Michael Derzak Adzema*
I consider this recent article by deMause [
click here if you haven't stumbled across it yet
] to be a huge contribution to the understanding of war and violence and
consequently to advancing the causes of peace and increased human well-being.
There is virtually nothing in it that I would wish to quibble with and nearly
all of it that I would gladly espouse and promote, to further those causes.
The exposition is masterfully crafted and exhaustively documented.
All it lacks, in order to assist the creation of a better world and humanity,
are "ears to hear"--and these, while woefully lacking at present, are guaranteed
to be more prevalent as time goes on, if deMause’s theory of the psychogenic
stages of history1 holds true.
Why people in increasing numbers will more easily be able
to hear the truth of deMause’s analysis will become clearer as I proceed
to make what I consider to be the best response to deMause’s latest contribution--a
response that constitutes an addition to it rather than a criticism of it.
The one facet I can think of that really needs adding, concerns the end of
his article, where deMause discusses the prevention of war and violence through
changed birthing and child-caring2 methods. This is
an optimistic conclusion to deMause’s analysis, as he attests, but there
is an additional optimistic appraisal that follows from his analysis.
The other conclusion concerns the benefit that could be
derived, in terms of ending war and violence, not only by preventing
or mitigating birth trauma, but also by healing or alleviating birth
trauma suffered by those who--until some unlikely utopian, perfect-birth-and-parenting
future overtakes us--are unlucky enough to not be protected from the abuses
of pre- and perinatal trauma. As one who has been involved in the healing
of such trauma--including primal therapy, rebirthing, and holotropic breathwork
TM --for nearly a quarter-century and who currently facilitates a form
of birth-trauma resolution that I call primal breathwork (based on
Stanislav Grof’s holotropic breathworkTM), I would like to add
that perspective.
DeMause writes,
[T]he group-fantasy shared prior to wars expresses
the nation’s deep feeling that the increase in pleasure brought about by
the prosperity and progress that usually precede wars "pollutes" the national
blood-stream with sinful excess, making men "soft" and "feminine"--a frightful
condition that can only be cleansed by a blood-shedding purification.
3
Stanislav Grof’s basic perinatal matrices (BPMs)4 are
very much akin to deMause’s perinatal schema, with some slight differences
in emphasis, and much more elaboration on the part of Grof. Putting
them together yields these results: Grof’s BPM I involves the
experiences and feelings related to the sometimes, or at least relatively,
undisturbed prenatal period, sometimes characterized by "oceanic bliss"; it
corresponds to deMause’s societal period of "prosperity and progress" and
feelings of being "soft" and "feminine"--understandably here, for the fetus
is largely identified with his or her mother at this time and is very much
"soft," i.e., undefended. In Grof’s schema BPM I is followed
by BPM II, which are experiences and feelings related to the time
of "no exit" and claustrophobic feelings occurring to nearly all humans at
the beginning of labor, when the cervix is not yet dilated. Since there
does not seem to be any "light at the end of the tunnel," it is characterized
by feelings of depression, guilt, despair, and blame, in the position of
"the victim," and is very much like deMause’s period of collective feelings
of entrapment and poisonous placenta, which he has found to precede the actual
outbreak of war or other violence. This is then followed by BPM
III, which involves feelings and experiences of all-encompassing struggle
and is related to the time of one’s actual birth. Characterized also
by intense feelings of aggression and sexual excess--in the position, now,
of "the aggressor"--it is related directly, in deMause’s schema, to the time
of the actual period of warring. BPM IV follows this; it corresponds
to the time of emergence from the womb during the birth process and is characterized
by feelings of victory, release, exultation, but also sometimes, after that
initial relief, of depression--when the struggle does not bring the expected
rewards, as when, during modern obstetrical births, the neonate is harshly
treated and then taken away from the mother, disallowing the bonding which
should occur, naturally, immediately after birth. Of course this period
coincides exactly with deMause’s period of the ending of a war.
All of this is to say that in society, as it did in the
womb, a period of uninterrupted and relatively undisturbed feelings of growth
leads to feelings of depression (being too "soft" and "feminine," but also
"too fat" in the womb and, therefore, extremely constricted and compressed).
