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THE MASOCHISTIC PSYCHOCLASS OF EARLY CHRISTIANITY
As mothers moved from infanticidal to abandoning mode childrearing (see Chapters
6 and 7), early Christians could internalize a mommy who doesn’t actually kill
her children but only abandons them, both through emotional abandonment
and through sending them to wetnurses, fosterage, monasteries, service with
others, etc. Even profound neglect is less devastating than watching your baby
sister be strangled, so early Christians could for the first time in history
hope to get their mother’s/God’s love (redemption) if they show her their pain
and get her pity.
This display of pain to get the love of the mother is known
as the masochistic personality, a lower level borderline condition,179
which for the first time in history enables people to imagine that if they debase
and torture themselves, the mother/God will feel sorry for them and might provide
salvation, eventual closeness, rather than just helplessness and unbearable
loneliness.
The gods of antiquity were distant, impersonal
gods: "The gods might often mingle with men and women, but they did not seem
to spend their time cultivating reciprocal love."180 As Aristotle
said, "When one party is removed to a great distance, as God is, the possibility
of friendship ceases."181 But the Christian God "loves and can be
loved in return."182 For abandoning mode children, if you worship
and love your Mommy/God, if you take over yourself her beating and tortures
of your body, if you give up all personal needs and starve yourself and avoid
sex, you will through your masochistic display gain forgiveness and perhaps
even be allowed eventually to merge with Her.183
Christ is, of course, the main Suffering Victim
Alter who has been sent to earth by God to display his wounds and ask for pity
on behalf of mankind. While the narcissistic personalities of antiquity generally
agreed with Socrates that "no one is willfully evil,"184 the masochistic
personalities of early Christians put sin at the center of life and built up
a church of expiation and confession that for the first time allowed pardon
for the sins. The musings of early theologians about Christ sounded like the
ruminations of the child about his or her mother’s mistreatment:
God abandoned him, he treated him as
the most abominable of men; and after an infinity of disgraces, of ignominies,
and suffering, without any regard that he was His own Son, he caused him to
die by the most shameful and cruel torture there ever was…He worked his vengeance
on His Son, as if He had nothing to do with him.185
But the Christian, like the abandoning mode child,
then totally absolved the Mother/God of all blame by a simple trick, saying:
"I am all to blame. I deserve the torture. Mommy/God will pity me if I torture
myself." The trick is one regularly used today by lower level borderline
masochists, who show extremely high occurrences of reported childhood neglect
(92 percent)186 and physical and sexual abuse (59 percent to 91 percent),
who cut and burn and torture themselves endlessly in order to punish themselves
and gain pity from their mommy alters. Earlier gods in antiquity killed and
tortured children, of course, but they, like Jehovah, only "laughed at the slaughter
of the damned."187 The Christian God loved you for torturing
and sacrificing yourself.
The masochistic display of one’s wounds had already
become a popular group-fantasy of antiquity by early Christian times. Gladiatorial
combats "to appease the spirits of the dead" were widespread, where warriors
volunteered to be killed in the arena in order to display their wounds and gain
the applause of the people.188 Wholly gratuitous wars were fought
mainly for masochistic purposes; it was said that "warriors glory in their wounds;
they rejoice to display their flowing blood…The man who returns from battle
unhurt may have fought as well, but he who returns wounded is held in higher
esteem."189
Christian masochism ritualized the absolution/penance
ritual to assure adherents that when they felt unloved they could go to a church,
relive Christ’s agonies, confess their sins, carry out penances and assure their
Mommy/God that they still worshipped Her and that it was really the child’s/worshipper’s
fault that Mommy/God was so unhappy.
Confession, penance and absolution are, of course,
endless alter propitiations: "Gregory frequently expressed his fear that, because
of God’s unknown and unpredictable severity, man could never know if he inflicted
enough suffering upon himself to propitiate God…punishment should take the form
of a constant, unremitting anxiety and sorrow for one’s sins…as teeth tearing
the flesh."190
Both Christians and Jews "engaged in a contest and
reflection about the new-fangled practice of martyrdom,"191 even
unto suicide. Jesus, too, says John, really committed suicide, and Augustine
spoke of "the mania for self-destruction" of early Christians.192
Roman authorities tried hard to avoid Christians because they "goaded, chided,
belittled and insulted the crowds until they demanded their death."193
One man shouted to the Roman officials: "I want to die! I am a Christian," leading
the officials to respond: "If they wanted to kill themselves, there was plenty
of cliffs they could jump off."194 But the Christians, following Tertullian’s
dicta that "martyrdom is required by God," forced their own martyrdom so they
could die in an ecstatic trance: "Although their tortures were gruesome, the
martyrs did not suffer, enjoying their analgesic state."195
Even
today, about 10 per cent of masochistic borderlines complete suicide,196
always with a maternal "Hidden Executioner" alter present to feel pity.
