Chapter 9----The Evolution of the Psyche
and Society
"The search for meaning is the search for expression of one’s real self."
" |
---James F. Masterson
|
Since the further back in history one goes the lower the level of childrearing,
it follows that children in the past grew up in houses of horrors
that were like those of dissociated personalities of today. Psychiatric
studies have shown that there is a direct correlation between elevated
levels of dissociative symptoms—separate alters, depersonalization,
derealization—and the amount of early physical, sexual and emotional
abuse.1 That the average person before the modern period
walked streets full of spirits, demons, gods and other alters is evidence
of the dissociation that resulted from their routine abuse and neglect
as children. Historical evolution of the psyche, therefore, is the
slow, uneven process of integrating fragmented selves into the unified
self that is the goal of modern upbringing.2
Biological evolution stores traits in genes that are
passed down to subsequent generations with their modifications intact;
a chimp has all the genes necessary to make another chimp. But the
self of the human psyche must evolve anew each generation. Contemporary
newborns begin with the same psyche as prehistoric newborns; it is
only better childrearing that allows them to achieve a more unified
self. That dissociated selves were an everyday part of life in antiquity
and the Middle Ages is a much-denied fact of historians, just as anthropologists
deny that their subjects are dissociated personalities who live in
an animistic world full of alters inhabiting animals, objects and
dead ancestors. Thus both personal history and human history are products
of a search for a real self, a search for meaning in life, an integration
of separate brain networks, a development of more adaptive real selves,
with the unified self being a late historical achievement of only
a few.
HISTORY AS THE INTEGRATION OF THE SELF
Most people even today have only achieved a partial integration of
the "relatively independent subselves" that recent studies show they
begin constructing as infants.3 The most thorough recent
study of dissociation using a sophisticated interview technique finds
that "14 percent of the general public experience ‘substantial’ dissociative
symptoms"4 and most of the rest of us experience lesser
dissociative symptoms when triggered by situations similar to the
original abuse. This may seem excessive, until one remembers that
perhaps half of the adults today were sexually abused as children,
that most of us were physically and emotionally abused to some extent
and that helping mode parenting which respects the growth and individuation
of children is everywhere still rare. We may be surprised to discover
that people in the past had their demon alters exorcised or had conversations
with their various inner souls, but even today religious spirit possessions
are not uncommon—a third of Americans say they have experienced other
spirits in themselves and over 90 percent of us believe in and at
times converse with (pray to) god alters of one sort or another.5
Even in our day-to-day personal reactions, we more often switch into
alters than we like to admit: "’Mom, don’t we have any cornflakes?’
Shawn asked….Immediately the Mean alter sprang into action. ‘Screw
you, Shawn! Why are you so helpless? Find something else if we don’t
have any goddamn cornflakes. I’m not your fucking slave!’"6
Contemporary societies with overall lower level childrearing
regularly switch into their alters in possession states. Bourguignon
found 90 percent of 488 societies reported institutionalized altered
states of consciousness and spirit possessions7, with the
remaining 10 percent reporting other forms of overt dissociation.
One of the best-studied is Bali, where people live in "a world filled
with gods and spirits…at the core of many activities of daily life,
including ceremonies, rituals, dances, plays, and possession [by]
demons, witchcraft or black magic, and leak (spirits). Evil spirits
are often present."8 The journal Transcultural Psychiatry
regularly reports on possession and other dissociative states in other
cultures, from the "belief in spirit possession fundamental to Chinese
religious systems" to the possession rituals in Indonesia.9
Simpler cultures report more hallucinations, soul journeys and possessions
by animal spirits, while the more complex cultures report a greater
variety of possession trance roles.10 Like multiple personalities
in our society, altered states in other societies follow periodic
cycles,11 as people experience growth panic due to individuation,
then, as memories of early traumas threaten to surface, they switch
into alters and restage their anger, guilt and punishment in religious
rituals. Even today people in most societies individuate for six days
and spend the seventh worshiping a punishing spirit and asking for
forgiveness for the hubris/chutzbah of the previous week.
The psychology of alter formation and the acting-out
of alter rituals has been well studied recently by clinicians. Whether
experienced as inside or outside oneself, alters are actually inner
voices or hallucinations that are subnetworks of the brain, centering
more in the amygdalan network than the hippocampal,12 with
their own organized personalities and even unique brain-scan configurations
as the person switches personalities.13 All spirits, gods,
demons, shamans, priests and political leaders are alter containers,
projections of these inner alters; they derive their traits from the
early traumas, not merely from "cultural transmission of beliefs."
Dissociative personalities usually sense at some level that their
spirits derive from their parents. As Donne put it, a separate part
of ourselves—what he terms an "invisible corner" of us—derives from
our past (Father Adam and Mother Eve) and contains the "poison that
corrupts us."14 People in the past used to switch into
their alters regularly, hearing voices, having waking nightmares and
flashbacks, experiencing loss of time, periods of unreality and deadness,
hallucinating persecutors, feeling unalterably dirty, sinful and hopeless,
and acting out self-injurious episodes. All of these are evidence
of dissociative identity disorders that resulted from the routine
abusive childrearing practices of the past. One can view daily encounters
with alters in such studies as those of the anthropologists Richard
and Eva Blum on rural Greek communities, where people today—as in
ancient Greece—regularly switch into alternate states and either are
possessed by or encounter outside themselves devouring demons and
bloodthirsty maternal monsters as they go about their daily business.15
INFANTILE SOURCES OF ALTERS IN HISTORY
Alters always contain traces of the early abusive situation, so if
one knows the typical kinds of traumatic childrearing practices of
an age, one can use these to decode the shared alters of that age.
Goodwin’s studies of demon possesions in the sixteenth century are
particularly revealing, demonstrating how the demons of Jeanne Fery
were both "internalized abusers" and "keepers of the secret" of her
early sexual and physical abuse.16 Whether the dissociated
personalities are Perpetrator or Victim Alters, the original family
situation is usually decipherable. Demons particularly get into you,
say religious authorities, when mothers are mad at you for enjoying
yourself: "Say a child is taking a nice hot shower, he is relaxed,
enjoying himself. Suppose his mother yells at him to hurry up and
get out, that’s forbidden….The child can get scared and the demon
will get hold of him."17 In Mesopotamia, each person was
said to have a "personal god…the image of the parent—divine father
or mother" inside them, with a relationship "of master and slave,"
and these contributed to making their worlds filled with "demons,
evil gods and evil spirits."18 The gods of every land were
recognized as acting just like parents, often punishing people like
noisy children, as when Enlil sent the Babylonian flood to wipe
out mankind because they were "making too much noise down there so
she could not sleep"19 or as when the Aztec lords of the
underworld sacrificed the Aztec ball players because they were "too
noisy."20 Hell in Christian literature was often compared
to living with "an angry and furious woman."21 Possession
began early in life; in the Acts of Thomas, God himself advised
Christians "to avoid having children [since] the majority of children
[are] possessed by demons."22 Witches were often transparently
grandmothers or other women of the gynarchy (riding the grandmother’s
broomstick) or prone to murder children (like real mothers killing
their newborn) or "dance stark naked in the night" and seduce children
(like mothers who slept with their children while both were naked
and while the mother masturbated them).23 Every witch,
ghost and religious figure carried their family origin in each of
their features.
God, says Julian of Eclanum, is "the persecutor of
newborn children; he it is who sends tiny babies to eternal flames."24
The pictures of Hell regularly depict tormented souls as child-sized,
and their tortures are the routine tortures infants endured in the
past; being in Hell meant "unbearable thirst, the punishment of hunger,
of stench, of horror, of fear, of want, of darkness, the cruelty of
tortures, punishment without end…"25 The tight swaddling
bands were represented in Hell as "cruel fetters" with "their arms
stretched down to the feet," and the feces that the infants were left
in was shown in Hell as "being in a sewer" and as being "covered in
the feces of their own obscenity," with Hell having "a stench worse
than anything in this world."26
One can find Terrifying Mommy alters behind every
Devil; even the Greek word for devil, diabolos, means "accuser."
God, says Gregory, is the "Avenger," and he compares God’s treatment
of man with that of a mother who "beats her child one moment as if
she never loved him and the next moment loves him as if she had never
beaten him."27 Although gods are often male, this usually
only represents a defensive clinging to a Father to avoid worse fears
of maternal abandonment and torture.28 A cross-cultural
study of The Parental Figures and the Representation of God
found that religious people cling to their mothers far more and actually
see God with more maternal attributes than paternal.29
Demons in the past were even portrayed as wetnurses; the Dragon of
Delphi, for instance, was the wetnurse of Typhaon, Hera’s child.30
The victims of gods and demons alike are regularly depicted as "innocent,"
"like an innocent child." When Job complains to Yahweh, "I am innocent,"
he admits this makes no difference because Yahweh "destroys innocent
and guilty alike." Sinners were born sinful and deserved punishment
simply because they tried to be independent. The Devil, said Gerson,
"sends happy thoughts" to you of "undertaking mighty works," you forget
about God’s [Mommy’s] needs, you "relax," and you become a sinner.31
You must love God [Mommy], said Meister Eckart, "for nothing." You
live, said Thomas à Kempis, only "to make yourself a more fit vessel
for God’s [Mommy’s] purposes."32 All religions agreed on
one thing: "To assert one’s self, to succeed, to enjoy, even to exist,
is to dispossess the Father [Mother], to kill Him [Her]."33
Switching into alters began in early childhood. Children
were often pictured as possessed, and historians of witchcraft often
comment on "the sudden emergence, in a docile and amenable child,
of a personality which raves, screams, roars with laughter, utters
dreadful blasphemies [which] seems like the invasion of an alien being."34
Children, so close in time to their traumas, could remember what it
felt like to be a fetus suffering because their Poisonous Placenta
didn’t provide it with fresh, oxygenated blood, so they could identify
with a suffering Christ on a placental cross and could understand
priests when they said they deserved to be thrown into the "suffocations"
of Hell [womb] and be tortured by "fire coursing swiftly through their
veins, bubbling through their arteries, boiling like liquid lead."35
Common childrearing practices—like "roasting" infants in an oven to
cure them of evil eye—were remembered in the many burning visions
of Hell:
Let us always keep before our mind’s eye
an overheated and glowing stove and inside a naked man supine, who
will never be released from such pain. How lost he appears to us!
Just imagine how he is writhing in the stove, how he screams, cries,
lives, what dread he suffers, what sufferings pierce him, particularly
when he realizes his unbearable pain will never end!36
Demons were sometimes experienced as "creeping things,"
like children, who "dance, laugh, whistle, caper, fart, and prance."
