The evolution of childhood
hear it mourn the children
Oh, my brethren ...
The cry of the children (Elizabeth Barrett Browning)
The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have begun to wake up very recently. The further back in past, the lower the level of child care and children most at risk of violent death, abandonment, beatings, terror and sexual abuse. We propose here what we can recover the history of childhood from the testimonies that have survived.
If historians have not been repaired so far in these events is because for a long time been considered serious history should consider public events, not private. Historians have concentrated so much on the noisy stage of history, with its fantastic castles and great battles, which generally have not paid attention to what happened in the homes and in the playground. And while historians tend to look at the battles of yesterday the causes of today, we instead ask ourselves how to create each generation of parents and children after the problems encountered in public life.
At first glance, this lack of interest in the lives of children is rare. Historians have traditionally been dedicated to explaining continuity and change over time, and since Plato has been known that childhood is a key for it. Can not say it was Freud who discovered the importance of parent-child relationships for social change, the words of Saint Augustine: "Give me other mothers and give you another world "has been repeated for fifteen centuries great thinkers without affecting the historiography. Of course, from Freud our view of childhood has acquired a new dimension, and in the last fifty years the study of childhood has been customary for the psychologist, sociologist and anthropologist. It is only starting to be for the historian. This deliberate avoidance requires explanation.
Historians attribute the scarcity of sources, the lack of serious studies on children. Peter Laslett wonders why the "masses and masses of young children are strangely absent of the written ... There is something mysterious in the silence of those multitudes of children in arms, toddlers children and adolescents in the stories of men at the time wrote about his own experience ... We can not know if parents helped care for children ... Nothing is known yet of what psychologists call sphincter control ... In reality, we must make a mental effort to continually remind the children were always present in large numbers in the traditional world, with nearly half of the community living in a situation semisupresión. " [1] As noted by James Bossard, a sociologist of the family: "For Unfortunately, no history of childhood ever written, and it is doubtful that you can write some day, because of the paucity of historical data about the children. " [2]
This belief is so strong among historians that it is not surprising that this book began not in the field of history, but in applied psychoanalysis. Five years ago I was writing a book on a psychoanalytic theory of historical change and, in considering the results of half a century of applied psychoanalysis, I found that he had not become a science, especially since it had not become evolutivo. Dado que la repetición compulsiva, por definición, no puede explicar el cambio histórico, todos los intentos realizados por Freud, Roheim, Kardiner y otros autores para desarrollar una teoría del cambio acabaron en una estéril polémica del huevo o la gallina sobre si la educación de los niños depende de los rasgos culturales o a la inversa. Se demostró una y otra vez que las prácticas de crianza de los niños son la base de la personalidad adulta; el origen de las mismas sumió en la perplejidad a todos los psicoanalistas que se plantearon la cuestión. [3]
En una comunicación presentada en 1968 a la Association for Applied Psychoanalysis (Association for Applied Psychoanalysis) I outlined an evolutionary theory of historical change in the relations between parents and suggested that because historians had not yet addressed the task of writing the history of childhood, the association sponsors the work of a group of historians study the sources to discover the main stages of child rearing in the West since antiquity. This book is the result of this project.
The "psychogenic theory of history" outlined in my project proposal started with a general theory of historical change. His premise was that the central force of historical change is not technology or economics, but changes "psychogenic" personality resulting from interactions between parents and children in successive generations. This theory involved several assumptions, each subject to confirmation or refutation on the basis of empirical historical data:
- The evolution of parent-child relationships is an independent cause of historical change. The origin of this evolution is the ability of successive generations of parents to return to the mental age of their children and go through the anxieties of this age in better condition the second time in his own childhood. This process is similar to psychoanalysis, which also implies a return and a second chance to address the anxieties of childhood.
- This generational pressure "for psychological change is not only spontaneous, originating in the necessity of returning adult and the child's effort to build relationships, but also occurs regardless of social and technological change. Therefore, it can occur even in periods of social and technological stagnation.
- children's story is a series of adult-child approach in which each psychic distance shortening caused new anxiety. The reduction de esta ansiedad del adulto es la fuente principal de las prácticas de crianza de los niños de cada época.
- El complemento de la hipótesis de que la historia supone una mejora general de la puericultura es que cuanto más se retrocede en el tiempo menos eficacia muestran los padres en la satisfacción de las necesidades de desarrollo del niño. Esto quiere decir por ejemplo, que si en Estados Unidos hay actualmente menos de un millón de niños maltratados, [4] habría un momento histórico en que la mayoría de los niños eran maltratados, según el significado que hoy damos a este término.
- Dado que la estructura psíquica always be transmitted from generation to generation through the narrow shaft of children, parenting practices of children of a society are not simply one among many cultural traits. They are the very condition of the transmission and development of all other cultural elements and impose specific limits on what can be achieved in all other areas of history. In order to maintain certain cultural traits have to give certain childhood experiences, and after that experience no longer exist, the features disappear.
Now it is clear that an evolutionary psychological theory as ambitious as it can not undergo actually tested in a single book, and in this we have set the goal, more modest, reconstructed from the available data the situation of a son and a father in the past. The testimonies we may have of the existence of real evolutionary patterns of children in the past only appear when you expose the fragmented and often confusing history we have found the lives of children in the West during the past 2,000 years.
