Chaos Theory, Sick Society and You

[Michaelangelica]

Not a bad collective analysis for one so young, if a little too dark.

 

When one considers the fact that two super-powers invested forty years and unimaginable expenses in an insane arms race in order to gain hegemony over an entire planet, when both can hardly manage their own estates and budgets, there can be no doubt that we suffer from mass dysfunction to some large degree. But that state of mind is only superficial.

 

If we can put down the dice and survive the current teenage gamble with global commodities on the temple floor of our Father's estate, and stop toying with weapons of mass destruction, the innate goodness and decency of our kind will win through, and the future will look a lot more responsible for the prodigal son.:)

 

The Christians, Jews and Communists have The Bomb. Islam is next.

It is hard to remain optimistic

[Michaelangelica]

 

For the kinds of things I speak about now, I would have been burned at the stake but only a few hundred years ago, and would have been stoned to death, for the amusement of the city, only a few thousand years ago. That is assuming I survived the harsh treatment of a poor mongrel, peasant.

.

When the Nazis invaded Austria; Freud said "What progress we have made !;

in Medieval Times I would have been burnt at the stake;

now they just burn my books!"

[IDMclean]

The Christians, Jews and Communists have The Bomb. Islam is next.

It is hard to remain optimistic

 

All we can do is hope that the Bohemian ideals of Truth, Freedom, Beauty, and Love progress faster than the Apocolyptic ideals of Death, Famine, Pestilence, and War.

 

I've picked my pony, and I'm rooting for the good guy. This is the nature of pandora's box, we have discovered the weapons and we have released the power to cause so much harm, but at the bottom of this box is something grand that without our destructive knowledge we wouldn't know is in there. At the bottom is Hope.

 

That is my pony, Hope, for the Truth has set her Free. We exist, my friend, to keep the bad stuff from happening.

 

Cheer up, friend. It will all turn out alright in the end.

[MagnetMan]

Cheer up, friend. It will all turn out alright in the end.

Nice post Kickass. Make Angel smile.:hihi:

[Michaelangelica]

This brings to light much of which is argued by Anthropologist. It is a justification for the less than ideal things that were done to children and others within early society.

You don't want me to go back to the Tool Age or the Stone Age. Golden Age? Hardly. The child rearing practices of that time shouldn't even be compared to the current times..

 

I am comparing them (child rearing practices) to NOW.

Even the most barbaric child rearing practices described by deMusse are happening NOW in Australia.

[IDMclean]

Sorry, Angel, I needed to reference and do some studying.

 

Let's start from the beginning. We'll discuss from there.

[quote name=Foundations of Psychohistory, The Psychogenic

Theory Of History]

• 
  [1.] That psychohistory is the science of patterns of historical motivations and is based upon an anti-holistic philosophy of methodological individualism
   
  
  • 
    [lA.] Psychohistory is a science, not a narrative art like history.
    

• 
  [lA. 1.] All psychohistorical research must be comparative, striving toward lawful propositions.
   
  [lA. 2.] Psychohistory advances like any other science, by the discovery of new paradigms and attempts to disprove them.
   
  [lA. 3.] Like psychoanalysis, psychohistory uses self-observation of the emotional responses of the researcher as its prime tool for discovery; nothing is ever discovered "out there" until it is first felt "in here."
  

• 
  [lB.] Psychohistory is individualistic, not holistic like sociology and anthropology.
  

• 
  [lB. 1.] The holistic fallacy that the group exists as an entity over and beyond its individual constituents presumes what it should investigate-the fantasy that the group is really the mother's body and has goals and motives of its own.
   
  [1B. 2.] Sociology, whether Parsonian or Marxist, is based on the holistic statement of Durkheim that "social facts must be treated as things, that is, realities external to the individual" and is, as Parsons admits, "inherently teleological."
   
  [1B. 3.] Anthropology is based on a similar holistic concept of "culture," so that when Steward states that "Personality is shaped by culture, but it has never been shown that culture is affected by personality" the tautological form of the assertion is dependent upon not noticing that the term "culture" has no meaning beyond the term "personality."
   
  [1B. 4.] All statements of the form "X is socially (or culturally) determined" are tautological and assume a holistic entity beyond the individual.
   
  [1B. 5.] Terms such as "society," "culture," "state," "social structure," and "power are all holistic; their individualistic replacements are "group," "personality," "government," "group-fantasy," and "force."
   
  [1B. 6.] The central method of sociology and anthropology is to establish correlations between two facets of adult personality and then claim causal connection; the central method of psychohistory is to establish causes of motivational patterns in prior personal events and their restructuring within the adult group.
  

 

• 
  [1C.] Methodological individualism is the principle that group processes may be entirely explained by (a) psychological laws governing the motivation and behavior of individuals and (;) descriptions of their current physical historical situation, which itself is only the outcome of prior motivations acting on physical reality.
  