Another way of saying it: feelings of expansion are followed by a
fear of entrapment; and I agree wholeheartedly with deMause in saying
that it happens this way in a nation’s cycle of feelings because it happened
that way to us prior to and during our births. We have these patterns
of feelings as collective groups of individuals because our first experience
of expansion was followed by extreme depression, guilt, despair, and
then struggle and something bloodily akin to war--our actual births.
Anyway, during times of prosperity, when one is less
engaged in a struggle to survive, we find that one’s body will naturally
try to heal itself of unresolved and somatically imprinted trauma by bringing
into consciousness the repressed traumatic memories needing resolution.
This occurs in a manner similar to that of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Basically, one’s needs to "grow emotionally" (i.e., clear away the unresolved
trauma) can only come to the fore when one’s physical survival needs are relatively
taken care of; and this they unerringly do, given any such opportunity.
However, when these traumatic memories arise seeking resolution, they, also
unerringly, bring with them the associated feelings of depression, unease,
and pain. But because these feelings are anything but pleasant, to their
detriment most people seek to avoid these feelings through addictions and
other forms of "acting-out" behavior. So addictions and acting-out behavior
emerge after periods of relative stability precisely because that stability
allows unresolved feelings an opening for emergence and a possibility of
resolution and healing.
At this point, individuals (and collectively, society)
have the choice to allow the emergence of these feelings--we call that
feeling them--and reliving them (in this instance, reliving one’s birth)
to integrate and heal the underlying (birth) trauma, or the individual and
society can choose to avoid these uncomfortable feelings through acting them
out in one form or another. Of course war is the greatest, most all-consuming
form of such acting-out . . . the greatest struggle.
Thus, the fact is that because humans are who we are--characterized
by a particular kind of birth process, i.e., traumatic, and related to our
distinction of standing upright and thereby decreasing the pelvic opening
as well as suffocating the fetus prior to birth5--we are destined
to go through periods of rebirthing purificatory rituals, whether for good
or ill. For we are psychologically wedded to reliving that which we
could not fully experience at the time because of the overwhelming quality
of pain associated with it.
These rebirthing rituals we are doomed to repeat, one
way or the other. We are going to act out this primal pain (birth trauma)
in periods of feelings of expansion; then closedness or entrapment, guilt,
and depression; then aggression; then release or submission (depending upon
whether one wins or loses the war); and then relative peacefulness, or extreme
repression and depression (depending again on winning or losing). These
are then again followed by either (in winning) the same cycle of expansion
then entrapment . . . or (in losing) a similar cycle of reemerging strength
(akin to the expansion), then continuing depression or overarching gloom
and helplessness feelings coupled with revenge feelings and blame (akin to
the closedness and guilt; but note that revenge feelings and blame are also
aspects of the BPM II matrix); and then the cycle is the same again--viz.,
aggression, release or submission, and so on around.
So the question begging to be asked is "What do we do
about it?" Do we, as Mayr and Boelderl do in their article, "The Pacifier
Craze: Collective Regression in Europe,"6 decry the regression
. . . as if by disclaiming it we could somehow keep the cycle from happening.
They write, for example, that the situation of collective regression in Europe
"strikes us as being high-explosive [sic] and bitter enough."7
In another place they exclaim, "What is horrible about this insight
[of the increasing collective regression in Europe] is the additional observation
that regression is becoming still more radical."8
This response of railing against the "Darkness" is a
Freudian response. Yet it is not even a neo-Freudian one, since "regression
in the service of the ego"--which began to be seen as ever more important
by neo-Freudians--is not acknowledged, let alone considered.