PREVIOUS WORKS ON CHILDREN IN THE HISTORY
Although I believe this is the first book that seriously examines the history of childhood in the West, it is undeniable that historians have been writing for some time on children in the past. [5] But even so, I think the study of the history of childhood is just beginning, because most of these works give a distorted view of the facts of childhood in the periods they cover. The official biographers are the worst enemies child is generally idealized and very few biographers who provide useful information about the early years of the life of the character concerned. Sociologists of the story manage para formular teorías explicativas de los cambios en la infancia sin molestarse jamás en estudiar una sola familia, del pasado o del presente. [6] Los historiadores de la literatura, tomando los libros por la vida, pintan un cuadro novelesco de la infancia, como si se pudiera saber lo que realmente ocurría en el hogar norteamericano leyendo Tom Sawyer. [7]
Pero es el historiador de la sociedad, cuya tarea consiste en desentrañar la realidad de las condiciones sociales de otras épocas, el que más enérgicamente se defiende contra los hechos que pone de manifiesto. [8] Cuando un historiador de la sociedad verifies the existence of widespread infanticide declares "admirable and humane." [9] When one talks of the mothers who systematically beaten with sticks for their children while still in the cradle, he says, without evidence, that "if the discipline was harsh, was also a regular and fair and was informed by kindness. " [10] where a third party faced with mothers who got their children in cold water every morning to "strengthen" a practice that caused the death of children, says he "was not deliberate cruelty" but merely " had read Locke and Rousseau. " [11] the historian of society all the practices of other times you look good. When Laslett notes that usually had parents who sent their children, aged seven, to other homes to serve them as servants, taking in turn other servants-children, said that in reality they moved was the affection because it "suggests that perhaps parents do not want to subject their own children to the discipline of working at home." [12] Recognizing that the practice of whipping children with different instruments "at school and at home seems to have been so common in the seventeenth century as it was later" William Sloan feels compelled to add that "children, then as later, sometimes deserve to be whipped." [13] Philippe Ariès When accumulated so many testimonies of sexual abuse committed against children manifests admitting that "playing with the genitals of children was part of a widespread tradition, [14] goes on to describe a scene "traditional" on a train, in which a stranger is cast on a child "with his hand brutally rummaging inside the crotch of the child" while the father smiles, and concludes: "It was only a game whose character rough should care not to overdo it. " [15] masses of data are hidden, distorted, softened or forgotten. It glosses over the early years of the child, endlessly studied the formal content of education and avoids stressing the emotional content of the legislation on children and leaving the home side. And if, by nature of the book, it is impossible to ignore unpleasant facts are everywhere, invented the theory that "good parents leave no trace in written records." When, for example, Alan Valentine examines 600 years of letters from parents of 126 children and parents can not find one that does not insensitive, moralistic and quite self-centered, reaches the following conclusion:
"Without doubt, an infinite number of parents have written letters to their children and shaken us if we would encourage find them. Happier parents leave no history, and are men who do not behave too well with their children who often write the heartbreaking letters that have come to us. " [16] Similarly, Anna Burr, who has studied 250 autobiographies, says there's no happy memories of childhood, but carefully avoids draw conclusions. [17]
Of all the books on children at other times, the best known is perhaps that of Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childbood (Centuries of Childhood). One historian has noted how often is "cited as the Holy Scriptures." [18] Ariès's central thesis is the opposite of mine: he argues that the traditional child was happy because I could mix freely with people of diverse backgrounds and ages and in the early modern period was "invented" a special state called childhood that gave rise to a conception tyrannous family that destroyed the friendship and sociability and children deprived of liberty, imposing for the first time the splint and the prison cell.
Ariès To demonstrate this thesis uses two main arguments. Dice first in the High Middle Ages there was no concept of childhood. "Art before the twelfth century medieval know childhood or did not try to represent it" because the artists were "unable to paint a child except as a man on a smaller scale." [19] This means not only left in the limbo of ancient art but ignoring abundant evidence that medieval artists knew Children certainly paint realistically. [20] The etymological argument that Ariès used to demonstrate the ignorance of the concept of childhood as such is equally untenable. [21] In any case, the idea of \u200b\u200bthe invention of childhood is so confusing that it seems strange that so many historians have collected recently. [22] Ariès The second argument namely that the modern family restricts the child's freedom and increases the severity of punishments, is contrary to all data.
Much more reliable than Ariès are four books, of which only one has been written by a professional historian: The Child in Human Progress (The child in the progress of humanity) by George Payne, The Angel Makers (The creators of angels) of G. Rattray Taylor, Parents and Children in History (Parents and children in the story) David Hunt, and The Emotionally Disturbed Child: Then and Now (The child with emotional problems, then and now) Despert Louise. Payne, whose book, published in 1916, was the first to study the frequency of infanticide and the brutality towards children in history, in particular in antiquity. Taylor's book, well documented, is a complex psychoanalytical interpretation of the theme of childhood and personality in seventeenth century England. Hunt, like Ariès, focused primarily on the seventeenth-century document, unique in its kind, is the diary of Héroard on children of Louis XIII, but does so with great psychological sensitivity and awareness of the implications of psychohistorical their conclusions. And Despert compared, from the psychiatric point of view, ill-treatment inflicted on children in the past and present, exploring the range of emotional attitudes toward children from antiquity, and expresses his growing horror as he discovers evidence a relentless "cruelty and hardness of heart." [23]
However, despite these four books, the fundamental questions of comparative history of children have not been raised yet, much less solved. In the two sections of this chapter will examine some of the psychological principles applied to adult-child relationships in the past. The examples I use, although they continue to be typical of the child's life in other times, they are taken equally from all eras, but chosen as the clearest manifestations of psychological principles described. Will be in the three subsequent sections, which will offer an overview of the history of infanticide, abandonment, sending children to wet nurses, the babies wrap belts, beatings and sexual abuse, where I will start to examine to what extent such practices were widespread in each period.
PSYCHOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES OF THE HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD:
projects and investment REACTIONS
By studying children through many generations, is of utmost importance to focus on moments that influence the psyche of the next generation. This means, above all, what happens when an adult is facing a child who needs something. The adult has, in my opinion, three reactions: (1) You can use the child as a vehicle for projecting the contents of his unconscious: projective reaction, (2) may use the child as a substitute for a significant adult figure his own childhood: inversion reaction, or (3) may experience empathy for the child's needs and act to meet: empathic reaction.
projective reaction is well known to psychoanalysts that apply terms ranging from "projection" a "projective identification": a more specific and incisive sentiments download in others. The analyst, for example, is very accustomed to use it as a "container" [24] massive projections of the patient. This being used as vehicles of projections was what they used to happen to children in the past.
Similarly, the inversion reaction is known by those who have studied parents who spank their children. [25] The children exist solely to meet the needs of parents, and is almost always the fact that the child-as-father did not show affection causing the beating. In the words of a mother who clung to his children: "Never I felt loved in my life. When the child was born I thought I would. When she cried, her tears indicated that I wanted. So hit him. "
The third term, empathic reaction is used here in a narrower sense than it does in the dictionary. It is the ability of adults to be at the level of the need to correctly identify a child and unmixed own adult projections. This has to be able to keep sufficient distance to satisfy the need. Capacity is identical to the analyst's unconscious use of so-called "floating attention" or, as he calls Theodor Reik, "the third ear." [26]
reactions investment project and gave the parents sometimes simultaneously, producing an effect I call "double image": he saw the child as a being full of desires, hostilities and projected adult sexual thoughts at the same time as a father figure or mother, that is good and bad at once. Also the more you go back in history, more "concrete" or reification in these reactions is projective and investment, resulting in increasingly bizarre attitudes toward children, like those of contemporary parents of battered children and schizophrenic.
The first expression of these concepts that are closely intertwined that we examine corresponds to a scene from the past between child and adult. The scene takes place in 1739 and the child, Nicholas, has four years. This is an incident that he remembers and has been confirmed by his mother. His grandfather, who has paid much attention in recent days, decides he has to "prove" and tells him: "Nicholas, my son, have many flaws that afflict your mother. She is my daughter and I have always been pleased, too, and correct them obey me or lashing whip you as a dog to learn. " Nicholas, furious at the betrayal of "a person who has been so good to me, throws his toys on fire. The grandfather seems happy.
"Nicholas ... I said to prove. Do you really think that a grandfather who has been so kind to you yesterday and yesterday could treat you like a dog today? I thought you were smart ... "" I'm not an animal like a dog. "" No, but you're not as smart as I thought it otherwise would have understood he was joking. It was just a joke ... Come here, "I lay down on his arms. "That is not everything, "he continued," I want to make peace with your mother is saddened, deeply saddened by your fault ... Nicholas, your father loves you, you will want him? "" Yes, grandpa! "" Suppose you were in danger and needed to save you to place your hand on fire, would you? I would put it ... there if necessary? "" Yes, grandpa! "" Why me? "" Why you? ... Yes, yes "" And your mother? "" Why Mom? The two hands, two! "" We'll see if you speak the truth because your mother is in dire need of your help! If you want, you have to prove it. "I said nothing, but thinking of what had been said, I went to the fireplace and, while they made signs, put my right hand in the fire. The pain tore me a whimper. [27]
What makes this scene so typical of adult-child interaction in the past is the existence of so many contradictory attitudes of the adult without any resolution. The child is loved and hated, rewarded, punished, bad and good all at the same time. Needless to say, this puts the child in a "double bond" contradictory signals (which according to Bateson and others are the basis of schizophrenia). [28] But contradictory signals themselves from adults who strive to demonstrate that the child is both very bad reaction (projective) and very good (reversal reaction). Reduce child depends on the pressing anxieties of the adult, the child acts as a defense of the adult.