• 
  [iC. 1.] The diagram below is sufficient to explain all historical processes, "group-fantasy" being the term for shared fantasies of individuals when in groups.
   
  
   
  [1C. 2.] Durkheim's sociological rule that "Every time that a social phenomenon is directly explained by a psychological phenomenon, we may he sure that the explanation is false" is replaced by the psychohistorical rule that "All group phenomena have psychological explanations; individuals in groups act differently than individuals alone only because they split their psychic conflicts differently, not because some 'social' force is acting on them."
   
  [1C. 3.] With the disappearance of the deathless entity society" all group values are revealed as tentative and subject to change each generation; what now seems problematic is not change but constancy.
   
  [1C. 4.] It is not only the irrational in history that is susceptible to psychohistorical explanation; all of history, its strengths as well as weaknesses, integration as well as disintegration, has childhood determinants and group dynamics.
  

 

My favorite part of DeMause's theorm comes shortly after this. Though will start here.

[CraigD]

Since KAC started this thread nearly 2 months ago, I’ve had the opportunity to read deMause’s “The Evolution of Childhood”, the preface to, and portions of the other sections of “Foundations of Psychohistory”.

 

Though much of the history it reveals is both fascinating and troubling, as a body of work, I think it fails to meet the standard of “a science, not a narrative art.” Although covering a wider range of primarily western history than historian Barbara Tuchman’s “A Distant Mirror”, it proposes about the same thesis – that child raising practices have a profound effect on adult personality, which in turn has a profound effect on culture, society, and history – with no greater statistical control for bias or other use of the scientific method. My intuitive feel is that Tuchman, and perhaps other historians and psychologists of the 1970s and 80s, while no more rigorous than deMause, presented a better anecdotal view of history as driven by childhood.

 

I personally agree with deMause’s thesis. However, just declaring one’s approach to be scientific, as he does, does not make it so. deMause fails to apply mathematically provable statistical controls to his analysis of history. Instead, he “cherry picks” historical evidence to support his thesis, much of it from 2nd or greater level sources (accounts of accounts of actual witnesses of events). This approach is unacceptable in such field as studying the spread of disease and setting insurance rates, or, I believe, any study that claims scientific authority.

 

Also, unlike Tuchman, deMause (in “The Evolution of Childhood”) makes absolutely no mention of even the possibility of a positive influence of science and technology on attitudes social attitudes toward children. In contrast, Tuchman’s thesis is that much of the reason that 14th century people were emotionally distant from their children for much or all of their childhoods was the terribly high rate of infant and young child mortality during that period (noble born children were typically not even given a name until their second birthday). I suspect that advances in medicine resulting in reduced child mortality has had a greater impact on changing the nature of childhood than a change from a psychological perspective toward children from “projective” to “empathic”, and that these changes in psychology are caused by, not the causes of, medical advances and other external psychological influences.

 

The wikipedia article for deMause states:

Psychohistory remains a controversial field of study, and deMause and other IPA scholars have detractors in the academic community.

I believe this controversy and criticism is deserved. In addressing a common historical bias – the nostalgic notion that children have been cherished and protected in nearly all cultures throughout human history – Psychohistory seems to have promoted another – that all human behavior results from psychological effects, and that the human psyche is well-described by psychodynamic psychological theories. Moreso now than when deMause published “Foundations” in 1982, I believe this ideas are contradicted by scientifically validated evidence.

[IDMclean]

Thanks Craig, that is a very good analysis.

 

I would like to act the advocate of DeMause's theorm. First off, is this. DeMause is a single person and is limited to the materials he can review.

 

DeMause's assertion that the causality arrow, where innovation is the result of advanced psychoclasses and leads to bridging the gap, ultimately in a psychogenic evolution. I believe to be true. Sure advances in Medicine do lead to better standards of living and such but the changes are ultimately motivated by the individual. The Individual is ultimately motivated by their past experiences.

 

I suspect that advances in medicine resulting in reduced child mortality has had a greater impact on changing the nature of childhood than a change from a psychological perspective toward children from “projective” to “empathic”, and that these changes in psychology are caused by, not the causes of, medical advances and other external psychological influences.

 

This is a sound hypothesis, however one must ask, in a causual universe, what is the motivation to reduce child mortality?

 

DeMause gives a theorm on this, as part of the Psychogenic Theory of History.

 

2. That the ultimate source of all historical change is psychogenesis, the lawful change in childrearing modes occurring through generational pressure.

 

2A. Psychogenesis depends upon the ability of parents and surrogates to regress to the psychic age of their children and work through the anxieties of that age better the second time than in their own childhood.

 

2A. 1. The regression-progression process stems from the innate biological desire of both parts of a previous dual-unity to relate to each other, and thus is the only historical theory to posit love as its central mechanism for change.

