Chapter 4--Restaging Early Traumas in War and Social
Violence
"A just
war for the true interests of the state advances its development
within a few years by tens of years, stimulates all healthy elements
and represses insidious poison."
|
--Adolf
Lasson |
When Adolf Hitler moved to Vienna in 1907 at the
age of eighteen, he reported in Mein Kampf, he haunted the prostitutes'
district, fuming at the "Jews and foreigners" who directed the "revolting
vice traffic" which "defiled our inexperienced young blond girls"
and injected "poison" into the bloodstream of Germany.1
Months before this blood poison delusion was formed, Hitler had the
only romantic infatuation of his youth, with a young girl, Stefanie.2
Hitler imagined that Stefanie was in love with him (although in reality
she had never met him) and thought he could communicate with her via
mental telepathy. He was so afraid of approaching her that he made
plans to kidnap her and then murder her and commit suicide in order
to join with her in death.
Hitler's childhood had been so abusive-his father regularly beat him
"with a hippopotamus whip," once enduring 230 blows of his father's
cane and another time nearly killed by his father's whipping3
that he was full of rage toward the world. When he grew up, his sexual
feelings were so mixed up with his revenge fantasies that he believed
his sperm was poisonous and might enter the woman's bloodstream during
sexual intercourse and poison her.4
Hitler's rage against "Jewish blood-poisoners" was, therefore, a projection
of his own fears that he might become a blood-poisoner. Faced with
the temptation of the more permissive sexuality of Vienna, he wanted
to have sex with women, but was afraid his sperm would poison their
blood. He then projected his own sexual desires into Jews- "The black-haired
Jewboy lies in wait for hours, satanic joy in his face, for the unsuspecting
girl"5 and ended up accusing Jews of being "world blood-poisoners"
who "introduced foreign blood into our people's body."6
As is usually the case with delusional systems, Hitler's projection
of his fears of his own poisonous sexuality into Jews and foreigners
helped him avoid a psychotic breakdown and allowed him to function
during his later life. He admitted this quite specifically in Mein
Kampf, saying that when he "recognized the Jew as the cold-hearted,
shameless, and calculating director of this revolting traffic in the
scum of the big city, a cold shudder ran down my back . . . the scales
dropped from my eyes. A long soul struggle had reached its conclusion."7
From that moment on, Hitler became a professional anti-Semite, ordering
Nazi doctors to find out how Jewish blood differed from Aryan blood,
having his own blood regularly sucked by leeches to try to get rid
of its "poison,"8 giving speeches full of metaphors of
blood poisoning and of Jews sucking people's blood out and, eventually,
ordering the extermination of all "world blood-poisoners" in the worst
genocide and the most destructive war ever experienced by mankind.
The success of Hitler's ability to use anti-Semitism to save his sanity
was dependent, of course, upon there being millions of followers who
shared his fantasies about poisonous enemies infecting the body of
Europe. Much of Europe at that time shared Hitler's experience of
a severely abusive childhood,9 and many shared his fantasy
that the ills of the modern world were caused by the poisonous nature
of Jews.10 When he used metaphors of blood in his speeches,
saying the world was a constant warfare of one people against another,
where "one creature drinks the blood of another," and that Jews were
spiders that "sucked the people's blood out," he was cheered on by
millions who shared his fantasies.11
GROUP-FANTASIES OF POISON BLOOD
In studying the shared fantasies of nations connected with how it
feels to be part of a group at a particular historical moment-what
I have termed historical group-fantasies12 I have regularly
found images of "poison blood" prior to outbreaks of war and violent
revolution. In war, the enemy is imagined to be sucking out the blood
of the nation; in revolution, the state is the blood-sucker, as in
the fantasy before the French Revolution that the state was an "immense
and infernal machine which seizes each citizen by the throat and pumps
out his blood."13 Images of poison blood are periodic in
history. They are usually found in conjunction with images of guilt
for recent prosperity and progress that are felt to "pollute 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.14 This fantasy of periodic shedding of poisoned
blood through war is based on the same presumed cleansing effects
as the bloodletting therapies physicians prescribed through the nineteenth
century to cure many diseases, which also were believed to be caused
by "gluttony, luxury and lustful excesses."15 As one military
leader put it, war "is one of the great agencies by which human progress
is effected. [It] purges a nation of its humors...and chastens it,
as sickness or adversity...chastens an individual;" it cures it of
its "worship of comfort, wealth, and general softness..."16
When John Adams asked Thomas Jefferson "how to prevent...luxury from
producing effeminacy, intoxication, extravagance, vice and folly?"
Jefferson's answer was: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from
time to time with the blood of patriots."17 As Sherlock
Holmes expressed it in a story set in August 1914, rapid material
progress had produced a feeling that "God's curse hung heavy over
a degenerate world, for there was an awesome hush and a feeling of
vague expectancy in the sultry and stagnant air...[but] a cleaner,
better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has
cleared....A bloody purging would be good for the country."18
Wars have often been thought of as purifying the nation's polluted
blood by virtue of a sacrificial rite identical to the rites of human
sacrifice so common in early historical periods. The blood of those
sacrificed is believed to renew the nation. War, said those preparing
for the bloody Finnish Civil War, purges guilt-producing material
prosperity through the blood of soldiers sacrificed on the battlefield:
"The idea of sacrifice permeated the war...Youth...have heard the
nation's soul crying for its renewal, their heart's blood [because]
nations drink renewal from the blood of the fallen soldiers."19
Usually the blood of the soldiers is thought of as being needed to
feed a maternal figure, either mother earth or, like the Aztecs, a
bloodthirsty mother-goddess.20 War renewed national strength
by feeding blood to the goddess the state was "reborn" by the soldier's
blood, and war cleansed the polluted national bloodstream as if there
was a "rebirth from the womb of history," a "bloody baptism" that
removed all poisonous self-indulgence.21 "A nation hath
been born again,/ Regenerate by a second birth!" wrote W. W. Howe
after the bloody American Civil War.22 Another American,
speaking of World War I, said "It was like the pouring of new blood
into old veins."23
The question immediately arises: How do such poisoned blood fears
originate? And what is their connection with birth? The answers to
these questions will become more convincing only after we have examined
a prior question: Why is war so often depicted as a woman?
GROUP-FANTASIES OF DANGEROUS WOMEN
For the past two decades, I have been collecting historical material
from sources such as magazine covers and political cartoons on images
of war. One of the most unexpected finding of was that war was so
often shown as a dangerous, bloodthirsty woman.24 Despite
the fact that women neither play much part in
deciding on wars nor in fighting them, war has so often been depicted
as a dangerous woman (Illustration 3:1) that a visitor to our planet
might wrongly conclude that women were our most bellicose sex. From
Athena to Freyja, from Marianne to Brittannia, terrifying women have
been depicted as war goddesses,25 devouring, raping and
ripping apart her children. The image has become so familiar we no
longer think to question why women are so often shown as presiding
over war rather than as its victims, as they are in reality.
Even in antiquity, when the god of war was usually male, his mother
was imagined to have hovered above the battlefield, demanding more
blood to feed her voracious appetite.26 And athough it
was almost always men who fought the battles,27 women in
early societies were expected to come along to watch from the sidelines,
rather like cheerleaders at a sports match, shrieking their own battle-cries,
heckling and insulting those warriors who held back and demanding
a plentiful show of blood on the battlefield.28
THE MARIE ANTOINETTE SYNDROME AND SOCIAL VIOLENCE
> The French Revolution fully demonstrates the role of the dangerous
woman fantasy in social violence, being preceded by a deluge of pamphlets
and newspapers picturing Marie Antoinette-actually a rather sweet-natured
young woman-as a sexually voracious, incestuous, lesbian, murderous
"bloodsucker of the French."29 The French Revolution, Terror
and revolutionary wars were accompanied by increasingly violent Marie
Antoinette fantasies, centering on grotesque images of her imagined
sexual perversities, while the king was pictured as merely an impotent
tool in her hands. Finally, the Tribunal, whipped up by the press,
declared her a "ravening beast" and chopped off her head, after she
had been accused of being a "tigress thirsty for the blood of the
French," a "ferocious panther who devoured the French, the female
monster whose pores sweated the purest blood of the sans-culottes,"
a "vampire who sucks the blood of the French," and a "monster who
needed to slake her thirst on the blood of the French."30
I have found that group-fantasies of monstrous bloodthirsty women
have preceded every war I have analyzed. Even the most popular movies
prior to wars reflect this dangerous woman fantasy. The biggest movie
preceding W.W.II was The Wizard of Oz, which is about a wicked witch
and how to kill her; the second biggest was Gone With the Wind, featuring
a bitchy Scarlet and the third biggest was The Women, which boasted
it featured 135 dangerous women. All About Eve before Korea and Cleopatra
before Vietnam had similar dangerous women as leads, and the Persian
Gulf War was preceded by a whole string of dangerous women movies,
from Fatal Attraction to Thelma and Louise,31 including
a hit TV series entitled Dangerous Women.