reactions are also projective and investment that make it impossible to blame in cases of severe beatings so prevalent in the historical record. No real child is the subject of the beatings. It is rather the projection of the adult ("Look at her, what makes eyes! This is how men earn, is a perfect flirt!, says a mother from her daughter two years after the spanking). Or an investment product ("love is growing all the time trying to impose. But I've shown who is boss here!" Says one father of her nine months he has broken his head) . [29] often can be captured in the historical sources fusion rapper and beaten, and therefore the lack of guilt. An American father (1830) account as he whips his four year old son because he did not read something. The child is strapped naked in the basement:
"With him in that state, and I, my dear wife and mistress of my family, all distressed and with a heavy heart, I began to give flogging ... During this most unpleasant task, sacrificed and angry, I frequent interruptions, sending and trying to persuade, silencing excuse, responding to objections ... I felt the full force of divine authority and express command as I have not felt in any circumstances in my life ... But under the powerful influence of the degree of angry passion and persistence that my son had expressed no surprise that he thought "Was to win the game", weak and trembling as I was, and knowing how he knew that hit made me suffer. At that time I could not sympathize with me or himself. " [30]
is this table reflects the merger of parent and child, the father complains that he is worth the suffering and compassion, we find when we ask how they could be so widespread beatings in the past. When a teacher says Renaissance to hit the child must be told that "aplicáis punishment against your feelings, by the imperatives of conscience and require that you do not return to cause so much pain and effort, because if you make must share the pain with you and thus have experience and proof that it is painful for both, "is not easy but notice the merger and believing wrongly that hypocrisy. [31]
In fact, the father sees the child so full of parts of himself that even real accidents suffered by the child are considered as damage to the parent. Corton Mather's daughter, Nanny, falls into the fire suffered serious burns, and the father exclaimed: "Oh, for my sins, the just God throws my daughter to the fire!" [32] Trafficking remember the evil deeds that may have made lately, but as he thinks he is the punishment can not feel guilty about their child (for example, by leaving her alone) and take corrective action. Soon after two other daughters also suffer severe burns. Their reaction is to preach a sermon on "The use that the parent should make the disasters that happen to their children."
This issue of "accidents" children should not be taken lightly as it holds the key deficiencies in the behavior of adults as parents. Leaving aside the wishes of death, of which more later, if occurring Many accidents was because children were left alone very often. Nibby, Mather's daughter would have died if not burnt by "a person who was just passing in front of the window because there was no one who could hear their screams. [33] is also typical this event happened in Boston during the colonial period:
"After dinner, mother to two children slept in the same room where they slept and went to visit a neighbor. When they returned ... the mother went to bed, seeing that his youngest daughter, a girl of about five years, was not there; and after much searching he found drowned in a pit in the basement. " [34]
The father attributed the accident to the fact that he had worked on a holiday. What matters is not only that was common until the twentieth century the habit of leaving children alone. More importantly, parents can not deal with preventing accidents by not feeling guilty, since they consider that the object of punishment are its own projections adults. Those projections and manage their security systems do not invent and in many cases not even care that their children receive the least attention. His projection, unfortunately, said repetition.
The use of children as "vessel" for adult projections underlying the idea of \u200b\u200boriginal sin, and for eight years, adults generally agreed that, as Richard says Allestre (1676), "the newborn is tainted and corrupted by the sin inherited from our first parents through our flesh. " [35] Baptism often included the exorcism of the devil, and the belief that the crying baby to be baptized themselves left out of the demon persisted long after the removal formal exorcism in the Reformation. [36] Even when no formal religion emphasized the devil was there. Here is a nineteenth century scene in which a Polish Jew gives his teaching:
"The sufferings of the little victim trembled and used to run coolly whipping, slowly, slowly ... ordered the boy to strip and lie down on the bank ... and began to vigorously manage the leather straps ... "In every person there is a good spirit and an evil spirit. The good spirit has its own abode, which is the head. also has evil spirit, and that's where you get the whipping. " [37]
The boy was so loaded with projections that often risked being considered a freak if he cried too much or had other needs. There is abundant literature on the theft of children and their replacement by monsters. [38] But not always be seen that not only killed deformed children considered normal children phishers stolen, but also those who, as Saint Augustine says, "are possessed by a demon ... within the power of the devil ... some children die in that situation. " [39] Some Fathers of the Church stated that if a small child crying just committed a sin. [40] Sprenger and Kramer, in his bible of witch-hunting, Malleus Maleficarum (1487), argue that these monsters with the spirits replace the stolen children are recognized as "always scream in the most pitiful, and while breastfeeding are made four or five women never grow. " Luther agrees: "It's true: it is often taken to infants and children are put in place, and are more heinous than ten children with their droppings, their greed and their screams." [41] Guibert of Nogent , author of the twelfth century, considered holy because it supports his mother crying of a child adopted:
"The child bothered both my father and all his servants with the intensity of their crying and moaning during the night, but the day was very good, playing a few times and other sleep-that anyone who slept in the same room could hardly sleep. I heard the nurses who took my mother, night after night, they could not stop moving the rattle of the child, so bad was not his fault, but the demon that had inside and that the arts of a woman unable to get. The holy lady suffered severe pain in the middle of their shrill cries, there was no choice but to relieve your headache ... However, he never cast out of his home the child. " [42]
The belief that children were about to become absolutely evil beings is one of the reasons why they are tied or are clouded, in tight bandages, for so long. We observed the latent idea that passage of Bartholomaeus Anglicus (around 1230): "And for his softness child's legs can easily and quickly bow and bend and take various forms. And so the members and legs of children held in place with bandages and other suitable barriers so that no twisting or warping. " [43] belt to the child is to be full of dangerous and harmful projections of the parents. The reasons given to justify the wrapping bandages or strips in the past are the same as its practitioners are now in Eastern Europe: We have to hold the child because if you do not tear his ears, he would draw the eyes, would break the legs or be touched genitals. [44] As we will see shortly in the section on swaddled and restrictions, this implies in many cases put the child all kinds of girdles and corsets, table set you support and even tie his rope to chairs to prevent drag on the ground "like an animal."