 

2A. 2. The regression-progression process is identical to that which produces change in psychotherapy; thus history can be viewed as the psychotherapy of generations.

 

2B. The evolution of childhood proceeds at different rates of progress on both individual and population levels.

 

2B.1. Individual level variations in rates of psychogenic evolution occur because of (a) biological differences (both genetic and uterine events), (:) birth order differences (the later the birth, generally the less intense the parenting), and © chance (early loss of parent, injury, other personal life variations).

 

2B.2. Population level variations in psychogenic evolution occur because of (a) selection and isolation (emigration of a narrow range of parenting modes), (B) immigration (the infusion of new parenting modes into a larger population), © non-reproduction (psychotic unfit, or other lower psychogenic modes not as often raising children), (d) culture contact (reinforcing emergent parenting types, providing surrogate parents), (e) material conditions (only as they affect child rearing), and (I) group-fantasy factors (wars and revolutions as they affect children, share of work by mothers, father's share in child rearing, etc.).

 

2C. The evolution of childhood is a series of closer involvements between adults and children, each advance tending to heal splitting, reduce projection and reversal, and increase empathy.

 

2C. 1. The six psychogenic modes and their dates of evolution in the most advanced countries are:

 

 

Mother: "I wish you were dead, to relive my fear of being killed by my mother."

 

Child-sacrifice and infanticide, child as a breast-penis, intolerance of child's anger, hardening, ghosts and magic, child sale, child sodomy

Mother: "I must leave you, to escape the needs I project into you."

 

Longer swaddling, fosterage, outside wetnursing, monastery, nunnery and apprenticeship

 

Mother: "You are bad from the erotic and aggressive projections put in you."

Enemas, early beating, shorter swaddling, mourning possible, child as erotic object precursor to empathy.

 

Mother: "You can have love when I have full control over you."

 

Early toilet training, repression of child's sexuality, end of swaddling and wetnursing, empathy now possible rise of pediatrics

 

Mother and Father: "We will love you when you are reaching our goals."

 

Use of guilt, "mental discipline", humiliation, rise of compulsory schooling, delegation of parental unconscious wishes

 

Mother and Father: "We love you and will help you reach your goals."

 

Children's rights, de-schooling and free schooling, child therapy, birth without violence.

 

2C. 2. The "ambivalent mode" is a watershed in the evolutionary series, because up until then progress is achieved by internalization and repression of previously projected parts of the personality (magic), whereas after ambivalence is able to be tolerated (the Kleinian "depressive position"), progress is achieved through the reduction of repression and the increase in ego autonomy.

 

2C. 3. Progress at each mode depends on overcoming anxieties specific to that mode; for instance, a shortage of wetnurses will have a greater effect when abandonment is the crucial modal issue than at another time, and so on.

 

2D. The end result of man's biological evolution produced a helpless baby whose instinct is to form an intensely personal relationship, challenging the parent to regress and relate rather than repress and be alone.

 

2D. 1. Freud's idea that civilization proceeds by "progressively greater renunciation of instinct" was precisely backward; civilization proceeds only through progressively greater acceptance of the drives of children, allowing them to mature without defensive distortion.

 

2D. 2. Hegel's idea that history is "man's nature achieving itself" is closer to the truth, but only because each generation tries to help. their children achieve their own desires, so that new values are generated evolutionarily rather than teleologically.

 

Source: Foundations of PsychoHistory, Chapter Four: The Psychogenic Theory of History

 

2A. Psychogenesis depends upon the ability of parents and surrogates to regress to the psychic age of their children and work through the anxieties of that age better the second time than in their own childhood.

 

2A. 1. The regression-progression process stems from the innate biological desire of both parts of a previous dual-unity to relate to each other, and thus is the only historical theory to posit love as its central mechanism for change.

 

2A. 2. The regression-progression process is identical to that which produces change in psychotherapy; thus history can be viewed as the psychotherapy of generations.

 

This right here is what agrees with my experience of growing up. I have had the benefit of being raised by several Psychoclasses.

 

My mother is a helping, my father is a socializing/intrusive, My grandmother (of my mother) is a socializing/helping, my grandmother (of my father) is intrusive/ambivilent, and my aunt is socializing.

 

I am fairly certain anyway.

 

My father was driven to the New Jersey turnpike, by his mother at age 13 and left there. He is a much better person than my grandmother (Green) or her current husband. He was a wander and ultimately has made his own way through life.

 

The common thread of these people in my life has been consecutively, and it is what ultimately drove me to be who I am, love. Each one of these people who have helped to raise me, some more than others, have all contributed what they could because of love, of empathy, and of compassion.

 

As far as the "soft" sciences go, Psychohistory is young but far harder than many of it's alternatives. Admittedly it could be backed by more statisical proofs and such, but like many things in history, we lack the crucial data to make such backing. It is only in the past hundred years that we really have been collecting any kind of substantial, usable data regarding Psychological conditions.