More often demons were like parents, "leaping on his back, beating
him and whipping him and leaving him unconscious on the ground."37
Demons and devils almost always contain traces of childhood rape,
the Devil being, as one Colonial American woman who had intercourse
with the Devil confessed, "a thing all over hairy, all the face hairy
[pubic hair], and a long nose [penis]."38 As one study
of medieval rape puts it: "The main thing medieval demons and monsters
do is rape virgins."39 When hundreds of children at a time
report being forced to copulate with the Devil,40 one need
not believe in demons to see the earlier reality of the rape reports.
Witnesses to rape confessions often report that the girls speak in
"two voices, one her normal voice, the other ‘strange, coarse, unnatural,
heavy, masculine.’"41 Obviously the deeper alter voice
carries the memory of the original rapist, as it so often does in
contemporary rape victims. Demons during the Middle Ages were always
assaulting people as incubi and succubi that sexually assault people
in their beds, restaging childhood family bed rapes.42
Some female mystics even hallucinated that Christ appeared before
them and had intercourse with them.43 Even the Holy Ghost
contains a trace of rape, since the Virgin Mary was impregnated by
God with it (Yahweh in Hebrew deriving from the Sumerian word for
"sperm.")44 Religious ritual often restages the rape scene
openly:
The temple in the Near East was the womb.
It was divided into three parts; the Porch, representing the lower
end of the vagina up to the hymen, or Veil; the Hall, or vagina itself;
and the inner sanctum, or Holy of Holies, the uterus. The priest,
dressed as a penis, anointed with various saps and resins as representing
the divine semen, enters through the doors of the Porch, the "labia"
of the womb, past the Veil or "hymen" and so into the Hall.45
RELIGIONS AS RITUALS USING SHARED ALTER FETISHES
In religions and politics, people turn to idealized authorities to
avoid the risk of depending on themselves and to restage the painful
feelings of abandonment by parents that they had when they tried to
individuate as children. Religions restage traumatic events encapsulated
in dangerous alters. This is why the word "sacred" (sacer) everywhere
designates "poison," "dangerous," "taboo,"46 because the
sacred is where we store our most poisonous, dangerous early memories.
Gods, demons and spirits are not just containers for haphazard projections;
they are highly organized and endurable, and so must first
exist as durable, organized subselves in individual brains. It is
through religious questions about God that people in the past asked
their most important questions about Mommy: Why does she hate me,
why did she tie me up, leave me abandoned in my feces, let me starve,
why did she beat me, why did she strangle my baby sister, what does
she want from me, what did I do wrong to deserve such torture?
Because preverbal infants imagine they store their
painful memories in various body parts, alters that carry early traumas
are often pictured as inhabiting internal organs: hearts, brains,
the gall bladder, even intestines. Jeffrey Dahmer used to dismember
bodies, he said, because he "wanted to see what someone looked like
inside," searching for alters in the organs of the corpses he decapitated,
draped on altars and then—like Osiris—tried to reassemble, as though
he were reassembling his own dissociated body part alters.47
He then ate some of the body parts, like Aztecs eating the heart of
their sacrificed victims, reinternalizing the projected alters that
were "full of vital force." Christian saints hallucinated both Christ
and devils inhabiting their hearts, and even talked to them regularly.48
Egyptians said their double, their ka, inhabited their hearts,
and had spells entreating the heart to "rise not up as a witness against
me."49 Aztecs believed there were three animistic souls,
one in the head, one in the liver and one in the heart, and they cut
each of these organs out of victims in their sacrificial rituals.50
To this day, children’s hearts are reported cut out and thrown into
the sea in Chile as sacrifices to spirits, as the child begs, "Just
let me live, Grandfather."51
Tribal people had such primitive childrearing that
they were constantly involved with the alters inhabiting their organs.
"The first thing a shaman has to do when he has called up his helping
spirits is to withdraw the soul from his pupil’s eyes, brain and entrails,"
purifying and liberating them.52 Shamans "cured" others
of "soul loss" by sucking out their poisonous organ alters through
their skin.53 Early religions are mainly concerned with
purifying and acting out the feelings of organ alters, usually in
rituals that use animal spirit alters, attacking, dismembering and
rebirthing initiates. Animal alters reveal their infantile
origins in that they are projected into beings that crawl and are
not verbal, like infants. Thus all animal sacrifices are infantile
alter sacrifices, even when we today go hunting. The infantile origin
of animal alters is clearly revealed in the Ainu bear sacrifice, where
a black bear cub is actually suckled by the mothers before being sacrificed.54
Shamans around the world hallucinate that they remove all their internal
organs and replace them with "incorruptible" organs, often pressing
quartz crystals into their body to accomplish this.55 Egyptians
not only separately mummified their internal organs, addressing their
ka as "my heart, my mother,"56 they also mummified animals,
reptiles, birds and fishes that were their animal alters.57
As we saw in Chapter 3, they even mummified the Royal Placenta and
worshiped it, like the Baganda did until recently, placing it on an
actual throne and addressing it as "King."58 Christians,
too, used to collect body parts as relics, worshiping the heart, pieces
of skull, limb bones or fingers of saints dug up from their graves.59
Animal Perpetrator Alters were frequently the central
gods of early religions, such as when Yahweh was represented with
serpent legs or when Egyptian gods were shown as various devouring
animals.60 That gods are usually perpetrators restaging
early physical abuse is the answer to Freud’s question: "Why does
religion seem to need violence?"61 When violence against
children disappears, religious and political violence will disappear.
Religions and politics as we know them will no doubt disappear also.
Religions work by constructing sacred spaces that contain triggers
for switching into trances in order to access people’s alters and
obtain some relief from their tortures. Looking out a Rose Window
of a cathedral triggers nothing so much as fetal memories of seeing
light through your mother’s abdomen. The entrainment of personal alters
into a shared personal experience can be seen today most clearly in
groups like the Shakers, where adherents experience dissociation states;
get together in churches full of pictures of Christ as a Victim Alter
to trigger their childhood memories of being victimized; profess their
total obedience to Elders in order to trigger the obedience demanded
by their parents; and have a "mother matron" wash their hands or face,
also to parallel the early childhood state. Then the church leader,
the "Pointer," carries out the Perpetrator Alter role by punishing
one of the Shakers: "With a temper that flares suddenly, he takes
a wide leather strap and pounds the table, altar, or Bible with the
edge of it…then wields it against a woman [who] became dissociated
as he held her hands and swung her arms from side to side…remarking,
‘Satan, he wait for you!’ He proceeded to strike the woman’s open
palms with his strap." The Pointer becomes the instrument of the Holy
Ghost, saying: "It is the Holy Spirit who gives punishment to you,"
and, while the culprit is still in a possession trance, lashes her
as she was lashed as a child, telling her she was now forgiven for
being sinful.62
The neurobiology of "God experiences" is well understood.
They are actually temporal lobe seizures, similar to the seizures
of epileptics, explaining why so many mystics experienced clear epileptic
seizures. These "kindling" seizures—which have been correlated with
previous serious child abuse—begin in the hippocampus and spread to
the amygdalan network, transforming previous painful anoxic depressive
rage feelings into what Mandell calls "ecstatic joyful rage," with
a disappearance of self boundaries so that the person is suddenly
overcome with feelings of unity and love.63 The neurobiology
of "God in the brain" is similar to the effects of drugs like cocaine
and the hallucinagens, "inducing an acute loss of serotonergic regulation
of temporal lobe limbic structures and releasing the affectual and
cognitive processes characteristic of religious ecstasy and conversion."64
Persinger describes "the release of the brain’s own opiates that can
cause a narcotic high" during these God-merger experiences, producing
"with a single burst in the temporal lobe, a personal conviction of
truth and a sense of self-selection [that] shames any known therapy."65
As Otto puts it, the mysterium tremendum of religious ecstasy
"bursts in sudden eruption up from the depths of the soul with spasms
and convulsions and leads to the strangest excitements, to intoxicated
frenzy, to transport and to ecstasy…wild and demonic…and can sink
to an almost grisly horror and shuddering."66 Saint Theresa
tells how it felt to experience this painful ecstasy in her organ
alters: "An angel pierced its spear several times through my heart,
so that it penetrated to my bowels, which were extracted when the
spear was withdrawn, leaving me all aflame with an immense love for
God. The pain was so great that I had to groan, but the sweetness
that came with this violent pain was such that I could not wish to
be free of it."67
Religions devise rituals to exteriorize alters and
collude with others in the delusion that internal alters really exist
outside oneself, providing some group relief from feeling unlovable
by sharing myths like "Christ died for your sins" and asking for forgiveness
in hopes that God, the Omnipotent Mommy Alter, will finally love them.
Each step of the shaman’s or priest’s ritual can be decoded to reveal
its infantile origin: "In every ritual, we must do what the gods [parents]
did in the beginning,"68 The most severely abused children
today who become multiple personalities (Dissociated Identity Disorders)
frequently join one of the many fundamentalist religious cults in
order to decrease the pains of their dissociation. Religions provide
alter fetishes—shaman’s rattles, Dionysian phallic replicas,
suffering Christ statues—that contain the traumas of the alters and
allow the worshiper to act out the guilt and punishment they demand.
Most gods began as fetishes, "spirits embodied in material objects,"70
and demon fetish figurines were plentiful in antiquity, being made
to be ritually destroyed or thrown into the river or buried in deserted
places to punish the Victim Alters that were projected into them.71
These alter fetishes were believed to have "accumulated power so intense
and dangerous" that they had to be "killed" in order to release their
force.72 All the statues and standards worshiped by the
Egyptian and Mesopotamians were so concretely alternate personalities
that they were regularly fed and spoken to, "in order to sustain the
power with which they were charged."73 Most early Sacred
Kings only remained kings as long as they had possession of their
fetish alters, the Royal Crown—symbol of the maternal vagina—and the
throne—symbol of the maternal chair.74 As will be discussed
below, the fantasy of the omnipotent Terrifying Mommy always lies
behind even masculine gods and demons, both in religious and political
group-fantasies.
THE SEVEN STAGES OF HISTORICAL PERSONALITY
According to James Masterson, personality disorders are results of
"false selves" that defend against painful affects of early life and
present-day experiences, designed to camouflage the real targets of
emotional life—the infantile feelings and memories—and based not on
reality but on organized fantasies involving part-selves. Contemporary
personality disorders as described in Masterson’s revisions of DSM
IV75 form a series of personality types from schizoid to
narcissistic, borderline, depressive and neurotic which conform to
the stages of evolution of historical personalities that result from
the childrearing modes described in the previous two chapters.