This is confirmed by Mayr and Boelderl in their statement
that "[R]egression by definition is a process of repression and a defense
mechanism."9 These are surprising words, in light of the
concept of regression in the service of the ego and awareness of the clinically
based evolution of psychotherapeutic theory since Freud’s original postulations,
over a half-cenutry ago. Moreover, these words indicate a conflict
with or ignorance of the fact that deMause’s theory of evolution or historical
change requires regression on the part of parents, while parenting their
children, as the primary "engine" of sociopsychological progress.10
At any rate, if we adopt the Freudian tactic, we are
as effective in derailing the cycle of violence (war, death-rebirth) as Freudians
are in what amounts to admonishing their clients to "stop it" (their cycles
of neurotic self-sabotage and self-destruction; the individual manifestations/
acting out of their birth traumas). This disclaiming of the cycle and
the reliance on "will-power" to change one’s patterns has been exposed in
its impotence, as evidenced by the growing acknowledgment of the ineffectiveness
and, indeed, counter-effectiveness of psychoanalysis.11 This
impotence of intellectual understanding in the face of these patterns of
self-destruction occurs because these schemas are rooted in memories that
exist in an emotional and entirely dissociated part of the brain, which is
hardly touched by neocortical admonishing of any kind. As deMause
correctly points out, the fetus’s "early experiences have been found to be
recorded in a separate early neural network--a dissociated emotional memory
system centering in the amygdala, quite distinct from the declarative
memory system centering in the hippocampus that is established in later
childhood."12
With the exposure of the ineffectiveness of the Freudian
tactic of intellectual understanding has come the Freudian movement’s disintegration
into schools advocating various other strategies for change. These schools/strategies
include the psychiatric--the use of drugs; the neo-Freudians who acknowledge
and use "regression in the service of the ego" and abreaction; the humanistic-existential
approaches, stressing the "experiential";13 and the Jungians and
neo-Jungians, who would seek the resolution of these cycles in their inner
archetypal acting out, resulting in an eventual rootedness of the ego in
a higher Self (a spiritual center) beyond or transcending the cycles.
Other approaches include the bulk of the spiritual, new-age, or transpersonal
means that are flourishing these days, which basically differ from all others
in their belief that one can simply bypass those cycles and go directly to
the Light or the Self by dismissing the cycles/ the Darkness (Shadow) through
affirming the Light, meditating the Darkness out or the Light in, changing
one’s thoughts, creating one’s reality, and various combinations of these.
Finally, these newer schools and strategies for healing include that of what
might be called experiential psychotherapy, which includes primal
therapy, holotropic breathworkTM, some forms of (experiential)
meditation (Vipassana meditation, for example), Reichian and bioenergetic
approaches, some forms of hypnotherapy (experiential ones--ones that involve
reliving traumas), and virtually all the techniques, treatments, and correctives
that are espoused in the field of pre- and perinatal psychology.
The point is that from a good number of these other-than-Freudian
perspectives--and all of those that acknowledge the importance of "regression
in the service of the ego"--and from the perspective of the entire field of
experiential psychotherapy, the answer to the cycles of violence, war, and
death-rebirth is to stop the acting out, not by simply intellectually decrying
it (as if one can talk oneself out of one’s inner fears and one’s Darkness/Shadow),
but by reliving those cycles of violence at their (primal) origins . . .
that is, by reliving the violence of birth, which is so thoroughly, masterfully
delineated in deMause’s paper.14
But from this perspective of experiential psychotherapy--one
completely congruent with and grateful of deMause’s contribution in his article--regression,
in Europe, or elsewhere, is not seen as something to decry, disclaim, be
horrified of, or be seen as dangerous (as in Mayr and Boelderl’s article)
but is seen as an opportunity. Regression is certainly not seen as
a form of defense but as the opposite of that. Regression is part of
a process of diminishing one’s defenses against one’s internal reality
of pain and trauma. Thus, examples of blatant collective regression
as in Europe--more so to the extent they are relived, released, and integrated--are
entirely auspicious for the eventual elimination of war as a collective device
of acting out (defending against) the painful feelings coming from one’s
personal history which one carries around, all unknowingly, and which pervade,
in one way or another, in forms subtle and not so subtle, every moment of
one’s consciousness in the present.