When war breaks out, these terrifying women images disappear from
the nation's fantasy life. The dangerous woman image now is projected
into the enemy, so that the war is experienced unconsciously as a
battle with a mother-figure. For example, when the United States attacked
Libya, the New York Post reported the rumor that American intelligence
had discovered that Moammar Khadafy was actually a "transvestite dressed
in women's clothes and high heels,"32 even touching up
a photo to show how he "might look...dressed in drag." Even more often,
the enemy is shown as a dangerous mommy, as in the Persian Gulf War
when Saddam Hussein was depicted as a dangerous pregnant mother with
a nuclear bomb in her womb or as the mother of a death-baby (see Chapter
2)
> Hallucinating dangerous feminine characteristics in one's enemies
goes all the way back to antiquity, when the earliest battles were
imagined to have been fought against female monsters, often the mother
of the hero, whatever her name-Tiamat, Ishtar, Inanna, Isis, or Kali.33
Typical is the Aztec mother-goddess Huitzilopochtli, who had "mouths
all over her body" that cried out to be fed the blood of soldiers.34
Early Indo-European warriors had to pass through initiatory rituals
in order to attain full status in which they dressed up and attacked
a monstrous dummy female poisonous serpent, complete with three heads.35
Although early warriors fought against men, not women, they often
anally raped and castrated their enemies, turning them into symbolic
women; from ancient Norse to ancient Egyptian societies, heaps of
enemy penises on the battlefield are commonly portrayed.36
In addition, according to the world's leading historian of war, "the
opportunity to engage in wholesale rape was not just among the rewards
of successful war but, from the soldier's point of view, one of the
cardinal objectives for which he fought."37 More women
have been raped and killed in some wars than enemy soldiers. The hero
is therefore simultaneously both a self-killer, punishing projected
parts of himself, and a mother-killer, inflicting revenge for early
traumas.38
At the same time, by restaging early traumas in wars the magical goal
is achieved of merging with the mother in a defensive maneuver to
deny her as a dangerous object. Giving one's life for one's Motherland
means finally joining with her. The soldier who dies in war, says
one patriot, "dies peacefully. He who has a Motherland dies in comfort...in
her, like a baby falling asleep in its warm and soft cradle..."39
Yet even though we understand that both the Motherland and the enemy
in wars are ultimately the early mother, the question remains: what
could possibly be the infantile origin of fantasies of the enemy as
a poisonous blood-sucking monster? Why did Americans before the Revolutionary
War feel "poisoned by Mother England" and fight a war rather than
pay a minor tax? Why did Hitler fear "blood-sucking Jews and foreigners,"
and why did Aztec soldiers go to war to feed blood to a monstrous
mother-goddess? Closer to today, why did Americans for so long fear
their "national life-blood" was being "poisoned" by Communists? Why
do so many today feel the government and welfare recipients are "sucking
their blood?" Images of blood-sucking, engulfing enemies are ubiquitous
throughout history. Surely our blood was never really poisoned or
sucked out of us by a maternal monster in our past. Or was it?
WAR AND THE FETAL DRAMA
As I described in my Foundations of Psychohistory,40 when
I first began collecting the emotional imagery surrounding the outbreak
of war I was puzzled by recurring claims by aggressors that they were
forced to go to war against their wishes because "a net had suddenly
been thrown over their head" or a "ring of iron was closing about
us more tightly every moment" or they had been "seized by the throat
and strangled." I piled up hundreds of these images of nations being
choked and strangled, "unable to draw a breath," "smothered, walled-in,"
"unable to relieve the inexorable pressure" of a world "pregnant with
events," followed by feelings of being "picked up bodily" in "an inexorable
slide" towards war, starting with a "rupture of diplomatic relations"
and a "descent into the abyss," being "unable to see the light at
the end of the tunnel" as the nation takes its "final plunge over
the brink," and even that wars were "aborted" if ended too soon. Given
the concreteness of all this birth imagery, I concluded that war was
a rebirth fantasy of enormous power shared by nations undergoing deep
regression to fetal traumas.
> War has long been described in images of pregnancy: "War develops
in the womb of State politics; its principles are hidden there as
the particular characteristics of the individual are hidden in the
embryo" (Clausewitz); "Germany is never so happy as when she is pregnant
with a war" (proverb).41 Wars are felt to be life-and-death
struggles for "breathing space" and "living room," Lebensraum, as
though nations were reliving the growing lack of space and oxygen
common to all fetuses just prior to and during birth (plus, for most
infants right up to Hitler's generation, the reliving of the pain
of tight swaddling). As Adzema puts it, "feelings of expansion are
followed by a fear of entrapment."42 Nations become paranoid
prior to wars, and feel they have to resort to violence in order to
get out of what appears to be a choking womb and birth canal. Bethmann-Hollweg,
for example, told the Reichstag in announcing war in 1914 that Germany
was surrounded by enemies, and "he who is menaced as we are and is
fighting for his highest possession can only consider how he is to
hack his way through."43 As Hitler repeated over and over
again, only a violent "rebirth" could "purge the world of the Jewish
poison" and avoid it being "asphyxiated and destroyed."44
Now, the notion that war might be a battle against a dangerous mother
is difficult enough to believe. That it in addition includes fantasies
that you are hacking your way out of the engulfment of your own birth
is infinitely harder to accept. But what followed then in my psychohistorical
research into imagery prior to wars was a discovery that seemed to
be a final step into the unbelievable, revealing a depth of regression
prior to wars greater than anything yet contemplated in the psychological
literature. Yet it was a discovery that for the first time seemed
to explain the true origin of the poison blood imagery.
> What I found was that the cartoons, past and present, of the enemy
in war were dominated by an image that was even more widespread than
that of the dangerous mommy: it was that of a sea-beast, often with
many heads or arms, a dragon or a hydra or a
serpent or an octopus that threatened to poison the lifeblood of the
nation. Most early cultures believed in this beast as a dragon that
was associated with watery caves or lakes; modern wars show the beast
as a blood-sucking, many-headed enemy. This serpentine, poisonous
monster I have termed the Poisonous Placenta, since it resembled what
the actual placenta must have sometimes felt like to the growing fetus,
particularly when the placenta fails in its tasks of cleansing ithe
fetal blood of wastes and of replenishing its oxygen supply. When
the blood coming to the fetus from the placenta is bright red and
full of nutrients and oxygen, the fetus feels it is being fed by a
Nurturant Placenta, but when the mother smokes, takes drugs or is
hurt or frightened or otherwise stressed, the placenta does not remove
the wastes from the fetal blood, which therefore becomes polluted
and depleted of oxygen. Under these stressful conditions, the helpless
fetus experiences an asphyxiating Poisonous Placenta, the prototype
for all later hate relationships, including the murderous mother,
the castrating father or the dangerous enemy. It is even likely that
the fetus, like Oedipus, feels it is actually battling with the dangerous
beast (Sphinx means "strangler" in Greek) in order to restore connections
with the Nurturant Placenta. This battle, one that I have termed the
fetal drama, is repeated in death-and-rebirth restagings of traumatic
battles in all wars and other social violence.
> The cosmic battle with the Poisonous Placenta (the capitals are
in honor of it being the prototype for God and Nation), where we repeat
the fetal drama of a paradise lost, of being sucked into the whirlpool
and crushing pressures of birth, and where we fight the placental
dragon, is well depicted in a comic-book character,
Conan the Barbarian, although I could just as easily have used pictures
and texts from ancient myths of battles with sea-beasts such as Tiamat,
Rahab, Behemoth, Humbaba, Apophis, Hydra, Gorgon or Typhon.45
In this version, a baby is first shown abandoned, beginning his watery
birth passage between head-crushing bones, going down the whirlpool
of birth after the amniotic waters break, and then being choked by
the Poisonous Placenta, a black sea-monster that tries to asphyxiate
it. The hero, an imaginary powerful version of the fetus, battles
with the Poisonous Placenta and frees the fetus, who reaches the safety
of land. The final panel shows that the goal, however, is not birth,
the arrival on land, but the reuniting with the placenta. That it
is the Nurturant and not the Poisonous Placenta that holds the baby
in its embrace is depicted by its being shown as a white sea beast.
> In most cultures, the placenta is considered very much alive after
delivery; it is felt to be so dangerous to the community that unless
it is buried somewhere deep the whole tribe will fall sick.46
The fantasy of the Poisonous Placenta is even present in most small
groups. As one group analyst describes his conclusions from a lifetime
of studying unconscious group images:
One of the most active, or rather paralyzing, unconscious group representations
is that of Hydra: the group is felt to be a single body with a dozen
arms at the ends of which are heads and mouths, each functioning independently
of the others...incessantly searching for prey to be squeezed and
suffocated, and ready to devour one another if they are not satisfied.47
Obviously, full understanding of the placental source of "poison blood"
imagery and of the fetal origins of war and social violence is going
to have to wait until we investigate more fully the psychology of
dangerous wombs, Poisonous Placentas and asphyxiating births which
is to say, until we understand more about both the psychology and
neurobiology of fetal life.
THE ORIGINS OF FETAL PSYCHOLOGY
After Freud initially proposed that mental life began after birth,
he later admitted that he had come to believe he was wrong, saying
that "the act of birth is the first experience of anxiety."48
Although most other psychoanalysts believed mental life began only
with infancy, there were a number of exceptions, beginning with Otto
Rank's The Trauma of Birth in 1923,49 which began the investigation
of birth anxiety derivatives in adult life and culture. After Rank,
Donald Winnicott wrote in the early 1940s a paper on "Birth Memories,
Birth Trauma, and Anxiety,"50 which, however, was little
noticed, since, as he said, "It is rare to find doctors who believe
that the experience of birth is important to the baby, that it could
have any significance in the emotional development of the individual,
and that memory traces of the experience could persist and give rise
to trouble even in the adult." While still a pediatrician, Winnicott
saw that newborn babies varied enormously and that prolonged labor
could be traumatic to the fetus, resulting in extreme anxiety-so much
so that he thought "some babies are born paranoid, by which I mean
in a state of expecting persecution..."51 He was even able
to conclude that "at full term, there is already a human being in
the womb, one that is capable of having experiences and of accumulating
body memories and even of organizing defensive measures to deal with
traumata..." He sometimes would allow his child patients to work through
birth anxiety directly, having one child sit in his lap and "get inside
my coat and turn upside down and slide down to the ground between
my legs; this he repeated over and over again....After this experience
I was prepared to believe that memory traces of birth can persist."52
He also encouraged some adult patients to relive the breathing changes,
constrictions of the body, head pressures, convulsive movements and
fears of annihilation experienced during their births, with dramatic
therapeutic results.53
After Winnicott, psychotherapists such as Fodor, Mott, Raskovsky,
Janov, Grof, Verny, Fedor-Freybergh, Janus and others published extensive
work showing how their patients relived birth trauma in therapy and
removed major blocks in their emotional lives.54 These
traumatic birth feelings of being trapped, of crushing head pressures
and cardiac distress, of being sucked into a whirlpool or swallowed
by terrifying monsters, of explosive volcanoes and death-rebirth struggles
appear regularly in the 60 percent of our dreams that have been found
to contain overt pre- and perinatal images,55 although
most therapists continue to overlook their connections with actual
birth memories.