Short of suicide, martyrdom and asceticism was
built into every element of Christian ritual and practice. Monasticism was an
orgy of masochistic penance for the sins of individuation, with fasts, flagellations,
continence and pilgrimages routine requirements—restaging the starvations, bindings,
beatings and expulsions to wetnurse of childhood. Yet, unlike earlier religions,
Christianity allowed their priests to forgive, console and reconcile
the sinner/child with Mommy/God after the punishment. Whereas earlier religions
punished animals or others as Victim Alters, Christianity encouraged the punishment
of one’s own body as a cleansing "second birth." Mommy/God could be
pacified by martyrdom and one could receive Her/His love at last.
Octavius described
the pleasure God had at seeing Christians suffering: "How fair a spectacle for
God to see when a Christian stands face to face with pain."197 As
Pope Urban told the knights in order to get them to go on the First Crusade:
"We hold out to you a war which contains the glorious reward of martyrdom,"198
with its final reward, the love of God, since "only martyrs will attain to Paradise
before the Second Coming."199
That priests were punishers leads one to wonder
if they were not really concretizations of Perpetrator Alters, that is, remnants
of abusers. Although one usually is used to identifying the "legions of demons
and spirits" that made Christians gash themselves as the perpetrators, priests
themselves are usually pictured as helpful figures. Yet priestly alters of masochists
today often turn out to have the features of rapists,200 while psychotherapists
who treat ritual abuse survivors find that "Satan usually turns out to be a
traumatized child," raging over early sexual abuse.201 In fact, alters
and religious fantasy figures usually contain remnants of both the perpetrators
and victims of childhood traumas.
The Devil might embody the rage of the raped
child, but he also has attributes of the rapist: he is naked, he has a "long
nose" (penis), he is red (flush of erect penis) and he is "hairy" (pubic hair).
The precise details of the image of Christ on the Cross are all from childhood.
Christ is shown as an infant (naked, except for swaddling-band loincloth), abandoned
by Mommy (God), bound or nailed to a wooden Cross (the wooden board all infants
were bound to during swaddling), with a crown of thorns (the painful head-shaping
devices used on infants before swaddling) and with a bloody hole in his side
(evidence of the childhood rape, vaginal or anal).
Even the details of Christ’s
life conform to routine childhood conditions. For instance, Christ got the bloody
wound in his side, the subject of much theological concern, because his Father
sent him down to be crucified—just as so many real fathers at the time sent
their young children to their neighbors to be used as sexual objects—and the
bad soldier stripped Christ and stuck his phallic lance into him—just as the
bad neighbor stripped the child and stuck his erect penis into him. If sexuality
meant memories of rape to most children growing up at that time, it is no wonder
that Christianity preached sexuality was shameful, "a token of human bondage,"
and must be avoided at all costs.
The ritual of the Mass, too—with "the Lord,
sacrificed, and laid upon the altar, and the priest, standing, and all the people
empurpled with his most precious blood" (Chrysostom)202 —is equally
a "rite of penetration," a restaging of childhood rape, as the frightening priest
in his black robe circles slowly around the helpless, naked Christ. The deepest
feeling behind all these Christian rites was the loneliness and hunger of the
worshipper—the abandonment depression—so it is not surprising that images of
real hunger often broke through during the Christian ritual.
Priests and worshippers
often reported that during Holy Communion they would see in the host "a very
young boy; and when the priest began to break the host, they thought they saw
an angel coming down out of the sky who cut the boy up with a knife." Or else
they would fear that the worshipper might not want to bite into "the Communion
wafer if they could see that they were actually biting off the head, hands and
feet of a little child."203
Even Christ himself, the Victim Alter,
was thought to be terribly hungry: "Christ’s hunger is great beyond measure;
he devours us…his hunger is insatiable."204 The abandoning mode child’s
hunger—for love, food, care, support—is never forgotten, and it can be found
at the heart of every Christian ritual throughout the Middle Ages.