Childrearing
|
Personality
|
Ideal
|
Mother/God
|
Sacrifice
|
Tribal:
Early infanticidal
|
Schizoid
|
Shaman
|
Devours, seduces, abandons child
|
To animal alter spirits
|
Antiquity:
Late Infanticidal
|
Narcissist
|
Hero
|
Kills, punishes evil child
|
To human alter gods
|
Christian: Abandoning
|
Masochist
|
Martyr
|
Forgives hurt Self-child
|
Torture
|
Middle Ages: Ambivalent
|
Borderline
|
Vassal
|
Dominates, beats worshipful child
|
Subservient clinging
|
Renaissance: Intrusive
|
Depressive
|
Holy Warrior
|
Disciplines obedient child
|
Obeying
|
Modern:
Socializing
|
Neurotic
|
Patriot
|
Manipulates child
|
Incomplete Separation
|
Post-Modern: Helping
|
Individuated
|
Activist
|
Trusts, loves child
|
No sacrifice of real self
|
Illustration 9-1—Table of Historical
Personalities
THE SCHIZOID PSYCHOCLASS OF TRIBAL SOCIETIES
The schizoid personality cluster—including paranoid and psychopathic
personalities—features magical, primary process thinking; periods
of depersonalization, unreality and grandiosity; animistic fused subject/object
experiences; an inability to experience intimacy; and extreme episodes
of suspicion and rage. Because tribal mothering (see Chapter 6) is
so primitive, so lacking in empathy for the child and so engulfing
in overt maternal incest, the schizoid tribal personality has a fear
of being taken over and a "profound inability to love himself."76
Schizoids therefore cannot stand close relationships and so cannot
form higher levels of social organization based on trust. Tribal personalities
since the Palaeolithic formed animal and organ alters containing dissociated
Perpetrator and Victim Alters. Animal alters were depicted in the
cave paintings of early times and were sacrificially stabbed over
and over again in ecstatic rebirth rituals held deep in womb-caves
covered with several inches of blood-red ochre. The depersonalization
of schizoids—the result of severe separation stress—is so extreme
that they regularly felt themselves breaking into fragmented pieces,
switching into dissociated states and going into shamanistic trances
to try to put themselves together. During shamanistic journeys, schizoids
experience themselves as sliced up, their bones removed, their flesh
devoured by female monsters, and as repeating the tortures of childhood
by being starved, burned, beaten, raped and lacerated.77
Like schizoid personalities today, much of their lives were spent
in fantasy worlds that repeated the childhood isolation that resulted
from their feeling that there was simply no path to a real relationship
with parents or others. Since alters are formed to contain and control
memories of early terrors, when defenses threaten to break down the
schizoid is flooded with agony.78 In tribal groups, there
is no hope for forgiveness, there is no "sin," no chance of atonement,
only "eat mommy or be eaten by her," only sadistic master-slave fears
and detachment-alienation defenses, all restaged in endless rituals
and cannibalistic feasts where organ alters are eaten. Bourguignon
found spirit possession rituals (where an alter totally takes over
the host personality) only in simple hunter-gatherer societies, while
possession-trance rituals (where various demon alters appear as spirits
during brief ritual trances) were found in agricultural or animal
herding societies.79 Possession rituals today feature a
"judgement of the soul by an old woman, the mother-animal, the mistress
of the dead," and in the past featured "human victims offered in sacrifice
to propitiate the Master of the Animals."80 The animal
masks of the shaman are familiar from the various cave paintings that
have survived this early period, with the shaman’s drum said to be
"the voice of the primeval mother" and with Mistress of the Animal
representations continuing as late as the Greek goddess Artemis.81
Yakut shamans still hallucinate self-sacrifice to "a Bird-of-Prey-Mother,
which is like a great bird with an iron beak, hooked claws, and a
long tail [who] cuts its body into bits and devours it."82
Animistic alter fetishes surrounded early humans.
As one Chukchi put it: "All that exists lives. The lamp walks around.
The walls of the house have voices of their own, while the deceased
get up and visit the living."83 Every alter fetish contains
traces of the original trauma from when it was formed—even the shaman’s
rattle betraying the routine raping of children by having a "gourd
representing the womb and a penis-handle that inseminates it."84
Indeed, it is likely that most of the misnamed "Venus figurines" found
in early caves were in fact raping wands similar to those
used in contemporary cults that rape virgins in rituals,85
with faceless heads shaped like the glans of the penis, bulbous breasts
looking just like testicles, a vaginal triangle carefully indicated
and covered with red ochre representing the bloody results of the
childhood rape.86 It was no coincidence that the very first
art in the Upper Palaeolithic was mainly representations of the vulva.87
"Sacred rape" is part of shamanistic beliefs today,88 and
virgins are still cut and raped as sacrificial offerings to gods in
some areas of the world, giving as the reason: "Only blood satisfies
the tius [avenging spirits]."89 Girls in some
African tribes are still made to sit on erect penis figurines as punishment.90
That tunnels and caves were the locations of these raping rituals
fits well with the frequent use of tunnels and caves by contemporary
cults that rape schoolchildren.91 That the caves of the
Palaeolithic are cultic sanctuaries for trance hallucinations is further
confirmed by their being covered with "entoptic" images identical
to those experienced by contemporary shamans engaged in trance vision
quests.92
Plunging into the terrifying, hallucinatory world
of "Dreamtime" trances meant revisiting the terrifying world of childhood,
where mommies suck infants’ penises and fathers have seven-year-olds
fellate them. Initiates felt so polluted by their early seductions
that they submitted themselves at adolescence to initiatory group-fantasies
of disemboweling and washing of their entrails and other body parts,
while endlessly cutting themselves to cleanse their blood of their
badness. The !Kung bushmen of the Kalahari still switch into cleansing
trances once a week to experience their alter memories in convulsion-like
tremors, ending in the usual temporal lobe seizures of tribal personalities,
"bursting open, like a ripe pod" when "God killed my every thought.
He wiped me clean."93 Body parts containing projected alters
collected by early headhunters and cannibals existed with hallucinatory
reality: "The Dyaks were obsessed with the notion that severed heads
continued to exist as living beings…[they were] treated for months
with deep reverence and flattering speech. Choice morsels from the
table would be thrust into its mouth, and at the end of the meal a
cigar would be placed between its lips."94 Alters in enemy
scalps collected by warriors in many tribes were so real the scalps
used to be taken home, called "my child" and fed regularly.95
Since "enemies" were usually quite innocent of any wrongdoing until
a warrior’s alters were projected into them, captured enemies were
often tortured—to punish the projected childhood alters—and then eaten—to
return the punished alter to the original owner.96 Thus
what Sagan calls "aggressive cannibalism" and ascribes to "vengeance"
is in fact a punishment of a part of the self, projected into another
body, and then returned after punishment to one’s own body by eating
it.
Apparently the cultural explosion at the beginning
of the Upper Palaeolithic some 35,000 years ago was the result of
early language abilities affording the capacity to project alters
into others and into shared cultural alter fetishes.97
Early humans were schizoid personalities who did not have unified
real selves, only dozens of subselves which they projected into other
people and objects. One archeologist suggests that the spectacular
explosion of cultural developments 35,000 years ago came from "the
appearance of a very simple additional cognitive affective mechanism—a
disposition to engage in pretend play in childhood,"98
which in turn depends upon the ability to project parts of one’s self
into others and into objects. Contemporary tribal children have alters
they play with, far more real to them than the "imaginary playmates"
children in more complex societies have. In New Guinea, small children
have alternate personalities called finiik that "temporarily
depart from the body to wander abroad…during trances and other forms
of mystical experience."99 Anthropologists are often startled
to be introduced by a little child to his finiik, projected
into a certain stone or bird, or be told about how witch alters regularly
possess children’s bodies both in dreams and waking life—all spontaneously
experienced, long before being taught in ritual.
Wars, too, are fought to cleanse internal alters of
badness, repair the fragmented self and restore potency. Tribal warfare
against alter container "enemies" is accomplished mainly through ambush,
with warriors spearing unarmed men, women and children for wholly
imagined grievances. Tribes switch into Persecutory Alters mainly
on occasions of extreme growth panic, when new tasks such as building
houses or expanding gardens threaten too much growth and after initiations
that center on adolescents growing up. Homicide rates reach the highest
levels anywhere in the world—up to 60 percent—in schizoid tribal societies,
since extreme distrust of others is common: "Both men and women are
volatile, prone to quarreling and quick to take offense at a suspected
slight,"100 restaging the distrust and rage of their infanticidal
mothers. Women are routinely viewed as secretly being witches "who
can kill simply by staring at a person" and are often killed because
they are believed to poison people.101 Wife-beating is
nearly universal, female suicide rates from mistreatment often reaches
10-25 percent of women’s deaths, and routine torture and execution
of women suspected of poisoning men is common.102
Supreme gods in schizoids—unlike the more personal
gods of borderlines—are totally unloving and distant, reflecting the
uncaring nature of the parents. Eliade points out that even when thought
of as "eternal, omniscient and all-powerful," creator gods in tribal
cultures "withdraw to the sky," too remote and uncaring to be prayed
to or addressed.103 What takes their place is merging with
guardian spirits—empowerment by first torturing yourself to cleanse
your alters and then hallucinating an animal alter that might protect
you against being devoured by cannibalistic maternal giant alters
like the Australian "Old Serpent Woman" or the Kwakiutl giantess Tsonoqua,
who roams the forest searching for children to eat.104
Even when schizoids try to incorporate paternal features to avoid
being devoured, they end up giving their gods maternal features—like
the Rainbow Serpents of Australia, described as "gods who are male
but have a womb or female breasts…who look like snakes but also like
a woman…the ‘bad Mother’…who swallowed children left in her care."105
The main content, however, of tribal rituals is constructed
from fetal fantasies, because schizoid disintegration produces deep
regression to bad womb and rebirth memories. Psychotherapists like
Stan Grof—who regress their patients to fetal states—reproduce their
drawings in their books, and these look very much like shamanistic
experiences.108 Possessed shamans often describe switching
into trances during their dances in language that closely resembles
the birth experience:
The loa dance suggests water [amniotic fluid]…when
the drumbeat quickens [mother experiences contractions]…the whole
structure crashes like a cosmic surf over one’s head [breaking of
the amniotic waters]…the terror strikes and with a supreme effort
I wrench my leg loose, I must keep moving {trapped in birth canal]…My
skull is a drum, my veins will burst my skin [bloodstream anoxic because
placenta no longer delivers oxygenated blood]…I am sucked down and
exploded upward at once [birth]…Finally it is as if I lay at the far
distant end of an infinitely deep-down, sunken well, then suddenly:
surface; suddenly: air; suddenly:dazzling white [born].107
Róheim describes the initiation ritual of the Australian
aborigines in which initiates were forced to drink blood as "throwing
the novice into the Old Woman whose womb is symbolized by a semi-circular
trench…The Rainbow Serpent [Poisonous Placenta] is represented engraved
on the walls of the trench. A bull-roarer, called the ‘Mother’ and
also representing her womb, her ‘shade,’ is buried in the trench,
his spirit [alter] later leaving it to return to his spirit home."108
Both initiation rituals and shamanistic journeys usually include going
through long birth tunnels with umbilical ropes attaching them to
visit placental World Trees, feeling body dismemberments like those
fetuses feel during birth, performing bloody birth rituals in medicine
wheel circles shaped like placentas and restaging the "poison blood"
memories of birth by being covered by "the menstrual blood that can
cause you to die, called ‘dead womb blood.’"109 Only after
going through poison-blood rebirth restagings could tribal men hope
for a time to put their Devouring Mommy alters at rest and go about
with the daily work of living.