Perhaps one of the most important results of clinical research by
therapists sensitive to perinatal trauma-as described particularly
in the work of Linda Share56 is how regularly early trauma
produces an overwhelming fear of all progress in life. It is as though
the fetus concludes, "Going forward in life led to disaster; I must
remain 'unborn' all my life to avoid a repetition of this horrible
start."
> Fetuses that experience injuries in the womb, premature births,
birth complications, and many other medical conditions as newborns
regularly live the rest of their lives in fear of all growth and individuation.57
For instance, one baby who was born with a congenital atresia of the
esophagus, so that she choked on feedings, was seen to have multiple
fears of dying all during a 30-year followup study into her life.58
Another, who often dreamed of lying in a refrigerator, asked his parents
about the image, and they told him that as a newborn the window of
his room had mistakenly been left open on an extremely cold winter
night, and they "had thawed him out of his urine, feces and vomitus."59
Interpretation of this continuing fear led to a turning point in the
treatment and in the patient's life. Another baby was born with an
intestinal obstruction that prevented digestion, so she vomited up
all her milk. Although the condition was repaired at one month, for
the rest of her life she was concerned with disaster fantasies every
time growth was imminent. As Share described her, "Each new opportunity
for advancement stood for a metaphorical 'birth.' To be born in any
kind of way meant to have to reexperience the disaster of her infancy:
starvation, pain, surgery, and near-death. These, then, were the disasters
she fantasized, the panic attacks each time she headed for something
new and creative."60 As with all early trauma, any progress
threatened repetition of disaster.
RECENT RESEARCH INTO FETAL MEMORY
> Much has changed in our knowledge of the fetus during the decades
since the early pioneering excursions into perinatal psychology. Neurobiologists
have made startling advances in the understanding of how the brain
develops in the womb, experimental psychologists have discovered a
great deal about fetal learning, pediatricians have linked all kinds
of later problems to fetal distress, and one psychoanalyst has even
begun to compare thousands of hours of ultrasound observations of
individual fetuses with their emotional problems during infancy in
therapy with her. There are now thousands of books and articles on
the subject, as well as two international associations of pre- and
perinatal psychology, each with its own journal.61 I will
here only be able to summarize some of the main trends of this extensive
recent research.
Biologists used to think that because the fetus had incomplete myelination
of neurons it couldn't have memories.62 This notion has
been disproved, since impulses can be carried quite efficiently in
the thinly myelinated nerves of fetuses, only at a somewhat slower
velocity, which is offset by the shorter distances traveled.63
Indeed, far from being an unfeeling being, the fetus has been found
to be exquisitely sensitive to its surroundings, and our earliest
feelings have been found to be coded into our early emotional memory
system centering in the amygdala, the central fear system, quite distinct
from the declarative memory system centering in the hippocampus, the
center of consciousness, that becomes fully functional only in later
childhood.64 These early emotional memories are usually
unavailable to conscious, declarative memory recall, so early fears
and even defenses against them are often only recaptured through body
memories and by analyzing the consequences of the traumas.65
The fetal nervous system is so well developed that by the end of the
first trimester it responds to the stroking of its palm by a light
hair by grasping, of its lips by sucking, and of its eyelids by squinting.66
It will jump if touched by the amniocentesis needle and turn away
from the light when a doctor introduces a brightly lit fetoscope.67
By the second trimester, the fetus is not only seeing and hearing,
it is actively tasting, feeling, exploring and learning from its environment,
now floating peacefully, now kicking vigorously, turning somersaults,
urinating, grabbing its umbilicus when frightened, stroking and even
licking its placenta, conducting little boxing matches with its companion
if it is a twin and responding to being touched or spoken to through
the mother's abdomen.68 Each fetus develops its own pattern
of activity, so that ultrasound technicians quickly learn to recognize
each fetus as a distinct personality.69 Even sensual life
begins in the womb; if a boy, the fetus has regular erections of his
penis, coinciding with REM sleep phases, and baby girls have been
seen masturbating during REM sleep.70
THE EMOTIONAL EFFECTS OF FETAL STRESS
> In addition to what we know about the disastrous effects on the
fetus of prenatal exposure to drugs and alcohol,71 we now
have considerable evidence on how maternal stress and other emotions
are transmitted to the fetus. When a pregnant mother is offered a
cigarette after having been deprived of smoking for 24 hours there
is a significant acceleration in fetal heartbeat even before the cigarette
is lit, and maternal smoking during pregnancy has been found to triple
the rate of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorders later in the
child.72 The fetus has been found to be sensitive to a
wide range of maternal emotions in addition to any drugs or other
physical traumas she endures.73 When the mother feels anxiety,
her increased heartbeat, frightened speech, and alterations in neurotransmitter
levels are instantly communicated to the fetus, and her tachycardia
is followed within seconds by the fetus's tachycardia; when she feels
fear, within 50 seconds the fetus can be made hypoxic (low oxygen).
Pregnant monkeys stressed by simulated threatening attack had such
impaired blood circulation to their uteruses that their fetuses were
severely asphyxiated.74 Alterations in adrenaline, plasma
epinephrine and norepinephrine levels, high levels of hydroxycortico-steriods,
hyperventilation and many other products of maternal anxiety are also
known to directly affect the human fetus. Numerous other studies document
sensory, hormonal and biochemical mechanisms by which the fetus is
in communication with the mother's feelings and with the outside world.75
Even baby monkeys have been found to be hyperactive, with higher levels
of the stress hormone, cortisol, after birth from a mother who was
experimentally stressed during her pregnancy.76
While positive maternal emotions have been experimentally shown to
increase later growth, alertness, calmness and intelligence the fetus
even benefits from the mother singing to it in the womb and prenatal
infant stimulation, particularly being bathed in pleasant music, improves
fetal development compared to control groups,77 maternal
distress and chemical toxins have been shown to produce low birth
weights, increased infant mortality, respiratory infections, asthma
and reduced cognitive development.78 Ultrasound studies
record fetal distress clearly, as it thrashes about and kicks in pain
during hypoxia and other conditions. One mother whose husband had
just threatened her verbally with violence came into the doctor's
office with the fetus thrashing and kicking so violently as to be
painful to her, with an elevated heart rate that continued for hours.79
The same wild thrashing has been seen in fetuses of mothers whose
spouses have died suddenly. Maternal fright can actually cause the
death of the fetus, and death of the husband and other severe emotional
distress within the family during the mother's pregnancy have been
associated with fetal damage in large samples in several countries.80
Marital discord between spouses has been correlated "with almost 100
per cent certainty...with child morbidity in the form of ill-health,
neurological dysfunction, developmental lags and behavior disturbance."81
Margaret Fries has conducted a 40-year longitudinal study predicting
emotional patterns that remain quite constant throughout the lives
of those studied, correlating the patterns to the mother's attitude
toward the fetus during pregnancy.82 Maternal emotional
stress, hostility toward the fetus and fetal distress have also been
statistically correlated in various studies with more premature births,
lower birth weights, more neonate neurotransmitter imbalances, more
clinging infant patterns, more childhood psychopathology, more physical
illness, higher rates of schizophrenia, lower IQ in early childhood,
greater school failure, higher delinquency and greater propensity
as an adult to use drugs, commit violent crimes and commit suicide.83
This increase in social violence due to pre- and perinatal conditions
has recently been confirmed by a major Danish study showing that boys
of mothers who do not want to have them (25 percent of pregnant mothers
admit they do not want their babies)84 and who also experience
birth complications are four times more likely when they get to be
teenagers to commit violent crimes than control groups.85
American studies also show similar higher violent crime rates correlated
with maternal rejection during pregnancy.86
THE NEUROBIOLOGY OF EARLY TRAUMA
> There are sound neurobiological reasons for this correlation between
fetal trauma and social violence. Early brain development is determined
both by genes and by cellular selection and self-organizational processes
that are crucially dependent upon the uterine environment.87
Since fetal and early infantile traumas and abdonments occur while
the brain is still being formed, while cell adhesion molecules are
still determining the brain's initial mapping processes and while
synaptic connections are still undergoing major developmental changes,
memories of early traumas cannot be handled as traumas are later in
life and instead are coded in separate neuronal networks that retain
their emotional power well into adulthood.88
Fetal abuse can be direct, either from drugs or from the pregnant
mother being abused by her mate. According to the Surgeon General,
"one in three pregnant women in America is slapped, kicked or punched
by their mates."89 In addition, maternal emotional stress
produces such biochemical imbalances as an overactivation of the pituitary-adrenal
cortical and sympathetic-adrenal medullary systems with consequent
increases of adrenocorticotrophic hormone (ACTH), cortisol, pituitary
growth hormone and catecholamine levels. Maternal emotional stress
has even been correlated with damage to the hippocampus, the center,
along with the thalamus, of conscious memory and self feelings.90
Furthermore, the emotions of the mother can be directly transmitted
through the neurotransmitters and other hormones in her blood to the
fetal blood and then to DNA-binding receptors in the fetal cells that
turn genes on and off, thus programming her stress directly into the
developing fetal brain.91 This bath of maternal hormonal
imbalances can produce severe fetal traumatic emotional dysfunctions.92
Baby rats, for instance, whose mothers had been frightened by loud
noises during pregnancy, were found to have copious supplies of stress
hormones, plus fewer receptors for benzodiazepines and fewer GABA
receptors, both needed for calming action during stress.93
The results of the mother not wanting her baby can prove lethal: one
study of eight thousand pregnant women found that unwanted babies
were 2.4 times more likely to die in the first month of life.94
Infants traumatized in utero and during birth are those Winnicott
referred to as "born paranoid," and can remain hypersensitive to stress,
over-fearful, withdrawn and angry all of their lives. Fetal traumas
and abandonments result in overstimulation of neurotransmitters, producing
hypersensitivity and other imbalances in such important neurotransmitters
as the catecholamines. The most important of these imbalances is low
serotonin levels, which have been demonstrated to lead to persistent
hyperarousal and compulsive reenactment in violent social behavior,
including both homicide and suicide.95 Because of this,
reenactment in later life can be an even more potent source of violent
behavior in the case of fetal trauma than it has been found to be
in the case of childhood or war trauma.96
The same neurobiological factors have been found to be responsible
for the increase in violence against self. Suicide patterns are so
strongly linked to birth that epidemiologists have found higher suicide
rates in areas of the country that a few decades earlier had had higher
birth injuries.97 What probably happens is that birth traumas
reset life-long serotonin and noradrenaline levels to lower levels,
since there is a strong statistical link between low serotonin and
noradrenaline and violent suicides.98 Other studies have
shown that even the types of suicides were correlated with the kinds
of perinatal traumas, asphyxia during birth leading to more suicides
through strangulation, hanging and drowning, mechanical trauma during
birth correlated with mechanical suicide elements, drugs given during
birth being correlated to suicide by drugs, and so on. The rise in
adolescent drug addiction and suicide recently, mainly connected with
drug use, is believed to be at least partially due to the more frequent
use of drugs prescribed by obstetricians during birth in recent decades.99
The same principle may hold for the rise of violent crimes during
the 1970s and 80s, which has been connected with the rise of the extremely
painful rite of circumcision in newborn boys during the 1950s and
60s;100 it could equally have contributed to the rise of
teenage suicides, since perinatal trauma can also be turned against
the self. Violence done to babies always returns on the social level.
