Lloyd deMause
Thirty-six years ago, we discovered a field of study called psychohistory.
What in heck, you may ask, is psychohistory?
For an answer, in January 1987, we called on Lloyd deMause, the inventor of this sub-psychiatric science, at his office in New York City.
“Psychohistory,” Dr. deMause told us, “is the science of historical motivation.”
Meaning?
“What people’s motives are in history.”
As in…
“What motivates people to go to war.”
That day we conducted a lengthy interview with Dr. deMause. It has never been published … until now.
Robert F. Kennedy
With Russian dictator Vladimir Putin veering toward the use of nuclear weapons, it seems that what the good doctor laid on us decades ago may be more relevant today than ever before.
Lloyd deMause was educated at Columbia University and did post-graduate work in political science before training at a psychoanalytical institute.
Essentially, as a “psycho-historian,” Dr. Lloyd presumed to put history on the couch — and taught his techniques of psychohistory to students at the City University of New York, who would often tell him, “Now I’m scared to death like you are.”
Which makes this a good Halloween story to boot.
“We look very carefully at what people said to each other during a crisis,” Dr. deMause began, “and what was scribbled on the edges of diplomatic document as they went back and forth, the telegrams that were sent, and what cartoons appeared in the newspapers. Suddenly, you begin to see things in quite a different way.”
How so?
“You begin to wonder whether sets of different nations might not be influencing other people unconsciously. These unconscious messages pass around all the time.”
Is there someone in control of such messages or their conveyance?
“I don’t think it’s conscious at all, but I don’t make that distinction.”
Then who’s sending the messages? The White House? The media?
“I don’t think it’s just the leaders or the media. If I looked only at letters to the editor, I’d get the same sort of images. The group fantasy.”
AND THAT”S THE ESSENCE OF PSYCHOHISTORY
“The group fantasy works in cycles,” Dr. deMause explained. “We pour our bad feelings and unacceptable wishes onto the president, and then it disintegrates, and we must find something abroad to take care of it because he is no longer able to handle our fantasies. Cycles for this tend to be around the 50-year period.
“Essentially, you go through four general periods: A new child-rearing mode, a number of people brought up a little warmer, a little more individualistic. That group does something new. That’s the ‘20s and ‘60s in America. That’s the Young Romantics of the early 19th century.
“But they start to drive the older classes bonkers. Progress produces enormous anxiety in the older cycle classes. The first thing to arrive is a depression. Eighty-five percent of all major wars that occurred over the last 800 years have been on the upcycle of the wave, because there’s too much progress. After each war, you had a depression.”
So if one is trying to forecast what happens next?
“Since 1945 and the atomic bomb, most of the big nations have been trying to work out new patterns, trying to make do with small recessions, not big depressions, trying to make do with smaller wars, not big wars. A depression is an internal sacrifice. As a historian, I see what we do is a repeat of similar things in earlier civilizations, which emphasized that the reason you have leaders is for sacrifice to the gods.
“That’s true now too. Governments will fall unless they perform their sacrificial function from time to time. They must stop the older classes from being too anxious, give them sacrificial scapegoats for the things they are achieving. I’ve studied societies going on with continuous wars for thousands of years. You’d think they’d kick out the guy who’s making these wars, and yet they go on and on.”
And you’re saying it’s because of poor child-rearing?
“If we all had terrific child-rearing,” says Dr. deMause, “there’d be no reason to continue going through depressions and wars. That’s what I look at in terms of what’s coming from any nation: what they do to their kids. For instance, when children were un-swaddled in the West. Make a list of the dates of un-swaddling and then put it next to the date of the first democratic revolutions. They’re identical.”
Better child-rearing would put an end to depressions and wars?
“That’s the long-term solution. But we have so many big bombs around, we’re not going to get there if we wait for the whole world to do it. And many countries — Arabic fundamentalist countries, for example — are only just going through their reformation. And they’re going to get atomic bombs.”
So what can anyone do about it?
“As a psycho-historian, I try to call attention to these unconscious fantasies. It is only possible to live out unconscious fantasies if they remain unconscious. As soon as they become conscious, it’s very difficult to act them out. I liken what we do to a suicide hotline. When a guy calls and he wants to jump out a window, there’s no time to cover all his childhood problems.
