The Psychology and Neurobiology of Violence
by Lloyd deMause
(This
article is Chapter 3 of the forthcoming book, The Origin of War in
Child Abuse)
In the past two decades over a hundred
careful studies have shown that violence is the result of
insecure/disorganized early attachments. Furthermore, in recent years major
advances in neurobiological techniques have revealed how these early disordered
attachments are embedded in the brain and are reenacted in later life in
personal and social violence.
This book is
based upon the premise that the evolution of amounts of interpersonal violence,
terrorism and war is dependent upon the evolution of historical personality
types, which I call "psychoclasses." This evolution, in turn, depends
upon the historical evolution of childrearing modes, as shown in the charts
below. The evidence for the evolution of childrearing has been the
subject of seven books and over eighty scholarly articles by myself published
during the past four decades, backed up by the findings of over
fifty psychohistorical colleagues which I have published in my scholarly
journals, The Journal of Psychohistory and The Journal
of Psychoanalytic Anthropology.[1]
Period
Childrearing Mode Personality
Type Parenting Styles
Tribal
Early
Infanticidal Schizoid Infanticide
of most newborn, maternal
incest, tight
swaddling, abandonment,
routine
battering and rape
Antiquity Late
Infanticidal Narcissistic Infanticide,
child sacrifice, swaddling, impulsive
beating, killing nurses,
pederasty, rape, fosterage,
genital
mutilation, torture as
hardening
Early
Christian Abandoning Masochistic Tight
swaddling, beating and torture for discipline,
foundling,
apprentice and monastery abandonment
Middle
Ages Ambivalent Borderline Infanticide
frowned upon, swaddling remains,
beating
for sins, rape illegal, education expanded
Renaissance Intrusive Depressive No infanticide or swaddling, hitting to
control child's
emotions, girls
educated, separate child beds
Modern Socializing Neurotic Threats
and light spanking rather than beating to
socialize child to parents' goals,
mothers enjoy rather than fear children, fathers begin parenting
Post-Modern Helping Individuated Parents
help child reach own goals, explain rather
than punish, unconditional love,
trust and support, fathers share parenting
Fig.
3-2 The Evolution of Historical Personalities
The evolution of
childrearing is an uneven historical process, both within societies and in
different areas of the world, so each nation today has all six personality
modes — which I term "psychoclasses" — within it, forming its various
levels of political behavior from reactionary to
progressive. Nevertheless, the evolution of childrearing modes and
historical personalities — which I term "psychogenesis" — has
improved personalities over the centuries in almost all areas of the globe,
reducing the violence produced by abusive and abandoning parenting. This
historical evolution of childrearing is reflected in the opening sentence of my
1974 book, The History of Childhood:
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.[2]
Since I will be
showing in this book that childrearing is the origin of both personal
violence and war, this improvement over the centuries in childhood in the
most advanced societies should show a steady decrease in personal and group
violence. The chart below demonstrates this decline in human
violence, based upon actual rates of the various forms of violence as shown in
the historical record. It reflects a steady decline of those dying
from infanticide (infanticide is not usually counted as murder), homicide,
suicide, war and democide (state killing of its own population) from about 75
percent in tribal groups to under 2 percent dying of violence in developed
democratic societies today.[3]
As we will see in
forthcoming chapters, the rate of childrearing evolution for most of history
crucially depends upon the amount of love and support give to mothers, who have
been the primary caretakers of children in their early years. Psychogenesis
depends upon parents not reinflicting the damage done to them by their own
families. It usually goes unrecorded in the historical record, occurring as
mothers decide not to use her child erotically, not to tie it up so long in
tight swaddling bands, not to turn her back or call the child
"demanding" as the child tries to relate to her. A mother who was
badly abused herself as a child, sexually, physically, emotionally, can hardly
be expected to be able to give love and empathy to her own child — she is
severely "post-partum depressed," as most mothers were in history and
as a third or more of mothers still are today in more advanced nations (up to
80% have "baby blues."[4]) Mothers are human, after all,
and since most females in history have been routinely tied up, genitally
mutilated, beaten, raped and subjected to daily abuse (as for instance most
Muslim women today still are),[5] one can hardly be surprised that as
mothers they are not able to be loving caretakers of their
children. As we will see in later chapters, it is after historical
periods when girls and women are given new rights and opportunities to grow
that they improve childrearing and that when the next generation becomes adult
it introduces new political freedoms and economic opportunities, changing
society for the better as they become more independent of old ways.
THE FORMATION OF
THE MIND AND BRAIN THROUGH ATTACHMENTS
The mind and
therefore the emotional content of the brain are created in the first few years
of life through the attachment bond between the infant and the primary
caretaker. (Fathers can be perfectly effective primary caretakers too, of
course, although few historically have chosen to do so.)[6] From the very beginning, the
mother's emotionally expressive face and eyes are the most important objects in
the infant's world, and the infant's wide pupils evoke the mother's gaze and
increase her oxytocin, stimulating her attachment and especially her empathy,
as registered in her mirror neurons.[7] (As we will soon see, loss of the
ability of mirror neurons to feel empathy is crucial in the formation of
violence in the brain.) A mother who is too depressed or too busy or
too angry to respond to her child's emotionally expressive face is laying down
the foundation of all later violence. "The baby sees his own self when he
looks at the mother's face and what he sees there is vital for the feeling
of 'I am seen, so I exist, feel real, and my existence has been
proved.'"[8] It is mainly the right hemisphere of
both mother and infant that regulates early emotional states and copes with
stress.[9] Romanian
orphans put in cribs at birth and fed regularly but not smiled at or "sung
to" usually die, since they have "black holes" in their brain
scans rather than healthy, functioning right hemispheres.[10] Even rhesus monkeys who are
separated at birth from their mothers' gaze grow up fearful and violently
attack other monkeys.[11] Insecurely attached children
actually display nine times as much aggression as their securely attached
peers.[12] Obviously
the degree of infant-maternal attachment crucially affects the amount of
violence later acted out in adults.
In the first two
months, the infant who is properly cared for experiences what Stern calls an
"emergent sense of self," during which the "looking into the
eyes that are looking back into his is a central event around which everything
turns…The baby's brain is literally tuned by the caregiver's brain to produce
the correct neurotransmitters and hormones…The infant discovers that he or she
has a mind and that other people have minds as well."[13] Experiments showing how depressed
or angry mothers regularly produce insecurely attached infants who grow up to
be violent adults — the so-called "Ainsworth studies" of emotional
neglect in childhood — now run into the hundreds worldwide.[14] Severe maternal neglect can be seen
in most mothers who are post-partum depressed or who drink alcohol daily or
smoke a lot or are maritally dissatisfied or who are lone caretakers (only one
in six children see their father once or more a week in America, and the
majority of American children today live their lives in homes without fathers).[15] Insecure/disorganized
attachments are "attempts by the child to resolve the paradox presented by
a frightened/frightening attachment figure by assuming the role of the
caregiver…[When the caregiver's actions are designed] to humiliate him or her
into submission…the child seems motivated to protect the parent by being
excessively cheery, polite, or helpful."[16] It is this reaction to authoritarian/abandoning
parenting which has been the rule during most of history that gets repeated so
often in political behavior, where insecurely-parented nations cling to
Punitive Parent Leaders in response to their demands for submission.