From this experiential psychotherapeutic perspective,
developments like those that Mayr and Boelderl describe as collective regression
in Europe and Lawson describes as occurring at rock concerts15
should have us, if not dancing in the streets, at least hopeful of a gradual
decrease in the use of war and violence. Why? It is because
the youth who display this "regression" so blatantly were brought up by an
"advanced" form of childrearing than that previously16 that they
have fewer defenses, fewer layers of obfuscation covering up their
unconscious psychodynamics; consequently the regression is seen more clearly
in their behavior.
Why is this important? DeMause points out that
people do go to war, and that prior to it their perinatal dynamics come to
the fore, as evidenced by the words and images in the media and in leaders’
speeches used to describe the situational dynamics. Thus, our leaders
take us into war, they act out their perinatal dynamics (and we in
following them act out ours) in such gruesomely overt ways because
these dynamics are so hidden, repressed, and overlaid with defenses that
the conscious mind has absolutely no access to (and hence insight
into) them as being part of one’s unconscious dynamics. Consequently
the conscious mind is completely able to convince
itself that those dynamics are actual, real, and doubtless
parts of the situation and therefore require an actual, real, and extreme
response. The amount of resolve required to act out war can only be
wrought of an unflinching belief in the rightness, absolute correctness,
of one’s perspective of the situation and therefore of that extreme course
of response. And that can only be brought about by a total dissociation
from one’s perinatal traumas, and a complete and utter projection of it on
the outside--the enemy, in particular.
The contrary is also true: When there does not
exist that total and complete dissociation of the perinatal trauma--when
it is, as in Europe and rock concerts currently, closer to the surface, less
defended against, less repressed and, hence, more blatant--it is more accessible
to consciousness and less likely to be acted out in the extreme as
in war (it is more likely to be acted out in lesser extreme forms,
such as jumping into mosh pits, carrying pacifiers, listening to baby tunes
about the, very real, difficulties of being a baby, and so on). Finally,
it is more likely to be actually allowed to emerge in consciousness and be
relived, and thereby "healed" . . . and gone beyond, to be replaced by something
more benign and more socially constructive,17 and thus to be removed
forever as a motivation to war or violence. This is the auspicious
view of the developments described by Mayr and Boelderl. Janov was
the first to point out that a permanent resolution of underlying trauma initially
entailed an aggravation of symptoms and symbolic acting out,18
i.e., the underlying dynamics become more blatant and apparent in behavior.
He was also the first to note that the acting-out and overt neurotic was
closer to being "real," and therefore really sane, than his or her highly
functioning and "normal," but repressed, rigidly defended, and unfeeling
neighbor.19
Finally, the correctness of this view has been borne
out in recent history. Glenn Davis analyzed the socializing psychoclass
and found that it comprised four submodes. In order, beginning in the
mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century and each one a more "evolved"
and humane one than the previous one, they are the submodes of psychic
control, aggressive training, vigorous guidance, and
delegated release.20 He concluded that in America the
Vietnam War was perpetrated by individuals belonging almost entirely to the
aggressive-training and vigorous-guidance psychoclasses.21
Yet it was brought to an end largely as a result of the efforts of an antiwar
movement whose largest component was a Sixties youth brought up under a delegated-release
child-caring mode22--the most "advanced" mode short of the helping
mode (which would essentially, then, be that mode enjoyed by the children
of the delegated-release psychoclass) and psychologically with the most "advanced"
ego structures23 (again, prior to their children--those of the
helping mode).
It is obvious that these Sixties youth did not have the
same unflinching and unqualified belief in the absolute rightness of their
country’s position as did many of their parents. This is obviously
the case in a psychoclass of youth chanting a generational mantra, "Question
authority!" and whose more extreme members would at times even go over to
the perspective of seeing the war from the eyes of the "enemy," the Other
(witness: Jane Fonda’s journey to Hanoi, the waving of North Vietnamese flags
by protesters, and the carrying of little red books on the sayings of Chairman
Mao).