> Far from being the safe, cozy haven to which we all supposedly want
to return, the womb is in fact often a dangerous and often painful
abode,101 where "more lives are lost during the nine gestational
months than in the ensuing 50 years of postnatal life."102
Few fetuses, for instance, escape experiencing painful drops in oxygen
levels when the mother is emotionally upset, smokes, drinks alcohol
or takes other drugs. As the placenta stops growing during the final
months of pregnancy, it regresses in efficiency, becoming tough and
fibrous, as its cells and blood vessels degenerate and it becomes
full of blood clots and calcifications, making the fetus even more
susceptible to hypoxia as it grows larger and making the late-term
fetus "extremely hypoxic by adult standards."103 Furthermore,
the weight of the fetus pressing down into the pelvis can compress
blood vessels supplying the placenta, producing additional placental
failure.104 Practice contractions near birth give the fetus
periodic "squeezes," decreasing oxygen level even further,105
while birth itself is so hypoxic that "hypoxia of a certain degree
and duration is a normal phenomenon in every delivery," not just in
more severe cases.106 The effects on the fetus of this
extreme hypoxia are dramatic: normal fetal breathing stops, fetal
heart rate accelerates, then decelerates, and the fetus thrashes about
frantically in a life-and-death struggle to liberate itself from its
terrifying asphyxiation.107 In addition, fetal abuse is
often the result of the pregnant mother's wish to hurt or punish her
unborn child. One study showed 8 percent of 112 pregnant American
women openly acknowledged this wish, often hitting their abdomen or
otherwise purposely abusing their fetus.108 The real figure
is likely to be higher than this, particularly in the past.
THE REALITY OF FETAL MEMORY
That the fetal memory system is sufficiently mature not only to learn
in the womb but also to remember prenatal and birth experiences is
confirmed by a growing body of experimental, observational and clinical
data. Neonates can remember lullabies learned prenatally109
and can pick out at birth their mothers' voices from among other female
voices and respond differently (by the increased ratre of sucking
on a pacifier) to familiar melodies they had heard in utero.110
Sallenbach played simple melodies to the fetus in utero, based on
four notes, and found that the fetus was able not only to move to
the beat but continued to mark the beat when the notes were discontinued.111
As evidence of even more complex memories, DeCasper had 16 pregnant
women read either The Cat in the Hat or a second poem with a different
meter to their fetuses twice a day for the last six weeks of their
pregnancy.112 When the babies were born, he hooked up their
pacifiers to a mechanism that allowed them to chose one of two tape
recordings by sucking slowly or quickly, choosing either the tape
in which their mothers read the familiar poem or the tape where she
read the unfamiliar poem. The babies soon were listening to the tape
of the familiar poem, indicating their mastery of the task of remembering
complex speech patterns learned in utero. Chamberlain sums up his
extensive work on birth memories, which he found very reliable when
comparing them with both the memories of the mother and hospital records,
"They demonstrate the same clear awareness of violence, danger, and
breech of trust which any of us adults might show in a similar situation...Even
three-year-olds sometimes have explicit and accurate birth recall."113
Distress during birth is particularly able to be later remembered
during dreams, when dissociated early neural emotional memory systems
are more easily accessed. For instance, one child who had been a "blue
baby" and near death while tangled in his umbilicus during birth and
had had a forceps delivery had the following revealing nightmare during
most of his childhood:
I would be kneeling down, all bent over. I am frantically trying to
untie knots in some kind of rope. I am just starting to get free of
the rope when I get punched in the face.114
With the number of recent experiments demonstrating fetal competence,
classical conditioning and more advanced learning ability,115
it is not surprising that some parents have recently begun to make
the fetus a "member of the family," playing with them, massaging them
and calming them down when they thought they had communicated distress
by excessive movement and kicking, and trading light pokes in return
for fetal kicks, in what they call "The Kicking Game."116
One father taught his baby to kick in a circle; a mother played a
nightly game where she tapped her abdomen three times and the fetus
bumped back three times.117 Another father who called out
"Hoo hoo!" next to his pregnant wife's belly nightly found his child
pushing with a foot into his cheek on whichever side he called; father
and baby played this game for 15 weeks; he found his next baby was
able to learn the same game.118 These parents tried to
avoid maternal stress, loud arguments and loud noises especially rock
music because they became aware it produced fetal distress.
> Recent insights into fetal learning have led to some impressive
research on fetal enrichment that demonstrates that prenatal stimulation
produces advances in motoric abilities and intelligence that last
for years. Experimental groups of pregnant women and their fetuses
who participated in prenatal stimulation enrichment were investigated
in parallel with carefully selected control groups not involved in
any prenatal program. The postnatal evaluation of both groups on standard
developmental tests shows highly significant enhancement from fetal
sensory stimulation in motoric performance, visual skills, emotional
expression and early speech.119 Even more impressive, when
these prenatally-induced enrichment effects are consolidated by immediate
post-natal enrichment experiences, they produce improvements over
the control group in Stanford Binet IQ tests at age three ranging
from 38 percent for language and 47 percent for memory to 51 percent
for social intelligence and 82 percent for reasoning, a fetal Head
Start program of astonishing efficiency.
THE FINDINGS OF ULTRASOUND RESEARCH
Perhaps the most impressive observational work on the personality
of the fetus is being done by the Italian psychoanalyst Alessandra
Piontelli, by combining thousands of hours of ultrasound observations
with clinical psychoanalytic work with young children. Her research
into pre- and perinatal memories began after she encountered an eighteen-month-old
child who was reported by sensitive parents as being incessantly restless
and unable to sleep:
I noted that he seemed to move about restlessly almost as if obsessed
by a search for something in every possible corner of the limited
space of my consulting room, looking for something which he never
seemed able to find. His parents commented on this, saying that he
acted like that all the time, day and night. Occasionally Jacob also
tried to shake several of the objects inside my room, as if trying
to bring them back to life. His parents then told me that any milestone
in his development (such as sitting up, crawling, walking, or uttering
his first words) all seemed to be accompanied by intense anxiety and
pain as if he were afraid, as they put it, 'to leave something behind
him.' When I said very simply to him that he seemed to be looking
for something that he had lost and could not find anywhere, Jacob
stopped and looked at me very intently. I then commented on his trying
to shake all the objects to life as if he were afraid that their stillness
meant death. His parents almost burst into tears and told me that
Jacob was, in fact, a twin, but that his co-twin, Tino, as they had
already decided to call him, had died two weeks before birth. Jacob,
therefore, had spent almost two weeks in utero with his dead and consequently
unresponsive co-twin.120
Verbalization of his fears that each step forward in his development
might be accompanied by the death of a loved one for whom he felt
himself to be responsible "brought about an incredible change in his
behavior," says Piontelli. Similarly, Leah La Goy, an American psychotherapist,
has documented seventeen children who were her patients who had lost
a twin in utero and who "consistently create enactments of fearing
for their own life [which] can and often does weaken the parent-child
bonding process" because they believe their mother might try to get
rid of them too.121
Piontelli, like many other child therapists, began to be struck by
the frequency and concreteness of children's "fantasies" about their
life before birth. Unlike most therapists, who, however, ignore their
accurate observations because their training taught them the mind
only begins after birth, she carefully recorded them and tried to
confirm their reality, first by consultation with the family and eventually
by her own extensive ultrasound observations of fetal life. The correlations
and continuities between fetal experiences and childhood personality
"were often so dramatic," she says, "that I was amazed that I had
not been more aware of them at the time."122 One set of
twins often stroked each others' heads in the womb through the dividing
membrane; at the age of one, they could often be seen playing their
favorite game of using a curtain as a kind of membrane through which
they stroked each other's heads.123 Another set of twins
whose mother considered abortion because of her fear they might be
jealous of each other-punched each other all the time in the womb
and continued to do so after birth.