The infanticide,
tying up, starving, battering, torture and rape of children that has been
routine in history will be examined in more detail in later chapters of this
book. Even today, however, most children in most nations are badly abused and
neglected in their early years. This is denied by most people. A
recent survey of British doctors, for instance, said they believed the child
sexual abuse rate was "probably less than one percent," while careful
studies of U.K. childhood sexual assault showed two-thirds of girls and
one-third of boys had been used sexually.[17] The figures for the U.S. are about
the same. Physical abuse is even more
prevalent; two-thirds of British mothers said they routinely hit
their infants in their first year of life, and in the next two years 97% said
they hit their children "at least once a week…most a good deal more
often," using straps, belts, canes and sticks on the boys.[18] Figures
for less advanced societies are even higher, where, for instance, many Islamic
societies still raping the majority of both girls and boys, and
"infanticide, abandonment of babies, to beating, shaking, burning,
cutting, poisoning" are found to be common.[19] Since Islamic females traditionally
have had their genitals painfully cut off as young girls (in Egypt today, for
instance, 97 percent of uneducated families and 66 percent of educated families
still practice female genital mutilation),[20] it is hard to be surprised that
they grow up to be less than effective mothers.
Most mothers in
history and a majority of mothers even today experience post-partum depression,
which badly affects their ability to take care of and show love and empathy for
their babies. It is bad enough that child care is itself so
demanding: A study of 900 American mothers found that they most enjoyed
"socializing, praying, eating, exercising, watching TV and cooking"
more than "taking care of my children."[21] Even more crucial are the
studies that show that 80 percent of mothers experience either (1) mild
"baby blues" for months after birth, (2) postpartum depression for up
to several years, or (3) puerperal psychosis: "They feel low, anxious,
tearful, and irritable. They have rapid mood swings…feel hopeless…experience
panic attacks...feel worthless, inadequate…have suicidal thoughts and thoughts
of harming or killing their children."[22] They regularly think: "I
had Holly in a carriage, going onto the escalator, and I remember thinking, 'if
I let go of this carriage, she'll probably be dead at the end' or 'I could drop
Jamie right in the lake and he'd be drowned.'"[23] They confess they are "afraid
to be alone with my baby." Depressed mothers are "about 40
percent of the time unresponsive or disengaged, whilst much of the rest of the
time they are angry, intrusive and rough with their babies."[24] Some
psychiatrists call postpartum mood disorders "the biggest complication of
birth today. Yet despite the epidemic proportions of such illnesses, they fail
to receive the attention they deserve."[25] It is understandable that careful
studies have found that "those children whose mothers had been depressed
in the months after childbirth were more violent than other children."[26] And,
since mothers are the main caretakers in the family, it is not surprising that
mothers or mother substitutes are still today responsible for more of the cases
of violent physical abuse of children than fathers or father substitutes.[27]
Although
depression is recognized as usually caused by an overexcited amygdalan fear
network and a reduction of the calming hormone serotonin, postpartum depression
is not in fact caused by maternal hormone changes after birth.[28] Abusive
mothers are either depressed or angry, and the cortisol levels of both
depressed and angry mothers are elevated both in the mother and in her child.[29] There
are two sources of depression, child abuse and neglect by parents: (1) the kind
of parenting the parents themselves received in their own childhood, and (2)
the lack of assistance they receive as parents from their families and societies
in caring for the child.
The parents of
the caretaker are still present as "ghosts in the nursery" when the
child is born, in the form of dissociated persecutory alters
(alternative personalities) — internal objects and voices that repeat the
traumas and fears the caretaker experienced as a child, since "The hurtful
parent was once a hurt child."[30] Parents often believe that
when their babies cry they "sound just like my mother, complaining all the
time" or "just like my father, a real tyrant!" They themselves
repeat exactly the same words and feelings their own mothers always yelled at
them: "You're so selfish! You never think of me!"[31] The mother experiences herself as
the good, persecuted mother while the baby is seen as a primarily bad, utterly
persecuting and justifiable object of hatred."[32] The helpless, vulnerable child
experiences this reenactment of maternal fear and hatred as ending in
abandonment or death. As Joseph Rheingold says, "Most mothers
do not murder or totally reject their children, but death pervades the
relationship between mother and child."[33] These death fears become the basis
for all later violence, both personal and social. Fay Weldon puts it
succinctly: "Once you have children, you realize how wars start."[34]
The second source
of post-partum fear, anger and depression in the mother is the lack of
assistance they get in caring for their children. When the mother must work and
gets no help in caring for her children, when the father is violent toward her
or demands constant attention, when there are deaths or severe illnesses in the
family, when economic or military disruptions or dozens of other sources of
maternal stress that are the norm in families throughout history occur,
caretakers simply cannot offer the time and energy and love that are required
to form secure attachments to their infants, so they grow up to be insecure,
disorganized children who are irrational, out of control and violent later on.[35] In
European nations today like Austria where the government provides mothers three
years of paid leave for each child plus other daycare help, mothers are far
more able to be effective caretakers, and rates of youth homicide and suicide
and drug abuse have declined dramatically.[36]
THE FEAR OF BEING
KILLED BY YOUR MOTHER
Whether the
mother is depressed and withdrawn or dominating and angry, the extremely
vulnerable baby and young child fears being killed or abandoned by her, and
this fear of imminent death is embedded in the brain in a dissociated alter in
its right hemisphere, where it is unavailable for correction as the child grows
up. Beginning with two path-breaking psychiatrists writing in the 1970s —
Joseph Rheingold (The Mother, Anxiety, and Death: The Catastrophic Death
Complex) and Dorothy Bloch ("So the Witch Won't Eat Me":
Fantasy and the Child's Fear of Infanticide) — psychoanalysts have begun to
address the fact that many of their patients continue to fear and defend
against early death-dealing Killer Mother alters that remain in a cut-off
dissociated state in their psyches. Rheingold emphasizes the child's terror of
being violently killed by their mother who wishes him dead, and shows that he
concludes that it must be because he is bad and that "by dying he appeases
her and hopes to gain her affection."[37] Rheingold sees this as not only the
source of suicide and other self-destructive behavior but as the ultimate source
of religion in rebirth fantasies such as the Christian and Islamic wish to die
and be merged with God/Allah, shouting "Allahu akbar," "God
is Great," the Killer Mother is Great, where "mother's
love is the prize of death."[38] Rheingold reports on
Despert's studies of the dreams of preschool children, which are "almost
always sadistic [and] concern being chased, bitten, and devoured [by beasts,
identified with the mother] never pushed, hit, scratched, or kicked, all
hostile acts that he might have actually encountered."[39] Even when Sylvia Anthony "asked
normal children of 2 to 5 years of age to tell a story [of any kind, they told
ones] of aggression, death and destruction and fears…of wild animals like
lions, wolves, and gorillas, of ghosts and witches."[40] Rheingold's work backed an
earlier statement by Freud that he found a "surprising, yet regular, dread
of being killed by the mother" in patients,[41] a clinical finding that he soon
explained away by positing an inherited "death instinct" rather than
destructive mothering. Since children have little fear of normal dying of old
age, Rheingold emphasizes that "the child does not fear to die; he fears
being murdered…thoughts of punishment and death come readily to the
minds of children."[42] Being unloved means being
killed for being bad.