But does this undermining of the self-righteous position
necessary for the instigation and carrying out of war--this ability to see
at least somewhat from the Other’s perspective, and not just one’s own--have
anything to do with a closeness to perinatal dynamics, a closeness to the
unconscious for that (Sixties) generation of youth? The answer:
Absolutely yes! Kenneth Keniston documented in two books, The Uncommitted
and Young Radicals, the unconscious dynamics of that generation--both
the "alienated-hippie" and "activist" sectors of it.24 A
reading of his books (though Keniston knew nothing of perinatal dynamics at
that time, and few people did, for that matter) reveals a degree of perinatal
imagery, fantasy, and acting out--especially among "the uncommitted"--enough
to make a troll-handling, pacifier-wearing, mosh-pit jumping youth of today
to blush! These dynamics can be readily seen by looking to Keniston’s
original works; however the full delineation of these dynamics are to be seen
in my work-in-progress, tentatively titled The Once and Future Generation:
"Regression," Mysticism, and "My Generation."
To summarize, deMause writes, "Hitler’s projection of
his fears . . . into Jews and foreigners helped him avoid a psychotic breakdown
and enabled him to function during his later life, as long as others shared
his delusion of poisonous enemies." Therefore acting out collectively,
as in war, can prevent a psychotic breakdown. But when the consequences
of acting out one’s birth trauma, collectively, is millions of people (including
oneself) dead, not to mention the uncountably large loss of material and
personal resources, it is clear that by comparison a psychotic breakdown
is a more benign alternative for either the individual or the society(s)
in which that or those individual(s) act.
Similarly, not providing the outlet of war as
a collective birth ritual (oftentimes euphemistically called a "rite of passage")
would allow the genuine neurotic breakdowns, of people’s defenses,
and their opening up to their underlying perinatal dynamics. Thus accessed,
they can be healed.
Yet it is true that this neurotic breakdown (of at least
a small amount) on the scale of society would result in the kind of collective
regressions that Mayr and Boelderl, and Lawson describe. That is, the
cause of peace (of the saving of human lives) requires that people pay the
price of encountering their primal pain. By all measures, this price
is minuscule . . . especially when you take into account the fact that many
people, after initially "breaking down" for lack of a collective (and highly
destructive) act-out, will actually succeed in reconstructing a self more
in line with reality, through the dynamics and means categorized under the
term regression in the service of the ego.
Thus, in the same way that the collapse of the Soviet
Union led not only to the emergence, in America, of a search for other societal
scapegoats and therefore the "Republican revolution," but also to a collective
self-analysis that has brought to the fore many of our social and political
shortcomings (cf. the rise of the talk show; the rituals of nationwide self-examination
over issues of sexual harassment, spouse abuse, and race relations played
out in the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas hearings and the O. J. Simpson trial;
and other such national psychodrama staged on TV shows like Nightline
); so also the prevention of war and the cause of peace will lead to such
inner soul-searching, such emergence of acting out on a smaller scale, and
such confrontation with one’s dark side. It needs to be pointed out
that this consequence, in toto, however uncomfortable and even violent
(on a smaller scale) at times, is a small price to pay compared to the price
of war which, by any measurement, is horrifyingly huge and unacceptable.
It must be kept in mind that it is the products of nearly
the most "advanced" mode of child-caring--the delegated-release subclass
of the socializing psychoclass--who have proved most willing to pay such
prices for peace, as for example, in increased soul-searching. In fact
they would be later stigmatized for just this quality of introspection, this
supposed fault of looking into themselves, through the derogatory appellation,
The Me Generation. Indeed, Keniston foresaw this
when he studied the Sixties generation as college students. Observing
the amount of inner exploration they engaged in during their quests for self-discovery,
he would describe this attribute in a biased way as "the overexamined life."
25 and more fairly, for the activist youth, as a "psychological-mindedness"
and "self-analysis."26
No doubt those who criticized these youth in the past
are some of the same ones who, now older, are wrongly castigating the self-analyzing
characteristics of society emerging as the Sixties generation begins coming
into its "triumphant" phase--the time when as adults a psychoclass takes over
the reins of society and most strongly influences it.27 These
highly defended and fear-minded conservatives, prone to projection, are incapable
of appreciating the integrity of a generation who "questioned authority"
in the Sixties and have since then been psychologically, emotionally, and
spiritually working on themselves, declaring for the first time in history
as a generation, "Let the buck stop here!" as they seek to turn themselves,
and by extension their children and society-at-large, into a more loving,
wise, and less acting-out humanity.