 

That is the issue of studying history, is grabbing up realiable data to analyze. Historians cherry pick, as much if not more. How many historical analysises have you seen and/or read regarding bob the butcher on cobble stone lane in what's it called backwater village in x country? This is not to say the data is not there, but that it is harder to gather than the "glorious" exploits of Alexander the Great, or of King Tut.

 

What I am saying is we work with what we have.

 

Anyway, thanks for the reply Craig, I look foward to more in the future.

[Michaelangelica]

He rubbishes sociology and anthropology and then says?

 

[1C. 4.] It is not only the irrational in history that is susceptible to psychohistorical explanation; all of history, its strengths as well as weaknesses, integration as well as disintegration, has childhood determinants and group dynamics.

Isn't this logically inconsistant?

 

The psychology, sociology and antrhropology of "group dynamics" is immense.The group/society is more than a sum of its parts. How can he use terms like "group dynamics" while dismissing sociology?

 

 

You may be interested in this. The psychology of groups is more than skin deep

a group of meerkats Mammals in complex social groups not only recognise each other as individuals, they also remember a lot of information about that individual. Social groups often rely on this memory - such as knowing who is dominant to whom, who is related to whom, and who has done what to whom in the past. It's like remembering who you have lent money to or done a favour for, and who hasn't repaid that money or has talked about you behind your back. You have to learn who to trust, who your friends are, and who to watch out for.

 

a baby chimp All this remembering goes on in a particular part of the brain called the neocortex. If you compare the size of a mammal's social group with the size of this part of the brain you find they are remarkably closely related.

This area, though, seems to take a long time to develop fully and animals in which it is very large take a very long time to grow up to adulthood.

During this time, the youngster has to learn all the rules of social behaviour in their group and to piece together all the relationships between the group members: knowledge that will be needed to avoid getting into trouble.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/animals/mammals/explore/behaviour.shtml

[IDMclean]

The group/society is more than a sum of its parts.

 

This is the view of sociology, and anthropolgy. Which is inconsistent with the theory of epigenetics of Psychogenesis. Where as Sociology and Anthropology say that the push for innovation come from top down, which is true to an extent, Psychogenic theory essentially has the push coming mostly from the individuals who make up the "group dynamic". that is that the Push for innovation comes from the bottom up.

 

Now I am well aware that in claiming the field of historical motivation exclusively for the psychohistorian I immediately run up against the oft - repeated claim by historians that they work with motivations all the time, so there is nothing new in that. I had heard this claim so often in the two decades since I first studied the philosophy of history that I was finally moved to measure exactly how often historians actually do examine motivations in their works. I therefore kept a tally-sheet as I read 100 history books of varying kinds and recorded exactly how many sentences were devoted to any kind of motivational analysis whatsoever not just psychoanalytic, but any level of attention at all. In no case did this motivational content reach as much as 1% of the book - so the field seemed to be ours by default. What wasn't pure narrative of one event after another turned out to be mainly the recitation of as many economic facts as possible in the hopes that their mere conjunction with the historical narrative would be mistaken for explanation.

 

Now anyone who has read any portion of the over 1,300 books and articles contained in the "Bibliography of Psychohistory"(6) will soon realize that psychohistory has reversed this 1 - to - 99 ratio, so that the bulk of psychohistorical writing is devoted to an intense concentration on motivational analysis while the physical events of history are necessarily given quite sketchy background treatment. There is, for instance, only one page at the beginning of Runciman's three - volume History of the Crusades(7) describing how the participants decided to begin four hundred years of wars, and then several thousand pages devoted to the routes, battles and other events which make up the "history" of the Crusades, A psychohistorian would assume the history, and spend his decades of research and thousands of pages in the most fascinating question for psychohistory - why so many set off on such a strange task as relic - saving. That the historian, when reviewing such a psychohistory, would accuse it of "ignoring" the full history of the Crusades should bother the psychohistorian as little as the accusation by the astrologer that Galileo "ignored" all the other stars in describing the path of one mere planet. It wasn't his task, and narrative history isn't ours.

 

This matter of psychohistory "ignoring" other fields when it specializes is a matter of some importance, since it is so often repeated by historians when criticizing psychohistorical works. In my own work, for instance, I have been accused of being ignorant of economics (although I am the founder and Chairman of the Board of a company which publishes seven professional economic newsletters), of being ignorant of sociology (although I am trained in sociology and was C. Wright Mills' research assistant at Columbia), of being unable to use statistics (although I earned my living as a professional statistician for five years) and of ignoring political factors (although all my graduate training was in political science). What seems not to have occurred to the critics of psychohistory is that we might choose to focus on the historical evolution of the psyche because only thereby can we reach the unsolved problems of precisely these same fields of politics, economics and sociology, fields which are shot through with unproven psychological assumptions and which have failed to become reliable sciences precisely because of the unsolved psychohistorical problems within them.