However, if adults ineligible project all their feelings in the child, it is clear that radical measures must be taken to help control this dangerous "child" container "when the bands and ties are no longer useful. Later examine various methods of control used by parents throughout the ages, but I speak here of one of these procedures, frighten a child with spirits or ghosts, to analyze its projective character.
ghostly figures used to frighten children throughout history are legion and adults systematically resorting to them until recently. The ancients had a Lamia and Striga, who, like his prototype Hebrew Lilith, children ate raw and, together with Mormo, Canidae, Poinar, Sybaris, Acco, Empusa, Gorgona and Ephialtes, were "invented for the benefit of a child, to be less reckless and unruly "according to Dio Chrysostom. [45] Most old disagreed that it was very convenient to always keep in mind the images of these witches to children to make them feel the terror of that night the spirits came to kidnap them, eat them, make them apart and suck the blood or bone marrow. In the Middle Ages, naturally came to the fore the witches and demons, and from time to time, appeared a Jew who cut the throats of children, along with a host of monsters and ghosts "as those with which the nurses are pleased to terrify. " [46] After the Reformation, the very God that holds you over the pit of hell, as it holds a spider or an insect repellent on the fire, " [47] was the main figure used as a ghost to scare children, and wrote pamphlets on child language in describing the tortures that God was in hell: "The child is in the oven to red. Hear how wanting to scream out ... Kicking with his feet upon the ground. " [48]
When religion ceased to be the focal point of the campaign of terror, we used figures closer to home: the werewolf swallow you, you make mincemeat Bluebeard, Boney ( Bonaparte) you eat, the coconut or the sweep will take you through the night. [49] These practices began to be questioned until the nineteenth century. A British father said in 1810 that "the once common practice of terrorizing children with tales of ghosts is now universally rejected, because of the higher national good sense. But for many people still living, fear of supernatural beings or darkness are among the true suffering of the children. " [50] However, even today in many villages of Europe, parents are threatening their children with the loup-garou (werewolf), the Barbu (the Bearded) or ramoneur (the sweep), or they say they will lead to the basement to be the eating rats. [51]
This need to personify punitive figures was so powerful that based on the principle of "specificity" adults came to make masks to frighten children. An English author, in 1748, explaining how the terror arose from the nurses that scared the children with tales of "bald head and bloody bones", read:
"The Nanny wants to calm the irritating child and to this end comprises a strange figure, the ushers and roar and yell at the child in a harsh tone and unpleasant to hurt the tender organs of hearing, giving the impression at the same time, gestures and proximity of that was to swallow. " [52]
These alarming figures were also the favorite of nurses who wanted to keep the kids in bed while they went out at night. Susan Sibbald ghosts remembered as a real element of his childhood in the eighteenth century:
Ghosts making their appearance was an event frequent ... I remember one night when the two nurses in Fowey wanted to leave ... remain silent to hear most dismal groans and squeaks across the wall, beside the staircase. The door opened wide and, oh, horror!, Entered a character, tall and dressed in white, who seemed to take fire from his eyes, nose and mouth. We were about to suffer an attack and we feel bad for several days, but we dared not tell. " [53]
children who were terrified they were not always as old as Susan and Betsey. In 1882, an American mother tells the story of a two year old daughter of a friend of hers, whose nanny, trying to enjoy the evening with the other maids while parents were out, took steps to not be bothered telling the girl:
A horrible ghost was hiding in the room to catch it at the time to get up from bed or make a sound. .. to be doubly sure not to be disturbed during the night. He did a great doll-like ghost, scary-looking eyes and a big mouth and placed at the foot of the bed where the innocent girl was fast asleep. When he finished the evening in the room with the servants, the nurse returned to his post. Opening the door quietly saw the girl sitting on the bed, staring, in a paroxysm of terror, the terrible monster that stood before her, and clasped his hands clutching his blond hair. She was dead! [54]
There is some evidence that the use of these masks to frighten children dates back to antiquity. [55] The theme of fear of children to the masks is a favorite of artists, from the Roman frescoes to the engravings of Jacques Stella (1657). But since these traumatic events in ancient times were subjected to repression deeper, I could not determine its forms ancient accurate.
