THE EVOLUTION OF CHILDHOOD
Do ye hear the children weeping,
Oh my brothers . . .
The Cry of the Children
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
1
The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently
begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes, the lower the
level of child care, and the more likely children are to be killed,
abandoned, beaten, terrorized, and sexually abused. It is our task
here to see how much of this childhood history can be recaptured from
the evidence that remains to us.
That this pattern has not previously been noticed by historians is
because serious history has long been considered a record of public
not private events. Historians have concentrated so much on the noisy
sand-box of history, with its fantastic castles and magnificent battles,
that they have generally ignored what is going on in the homes around
the playground. And where historians usually look to the sandbox battles
of yesterday for the causes of those of today, we instead ask how
each generation of parents and children creates those issues which
are later acted out in the arena of public life.
At first glance, this lack of interest in the lives of children seems
odd. Historians have been traditionally committed to explaining continuity
2
and change over time, and ever since Plato it has been known that
child-hood is a key to this understanding. The importance of parent-child
relations for social change was hardly discovered by Freud; St. Augustine's
cry, "Give me other mothers and I will give you another world,"
has been echoed by major thinkers for fifteen centuries without affecting
historical writing. Since Freud, of course, our view of childhood
has acquired a new dimension, and in the past half century the study
of childhood has become routine for the psychologist, the sociologist,
and the anthropologist. It is only beginning for the historian. Such
determined avoidance requires an explanation.
Historians usually blame the paucity of the sources for the lack
of serious study of childhood in the past. Peter Laslett wonders why
the "crowds and crowds of little children are strangely missing
from the written record. . . . There is something mysterious about
the silence of all these multitudes of babes in arms, toddlers and
adolescents in the statements men made at the time about their own
experience. . . . We cannot say whether fathers helped in the tending
of infants. . . . No-thing can as yet be said on what is called by
the psychologists toilet training. . . . It is in fact an effort of
mind to remember all the time that children were always present in
such numbers in the traditional world, nearly half the whole community
living in a condition of semi-obliteration."(1) As the family
sociologist James Bossard puts it: "Unfortunately, the history
of childhood has never been written, and there is some doubt whether
it ever can be written [because] of the dearth of historical data
bearing on childhood."(2)
This conviction is so strong among historians that it is not surprising
that this book began not in the field of history at all but in applied
psychoanalysis. Five years ago, I was engaged in writing a book on
a psychoanalytic theory of historical change, and, in reviewing the
results of half a century of applied psychoanalysis, it seemed to
me that it had failed to become a science mainly because it had not
become evolutionary. Since the repetition compulsion, by definition,
cannot explain historical change, every attempt by Freud, Roheim,
Kardiner, and others to develop a theory of change ultimately ended
in a sterile chicken-or-egg dispute about whether child-rearing depends
on cultural traits or the other way around. That child-rearing practices
are the basis for adult personality was proven again and again. Where
they originated stumped every psychoanalyst who raised the question.(3)
In a paper given in 1968 before the Association for Applied Psychoanalysis,
I outlined an evolutionary theory of historical change in parent-child
relations, and proposed that since historians had not as yet begun
the job of writing childhood history, the Association should sponsor
a team of historians who would dig back into the sources to un-
3
cover the major stages of child-rearing in the West since antiquity.
This essay is the outcome of that project.
The "psychogenic theory of history" outlined in my project
pro-posal began with a comprehensive theory of historical change.
It posited that the central force for change in history is neither
technology nor economics, but the "psychogenic" changes
in personality occurring be-cause of successive generations of parent-child
interactions. This theory involved several hypotheses, each subject
to proof or disproof by empirical historical evidence:
- That the evolution of parent-child relations constitutes an independent
source of historical change. The origin of this evolution lies in
the ability of successive generations of parents to regress to the
psychic age of their children and work through the anxieties of
that age in a better manner the second time they encounter them
than they did during their own childhood. The process is similar
to that of psychoanalysis, which also involves regression and a
second chance to face childhood anxieties.
- That this "generational pressure" for psychic change
is not only spontaneous, originating in the adult's need to regress
and in the child's striving for relationship, but also occurs independent
of social and technological change. It therefore can be found even
in periods of social and technological stagnation.
- That the history of childhood is a series of closer approaches
between adult and child, with each closing of psychic distance producing
fresh anxiety. The reduction of this adult anxiety is the main source
of the child-rearing practices of each age.
- That the obverse of the hypothesis that history involves a general
improvement in child care is that the further back one goes in history,
the less effective parents are in meeting the developing needs of
the child. This would indicate, for instance, that if today in America
there are less than a million abused children,(4) there would be
a point back in history where most children were what we would now
consider abused.
- That because psychic structure must always be passed from generation
to generation through the narrow funnel of childhood, a society's
child-rearing practices are not just one item in a list of cultural
traits. They are the very condition for the transmission and development
of all other cultural elements, and place definite limits on what
can be achieved in all other spheres of history. Specific childhood
experiences must occur to sustain specific cultural traits, and
once these experiences no longer occur the trait disappears.
The evidence for the evolution of childhood will be examined in this
essay, and the remainder of the psychogenic theory will be spelled
out in the rest of this book.