Dorothy Bloch is
one of the first psychiatrists actually treating young children, and she was
startled to find that her little patients constantly feared that she "or
their parents—might kill them. That the fear of infanticide might be their
central preoccupation? Absurd. As one child after another admitted me to his
world of fantasy, however, I witnessed a terror of being killed that varied
only in its intensity."[43] As she discovered that the world of
little children "abounded in beasts of terrifying mien, in cruel witches
and monsters who pursued their victims with unrelenting savagery," she
became convinced that "the identities behind these imaginary, terrifying
figures are the child's own parents…[Although] children's fantasies appeared to
concentrate on the fear of being killed, the displacement of terror onto monsters
was obviously designed to preserve an idealized image of their parents."[44] And
when the displacement onto monsters is investigated further, she found they
picked up the mother doll and "stated with deep feeling, 'She wants her
child to die!'"[45] And, of course, she regularly found
the mother was violent toward the child or constantly said things like "I
wish I never had you" or even that the parents were violent toward each
other, with "the intensity of their fear depending upon…the degree of
violence they have experienced."[46] Even maternal depression
alone convinced the child that they were worthless; indeed, maternal withdrawal
regularly produces more insecure attachments than maternal domination and
anger.[47] Bloch
constantly found that her patient "idealized his parents [and] convinced
himself that his parents wanted to and were capable of loving him, but that it
was his worthlessness that made them hate and even want to destroy him. The
investment in this distortion seemed universal."[48] After the child is convinced
he is bad and deserving to be destroyed, every incident in his life becomes
proof of his responsibility for unhappy events: "Is there a
death in the family? — he's a murderer. An accident? — he's the
secret perpetrator…His 'badness' causes his mother to leave him for a job…and
drives his father to absent himself on business trips…he is the subject of
every quarrel and the author of every disaster [even of] divorce."
And when boys
regularly draw and play soldiers and warfare, they reveal their "concern
with murder and annihilation" as their "response to their fear of
infanticide."[49]
Other
psychoanalysts have picked up the themes of Rheingold and Bloch and shown by
careful statistical studies that "securely attached individuals report
less fear of death than insecurely attached individuals" and that the
expectation of death as punishment for being "bad" is caused by
insecure or disorganized attachments.[50] Stern, Anthony and others have
confirmed that "dreams are full of death symbolism" beginning at
eight months of age when babies begin to experience pavor nocturnes attacks and
nightmares when "sleep is interrupted by intense terror personified by an
attacking monster."[51] Various Jungians have written on
the child's fears of the Terrible Mother or devouring Dragon Mother.[52] Dozier's
book, entitled Fear Itself: The Origin and Nature of the Powerful
Emotion That Shapes Our Lives and Our World, concludes: "From
ages four to six, the fear of death and imaginary threats come to dominate the
child's mind [including] fears of monsters, ghosts, murderers, tigers, lions,
or other predatory animals."[53] Rorschach and Thematic
Apperception tests found that "children consistently identified death
itself with punishment and violence."[54] Kahr found his patients in a
British psychiatric hospital all told him their parents wanted to kill them and
that furthermore he "soon discovered that many of my patients had
experienced profound death threats and attempts on
their lives in childhood and adolescence. The bodies of these patients
remained alive, but the souls had suffered untold destruction."[55] And
Masterson found children of borderline mothers felt that "the only way
they could please their own mothers was to kill themselves" and that their
mothers actually often told them "I'd be better off without you" and
"I could kill you."[56]
Least it be
objected that most of these studies are from clinical populations, further
studies must be cited to show that even in an advanced population, an upper
middle class New York City area, most of the preschool children are full of
fears of being killed by their parents. One study was conducted for several
years by Stephen Joseph, and shows convincingly that "Young children are
afraid most of the time, so afraid that they find it difficult to learn, to
think, and to grow."[57] Joseph simply sat on a chair on one
side of a nursery school, and told the children he was just there to talk to
them, not supervise them. He found that although they generally tried to hide
their real feelings, they were hourly "preoccupied with death and death games."[58] Monsters,
ghosts and witches were constantly out to kill them, and when they weren't
actually fighting between themselves, "they played war games or cops and
robbers…Most were battles between the good guys and the bad guys [with]
constant ordering of alliances and coalitions…they seemed more like governments
in world politics than children in nursery school."[59] They constantly looked for
the answer to the question: "Will you 'dead' me, or kill me, if I act bad
enough?"
When Joseph spoke
privately to each of the children, they told him of their obsession with their
fears: "When I tell people, 'Some day I'm going to be dead,' they say,
'Now look, kid, stop making jokes. I know you won't die.' You see? I can't tell
anyone what I think about dying, because no one will listen to me!"[60] Talking
about death with parents or teachers was taboo. They revealed that
they dreamed about being killed "hundreds of times."[61] They
concluded that even thinking about death would make them crazy, or even make
them dead. No one wants a "morbid, disturbed child." So
when Joseph told them "If you are thinking about death, I can try to
answer some of your questions." They responded, softly: "I
think about it a lot."
He found that
whether the incidents children react to in their daily life with death fears
consist of being hit at home or watching endless deaths on TV, they told him it
raised the question, "If they punish me for something small, will they
kill me for something big?"[62] They were "obsessed with death
as a punishment for not conforming, for daring to think, for asking questions,
and for not obeying the authorities." The children asked Joseph: "Why
do grownups make up stories to scare kids, if they aren't
real?" They ganged up, teased, tormented and fought other
children in games they called "The Monsters Kill the
Children." They told of nightmares of being killed that they
had similar to the games that they played. God played a major role as Killer
Monster, and those that went to church told him the wafer "tasted like a
real body" when they ate it.[63] Their parents and their society
convinced them that death was not only real, it was imminent, and it was
because they were bad.