Figure 1
Children playing with horror masks
(Jacques Stella, 1657}
Dio Chrysostom said that "through horrific images of children are discouraged when they want to eat or play or anything amiss, "and discussing theories about their use more effective:" I think every guy is afraid of a demon or goblin own and often frightened when he evokes, of course, children are naturally fearful scream whatever is the object used to scare them. " [56]
However, if you terrorize children with masked figures when just cry, want to eat or want to play, the magnitude of the projection and the need to control by the adult has reached enormous proportions that are only now Frank psychotic adults. You still can not accurately determine the frequency of use of these specific figures in the past, although there was talk of them as common. It can be shown that many forms were common. For example, in Germany until recently appeared in stores on Christmas Eve bundles of branches of broom, tied in the center, forming a stiff brush on both ends. These mallets were used to beat children. During the first week of December adults put frightening costumes and pretending to be a messenger of Christ, called Pelz-nickel, punishing the children and told them if they were to receive gifts for Christmas or not. [57]
Only when you see the struggle that parents are struggling to quit this habit of concrete is frightening images reveals the strength of the need to do so. One of the first advocates of children in nineteenth century Germany was Jean Paul Richter. Levanna In his book, which enjoyed great popularity, parents censured their children dominated by "images of terror", arguing that medicine provided evidence that "were often victims of madness." However, the urge to repeat the trauma of her own childhood was so strong that he was forced to invent more moderate versions of his own son:
"As a person can only terrorize the once with same thing, I think it's possible to release the children from reality through mock representations alarming circumstances. For example: I walk with my little Paul, aged nine, by the middle of the woods. suddenly appear and fall about us three bandits stained in black and armed, to which I have hired the day before for the adventure with a reward. We only carry two poles, but the band of thieves has swords and an unloaded gun ... I bypass the gun so it can not reach me and took the knife from the hand of one of the bandits with my stick ... But (I add in this second edition) all these games are of questionable value ... but knives and similar costume ... could be used profitably at night to bring to light the everyday fantasies inspired by the belief in spirits. " [58]
Another concrete industry This need to terrorize children involves the use of cadavers. Are known to many scenes from the novel by Ms. Sherwood, History of the Fairchild Family, [59] in which takes the children to visit the place which set out to inspect the executed bodies of the rotting hanged there while moralizing stories were told. What is not always taken into account is that these scenes were taken from real life and were an important part of childhood at the time. It was customary to take school children to take to witness executions and parents often bring to such events after whipping back home to remember what they had seen. [60] Even as Mafia Vegio humanist educator, who wrote books to protest against the practice of beating children, had to admit that "let them witness a public execution, sometimes there is no means a bad thing ". [61]
The effect of this constant contemplation of corpses had on children was, of course, very serious. A girl, whom her mother had shown as an example the corpse of his friend of nine years had just died, going from one place to another and said: "They will daughter into the hole, and what will mom? " [62] Another child woke in the night screaming after seeing hangings and" practiced hanging his cat. " [63] Harriet Spencer, aged eleven, wrote in his diary that he saw bodies everywhere, in the pillory and disjointed on the rack. His father had been seeing hundreds of bodies that had been dug to make room for others.
"Dad says it's stupid and superstitious fear of seeing corpses, so I got behind from it by a dark staircase, narrow and steep that went round and round, until they opened a door into a large cavern. Was illuminated by a lamp hanging from the center, and the priest carried a torch in his hand. At first he saw nothing and when I could barely see I dared to look, it was awful everywhere black figures, some grinning, some pointing out to us, or wince at all positions and so horrible that or was point of screaming and thought they all moved. When dad saw how uncomfortable I was not angry, but was very kind and said I must control myself and get close to touching one of them, which was very unpleasant. Her skin was dark brown and very dry on the bones, and hard to the touch, like marble. " [64]
This scene loving father helping her daughter overcome a fear of bodies is an example of what I call "projective attention" to distinguish the true empathetic care is the result of empathic response. The projective attention as the first step always requires the unconscious projection of the adult in the child, and can be distinguished empathic care because it is inadequate or insufficient in relation to the real needs of the child. The mother who responds to all manifestations of discomfort of breastfeeding child, which takes up a lot of clothes for your child when it is entrusted to a wet nurses outside the home, and which devotes a full hour to wrap your child in strips, are all examples of projective attention.
However, projective care enough to educate children. It's actually what anthropologists who study primitive children in villages often called "good child care, and until an anthropologist studying psychoanalytic training again the same tribe is not clear that what is measured is the projection and not true empathy. For example, studies of the Apache Indians [65] always give the highest ranks of the scale of "oral satisfaction," so important to the development of feelings of safety. The Apaches, like many primitive tribes, feed the children when they ask for it for two years and that is what the classification was based. But when the psychoanalytic anthropologist I. Bryce Boyer visited revealed the real projective basis of this fact:
"The attitude of mothers towards their children Apaches today is surprisingly inconsistent. They are usually very loving and caring relationships individuals with their young children. There is much body contact. The feeding time is usually determined by the cries of children, and any sign of discomfort should answer to all the breast or bottle. At the same time, mothers have little sense of responsibility regarding the care of children, and one has the impression that the mother's tenderness for his son is based on treatment provided him she wants for himself as an adult. There are many mothers who give up or give in to their children, young children who lovingly nursed a week earlier. This practice gives the Apaches aptly named "take the child." Not only feel consciously little guilty of this behavior, but sometimes are really pleased to be able to free of charge. In some cases, mothers who have given their children "forget" that they had. Apache typical mother believes that the only thing required is that a child's physical care. Has no scruples, or if you have very mild to leave your child with anyone while she impulsively leaves to chat, shop, play or drink and flirt. Ideally, the mother hopes her son to a sister or some older relative. Formerly almost always available resource. " [66]
Even
act as simple as feeling empathy for children suffering from shock was difficult for adults in the past. The few teachers that before modern times was advised not to beat up children usually worth the argument that this would have bad consequences, it would not harm the child. However, without this element of empathy, the council had no effect whatsoever and the children continued to be beaten as before. Mothers who trusted their children to wet nurses for three years felt really distressed when children did not want to go home, yet could not understand why. Impassive wrapped hundred generations their children in tight belts and they were unmoved protest loudly because they lacked the necessary psychological mechanism to empathize with them. Only when in the slow historical process of parent-child development finally acquired this power through the interaction of successive generations of parents and children, were warned that the wrap in strips was completely unnecessary. Richard Steele in The Tatler, described, in 1706, which in his view was a child after birth:
"I lie very still, but the witch, without any reason or provocation catch me and I wrapped the head pressing as it may; Then I tied the two legs and makes me swallow a horrible potion. I think it is an unpleasant way to reach life starting by taking a purge. Once dressed and took me next to a bed where she was a beautiful young woman (my mother) who had wanted to shake up suffocating ... and threw me into the arms of a girl who had been brought in to look after me. The girl was very proud of the position of a woman's own mother, and was determined to undress and dress again, when I said a noise, to see what was bothering me, it was sticking pins in every joint. I kept crying and then put me on his lap face down and to calm down, began to set all the pins, giving me pats on the back and belting out a lullaby ... " [67]
I have not found a description of such a degree of empathy in any time before the eighteenth century. Shortly after ending two thousand years of wrap strips.