4
PREVIOUS WORKS ON CHILDREN IN HISTORY
Although I think this essay is the first to examine seriously the
history of childhood in the West, historians have undeniably been
writing about children in past ages for some time.(5) Even so, I think
that the study of the history of childhood is just beginning, since
most of these works so badly distort the facts of childhood in the
periods they cover. Official biographers are the worst offenders;
childhood is generally idealized, and very few biographers give any
useful information about the subject's earliest years. The historical
sociologists manage to turn out theories explaining changes in childhood
without ever bothering to examine a single family, past or present.(6)
The literary historians, mistaking books for life, construct a fictional
picture of childhood, as though one could know what really happened
in the nineteenth-century American home by reading Tom Sawyer. (7)
But it is the social historian, whose job it is to dig out the reality
of social conditions in the past, who defends himself most vigorously
against the facts he turns up.(8) When one social historian finds
wide-spread infanticide, he declares it "admirable and humane."(9)
When another describes mothers who regularly beat their infants with
sticks while still in the cradle, she comments, without a shred of
evidence, that "if her discipline was stern, it was even and
just and leavened with kindness."(10) When a third finds mothers
who dunk their infants into ice water each morning to "strengthen"
them, and the children die from the practice, she says that "they
were not intentionally cruel," but simply "had read Rousseau
and Locke.''(11) No practice in the past seems anything but benign
to the social historian. When Laslett finds parents regularly sending
their children, at age seven, to other homes as servants, while taking
in other children to serve them, he says it was actually kindness,
for it "shows that parents may have been unwilling to submit
children of their own to the discipline of work at home. ,"(12)
After admitting that severe whipping of young children with various
instruments "at school and at home seems to have been as common
in the seventeenth century as it was later," William Sloan feels
compelled to add that "children, then as later, sometimes deserved
whipping. "(13) When Philippe Aries comes up with so much evidence
of open sexual molesting of children that he admits that "playing
with children's privy parts formed part of a widespread tradition,"(14)
he goes on to describe a "traditional" scene where a stranger
throws himself on a little boy while riding in a train, "his
hand brutally rummaging inside the child's fly," while the father
smiles, and concludes: "All that was involved was a game whose
scabrous nature we should beware of exaggerating."(15) Masses
of evidence are hidden, distorted, softened, or ignored. The
5
child's early years are played down, formal educational content is
endlessly examined, and emotional content is avoided by stressing
child legislation and avoiding the home. And if the nature of the
author's book is such that the ubiquity of unpleasant facts cannot
be ignored, the theory is invented that "good parents leave no
traces in the records." When, for instance, Alan Valentine examines
600 years of letters from fathers to sons, and of 126 fathers is unable
to find one who isn't insensitive, moralistic, and thoroughly self-centered,
he concludes:
"Doubtless an infinite number of fathers have written to their
sons letters that would warm and lift our hearts, if we only could
find them. The happiest fathers leave no history, and it is the
men who are not at their best with their children who are likely
to write the heart-rending letters that survive."(16) Likewise,
Anna Burr, covering 250 autobiographies, notes there are no happy
memories of childhood, but carefully avoids drawing any conclusions.(17)
Of all the books on childhood in the past, Philippe Aries's book
Centuries of Childhood is probably the best known; one historian notes
the frequency with which it is "cited as Holy Writ. " (18)
Aries's central thesis is the opposite of mine: he argues that while
the traditional child was happy because he was free to mix with many
classes and ages, a special condition known as childhood was "invented"
in the early modern period, resulting in a tyrannical concept of the
family which destroyed friendship and sociability and deprived children
of freedom, inflicting upon them for the first time the birch and
the prison cell.
To prove this thesis Aries uses two main arguments. He first says
that a separate concept of childhood was unknown in the early Middle
Ages. "Medieval art until about the twelfth century did not know
childhood or did not attempt to portray it" because artists were
"unable to depict a child except as a man on a smaller scale."(19)
Not only does this leave the art of antiquity in limbo, but it ignores
voluminous evidence that medieval artists could, indeed, paint realistic
children.(20) His etymological argument for a separate concept of
childhood being unknown is also untenable.(21) In any case, the notion
of the "invention of childhood" is so fuzzy that it is surprising
that so many historians have recently picked it up.(22) His second
argument, that the modern family restricts the child's freedom and
increases the severity of punishment, runs counter to all the evidence.
Far more reliable than Aries is a quartet of books, only one of them
written by a professional historian: George Payne's The Child in Human
Progress, G. Rattray Taylor's The Angel Makers, David Hunt's Parents
and Children in History, and J. Louise Despert's The Emotionally Disturbed
Child-Then and Now. Payne, writing in 1916, was the first to examine
the wide extent of infanticide and brutality toward children in
6
the past, particularly in antiquity. Taylor's book, rich in documentation,
is a sophisticated psychoanalytic reading of childhood and personality
in late eighteenth-century England. Hunt, like Aries, centers mostly
on the unique seventeenth-century document, Heroard's diary of the
childhood of Louis XIII, but does so with great psychological sensitivity
and awareness of the psychohistorical implications of his findings,
And Despert's psychiatric comparison of child mistreatment in the
past and present surveys the range of emotional attitudes toward children
since antiquity, expressing her growing horror as she uncovers a story
of unremitting "heartlessness and cruelty."(23)
Yet despite these four books, the central questions of comparative
childhood history remain to be asked, much less answered. In the next
two sections of this chapter, I will cover some of the psychological
principles that apply to adult-child relations in the past. The examples
I use, while not untypical of child life in the past, are not drawn
equally from all time periods, but are chosen as the clearest illustrations
of the psychological principles being described. It is only in the
three succeeding sections, where I provide an overview of the history
of infanticide, abandonment, nursing, swaddling, beating, and sexual
abuse, that I begin to examine how widespread the practice was in
each period.
PSYCHOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES OF CHILDHOOD HISTORY:
PROJECTIVE AND REVERSAL REACTIONS
In studying childhood over many generations, it is most important
to concentrate on those moments which most affect the psyche of the
next generation: primarily, this means what happens when an adult
is face to face with a child who needs something. The adult has, I
believe, three major reactions available: [1] He can use the child
as a vehicle for projection of the contents of his own unconscious
(projective reaction); [2] he can use the child as a substitute for
an adult figure important in his own childhood (reversal reaction);
or [3] he can empathize with the child's needs and act to satisfy
them (empathic reaction).