FUSION WITH THE
"KILLER MOTHER" ALTER AND SPLITTING OFF THE "BAD SELF"
ALTER
Children who
cannot depend upon their caretaker to work through their daily fears have to
"swallow down whole" their deadly abusers and store their abusive
personalities in their brains, in a dissociated part of the right hemisphere's
amygdalan network, a persecutory personality termed an alter.[64] Its
purpose is to hold the early terrors of abuse and abandonment in a split-off
form that allows the child to not have to express his pain and humiliation to
the parent (usually the mother) for fear of completely losing her and being
killed. The alter allows the child to blame himself for the abuse, then
splitting himself as victim into two additional internal alters: the Hero Self,
who clings to his Killer Mother Alter and protects her, and the Bad Self, whom
he must punish to avoid having the mother completely abandon and kill him.[65] The
dissociated alters being in the right hemisphere explains why "left-handed
males [right hemisphere dominant] are disproportionately represented in
delinquent and criminal groups."[66]
The child from
the first months of life is able to form dissociated alters. An example of just
how early this splitting can take place can be found in the case of a
fifteen-month-old baby girl, Sarah, whose babysitter took a series of
pornographic photos of her. The photos were discovered, and showed her
"naked and being touched by an erect, adult penis." Three years
later, Sarah draws pictures for her therapist of naked babies and says,
"She's my doll. She's laying on the bed naked. I cover her up. I'm yelling
at the doll. She was bad! I yell at my doll…'You! You bad thing!'"[67] Even
as a little child, Sarah blamed herself for her sexual abuse, then internalized
and reenacted the abuse while feeling fused with the abuser.
Alters are the
time bombs embedded in the right brain during childhood that are the sources of
all later violence. Because
they are dissociated modules, the adult can seem to be any personality mode,
even passive or withdrawn, but when they act out the earlier hurts and fears
and rages against a Bad Self victim, they can become a murderer or terrorist or
soldier massacring thousands without guilt. It is the dissociated
aspect of social violence and war that allows so many psychologists to conclude
that men like Goering or Auschwitz guards or bin Laden are "perfectly
normal," since their left-brain personalities are well organized, not
"psychotic," while their right-brain dissociated alter modules
periodically take over and commit their violence.[68]
Violent alters
are introjects present in most people throughout history as a result of their
extremely abusive and neglectful childrearing, even though the concept has only
recently begun to be investigated in connection with the inner voices of
multiple personalities and schizophrenics. Because these alters are
so well denied and defended against, we don't recognize them as the voices of
past abuses, accusations and humiliations that they really are. When
psychoanalysts know about dissociated alters, they can often observe them as
they are being formed in families. Richard Kluft, for instance,
describes how he "observed mother and son together. Whenever mother
switched into an angry alter the son switched into the 'scared'
alter. The boy's [conscious] personality denied being abused and
could not believe his mother would beat him…suppressing his angry alter for
fear of enduring even greater abuse."[69]
Surveys of
healthy people reveal 39 percent admit they hear 'inner voices" regularly
in their minds.[70] One psychotherapist, Robert
W. Firestone, practices what he terms "voice therapy" by getting them
to access their "parental or child voices" and seeing how they affect
their daily self-accusations. Firestone discovered that all his patients — and
even his neighbors and fellow therapists in discussion groups — contain these
voices. One way he recovers the angry voices is to ask the person to recall
when during the previous week they became angry at themselves and what
triggered the self-attack. They report feelings like "I'm such a
failure," or "I'm so incompetent at work" or "I'm so
inconsiderate of my wife." He then asks them to rephrase these
self-accusations in the first person, such as "You'll always be a
failure!" or "You're such a selfish person" or "You're
always so inconsiderate!" or even "Why don't you just die!" —
often in the voice of their mothers. They then realize where their fears and
lack of attachments originate, and answer the voice, challenging its
accusations.[71] He finds his therapy works both
with violent and self-destructive persons in limiting their acting out and with
self-limiting people who "act as their own jailers…people at the mercy of
the defense system that they originally constructed to protect themselves when
they were little."[72] Only by breaking "the
Fantasy Bond that originates as an illusion of fusion with the idealized
mother" are patients able to be independent and innovative and empathic
toward others.[73]
The alter created
in fusion with the Killer Mother is not just simple "identification"
or "internalization" as Freudian psychoanalytic theory imagines. It
is a powerful defense against death fears — an act of desperation not love. It
involves both the extreme idealization which is evident in nations or religious
groups with a need to act out the original death fears by dying as a martyr for
your grandiose Motherland or for your almighty God or Goddess. All
violent groups are formed by the fusion of the Heroic Self alter with the
Killer Mother alter, just as all suicidal behavior has been found to contain a
"oneness fantasy" where "the individual believes that part of
the self will survive [death] in a fusional relationship with an idealized
mother."[74] The power of this fusion fantasy
can be seen in a simple experiment that has been repeated over and over again
by Silverman and his group. They showed subliminal messages to
hundreds of people, and found that only one — "MOMMY AND I ARE ONE"—
had an enormous emotional effect, reducing their anxieties and pathologies and
their smoking and drinking addictions measurably.[75] "Daddy and I are one" had
no effect. The power of this fantasy from earliest childhood on can be seen
from the fact that the majority of three-year-old boys said when they grew up
they wanted to be mothers.[76] It is a fear of revealing
this basic need to be fused with the mother that is responsible for boys
playing separately from girls from the age of four and for their fears that
they might "change into a girl" and so must dominate girls (and women
and enemy nations) to avoid becoming a "sissy," a "wimp."[77] Yet
the fusion with the Killer Mother fantasy continues, since, as Masterson puts
it: "The patient's feelings of infantile deprivation are so fundamental,
so deep, and the feelings of abandonment so painful that he is willing in therapy,
as he was as a child, to sacrifice anything to fulfill the fantasy
of reunion."[78]
Furthermore, as
the Masterson group is nearly alone in emphasizing, it is during actual
"experiences of psychosocial growth, including moves toward
separation-individuation" that the fear of being abandoned by the mother
are most powerfully re-experienced, producing a renewed "wish for
reunion that relieves the feelings of abandonment."[79] It is, observes Masterson, when
patients make good progress in therapy and in their lives that they suddenly
find themselves "engulfed in a feeling of freedom" and then
panic. Patients say: "Going beyond what my mother wanted me to
be makes me feel like I'm falling apart, disintegrating, and sets off a
minefield of attack, destruction, and killing."[80] They are experiencing what I
have termed "growth panic" — fears of success and
independence and new freedoms and challenges. Growth panic is
experienced periodically in historical periods of progress and new political
freedoms, leading to renewed needs for fusion with their Killer Motherland and
a creation of Bad Self enemies, and finally then wars against any out-group
that is willing to fight and die for their Killer Motherland.[81] As
we will see in the next chapter, it is growth panic that accounts for why
nations go to war far more often after periods of success and social change
than after periods of economic distress, as is often claimed.