We cannot expect that everyone will heal their birth
traumas when they arise into consciousness during periods of peace.
However, we can expect--especially now that there is understanding of these
dynamics and there are techniques and modalities available for healing them--that
some people will!
Furthermore, even the more ritualistic and superficial
yet blatant regressions to infancy, birth, prenatal, or even prior to that--e.g.,
as Mayr and Boelderl describe in Europe--are not the indication of a "death
drive" or "death instinct" as they have claimed.28 They are
instead the manifestations of a drive to healing--a drive to regressing
to early traumas and to reexperiencing the events that occurred then and
thus recapturing an integrity of self that existed prior to the dissociation
that happened as a result of those traumas. This drive to regression
is no more a "death wish" than the mystical or spiritual quest is a "death
wish," and for the same reasons, as Jung correctly admonished Freud a long
time ago.
In conclusion, when we see blatant collective regressions,
by the sorts of people mentioned, to these perinatal dynamics in undisguised,
and relatively harmless, social rituals (as described by Mayr and Boelderl,
and Lawson) we can expect that, because of their closeness to their unconscious
pain, they are likely--even if only a little more likely because of their
more advanced mode of child-caring--to have insight into these dynamics and
to resist acting them out in a more extreme form, like war. To put
it another way, I would have preferred that Hitler had acted out his craziness
by jumping into mosh pits, humming baby tunes, wearing a pacifier (or even
engaging in sexual orgies) than the way he did. So these are not signs
of an impending war. What did you expect peace to look like?
Rather they are the scenery of human healing, we should expect to be seeing,
on the pathway to peace.
References
- Lloyd deMause, Foundations of Psychohistory.
New York: Creative Roots, 1982, especially Ch. 4, "The Psychogenic Theory
of History."
- By this term, child-caring, I mean what is usually
meant by the term childrearing. For reasons fully stated in
Aesthema: The Journal of the International Primal Association,
No. 11, p. 63, Editor’s Note, I will use child-caring when I mean
healthy parenting of children, for I consider childrearing to be a pejorative
toward children, a relic of our history of child abuse. I still use
childrearing when referring to former modes of parenting which were abusive
and did involve "rearing" and not "caring," however.
- Lloyd deMause, "Restaging of Early Traumas in War and
Social Violence." The Journal of Psychohistory 23 (1995): 2.
- Stanislav Grof, Realms of the Human Unconscious:
Observations from LSD Research. New York: Viking Press, 1975; LSD
Psychotherapy. Pomona, CA: Hunter House, 1980; Beyond the Brain: Birth,
Death, and Transcendence in Psychotherapy. Albany, NY: State University
of New York Press, 1985; The Adventure of Self-Discovery: Dimensions of
Consciousness and New Perspectives in Psychotherapy and Inner Exploration
. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988; The Holotropic
Mind: The Three Levels of Human Consciousness and How They Shape Our Lives
. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993.
- A. Briend, "Fetal Malnutrition: The Price of Upright
Posture?" British Medical Journal 2 (1979): 317-319.
- Daniela F. Mayr & Artur R. Boelderl, "The Pacifier
Craze: Collective Regression in Europe." The Journal of Psychohistory
21 (1993): 143-156.
- Ibid., p. 144.
- Ibid., p. 148, emphasis mine.
- Ibid., pp. 149-150.
- DeMause writes, "[T]he ultimate source of all historical
change is psychogenesis, the lawful change in childrearing modes occurring
through generational pressure. . . . 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." (op. cit., 1982, p. 135, emphasis mine
.)
- See, for example, Alice Miller, For Your Own Good:
Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence, trans. by
Hildegarde and Hunter Hannum. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, especially
"Vantage Point 1990," pp. vii-ix.
- deMause, op. cit., 1995, p. 12, emphasis in original
.
