Lloyd deMause

“But until my Journal of Psychoanalytical Anthropology began to be published and until my book The Emotional Life of Nations came out, few realized how much anthropologists distorted mothering in their tribes.”

“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.”

“It is no wonder that historians have chosen to hide, deny and whitewash the record here uncovered.”

“Most historians have been as little able to feel empathy for infants sent to wet nurses as the mothers themselves were.”

“Most ethnologists scrupulously avoid describing how these children feel about participating in the killing or eating of their siblings.”

“Anthropologists have promulgated the myth of the peaceful savage so effectively that when actual deaths by war are tabulated for prestate simple societies, one is astonished by how such a notion can continue to be taught to students.”

“Sociologists and historians have avoided looking for the family sources of wars and social violence. Whenever a group produces murderers, the early parental relationship must have been abusive and neglectful. Yet this elementary truth has not even begun to be considered in historical research; just stating that poor mothering lies behind wars seems blasphemous.”

“Psychohistory, like psychoanalysis, is a science in which the researcher's feelings are as much or even more a part of his research equipment than his eyes or his hands. [...] Weighing of complex motives can only be accomplished by identification with human actors, the usual suppression of all feeling preached and followed by most "science" simply cripples a psychohistorian as badly as it would cripple a biologist to be forbidden the use of a microscope. The emotional development of a psychohistorian is therefore as much a topic for discussion as his or her intellectual development.”

“Historians are presumed to be unable to "do psychology," which is "mystical" anyway, so they are forced to accept the most "rational" explanations... "and it is on these that history is built."”

“I have been accused of being ignorant of economics (although I am the founder and Chairman of the Board of a company which publishes seven professional economic newsletters), of being ignorant of sociology (although I am trained in sociology and was C. Wright Mills' research assistant at Columbia), of being unable to use statistics (although I earned my living as a professional statistician for five years) and of ignoring political factors (although all my graduate training was in political science).”

“There is, for instance, only one page at the beginning of Runciman's three-volume History of the Crusades describing how the participants decided to begin four hundred years of wars, and then several thousand pages devoted to the routes, battles and other events which make up the "history" of the Crusades.”

“Whole great chunks of written history are of little value to the psychohistorian, while other vast areas which have been much neglected by historians — childhood history, content analysis of historical imagery, and so on — suddenly expand from the periphery to the center of the psychohistorian's conceptual world, simply because his or her own new questions require material nowhere to be found in history books.”

“Psychohistory, as a science, will always be problem-centered, while history will always remain period-centered. They are simply two different tasks.”

“Written history may, in the course of its narrative, use some of the laws established by the various sciences, but its own task remains that of relating the essential sequence of historical action and, qua history, to tell what happened, not why.”