The result of always being subject to infanticidal,
incestuous abandoning maternal memories is that schizoid tribal personalities
cannot tolerate separation or rejection in their daily life. "Rejection
is unendurable…families cluster together in an encampment ‘often touching
against their neighbors’ [because] separation and loneliness are unendurable
to them. [They] cannot bear the sense of rejection that even mild
disapproval makes them feel."110 What is misnamed "egalitarianism"
is really mistrust and fear of being called "selfish" for owning.
Hoarding and self-aggrandizement are simply not tolerated—people were
often killed for trying to keep more than their share of goods—ambition
was stopped by overwhelming schizoid envy, change was feared and the
surpluses and savings which were necessary for future innovation were
nowhere to be found. As Murphy found, in tribal societies "the mother
is an eternal threat to self-individuation, a frustrater of urges,
and a swallower of emergent identity" of men.111 The early
incest was particularly destructive of separation and individuation.
As one Maori sage put it: "That which destroys man is the mana of
the vagina." Men are forced to merge with their mothers in order to
appropriate the power of their vagina: "Warriors became the symbolic
equivalent of menstruating women…[both] bloody warriors and menstruating
women…were charged with powerful destructive energy…warriors’ bodies
and weapons were decorated with designs marked in red hematite [and]
they expropriated the destructive power of menstruating women [by]
ritual nosebleeding or subincision."112 Often the bond
between men was obtained by their sharing the mommy-alter in their
blood, cutting their veins and smearing their blood on each other
to form "blood brotherhoods."113 But strong leaders are
avoided because they might bring back memories of maternal domination:
"Australian aborigines traditionally eliminated aggressive men who
tried to dominate them [and] in New Guinea, they execute prominent
individuals who overstep their prerogatives."114 Personal
loyalty to leaders is tentative because of their overwhelming schizoid
mistrust and envy, so the most social organization that can be achieved
is "Big Men" who do not threaten to subject others too much to maternal
engulfment and despair—better to stick to alter fetishes and constant
gift-exchange to ward off the return of childhood memories of starvation
and abandonment. Every step toward personal closeness or trust brings
flashbacks to maternal distancing, since "schizoid states often lead
to acute paranoid regressions because the patient’s aggression becomes
more threatening to him as he allows himself to get closer to other
individuals."115 Thus wars in tribal societies often follow
disappointments in sexual affairs—as men fail in achieving intimacy,
they become paranoid and go off to kill imagined "enemies." Only when
childrearing achieved the next highest mode were men able to achieve
complex societies that allowed dominant male leaders and trust in
others sufficient to permit ownership and complex hierarchical organizations
that could permit development of higher levels of economic production
and trade.
THE NARCISSISTIC PSYCHOCLASS OF ANTIQUITY
Narcissistic personalities ward off their sense of an empty, inadequate
self by fusing with the harsh attacking parent alter and forming a
grandiose self that identifies with the omnipotent parent. Or they
become a latent narcissist and cling to and admire a grandiose other,
a narcissistic hero who can stand up to the destructive mother alter.116
Whereas schizoid tribal personalities tried to maintain a safe distance
to avoid engulfment, the narcissistic personalities of antiquity tried
to maintain some sense of self by arming themselves with grandiose
exhibitionism. Thus they constantly live in the state of narcissistic
display, as for instance early Greeks did when they spent their days
displaying their bodies at gymnasiums and at night—rather than going
home to risk intimacy with their wives —engaged in male-only drinking/raping
parties. The narcissistic personalities of antiquity were exploitative,
distrustful, ruthless and lacking in empathy,117 being
preoccupied with fantasies of the power and brilliance of a world
filled with arrogant, distant narcissistic heroes and gods and grandiose
political leaders upon whom they depended to validate their weak sense
of self. Their pedophilia was also a result of their only being able
to have sex with a narcissistic double of themselves stemming from
when they were beautiful youths and, like Narcissus, fell in love
with themselves, avoiding women as "vultures" who were out to catch
and devour them.
Early civilizations began with both gods and leaders
who had maternal characteristics: devouring goddesses everywhere prevailed,
and even chiefs seemed to be mommies—as the Anyi said: "When the king’s
breasts are full of milk, it is his people who drink."118
Parin found the Anyi clung to their kings because "their fear of women
was greater than their fear of men" and because of "their need to
find a chief or master who enjoys prestige and power so that they
can submit to him and introject power" and avoid maternal engulfment.119
As Galen put it: "Each man trembled forever on the brink of becoming
‘womanish’"120 —i.e., of switching permanently into his
mommy alter and losing his self. The ever-present fear of turning
into a woman found throughout early civilizations explains why religions
and politics were defensive arenas filled with sadistic maternal alters
and why periodic wars were desperately needed to attempt to restore
men’s potency.
The daily life of the narcissistic personalities of
antiquity was filled with projected alters, from the evil spirits,
devils and dybbuks that Jews were constantly exorcising to
the bloodthirsty female spirits, serpents and demons that Sumerians,
Egyptians, Greeks and Romans tried to ward off with their various
religious fetishes. "At every corner evil spirits were on the watch…there
was also danger from the spells of numerous witches, in whom everyone
believed implicitly."121 Even supposedly rational Greeks
were, as Gouldner put it, "deeply concerned about their capacity to
go murderously berserk."122 Egyptians regularly talked
to their avenging alters, as the "world-weary man" talked to his "double,"
his Ba, about suicide, making "suicide so common that the crocodiles
in the Nile could no longer cope with the corpses."123
Hippocrates confirmed that Greeks often experienced "convulsions,
fears, terrors and delusions," and physicians in every country of
antiquity were expected to treat possessions, hallucinations, frenzies,
lycanthropies and other symptoms of dissociated personalities (melancholy
in Greek meaning "furor.")124 The average Greek acknowledged
that his emotional life was constantly controlled by his alters, which
were given names like psyche, thumos, menos, kardia, kradie, etor,
noos, ate, and so on. Dodds says that Homer describes ate,
for instance, as "a temporary clouding or bewildering of the normal
consciousness…a partial and temporary insanity…ascribed to an external
‘daemonic’ agency."125 Medea says she did not kill her
children, her thumos forced her to kill them. One’s psyche
looks and sounds like a living person, Odysseus says, but it flies
off "like a shadow or a dream."126 Sometimes they were
co-conscious with these alters, but often they were not, since they
completely took over the self. Adkins wrote an entire book on how
the Greeks of antiquity kept switching into their subpersonalities,
describing their "low degree of unity and cohesion [as] one ‘little
man’ (so to speak) within him after another addresses and prompts
him…"127 Usually the spirits and demons of antiquity betrayed
their maternal origin—not so surprising when one reads statements
like that of Galen who said "my mother was so very prone to anger
that sometimes she bit her handmaids"128 or that of Xenophon
who said he would "rather bear a wild beast’s brutality than that
of his mother."129
The earliest civilizations uniformly worshipped vampire
goddesses who were devouring maternal alters. All were what Jungians
term "Dragon Mothers"130 —from Lilith, Nin-Tu, Hecate and
Ishtar to Moira, Shiva, Gorgon and Erinyes. They were usually called
by their worshipers "Terrible Mothers," usually had serpentine features
and were called terms like "cruel, jealous, unjust, her glance brings
death, her will is supreme" by worshippers.131 Since contemporary
multiple personalities also sometimes hallucinate gigantic serpents
as alters,132 one must believe the witnesses in early civilizations
when they insist they really saw these serpent-goddesses. The Dragon
Mother Goddesses accurately embodied the infanticidal "infinitely
needy mother who cannot let her children go because she needs them
for her own psychic survival…giving her child the impossible task
of filling her limitless void [and] engulfing them to prevent them
from claiming a separate life for themselves."133 One of
the earliest Vulture Goddesses can be seen on the shrine walls of
the Neolithic town of Catal Hüyük, a bloodthirsty Goddess with wings
of a vulture who is shown eating headless corpses. Corpses of people
were actually thrown into the fields nearby so vultures could eat
them in sacrificial rebirth rituals.134 That vultures were
maternal was shown long ago in Freud’s paper showing that the Egyptian
hieroglyph for "mother" clearly represents a vulture and that the
Egyptians worshipped a vulture-headed mother-goddess.135
Even early Hebrews worshipped a mother-goddess, Asherah,136
who, along with Lilith, the other vampire goddess mentioned in the
Bible, "ceaselessly devoured the blood" of her worshippers and "roamed
the world in search of children to eat, rape and kill." Even the Sphinx
(sphinx means "throttler") was a maternal monster who devoured
youth.137 Most of the male animal gods of early civilizations
were pictured as slaves of goddesses, like "the Bull of Heaven, the
ferocious monster who killed three hundred men at each snort of his
breath [whom] Ishtar in her rage sent down to devastate the land."138
But usually the Mother Goddesses accomplished their own slaughters:
"Kali, the Black One, breasts big with milk, adorned with the blood-dripping
hands and heads of her victims, devouring the entrails of a human
victim or drinking blood from a human skull."139 Statues
of these bloodthirsty goddesses were set up in ziggurats and temples
all over the world, daily washed, dressed, fed, talked to, and heard
to speak their commands,140 so hallucinatory was the
power of the alters. The statues were such bloodthirsty maternal alter
fetishes that often priests would take the blood of the sacrificial
victim and anoint the face of the idol so She could drink of it.141
"Divinely-induced madness"—as in the Dionysian rituals of ancient
Greece— would sometimes even cause women to become possessed by their
Terrible Mother alters and act out the killing of the victim, especially
when they were experiencing post-partum depressions. As Euripides
describes them: "Breasts swollen with milk, new mothers who had left
their babies behind at home…clawed calves to pieces with bare hands
[and] snatched children from their homes."142
The fetal origins of early religions were everywhere
evident. Actual human placentas were often hung on trees, worshipped
and offered human sacrifices.143 Goddesses like Tiamat
were referred to as "poisonous wombsnakes," Sumerians and Babylonians
worshipped "placenta-ghosts," and even the Hebrew name for Eve (Khawwa)
meant "the Serpent Lady."144 Peruvians used to place their
actual placentas into the womb of their religious statues,145
just as most nagual worshipped in ancient Meso-American religions
were real placentas.146 All the "Cosmic Trees" found in
early religions—from the Tree of Eden to Jesus’ Cross—were placental
in origin, and the priest was often portrayed as a fetus: "He has
become a fetus. His head is veiled and he is made to clench his fists,
for the embryo in its bag has its fists clenched. He walks around
the hearth just as the fetus moves within the womb…he unclenches his
fists, he unveils himself, he is born into divine existence, he is
a god."147 Carthaginian and other child sacrifice religions
used both fetuses and newborn in their rites,148 and cults
even today often kill real fetuses in rebirth rituals.149
Even the Deluge myths—from Gilgamesh to that of the Hebrew Bible—contain
many elements of the rush of amniotic waters prior to birth.