Presumably there will be many sources of all types where you can find this rare empathic ability in the past. Of course, the first is available is the Bible: she has to find some empathy for the needs of children, and surely Jesus is always represented surrounded by children? However, when reading over two thousand references to children listed in Complete Concordance to the Bible, these gentle images do not appear. There are many on the slaughter of children, the stoning of children, administration of whipping of children, strict obedience on their love for their parents and their role as bearers of the name of the family, but not a single to disclose any empathy with their needs. Even the famous phrase: "Let the children come to me" is the usual practice in the Middle East to exorcise by laying on of hands, a practice that many holy men applied to eradicate the evil inherent in the children: "Then little children were brought him to lay hands on them and pray ... And when they had laid his hands, he went there "(Matt. 19: 13).
All this does not mean that parents of other times not love their children, yes they loved them. Neither today's parents who spank their children are sadists. They want, and his way sometimes, and sometimes are able to express tenderness, especially when children do not demand too much. The same is true of parents of other times, the expressions of affection to children occur more often when the child asks for nothing, especially when you are asleep or dead. Homer's phrase, "As a mother frightens a fly out of the way your child immersed in a sweet dream" is coupled with the epitaph of Marcial:
Cover your bones slightly tender grass,
And you land, not
fishes on how light it was for you [68]
is at the time of death when the father before incapable of empathy, regret, with Morell (1400): I loved, but never did you use in your love to make you happy, he was treated like a stranger rather than a son. I never gave him an hour's rest ... Never kissed him when he wished, he did you support the school and many hard knocks. " [69]
was certainly not the capacity to love that he lacked his father's past, but rather the emotional maturity necessary to see the child as a person other than himself. It is difficult to estimate the proportion of parents who reached today with some consistency empathetic level. I once did a survey of a dozen therapists asking how many of their patients at the beginning of the analysis were able to keep pictures of their children as individuals irrespective of their own projected needs, all of whom said they were very few those who had that ability. In the words of one of them, Amos Gunsberg: "That does not happen until the analysis is already somewhat advanced, always at a particular time, when they get an image of themselves as separate entities of his own mother omnipresent."
Parallel to the reaction
project is the inversion reaction, in which the child and father reverse roles, often with bizarre results. Investment begins long before birth the child is the source of the strong desire to have children who can be seen in the past and that is always expressed in terms of what children can hold for the parents, never what they are can give them. It complains that Medea before committing infanticide is that by killing their children will not have anyone to look after her:
"In vain, my children, I have raised, in vain I faced hardships and consumed me in efforts supporting the terrible pain of childbirth. And to think he had high hopes placed in you - me unhappy! - that alimentaríais me in my old age and that, once dead, I enterraríais with your own hands, desired action by mortals. And now that sweet thought is dead. " [70]
Once born, the child becomes the father of her mother and father, on the positive or negative, without taking any account of his age. The child, regardless of sex, be dressed in clothes similar to the style that carries the mother's father, is not only a long dress, but outdated, at least a generation earlier. [71] mother literally reborn in the son, not only saw the children as "miniature adults", but visibly and women in miniature, are sometimes low-cut dresses.
The idea that the grandfather is reborn in the child really was common in antiquity, [72] and the similarity between English words baby (child) and baba, Babe (grandmother) points to similar beliefs. [73] But there is evidence of specific investments in the past, investments that are almost hallucinatory. For example, adults used to kiss or suck the breasts of young children. Louis XIII, small, people around him and kissed him on the penis and nipples. Although Héroard, your diarist, makes him always play an active role (at thirteen months "means that M. De Souvré, M. De Termes, M. and M. De Liancourt Zaneta you kiss the penis"), [74] then it is clear that he was being passively manipulated: "I never want to let you touch the nipples Marquesa. His mother had told him: 'Lord, do not let anyone touch the nipples or the penis, you cut it'. " [75] But the adults could not resist putting their hands and lips on the penis and the nipples of the child. Both were the mother's breast recovered.
Another example of the image of the child and mother "was the widespread belief that children were in their breast milk had to be removed. At the Bali (premium) XIV century Italian was ordered to "take care of pressing child's breasts often to get the milk that has bothered them since. " [76] In reality, this belief is a slight justification in the fact that sometimes, rarely, the breast of a newborn may leave a drop of milky fluid, excess female hormones in the mother. But there is a difference between this and "unnatural practice, but common, hard to tighten the delicate breasts of a newborn child, with the rough hand of the nurse, who is the general cause of inflammation of these parts" as still had to point out in 1793 Alexander Hamilton American pediatrician. [77]
Kissing, sucking and squeezing her breasts are just some of the uses made of "child as breast." There is evidence of different practices, such as that against which he warned the doctor of the early nineteenth century.