That enemies
—either personal or group — are Bad Self alters rather than just objects to
hate to express an inherited "aggressive instinct" is not recognized
by most students of violence. But none of the characteristics of a
relationship with an enemy conform to the instinct notion. Enemies,
like your Bad Self, are usually vulnerable. Neither
bullies in a playground, who pick on the most helpless kids, nor war-prone
leaders choose strong enemies to fight. They even speak of enemies
with infantile images like "They're stinky” or ”They're
about to devour us" or they speak like their punitive
mothers and, like George W. Bush, say "They only respect force"
when starting wars. The Nazis first killed helpless German
children In gas chambers, not Jews; over 70,000 "undesirable
children who were late in being toilet trained or had used dirty words were
deemed "undesirable bad babies" and gassed in 1939, before the
Holocaust.[82] Enemies everywhere are
tortured while naked, as if they were babies, from the naked
torture rituals of antiquity to those of Abu Ghraib. For that
matter, Greek soldiers in antiquity often fought while nearly naked as a baby,
except for their shields — which had Athena embedded on it — as if they could
only sacrifice themselves for their Killer Motherland while dressed as
babies. Other examples of war enemies as babies are legion: the
Turks for instance used to infantilize the Armenians by making them strip naked
like helpless infants and march until they died. Furthermore, little
boys recognize early on their need to be martyrs for their Killer
Motherland. The majority of boys questioned in one study admitted
openly that they were willing to die for America.[83] Not die for any worthwhile
American war goal — the study was done in 1974 when the
Vietnam War was thoroughly unpopular. Just willing to die for America, their
Motherland, to become martyrs, like Christ dying for his God. They
need to die to renew the Killer Motherland: "The souls of nations are
drinking renewal from the blood of fallen soldiers. [The soldier] dies
peacefully. He who has a Motherland dies in comfort…in her, like a baby falling
asleep."[84]
THE
NEUROBIOLOGY OF HOW FEARS ARE STORED IN DISSOCIATED ALTERS
Schore, Le Doux
and other neurobiologsts provide massive evidence that the neural circuitry of
the infant's fear system is located in the right brain in two main affect
regulators: the prefrontal cortex (the regulator) and the amygdala (the fear
system.)[85] When children experience
maternal abandonment fears and maternal abuse, they release cortisol, which
shuts down their prefrontal cortex and makes their amygdala hyperactive,
"indelibly imprinting, burning in" the memory of the threatening
mother in their amygdalan module.[86] "The role of the
amygdala is to remember a threat, generalize it to other possible threats, and
carry it into the future."[87] "Human subjects whose
brains were electrically stimulated in the region of the amygdala reported a
sense of being reprimanded by an authority."[88] Only major dangers imprint
themselves in dissociated form in the amygdala.[89] Amygdalae of insecurely
attached children are hyperactive and larger than those of securely attached
children, plus their prefrontal cortices are smaller, and so they are less able
to control their fears, angers and other irrational emotional reactions in
response to later interpersonal difficulties.[90] As LeDoux puts it, "They
are probably with us for life."[91]
This early
imprinting of dissociated alters in the right amygdala of humans is the main
source of violence in later life. Brain scans reveal that "an enduring pattern,
associated with destructive, defensive rage, is imprinted into an immature,
inefficient orbitofrontal [cortical] system [and amygdala] during relational
trauma in early childhood."[92] "The child uses the
output of the mother's emotion-regulating right cortex as a template for the
imprinting of circuits in his own right cortex." Later,
"when adult human subjects are shown fearful or angry faces, it immediately
depresses their right cortexes"[93] and activates their right amygdalae
— as when they are racially biased white subjects who are shown faces of
African Americans.[94] The right amygdala has
been measured to be larger and more excitable in psychotics,
depressives, anxiety disorders and murderers [95]— plus, presumably, if they ever would
allow us to measure them, in terrorists and war lovers. In addition,
all these violence-prone products of early relational trauma suffer from
elevated norepinephrine (acting-out neurotransmitter) levels and depressed
serotonin (calming hormone) levels.[96]
Finally, one further
important area of the brain becomes damaged during early stress: the
insula, a deep area of the cortex that contains most of the "mirror
neurons" that make people capable of empathy of the emotional states of
others.[97] It is the cutting off of access
especially to the right insula that occurs when mass murderers switch into
their violent alters that allows them to kill myriad numbers of strangers
without guilt. And it is the cutting off of the empathic mirror neurons of the
right insula that allows SS men to gather together French women and children,
"hug them with tenderness" and treat them "with utmost
kindness," and then switch into their violent alters, put them in a church
and set them afire and burn them to death.[98] Indeed, the turning off of
the empathic insula is responsible for all in-group/out-group splitting when
people enter their violent alters in wars. Without this turning off of empathy
in the war trance, mass violence is impossible. But when Hutu and
Tutsi who have been friends living next to each other and intermarrying for
decades switch into a war trance for internal emotional reasons and cut off the
empathic mirror neurons in their right insula, they suddenly find themselves
able to chop off their neighbors' heads and arms without guilt.
Neuropsychiatrists
have examined abused and neglected children with brain scans, and shown the
damage done that affects their need for violence later on. Bruce Perry has
published a huge number of studies showing abnormal brain development following
neglect and abuse in little children, including significantly smaller brains,
decreased activity in their prefrontal cortex, hippocampal damage and
amygdaloid overexcitation that produces "electrical storms" similar
to those experienced by patients with temporal lobe epilepsy, seizures that
cause hallucinations and violent behavior.[99] As we will see shortly, nations
starting wars undergo emotions that are similar to individuals who are having
epileptic fits, and violent religious leaders, like Mohammed, often experience
actual epileptic seizures. Brain-wave abnormalities are found in both
prefrontal and amygdalan areas in those who had been traumatized in
childhood. [100] The medial prefrontal cortex — the
part of the brain just behind the eyes — which has been termed the site of the
"moral-decision module" and the "sense of self," is so
damaged by early mistreatment that all impulses are released
from control, both violent impulses and sexual impulses — which accounts for
why soldiers on a rampage so often not only kill but