One fetus, who often buried his face in the placenta as if it were
a pillow, as a child insisted that his mother get him a pencil case
shaped like a pillow that he used similarly. Still other children
played out various obstetrical distress problems in later life in
dramatic detail, such as one child who had nearly died because her
umbilical cord had been tightly knotted around her neck and who spent
most of her early childhood wrapping ropes, strings and curtain cords
around her head and neck, playing with them and licking them in a
frenzy.124 The enormous importance of being able to use
fetal insights such as these in the therapy of both children and adults
for profound relief and personality change has been carefully documented
by Piontelli and other therapists.125
THE POISONOUS PLACENTA
Piontelli's pioneering use of ultrasound to observe actual fetal behavior
has, in fact, for the first time confirmed my own conclusions made
from historical material about the relationship between the fetus
and its placenta. Even birth therapists have objected to my theory
that "the fetus begins its mental life in active relationship with
its own placenta." Thomas Verny, author of the pioneering book The
Secret Life of the Unborn Child, said that although he agreed that
"mental life begins in the womb with a fetal drama," he disagreed
that the placenta has any role in this drama, saying, "Personally,
in fifteen years of doing intensive, regressive type of psychotherapy
I have never yet heard one of my patients refer in any way at all
to his or her placenta."126 David Chamberlain, author of
Babies Remember Birth, agrees, saying, "I have heard complaints about
all these things in hypnosis but never against a 'poisonous placenta.'
The reaction is always against the mother herself."127
Until birth is complete, the fetus, of course, has never met a "mother,"
only a womb and a placenta and an umbilicus. Piontelli's ultrasound
observations reveal the complex relationship between the fetus and
its placental/umbilical "first object." Fetuses stroke and explore
the placenta all the time, and grab the umbilicus for comfort when
distressed. Their behavior toward the placenta and umbilicus correlates
with later behavior patterns in their infancy, so that, for instance,
when Piontelli watches one fetus use the placenta as a pillow in the
womb, observing it "sucking the cord [and] resting on the placenta
as if it were a big pillow...burying himself in the placenta...as
if it were a pillow," she then notices it has difficulty sucking the
mother's breast after birth, preferring to use it as a pillow instead:
"He is not sucking...he is leaning against it...it's not a pillow
you know!"128
Another fetus Piontelli watched in utero by ultrasound constantly
licked her placenta and umbilicus while holding her hands between
her legs on her vagina. The mother, who was both very overweight and
whose "rather vamp-looking, low-necked, black velvety dress, together
with her smeared and bright make-up, made her look quite 'whorish,'
though in an outdated and clumsy way, like a character out of a Fellini
film,"129 kept saying her baby girl would turn out to be
"whorish" and had many conflicts about having her. The fetus responded
to the maternal rejection by licking her placenta and masturbating:
She is licking the placenta now...look at what she is doing with her
other hand...it is still there right in between her legs...licking
the placenta again...my God...she is really wild this time...look...it
just goes on and on...Look how she licks it!...we can almost hear
the noise...look...she is pulling it down towards her mouth...my God!...her
tongue is really strong...look she is doing it again...and again...and
again.130
That this "seducing" of the placenta by this fetus plus her auto-eroticism
might have been defensive maneuvers designed to ward off fear is indicated
by her later actions in therapy with Piontelli as a child. In therapy,
said Piontelli, she seemed to have only two modes of being: (1) fear
of everything as being persecutory and poisoning, so that she spent
her early therapy sessions terrified and screaming, and (2) in "orgies,"
like a "whore," eating and licking everything and masturbating.131
Apparently her mother's rejecting attitude and poor uterine conditions
had affected the fetal amygdalan early emotional memory system. In
monkeys, destroying their amygdalae causes them to mouth everything
they come into contact with and try to have sex with everything they
meet, exactly the same mouthing and masturbating orgies this child
engaged in both as a fetus and infant. So intent on licking and seducing
everything was this baby that she couldn't even suck her mother's
breast:
The breast...seems to be a despicable object...she absolutely refuses
milk...Her mother says, "What are you doing?...you are not sucking
it, you are playing...she is not sucking it...she is licking it!"...she
starts licking her mother's chest vigorously with the same wild motions
I had previously noticed when she licked the placenta...She licked
any surface or fabric which came into contact with her face. I saw
her licking her mother's chest, her shoulders, her chin, her arms
and the clothes covering them.132
As an alternative to her screaming and paranoid fear, the baby had
developed a pattern of seducing both placental objects and herself,
filling her abyss of anxiety with wild, orgiastic licking and masturbating:
She sits on the table with her legs wide open looking rather obscene.
She inserts a finger inside her cup and licks it. Then she puts her
hands between her legs while moving her tongue over her lips. She
looks very excited and her face is all red now. I say that she's filling
herself with prohibited excitement now. She puts her finger in her
mouth and then almost inside her vagina, saying, "This or this, they
are both nice..."
Piontelli's little children with fetal problems did not, of course,
say their persecutors were "Poisonous Placentas," any more than did
the adult patients of Verny or Chamberlain. Yet there is little question
that it was the placenta that they felt had persecuted them while
in the womb and that they still felt persecuted by after birth; in
both cases their defensive oral and genital "orgies" were the same.
Psychotherapists regularly encounter placental images in their practice,
yet, because they cannot conceive of fetal mental life in the womb,
they ascribe these images to other sources. The most famous placental
images are known to psychoanalysts as "the Isakower phenomenon," which
often occurs when falling asleep. It consists of a sense that one
is floating, with a "shadowy and undifferentiated, usually round [object]
which gets nearer and larger."133 The floating and the
round object are not, as therapists have assumed, memories of the
mother's breasts; breasts come in twos and are rarely found floating.
Isakower himself described the image accurately as a "disc," lying
on top of him, an object another person said was shaped like a "balloon:"
Other patients described it as follows:
I'm as small as a point-as if something heavy and large was lying
on top of me-it doesn't crush me...I can draw in the lump as if it
was dough-then I feel as if the whole thing was in my mouth...it's
like a balloon...it's not unpleasant...134
a small cloud...became larger and larger. It enveloped everything...Somebody
said it was poisonous...135
A large, black plastic container, which resembled a garbage bag...136
Besides the regression involved in falling asleep or hallucinations
on the analytic couch, overt placental images are also found by clinicians
in deeply regressed patients, who often hallucinate blood-sucking
monsters persecuting them. Most of these monster-phobias are extremely
frightening, the patients fearing blood-sucking spiders or vampires
or octopuses or Medusas or sphinxes.137 It simply makes
no sense to call these blood-sucking beasts and spiders "phallic mothers,"
as Freud and Abraham did,138 particularly when they are
accompanied by umbilical droplines.139 The vampire as a
blood-drinking woman is another widespread fantasy; even when the
vampire is Dracula, he is feminized by wearing a black satin cloak.140
Only the memory of the Nurturant Placenta can fully explain why we
drink Christ's blood, and only the memory of a Poisonous Placenta
can explain why the Erinys suck blood and why devils are blood-red.
Often both images are present at the same time in psychotics, as in
the following description by Wilhelm Reich of his schizophrenic patient's
hallucination of drinking from a bloody, round table:
They were drinking gallons of blood in front of me. The devil is red
because of that and he gets redder and redder and then the blood goes
to the sun and makes it on fire. Jesus was dripping blood on the cross
by drops and this was being swallowed then he was seated on the side
of the devil and drinking too-the table was round oblong of flowing
thick blood (no feet on it). Mother Mary was at the corner watching.
She was white as a sheet-All her blood had been drained off and consumed.
She saw her son drinking that and suffered.141
Rosenfeld finds that images of being drained of blood are frequent
in regressed patients, involving concrete "primitive psychotic body
images" based on the notion that "the body contains nothing but liquids
or blood and is enveloped by one or more arterial or venous walls...the
experience of draining of blood and being emptied corresponds to the
breakdown of this psychological image of a wall or membrane containing
liquid or blood."142 A better image of the placenta cannot
be imagined, though Rosenfeld didn't notice its uterine source. These
patients often imagine that the analyst or others are literally sucking
blood out of them. Mahler described a typical young patient of hers:
He was preoccupied with the fear of losing body substance, of being
drained by his father and grandfather, with whom his body, he believed,
formed a kind of communicating system of tubes. At night the father-grandfather
part of the system drained him of the 'body juices of youth.' Survival
depended on who was most successful in draining more life fluid from
the others...He invented an elaborate heart machine which he could
switch on and connect with his body's circulatory system so that he
would never die.143
THE FETAL DRAMA IN HISTORY
However disguised, the Poisonous Placenta and the Suffering Fetus
are the most important images of the fetal drama, and the restaging
of their violent encounter is a central religious and political task
of society. I suggest that this battle with the persecuting placental
beast constitutes the earliest source of war and social violence,
traumas that must be restaged periodically because of the neurobiological
imperatives of early brain development. The center of society is wherever
the fetal drama is restaged-as at Delphi, it is often called the "navel
of the world," and is associated with placental World Tree worship.144
The evolution of society occurs as this fetal drama moves from the
tribe to the kingdom to the nation and is enacted with larger and
larger numbers of people emotionally entrained by its sacrificial
rituals.
Group-fantasies of poisonous blood become most widespread during periods
of progress and prosperity. They are particularly ubiquitous during
apocalyptic millenarian periods. Traditional historians have blamed
these apocalyptic fantasies, such as the periodic "Great Awakenings"
in America145 or the millenarian movements in England,146
upon "collective stress."147 The problem is that these
movements always occur during periods of progress, peace and prosperity,
so these authors have had difficulty in locating the source of the
social stress. When British millenarianists became entranced to a
64-year-old woman who said she was about to give birth to a second
Christ,148 or when Americans expected the end of the world
in a final combat with the Great Beast of the Apocalypse and destroyed
their goods in expectation of their coming rebirth149 they
did so during periods of prosperity, not social stress. What is feared
and what leads to the deepest regression is growth and new challenges,
a growth that threatens a repetition of early traumas.