The projective reaction is, of course, familiar to psychoanalysts
under terms which range from "projection" to "projective
identification a more concrete, intrusive form of voiding feelings
into others. The psychoanalyst, for instance, is thoroughly familiar
with being used as a "toilet - lap"(24) for the massive
projections of the patient. it is this condition of being used as
a vehicle for projections which is usual for children in the past.
Likewise, the reversal reaction is familiar to students of battering
parents.(25) Children exist only to satisfy parental needs, and it
is always
7
the failure of the child-as-parent to give love which triggers the
actual battering. As one battering mother put it: "I have never
felt loved all my life. When the baby was born, I thought he would
love me. When he cried, it meant he didn't love me. So I hit him."
The third term, empathic reaction, is used here in a more limited
sense than the dictionary definition. It is the adult's ability to
regress to the level of a child's need and correctly identify it without
an admixture of the adult's own projections. The adult must then be
able to maintain enough distance from the need to be able to satisfy
it. It is an ability identical to the use of the psychoanalyst's unconscious
called "free-floating attention;' or, as Theodor Reik terms it,
"listening with the third ear."(26)
Projective and reversal reactions often occurred simultaneously in
parents in the past, producing an effect which I call the "double
image," where the child was seen as both full of the adult's
projected desires, hostilities, and sexual thoughts, and at the same
moment as a mother or father figure. That is, it is both bad and loving.
Furthermore, the further back in history one goes, the more "concretization"
or reification one finds of these projective and reversal reactions,
producing progressively more bizarre attitudes toward children, similar
to those of contemporary parents of battered and schizophrenic children.
The first illustration of these closely interlocking concepts which
we will examine is in an adult-child scene from the past. The year
is 1739; the boy, Nicolas, is four years old. The incident is one
he remembers and has had confirmed by his mother. His grandfather,
who has been rather attentive to him the past few days, decides he
has to "test" him, and says, "Nicolas, my son, you
have many faults, and these grieve your mother. She is my daughter
and has always obliged me; obey me too, and correct these, or I will
whip you like a dog which is being trained." Nicolas, angry at
the betrayal "from one who has been so kind to me," throws
his toys into the fire. The grandfather seems pleased.
"Nicholas . . . I said that to test you. Did you really think
that a grandpapa, who had been so kind to you yesterday and the
day before, could treat you like a dog today? I thought you were
intelligent ..."" I am not a beast like a dog." "No,
but you are not as clever as I thought, or you would have understood
that I was only teasing. It was just a jgke . . . Come to me."
I threw myself into his arms. "That is not all," he continued,
"I want to see you friends with your mother; you have grieved,
deeply grieved her Nicolas, your father loves you; do you love him?"
"Yes, grandpapa!" "Suppose he were in danger and
to save him it was necessary to put your hand in the fire, would
you do it? Would
8
you put it . . there, if it was necessary?" "Yes grandpapa."
"And for me?" "For you? . . . yes, yes." "And
for your mother?" "For mamma? Both of them, both of them!"
"We shall see if you are telling the truth, for your mother
is in great need of your little help! If you love her, you must
prove it." I made no answer; but, putting together all that
had been said, I went to the fireplace and, while they were making
signs to each other, put my right hand into the fire. The pain drew
a deep sigh from me."(27)
What makes this sort of scene so typical of adult-child interaction
in the past is the existence of so many contradictory attitudes on
the adult's part without the least resolution. The child is loved
and hated, rewarded and punished, bad and loving, all at once. That
this puts the child in a "double bind" of conflicting signals
[which Bateson(28) and others believe underlie schizophrenia], goes
without saying. But the conflicting signals themselves come from adults
who are striving to demonstrate that the child is both very bad (projective
reaction) and very loving (reversal reaction). It is the child's function
to reduce the adult's pressing anxieties; the child acts as the adult's
defense.
It is also the projective and reversal reactions which make guilt
impossible in the severe beatings which we so often encounter in the
past. This is because it is not the actual child who is being beaten
It is either the adult's own projections ("Look at her give you
the eye! That's how she picks up men - she's a regular sexpot!"
a mother says of her battered daughter of two), or it is a product
of reversal ("He thinks he's the boss - all the time trying to
run things hut I showed him who is in charge around here!" a
father says of his nine-month-old boy whose skull he has split).(29)
One can often catch the merging of beaten and beater and therefore
lack of guilt in the historical sources. An American father (1830)
tells of horsewhipping his four-year-old boy for not being able to
read something. The child is tied up naked in the cellar:
With him in this condition, and myself, the wife of my bosom, and
the lady of my family, all of us in distress, and with hearts sinking
within us, I commenced using the rod . . During this most unpleasant,
self denying and disagreeable work, I made frequent stops, commanding
and trying to persuade, silencing excuses, answering objections
. . . I felt all the force of divine authority and express command
that I ever felt in any case in all my life . . . But under the
all controlling influence of such a degree of angry passion and
obstinacy, as my son had manifested, no wonder he thought he "should
beat me out," feeble and tremulous as I was; and knowing as
he did that it made me almost sick to whip him. At that time he
could neither pity me nor himslf.(30)
9
It is this picture of the merging of father and son, with the father
complaining that he himself is the one beaten and in need of pity,
which we will encounter when we ask how beating could have been so
wide-spread in the past. When a Renaissance pedagogue says you should
tell the child when beating him, "you do the correction against
your mind, compelled thereunto by conscience, and require them to
put you no more unto such labour and pain. For if you do (say you)
you must suffer part of the pain with me and therefore you shall now
have experience and proof what pain it is unto both of us" we
will not so easily miss the merging and mislabel it hypocrisy.(31)
Indeed, the parent sees the child as so full of portions of himself
that even real accidents to the child are seen as injuries to the
parent. Cotton Mather's daughter Nanny fell into the fire and burned
herself badly, and he cried out, "Alas, for my sins the just
God throws my child into the fire!"(32) He searched everything
he himself had recently done wrong, but since he believed he was the
one being punished, no guilt toward his child could be felt (say,
for leaving her alone), and no corrective action could be taken. Soon
two other daughters were badly burned. His reaction was to preach
a sermon on "What use ought parents to make of disasters befallen
their children."
