39 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
History for the Future, January 8, 2001
This review is from: The History of Childhood (Master Work) (Paperback)
This revolutionary book impacted not only childhood history but history in general, as well as psychology and the hybrid field of psychohistory. The scholarly contributions remain essential reading for those who wish to look candidly at the past and the introduction by deMause is simply epochal. His view that adult and social violence have their origins in childhood has been vindicated by the most important studies of the subject, including James Gilligan's "Violence," Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Rhodes's "Why They Kill," and Anna Motz's groundbreaking study of female violence "The Psychology of Female Violence," the latter two having drawn on the works of deMause. Accordingly, this book is important not only for understanding our past, but as an indicator of where much fruitful scholarship is going to be done in the future. This work has rightly been praised by such noted historians as William Langer, Past President of the American Historical Association, and Rudolph Binion, as well as many luminaries from the field of psychology including psychiatrist Morton Schatzman, and eminent therapists like Reuben Fine and Alice Miller, who has drawn extensively on deMause's work. I concur with the New York Review of Books that this work is "Brilliant...bold...challenging." I would also add "indispensable." I cannot recommend this work too highly.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Newton of the history of childhood, October 5, 2011
This review is from: The History of Childhood (Master Work) (Paperback)
The publication of The History of Childhood in 1974 marks the turning point in the field that deMause created. Putting aside the idealizations of previous historians, the book examines for the first time the history of Western childhood. In the new deMausean paradigm the force of the change is neither technology nor the economy, but the interactions between parents and children.
The initial paragraphs became so famous in psychohistory that they have being quoted extensively:
Quote:
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. It is our task here to see how much of this childhood history can be recaptured from the evidence that remains to us.
That this pattern has not previously been noticed by historians is because serious history has long been considered a record of public not private events. Historians have concentrated so much on the noisy sand-box of history, with its fantastic castles and magnificent battles, that they have generally ignored what is going on in the homes around the playground. And where historians usually look to the sandbox battles of yesterday for the causes of those of today, we instead ask how each generation of parents and children creates those issues which are later acted out in the arena of public life.
/end quote
DeMause has no illusions. Like Thomas Kuhn, he knows perfectly well that paradigm revolutions are achieved gradually while the defenders of the old paradigm die and are replaced by new individuals. "If childhood history and psychohistory mean anything,", writes deMause, "they mean reversing most of the causal arrows used by historians to date." In other words, the way of seeing the world in the humanities and in social sciences is upside down, and psychohistory places our feet back on the ground. The relations between parents and children have determined the social, political and economic aspects in all civilizations of the world. In contrast to the findings of Darwin about the organism and its environment, in Homo sapiens the external world does not mold future developments so definitively as the intergenerational emergency of empathy does.
In a nutshell, the main finding of psychohistory is that academic history fails to recognize the profound role that the love of the parents for their children plays in the future developments of mankind.
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6 of 75 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting but unreliable, March 31, 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: The History of Childhood (Master Work) (Paperback)
The only trouble with this very interesting and readable book is that its conclusions have long since been discredited by eminent specialists in the field.
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