"But a very bad practice and repulsive nature is echoed by many nurses, aunts and grandmothers, who allow the child to suck on their lips. I had the opportunity to observe how a beautiful child weakened as a result of having been sucking the lips of his ailing grandmother for over six months. " [78]
I even found several references to parents that "children licked." Possibly it was what George Du Maurier spoke when he said of his newborn daughter: "The nurse brings me to the bed every morning so you can lick it with 'the tongue of oil." I like it so much it will continue until you reach the age of reason. " [79]
It seems that the perfect child would literally nursed the father and the old would agree. Whenever you are talking about children inevitably brought up the story Valerio Max in describing the "perfect" child. In the words of Pliny:
of filial love has certainly been countless examples around the world, but in Rome there was one that you can not compare everyone else. A lowly plebeian woman who had just given birth to a son had permission to visit his mother who was in prison serving a sentence and the keeper will always recorded in advance in order that they get any food. He was surprised his mother feeding her breast milk. Given this astonishing fact, the loyal affection of the child was rewarded with the release of the mother and the support given to both life, and the place where it happened was sacred to the goddess for a temple dedicated to "Filial Love." [80]
The story was repeated over the centuries as an example moralizing. Peter Charron (1596) said of him, that "did return the creek to the spring" [81] and the issue was brought to the painting by Rubens, Vermeer and other artists.
Often, the need to represent the image of the child as a mother "is imperative. Here, in a typical incident, a "joke" spent a little girl of six years, in 1656 by Cardinal Mazarin and other adults:
"One day, joking with her about a philanderer she said she had, at the end began to scold her for being pregnant ... I stretched the clothes from time to time and made him believe he was fat. This went on for as long as was deemed necessary to convince her that she was pregnant ... When the time of delivery, she found herself waking up one morning with a newborn child between savannas. You can not imagine the shock and grief felt at the sight. "Such a thing," he said, "It never occurred to anyone other than the Virgin Mary and me, for I have not felt any pain. " The queen went to comfort her and offered to be the godmother. Many came to talk to her as just given birth. " [82]
Children have always taken care of adults in very concrete ways. Since Roman times, children serve their parents at the table and in the Middle Ages all children except those of royal blood, acting as servants in their homes or the homes of others, and often had to rush back from school at noon to meet their parents. [83] I will not discuss here the issue of child labor. But should be noted that children usually from four to five years, worked very, long before child labor became a topic of discussion in the nineteenth century.
Figure 2. Elizabethan Family
at a dinner.
Note how younger children are standing to eat, the eldest son of the family serves
But the inversion reaction is manifested most clearly in the emotional interaction of children and adults. Today's social workers who visit mothers who spank their children often are surprised at how young children respond to the needs of their parents:
remember seeing a girl of eighteen months to calm his mother was extremely distraught and crying. First let the bottle that was sucking. Then it was turning to go to his mother, touching and ultimately make it calm down (which I was unable to even begin to do.) When he saw that his mother had calmed down, returned to his seat, leaned, grabbed the bottle and continued sucking. [84]
This role was often taken by children in the past. A girl "never cried or was upset ... many times, being a baby in the arms of his mother raised his little hand and wiping the tears from the cheeks of his mother. " [85] Doctors used to try to induce mothers to breastfeed their children instead of handing them over to a wet nurse outside the home, promising that "in return for this, the child tries to give away a thousand delights ... kisses, pats her hair, nose and ears, flattered ... " [86]
Figure 2.
Children as the loving mother.
medieval Madonnas portraits, often showing faces stiff, alternating with some like these, which show that the child is a lover who passionately embraces the mother
Around the same subject, I have cataloged over hundred pictures of mothers and children of all countries making sure that the tables in which the children watch, smile and caress mothers are older than those in mothers look, smile and pat the children, mothers' attitudes rare in any painting.
The willingness of children to care for adults was often their salvation. Madame de Sevigne decided in 1670 not to take her granddaughter with her eighteen months in a journey that could have been fatal to the child:
"Madame, du Fou du Py does not want me to take my granddaughter . He says that would expose him to danger, and finally I surrendered. I do not want the girl to take any chances, I have great affection ... A thousand things speaks, people party, slaps, crosses himself, calls forgiveness, makes bows, kisses her hand, shrugs, dance, coax, make the chuck, in short, is a delight, and spend hours having fun with it. I do not want to die. " [87]
The need for maternal affection felt by parents assumed a huge burden for the growing child. Sometimes even caused her death. One of the most common cause of death was asphyxiation young children in an adult bed to lie on the child, and although the cause was often an excuse for infanticide, pediatricians admit that when it was an accident , this occurred because the mother refused to put the baby into another bed when she went to sleep. "Not wanting to be separated from the child, he pressed even harder when you sleep. His chest pressed the child's nose. " [88] This reverse image of the child as shelter was the reality behind the common warning in the Middle Ages that the father should take care not to spoil their children "as the ivy will certainly kill the tree that is entangled, and monkey in his arms close to their pups to death for mere affection. " [89] Continue reading http://www.psicodinamicajlc.com/articulos/evolucion_infancia.html