THE BORDERLINE PSYCHOCLASS OF LATER CHRISTIANITY
It must be recalled that new parenting modes begin with just a few people at
a time, which means that ambivalent mode parenting and the resulting higher
level borderline personalities—which begin in the twelfth century—continued
for some time to be minorities in European families, co-existing with earlier
masochistic, narcissistic and schizoid personalities in their societies. By
the twelfth century, when Western Europe began to move in new directions, the
empires of antiquity had collapsed in a masochistic orgy of military self-destruction.
The clinging needs of the new borderline psychoclass—a symptom of their feelings
of isolation, emptiness and separation anxiety—were now defended against by
constructing the profound personal bonds of feudalism. "The borderline," says
Hartocollis, "is an angry individual. Characterized by oral demandingness, often
with a paranoid flavour [and] a sense of emptiness or depression…making him
feel chronically lonesome, frustrated, alienated."205 This emptiness
was known to medieval psychoclasses as acidia, which one twelfth-century
monk says is "a disgust of the heart, an enormous loathing of yourself…a great
bitterness…Your soul is torn to pieces, confused and split up, sad and embittered."206
From the twelfth century on, acedia attracted much attention as a "turning
away from God," again, the fault of the person/child, not of the God/Mommy.
When people confessed to feelings of acedia and reported their feelings
of despair and self-hatred, they were given severe penitentials by their priests
to ward off their suicidal thoughts.
The clinging of the feudal bond is paralleled
to the clinging tie to God and to Mother Mary and Jesus, who for the first time
takes on overt maternal traits, even allowing worshippers to suck his breasts
and wounds.207 Real ambivalent mode mothers were now nurturing enough
so that one can even find descriptions of "God as a woman nursing the soul at
her breasts, drying its tears and punishing its petty mischief-making…"208
Of course, in true borderline style, the price of some closeness with God is
total devotion, the medieval Christian saying: "To my beloved, I will forever
be His servant, His slave, All for God, and nothing for me."209 As
contemporary borderlines say: "I know you will love and take care of me if I
don’t self-activate. I’ll please you by clinging and complying with your wishes,
so you will take care of me, and these bad (abandonment) feelings will go away."210
The advances of borderline personalities beyond
lower-level masochistic psychoclasses were, however, profound, and soon began
to carry Western Europe beyond the accomplishments of the rest of the world.
Much has been written of "the invention of the self and individuality" beginning
in the twelfth century. Prior to this period, there was not even a word for
"self," and the word "personality" meant a mask held before an actor, i.e.,
a "false self."211 But "the practice of self-examination was deeper
and more widespread in twelfth-century Europe than at any time before [and]
medieval Europe changed from a ‘shame culture’ to a ‘guilt culture’" as inner
motives and not just outer behavior became the focus of confessions and of literature.212
Autobiographies began to multiply, seals indicating personal identity began
to be used more widely and writers began to wonder if God might allow a unique
self for each person, a homo interior that was fashioned by
one—"in the image of God," of course, but nevertheless made by one’s real self.213
The results in society from the twelfth through the fifteenth century of these
advances in self were astonishing: a vast expansion in agriculture and early
industries, the beginnings of both State formation and of capitalism, an upsurge
in trade and exploration, a huge population growth as infanticide dropped, an
enormous growth of cities and civil rights. Change became not only possible
but preferable for the first time in history. Those people in these centuries
who were still masochistic and narcissistic decompensated from all the change,
became possessed by devils, imagined they might soon be thrown in Hell for their
bold new aspirations, or flagellated themselves for wanting to be independent.
Growth panic soon began to produce periodic fears of millenarian violence, leading
directly to the apocalyptic expectations and witch-hunts of the Renaissance
and Reformation.
THE DEPRESSIVE PSYCHOCLASS OF THE RENAISSANCE
AND REFORMATION
The new childrearing mode beginning around the sixteenth century—the intrusive
mode—was a leap forward, when mothers stopped sending their children to wetnurse
and stopped leaving them hungry in their cradles, faced the tasks of caring
for them boldly if uncertainly, ended swaddling, beat them less and reduced
their being sent out as servants. As it was described earlier, "parents shifted
from trying to stop childrens’ growth to trying only to control it and make
it ‘obedient.’
