The Psychology and Neurobiology
of Violence
(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]
Historical 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,m000 "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.
[9] Ibid., p. 49.
[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.
[23] Ibid, p. 176.
[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.
[38] Ibid., p. 15.
[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.
[41] Ibid., p. 110.
[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.
[44] Ibid., pp. 2, 12.
[45] Ibid., p. 45.
[46] Ibid., p. 3.
[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.
[49] Ibid., p. 80.
[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.
[58] Ibid., p. xiv.
[59] Ibid., p. 9.
[60] Ibid., p. 20.
[61] Ibid., p. 129.
[62] Ibid., p. 45.
[63] Ibid., p. 127.
[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.
[72] Ibid, p. 28.
[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 Understanding of Violence and Suicide. London: Routledge, 1999, p. 148.
[75] Lloyd H. Silverman, et al, The Search for Oneness. New York: International Universities Press, 1982.
[76] Stephen J. Ducat, The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity. New York: Beacon Press, 2005, p. 32.
[77] Barrie Thorne, Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994, pp. 74, 88, 116; Stephen J. Ducat, The Wimp Factor.
[78] James F. Masterson, Psychotherapy of the Borderline Adult: A Developmental Approach. New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1976, p. 109.
[79] Ibid., pp. 62-63.
[80] Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 174.
[81] Ibid., p. 94-96.
[82] Ibid., p. 217.
[83] Howard Tolley, Jr., Children and War: Political Socialization to International Conflict. New York: Teachers College Press, 1973, p. 34.
[84] Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 180.
[85] Allan N. Schore, Affect Dysregulation & Disorders of the Self. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2003; Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.
[86] Allan N. Schore, Affect Dysregulation & Disorders of the Self, p. 285.
[87] Louis Cozolino, The Neuroscience of Human Relationships: Attachment and the Developing Social Brain. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006, p. 319.
[88] Ibid., p. 251.
[89] Joseph LeDoux, Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are. New York: Viking, 2002, p. 61.
[90] Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain, p. 250.
[91] Ibid., p. 252.
[92] Allan N. Schore, Affect Dysregulation & Disorders of the Self, p. 294.
[93] Ibid., p. 9.
[94] Joseph LeDoux, Synaptic Self, p. 221.
[95] Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, "The Amygdala in Brain Function: Basic and Clinical Approaches." Vol. 985, 2003, p. 370-380; Allan N. Schore, Affect Dysregulation & Disorders of the Self, pp. 211, 299; Allan N. Schore, Affect Dysregulation & Disorders of the Self, p. 202.
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[103] Debra Niehoff, The Biology of Violence. New York: The Free Press, 1999, p. 199.
[104] Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 330.
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[109] Alan Siegel and Kelly Bulkeley, Dreamcatching, p. 10.
[110] Eugene L. Bliss, Multiple Personality, Allied Disorders, and Hypnosis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 126.
[111] Ibid., p. 126.
[112] Peter Brown, The Hypnotic Brain: Hypnotherapy and Social Communication. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991, p. 118.
[113] Ibid.
[114] Ibid., pp. 94, 107.
[115] Eric Vermetten at al, Eds. Traumatic Dissociation: Neurobiology and Treatment. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Publishing, 2007, p. xxi.
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[118] Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations, p. 146.
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