Summer 2005
After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order, Emmanuel Todd, trans. C. Jon Delogu. NY: Columbia University Press, 2003. xxiii, 233pp., Reviewed by David Lotto
Emmanuel Todd is a Frenchman of Jewish background who describes himself as a historian and an anthropologist. His primary affiliation is as a researcher at the French National Institute for Demographic Studies in Paris. He begins his preface by telling us that he identifies himself as European and French with strong ties of both family and sympathy to the “Anglo-Saxon world” saying that he is not “one more French intellectual carrying the same old anti-American virus that has infected so many Parisian intellectuals.”
This book, first published in 2002 as Apres l’empire, was a “best-seller” in France and Germany. …
Childrearing Reforms: The Seeds of Democracy and Human Rights, Robin Grille
If abusive and authoritarian upbringing leads to war and political tyranny, what kinds of social change are brought about when a large enough proportion of any population shifts to more supportive and empathic parenting? In this chapter we will look at the growth of democracy and social justice in nations such as France, the USA and Sweden, and how these developments have closely followed child rearing reforms.
Further on, we will look at some of the remarkable social changes brought about by the advent of modern child rearing (deMause’s Socializing Mode) in the 20th century. Even more exciting improvements in social harmony and sustainability will be possible as ‘Helping Mode’ or natural parenting styles begin to germinate. …
Father Avoidant, Mother Dependent: The First Seven Years in a Child’s Life in Classical Greece, Robert Rousselle
Many ancient Greeks, among them poets, physicians, and philosophers, divided human life into stages of equal numbers of years. The most frequently used number was seven, with the first seven years equaling the period of earliest childhood. As early as the sixth century B.C. the Athenian poet and lawgiver Solon suggested that the earliest period of childhood ended at age seven with the loss of the baby teeth. 1 Comic poets echoed this association, 2 as did De Hebdomadibus, attributed to Hippokrates, but probably dating to the first half of the fourth century B.C. 3 Even the rational, scientific Aristotle grudgingly accepted as accurate the division of life into periods of seven years, and noted that most animals lost their baby teeth in their seventh year. …
Healing a Collective: A PsychoPolitical Action Project, Margret Rueffler
The project “Healing a Collective” was born in August 1994, after a visit to war-torn Georgia. What brought me there? In my work as a transpersonal psychologist, and as director of the PsychoPolitical Peace Institute in New York and Zurich, I gave a series of lectures in Moscow in 1990. Two of the participants were from Georgia. One, the doctor in charge of Bakuriani hospital, spent four weeks in 1991 training with me in New York. During his stay, back in Bakuriani, several people belonging to his ethnic group, Ossetians, were murdered. I became aware during this crisis of the complexity of the situation. My concern and interest grew and deepened, and prompted me to visit him in Georgia three years later after its war. …
Mediation from a Group Dynamics Point of View, Christian Lackner
This contribution briefly presents two aspects. The first part reports on the history and work of the Austrian School of Group Dynamics, assuming that readers are not acquainted with it. The second part offers five fields of problems which show up regularly in a conflict mediation setting.
When Kurt Lewin, a German social scientist, emigrated to the U.S., started his first experiments with groups and out of this developed Group Dynamics as an applicable social science, European scientists visited him, bringing the initial insights back to Europe in the early 1960s. They tried to introduce GD to Europe and founded Group Dynamic Societies (with the EIT as a subsidiary of the National Training Laboratory). …
Peace Counseling: A New Profession, Lloyd deMause “Wars begin in the minds of men.” -UNESCO Charter
The study of the emotional causes of war has been a central focus of research during the past four decades by myself and other psychohistorians in The Journal of Psychohistory. Just as prison psychiatrists have recently found that murderers regularly have had horribly abusive childhoods,1 psychohistorians have discovered that wars too are reenactments of the horrors of widespread child abuse and neglect. The usual economic and social causes ascribed to wars, I have found, are only excuses, rationalizations given to explain away the killings, secondary to acting out the shared inner emotional conflicts of individuals. “Realist” theories of war are mistaken. …
The Roots of War and Terror, Anthony Stevens, London: Continuum, 2004. 263pp., Reviewed by Francoise Hall
The question of why the probability increases daily that humans will put an end to their own species is of crucial interest not only to everyone on earth but especially to psychohistorians whose self-imposed mission is to discover the why of history. Hence, it is with sadness that I express my negative impression of this book.
The main thrust of this book is to show that war is likely to be an expression of a complex of inter-related archetypes, but the author simply asserts this without any discussion of other modern important works on the causes of war. Some of the ignored material includes the seminal work by Lloyd deMause on childhood and the later need for an enemy; Danieli Yael’s work on the multi-generational legacies of trauma; Raymond Kelly’s work on warless societies and the origins of war, and the work of Houston Smith on the evolution of empathy and social consciousness. …