This matter of "accidents" to children is not to be taken
lightly, for in it lies hidden the clue to why adults in the past
were such poor parents. Leaving aside actual death wishes, which will
be discussed later, accidents occurred in great numbers in the past
because little children were so often left alone. Mather's daughter
Nibby would have been burned to death but for "a person accidentally
then passing by the window,"(33) because there was no one there
to hear her cries. A colonial Boston experience is also typical:
"After they had supped, the mother put two children to bed
in the room where they themselves did lie, and they went out to
visit a neighbor. When they returned .. . the mother [went] to the
bed, and not finding her youngest child (a daughter about five years
of age), and after much search she found it drowned in a well in
her cellar . . "(34)
The father blames the accident on his having worked on a holy day.
The point is not only that it was common to leave little children
alone right up to the twentieth century. More important is that parents
cannot be concerned with preventing accidents if guilt is absent because
it is the adult's own projections that they feel have been punished.
Massive projectors don't invent safety stoves, nor often can they
even see to it that their children are given the simplest of care.
Their projection, unfortunately, insures repetition.
10
The use of the child as a "toilet" for adult projections
is behind the whole notion of original sin, and for eighteen hundred
years adults were in general agreement that, as Richard Allestree
(1676) puts it, "the new-born babe is full of the stains and
pollution of sin, which it inherits from our first parents through
our loins . . "(35) Baptism used to include actual exorcism of
the Devil, and the belief that the child who cried at his christening
was letting out the Devil long survived the formal omission of exorcism
in the Reformation.(36) Even where formal religion did not stress
the devil, it was there; here is a picture of a Polish Jew teaching
in the nineteenth century:
He derived an intense joy from the agonies of the little victim
trembling and shivering on the bench. And he used to administer
the whippings coldly, slowly, deliberately . . . he asked the boy
to let down his clothes, lie across the bench . . . and pitched
in with the leathern thongs In every person there is a Good Spirit
and an Evil Spirit. The Good Spirit has its own dwelling-place-which
is the head, So has the Evil Spirit-and that is the place where
you get the whipping."(37)
The child in the past was so charged with projections that he was
often in danger of being considered a changeling if he cried too much
or was otherwise too demanding. There is a large literature on change-lings,(38)
but it is not generally realized that it was not only deformed children
who were killed as changelings, but also those who, as St. Augustine
puts it, "suffer from a demon . . . they are under the power
of the Devil .. . some infants die in this vexation . . ." (39)
Some church fathers declared that if a baby merely cried it was committing
a sin.(40) Sprenger and Kramer, in their bible of witchhunting, Malleus
Maleficarurn (1487), contend that you can recognize changelings because
they "always howl most piteously and even if four or five mothers
are set on to suckle them, they never grow." Luther agrees: "That
is true: they often take the children of women in childbed and lay
themselves down in their place and are more obnoxious than ten children
with their crapping, eating, and screaming."(41) Guibert of Nogent,
writing in the twelfth century, considers his mother saintly because
she put up with the crying of an infant she had adopted:
. . . the baby so harassed my mother and all her servants by the
madness of its wailing and crying at night-although by day it was
very good, by turns playing and sleeping-that anyone in the same
little room could get scarcely any sleep. I have heard the nurses
whom she hired say that night after night they could not stop shaking
the child's rattle, so naughty was he, not through his own fault,
but made so by the Devil within, and that a woman's craft
11
failed entirely to drive him out. The good woman was tormented
by extreme pain; amid those shrill cries no contrivance relieved
her aching brow. . . . Yet she never shut the child out of her house...
(42)
The belief that infants were felt to be on the verge of turning into
totally evil beings is one of the reasons why they were tied up, or
swaddled, so long and so tightly. One feels the undertone in Bartholomaeus
Anglicus (c. 1230): "And for tenderness the limbs of the child
may easily and soon bow and bend and take diverse shapes. And therefore
children's members and limbs are bound with lystes [bandages], and
other covenable bonds, that they be not crooked nor evil shapen .
. ."(43) It is the infant full of the parent's dangerous, evil
projections that is swaddled. The reasons given for swaddling in the
past are the same as those of present-day swaddlers in Eastern Europe:
the baby has to be tied up or it will tear its ears off, scratch its
eyes out, break its legs, or touch its genitals.(44) As we shall see
shortly in the section on swaddling and restraints, this often includes
binding up children in all kinds of corsets, stays, backboards, and
puppet-strings, and even extends to tying them up in chairs to prevent
them from crawling on the floor "like an animal."
Now if adults project all their own unacceptable feelings into the
child, it is obvious that severe measures must be taken to keep this
dangerous toilet-child" under control once swaddling bands are
out-grown. I shall later examine various methods of control used by
parents down through the centuries, but here I want to illustrate
only one control device-frightening the child with ghosts-in order
to discuss its projective character.
