Hi!
You know that "psychohistory" stuff I'm always talking about? Here's a 5-year-old article that I found in my in-box-- I thought you might find it of interest.
>>From The New Yorker, "The Talk of the Town" column, December 5, 1994 (sic):
>"BAD MOMMIES AND OTHER OMENS"
>Lloyd deMause is expecting a war. His index of leading indicators -- editorial cartoons, magazine covers, Op-Ed pieces, newspaper headlines -- has been telling him that some blowout is right around the corner, and for a while he thought that Haiti might be it. But instead of a proper incursion America opted for Operation Uphold Democracy, which was not precisely what deMause had in mind. 'Now that few of our boys will be sacrificed, Isuspect we will feel depressed again,' he wrote recently. 'I wonder if we can find another place to invade in the coming months.'
>DeMause (whose name is pronounced de-MOSS) is not a warmonger. He's not even your garden-variety nut job; he is a psychohistorian -- which, according to some more conventional historians, amounts to pretty much the same thing. To buy into psychohistory, you have to subscribe to some fairly wolly assumptions -- you have to agree that there are hidden messages embedded in our leaders' speeches, for instance, and that a nation's child-rearing techniques affect its foreign policy. Yet deMause's analyses have often proved weirdly prescient. He predicted the defeat of Jimmy Carter, and the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. He predicted what eventually became the Gulf War. 'I don't want to focus on prediction,' he says. 'But I do think that a good scientist -- if psychohistory is a science -- should try to predict. Psychohistory is empirical. It's based on the scientific methods of psychology.'
>DeMause is sixty-three years old and slightly stooped, he has gray hair and a gray beard and a long, goatish face, and his eyes glisten. When he talks, he keeps his elbows close to his sides, so that his awkward, emphatic gestures seem to shoot right out of his rib cage. He has written six books, all of which he has had to publish himself. Most of his articles show up in the Journla of Psychohistory, which he edits and publishes himself, too. For nearly four decades, he has been promulgating the gospel of psychohistory, and for nearly four decades he has met with disparagement and scorn. His forthcoming book, 'The Emotional Lives of Nations,' was, he says, 'sent around by an agent -- and they were all afraid of it.' He looks oddly cheery about the whole thing.
>so who's afraid of deMause, and why? Psychohistory, according to its chief practitioner, asserts that nations have psychologies, just as individuals do; they have dreams and fantasies that can be analyzed; they have urges that arise from the childhood fears and traumas of their populace. 'If you're a psychoanalyst,' deMause says, 'and a patient comes in twenty days in a row and has dreams that his wife falls off a cliff, you want to aks him, "Do you have a death wish toward her?" Well, so, too, if you see death wishes experssed toward Reagan, and you see them rather consistently, then you thin, Well, maybe there is a wish like that out there." The way deMause parses the national dreamwork is by obsessively scrutinizing the media -- 'particularly visual material, since dreams are mainly visual,' he says. 'So I take oall the cartoons and magazine covers, and when I see covers with a lot of kids with guns I forget about whether there really are or are not guns in schools -- the sense of the country is that kids are dangerous. These things pour into my office. We're a sort of monitoring center of national dream life.'
>Like certain more prominent historians, deMause thinks that American history runs in cycles -- except that deMause's cycles proceed from what he calls group-fantasies. There have been about five full turns of the wheel, he thinks, since the dawn of the republic, and, since the nineteen-forties, each one has been faster than the last. They all begin with what deMause has designated an Innovative Period: social experimentation, liberalism, invention, 'less scapegoating of women and minorities.' Naturally, members of the ruling establishment -- what deMause calls 'the older psychoclasses' -- don't take very kindly to all this trailblazing. 'They feel, Oh my God, I can't beat my wife anymore! What is this?' deMause says. 'Women are getting votes? Social relations are changing" Homosexuals coming out of the closet? Terrible, terrible!'
>So the euphoria ends, purse strings tighten; public confidence staggers. 'And that mood lasts for a little while and you have an actual Depression,' deMause says. 'Then you come out of the Depression and you have a Manic Perod, in which you start doing manic things domestically and you start expanding abroad -- sending troops to Vietnam and places like that and getting very paranoid of enemies coming up.'
>And after that? 'You have a war -- or generally two wars.' Hmm. So if the efflorescence of the late sixties and early seventies was our most recent Innovative Period, and the recession of the early eighties was our most recent Depression, and the manic period of the late eighties was our Manic Period, it's about time for -- What did he say? Two wars?
>'The Gulf War was in 1991 -- OK?' deMause explains. "Now we're back at the Manic Period again, and my guess is that we're going up to another war. The Gulf War was short. It didn't get our anxieties off. We really were quite disappointed that it ended early, and we threw Bush out because of it -- he became a wimp again. And now we're getting all this still very regressed material -- you can just see all this very, very violent stuff.'
>He brandishes a folder full of Xeroxes and clippings. Everywhere you look you see images of tiny men and threatening, monstrous women -- Lorena Bobbitt with knife, Hillary Clinton with gun, Hillary Clinton with Lorena Bobbitt's knife, Bill Clinton cowering. 'We had all this sort of thing right before the Gulf War, too,' he says. 'And then, when the war began, these images ended. There were no more. The bad, horrible, child-abusing-mommy image got shifted to the enemy.' He stabs a finger at cartoons of Saddam Hussein pregnant (with nukes), Saddam Hussein dandling children who are bound and gagged. 'That's what's fascinating. It's always "We're going too far, there's too much sex, we gotta clamp down, we gotta -- " The id gets out of control. And the superego, which is Mommy, is gonna come and punish us. And eventually, we say, "Let's inflict it on somebody else." That's what a sacrifice is. In ancient times, they would say, "It's time to go to war now, because it's time to sacrifice people Because the goddess in angry."'
>Apparently, she's still angry. One wonders, for instance, whether the Susan Smith case would have ignited quite such a hullabaloo were we not in the throes of a new deMausian Manic Period. But does that really mean that another war is around the corner? DeMause thinks so. These days, his folders bulge with 'bad mommies and monsters. Which I see as placentas,' he says. 'Believe it or not.'"
>[A copy of this article, with a New Yorker cartoon of deMause lighting an explosive world, can be obtained by emailing me at <psychhst@tiac.net> and giving me your postal address.]
>Lloyd
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Original file name: Prediction of War
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