True empathy begins with intrusive mode parents, producing a
general improvement in the level of care and reduced mortality, leading to more
investment in each child." The difference between borderline and depressive
personalities today has been documented to be a result of far less overt sexual
and physical abuse during childhood, with far less impulsivity, low self-esteem
and self-destructive acts in the depressive, despite the presence of sadness
as a major emotion.214 This is because what the depressives are doing
that borderlines cannot yet do is facing their abandonment depression.
Psychotherapists find that after treating borderlines and confronting their
defenses for some time, they then become more depressed, having finally to face
the abandonment fears of their childhood rather than running away from them
into clinging, self-destructive behavior, since "depression accompanies improvement…the
beginnings of identity integration, the development of integrated self and object
representations [and] conscious guilt and remorse."215
Ever since Huizinga analyzed the "sombre melancholy
that weighed on people’s souls" after the close of the Middle Ages, the period
has been well known for its deep despondency, when, says Donne, God "reserved
for these times an extraordinary sadness, a predominant melancholy."216
From sixteenth-century diaries to Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, books
on inner life were little more than records of the writer’s depressions and
how he tried to overcome them. Humanists glorified melancholy as the heightened
self-awareness of the intellectual, the cost of individualism, and they were
right. Melancholy had to be faced for one to be what Pico called a man "restrained
by no narrow bonds, according to thine own free will in thou, thine own maker
and molder, fashioning thyself in whatever manner thou likest best."217
Both Jaques and Hamlet were proudly presented by Shakespeare as "melancholy
philosophers," wearing black with pride, "condemning abuses, but never condemning
earthly existence."218 Ficino speculated on "Why Melancholics Are
Intelligent," noting that the most bold, learned people he knew were always
melancholic,219 and philosophers gave the excellent advice that friendship
was the best antidote to "melancholy, the malaise of the age."220
Elizabethans thought melancholy "both a very wretched state and a very happy
state…[and] melancholy was often praised and sought after as a great felicity,"
a mark of an intellectual who had "risen superior to the petty concerns of ordinary
men and occupied with thoughts of worth and dignity,"221 thoughts
of personal meaning and self improvement.
Though Mommy’s/God’s grace might only come after
"holy desperation" for the depressive personality of the Reformation, though
Her forgiveness might still be "unpredictable, unknowable and incomprehensible,"
if one obeys Her dicta then She might be a forgiving God who cared for you.222
Luther could now hope that God would actually love him because He was sometimes
kind! This hope suddenly allowed an expansion of the real self, and
the world, and its activities suddenly became invested with new vigor. For the
new depressive psychoclass, Mommy/God didn’t need you sexually, so celibacy
was not necessary. She could forgive, so one could actually trust Her
and cast oneself upon Her mercy. She paid attention to your need for food, so
you didn’t have to fast your whole life. She actually listened to you, so you
could individuate your self beyond clinging to religious and political authorities.
Dissociation and splitting declined for these depressives—achieving for the
first time what Melanie Klein calls "the depressive position" which allows merger
of the good breast/bad breast split—so women were not split into virgins and
whores (Mary and Eve) but were for the first time seen as human beings with
both good and bad qualities, and marriage for the first time in history became
a worthy goal rather than just a way to legitimate fornication.
By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the
new mode of intrusive childrearing had catapulted Western Europe far beyond
the earlier psychoclasses of the rest of the world, giving their minority of
depressives a new sense of self worth and the ideal of cumulative, necessary
progress which led to the modern world we know today. The growth of knowledge,
the invention of printing, the new questioning of authority, the exploration
of new lands and ideas, all were evidence that "European people had altered
in some fundamental way"223 —a change in their psyches, not in their
environment.
For the first time in history, Mommy/God "was relegated to a vague
and impenetrable heaven, somewhere up in the skies. Man and man alone was the
standard by which all things were measure."224 Science began its
spectacular leap into the unknown. Political systems without divine sanctions
and economics that were based on real trust became the goals of society. Joy
in life need not be something sinful, hope was allowed and freedom for self
exploration did not need to be disobedience to Mommy/God. These lessons—first
learned in families at the feet of innovative mothers—soon produced new institutions
to express these new freedoms, particularly in France and England, where childrearing
was most advanced.