“But what you can do is stop him from jumping by talking to him and make him aware of his anger, make him aware of the difference between fantasy and reality. I don’t think I’m going to save the world. But sometimes small things make big differences.”
CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS
“I’ll never forget Bobby Kennedy’s role in the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Dr. deMause continued. “They were sitting in the White House Situation Room, and there’s a hundred-mile line drawn around Cuba, and J.F.K, said we would sink the next Russian ship that crosses it. A guy walks in and says, ‘Well, a Russian ship is coming across. Shall we sink it?’ Khrushchev said that if a Russian ship was sunk, they’d launch their missiles. World War III.
“A bunch of images came to Bobby’s mind: The image of his brother (Joseph, who died in World War II); images of children dying, which is the essence of war. He tapped into his own unconscious and the unconscious of the whole nation. For no reason at all, he came up with an answer, turned to J.F.K. and said, ‘Let’s redraw the line to 50 miles and give them a little more time, and J.F.K. said OK.
“In the space of 50 miles, the Russians changed their mind. The only hope we’ve got is to be conscious. The brain stem is where the unconscious is, our reptilian brain, and it leads us astray. That’s where all our childhood material is, and it drives us into these irrational solutions.”
How does the group fantasy work?
“Groups form their unconscious collective — the group fantasy — through their communications. I’m always astonished that the same idea or image of a cartoon will appear in Seattle and New York on the same day — two different cartoons projecting an identical image.”
What do you attribute this to?
“A basic stock of images we all have, like falling off a cliff. The imagery of a dragon comes from way back when you’re in the womb. The placenta itself has veins, and you’ve got a snake-like umbilicus. Serpentine monsters and octopus are imagery from the womb. When I see a president (in a cartoon drawing) grabbed and strangled by a monster called inflation, I know we’re about to consider a war solution. We’re being strangled like we were in the womb.”
THE PROCESS
What is your method for detecting the meaning of the imagery around us that produces the group fantasy?
“Essentially,” Dr. deMause elucidated, “you pick out all the emotional words, all the metaphors, all the similes, and leave out all the objects. Leave out the nouns unless it’s a family image. It is the emotion, the active verbs you’re going for, and the adjectives.
“The most astonishing thing is that you can’t miss the fantasies. A group fantasy runs for a month or two. And it’s overwhelming. I was teaching at City University when President Reagan was shot. For three weeks before he was shot, all my students were gathering images. The front page of U.S. News & World Report (was) headlined ‘Too Much Waste—Reagan’s Next Target.’ My students kept coming in and saying ‘Look, they’re going to kill Reagan!’ We went for a couple weeks that way. I went back and found images prior to J.F.K.’s assassination — images that would suggest to an assassin to kill him.”
As in a Manchurian candidate?
“If you want to get a message through, you slightly hide it. You get it past our censor, our unconscious mind. You say, ‘Waste Reagan’ in a funny way, you put a dash in between, and you show Reagan with the word ‘target’ next to him.”
And you’re saying the editor who created that headline had no idea of the unconscious impact?
“Unconsciously, the editor was fully attuned to the group fantasy. That’s why certain cartoonists are good, others are not. The cartoonist who doesn’t tap into the group fantasy loses his job. The front cover is the most discussed thing at Time and Newsweek. They discuss it in secret behind locked doors. And yet, the number of times they come out with the same image is astonishing.”
So the editors devising the headlines, the cartoons and cover imagery are not consciously aware of the group fantasy they are promoting?
“No, the group fantasy is unconscious.”
What about the person who picks up the hidden message? How does that occur?
“A disturbed person — let’s use John Hinckley (who shot Reagan) as an example. He had been stalking someone else, but nothing legitimized it. Then he sees all these messages on the newsstands … whether he was going to shoot Reagan or someone else was determined by the group fantasy at that time. Take Sirhan Sirhan, R.F.K.’s (accepted) assassin. He has always claimed he adored Robert Kennedy but somehow got hypnotized into shooting at him. You’ve always got, at any given time, 20,000 crazy nuts out there to pick up the message.
“Maybe someplace, when someone’s just about ready to say, ‘I can’t lose face, we’ve got to launch the missiles,’ somebody will say, ‘I remember this guy deMause in New York. …’ ”
If only.