- I should make clear that this "experiential" approach
is, from the perspective of the experiential psychotherapeutic approach I
will be describing shortly, actually the superficial symbolic acting out
of these underlying and powerful cycles in a way that is only a little less
impotent than the Freudians.
- deMause, op. cit., 1995.
- Alvin H. Lawson, "Placental Guitars, Umbilical Mikes,
and the Maternal Rock-Beat: Birth Fantasies and Rock Music Videos." The
Journal of Psychohistory 21 (1994): 335-353.
- Mayr and Boelderl claim quite wrongly and quite strangely--as
if to make the facts not conflict with deMause’s psychogenic theory, or as
if to cover up some hole in their analysis--that those caught up in the pacifier
craze were raised under the intrusive and socializing parenting
modes (op. cit., 1993, p. 145) and yet, in 1992, were between the ages of
15 and 30 (Ibid., p. 143). This is hard to understand because these
youth would have been born between the years 1962 and 1977 in advanced Western
countries of mostly Western Europe--Italy, Germany, Austria, all of Europe,
and even the U.S. (Ibid.).
However, the intrusive and socializing modes are
associated, by deMause, with the eighteenth century and the nineteenth to
mid-twentieth centuries, respectively, in the Western world (deMause, op.
cit., 1982, p. 62). On the other hand, the helping mode begins
mid-twentieth century in the Western world (Ibid., p. 63). The conclusion
from this is that these youth, described by Mayr and Boelderl, would have
been greatly influenced by the helping mode; they would be expected, at least,
to have received the most advanced methods of child-caring overall in the
world at this time--considering deMause’s theory--since they are the most
recent progeny of the Western world! Indeed, if these cannot be considered
products of the helping mode, who can be? In order for Mayr and Boelderl
to dispute this and claim they were exceptions to the rule and were raised
under intrusive and socializing modes, they would have had to do a study
demonstrating this, or at least cite one done. And this they do not
do.
- Michael D. Adzema, "Reunion With the Positive (Self),
Part 1: The Other Half of ‘The Cure.’" Primal Renaissance: The Journal
of Primal Psychology 1(2): 72-85.
- Arthur Janov, The Primal Scream: Primal Therapy:
The Cure for Neurosis. New York: Dell, 1970.
- Ibid.
- Glenn Davis, Childhood and History in America
. New York: The Psychohistory Press, 1976.
- Ibid., especially Ch. 7, "The Great Society and the
Youth Revolt," and p. 240.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., p. 241.
- Kenneth Keniston, The Uncommitted: Alienated Youth
in American Society. New York: Dell, 1965; Young Radicals: Notes on
Committed Youth. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968.
- Keniston, op. cit., 1965.
- Keniston, op. cit., 1968, especially p. 81.
- Davis, op. cit., especially Ch. 7, "The Great Society
and The Youth Revolt."
- Mayr and Boelderl, op. cit., p. 149.
*
This article was originally published in The Journal of Psychohistory,
V. 23, No. 4, Spring 1996, 395-406.
Bio
Michael Derzak Adzema is a free-lance scholar, who has written for
a variety of international and regional magazines and journals. He is also
a transformational facilitator, offering individual primal process facilitation;
and with his wife, Mary Lynn, he conducts regular workshops in primal breathwork
(based on the Holotropic Breathwork™ of Stanislav Grof). He specializes in
writing about psychology and spirituality; but has written extensively on
their interrelation with topics such as the environment, consciousness, health
and nutrition, and metaphysics, as well as psychohistory. He is the founder
of SSILLY God Ventures and AHPPI (Alliance for Holotropic, Primal, Pre/Perinatal,
and Psychohistorical Insight and Information). He is the publisher and editor
of AHPPI’s magazine, Primal Spirit: The Deeper Wave of the New Age
, and is webmaster of its site (this site) on the Internet (www.primalspirit.com).
He also serves as the editor of Primal Renaissance: The Journal of Primal
Psychology. He can be contacted at P.O. Box 1348, Guerneville, CA 95446-1348;
phone (570) 262-1166.
Comments? E-mail me by clicking on:
mickel@primalspirit.com
Mickel
Adzema
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