Every detail of the worship of Mother Goddesses has
its origins in actual traumatic childrearing experiences of antiquity.
Most "Terrifying Mothers" had divine sons who were forced to commit
incest with them,150 similar to the Japanese mothers and
others described in the previous chapter,151 with "every
mother goddess having their son-lovers, Inanna and Tammuz, Isis and
Osiris, Cybele and Attis, Aphrodite and Adonis."152 The
religious rituals restaged accurately the maternal seduction: "Not
only does the Mother Goddess love her son simply for his phallus,
she castrates him, taking possession of it to make herself fruitful."153
In India until recently, "visitors to many ancient shrines used to
have symbolic intercourse with stone-cut female deities by thrusting
their fingers into deep touchholes, worn by generations of finger-thrusters,
at the deities’ sexual centers."154 Thus it is quite mistaken
to call ancient sexual seduction rituals "Sacred Marriages." They
are in fact "Sacred Maternal Incests." When the incest is
complete and the "insatiable appetite" of the Goddess assuaged, the
Mother Goddess then castrated her son155 and even, in the
case of Ishtar, "wore a necklace of testicles in depictions of her.
The Great Mother was gentler to women than to men, who had great reason
to fear her dark side as Devouring-Mother. [She] existed not to be
loved, but to be placated."156 Worshippers of
the Magna Mater, called galli, castrated themselves for her,
"wishing to be like a child, the better to serve the goddess,"157
"running through the city with severed organs and throwing them into
any house."158
That sacrifices of all sorts are for "wiping out evil
and guilt" of the community is well-established,159 but
that sacrifice was usually equated with childbirth ("man’s childbearing")
and sacrificers serve inner maternal alters and often pretend to be
mothers ("the priests masqueraded as pregnant women during the sacrifice")160
is less well known. Astarte "massacred mankind, young and old, causing
heads and hands to fly and tying heads to her back, hands to her girdle."161
Drawings of the goddess "show her perpetual hunger for human sacrificial
victims."162 Visnu particularly favored devouring the victims’
genitals.163 The sacrificial rituals made a point of saying
the victim must be innocent, like a child. Ancient religions used
to blurt out alter beliefs that we today only tentatively suggest
might be true.
Because these goddesses were also "The Mistresses
of Battle," soldiers killed in battle were also seen as sacrifices
to her bloodthirsty appetite. "The goddess brings destruction to enemies;
she drinks the blood of the victims who were formerly her children…she
could not be halted in her slaughter of the human race."164
Since these deaths originated in such memories as watching his mother
strangle his little sister when she was born, war goddesses particularly
needed the death of their own soldiers. As an early Ugaritic text
says of the goddess Anat: "She is filled with joy as she plunges her
knees in the blood of heroes."165 Often the sacrificer
was actually female, as was the chief priestess of the Celtic moon
goddess, who cut off the victims’ heads with her own hands, restaging
the maternal infanticide.166
But rituals don’t just repeat early trauma: they restage
them—rearrange them to include elements of both the violence of the
Perpetrating Alters and the rage of the Victim Alters. Thus the murderous
goddess Tiamat is killed by her son Marduk in a tremendous battle
by an "arrow that tore through her belly and inner parts."167
Only by defeating the infanticidal mother could sons "overcome chaos."
As Halpern says: "The hero is one who slays his mother [and] institutes
a new order on earth…culture is the work of the hero, the mother-killer,
and represents his attempt at self-generation."168 That
the killing is the rage of the infantile victim alter against the
mother is seen by the fact that the Mother Goddess, after being killed,
is nevertheless identified with: for instance, the Aztecs beheaded
women representing their Mother Goddesses and flayed them,
donning their skins so that they can become them and acquire
their dangerous powers, their mana.169
The acquisition of the powers of the Terrifying Mother
by a male God was only slowly and partially accomplished in antiquity.
Yahweh might conquer the primordial female monster, Leviathan, symbol
of chaos, and He might demand complete obedience, "with all thy heart
and all thy soul and all thy might." He might even take over sacrificial
demands, as when He tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac to found Israel
in a blood-brotherhood convenant. But behind what Maccoby calls "The
Sacred Executioner"170 lies the sacrificial mother alter;
behind every adored Adonis lies the cruel Astarte. Greeks may have
tried to defend against maternal engulfment by holding annual processions
where they marched with giant phalli, but the vase illustrations of
the phalli show women holding them up in the air. Even powerful
kings, like Odin or Wodan, had to be periodically sacrificed to the
Mother Goddess, the World Ash, to assuage her blood thirst and cleanse
the people.171 Only by sacrificing together could men establish
patrilineal kinship and political power. Even in Greece and Rome,
patrilineal kin only knew they were kin because they sacrificed together:
sacrifice was called "a remedy for having been born of woman." Even
death in war strengthened the weak bonding between males—when an Aztec
captured an enemy, he called him "my beloved son" and the captive
answered, "my beloved father," then killed him.172 That
the sacrificial victim contained the Bad Boy Alter can be seen at
the beginning of the ritual, when the victim is "injected with the
poison" of childhood sin, rubbed with dirt if the victim was an animal
or given many sexual partners before the sacrifice if the victim was
a human. That it was internal alters who demanded the sacrifice was
indicated by the priest saying, "The gods have done this deed; I did
not do it!" or, as in Athens, by holding a trial after the sacrifice
in which the full blame for the slaying was attributed to the knife,
which, "having been found guilty, was punished by being destroyed."173
The more wealthy and successful ancient societies
became, the more guilty they felt, the more their growth panic led
them to defend against their avenging maternal alters by clinging
to a more and more powerful male leader. As Earle observes, "chiefdoms
are states of mind [and] chiefs rule not because of their power but
because of their place in a sacredly chartered world order"174
—the world order of alters and their containers. The more kings appropriated
maternal alter power—her mana—the more they had to go through
seasonal cleansing ceremonies, including ritual abasement and even
"killing of the king," in order to punish themselves for their hubris.175
In these ceremonies, the king was ritually called "a turd [who] has
come to save us,"176 hit in the face with a sword, and
only then invested with Heil,177 his portion of
maternal mana. But everyone in antiquity knew where his power
really came from: the vaginal maternal crown, which was addressed
by the king as "O Red Crown, Let there be fear of me like the fear
of thee;" the throne, called the "mother" of the king; and the sceptre,
"a branch from the placental Tree of Life."178
THE MASOCHISTIC PSYCHOCLASS OF EARLY CHRISTIANITY
As mothers moved from infanticidal to abandoning mode childrearing
(see Chapters 6 and 7), early Christians could internalize a mommy
who doesn’t actually kill her children but only abandons
them, both through emotional abandonment and through sending them
to wetnurses, fosterage, monasteries, service with others, etc. Even
profound neglect is less devastating than watching your baby sister
be strangled, so early Christians could for the first time in history
hope to get their mother’s/God’s love (redemption) if they show her
their pain and get her pity. This display of pain to get the love
of the mother is known as the masochistic personality, a lower level
borderline condition,179 which for the first time in history
enables people to imagine that if they debase and torture themselves,
the mother/God will feel sorry for them and might provide salvation,
eventual closeness, rather than just helplessness and unbearable loneliness.
The gods of antiquity were distant, impersonal gods:
"The gods might often mingle with men and women, but they did not
seem to spend their time cultivating reciprocal love."180
As Aristotle said, "When one party is removed to a great distance,
as God is, the possibility of friendship ceases."181 But
the Christian God "loves and can be loved in return."182
For abandoning mode children, if you worship and love your Mommy/God,
if you take over yourself her beating and tortures of your body, if
you give up all personal needs and starve yourself and avoid sex,
you will through your masochistic display gain forgiveness and perhaps
even be allowed eventually to merge with Her.183
Christ is, of course, the main Suffering Victim Alter
who has been sent to earth by God to display his wounds and ask for
pity on behalf of mankind. While the narcissistic personalities of
antiquity generally agreed with Socrates that "no one is willfully
evil,"184 the masochistic personalities of early Christians
put sin at the center of life and built up a church of expiation and
confession that for the first time allowed pardon for the sins. The
musings of early theologians about Christ sounded like the ruminations
of the child about his or her mother’s mistreatment:
God abandoned him, he treated him as the
most abominable of men; and after an infinity of disgraces, of ignominies,
and suffering, without any regard that he was His own Son, he caused
him to die by the most shameful and cruel torture there ever was…He
worked his vengeance on His Son, as if He had nothing to do with him.185
But the Christian, like the abandoning mode child,
then totally absolved the Mother/God of all blame by a simple trick,
saying: "I am all to blame. I deserve the torture. Mommy/God will
pity me if I torture myself." The trick is one regularly used
today by lower level borderline masochists, who show extremely high
occurrences of reported childhood neglect (92 percent)186
and physical and sexual abuse (59 percent to 91 percent), who cut
and burn and torture themselves endlessly in order to punish themselves
and gain pity from their mommy alters. Earlier gods in antiquity killed
and tortured children, of course, but they, like Jehovah, only "laughed
at the slaughter of the damned."187 The Christian God loved
you for torturing and sacrificing yourself.
The masochistic display of one’s wounds had already
become a popular group-fantasy of antiquity by early Christian times.