Ancient societies used to believe that because of growing pollution
the universe periodically threatened to dissolve in primordial waters,
and unless a war was fought between a hero-an avenging fetus-and an
asphyxiating sea-monster, the world would disappear.150
The purpose of war and all other sacrificial blood-letting, says Frazer,
was "to reinforce by a river of human blood the tide of life which
might grow stagnant and stale in the veins of the dieties."151
We believe the same right up into modern times; most nations have
repeated the cleansing war ritual four times a century for as far
back as historical records have survived.152
THE NEUROBIOLOGY OF EARLY TRAUMA
The neurobiological effects of trauma and neglect both prenatal and
during childhood and the compulsion to restage early traumatic violence
and inflict it upon others and upon one's self are becoming fairly
well understood through recent advances in neuroscience. Inescapable
dangers and intolerable stresses subject the brain to massive secretions
and subsequent depletions of a variety of neurotransmitters, including
norephinephrine, dopamine and serotonin, which lead to hypervigilance,
explosive anger and excessive sensitivity to similar events in the
future, which are experienced as though they were as dangerous as
the earlier incident.153 In addition, the hormones that
flood the brain to mobilize it in the face of threats, especially
cortisol, have been found to be toxic to cells in the hippocampus,
the part of the brain that, along with the thalamus, is the center
of the neural system for consciousness, actually killing neurons and
reducing the size of the hippocampus, making retrieval and therefore
modification of early traumas nearly impossible.154 It
is this process that constitutes "repression," which is really dissociation,
an inability to retrieve memories rather than a forgetting. Thus,
without the ability to remember and modify early traumas through new
experiences, the brain continues to interpret ordinary stressors as
recurrences of traumatic events long after the original trauma has
ceased.
Paranoid results are particularly true of the earliest traumas of
fetal and infantile life. This is so because the hippocampus is quite
immature until the third or fourth year of life, and therefore the
early trauma is encoded in the emotional memory system centering in
the amygdala and extending particularly to the prefrontal cortex,
the center of emotions155 memories which have been described
as being nearly "impervious to extinction."156 Early traumas,
coded in this thalamo-amygdalan-cortical memory system, record fearful
memories that remain powerful for life, long after the cognitive memories
of the traumatic event itself are forgotten.157 Infants,
for instance, who experience premature births or eating disorders
at birth often fear all new arousals, as though they represented the
same threat to life as birth once did.158 This is why Piontelli's
fetus, who licked her placenta and masturbated in utero, continued
compulsively to lick her mother's breast and masturbate after birth,
warding off her earliest uterine dangers. It is also relevant to our
hypothesis that early emotional traumas are intimately linked with
social behavior to note that the amygdala-where these early trauma
are recorded-is recognized as playing a central role in the social
behavior of animals. For instance, removal of the amygdalae produces
social isolates in most nonhuman primates, while having devastating
consequences on their ability to mother, often resulting in death
for their infants.159
In addition, the continuing low serotonin levels and high noradrenaline
levels produced by trauma decrease normal aggressive inhibitions (serotonin
being the main soothing neurotransmitter and noradrenaline being the
main stress hormone) to such an extent that low serotonin and high
noradrenaline have been reliably shown to be central to social violence
of both humans and other primates.160 Monkeys who have
early traumas have low serotonin and high noradrenaline levels, and
are "nasty, hostile, crazy," often killing their peers for no reason,161
while traumatized children with low serotonin have more disruptive
behavior162 and compulsively restage their traumas in their
play with peers, both in order to maintain some control over its timing
anything to avoid re-experiencing their helplessness and also because
they can thereby identify with the aggressor.163 Others
repeat their original traumas by self-injury, as did the patient who
tried to commit suicide by putting his head beneath his car and causing
it to crush his skull, saying God had told him "to kill myself to
be reborn," thus concretely restaging his earlier experience of having
his head stuck in the birth passage.164
The amount of maternal stress necessary for traumatizing the fetus
and child is astonishingly little:
Monkeys born to mothers who listened to ten minutes of random noise
each day during mid-and late pregnancy had higher noradrenaline livels
than normal mokeys. The hyped-up monkeys were impulsive, overresponsive,
and had fewer social skills as infants. When the prenatally stressed
monkeys got to be the equivalent of preteens, their noradrenaline
was till high and their behavior still abnormally hostile and aggressive...165
Later traumas, abandonments and betrayals of childhood are then recorded
in the same amygdalan early emotional memory system laid down by fetal
traumas. Evidence for this fetal matrix for later trauma is everywhere
to be found, only we have so far been unaware of its meaning and overlooked
it. For instance, when a gunman came into Cleveland Elementary School
in 1989 and fired wave after wave of bullets at children in the playground,
killing many of them, the trauma was "seared into the children's memory...Whenever
we hear an ambulance on its way to the rest home down the street,
everything halts...The kids all listen to see if it will stop here
or go on," said one teacher.166 But the childhood trauma
also stirred up the fetal level of fear, that of the Poisonous Placenta:
"For several weeks many children were terrified of the mirrors in
the restrooms; a rumor swept the school that 'Bloody Virgin Mary,'
some kind of fantasized monster, lurked there."167 All
danger appears to tap into our earliest fetal fears, even though most
of our developmental history stems from events of childhood proper.
Childhood itself, of course, particularly its earliest years, provides
most of the content for the restagings in history. There is evidence
that good childrearing can reverse the long-term effects of fetal
stress. In a study of 698 infants born in Hawaii in 1955 with pre-
or perinatal complications, it was found that those who experienced
both fetal trauma and childhood rejection were twice as likely to
have received some form of mental health help before age ten due to
learning or behavioral problems, including repeated delinquencies,
while those who had a close bond with at least one caretaker responded
by showing a decrease in the effects of the early trauma.168
So even though fetal trauma has long-lasting effects, and even though
few historical events are without traces of fetal imagery, the main
source of historical change is still the evolution of childhood.
CULTURE AND HISTORY AS HOMEOSTATIC MECHANISMS
The social restaging of early trauma and neglect, predicated upon
damaged neuronal and hormonal systems, is thus a homeostatic mechanism
of the brain, achieved by nations through wars, economic domination
and social violence. Each of us constructs a separate neural system
for these early traumas and their defenses-a dissociated, organized
personality system that stores, defends against and elaborates these
early fetal, infantile and childhood traumas as we grow up. Once this
basic concept is realized, all the rationalizations of history become
transparent; for instance, when Germans say they must start WWII to
get "revenge for the Day of Shame," one can ignore the ostensible
reference (The Treaty of Versailles) and recognize instead the real
source of "German shame"-the routine humiliations, beatings, sexual
abuse and betrayals of German children by their caretakers.
The initial fetal matrix of the organization of these traumas is obvious.
Children's playgrounds are full of fetal objects, from swings that
repeat amniotic rocking to birth tunnels and slides-all enjoyed by
children who must remember their fetal life, since they generally
have not as yet been told about where babies grow. Infants cling to
pillows and Teddy Bears and watch television programs like "The Care
Bears," which features baby bears with rainbow umbilicuses coming
out of their tummies and has an evil "Dr. Coldheart" who tries to
push black, poisonous wastes into their umbilicuses. Growing children
organize fetal games, hitting, kicking and throwing around placental
membranes (one, the football, even egg-shaped, that we rebirth through
our legs) and reenacting birth when passing them through upright legs
or vaginal hoops. We likewise relive our birth when we celebrate Christmas
as a rebirth ritual, complete with a placental tree and a Santa Claus-a
chubby blood-red fetus going down his birth chimney attached to his
placental bag-not to mention such thrills as bungee-jumping our rebirth
at the end of a long umbilicus or throwing ourselves into mosh pits
to be reborn at rock concerts.169 Similarly, all religions
contain at their center the Suffering Fetus and its Poisonous Placenta,
whether it is the dismembered, suffering Osiris or the bleeding Christ
on his placental cross or the dead Elvis, at whose grave a mass veneration
takes place beneath a giant placental heart and a soundtrack of him
singing the song "Hurt."170 The central religious aim of
reuniting with the placenta can even be seen in the origin of the
word religion "re-ligare," that is, "to unite again."
History as a homeostatic mechanism which is needed to regulate the
emotional disfunctions of the brain is a central concept of my psychogenic
theory. I consider it impossible to understand historical events without
an understanding of modern neurobiology. For instance, the fact that
damaged amygdala function is found in paranoid schizophrenics171
leads one to question if the paranoid mood of nations before and during
wars may be related to real, measurable diminished amygdalan functioning
which, combined with reduced serotonin levels and other neurotransmitter
imbalances, appear to cause our periodic searches for enemies. The
leader's function is, in this view, similar to that of a psychiatrist
administering prescriptions for wars and depressions as psychological
"uppers" and "downers," designed to restore homeostatic equilibrium
in the brains of a nation ravaged by surging neurotransmitters and
other hormones.
THE LEADER AS POISON CONTAINER
Because the fetus's umbilicus is like a pulsing fifth limb and because
the placenta is the fetus's first love object, I believe we so deeply
experience the loss of our umbilicus/placenta that we walk around
feeling we have still a "phantom placenta"-the same phenomenon as
the "phantom limb" experienced by amputees172 and are constantly
looking for a leader or a flag or a god to serve as its substitute.