 

Source: Foundations of Psychohistory, chapter 2, Roughly pages 86-87.

 

I highly suggest that the links that I provide, are read. If for no other reason that to be able to honestly say: "I read it and I disagree with it." I can only point to various parts, you must then choose to either read, or not.

 

Interesting article from a different perspective.

Children versus Childhood By Julia Grant

[Michaelangelica]

This is the view of sociology, and anthropolgy. Which is inconsistent with the theory of epigenetics of Psychogenesis. Where as Sociology and Anthropology say that the push for innovation come from top down, which is true to an extent, Psychogenic theory essentially has the push coming mostly from the individuals who make up the "group dynamic". that is that the Push for innovation comes from the bottom up.

 

 

I highly suggest that the links that I provide, are read. If for no other reason that to be able to honestly say: "I read it and I disagree with it." I can only point to various parts, you must then choose to either read, or not.

I have printed out your fist page and have read it three times. I have a life.I am not as enthusiastic about De muse as you are.

I'll get there don't panic.:eek2:

That (above) was my first obvious objection (to your recent, first, info post). It is a bit severe to dismiss the body of knowledge that has built up in the social sciences over the past 50 years.

"group dynamic" is a term used by psychologists and sociologists to denote certain behaviours and mechanics of groups that become observable and measurable in groups of certain sizes. A group of 12 is different to a group of 112.

These "group dynamics" seem to occur whoever makes up the group. So how can De Muse say that "group dynamic" is dependent on the individual psyche? It is a function of the individual and the social environment.

 

Anthropologists often have interesting insights into "group dynamics" when researching the loss of "Terra preta" Civilisations in the Amazon anthropologists found remnants of a feudal social structure in tiny tribal groups. The sort of thing you would expect to find in very large groups.

We now know that over 10mil people lived in the Amazon and were wiped out by something, probably disease, shortly after the first Spanish visit.

Such structural "group dynamics" left over from a bigger "group dynamic" are real artifacts. It is hard to see how they come from anything but the pre-history of these people.

How could the personalities of the people in the Little Tribal Groups left in the Amazon make these remnant, feudal "group dynamics" as I understand DeMuse would want us to believe?

[Michaelangelica]

Originally Posted by Foundations of Psychohistory, The Psychogenic

 

[lA.] Psychohistory is a science, not a narrative art like history.

The science of History& History of Science professors will not like to hear that

 

[lA. 1.] All psychohistorical research must be comparative, striving toward lawful propositions.

what are you going to compare with what?

[lA. 2.] Psychohistory advances like any other science, by the discovery of new paradigms and attempts to disprove them.

So, you want brownie points for this?

If you then say that child-rearing practices and group fantasy gives us history. I become speechless

 

[lA. 3.] Like psychoanalysis, psychohistory uses self-observation of the emotional responses of the researcher as its prime tool for discovery; nothing is ever discovered "out there" until it is first felt "in here."

How then do you maintain any scientific objectivity?

If it all comes out of the inside of your head?

 

[lB.] Psychohistory is individualistic, not holistic like sociology and anthropology.

Again, so?

Is De Muse saying history needs people?

People make history?

Screwed up people make different history to non-screwed up people?

They are all fairly self evident aren't they?

[lB. 1.] The holistic fallacy that the group exists as an entity over and beyond its individual constituents presumes what it should investigate-the fantasy that the group is really the mother's body and has goals and motives of its own.

What the hell is "the fantasy that the group is really the mother's body " Whose head did that come out of?

[1B. 2.] Sociology, whether Parsonian or Marxist, is based on the holistic statement of Durkheim that "social facts must be treated as things, that is, realities external to the individual" and is, as Parsons admits, "inherently teleological."

Is it?

I don't know

[1B. 3.] Anthropology is based on a similar holistic concept of "culture," so that when Steward states that "Personality is shaped by culture, but it has never been shown that culture is affected by personality" the tautological form of the assertion is dependent upon not noticing that the term "culture" has no meaning beyond the term "personality."

agreed if you did not have people you would not have anthropology

 

[1B. 4.] All statements of the form "X is socially (or culturally) determined" are tautological and assume a holistic entity beyond the individual.

Yes they do but they also assume that there are zillions of other things in the mix too.

Chromosomes, by themselves, can't even decide you eye colour so how should society be any less complex?

[1B. 5.] Terms such as "society," "culture," "state," "social structure," and "power are all holistic; their individualistic replacements are "group," "personality," "government," "group-fantasy," and "force."

Why bother?

What's "group fantasy"?

. Is this an encounter group game I have missed out on?