The number of ghost-like figures used to frighten children through-out
history is legion, and their regular use by adults was common until
quite recently. The ancients had their Lamia and Striga, who, like
their Hebrew prototype Lilith, ate children raw, and who, along with
Mormo, Canida, Poine, Sybaris, Acco, Empusa, Gorgon, and Ephialtes,
were invented for a child's benefit to make it less rash and according
to Dio Chrysostom. (45) Most ancients agreed that it was good to have
the images of these witches constantly before children, to let them
feel the terror of waiting up at night for ghosts to steal them away,
eat them, tear them to pieces, and suck their blood or their bone
marrow. By medieval times, of course, witches and devils took front
stage, with an occasional Jew thrown in as a cutter of babies' throats,
along with hoards of other monsters and bogies "such as those
[with] which nurses love to terrify them."(46) After the Reformation,
God himself, who "holds you over the pit of hell, much as one
holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire,"(47)
was the major bogeyman used to terrify children, and tracts were written
in baby talk describing the tortures God had in store for children
in Hell: "The little child is in this
12
red-hot oven. Hear how it screams to come out . . . It stamps its
little feet on the floor. . ."(48)
When religion was no longer the focus of the terrorizing campaign,
figures closer to home were used: the werewolf will gulp you down,
Blue Beard will chop you up, Boney (Bonaparte) will eat your flesh,
the black man or the chimney sweep will steal you away at night.(49)
These practices came under attack only in the nineteenth century.
One English parent said in 1810 that "the custom once prevalent
of terrifying young minds with stories of ghosts, is now universally
reprobated, in consequence of the increasing stock of national good
sense. But many yet living can place fears of supernatural agency,
and of darkness, among the real miseries of childhood . . . (50) Yet
even today, in many villages of Europe, children continue to be threatened
by parents with the loup-garou (werewolf), the barbu (bearded man),
or the rarnoneur (chimney sweep), or told they will be put in the
basement to let the rats gnaw on them.(51)
This need to personify punitive figures was so powerful that, follow-ing
the principle of "concretization," adults actually dressed
up Katchina- like dummies to use in frightening children. One English
writer, in 1748, while explaining how terror originated with nurses
who frightened infants with stories of "raw-head and bloody-bones,"
said:
The nurse takes a fancy to quiet the peevish child, and with this
intent, dresses up an uncouth figure, makes it come in, and roar
and scream at the child in ugly disagreeable notes, which grate
upon the tender organs of the ear, and at the same time, by its
gesture and near approach, makes as if it would swallow the infant
up.(52)
These fearful figures were also the favorites of nurses who wanted
to keep children in bed while they went off at night. Susan Sib bald
remembered ghosts as a real part of her eighteenth-century childhood:
Ghosts making their appearance were a very common occurrence. .
. I remember perfectly when both the nursery maids at Fowey wished
to leave the nursery one evening . . . we were silenced by hearing
the most dismal groanings and scratchings outside the partition
next the stairs. The door was thrown open, and oh! horrors, there
came in a figure, tall and dressed in white, with fire coming out
of its eyes, nose and mouth it seemed. We were almost thrown into
convulsions, and were not well for days, but dared not tell.(53)
The terrorized children were not always as old as Susan and Betsey.
One American mother in 1882 told of a friend's two-year-old girl whose
nurse, wanting to enjoy herself for the evening with the other servants
while the parents were out, assured herself she wouldn't be disturbed
by telling the little girl that a
13
horrible Black Man . . . was hidden in the room to catch her the
moment she left her bed or made the slightest noise . . to make double
sure that she should not be interrupted during the evening's enjoyment.
She made a huge figure of a black man with frightful staring eyes
and an enormous mouth, and placed it at the foot of the bed where
the little innocent child was fast asleep. As soon as the evening
was over in the servant's hall, the nurse went back to her charge.
Opening the door quietly, she beheld the little girl sitting up in
her bed, staring in an agony of terror at the fearful monster before
her, and both hands convulsively grasping her fair hair. She was stone
dead!(54)
There is some evidence that this use of masked figures to frighten
children goes back to antiquity.(55) The subject of children being
frightened by masks is a favorite of artists from the Roman frescos
to the prints of Jacques Stella (1657), but since these early traumatic
events
were subject to the deepest repression, I have not yet been able
to establish their precise ancient forms. It was said by Dio Chrysostom
that "terrifying images deter children when they want food or
play or anything else unseasonable" and theories were discussed
on their most effective use: "I believe each youngster fears
some bogey peculiar to himself and is wont to be terrified by this-of
course, lads who are naturally timid cry out no matter what you produce
to scare them. . ." (56)
Now when infants are terrorized with masked figures when they merely
cry, want food, or want to play, the amount of projection, and the
adult's need to control it, has reached massive proportions only found
in overtly psychotic adults today. The exact frequency of use
14
of such concrete figures in the past cannot as yet be determined,
although they were often spoken of as common. Many forms, however,
can be shown to be customary. For instance, in Germany until recently
there would appear in shops before Christmas time stacks of stick
brooms, tied in the middle, and making a stiff brush at both ends.
These were used to beat children; during the first week in December,
adults would dress up in terrifying costumes and pretend to be a messenger
of Christ, called the Pelz-nickel, who would punish children and tell
them if they would get Christmas presents or not.(57)
It is only when one sees the struggle which parents go through to
give up this practice of concretizing frightening images that the
strength of their need to do so is revealed. One of the earliest defenders
of childhood in nineteenth-century Germany was Jean Paul Richter.