Unfortunately, while depressives could begin
to try to live out their new freedoms, they were still a minority in these centuries,
and the earlier psychoclasses experienced the new freedoms of the age as terribly
dangerous and certain to call upon them the wrath of Mommy/God. These centuries
of progress were therefore also centuries of apocalyptic fears and wars, when
people were certain that so much change would unchain Satan and his swarms of
demon alters and that the world was certain to end soon.
Apocalyptic prophecies,
cults and religious wars proliferated in Reformation Europe, particularly in
areas like Germany where childrearing had changed the least.225 What
Trevor-Roper calls "the general crisis of the seventeenth century"226
was in fact a psychoclass conflict, and the demons, witches and anti-Christs
that roamed Europe at that time were all really the Persecutory Alters that
inhabited the schizoid, narcissistic, masochistic and borderline psychoclasses
that still represented the majority of Europe. These earlier psychoclasses responded
with violence to all the progress of the period, "acting out with fierce energy
a shared [millenarian] phantasy which, though delusional, yet brought them such
intense emotional relief that they…were willing both to kill and to die for
it."227 The new religious services of the Reformation were felt to
be "full of wild liberty," and "beast-like carnal liberty" was reported seen
at anabaptist prayer meetings, where services were said to be conducted in the
nude.228
All the individuation would certainly bring punishment upon
mankind, and pamphlets were circulated describing how clouds were raining blood
and flocks of birds were holding cosmic battles in the sky "as auguries of some
impending disaster."229 A placental "Many-Headed Monster" was hallucinated
as savaging Europe, carrying out the Day of Judgement because "by now seven-year-old
children demonstrated more wickedness than had previously been possible by evil
old men…the world had become so wicked that things could hardly get worse."230
Religious wars broke out all over Europe, as "God was unable to bear it any
longer and decided to cleanse his Church with a great scourge."231
Historians have long been puzzled by why the
witchcraft epidemic took place in the centuries that were most progressive,
but if the craze is seen as a reaction to growth panic it becomes explainable.
Tens of thousands of women responded to their new freedoms by becoming possessed
by their alters and falling into trances: "Observers spoke of the possessed
as ‘choked,’ subjected to ‘thousands of cruel pinches,’ ‘stuck [with] innumerable
pins,’ and ‘cut with knives and struck with blows that they could not bear,"232
as they restaged the memories of swaddling pins, parental blows and other childhood
traumas.
Those who persecuted witches were obviously taking vengeance upon their
mommies; indeed, most witches were either mothers or wetnurses.233
A witch was transparently a mommy, since she rode on a maternal broom, had special
teats where "imps" sucked on her body, smothered babies in their cradles and
came into your bedroom uninvited and seduced you.234 As Roper puts
it: "Relations between mothers, those occupying maternal roles and children,
formed the stuff of most witchcraft accusations."235 "Over and over
again in the trial records, the accused women are addressed as ‘Mother’…the
witch is a monstrous mother…"236
The rape of children formed a central focus for
witchcraft group-fantasies. Descriptions of the sexual orgies that went on at
sabbats clearly reveal their origins in childhood rape attacks, and
young girls who had "convulsive fits" in court "as the Devil entered them"237
restaged each detail of their earlier rapes before their startled audiences.
Nuns in particular were afflicted with demonic possession, going into trances
and accusing priests of seducing them, which they often had really done.238
The extreme youth of those raped can be seen in their complaint that "the genital
organs of their Demons are so huge and so excessively rigid that they cannot
be admitted without the greatest pain."239 Entire villages would
sometimes periodically go into trances together, call themselves "Benandanti,"
and fight Devils together, all while fully dissociated, "as if I was both sleeping
and not sleeping."240 By the time the witch-craze had disappeared
by the beginning of the eighteenth century, a million innocent people had died
in an orgy of alter persecution caused by too much progress during the Reformation—just
as six million would later die in the alter persecution caused by too much progress
in Weimar Germany.
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This article is Part III of Chapter 9 of deMause's new book The Emotional Life of Nations (New York: OtherPress, 2002). For more by deMause, see
his website, www.psychohistory.com
Go to Part IV of Lloyd deMause's The Evolution of Psyche and Society
Read Dr. James C. Duffy's article about why deMause's findings are believable and why resistance persists despite the overwhelming evidence he presents.
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