 

[1B. 6.] The central method of sociology and anthropology is to establish correlations between two facets of adult personality and then claim causal connection; the central method of psychohistory is to establish causes of motivational patterns in prior personal events and their restructuring within the adult group.

Say that in crowded room of psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists and they will hang you from the ceiling in tatters. Psychologists especially avoid silly statistical causality like that (unlike biologists:) )

 

[1C.] Methodological individualism is the principle that group processes may be entirely explained by (a) psychological laws governing the motivation and behavior of individuals and (B) descriptions of their current physical historical situation, which itself is only the outcome of prior motivations acting on physical reality.

Yep, but that's just part of the jig-saw.

I would love to see someone try to account for all the variables in this staement:"descriptions of their current physical historical situation, which itself is only the outcome of prior motivations acting on physical reality" A labour of Hercules and several Phds

 

 

[iC. 1.] The diagram below is sufficient to explain all historical processes, "group-fantasy" being the term for shared fantasies of individuals when in groups.

I missed out on these.

I have my own private ones when bored.

 

 

 

[1C. 2.] Durkheim's sociological rule that "Every time that a social phenomenon is directly explained by a psychological phenomenon, we may he sure that the explanation is false" is replaced by the psychohistorical rule that "All group phenomena have psychological explanations; individuals in groups act differently than individuals alone only because they split their psychic conflicts differently, not because some 'social' force is acting on them."

[1C. 3.] With the disappearance of the deathless entity society" all group values are revealed as tentative and subject to change each generation; what now seems problematic is not change but constancy.

Yep, things change all the time.

Even change changes.

So why does DeMuse enjoy stating the obvious so much?

 

[1C. 4.] It is not only the irrational in history that is susceptible to psychohistorical explanation; all of history, its strengths as well as weaknesses, integration as well as disintegration, has childhood determinants and group dynamics.

History can't have "strengths as well as weaknesses".

This is anthropomorphising it. Historians can have strengths and weaknesses.

"History is determined by childhood factors." Yes Hitler hated his father

 

I can't believe you can swallow this crap.

You still haven't answered my assertion that all DeMuse's childhood stages occur in my society now. Yet my society is considered a progressive Western liberal (?)democracy.

Stating a list of parenting styles then saying history progresses somehow as the styles change then becomes nonsense as all styles exist now. There is no progression , ( although many would like to see the more brutal forms stamped out), no change, just different people dragging their kids up different ways.

[IDMclean]

I believe that i have infact addressed your assertion, several times during this thread. I have tried to explain it from multipul different view points and it seems that they all were either ignored or misinterpted.

 

I have already stated that in modern day society, from small groups to global, all Psychoclasses are observable. The rarest one being Helping class, and as DeMause himself says, this is doubtful that we have even seen a helping class psyche.

 

I have stated, I am fairly sure, before that these classes are not mutually exclusive. Classes weather Psychological, or social (IE Rich, Middle, Poor), all exist simultatiniously.

 

As for the aboriginals, DeMause discusses them, as well as a number of other societies, in his various reading materials freely available on his site which go above and beyond the scope of a single thread.

 

As I have stated before, and as DeMause states:

[lB.] Psychohistory is individualistic, not holistic like sociology and anthropology.

 

 

Foundations of Psychohistory, Chapter two:

THE INDEPENDENCE

OF PSYCHOHISTORY

 

It has been two years since the founding of the History of Childhood Quarterly: The Journal of Psychohistory. During that short time, it has attracted the attention of both the scholarly and mass media, being excerpted and attacked in the New York Review of Books, Harpers, Commentary, Psychology Today, Human Behavior and the London Times Literary Supplement.(1) Most of the attacks have used the arguments of historian Jacques Barzun in his recent book Clio and the Doctors: Psycho-History, Quanto-History arid History,(2) in which he angrily opposes the notion that psychohistory is a division of history at all, since history, he says, is a narrative discipline telling what happened while psychohistory aspires to be a science focusing on why it happened. The book, and its earlier version as an article in the American Historical Review,(3) have been widely attacked by psychohistorians as containing too narrow a conception of the role of written history. Yet I wonder if Barzun might not in this instance be right and the psychohistorians wrong - if psychohistory is not quite a different enterprise from history, with its own methodology, its own independent tasks, and its own standards of excellence.

 

Ever since 1942 when the philosopher Carl Hempel published his essay "The Function of General Laws in History,"(4) it has been recognized by most philosophers of history that history cannot be a science in any strict sense of the term and that history can never regard it as part of its task to establish laws in the Hempelian sense. Written history may, in the course of its narrative, use some of the laws established by the various sciences, but its own task remains that of relating the essential sequence of historical action and, qua history. to tell what happened, not why.