In his popular book Levanna, he condemned parents who kept children
in order "by images of terror," claiming medical evidence
that they "frequently fall victims to insanity." Yet his
own compulsion to repeat the traumas of his own childhood was so great
that he was forced to invent lesser versions for his own son:
As a person can be terrified only once by the same thing, I think
it possible to spare children the reality by sportive representations
of alarming circumstances. For instance: I go with my little nine-year-old
Paul to walk in the thick wood. Suddenly three blackened and armed
ruffians rush out and fall upon us, because I had hired them for
the adventure with a small thieves' premium the day before. We two
are only provided with sticks, but the band of robbers are armed
with swords and a pistol without bullets . . . I turn away the pistol,
so that it may miss me, and strike the dagger out of one of the
thieves' hand with my stick. . . But (I add in this second edition)
all such games are of doubtful advantage . . . although similar
cloak and dagger pieces . . . might be tried advantageously in the
night, in order to bring the fancies, inspired by a belief in ghosts,
to common everyday light.(58)
Another whole area of concretization of this need to terrorize children
involves the use of corpses. Many are familiar with the scenes in
Mrs. Sherwood's novel, History of the Fairchild Family,(59) in which
the children are taken on visits to the gibbet to inspect rotting
corpses hanging there, while being told moral stories. What is not
often realized is that these scenes are taken from real life and formed
an important part of childhood in the past. Classes used to be taken
out of school to hangings, and parents would often take their children
to hangings and then whip them when they returned home to make them
remember what they had seen.(60) Even a humanist educator such as
Mafio Vegio, who wrote books to protest the beating of children, had
to admit that
15
"to let them witness a public execution is sometimes not at
all a bad thing. "(61)
The effect on the children of this continuous corpse-viewing was
of course massive. One little girl, after her mother showed her the
fresh corpse of her nine-year-old friend as an example, went around
saying "They will put daughter in the deep hole, and what will
mother do?"(62) Another boy woke at night screaming after seeing
hangings, and "practiced hanging his own cat."(63) Eleven-year-old
Harriet Spencer recorded in her diary seeing dead bodies everywhere
on gibbets and broken on the wheel. Her father took her to see hundreds
of corpses which had been dug up to make room for more.
. . . Papa says it is foolish and superstitious to be afraid of
seeing dead bodies, so I followed him down a dark narrow steep stair-case
that wound round and round a long way, till they opened a door into
a great cavern. It was lit by a lamp hanging down in the middle,
and the friar carried a torch in his hand. At first I could not
see, and when I could I hardly dared look, for on every side there
were horrid black ghastly figures, some grinning, some pointing
at us, or seeming in pain, in all sorts of postures, and so horrid
I could hardly help screaming, and I thought they all moved. When
Papa saw how uncomfortable I was, he was not angry but very kind,
and said I must conquer it and go and touch one of them, which was
very shocking. Their skin was all dark brown and quite dried up
on the bones, and quite hard and felt like marble.(64)
This picture of the kindly father helping his daughter overcome her
fear of corpses is an example of what I term "projective care,"
to distinguish it from true empathic care which is the result of the
empathic reaction. Projective care always requires the first step
of projection of the adult's own unconscious into the child, and can
be distinguished from empathic care by being either inappropriate
or insufficient to the child's actual needs. The mother who responds
to her child's every discomfort by nursing it, the mother who gives
great attention to her infant's clothes as she sends it away to the
wet-nurse, and the mother who takes a full hour to tie up a child
properly in swaddling clothes are all examples of projective care.
Projective care is, however, sufficient to raise children to adulthood.
Indeed, it is what is often called "good care" by anthropologists
studying primitive childhood, and it is not until a psychoanalytically-trained
anthropologist re-studies the same tribe that one can see that projection
and not true empathy is being measured. For example, studies of the
Apache(65) always give them the highest ratings on the "oral
satisfaction"
16
scale so important for the development of feelings of security. The
Apache, like many primitive tribes, feeds on demand for two years,
and this is what the rating was based upon. But only when psychoanalytic
anthropologist L. Bryce Boyer visited them was the true projective
basis of this care revealed:
The care afforded infants by Apache mothers nowadays is startlingly
inconsistent. They are usually very tender and considerate in the
physical relationships with their babies. There is much bodily contact.
Nursing times are generally determined by the baby's cry, and every
distress is greeted first by the nipple of a breast or a bottle.
At the same time, mothers have a very limited sense of responsibility
so far as child care is concerned, and the impression gained is
that the mother's tenderness for her baby is based upon her bestowing
upon the infant care she herself desires as an adult. A great many
mothers abandon or give away children-babies they had been nursing
lovingly only a week before. Apaches very accurately name this practice
"throwing the baby away." Not only do they feel scant
conscious guilt for this behavior, but at times they are overtly
delighted to have been able to rid themselves of the burden. In
some instances, mothers who have given children away, "forget"
they ever had them. The usual Apache mother believes physical care
is all an infant requires. She has little or no compunction about
leaving her baby with just anyone at all while she impulsively leaves
to gossip, shop, gamble or drink and "fool around." Ideally,
the mother entrusts her baby to a sister or older female relative.
In aboriginal times, such an arrangement was almost always possible.(66)
Even such a simple act as empathizing with children who were beaten
was difficult for adults in the past. Those few educators who, prior
to modern times, advised that children should not be beaten generally
argued that it would have bad consequences rather than that it would
hurt the child. Yet without this element of empathy, the advice had
no effect whatsoever, and children continued to be beaten as before.
