- Paperback: 464 pages
- Publisher: Souvenir Press Ltd (1 Feb 1976)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0285648071
- ISBN-13: 978-0285648074
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,068,121 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Brilliant ... bold ... challenging ... heavily documented. The New York Review Of Books Crucial in understanding how the wounded child is archetypal of our time. -- John Bradshaw Neither history nor psychiatry can ever be the same again. A turning point in the integration of the social sciences. -- Reuben Fine, Ph.D. Lloyd deMause is probably the first scholar who has made a thorough study of the history of childhood without glossing over the facts. -- Alice Miller
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
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from the Foreword: Possibly the heartless treatment of children, from the practice of infanticide and abandonment through to the neglect, the rigors of swaddling, the purposeful starving, the beatings, the solitary confinement, and so on, was and is only one aspect of the basic aggressiveness and cruelty of human nature, of the inbred disregard of the rights and feelings of others. Children, being physically unable to resist aggression, were the victims of forces over which they had no control, and they were abused in many imaginable and some almost unimaginable ways by way of expressing conscious or more commonly unconscious motives of their elders...The present volume abounds in evidence of all kinds, from all periods and peoples. The story is monotonously painful, but it is high time that it should be told and that it should be taken into account...
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I first came across this book during a lecture on the nature of childhood at university. Just by reading a few extracts given out by the lecturer got me hooked on the fancinating yet heart-rending challenges of childhood in the past to the present day. Today when we look at the up-bringing of children it's hard to believe what we call child abuse was an everyday occurance where no-one batted an eyelid as it was for the child's own good. I for one are'nt what you call a book person & find myself rarely reading a book but i have to admit this book has got me into reading rather than watching TV. So if your studying childhood or childcare or you are just interestesd in a bit of history this book is a must have in an area that has been rarely studied or recorded but only by a few in this field.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Lloyd deMause's team of investigators gives a vast portrait of childhood through the ages. With often horrifying detail they show how the conditions for children have changed, usually at glacial speed. They refer constantly to eyewitnesses of the past, who testify to what childhood was, or instruct parents in the wisdom their age. And much of this traditional advice is absolutely chilling. As the centuries crawl by we see a pitifully gradual improvement in the way children are treated or trained. We watch an accumulation of almost imperceptible shifts in expectations for mothers and fathers. The right of fathers to inflict abuse including the death penalty on their offspring, the arranged child betrothals, the naming of children after their parents, or the caste-like molding of kids to their family professions, all slowly fade, while other experiments in child rearing arise. The children so abysmally neglected in most works of history take center stage. The tale they tell is damning yet filled with hope.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3 reviews
39 of 40 people found the following review helpful
History for the Future
9 Jan 2001
Format:Paperback
This revolutionary book impacted not only childhood history but history in general, as well as psychology and the hybrid field of psychohistory. The scholarly contributions remain essential reading for those who wish to look candidly at the past and the introduction by deMause is simply epochal. His view that adult and social violence have their origins in childhood has been vindicated by the most important studies of the subject, including James Gilligan's "Violence," Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Rhodes's "Why They Kill," and Anna Motz's groundbreaking study of female violence "The Psychology of Female Violence," the latter two having drawn on the works of deMause. Accordingly, this book is important not only for understanding our past, but as an indicator of where much fruitful scholarship is going to be done in the future. This work has rightly been praised by such noted historians as William Langer, Past President of the American Historical Association, and Rudolph Binion, as well as many luminaries from the field of psychology including psychiatrist Morton Schatzman, and eminent therapists like Reuben Fine and Alice Miller, who has drawn extensively on deMause's work. I concur with the New York Review of Books that this work is "Brilliant...bold...challenging." I would also add "indispensable." I cannot recommend this work too highly.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
The Newton of the history of childhood
6 Oct 2011
Format:Paperback
The publication of The History of Childhood in 1974 marks the turning point in the field that deMause created. Putting aside the idealizations of previous historians, the book examines for the first time the history of Western childhood. In the new deMausean paradigm the force of the change is neither technology nor the economy, but the interactions between parents and children.
The initial paragraphs became so famous in psychohistory that they have being quoted extensively:
Quote:
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.
/end quote
DeMause has no illusions. Like Thomas Kuhn, he knows perfectly well that paradigm revolutions are achieved gradually while the defenders of the old paradigm die and are replaced by new individuals. "If childhood history and psychohistory mean anything,", writes deMause, "they mean reversing most of the causal arrows used by historians to date." In other words, the way of seeing the world in the humanities and in social sciences is upside down, and psychohistory places our feet back on the ground. The relations between parents and children have determined the social, political and economic aspects in all civilizations of the world. In contrast to the findings of Darwin about the organism and its environment, in Homo sapiens the external world does not mold future developments so definitively as the intergenerational emergency of empathy does.
In a nutshell, the main finding of psychohistory is that academic history fails to recognize the profound role that the love of the parents for their children plays in the future developments of mankind.
The initial paragraphs became so famous in psychohistory that they have being quoted extensively:
Quote:
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.
/end quote
DeMause has no illusions. Like Thomas Kuhn, he knows perfectly well that paradigm revolutions are achieved gradually while the defenders of the old paradigm die and are replaced by new individuals. "If childhood history and psychohistory mean anything,", writes deMause, "they mean reversing most of the causal arrows used by historians to date." In other words, the way of seeing the world in the humanities and in social sciences is upside down, and psychohistory places our feet back on the ground. The relations between parents and children have determined the social, political and economic aspects in all civilizations of the world. In contrast to the findings of Darwin about the organism and its environment, in Homo sapiens the external world does not mold future developments so definitively as the intergenerational emergency of empathy does.
In a nutshell, the main finding of psychohistory is that academic history fails to recognize the profound role that the love of the parents for their children plays in the future developments of mankind.
6 of 77 people found the following review helpful
Interesting but unreliable
31 Mar 2000
Format:Paperback
The only trouble with this very interesting and readable book is that its conclusions have long since been discredited by eminent specialists in the field.
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