 

Psychohistory, like Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. Is it's own field of study, a new field and mainly ignored/contriversial. It's a whole new method, not just a new theory in an existing set. It's a new metascience of it's own. It takes from many other fields and has distict ties and Synergies but it ultimately is a new way of looking at history, which as DeMause is closer to being a science than Formal History.

 

The Field of History has only recently, in the past hundred years maybe, become a "science", for the most part it has been a narrative.

 

Sociology is fine and all, but it has it's own issues. For instance:

social facts must be treated as things, that is, realities external to the individual

 

Says basically, and my mother has confermed this, with her time studying as a sociology student at the California State University, Chico, that in Sociology you can not examine the individual in the society and must consider the society as a whole. That it is essentially forbidden to examine the individual because "The group/society is more than a sum of its parts". Which is inheriently false. The group is what it is and no more than that. DeMause approaches with this mind set and basically says that "the group is the product of the individuals that make it up."

 

The group fantasy which DeMause refers to is the sub-conscious desires of the group as a whole. Given that the individual is driven by the Psyche which is composed of something like the Conscious, Sub-Conscious, and Pre-Conscious. As well as the Ego, Super-Ego, and the Id. Though I am not sure if this is the model which DeMause uses I do know that basically it is that we see the group as a matrix of matrixes. The individual is a matrix of Psychological variables.

 

Now why DeMause has to point out the obvious is this: it's not obvious to all that exist. The Foundations of Psychohistory is the more "Textbook" like of his writtings and is decidedly directed towards a more educational setting than his "Emotional Life of Nations" which is for a more general setting.

 

Like I have said The whole of the Method is beyond the simple scope of this forum and would require some dedicated study to more fully comprehend.

 

I can show you the door but you must walk through it.

 

As for Social progress according to advances in childrearing due to a majority shift of Psychoclasses? That seems like a perfectly valid form of progress to me. Sure the various Psychoclasses exist here and now, but the real blue ribbon baby is which one is the majority in your neck of the woods? Or perhaps what Psychoclass do you come from, can you identify them?

 

[lA. 3.] Like psychoanalysis, psychohistory uses self-observation of the emotional responses of the researcher as its prime tool for discovery; nothing is ever discovered "out there" until it is first felt "in here."

How then do you maintain any scientific objectivity?

If it all comes out of the inside of your head?

 

The real question is: "Since when were scientist anything but human?" That is to say that no scientist known to date has been without bias and emotional, intuitive, and logical impulse guiding them.

 

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” — Albert Einstein

 

This is merely a formulation and admittance, in a formal manner, that the observer is not independent of the observed. Therefore it is crucial to keep one's eye to their own internal workings lest they fall prey to fallacy. Which comes back to:

 

[lA. 1.] All psychohistorical research must be comparative, striving toward lawful propositions.

 

Comparative Research is:

 

Comparative:

 

Of or relating to the scientific or historical comparison of different phenomena, institutions, or objects, such as languages, legal systems, or anatomical structures, in an effort to understand their origins or relationships.

Source: Dictionary.com

 

Research is often described as an active, diligent, and systematic process of inquiry aimed at discovering, interpreting and revising facts. This intellectual investigation produces a greater understanding of events, behaviors, or theories, and makes practical applications through laws and theories. The term research is also used to describe a collection of information about a particular subject, and is usually associated with science and the scientific method.

 

The word research derives from Middle French (see French language); its literal meaning is 'to investigate thoroughly'.

 

Thomas Kuhn, in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, traces an interesting history and analysis of the enterprise of research.

 

Source: Research

 

So I would say, the answer to your question is, Comparative to other research, in ideal condition, it would be compared to any other research on the same topic, Irregardless of field.

 

I can swallow this allot easier than the alternatives because the alternatives are "Soft" science for a reason. They tend towards the inheriently logically falliable, and are incomplete in the scope of the problems they propound to solve. I personally equate much of our study of history, anthropology and likewise informal, or near informal (read narrative, anecdotal, conjectured) fields to Mystism, Magical thinking, Apologetics, and misleading misinformative biased Fallacial Reasoning.

 

This is to say that some good things have come from these fields and that they are important, though in heavy need of improvement. That the good (quality-wise) things that come from them are the exception, not the rule.

 

I hope that helps some.

[CraigD]

Like Micaelangelica, I find much of deMause’s reasoning hard-to-swallow. Personally, I find his claim that his approach, “psychohistory”, is scientific, while those of other psychologists, historians, and sociologists, are not, unsupported.

 

Stripping away the wordiness of all these “soft sciences”, we can consider at least a couple of simple hypotheses and alternative hypotheses, phrased as questions:

• Do children who are treated cruelly (or harshly) tend to grow up to be cruel (or harsh) adults? Do children who are treated kindly tend to grow up to be kind adults?
  
• Do different cultures at different times differ substantially in the ratio of children who are treated cruelly to those who are treated kindly (CtoK)?
  
