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Lloyd deMause is director of The Institute for Psychohistory, which is in New York City and has 17 branches in various countries. He is editor of The Journal of Psychohistory and president of the International Psychohistorical Association. He was born in Detroit, Michigan on September 19, 1931. He graduated from Columbia College and did his post-graduate training in political science at Columbia University and in psychoanalysis at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis. He has taught psychohistory at the City University of New York and the New York Center for Psychoanalytic Training, is a member of the Society for Psychoanalytic Training, and has lectured widely in Europe and America. He has published over 80 scholarly articles in such periodicals as The Nation, Psychology Today, The Guardian, The Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology, The Journal of Psychohistory, Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity, Psyche, Kindheit, Texte zur Kunst, Psychologie, Psychologos: International Review of Psychology, Psychoanalytic Beacon and Psychologie Heute. He is on the editorial board of Familiendynamik, The International Journal of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Medicine and Mentalities/Mentalites. His books include The History of Childhood, A Bibliography of Psychohistory, The New Psychohistory, Jimmy Carter and American Fantasy, Foundations of Psychohistory, Reagan’s America, The Emotional Life of Nations, and The Origins of War in Child Abuse. His work has been translated into nine languages. He has three children: Neil, Jennifer and Jonathan. http://www.psychohistory.com/index.html http://www.freedomainradio.com/FreeBooks.aspx http://www.kidhistory.org/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNLq1Y_OFEQ 1 The Origins of War in Child Abuse by Lloyd deMause http://www.psychohistory.com/originsofwar/01_killermotherland.html Table of Contents Chapter 1 — The Killer Motherland .......................................................................................... 3 Chapter 2 — Why Males Are More Violent ............................................................................ 28 Chapter 3 — The Psychology and Neurobiology of Violence ................................................. 41 Chapter 4 — War As A Sacrificial Ritual ................................................................................ 72 Chapter 5 — The Seven Phases of Going to War .................................................................... 82 Chapter 6 — The Childhood Origins of World War II and the Holocaust ............................ 109 Chapter 7 — Child Abuse, Homicide and Raids in Tribes .................................................... 142 Chapter 8 — Infanticide, Child Rape and War in Early States .............................................. 165 Chapter 9 — Bipolar Christianity: How Torturing "Sinful" Children Produced Holy Wars . 191 Chapter 10 — Patriarchal Families and National Wars ......................................................... 230 Chapter 11 — Global Wars to Restore U.S. Masculinity ...................................................... 258 Chapter 12 — Ending Child Abuse, Wars and Terrorism ..................................................... 285 2 Chapter 1 — The Killer Motherland War is the mother of all things. – Heraclitus In the course of researching my book The Emotional Life of Nations, I discovered that just before and during wars the nation was regularly depicted as a Dangerous Woman. I collected thousands of magazine covers and political cartoons before wars to see if there were any visual patterns that could predict the moods that led to war, and routinely found images of dangerous, bloodthirsty women. Even the most popular movies before wars featured dangerous women, from The Wizard of Oz with its killing witches before WWII to All About Eve before the Korean War, Cleopatra before Vietnam, Fatal Attraction and Thelma and Louise before the Persian Gulf War and Laura Croft and Kill Bill at the start of the Iraqi War. War itself when personified was always shown as a Killer Woman, tempting young men with her attractiveness. I called the Killer Woman a Marie Antoinette syndrome, after the group-fantasy of the French during the Revolution that she was a “ferocious panther who devoured the French” despite the fact that she was actually a rather sweet person. When the war starts, the terrors in the media that Dangerous Women are abroad demanding blood are projected into some Enemy who agrees to engage in mutual killing, and oddly enough the Enemy also assumes the Killer Woman imagery, as, for instance, 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. That wars are seen emotionally as led by dangerous Killer Mothers, with war goddesses from Athena to Freyja and from Brittania to Marianne depicted as devouring, raping and ripping apart her children, is one of my most unexpected findings during the three decades I have