As this country is strangled by inflation — the sign, claims Lloyd deMause, that war is looming — one hopes world leaders will come to their senses and, as Bobby Kennedy did during the Cuban Missile Crisis, give more time for those losing face to get fully conscious and come to their senses.
AND SPEAKING OF VLADIMIR PUTIN
How was the Russian tyrant reared as a child?
The answer, in the context of Dr. deMause’s theories, is dangerously chilling.
Mad Vlad grew up in St. Petersburg, a city devastated by the Nazis, in an apartment infested by rats, no hot water or bathtub, no heating, two older siblings who perished — and he was regularly bullied by other kids.
As reported last March by Aces Too High News: “Hitler, Stalin and Mao Zedong all suffered years of merciless beatings and other unconscionable abuse in childhood and went on to be responsible for the deaths of millions of people.”
WASHINGTON WHISPERS
A reliable Pentagon source in-the-know tells The Investigator that reporters from several national publications (can’t name them, says the source) are working overtime to nail down stories suggesting that the CIA warned senior military officers in advance of the suicide bombing at Kabul airport’s gateway on Aug. 26, 2021 — and in essence ignore the intelligence, resulting in 183 deaths, including 13 members of the U.S. military.
Incredibly, one theory being pursued is that military commanders purposely ignored the warning.
Reason?
“The conspiracy theory view is that they needed to justify why just a trickle of people were getting through,” says our Pentagon source.
The more sober question reporters are asking: Where are the two senior translators who were on a bus (part of a 13-bus convoy not permitted access to the airport)? These were personal translators to Gen. Kenneth McKenzie Jr., who was U.S. Cen Com chief, and four-star Gen. Scott Miller.
The whisper is that the U,N,-certified Afghan translators were taken off their bus and spirited safely through Qatar before settlement somewhere in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
Reporters and Republican congressional investigators alike are desperate to locate these translators for establishing the truth about a) the lead-up to the bombing and b) why the 13-bus convoy (which included some rather important individuals) in which they had been traveling was not admitted entry.
If Republicans win a majority in the House in the midterm elections next month, it is whispered to us that No. 1 on their investigative committee agenda is the bungled withdrawal of Afghanistan, and the comings and goings (less on the goings) at Kabul airport.
Republican congressional leaders believe that the withdrawal was the result of a secret pact between Joe Biden and China: Give Afghanistan to the Chinese, who, through Pakistani proxies, would gain access to rare earth minerals. In return, Pakistan and China would ensure that the Taliban do not launch strikes against Americans or their facilities.
Nos. 2 and 3 on the Republican hit list are whispered to be Hunter Biden (and the contents of his laptop) and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (Since we learned this, prosecutors in the Biden case appear to finally be moving on this, a balancing act — our source speculates — for indicting Donald Trump over his retention of classified files.)
Regarding Ukraine, it is whispered that the Kremlin has been told by senior U.S. officials, in no uncertain terms, that if they use a tactical nuclear weapon on Ukraine, the response from NATO and the USA will be “catastrophic” for Russia. Specifically, Western forces conveyed an intention to demolish all Russian conventional forces on the (Ukrainian) battlefield and to include their Black Sea naval fleet.
“All interagency pipelines are open,” our Pentagon source told us. “I’ve seen the real maps. With Ukrainian forces only 12 miles from the Russian border, the situation is extremely volatile — and much more serious than the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
A VERY CHARMED CHINA
If there is any good news, it would be this: Not only has China rebuffed Mr. Putin’s efforts to purchase weapons, so has North Korea.
China is delighted to sit on the sideline, waiting for Mr. Putin to deplete his military personnel and hardware so it can challenge a weakened Russia over its own territorial disputes.
Another Department of Defense source tells The Investigator that once a war concludes (presumably with Mad Vlad’s defeat and disappearance as Russia’s dictator), there are plans afoot by the victors to disassemble the Russian Federation into independent countries and thereafter render them harmless to their neighbors.
“What you will see,” he says, “is oligarchs and local warlord-type politicians gobbling up and ingesting pieces of Russia like starving prisoners at a Texas barbecue.”
In other words, the exact opposite of what power-mad Putin desired as his legacy. May all his demons come true.
Robert Eringer is a longtime Montecito author with vast experience in investigative journalism. He welcomes questions or comments at reringer@gmail.com.