• If so, are conditions that effect CtoK created by large populations, or by a few atypical individuals?
  

I suspect that advances in medicine resulting in reduced child mortality has had a greater impact on changing the nature of childhood than a change from a psychological perspective toward children from “projective” to “empathic”, and that these changes in psychology are caused by, not the causes of, medical advances and other external psychological influences.

This is a sound hypothesis, however one must ask, in a causual universe, what is the motivation to reduce child mortality?

I offer that the medical advances that reduce child mortality are often the unintentional “spinnoffs” of other medical advances. It’s widely accepted that western medicine has advanced most rapidly during times of war, the motivation being to increase military effectiveness by better treating battlefield injuries. So, counter-intuitively, war, which can be characterized as cruel and lethal, may lead to social change that decrease mortality and promote kindness.

 

Of course, the above is just the sort of reasonable-sounding speculation one could call “narrative art.”

 

I find it interesting that the term “psychohistory” was first used in a work of fiction – Asimov’s “Foundation”, in 1942, 17 years before Erik Erikson used it. Asimov’s fictional psychohistory is an exact, mathematical formalism. Erikson’s is essentially the same as deMause’s.

 

I read “Foundation” when I was young (7 years old). It shaped my view of Science and History in a peculiar way – though I could read well for my age, my fact-checking ability was typically childish. I was over 15 before I realized that Asimov’s version of psychohistory didn’t exist as a real, mathematical discipline in even a preliminary form.

 

This came as quite a disappointment, but served to instill in my young self a strong sense of skepticism.

[IDMclean]

* Do children who are treated cruelly (or harshly) tend to grow up to be cruel (or harsh) adults? Do children who are treated kindly tend to grow up to be kind adults?

* Do different cultures at different times differ substantially in the ratio of children who are treated cruelly to those who are treated kindly (CtoK)?

* If so, are conditions that effect CtoK created by large populations, or by a few atypical individuals?

 

Answer to the first question, as best as such an answer can be without going of into more esoteric psychological explination is, yes. A child who is abused (careful of this word's definition, it carries allot of unobserved connotations), they will tend to develop into abused people. Psychological scarring. They will tend to mature without developing as acute empathy. A child that is treated with empathy in development, will exhibit, on average, higher levels of empathy themselves. This is by no means absolute.

 

One reacts generally in two ways to abuse. One is internalization, acceptance of the cause of the abuse as one's own responsibility. In short "I deserved that.". Two is Externalization, rejection of the cause of the abuse as one's own responsibility. The reaction is developmentally psychologically determined, and experience driven.

 

The answer to the second one, in short, is also yes. I think, I am not absolute on my understanding of the question. Cultures vary quite a bit in their child rearing practices, and in their relative acutity of empathy. Psychoclasses do not have to progress linearly, though in general they do. Examples of advanced psychoclasses outside of the majority psychoclass include: Siddartha, Gandhi, Jesus, and a plethora of others. The people who were ahead of their time. The advancement of a society depends on the attention given to childrearing.

 

Answer to the third Question: Depends on the individuals who make up the group dynamic. Individuals can lead the society into a new psychoclass, but the drive to do so ultimately is statistical. So in general, the group as a statistical sampling of various psychoclasses will tend to advance according to the majority psychoclass. The origin point ultimately is the individuals driving the society and not the otherway around, though group dynamics can help on a whole.

 

Now as for the Medicine hypothesis. The clear cause, to me, is that of "love", empathy, and compassion. the reason to improve the medicine is to address the needs of the loved ones. Weather they are blood related or not. Once again the child rearing of the individual weighs in heavily on this one. A child-become-adult who has been helped (treated more empathicly) to realize greater potential, will on average have higher empathy, and therefore will try harder to alleviate suffering, and mortality.

 

Indeed Erik is an interesting individual. I would like to read more about him. I like the eight virtues, allot. They remind me of the eight-fold path posed by Siddartha.

 

Also in regards, I do believe that psychology forms a spring board for Psychohistory, as I understand it psychohistory was born of psychoanalysis and shares many things in common. This said I do believe that DeMause conciders psychology a science. History as a field, itself admits that it is not a science. It is only in contempary reform of the field that it has become more of a formal objective science than a subjective field like theology.

 

It's all in the methodology.

[Michaelangelica]

Perhaps an example might help?

 

Say the 14C how would DeMuse interpret that century differntly from Barbara Tuchman in A Distant Mirror?

or

could you give an example of a smaller historical event interpreted by DeMuse and conventional wisdom, so as to see the differences?

[IDMclean]

Well for one, I would have to finish my reading of DeMause to go to that level of detail, and second I would have to have read Barbara Tuchman's "A Distant Mirror" to be able to write a formal or informal comparitive Essay.

 

I will try my best with the resources at hand, but it will take some time, so please be patient.