Gladiatorial combats "to appease the spirits of the dead" were widespread,
where warriors volunteered to be killed in the arena in order to display
their wounds and gain the applause of the people.188 Wholly
gratuitous wars were fought mainly for masochistic purposes; it was
said that "warriors glory in their wounds; they rejoice to display
their flowing blood…The man who returns from battle unhurt may have
fought as well, but he who returns wounded is held in higher esteem."189
Christian masochism ritualized the absolution/penance ritual to assure
adherents that when they felt unloved they could go to a church, relive
Christ’s agonies, confess their sins, carry out penances and assure
their Mommy/God that they still worshipped Her and that it was really
the child’s/worshipper’s fault that Mommy/God was so unhappy.
Confession, penance and absolution are, of course,
endless alter propitiations: "Gregory frequently expressed his fear
that, because of God’s unknown and unpredictable severity, man could
never know if he inflicted enough suffering upon himself to propitiate
God…punishment should take the form of a constant, unremitting anxiety
and sorrow for one’s sins…as teeth tearing the flesh."190
Both Christians and Jews "engaged in a contest and reflection about
the new-fangled practice of martyrdom,"191 even unto suicide.
Jesus, too, says John, really committed suicide, and Augustine spoke
of "the mania for self-destruction" of early Christians.192
Roman authorities tried hard to avoid Christians because they "goaded,
chided, belittled and insulted the crowds until they demanded their
death."193 One man shouted to the Roman officials: "I want
to die! I am a Christian," leading the officials to respond: "If they
wanted to kill themselves, there was plenty of cliffs they could jump
off."194 But the Christians, following Tertullian’s dicta that "martyrdom
is required by God," forced their own martyrdom so they could die
in an ecstatic trance: "Although their tortures were gruesome, the
martyrs did not suffer, enjoying their analgesic state."195
Even today, about 10 per cent of masochistic borderlines complete
suicide,196 always with a maternal "Hidden Executioner"
alter present to feel pity.
Short of suicide, martyrdom and asceticism was built
into every element of Christian ritual and practice. Monasticism was
an orgy of masochistic penance for the sins of individuation, with
fasts, flagellations, continence and pilgrimages routine requirements—restaging
the starvations, bindings, beatings and expulsions to wetnurse of
childhood. Yet, unlike earlier religions, Christianity allowed their
priests to forgive, console and reconcile the sinner/child
with Mommy/God after the punishment. Whereas earlier religions punished
animals or others as Victim Alters, Christianity encouraged the punishment
of one’s own body as a cleansing "second birth." Mommy/God could
be pacified by martyrdom and one could receive Her/His love at last.
Octavius described the pleasure God had at seeing Christians suffering:
"How fair a spectacle for God to see when a Christian stands face
to face with pain."197 As Pope Urban told the knights in
order to get them to go on the First Crusade: "We hold out to you
a war which contains the glorious reward of martyrdom,"198
with its final reward, the love of God, since "only martyrs will attain
to Paradise before the Second Coming."199
That priests were punishers leads one to wonder if
they were not really concretizations of Perpetrator Alters, that is,
remnants of abusers. Although one usually is used to identifying the
"legions of demons and spirits" that made Christians gash themselves
as the perpetrators, priests themselves are usually pictured as helpful
figures. Yet priestly alters of masochists today often turn out to
have the features of rapists,200 while psychotherapists
who treat ritual abuse survivors find that "Satan usually turns out
to be a traumatized child," raging over early sexual abuse.201
In fact, alters and religious fantasy figures usually contain remnants
of both the perpetrators and victims of childhood traumas. The Devil
might embody the rage of the raped child, but he also has attributes
of the rapist: he is naked, he has a "long nose" (penis), he is red
(flush of erect penis) and he is "hairy" (pubic hair). The precise
details of the image of Christ on the Cross are all from childhood.
Christ is shown as an infant (naked, except for swaddling-band loincloth),
abandoned by Mommy (God), bound or nailed to a wooden Cross (the wooden
board all infants were bound to during swaddling), with a crown of
thorns (the painful head-shaping devices used on infants before swaddling)
and with a bloody hole in his side (evidence of the childhood rape,
vaginal or anal). Even the details of Christ’s life conform to routine
childhood conditions. For instance, Christ got the bloody wound in
his side, the subject of much theological concern, because his Father
sent him down to be crucified—just as so many real fathers at the
time sent their young children to their neighbors to be used as sexual
objects—and the bad soldier stripped Christ and stuck his phallic
lance into him—just as the bad neighbor stripped the child and stuck
his erect penis into him. If sexuality meant memories of rape to most
children growing up at that time, it is no wonder that Christianity
preached sexuality was shameful, "a token of human bondage," and must
be avoided at all costs. The ritual of the Mass, too—with "the Lord,
sacrificed, and laid upon the altar, and the priest, standing, and
all the people empurpled with his most precious blood" (Chrysostom)202
—is equally a "rite of penetration," a restaging of childhood rape,
as the frightening priest in his black robe circles slowly around
the helpless, naked Christ. The deepest feeling behind all these Christian
rites was the loneliness and hunger of the worshipper—the abandonment
depression—so it is not surprising that images of real hunger often
broke through during the Christian ritual. Priests and worshippers
often reported that during Holy Communion they would see in the host
"a very young boy; and when the priest began to break the host, they
thought they saw an angel coming down out of the sky who cut the boy
up with a knife." Or else they would fear that the worshipper might
not want to bite into "the Communion wafer if they could see that
they were actually biting off the head, hands and feet of a little
child."203 Even Christ himself, the Victim Alter, was thought
to be terribly hungry: "Christ’s hunger is great beyond measure; he
devours us…his hunger is insatiable."204 The abandoning
mode child’s hunger—for love, food, care, support—is never forgotten,
and it can be found at the heart of every Christian ritual throughout
the Middle Ages.
THE BORDERLINE PSYCHOCLASS OF LATER CHRISTIANITY
It must be recalled that new parenting modes begin with just a few
people at a time, which means that ambivalent mode parenting and the
resulting higher level borderline personalities—which begin in the
twelfth century—continued for some time to be minorities in European
families, co-existing with earlier masochistic, narcissistic and schizoid
personalities in their societies. By the twelfth century, when Western
Europe began to move in new directions, the empires of antiquity had
collapsed in a masochistic orgy of military self-destruction. The
clinging needs of the new borderline psychoclass—a symptom of their
feelings of isolation, emptiness and separation anxiety—were now defended
against by constructing the profound personal bonds of feudalism.
"The borderline," says Hartocollis, "is an angry individual. Characterized
by oral demandingness, often with a paranoid flavour [and] a sense
of emptiness or depression…making him feel chronically lonesome, frustrated,
alienated."205 This emptiness was known to medieval psychoclasses
as acidia, which one twelfth-century monk says is "a disgust
of the heart, an enormous loathing of yourself…a great bitterness…Your
soul is torn to pieces, confused and split up, sad and embittered."206
From the twelfth century on, acedia attracted much attention
as a "turning away from God," again, the fault of the person/child,
not of the God/Mommy. When people confessed to feelings of acedia
and reported their feelings of despair and self-hatred, they were
given severe penitentials by their priests to ward off their suicidal
thoughts.
The clinging of the feudal bond is paralleled to the
clinging tie to God and to Mother Mary and Jesus, who for the first
time takes on overt maternal traits, even allowing worshippers to
suck his breasts and wounds.207 Real ambivalent mode mothers
were now nurturing enough so that one can even find descriptions of
"God as a woman nursing the soul at her breasts, drying its tears
and punishing its petty mischief-making…"208 Of course,
in true borderline style, the price of some closeness with God is
total devotion, the medieval Christian saying: "To my beloved, I will
forever be His servant, His slave, All for God, and nothing for me."209
As contemporary borderlines say: "I know you will love and take care
of me if I don’t self-activate. I’ll please you by clinging and complying
with your wishes, so you will take care of me, and these bad (abandonment)
feelings will go away."210
The advances of borderline personalities beyond lower-level
masochistic psychoclasses were, however, profound, and soon began
to carry Western Europe beyond the accomplishments of the rest of
the world. Much has been written of "the invention of the self and
individuality" beginning in the twelfth century. Prior to this period,
there was not even a word for "self," and the word "personality" meant
a mask held before an actor, i.e., a "false self."211 But
"the practice of self-examination was deeper and more widespread in
twelfth-century Europe than at any time before [and] medieval Europe
changed from a ‘shame culture’ to a ‘guilt culture’" as inner motives
and not just outer behavior became the focus of confessions and of
literature.212 Autobiographies began to multiply, seals
indicating personal identity began to be used more widely and writers
began to wonder if God might allow a unique self for each
person, a homo interior that was fashioned by one—"in the
image of God," of course, but nevertheless made by one’s real self.213
The results in society from the twelfth through the fifteenth century
of these advances in self were astonishing: a vast expansion in agriculture
and early industries, the beginnings of both State formation and of
capitalism, an upsurge in trade and exploration, a huge population
growth as infanticide dropped, an enormous growth of cities and civil
rights. Change became not only possible but preferable for the first
time in history. Those people in these centuries who were still masochistic
and narcissistic decompensated from all the change, became possessed
by devils, imagined they might soon be thrown in Hell for their bold
new aspirations, or flagellated themselves for wanting to be independent.
Growth panic soon began to produce periodic fears of millenarian violence,
leading directly to the apocalyptic expectations and witch-hunts of
the Renaissance and Reformation.
THE DEPRESSIVE PSYCHOCLASS OF THE RENAISSANCE AND
REFORMATION
The new childrearing mode beginning around the sixteenth century—the
intrusive mode—was a leap forward, when mothers stopped sending their
children to wetnurse and stopped leaving them hungry in their cradles,
faced the tasks of caring for them boldly if uncertainly, ended swaddling,
beat them less and reduced their being sent out as servants. As it
was described earlier, "parents shifted from trying to stop childrens’
growth to trying only to control it and make it ‘obedient.’ True empathy
begins with intrusive mode parents, producing a general improvement
in the level of care and reduced mortality, leading to more investment
in each child." The difference between borderline and depressive personalities
today has been documented to be a result of far less overt sexual
and physical abuse during childhood, with far less impulsivity, low
self-esteem and self-destructive acts in the depressive, despite the
presence of sadness as a major emotion.214 This is because
what the depressives are doing that borderlines cannot yet do is facing
their abandonment depression. Psychotherapists find that after
treating borderlines and confronting their defenses for some time,
they then become more depressed, having finally to face the abandonment
fears of their childhood rather than running away from them into clinging,
self-destructive behavior, since "depression accompanies improvement…the
beginnings of identity integration, the development of integrated
self and object representations [and] conscious guilt and remorse."215
Ever since Huizinga analyzed the "sombre melancholy
that weighed on people’s souls" after the close of the Middle Ages,
the period has been well known for its deep despondency, when, says
Donne, God "reserved for these times an extraordinary sadness, a predominant
melancholy."216 From sixteenth-century diaries to Burton’s
Anatomy of Melancholy, books on inner life were little more
than records of the writer’s depressions and how he tried to overcome
them. Humanists glorified melancholy as the heightened self-awareness
of the intellectual, the cost of individualism, and they were right.