also rape the innocent victims they encounter.[101] As
Konner puts it in his study of "Human Nature, Ethnic Violence and
War": "…child abuse [produces] frontal lobe damage that contributes
to violent tendencies…epileptics…with seizures in the amygdala have aggressive
outbursts. People with records of criminal aggression have more EEG
abnormalities than others…reduced brain serotonin activity lowers the threshold
for aggressive reactions to frustration…Impulsively violent and antisocial
individuals have low levels [of serotonin]."[102] In addition, a prefrontal cortex
with low serotonin means the subject experiences delusions and hallucinations,
which because of early structural damage means they cannot catch errors and
correct them before they become violent in reacting to imaginary threats.[103] This
delusional outcome for neglected and abused children is very important in
nations starting wars, which as we will see regularly begin with delusional
threats from neighbors they imagine are about to attack. Since the brain
damage done by withdrawal of the mother
is even worse than that done by her anger, the effects of the universal
swaddling and other abandonment practices throughout history — where the infant
is left alone in its crib "to avoid it becoming a tyrant" — embed
dissociated violent alters in their right hemispheres that make them profoundly
violence-prone later in life.[104]
The defense of
dissociation begins in insecure infants who "conceive of the parent's mind
as simply too terrifying" to relate to, "creating a defensive
disruption of their capacity to depict thoughts and feelings in themselves and
others."[105] It is effective in handling
overwhelming fears: "Dissociation is a method of coping with inescapable
stress [allowing] infants to enter into trance states and to ignore current
sensory input."[106] Children then only recapture
the traumatic images in nightmares (when the amygdala "lights up like a
pinball machine") and fears of ghosts and monsters that escape the
imprinted violent parent alter. One describes his monster dreams that imprinted
his fears of his punitive father that were imprinted in his brain:
I was down in the
basement in bed sleeping and it was the terror of all terrors. I knew the ghost
was around the corner…I finally decided I would just yell and let the ghost
come out and get me. I sat up in bed and screamed as loud as I could. The ghost
came roaring out of its hiding place and jumped all over me and attacked me…[107]
Traumatized
children often [108]access their terrifying alters by
"depersonalizing, going numb, day dreaming, and staring off into space
with a glazed look." Because alters are not modified by
later experience, "it is not unusual for a childhood dream symbol to
continue intermittently for years or even decades."[109] They often appear as imaginary companions
during self-induced "hypnoid" trance states, even as fully conscious
alternate personalities.[110] I myself as a child used to split
off from myself and float to the ceiling when my father beat me with his razor
strap. I was so certain I could really fly I told a friend to watch
me jump from a second story window and fly down (I of course broke my ankle
doing so.) The majority of children even today have invisible
companions or selves that are actually alters.[111]
Alters are
"activated by strong emotional experiences, whether intensely pleasurable
or intensely painful."[112] Dreams and hypnotic states are
"increased facilities in enhancing amygdaloid-hippocampal activity,
resulting in increased theta wave production."[113] All adults increase their
daydreams, reveries and fantasies in cycles of about 90 minutes during the day,
as shown by increased EEG alpha wave activity, during which hypnotists find
they can more easily reach dissociated alter material.[114] In fact, hypnosis has been
described as "controlled dissociation [and] dissociation as a form of
self-hypnosis."[115] Children who have been
abused are more easily hypnotizable by charismatic political leaders.[116] The
child's behavior when re-experiencing the abuse of their punitive alters always
contains a self-destructive aspect, even suicidal attempts, which often get
acted out later on, since "adolescents themselves preferred death to
exposing their abusive parents."[117] Violent criminals, according
to Richard Rhodes, "consult 'phantom communities' [alters] in their heads
who approve of their violent acts as revenges for past humiliations."[118] According
to James Gilligan, a prison psychiatrist who has spent his life talking to
violent criminals in prisons, reveals that they all were horribly abused as
children:
As children,
these men were shot, axed, scalded, beaten, strangled, tortured, drugged,
starved, suffocated, set on fire, thrown out of windows, raped, or prostituted
by mothers who were their 'pimps.' . . . Some people think armed robbers commit
their crimes in order to get money. But when you sit down and talk with people
who repeatedly commit such crimes, what you hear is, 'I never got so much
respect before in my life as I did when I first pointed a gun at
somebody.'"[119]
Although violent
assault rates in the U.S. today are under one percent of the population per
year (with over 30 percent of the population of the U.S. being arrested at
least once in their lives),[120] the rates of murder earlier in
history were far higher,[121] especially if infanticide rates of
up to 50 percent of newborn are considered murder, as they should be. Gilligan
calls all interpersonal violence "an attempt to achieve justice"
for the childhood harm done to them.[122] Our justice system makes
violent people more violent, since, as Gilligan has
shown: "Punishment does not prevent violence,
it causes it."[123] Murderers are full of shame,
live in a constant state of hypervigilance and feel no empathy or attachments
for anyone in their threatening world, all the result of the alters that remain
embedded since their childhoods. Most when questioned say, like Kip
Kinkel, who fired at his schoolmates and teachers: "Voices directed me to
kill."[124] Bessel van der Kolk,
the most famous expert on dissociated alters, concludes: "People with
childhood histories of trauma, abuse and neglect make up almost the entire
criminal justice population in the US [with abusive childhoods causing]
dissociative states."[125] And Robert Firestone reports
all his suicidal patients hear parental voices telling them they should kill
themselves.[126]
Most people, of
course, consciously consult their punitive alters through prayer, with 90
percent of Americans saying they pray to their hyper-grandiose, demanding,
punitive deity on a daily basis.[127] Jeanette Good's careful study of
religious belief shows the amount of religious experience in life is
correlated with the degree of corporal punishment and shame inflicted by
caretakers in the believer's childhood.[128] Praying and other religious
activities — like all alter experiences — aims at fusion with the idealized
Killer Mother alter, the god who has abandoned one for one's sinfulness,
because you as a child were "bad." And, of course,
religions, like all in-groups, commit violence by projecting this Bad Self
alter onto other believers and persecuting them.