studied war psychohistorically. The further back in history one goes, the more wars are openly considered as being fought for Killer Goddesses, from Tiamat, Ishtar, Inanna, Isis and Kali to the Aztec mother- goddess Huitzilopochtli, who had “mouths all over her body” that cried out to be fed the blood of her soldiers.1 Before wars, there is a precise moment when the Killer Mother image gets split into the Good Motherland and the Bad Motherland, and the warrior clings to the Good Mother even when she sends him to die and be “buried in her bosom” and kills and rapes Enemy women without guilt. Soldiers often say they are willing to die “peacefully” for a beloved “Motherland…like a baby falling asleep” in Her womb, wrapped in a maternal dress/flag.2 Wars are from their beginning 3 experienced as direct repetitions of the birth struggle, begun when nations are “smothered and unable to draw a breath,” continuing until they can “see the light at the end of the tunnel” and even “aborted” if ended too soon.3 As the German proverb puts it, “Germany is never so happy as when she is pregnant with war.”4 Even the nuclear bomb is seen as part of a rebirth ritual. The Hiroshima bomb, named “Little Boy” and dropped from the belly of a plane named after the pilot’s mother, was announced as successful by General Groves who cabled President Truman: “The baby was born.”5 Rysunek 1 Fig. 1-1 War is usually depicted as a Killer Woman Rysunek 2 Fig. 1-2 Images of Killer Women proliferate in the media before wars and then are projected into enemies. 4 Wars are thought of as being fought mainly by men against men, but most wars kill more women and children than men—today for every soldier who dies in war, ten civilians die, about half of them children.6 Most war leaders and most soldiers are male and somewhat more women than men oppose going to war.7 Women are far more likely to be the victims of violence than men: in the U.S. in 1980, “one of every two women experiences some form of battering, one of four experiences incest, one of four is raped, 97 percent of all male-female violence is against females.”8 If, as feminists of all stripes contend, violence and militarism are simply patriarchy writ large, why are Motherlands the central focus of emotional group-fantasies about war? The answer is clear: all these “Dangerous Women” and Killer Motherland fantasies are mainly those of men. It is mainly men who kill under the delusion that “We have laid ourselves over the body of the motherland in order to revive her”9 or “We are to die so that the motherland may live; for while we live the motherland is dying.”10 It was men on WWI battlefields who called their cannons “Mother” and referred to themselves as children waiting upon and feeding Her.11 It is men who as officers refer to themselves as the “company mother” or as “the mother hen watching the other guys like they was my children.”12 It is men who join the military to appeal to women as brave heroes who will save them, who respond to recruiting posters saying “Women of Britain Say ‘GO!”, who claim “all women like to hear of men fighting and facing danger”13 and who go to their death in battle with one word, “Mom,” on their lips. Mothers today may not send their sons forth to battle with the adjuration “Come back with your shield or on it” as did Spartan mothers, but in fantasy many soldiers still hear the inner voices of their mothers saying to them: “Grow up and be a MAN”—i.e., kill or be killed.14 Rysunek 3 Fig. 1-3 The Killer Motherland is split into "the One we die for" and "the One we kill." 5 Rysunek 4 Fig. 1-4 Hitler and Germania Rysunek 5 Fig. 1-5 Medusa. When Hitler saw this painting of Medusa he said, "They are the eyes of my mother!" Rysunek 6 Klara Hitler War leaders know the Killer Motherland group-fantasy that moves men to war, and repeat it endlessly before and during wars. Hitler spoke of German devotion to their Mutterland thousands of times in his speeches, saying “I promise you the sacrifice of 10 million German youth” to Germania. Hitler said he was literally married to Germania: “Marriage is not for me and never will be. My only 6 bride is my Motherland,”15 and this is the reason he did not marry any other woman. (This was an old idea for the military—before modern mass armies, soldiers were usually prohibited from marrying, since they were considered as wed to their Motherlands and units.)16 Goebbels confirmed that “the entire people loves him because it feels safe in his hands like a child in the arms of a mother.” Hitler’s conviction that he got his power from his mother was so literal that he kept pictures near his desks of both his actual mother, Klara, and of Medusa, whose gaze turned people into stone. Hitler said of the painting of Medusa, “They are the eyes of my mother!”17 Medusa was so deadly that one look from her could kill you. Hitler endlessly practiced before a mirror so his eyes would be killing “mother-eyes” like those of his own deeply depressed mother.

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