Melancholy had to be faced for one to be what Pico called a man "restrained
by no narrow bonds, according to thine own free will in thou, thine
own maker and molder, fashioning thyself in whatever manner thou likest
best."217 Both Jaques and Hamlet were proudly presented
by Shakespeare as "melancholy philosophers," wearing black with pride,
"condemning abuses, but never condemning earthly existence."218
Ficino speculated on "Why Melancholics Are Intelligent," noting that
the most bold, learned people he knew were always melancholic,219
and philosophers gave the excellent advice that friendship was the
best antidote to "melancholy, the malaise of the age."220
Elizabethans thought melancholy "both a very wretched state and a
very happy state…[and] melancholy was often praised and sought after
as a great felicity," a mark of an intellectual who had "risen superior
to the petty concerns of ordinary men and occupied with thoughts of
worth and dignity,"221 thoughts of personal meaning and
self improvement.
Though Mommy’s/God’s grace might only come after "holy
desperation" for the depressive personality of the Reformation, though
Her forgiveness might still be "unpredictable, unknowable and incomprehensible,"
if one obeys Her dicta then She might be a forgiving God who cared
for you.222 Luther could now hope that God would actually
love him because He was sometimes kind! This hope suddenly
allowed an expansion of the real self, and the world, and its activities
suddenly became invested with new vigor. For the new depressive psychoclass,
Mommy/God didn’t need you sexually, so celibacy was not necessary.
She could forgive, so one could actually trust Her and cast
oneself upon Her mercy. She paid attention to your need for food,
so you didn’t have to fast your whole life. She actually listened
to you, so you could individuate your self beyond clinging to religious
and political authorities. Dissociation and splitting declined for
these depressives—achieving for the first time what Melanie Klein
calls "the depressive position" which allows merger of the good breast/bad
breast split—so women were not split into virgins and whores (Mary
and Eve) but were for the first time seen as human beings with both
good and bad qualities, and marriage for the first time in history
became a worthy goal rather than just a way to legitimate fornication.
By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the new
mode of intrusive childrearing had catapulted Western Europe far beyond
the earlier psychoclasses of the rest of the world, giving their minority
of depressives a new sense of self worth and the ideal of cumulative,
necessary progress which led to the modern world we know today. The
growth of knowledge, the invention of printing, the new questioning
of authority, the exploration of new lands and ideas, all were evidence
that "European people had altered in some fundamental way"223
—a change in their psyches, not in their environment. For the first
time in history, Mommy/God "was relegated to a vague and impenetrable
heaven, somewhere up in the skies. Man and man alone was the standard
by which all things were measure."224 Science began its
spectacular leap into the unknown. Political systems without divine
sanctions and economics that were based on real trust became the goals
of society. Joy in life need not be something sinful, hope was allowed
and freedom for self exploration did not need to be disobedience to
Mommy/God. These lessons—first learned in families at the feet of
innovative mothers—soon produced new institutions to express these
new freedoms, particularly in France and England, where childrearing
was most advanced.
Unfortunately, while depressives could begin to try
to live out their new freedoms, they were still a minority in these
centuries, and the earlier psychoclasses experienced the new freedoms
of the age as terribly dangerous and certain to call upon them the
wrath of Mommy/God. These centuries of progress were therefore also
centuries of apocalyptic fears and wars, when people were certain
that so much change would unchain Satan and his swarms of demon alters
and that the world was certain to end soon. Apocalyptic prophecies,
cults and religious wars proliferated in Reformation Europe, particularly
in areas like Germany where childrearing had changed the least.225
What Trevor-Roper calls "the general crisis of the seventeenth century"226
was in fact a psychoclass conflict, and the demons, witches and anti-Christs
that roamed Europe at that time were all really the Persecutory Alters
that inhabited the schizoid, narcissistic, masochistic and borderline
psychoclasses that still represented the majority of Europe. These
earlier psychoclasses responded with violence to all the progress
of the period, "acting out with fierce energy a shared [millenarian]
phantasy which, though delusional, yet brought them such intense emotional
relief that they…were willing both to kill and to die for it."227
The new religious services of the Reformation were felt to be "full
of wild liberty," and "beast-like carnal liberty" was reported seen
at anabaptist prayer meetings, where services were said to be conducted
in the nude.228 All the individuation would certainly bring
punishment upon mankind, and pamphlets were circulated describing
how clouds were raining blood and flocks of birds were holding cosmic
battles in the sky "as auguries of some impending disaster."229
A placental "Many-Headed Monster" was hallucinated as savaging Europe,
carrying out the Day of Judgement because "by now seven-year-old children
demonstrated more wickedness than had previously been possible by
evil old men…the world had become so wicked that things could hardly
get worse."230 Religious wars broke out all over Europe,
as "God was unable to bear it any longer and decided to cleanse his
Church with a great scourge."231
Historians have long been puzzled by why the witchcraft
epidemic took place in the centuries that were most progressive, but
if the craze is seen as a reaction to growth panic it becomes explainable.
Tens of thousands of women responded to their new freedoms by becoming
possessed by their alters and falling into trances: "Observers spoke
of the possessed as ‘choked,’ subjected to ‘thousands of cruel pinches,’
‘stuck [with] innumerable pins,’ and ‘cut with knives and struck with
blows that they could not bear,"232 as they restaged the
memories of swaddling pins, parental blows and other childhood traumas.
Those who persecuted witches were obviously taking vengeance upon
their mommies; indeed, most witches were either mothers or wetnurses.233
A witch was transparently a mommy, since she rode on a maternal broom,
had special teats where "imps" sucked on her body, smothered babies
in their cradles and came into your bedroom uninvited and seduced
you.234 As Roper puts it: "Relations between mothers, those
occupying maternal roles and children, formed the stuff of most witchcraft
accusations."235 "Over and over again in the trial records,
the accused women are addressed as ‘Mother’…the witch is a monstrous
mother…"236
The rape of children formed a central focus for witchcraft
group-fantasies. Descriptions of the sexual orgies that went on at
sabbats clearly reveal their origins in childhood rape attacks,
and young girls who had "convulsive fits" in court "as the Devil entered
them"237 restaged each detail of their earlier rapes before
their startled audiences. Nuns in particular were afflicted with demonic
possession, going into trances and accusing priests of seducing them,
which they often had really done.238 The extreme youth
of those raped can be seen in their complaint that "the genital organs
of their Demons are so huge and so excessively rigid that they cannot
be admitted without the greatest pain."239 Entire villages
would sometimes periodically go into trances together, call themselves
"Benandanti," and fight Devils together, all while fully dissociated,
"as if I was both sleeping and not sleeping."240 By the
time the witch-craze had disappeared by the beginning of the eighteenth
century, a million innocent people had died in an orgy of alter persecution
caused by too much progress during the Reformation—just as six million
would later die in the alter persecution caused by too much progress
in Weimar Germany.
THE NEUROTIC PSYCHOCLASS OF MODERN TIMES
The socializing mode of childrearing that began in the eighteenth
century and that continues to be the ideal of most nations today replaced
the absolute obedience of the intrusive psychoclass with parental
manipulation and psychological punishments, in order to make the child
"fit into the world" as a replica of the parent.241 Individuation
was still limited, since the needs and goals of the parent superceded
those of the child as it attempted to separate, but empathy was now
available to parents to ensure that basic care was provided. It was
the socializing psychoclass that built the modern world, with its
ideal of the competent self and the quest for a real self
as a life-long existential quest.242 As Masterson puts
it: "The psychoneurotic personality…has the capacity for whole self-
and whole object-relations, and repression has replaced splitting.
From the perspective of the personality disorder, to be psychoneurotic
is an achievement."243
Rather than switching into full possession trances
and demon alters, the neurotic psychoclass of modern times switches
into their social alters, their social roles (see Chapter 4), as organized
by the group-fantasies of nations rather than by religious groups.
Sacrifice for the Mommy-Nation—dying for the Motherland—replaces dying
for Christ: "We are to die so that the motherland may live; for while
we live the motherland is dying…A nation can only regenerate itself
in a bath of blood."244 It was the nation as a
master group-fantasy that organized and contained both the new faith
in progress and its sacrificial wars, acted out in periodic cycles
of innovative, depressive, manic and war stages (see Chapter 5). In
each stage, nations follow a different psychoclass style. In the innovative
stage, the neurotic psychoclass provides new social, political and
economic progress; in the depressive stage, the depressive psychoclass
is followed into economic depression; in the manic stage, narcissists
take over with their grandiose projects; and in the war stage nations
follow self-destructive masochists and paranoid schizoids into violence.
Choosing earlier psychoclasses—psychological fossils—as leaders has
become a constant practice in modern nations, only masked by the idealization
of the public switched into their social alters. To realize that we
willingly delegate to a handful of men sitting in a deep trance in
the Oval Office the power to blow up much of the world depending upon
whether they think they feel "humiliated"—as in the Cuban Missile
Crisis—is to realize the bizarre extent of the dissociation between
fantasy and reality that continues to pervade our modern psyches.
All the other aspects of modern industrial society
are equally results of the new socializing psychoclass childrearing,
causing a greater increase in material prosperity in the past two
centuries than in all the rest of human history. The reason for this
astonishing progress is that science, technology and economic development
depend more on investments in parenting than investments
in equipment, since they crucially require an "exploring self" constructed
from childhood. A few economists realize that the wealth of nations
lies in the development of psyches more than in the investment of
capital. Everett Hagan and Lawrence Harrison, for instance, have demonstrated
that those nations furthest behind today in economic development suffer
from a severe underinvestment in families and children, not in capital
equipment.245 The historical record is clear: early pioneers
in science and technology first had to overcome their alter projections
before they could discover how the world worked. As Keith Thomas puts
it: "It was the abandonment of magic which made possible the upsurge
of technology, not the other way round."246 Newton had
to stop seeing falling objects "longing to return to Mother Earth"
before he could posit a force of gravity. Chemists had to give up
"alchemical visions of womb-battles between good and evil" inside
their flasks before they could observe the real causes of chemical
change.247 Farmers had to be able to empathize with their
horses in order to invent the harness collar that moved the pressure
down from their throats to their flanks so they wouldn’t be choked
in order to increase the loads they could pull.248 Farmers
also had to stop thinking of plowing as "tearing at the breast of
Mother Earth" in order to invent the deep plow and change the face
of European agriculture. Men had to begin to value their families
in order to build wooden floors in their homes rather than leaving
them clay as was the practice for millennia.249 Every invention
had its origin in the evolution of the psyche; every exploration of
nature was a dimension of the exploration of the self.