THE
PSYCHODYNAMICS OF SWITCHING INTO DISSOCIATED ALTERS
The psychodynamcs
of having a nightmare, entering into a hypnotic trance, becoming possessed, murdering
someone and starting a war are similar. They all are results of switching into
dissociated violent right hemisphere alters, terror modules in the right
amygdala that are embedded early in life and continue to relive the fears of
early abuse and neglect.[129] When young boys "play
war," they are practicing switching into their violent alters, practice
fusing with their Killer Motherland, and practice the killing of Bad Self
enemies. Nightmares and hypnotic states show increased right
hemisphere EEGs,[130] which is why hypnotists use
"sleeping methods" to switch people into a trance.[131] The switching process in
tribal rites begins when the group proclaims individuals are "too
successful...they must have stolen other person's yams from their gardens by
magic," they must be sorcerers.[132] Their "ghostly
self" (alter) is then experienced as terrifying fear, and then,
usually after frenzied dancing or other painful "driving" rites that
produce tremors and hypoglycemia, they are able to achieve a state of fusion
with their Killer Mother alter that feels like "ecstasy" and
"awe," since the fusion state releases endogenous opioids that are
experienced as morphine-like mystical feelings of grandiosity. Over a third of
Americans report they have experienced this feeling; the majority of tribal and
earlier historical personalities are able to experience the fusion ecstasy of
possession.[133] During alter fusion the possessed
person experiences unity with the Killer Mother alter which is often described
as "love," but the price of this delusional state is loss of personal
self and a splitting off of Bad Self, which soon must be persecuted in some
out-group under the command of alter "voices" demanding
punishment. Eliade describes one spiritual possession of a shaman
who was possessed by "a woman with one-half of her face black, and the
other half red. [She first said] 'I love you.' [Then] If you will
not obey me, I shall kill you.'"[134]
Bourguignon
reported in her cross-cultural survey of 488 societies, that "ninety
percent have one or more institutionalized, culturally patterned forms of
altered states of consciousness," what Crapanzano terms "possession
trances."[135] Possession by alters is
reported as beginning in childhood throughout history. In the Acts
of Thomas, God himself advised Christians "to avoid having
children [since] the majority of children [are] possessed by demons."[136] When
fully into their possession alter, Christians often "speak in
tongues," repeating the meaningless sounds of early childhood, while
trembling with fear.[137] As we will examine more
thoroughly in coming chapters, even Greek and Roman thinkers reported
possession by alters felt as body parts that they talk to and are moved by
"little men" voices like the thumos and kradie and psyche.[138] Even
more familiar are the states of possession of oracles, witches, shamans and
others in people thought to be invaded by demons or spirits and who had to be
exorcised or killed in order to be released from their possession state.[139] Witches
in particular were acknowledged as Killer Mothers: "Over and over again in
the trial records, the accused women are addressed as 'Mother' …The witch is a
monstrous mother."[140]
The same process
of switching into violent alters is necessary in order for tribes and states to
begin wars. In the following chapters we will show that there are
seven separate stages to complete this alter switch into a full fighting war
trance. That the people who are most prone to the war trance are
reactionaries who have had the worst, most authoritarian, most abusive
childrearing is a truth that has many studies to back it up. These begin with
a whole series of "authoritarianism" studies, beginning with The
Authoritarian Personality by Theodore Adorno and others, which
established a "Fascism Scale" that measured those who were uncritical
toward authorities of the in-group, who believed in punishing those who
violated conventional values, who were preoccupied with dominance-submission
relationships and identified with "tough" power figures, and who had
generalized hostility and destructiveness toward those who didn't agree with
them.[141] All
these traits have been shown to be results of resentment about the parents'
lack of love, displaced to fear and hatred of the out-group. Studies
then followed by Etheredge, Tomkins, Alice Miller and myself that traced this
authoritarian personality to what Miller termed "poisonous pedagogy"
that acted out the kinds of harsh childrearing discipline that have been the
cause of reactionary political behavior. Michael Milburn summarizes
his extension of these findings in his asking undergraduates at the University
of Massachusetts the following question:
"If you
ruined an expensive toy…would your parents have spanked you, taken away
privileges, scolded you, expressed disappointment, or not punished you?"
…People who reported high levels of punishment…held significantly more punitive
attitudes…more in favor of the death penalty, using military force, and were
against abortion.[142]
Other
authoritarianism studies found that reactionaries "venerated" their
domineering parents and had a contempt for the weakness of others, that
reactionaries fear death more than progressives, that mother-dominant families
were more antisemitic than father-dominant, that parents whose children were
"more basically secure" and who were raised with more empathy held
more progressive political attitudes. Reactionaries have been shown
to have greater death anxieties, entertain more apocalyptic fantasies, see
children as sinful and needing punishment, fear femininity more, and are quick
to feel humiliation and take vengeance, all results of having powerful
dissociated alters.[143] As will be detailed in the
next chapter, modern nations switch into their alters about every 25 years in a
self-destructive sacrificial ritual in which they act out in the slaughters of
war the nightmares that were embedded like time bombs in their brains during
their abusive childhoods.
Lloyd deMause is Editor
of The Journal of Psychohistory, Director of The Institute for
Psychohistory, Treasurer of the International Psychohistorical Association, and
author/editor of seven books, including The Emotional Life of Nations. He can
be contacted at psychhst@tiac.net. His website is www.psychohistory.com
[1] See Lloyd deMause,
Ed., The History of Childhood. New York, Psychohistory Press, 1974
and Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations. New York: Karnac,
2002. Further extensive bibliography is on www.psychohistory.com.
[2] Lloyd deMause, "The Evolution of Childhood."
In Lloyd deMause, Editor, The History of Childhood. New York:
Psychohistory Press, 1974, p. 1.
[3] Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations. New
York: Karnac, 2002, pp. 220-221.
[4] Katherine Ellison, The Mommy Brain: How
Motherhood Makes Us Smarter. New York: Basic Books, 2006, p. 21.
[5] Lloyd deMause, "'If I Blow Myself Up and Become a
Martyr, I'll Finally Be Loved'" The Journal of Psychohistory 33(2006):
300.
[6] Brenda Geiger, Fathers As Primary
Caregivers. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996.
[7] Thomas R. Insel, "A Neurobiological Basis of
Social Attachment." American Journal of Psychiatry 154(1997):
733; Robin Karr-Morse and Meredith S. Wiley, Ghosts From the Nursery:
Tracing the Roots of Violence. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997,
p. 188.
[8] Ofra Lubetzky, "Integrating Mind and Body:
Mother-fetus-infant Relationships and the Maturation of the Right
Hemisphere." International Journal Prenatal and Perinatal
Psychology and Medicine. 17(2005): 55.
[10] Chugani, H. et al, "Local brain functional
activity following early deprivation: a study of post-institutionalised
Romanian orphans." Neuroimage 14(2001):1290-1301.
[11] Jan Volavka, Neurobiology of Violence. Washington,
DC: American Psychiatric Press, 1995, p. 28.
[12] Mark Zoccolillo et al, "The Intergenerational
Transmission of Aggression and Antisocial Behavior"in Richard E. Tremblay
et al, Eds. Developmental Origins of Aggression. New York: The
Guilford Press, 2005, p. 358.
[13] Ofra Lubetzky, "Integrating Mind and Body,"
pp. 50-55.
[14] Ellen Moss et al, "Attachment at Early School Age
and Developmental Risk: Examining Family Contexts and Behavior Problems of
Controlling-Caregiving, Controll-Punitive, and Behaviorally Disorganized
Children." Developmental Psychology 40(2004): 519-529;
Peter Fonagy, Attachment Theory and Psychoanalysis. New York:
Other Press, 2001; Bruce D. Perry, "Bonding and Attachment in Maltreated
Children: Consequences of Emotional Neglect in Childhood"
www.childtrauma.org.
[15] Jan Volavka, Neurobiology of Violence, p.
61; Robin Karr-Morse and Meredith S. Wiley, Ghosts From the
Nursery, p. 230.
[16] Ellen Moss et al, "Attachment at Early School Age
and Developmental Risk," p. 520.
[17] Brian Corby, Child Abuse: Towards a Knowledge
Base. Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000, p. 98.
[18] Lloyd deMause, "What the British Can Do To End
Child Abuse," The Journal of Psychohistory 34(2006): 5.
[19] Lloyd deMause, "'If I Blow Myself Up and Become a
Martyr, I'll Finally Be Loved.'" The Journal of
Psychohistory 33(2006):302.
[20] Nawal El Saadawi, Te Hidden Face of Eve: Women
in the Arab World. Boston: Beacon Press, 1980, p. 34.
[21] Time, January 17, 2005, p. A6.