Mothers who sent their infants to wet-nurses for three years were
genuinely distressed that their children then didn't want to return
to them, yet they had no capacity to locate the reason. A hundred
generations of mothers tied up their infants in swaddling bands and
impassively watched them scream in protest because they lacked the
psychic mechanism necessary to empathize with them. Only when the
slow historical process of parent-child evolution finally established
this faculty through successive generations of parent-child interaction
did it become obvious that swaddling was totally unnecessary. Here
is Richard Steele in The Tatler in 1706 describing how he thought
an infant felt after being born:
17
I lay very quiet; but the witch, for no manner of reason or provocation
in the world, takes me and binds my head as hard as she possibly
could; then ties up both my legs and makes me swallow down an horrid
mixture. I thought it an harsh entrance into life, to begin with
taking physic. When I was thus dressed, I was carried to a bedside
where a fine young lady (my mother, I wot) had like to have me hugged
to death . . . and threw me into a girl's arms that was taken in
to tend me. The girl was very proud of the womanly employment of
a nurse, and took upon her to strip and dress me anew, because I
made a noise, to see what ailed me; she did so and stuck a pin in
every joint about. I still cried, upon which, she lays me on my
face in her lap; and, to quiet me, fell to nailing in all the pins,
by clapping me on the back and screaming a lullaby...(67)
I have not found a description with this degree of empathy in any
century prior to the eighteenth. It was not long thereafter that two
thousand years of swaddling came to an end.
One imagines that there would be all kinds of places to look to find
this missing empathic faculty in the past. The first place to look,
of course, is the Bible; certainly here one should find empathy toward
children's needs, for isn't Jesus always pictured holding little children?
Yet when one actually reads each of the over two thousand references
to children listed in the Complete Concordance to the Bible, these
gentle images are missing. You find lots on child sacrifice, on stoning
children, on beating them, on their strict obedience, on their love
for their parents, and on their role as carriers of the family name,
but not a single one that reveals any empathy with their needs. Even
the well-known saying, "Suffer little children, and forbid them
not, to come unto me" turns out to be the customary Near Eastern
practice of exorcising by laying on of hands, which many holy men
did to remove the evil in-herent in children: "Then there were
brought unto him little children, that he should put his hands on
them, and pray... he laid his hands on them, and departed thence."
(Mat. 19.13.)
All of this is not to say that parents didn't love their children
in the past, for they did. Even contemporary child-beaters are not
sadists; they love their children, at times, and in their own way,
and are sometimes capable of expressing tender feelings, particularly
when the children are non-demanding. The same was true for the parent
in the past; expressions of tenderness toward children occur most
often when the child is non-demanding, especially when the child is
either asleep or dead. Homer's "as a mother drives away a fly
from her child when it lies in sweet sleep" can be paired with
Martial's epitaph:
18
Let not the sod too stiffly stretch its girth
Above those tender limbs, erstwhile so free;
Press lightly on her form, dear mother Earth,
Her little footsteps lightly fell on thee.(68)
It is only at the moment of death that the parent, unable to empathize
before, cries out to himself, with Morelli (1400): "You loved
him but never used your love to make him happy; you treated him more
like a stranger than a son; you never gave him an hour of rest . .
. You never kissed him when he wanted it; you wore him out at school
and with many harsh blows."(69)
It is, of course, not love which the parent of the past lacked, but
rather the emotional maturity needed to see the child as a person
separate from himself. It is difficult to estimate what proportion
of today's parents achieve with any consistency the empathic level.
Once I took an informal poll of a dozen psychotherapists and asked
them how many of their patients at the beginning of analysis were
able to sustain images of their children as individuals separate from
their own projected needs; they all said that very few had that ability.
As one, Amos Gunsberg, put it: "This doesn't occur until some
way along in their analysis, always at a specific moment when they
arrive at an image of themselves as separate from their own all-enveloping
mother."
Running parallel to the projective reaction is the reversal reaction,
with the parent and child reversing roles, often producing quite bizarre
results. Reversal begins long before the child is born-it is the source
of the very powerful desire for children one sees in the past, which
is always expressed in terms of what children can give the parent,
and never what the parent can give them. Medea's complaint before
committing infanticide is that by killing her children she won't have
anyone to look after her:
What was the purpose, children, for which I reared you?
For all my travail, and wearing myself away?
They were sterile, those pains I had in the bearing of you.
Oh surely once the hopes I had, poor me,
Were high ones; you would look after me in old age,
And when I died would deck me well with your own hands;
A thing which all would have done. Oh but it is gone,
That lovely thought.(70)
Once born, the child becomes the mother's and father's own parent,
in either positive or negative aspect, totally out of keeping with
the child's actual age. The child, regardless of sex, is often dressed
in the style of clothes similar to that worn by the parent's mother,
that is, not only in a long dress, but in one out of date by at least
a generation. (71)
19
The mother is literally reborn in the child; children are not just
dressed as "miniature adults" but quite clearly as miniature
women, often complete with decollate'.
The idea that the grandparent is actually reborn in the baby is a
common one in antiquity,(72) and the closeness between the word "baby"
and the various words for grandmother (baba, Babe) hints at similar
belief.(73) But evidence exists for more concrete reversals in the
past, ones that are virtually hallucinatory. For instance, the breasts
of little infants were often kissed or sucked on by adults. Little
Louis XIII often had both his penis and nipples kissed by people around
him. Even though Heroard, his diarist, always made him the active
one (at thirteen months "he makes M. de Souvre, M. de Termes,
M. de Liancourt, and M. Zamet kiss his cock")(74), it later becomes
evident that he was being passively manipulated: "He never wants
to let the Marquise touch his nipples, his nurse had said to him:
'Sir, do not let anyone touch your nipples or your cock; they'll cut
them off.' "(75) Yet the adults still couldn't keep their hands
and lips off his penis and nipples. Both were the mother's breast
returned.
Another instance of the "infant as mother" was the common
belief that infants had milk in their breasts which had to be expelled.