Just as gods are imagined as beings "from whom all blessings flow,"
leaders are seen as beings "from whom all power flows." In ancient
Egypt, people saved the actual placenta of the Pharaoh and put it
on a pole which they carried into battle; it was the first flag in
history.173 In America, we still ritually worship our placental
flag with its red arteries and blue veins at the end of a umbilical
flagpole-in public gatherings. In Baganda, they put the king's placenta
on a throne, pray to it and receive messages from it through their
priests.174 We do the same when we look to the sky for
UFOs high-tech placental disks that we hope might have messages for
us.175 Lawson has even experimentally correlated UFO abduction
scenarios with the actual birth experiences of the abducted, those
who had normal vaginal births imagining tunnel experiences during
abduction while those who had caesarean births experienced being yanked
up by the UFO without the tunnel images.176
The yearning for a phantom placenta a "poison container" for our dangerous
emotions to be our leader, and the search for a Poisonous Placenta
to be our enemy with whom we can fight, are the central tasks of all
social organizations, prior to any utility they may have. Leaders
are not mothers or fathers, and they are not always idealized. They
are poison containers for our feelings. Poison containers are objects
into which we can dump our disowned feelings, just as we once pumped
our polluted blood into the placenta, hoping for it to be cleansed.
We ascribe to poison containers all kinds of magical placental significances,
including the power to cleanse our emotions, which are felt to be
like polluted blood in accordance with their fetal origin. When the
leader appears unable to handle these emotions, when he appears to
be weakening and abandoning us, when our progress in life seems to
involve too much independence and we re-experience our early abandonment
by our placenta and our parents, we begin to look for enemies to inflict
our traumas upon.177
WAR AS A SACRIFICIAL RITUAL
War, then, is a sacrificial ritual designed to defend against fears
of individuation and maternal engulfment by restaging our early traumas
upon scapegoats. This theory is the exact opposite of the "social
stress" theories of all other social scientists, since it is usually
successes freedom and new challenges that are experienced as triggers
for wars, not economic distress or political stresses. The war ritual
is the final chapter of the reshearsing of early traumas that we all
experience as we grow up, from the 18,000 murders the average child
sees on TV to the bullying of scapegoats children practice on school
playgrounds and the sports we play in which we rehearse the mental
mechanisms necessary to dominate other groups and turn them into "enemies"
(the truth reflected in the saying that "British wars are won on the
Rugby fields").
That war is sacrifical, not utilitarian, and aims at reducing progress
and prosperity is shown by the finding that major wars almost always
occur after a sustained economic upswing. Not only are there many
more wars after periods of prosperity, but they are much longer and
bigger, "six to twenty times bigger as indicated by battle fatalities."178
Wars sacrifice youth symbols of our potency and hopefulness because
it is our striving, youthful, independent selves that we blame for
getting us into trouble in the first place. Wars are always preemptive
attacks on enemies we create-enemies we must find "out there" to relieve
the paranoia of having enemies "inside our heads" who resent our good
fortunes. Most wars start "for the sake of peace" because we really
believe we can have inner peace if we stop our progress and individuation,
if we sacrifice our striving self. Only if we can stop growing can
we protect ourselves from our most horrible fear-the repetition of
our earliest tragedies.
War, then, is a cleansing ritual sacrifice that is staged as a four-act
drama:
1. We begin to reexperience our early traumas when we fee too much
freedom, prosperity and individuation-wars are usually fought after
a period of peace, prosperity and social progress produced by a minority
who have had better childrearing, producing challenges that are experienced
as threatening by the majority whose childrearing is so traumatic
that too much growth and independence produces an abandonment panic,
fears of a persecutory mother-figure, a defensive merging with the
engulfing mother and then fears by men of having been turned into
women.179
2. We deify a leader who is a poison container into whom we can pump
our frightening feelings, our "bad blood" you can see this blood-transfer
concretely when Nazis put up their arms like an umbilicus and throw
their bad feelings their "bad blood" into Hitler for cleansing, while
he catches their feelings with an open palm, standing under a swastika
(the ancient symbol of the placenta) imprinted upon a blood-red flag,
the hypermasculine leader becoming society's protector by finding
an enemy to persecute rather than individuals reliving their early
tragedies alone and helpless.
3. We restage our early helplessness, humiliation and revenge-terror
fantasies with another nation who needs to act out their violence-minor
insults are experienced as so humiliating that even a holocaust can
be worth their revenge-as President Kennedy said as he considered
whether to risk an apocalyptic nuclear war in the Cuban Missile Crisis,
"If Krushchev wants to rub my nose in the dirt, it's all over."180
When progress and new challenges evoke paranoid fears of jealous enemies
and wishes/fears of engulfing mommies, nations collude in a trance-like
state to fight to defend against their delusional loss of potency.
4. We go to war by restaging our terrors in the social sphere, inflicting
our traumas upon our most vital selves, our youth wars are not, as
often said, "outlets for human aggression" in fact, nations usually
feel a new strength as they go to war, just as wife-beating husbands
become calm and self-righteous as they beat up their spouses;181
so, too, nations experience a manic strength as they fight to destroy
the poisonous enemy, revenge their traumas, regain their lost virility
and be reborn into a New World Order. These stages on the road to
war can be monitored through a fantasy analysis of a nation's emotional
life. Whether they can also be confirmed by changes in neurobiological
markers for instance, whether nations prior to wars experience measureable
surges in adrenaline and noradrenaline stress hormones and a manic
surge in dopamine levels-is yet to be investigated.
The imagery of war as a restaging of birth is ubiquitous. Consider
just the birth imagery surrounding the nuclear bomb. When Ernest Lawrence
telegramed to his fellow physicists that the bomb was ready to test,
his cable read, "Congratulations to the new parents. Can hardly wait
to see the new arrival."182 When the bomb was exploded
at Los Alamos, a journalist wrote, "One felt as though he had been
privileged to witness the Birth of the World...the first cry of the
newborn world."183 When President Truman met with world
leaders at Postdam just before dropping the bomb on Japan, General
Grove cabled him reporting that its second test was successful: "Doctor
has just returned most enthusiastic and confident that The Little
Boy is as husky as his big brother...I could have heard his screams
from here..."184 When the Hiroshima bomb, named "Little
Boy," was dropped from the belly of a plane named after the pilot's
mother, General Groves cabled Truman, "The baby was born." Even the
survivors of the Hiroshima explosion usually referred to the bomb
as "the original child."185 Similarly, when the first hydrogen
bomb, termed "Teller's baby," was exploded, Edward Teller's telegram
read, "It's a boy."186 Obviously nukes are felt to be powerful
babies perfect avenging fetuses. With them, our revenge for our early
traumas can now be infinite: war finally can destroy every "dangerous
mother" on earth. One can see why Truman, hearing that the world's
first nuclear bomb had just been dropped, exclaimed, "This is the
greatest thing in history!"187
PROSPERITY PANICS AND INTERNAL SACRIFICES
Wars are sacrificial defenses that have proven to be effective in
reducing fears of ego disintegration due to prosperity panic. But
even more effective than sacrificing mothers and children in external
wars is the internal, institutionalized wars against mothers and children
that nations conduct periodically as social policy. Structural violence
(excess deaths because of poverty alone) amount to 15 million persons
a year world wide, compared to an average 100,000 deaths per year
from wars.188 Economic recessions hurt and kill more mothers
and children as sacrificial victims than most wars.189
As in foreign wars (external sacrifices), political and economic wars
against mothers and children (internal sacrifices) are regularly conducted
during periods of peace and prosperity. These internal wars parallel
the regressive images we have been discussing; for instance, as William
Joseph found in studying the 1929 and 1987 stock market crashes, images
of dangerous women proliferated in the media, indicating that the
time for internal sacrifice was near.190
In America, in the mid-90s, after a period of peace and prosperity
and particularly after the demise of The Evil Empire that can be blamed
for the nation's emotional disorders dangerous women images multiplied
in the media, and enemies were felt to be inside rather than abroad.
Reductions in food, welfare, education and health care for women and
children became the national goal. After being obsessed with watching
for an entire year the trial of someone accused of being a mother-murderer,
O. J. Simpson, it is no coincidence that Americans were then united
in wanting to cut welfare for mothers and their children, acting out
their own mother-murder scenario. Europe, too, began feeling that
the Welfare State-imagined as a dangerous, engulfing Medusa-was an
enemy that had to be destroyed.191 That women and children
were the real enemies of the "G.O.P. Revolution" was not denied. As
Newt Gingrich put it, "The Welfare State has created the moral decay
of the world. We have barbarity after barbarity...brutality after
brutality. And we shake our heads and say, 'Well, what's going wrong?'
What's going wrong is a welfare system which subsidized people for
doing nothing...And then we end up with the final culmination of a
drug-addicted underclass with no sense of humanity..."192
Simpson and Gingrich, both our delegates were somehow uncanny, but
nontheless caried out the nation's unconscious sacrificial group-fantasies
all the same.
That a prosperous America has arranged to have so many people needing
welfare is a clue to why nations need poor people to punish for their
prosperity. Since it is prosperity and the fear of intolerable growth
that triggers the restaging of trauma, it makes psychohistorical sense
that America today-the most prosperous and freest nation of any in
history-has more women and children living in poverty than any other
industrialized nation. American child poverty rates are four times
those of most European nations, and are getting worse recently.193
It is national policy: "children do not catch poverty but are made
poor by state neglect."194 While France manages to afford
excellent child care centers for preschoolers, child care in America
is a disaster, with only 15 percent of the centers of "high quality,"
while the bottom 15 percent are in "childcare centers of such poor
quality that their health or development is threatened."195
Nor is it coincidental that the world's wealthiest country has the
highest child homicide rate196 and outside of Israel the
most newborn boys circumcised,197 both indices of society's
hostility towards children.