Economic life, too, only evolved as childrearing and
the psyche evolved. Tribal societies both in the past and in the present
could not trust, because parents were untrustworthy, so they could
not allow much wealth or surplus out of which they could create economic
progress. Ownership was felt to be dangerous selfishness, envy ran
rampant and ambition was feared: "The anthropologist may see people
behaving with generosity, but this is the result of fear."250
Those who acquired too much were expected to either engage in gift-exchange251
and other redistributive rituals252 or else to periodically
destroy their surplus in cleansing sacrificial ceremonies.253
Even the invention of money came from the sacred objects used for
sacrifice to deities.254 "Money is condensed wealth; condensed
wealth is condensed guilt…money is filthy because it remains guilt."255
What held back economic development for so many millennia
was that early civilizations were so abusively brought up that they
spent most of their energies chasing "ghosts from the nursery"—religious,
political and economic domination group-fantasies—rather than joining
in together to solve the real tasks of life. The appalling poverty
of most people throughout history has been simply an extension of
the emotional poverty of the historical family, making real cooperation
in society impossible. For instance, slavery was one of the most wasteful,
uneconomical systems ever invented, since denying autonomy to one’s
fellow workers simply wasted both the slaves’ and the owners’ productivity
and inventiveness. Running the world like a prison, with one half
occupied with guarding the other half, has always been extremely unproductive.
That unfree labor is always unproductive labor has long been acknowledged
by economists.256 Slaves were kept "as expressions of their
owners’ status and prestige"257 even when they could barely
manage to pick grapes because of their shackles. Owning slaves may
have been very dangerous to you and to your family, and they may have
often run away. But everyone still wanted to have them so they could
be used to restage the tortures of one’s childhood: "Galen remarked
how common it was for slaves to be punched with the fists, to be kicked,
to have their eyes put out, and how his own mother had had the habit
of biting her maidservants."258 Equipment for torturing
slaves was widespread, including special whips and racks for beatings,
special knives for facial mutilation and castration and metal plates
and flaming torches for burnings. "There was even a torture and execution
service operated by a company of undertakers…Flogging and crucifixion
were standard options at a flat rate to the user…"259
With a third or more of ancient societies being slaves,
an unending supply of bodies to flog was assured, even though this
meant remaining mired in low-productivity economies.260
Throughout the Roman classical period, Finley says, improvements in
economic techniques were "marginal [because] patterns of land use
and methods of tillage remained unchanged."261 It was more
important to restage early trumatic beatings and domination fantasies
than to improve the abysmal squalor in which nearly everyone lived.
Even with the disappearance of slavery during the Middle Ages—which
Marc Bloch called "one of the most profound transformations mankind
has known"262 —the serfdom and other kinds of bondage that
replaced it kept Europe for centuries in a rate of per capita product
of only a tiny fraction of a percent per year.263 It was
only by the early modern period when the need to restage family slavery
began to decline that trust began to replace domination and
the "take-off" phase in economics could begin. "The ultimate explanation
of economic development lies not in purely economic factors, such
as land, labor and capital…these will [occur] when people learn that
it is good business to be just and considerate toward one’s neighbors;
to solve quarrels peacefully; [and] to be held accountable for the
efficient use of resources." Purely economic theories that cannot
concieve of psychogenic causes are reduced to statements such as:
"No one planned Progress as a whole. It simply erupted."265
In addition to a take-off in economic progress, the
modern psychoneurotic personality began to achieve levels of intimacy
between men and women that were simply unknown to previous psychoclasses.
When mothers were incestuous, it was not surprising that women were
feared as sexually insatiable by men, and pederasty and rape were
preferred to intimate, married love. All women were in danger of turning
into dominating mothers and therefore had to be beaten; Homer’s word
for ‘wife,’ damar, means "broken into submission." In addition,
that women throughout so much of history were accused of being unable
to restrain their sexual appetites was not just a patriarchal myth—it
was more the result of the widespread rape of young girls being restaged
later in life, just as so many raped girls today grow up to repeat
their sexual assaults later on in prostitution or adultery. That human
sexuality through antiquity was conflated with violence and domination
and that Christianity was the most anti-sexual religion known to mankind
are only understandable as normal reactions to severe childhood seductions,
not as inexplicable religious teachings.
That "conjugal love between husband and wife was considered
ridiculous and impossible"266 in antiquity is better understood
as a consequence of the narcissistic personality’s need to have perfection
in their partner, fearing to risk attaching themselves to someone
who was imperfect and whom they might lose like they lost their mothers
and fathers earlier. Only through effective polygamy—either formal
or through having concubines and slaves as alternatives to wives—could
depending upon one woman be avoided. Indeed, the jealous mothers of
the gynarchies of the past would often step in between their sons
and their wives in order to keep them tied to themselves—as, for instance,
Augustine’s mother did when she made him dismiss his concubine, who
had lived faithfully with him for years. Even Christian marriages
were supposed to be passionless between the spouses. God stood in
for the grandmother and demanded that all love and passion be reserved
for Himself. It was not really until the depressive psychoclass began
to face their abandonment depression in the sixteenth century that
Erasmus could startle his readers with the view that marriage was
superior to virginity and Puritan wives could be able to write passionate
love poems to their husbands.267 And it was only by the
eighteenth century’s socializing psychoclass that "husbands and wives
who cherished each other were begun to be held in the greatest esteem
[as] conjugal love attracted not sarcasm, but the most fervent admiration,
thus giving rise to a sort of contest to see who could love his or
her beloved spouse the most, who could best prove to the world the
unshakable fidelity felt toward one’s life partner."268
THE INDIVIDUATED PSYCHOCLASS OF POST-MODERN TIMES
It is difficult to describe what kind of world might be made by individuated
personalities, as the first helping mode parents—where both mother
and father unconditionally love their children and help them achieve
their own goals and own real selves from birth—have only been around
for a few decades in the most advanced societies. As I watch my own
children and some of their helping psychoclass friends grow up and
establish their productive lives, I see them as very different from
my own socializing psychoclass peers. They are far more empathic and
therefore more concerned about others than we ever were, and this
has made them far more activist in their lives in trying to make a
difference and change the world for the better, mostly involving themselves
in local activities rather than global political changes. They lack
all need for nationalism, wars and other grandiose projects, and in
the organizations they start are genuinely non-authoritarian. There
is no question that if the world could treat children with helping
mode parenting, wars and all the other self-destructive social conditions
we still suffer from in the twenty-first century will be cured, simply
because the world will be filled with individuated personalities who
are empathic toward others and who are not self-destructive. A world
that loves and trusts its children and encourages them to develop
their unique selves will be a world of very different institutions,
a world without wars, jails and other domination group-fantasies.
The main problem is that the evolution of childrearing
has so far been a slow, uneven historical process, depending greatly
upon increasing the support given innovative mothers and their hopeful
daughters. Unfortunately, in a world where our destructive technology
has far outrun our childrearing progress—where a single submarine
can now carry a sufficient number nuclear warheads to destroy most
of the world with the push of a button—we do not have the luxury of
just waiting for childrearing to evolve. If we do, we will certainly
blow ourselves up long before child abuse disappears enough to make
us want to disarm. What we need now is some way for the more advanced
psychoclasses to teach childrearing to the less evolved parents,
a way to end child abuse and neglect quickly enough to avoid the global
holocaust that is awaiting us.
ENDING CHILD ABUSE BY INVESTING IN THE REAL WEALTH
OF NATIONS
Ever since the earliest psychohistorical studies were published linking
child abuse to war and social violence, one physician-psychohistorian,
Robert McFarland, concluded that it must be possible to end child
abuse in his community by starting a new institution, Community Parenting
Centers, and with every means possible teach good parenting
to every new baby born in his city, Boulder, Colorado. It seemed ridiculous
to McFarland that the entire world depends upon good parenting, while
parenting was the only subject never taught in schools or anywhere
else in the world. For the past two decades, therefore, McFarland
has run The Parenting Place in several counties of Boulder, reaching
out to visit every baby born in the areas and giving substantial support
to all mothers and fathers—holding parenting discussion groups, baby
massage courses, single mothers assistance, showing them how to bring
up children without hitting them, how to foster their independence,
etc. The wide range of activities of The Parenting Place can be seen
in two articles in The Journal of Psychohistory.269
Over half the families choose to be visited weekly in their homes
for parenting instructions. Since no new mother or father wants
to reject and abuse their babies, what McFarland found was that providing
this help and hope for parents allowed their underlying affection
to replace the abuse and neglect that comes from fear and despair—so
that his statistics from local police and hospital records now show
a real decrease in child abuse reports.
What is most astonishing is that McFarland found that
Parenting Centers costs are far lower than what is saved in the later
costs of abuse to the community. That the small budget for the Centers
is offset many times over by the costs to the communities of later
social services and criminal behavior is a not unexpected finding,
given that sociologists have calculated that "the costs to society
of career criminal behavior, drug use, and high-school dropouts for
a single youth is $1.7 to $2.3 million."270 With the world
spending trillions of dollars a year preparing for war and additional
trillions for jails, establishing Parenting Centers in every community
on earth for just a small part of this cost would soon provide an
enormous saving to mankind—an immediate saving, even before
the actual savings from the huge destructiveness of wars is realized.
McFarland calculates that every community on earth (he is even starting
a Parenting Center in Tajikistan in a sister city to Boulder) can
be supported by a small "children’s tax" of one-tenth of one percent
increase in the sales tax.
Only by starting now on a vast world-wide program
to end child neglect and abuse and raise all of our precious children
with respect can we avoid the likely coming global holocaust. Only
by reducing dissociation to a minimum through empathic parenting can
we avoid inflicting the self-destructive power we now have available
to us. This is the single most important finding of the new science
of psychohistory. Free universal training centers for parents may
be a radical new notion, but so once was the idea of free universal
schools for children. Our task is clear and our resources sufficient
to make our world safe for the first time in our long, violent history.
All it takes now is the will to begin.
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