[22] Natasha S. Mauthner, The Darkest Days Of My
Life: Stories of Postpartum Depression. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2002, pp. 3-4; Katharina Dlton, Depression After Childbirth:
How to Recognize, Treat, and Prevent Postnatal Depression. Third Ed. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 2; Paula Nicolson, Post-Natal
Depression: Psychology, Science and the Transition to Motherhood. London:
Routledge, 1998, p. 55.
[24] Sue Gerhardt, Why Love Matters: How Affection
Shapes a Baby's Brain. Hove: Brunner-Routledge, 2004, p. 124.
[25] Deborah Sichel and Jeanne Watson Driscoll, Women's
Moods: What Every Woman Must Know About Hormnes, The Brain, and Emotional
Health. New York: William Morrow and Co., 1999, p. 222.
[26] Dale F. Hay et al, "Pathways to Violence in the
Children of Mothers Who Were Depressed Postpartum." Developmental
Psychology 39(2003):1091.
[27] Anna Motz, The Psychology of Female Violence:
Crimes Against the Body. New York: Brunner/Routledge, 2001, p.
92.
[28] I. F. Brockington, Motherhood and Mental
Health. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 151.
[29] Robin Karr-Morse and Meredith S. Wiley, Ghosts
From the Nursery, p. 215.
[30] Dante Cicchetti and Sheree L. Toth, "Child Maltreatment
and Attachment Organization." In Susan Goldberg et al, Eds., Attachment
Theory: Social, Developmental and Clinical Perspectives. Hillsdale,
New Jersey: Analytic Press, 1995, p. 282.
[31] Louis Fraiberg, Ed., Selected Writings of
Selma Fraiberg. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987, p. 133.
[32] Rozsika Parker, Mother Love/Mother Hate: The
Power of Maternal Ambivalence. New York: BasicBooks, 1995, p. 20.
[33] Joseph C. Rheingold, The Fear of Being a Woman,
p. 143.
[34] Rozsika Parker, Mother Love/Mother Hate, p.
5.
[35] Judith Solomon and Carol George, "The Place of
Disorganization in Attachment Theory." In Judith Solomon and Carol
George, Attachment Disorganization. New York: Guilford
Press, 1999, pp. 6-9; Ellen Moss et al, "Attachment at Early School Age
and Developmental Risk." Developmental Psychology 40(2004):
519-532.
[36] Lloyd deMause, "What the British Can Do to End
Child Abuse," p. 6.
[37] Joseph C. Rheingold, The Mother, Anxiety, and
Death: The Catastrophic Death Complex. Boston: Little, Brown and
Co., 1967, p. 14.
[39] Ibid., p. 139; Joseph C. Rheingold, The Fear
of Being a Woman: A Theory of Maternal Destructiveness. New York:
Grune & Stratton, 1964, p. 136.
[40] Joseph C. Rheingold, The Mother, Anxiety, and
Death, p. 137.
[42] Ibid., pp. 139, 137, 140.
[43] Dorothy Bloch, "So the Witch Won't Eat
Me": Fantasy and the Child's Fear of Infanticide. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Co., 1978, p. 1.
[47] Lynne Murray and Peter J. Cooper, Postpartum
Depression and Child Development. New York: Guilford Press, 1997, p.
68.
[48] Dorothy Bloch, "So the Witch Won't Eat
Me!", p. 11.
[50] Tom Pyszczynski, et al, In the Wake of 9/11:
The Psychology of Terror. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological
Association, 2002, p. 84.
[51] Sylvia Anthony, The Child's Discovery of
Death: A Study in Child Psychology. New York: Harcourt, Brace
& Co., 1940, p. 65; Max M. Stern, "Death and the Child." In John
E. Schowalter, et al, Eds., The Child and Death. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1983, p. 21.
[52] Marisa Dillon Weston, "anorexia as a Symbol of an
Empty Matrix Dominated by the Dragon Mother." Group Analysis 32(1999):
71-85.
[53] Rush W. Dozier, Jr., Fear Itself: The Origin
and Nature of the Powerful Emotion That Shapes Our Lives and Our World. New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1998, p. 125.
[54] James B. McCarthy, Death Anxiety: The Loss of
the Self. New York: Gardner Press, 1980, p. 46.
[55] Brett Kahr, "Ancient Infanticide and Modern
Schizophrenia: The Clinical Uses of Psychohistorical Research." The
Journal of Psychohistory 20(1993): 269.
[56] Christine Ann Lawson, Understanding the
Borderline Mother: Helping Her Children Transcend the Intense, Unpredictable,
and Volatile Relationship. Northvale, New Jersey: Jason Aronson,
2000, p. 170.
[57] Stephen M. Joseph, Mommy! Daddy! I'm Afraid!:
Help Your Children Overcome Fears That Hold Them Back in School and at
Play. New York: Collier Books, 1974, p. xi.
[64] Doris Bryant et al, The Family Inside: Working
with the Multiple. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1992; Lisa
Goodman, et al, "Persecutory Alters and Ego States: Protectors, Friends,
and Allies." Dissociation 8(1995): 91-99. The
amygdalan fear network includes extensions to the hippocampus and cortex; see
Steven Johnson, Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of
Everyday Life. New York: Scribner, 2004, p. 61.
[65] Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations,
p. 93.
[66] Arnold P. Goldstein, Delinquent Gangs: A
Psychological Perspective. Champaign, Ill.: Research Press,
1991, p. 54.
[67] Lenore Terr, Too Scared To Cry: Psychic Trauma
in Childhood. New York: Harper & Row, 1990, p. 30.
a[68] Neil J. Kressel, Mass Hate: The Global Rise of
Genocide ad Terror. Westview, Perseus Books, 2003, pp. 137, 138.
[69] Richard P. Kluft, "Childhood Multiple Personality
Disorder:" In Richard P. Kluft, Ed., Childhood Antecedents of
Multiple Personality. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press,
1985, pp. 182, 175.
[70] Daniel B. Smith, Muses, Madmen and Prophets:
Rethinking the History, Science and Meaning of Auditory Hallucinations. New
York: Penguin Press, 2007.
[71] Robert W. Firestone, Voice Therapy: A
Psychotherapeutic Approach to Self-Destructive Behavior. New
York: Human Sciences Press, 1948, p. 34; Robert W. Firestone, The
Fantasy Bond: Effects of Psychological Defenses on Interpersonal
Relations. New York: Human Sciences Press, 1987, p. 304.
[73] Ibid, p. 21. For other therapists who recover fused
alters see Arthur Janov, Primal Healing: Access the Incredible Power of
Feelings to Improve Your Health. Franklin Lakes, New Jersey: New Page
Books, 2006; Fredric Schiffer, Of Two Minds: The Revolutionary Science
of Dual-Brain Psychology. New York: The Free Press, 1998; and Daniel
B. Smith, "Can You Live With the Voices in Your Head?" The
New York Times Magazine, March 25, 2007, pp. 49-53.
[74] Rosine J. Perelberg, Ed., Psychoanalytic
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