Economic success gives people increased opportunities for individuation;
national prosperity and peace are therefore dangerous ("If I grow
and enjoy myself, something terrrible will happen"). Periods of extended
prosperity without excternal "enemies" therefore produce prosperity
panics that require sacrificial victims, whether in Hebrew or Aztec
ritual sacrifice yesterday or in today's economic cycles. In good
economic times, such as in 1996, legislators in America, with the
support of the majority of citizens, vigorously cut all kinds of aid
to children. In New York City, 39 percent of the children are on welfare;
in Chicago, 46 percent, in Detroit, 67 percent, and anti-welfare legislation
was everywhere put into effect.198 With the largest Gross
Domestic Product of any nation at any time in history, America has
75 percent of the world's child deaths by homicide, suicide and firearms,
overwhelmingly leading the way for violence-related deaths of children.199
In 1996, at the peak of our current prosperity, Americans of both
parties, with the approval of the President, cut nutrition assistance
for 14 million children and Social Security for 750,000 disabled children,
along with cuts in school lunches, Head Start, child protection, education,
child health care and aid to homeless children-what the president
of the Children's Defense Fund described as "an unbelievable budget
massacre of the weakest."200
The media noticed the posperity panic, but are puzzled as to its cause,
after four prosperous years. The magazine cover that showed a depressed
Uncle Sam with the headline "If the Economy Is Up, Why Is America
Down?" could more accurately have been worded, "Because the Economy
Is Up, America Is Feeling Down."201 Cutting funds for Head
Start was in fact necessary to punish the striving child in ourselves.
Sen. Patrick Moynihan, calling the legislation "an obscene act of
social regression that visits upon children the wrath of an electorate,"
predicted the cuts in Aid to Families with Dependent Children alone
will put millions of children on the street.202 "It is
beyond imagining that we will do this," Moynihan said. "In the middle
of the Great Depression, we provided a Federal guarantee of some provision
for children, dependent children. In the middle of the roaring 90's,
we're taking it away."203 We were so bent on punishing
children for our own prosperity that we cut even funds for school
lunches, despite there being 12 million American children today who
are so malnourished that it has damaged their brains.204
But scapegoating children in prosperous times isn't paradoxical; it's
a psychohistorical regularity.
That the group-fantasies behind cutting benefits for women and children
are similar to the blood-sucking fantasies discussed above could be
seen in any of the flood of vampire movies that appeared at the same
time, often featuring bloodthirsty mother figures, or in the fantasies
of those in Congress and the
media who claimed that welfare recipients were "bleeding us dry" and
"sucking the blood out of the citizenry [like] a giant leech"-punishment
for which was for the government to "suck the blood" out of welfare
recipients (Illustration 3:6).205 As Presidential candidate
Sen. Phil Gramm said, "If we continue to pay mothers who have illegitimate
children, the country will soon have more illegitimate than legitimate
children," all feeding off of him, a scenario that is his projection
of the needy "baby Phil" demanding "MORE!" who was threatening to
"eat up American resources." Bad, sinful babies were seen as deserving
to be punished as scapegoats for the country's guilty prosperity.
Historically, during every period of prosperity and peace in American
history (such as in the 1850s and the 1890s), there has been legislation
by the newly wealthy to stop welfare for what they called "the undeserving
poor." Anti-welfare legislation, now as then, had nothing to do with
saving money; in fact, the cuts would cost a hundred times more than
their savings through increases in drug addiction, theft and murder.
Each time legislators condemn "moral decay" and "a breakdown in family
values"-code words for fear of freedom-they only mean that in fantasy
social collapse can be avoided by "ending dependency"-code words for
punishing poor children, symbols of their own dependency needs.
That punishing children, not saving money, is the aim of the legislation
becomes clear when the effects of each cutback is actually costed
out. For instance, the cuts in the Federal Supplemental Security Income
program not only reduce allowances for poor crippled children by 25
percent, they also throw hundreds of thousands of disabled children
off the program. This means, as one commentator put it, that
their families are so marginal economically that the additional cost
of caring for a child with spina bifida or profound mental retardation
is literally unbearable. So the kids will get dumped into state homes,
thus costing the taxpayers significantly more than the allowances
that enable their families to care for them. Not only cruel, but dumb
as well.206
But legislators are not dumb at all, only cruel, purposely cruel,
for the sake of all of us. Which is why we elect them to "balance
the budget," that is, to conduct a restaging of all the early cruelties
done to us, a warding off of the punishment we expect for our prosperity,
inflicting our early terrors upon society's scapegoats: helpless,
vulnerable children. Like war, the sacrifice of women and children
is promised to result in a magical "rebirth of national vitality"
that is well worth the difficult "labor pains" of passing the new
welfare legislation.207
ENDING FETAL AND CHILD ABUSE
Although these conclusions about the relative permanence of early
trauma and its inevitable restaging in war, social violence and economic
injustice admittedly appear to be discouraging, an awareness of the
source of human violence can actually be enormously hopeful. For if
early traumas rather than "aggressive human nature" are the cause
of our violence, then efforts to radically reduce these traumas can
be reasonably expected to reduce war and social domination. If, rather
than continuing the millennia-old historical cycle of traumatized
adults inflicting their inner terrors upon their children, we try
kindness instead, effectively helping mothers and children as a society
rather than burdening, abandoning or punishing them, we will soon
be able to end our need to reenact our traumatic memories on the social
stage. Let me describe why I believe this radical reduction of violence
is possible in our society today.
The studies that I cited earlier on maternal rejection included solid
statistical evidence showing that when babies are unwanted by their
mothers and have birth complications they will, when they become teenagers,
commit four times the number of violent crimes as those who are wanted.
If this four-to-one ratio holds for most restagings of early trauma,
then reducing this trauma to just a small fraction of what it is today
can be expected to save almost 75 percent of the cost of social violence.
I estimate the yearly cost of American social violence, external and
internal sacrifices combined, to be over $1 trillion per annum, adding
up the cost of most of the military, the interest on the debt, which
is all for recent wars, most of the criminal justice system, the loss
of life and property in crime, and so on. The savings, then, would
be 75 percent of $1 trillion, or $750 billion per annum. The only
question is: How is it possible to eliminate most early trauma and
child abuse, and what would it cost to do this?
The answer to this question is no longer merely theoretical. A decade
ago, a psychohistorian, Robert McFarland, M.D., reasoned that if my
psychogenic theory of history is right, he should be able to improve
both the health and the wealth of his community in Boulder, Colorado,
by reaching out to every new mother before her baby was born and help
her to welcome and then parent her child, a task society usually believes
does not require help from the community. Two issues of our Journal
of Psychohistory, entitled "Ending Child Abuse," and "Changing Childhood,"208
were devoted to showing how effective parent outreach centers can
be centers which have been replicated in several other states describing
such activities as facilities to new mothers, prenatal services, parenting
discussion groups, baby massage courses, single mother help, fathering
courses, puppet shows, lectures on how to discipline children without
hitting, psychotherapy referrals and home visiting during early years.
All these are provided on a shoestring budget, mainly with volunteer
and paraprofessional help, using local community resources. By providing
this prenatal and early childhood help, fetal and child abuse-as measured
by physical and sexual abuse reports, hospital records of injuries,
and followup studies-have been drastically reduced. No new mother
or father wants to reject or abuse their baby, the formula for baby
battering being, "I had my baby to give me the love I never got; but
instead she cried and sounded like my mother yelling at me, so I hit
her." What McFarland and others found was that providing new parents
with help and hope allowed their underlying affection to replace the
abuse that comes from fear, abandonment and despair.
The cost? Since McFarland stresses local community resources and volunteer
labor, very little. Even when he has expanded his parenting centers
to include day care facilities, he expects a local sales tax of one-tenth
of one percent to be sufficient to run the entire enterprise, a very
small "children's tax" that would represent the community's commitment
to invest in their children's future. A similar sales tax in every
community in the nation would produce .1 percent times $5 trillion
in yearly retail sales in America or $5 billion a year in tax revenues,
about the cost of two of the B2 bombers the military is building that
they admit are not needed. The savings, then, 15 to 20 years from
now, if we should decide to save our children from early traumas,
would be $750 billion per year saved, less $5 billion invested annually,
or $745 billion per year net savings, far more than enough to end
poverty forever in America. This does not even begin to consider the
additional trillions we currently spend on drugs, gambling and other
addictions that handle the pain of early traumas, activities which
are likely to wither away without their traumatic underpinnings.
INVESTING IN THE REAL WEALTH OF NATIONS
We regularly decide to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in technology
hoping for future benefits, under the notion that material investments
invariably produce prosperity. But Adam Smith was not radical enough
when he said the wealth of nations lay in its investment in technology.
The real wealth of nations is its children, since every scientific
and technological revolution has been preceded by a childrearing revolution.
Investing in the mental and physical health of children by preventing
damage to their brains from early traumatic experiences must accompany
investments in material technologies, or else any resulting prosperity
will continue to be destroyed in wars and social violence. Few people
realize that the cost of eliminating poverty entirely for all children
in America is only $39 billion, one-half of one percent of our gross
domestic product, or about the same amount as we waste financing the
CIA.209 A healthful, loving childhood without trauma isn't
expensive; in fact it saves trillions of dollars. And it's the most
important goal of mankind.
In the past two prosperous decades, we have purposely brought about
through our social policies an increase in the percentage of children
living in spirit-crushing poverty in America by over one-third, from
15 percent to 22 percent, which will soon make life in America more
violent than it had been when we were much less prosperous. "We are
underinvested in our childre," says Frederick Goodwin. "We spend seven
times more per capita on the elderly than we do on children....we
are wasting a tremendous resource."210 The connections
between early traumas and neglect are everywhere, yet we continue
to insist on policies that are guaranteed to increase social violence
and to undo the progress and prosperity we work so hard to achieve.
It may seem simplistic to conclude that most of human destructiveness
is the restaging of early traumas and that what we must do if we wish
to put an end to war and social violence is teach adults how to stop
abusing and neglecting and begin respecting and enjoying their children,
but I believe this is precisely what our best scientific evidence
shows.
Our task, then, is clear and our resources sufficient to make the
world safe for the first time in our long, violent history. All it
takes now is the will to begin.
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