. New York: Psychohistory Press, 1977
82. U.S. News and World Report, September 19,1977, p.25.
83. The New York Tiotes, September 16, 1977, p. A23.
84. Washington Post, September 25, 1977, p. C7.
85. Washington Post, October 9, 1977, p. A3.
86. Washington Post, October 10, 1977, p. A23.
87. The New Republic, December 17, 1977, p.1.
243
88. New York Times, November 9, 1977, p. A20.
89. U.S. News and World Report, December 2, 1977, p.23.
90. U.S. News and World Report, March 6, 1978, p.29.
91. New York Post, April21, 1978, p.19.
92. Vermont Royster, Wall Street Journal, March 1, 1978.
93. U.S. News and World Report, June 12, 1978, p. 19; Carl Rowan,
New York Post, June 5, 1978, p.23.
94. New York Times, May 26,1978, p. AlO.
95. I. F. Stone, "Carter, Africa and Salt," New York Review
of Rooks, June 12, 1978, pp.22-26.
96. New York Times, June 8, 1978, p. Al.
97. The Guardian, June 25,1978, p. 17.
98. The New Republic, September 30,1978, p.3.
99. Newsweek, October 2, 1978, pp. 110,, 22-23.
100. New York Post, March 15, 1979, p.23.
101. Frank H. Denton and Warren Phillips, "Some Patterns in the
History of Violence," Conflict Resolution 12 (1968): 182-195
102. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politic's
and Other Essays. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965, p.6.
103. The historiography of this controversy can be found in James
H. Hutson, "The American Revolution: The Triumph of a Delusion?"
in Frich Angcrmann, ed., New Wine in Old Skins. Stuttgart, 1976, pp.
177-194.
104. Ibid., p.177
105. George B. Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological
Joterpretation of Lincoln and His Age. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979
106. Ibid., p.259.
107. B. S. Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men.' A Study in Seventeenth-century
English Millenarlanism. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1972.
108. For a perceptive psychological approach to America's Great Awakenings,
see William G. MeLoughlm, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay
on Religion and Social Change in Amerlea, 1607-1977. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1968.
109. Nathan 0. Hatch, "The Origins of Civil Millennialism in
America: New England Clergymen, War with France, and the Revolution,"
William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 31(1974): 4070430.
110. John Mellen, The Duty of all to be ready for future Joipending
Events. Boston, 1756, pp.19-20.
111. Hatch, "Origins of Civil Millennialism," p.428.
112. Esmond Wright, Fabric of Freedom 1763-1800. Rev. Ed. N.Y.: Hill
and Wang, 1968, pp.96-102.
113. Hutson, "The American Revolution: The Triumph of a Delusion?",
p.188.
114. See especially Bradford Perkins, Prologue to War: England and
the United Stales 1805-1812. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1968.
115. Peter F. Walker, Moral Choices; Memory, Desire and Jmagination
in Nineteenth-Century American Abolitionism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1978.
116. Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and
the Subjection of the Amerlcan Indian, New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1975, p.147.
by: Lloyd deMause
The Institute for Psychohistory
140 Riverside Drive, NY NY 10024
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