The fourteenth-century Italian balia (wet-nurse) was instructed to
"be sure and press his breasts often - to get out any milk there
because it bothers him."(76) There actually is a slight rationalization
for this belief, since a newborn will on rare occasions show a drop
of milky fluid on its breasts as a result of a carryover of female
hormone from the mother. Yet there was a difference between this and
"the unnatural but common practice of forcibly squeezing the
delicate breasts of a newborn infant, by rough hand of the nurse,
which is the most general cause of inflammation in these parts,"
as the American pediatrician Alexander Hamilton still had to write
in l793.(77)
Kissing, sucking, and squeezing the breast are but a few of the uses
to which the "child as breast" is put; one finds a variety
of practices such as the one this pediatrician warned of at the beginning
of the nineteenth century:
But a practice of the most injurious and disgusting nature, is
that of many nursery maids, aunts and grandmothers, who suffer the
child to suck their lips. I had an opportunity of observing the
decay of a blooming infant, in consequence of having sucked the
lips of its sickly grandmother for upwards of half a year. (78)
I have even found several references to parents "licking children."
This, for instance, may be what George du Maurier was speaking of
when he said of his newborn: "The Nurse brings her to me every
morn-
20
ing in bed, that I may lick it with 'the basting tongue' -- I enjoy
the operation so much that I shall perservere till it reaches the
age of discretion."(79)
One receives the impression that the perfect child would be one who
literally breast-feeds the parent, and the ancients would agree. When-ever
children were discussed, the story of Valerius Maximus was certain
to come up, describing a "perfect" child. As Pliny tells
it:
Of filial affection there have, it is true, been unlimited instances
all over the world, but one at Rome with which the whole of the rest
could not compare. A plebeian woman of low position who had just given
birth to a child, had permission to visit her mother who had been
shut up in prison as a punishment, and was always searched in advance
by the doorkeeper to prevent her carrying in any food. She was detected
giving her mother sustenance from her own breasts. In consequence
of this marvel the daughter's pious affection was rewarded by the
mother's release and both were awarded maintenance for life; and the
place where it occurred was consecrated to the Goddess concerned,
a temple dedicated to Filial Affection . . . (80)
The story was repeated throughout the ages as an object lesson. Peter
Charron (1593) called it "turning the stream back again up to
the fountainhead,"(81) and the theme was the topic of paintings
by Rubens, Vermeer, and others.
Often the need to act out the image of "the child as mother"
be-comes overpowering; here, in a typical incident, is a 'joke"
played on a six-year-old girl in 1656 by Cardinal Mazarin and other
adults:
One day as he made sport with her about some gallant that she said
she had; at last he began to chide her, for being with child.
. . . They straightened her clothes from time to time, and made
her believe that she was growing big. This continued as long as
it was thought necessary to persuade her to the likelihood of her
being with child . . . The time of her lying-in came, she found
betwixt her sheets in the morning a child newborn. You cannot imagine
the astonishment and grief she was in at this sight. "Such
a thing," said she, "never happened to any but to the
Virgin Mary and myself, for I never felt any kind of pain."
The queen came to console her, and offered to be Godmother; many
came to gossip with her, as newly brought to bed.(82)
Children have always taken care of adults in very concrete ways.
Ever since Roman times, boys and girls waited on their parents at
table, and in the Middle Ages all children except royalty acted as
servants,
21
either at home or for others, often running home from school at noon
to wait on their parents.(83) I will not discuss here the whole topic
of children's work, but it should be remembered that children did
much of the work of the world long before child labor became such
an issue in the nineteenth century, generally from the age of four
or five.
The reversal reaction is shown most clearly, however, in the emotional
interaction between child and adult. Present day social workers who
visit "battering" mothers are often astonished at how responsive
little children are to the needs of their parents:
I remember watching an eighteen month old soothe her mother, who
was in a high state of anxiety and tears. First she put down the bottle
she was sucking. Then she moved about in such a way that she could
approach, then touch, and eventually calm her mother down (something
I had not been able to begin to do). When she sensed her mother was
comfortable again, she walked across the floor, lay down, picked up
her bottle, and started sucking it again.(84)
This role was frequently assumed by children in the past. One child
was "never known to cry or be restless . . . frequently, when
a babe in her mother's arms, at these seasons, would reach up her
little hand and wipe the tears from her mother's cheek . . . Doctors
used to try to entice mothers into nursing their infants themselves
instead of sending
22
them out to wet-nurse by promising that "in recompence whereof,
he endeavors to show her a thousand delights . . . he kisses her,
strokes her
hair, nose and ears, he flatters her . "(86) Along the same
theme, I have catalogued over five hundred paintings of mothers and
children from every country, and found that the paintings showed the
child looking at, smiling at and caressing the mother at a date prior
to the ones showing the mother looking at, smiling at and caressing
the child, rare actions for a mother in any painting.
The child's facility in mothering adults was often its salvation.
Mme. de Sevigne, in 1670, decided not to take her eighteen-month-old
grand-daughter along with her on a trip which could have proven fatal
to the child.
Mme. du Puy-du-Fou does not want me to take my grandchild. She
says it would be exposing her to danger, and at last I surrender;
I should not like to imperil the little lady-I am very fond of her.
... she does a hundred and one little things-she talks, fondles
people, hits them, crosses herself, asks forgiveness, curtsies,
kisses your hand, shrugs her shoulders, dances, coaxes, chucks you
under the chin: in short, she is altogether lovely, I amuse myself
with her for hours at a time. I do not want her to die.(87)
by: Lloyd deMause
The Institute for Psychohistory
140 Riverside Drive, NY NY 10024
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