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         MindNet Journal - Vol. 1, No. 64
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         V E R I C O M M / MindNet         "Quid veritas est?"
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    The views and opinions expressed below are not necessarily the
    views and opinions of VERICOMM, MindNet, or the editors unless
    otherwise noted.

    The following is reproduced here with the express permission of
    the author.

    Permission is given to reproduce and redistribute, for
    non-commercial purposes only, provided this information and the
    copy remain intact and unedited.

    Editor: Mike Coyle

    Assistant Editor: Rick Lawler

    Research: Darrell Bross

    Editor's Note:

    The author of the following speech, Lloyd deMause, is the editor
    of _The Journal_of_Psychohistory_, POB 401, New York, NY 10024,
    212.799.2294; 3 Henriette St., London, England WC2E 8LU,
    01.240.0856. Subscription Rates: U.S.: Individuals--$52.00 one
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    THE SOCIAL ALTER

    By Lloyd deMause

    This speech was given at the Eighteenth Annual Convention of the
    International Psychohistorical Association on June 7, 1995 in
    New York City.

    ----------------------------------------------------------------

    Social theorists have not been much interested in psychology.
    Durkheim, in fact, founded sociology with books on suicide and
    incest that claimed they are wholly without psychological
    causes1. Sociologists still echo Durkheim's obiter dicta against
    psychology. Most today agree with C. Wright Mills, who told me
    when I was his research assistant at Columbia University, "Study
    only enough psychology to make sure you can answer the bastards
    when they attack you."

    Psychologists, for their part, have their own massive denial
    system: ever since Freud and began to reveal the ubiquity of
    sexual seduction of children, he and most psychotherapists since
    then have denied that the widespread child abuse around them was
    the cause of emotional problems. As Freud said, "sexual assaults
    on small children happen too often for them to have any
    aetiological importance..."

    Freud's opinion during his entire life was that children could be
    physically, sexually and emotionally abused without psychological
    effects. He did not think that having sex with children was
    traumatic, In fact, he sometimes said seduction was beneficial,
    as, for instance, when women seduce little boys: "One can
    regularly observe in the circle of one's acquaintances that...men
    who have been seduced by women at an early age escape
    neurasthenia."2 Freud nowhere describes the rape of children as a
    betrayal of trust or as painful or as horrifying to the helpless
    child. He believed it presented problems only in the sense that
    it provided pleasurable but "unconsummated" excitation."3 Sexual
    seductions, he said, "produced no effect on the child"4 until a
    later assault awakened the memory by "deferred action."5 Freud
    even sided with the perpetrator. In the case of Dora, for
    instance, who was at 14 molested by a friend of her father's,
    Freud said, by a "kiss upon her lips [and] the pressure of his
    erect member against her body,"6 Freud backed the father who said
    she should have not objected, since the molester was a friend.
    Freud declared the girl "hysterical" if she complained about the
    assault on her: "I should without question consider a person
    hysterical in whom an occasion for sexual excitement elicited
    feeling that were preponderantly or exclusively
    unpleasurable..."7 His colleagues usually blamed the victim too.
    Abraham called sexual molestation of his patients by adults
    "desired by the child unconsciously [because of an] abnormal
    psyche-sexual constitution,"8 concluding they had "an abnormal
    desire for obtaining sexual pleasure, and in consequence of this
    undergo sexual traumas [rape]."9

    Nor has opinion changed in either academia or psychiatry lately.
    While many give lip service to the immorality of sexual assault
    on children, their real opinion, I have found from having given
    hundreds of speeches on the history of child abuse to academic
    and mental health audiences in the U.S. and Europe, is quite
    different. Academics who are concerned with human sexuality
    mostly agree with Kinsey ("It is difficult to understand why) a
    child...should be disturbed at having its genitalia touched,")10
    his co-author Pomeroy ("incest between adults and younger
    children can...be a satisfying and enriching experience,")11
    sexual historians Edwardes and Masters ("there is no shame in
    being a...pederast or a rapist if one is satisfied,")12 child
    sexuality expert social worker LeRoy Schultz "[incest is] a
    positive, healthy experience")13 or any of the hundreds of others
    in anthropology, psychology and history who determine the basic
    propedophile agenda in their fields today.14 The same is true for
    psychiatry. I recently was invited to address the American
    Psychiatric Association Convention in Philadelphia on the subject
    "The History of Child Assault." I gave far more evidence than I
    have cited here showing that the majority of children in all
    periods of history and all nations were sexually abused. They
    questioned me for a while, asking for even more evidence, and
    then seemed to admit that what I said was true. Then, for the
    last half hour, they ignored me, and discussed among themselves
    the following propositions: "If childhood sexual abuse has been
    so widespread for so long, perhaps we are wrong, perhaps we
    shouldn't be creating a conflict in children's minds. Since
    everyone does it, maybe sex between children and adults isn't
    wrong at all." Plus: "What might gentle incest be like?" After
    hearing this, I was not surprised when, a few months later, the
    American Psychiatric Association took pedophilia off their
    Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV), saying according to
    one disgusted psychiatrist, that "a person is no longer a
    pedophile simply because he molests children...He is a pedophile
    ONLY if he feels bad or anxious about what he's doing;"
    otherwise, having sex with children is a perfectly normal
    activity.16

    This massive denial of the origin of individual emotional
    problems in the traumatic abuse of children is in fact one and
    the same as the massive denial of the psychological origins of
    social behavior. They are two sides of the same historical coin.
    Both are rooted in the fact that our deepest fears are stored in
    a dissociated part of the brain that remains largely unexplored
    and is the source of the historical restaging of these traumas.
    Only when the contents and psychodynamics of these dissociated
    traumatic memories are made fully conscious can we understand the
    waking nightmare that we call history.

    To achieve this understanding, we can draw upon the resources of
    neurobiology, experimental and clinical psychology, history and
    the other social sciences to provide a fully scientific
    psychogenic theory of history. I will first review briefly recent
    advances in the understanding of the neurobiology of trauma and
    its dissociation and storage in a separate module of the brain.

    The extensive work of LeDoux16 has provided wide evidence that
    there are two memory systems in the brain, the earliest, the
    early emotional memory system, being located in neural networks
    centering on the amygdala, while the later, verbal, declarative
    memory system is located in networks centering on the
    hippocampus, which does not begin to mature until we are 3 to 4
    years of age. Early fears and other traumatic memories, even in
    other mammals, are not only stored in this separate module of the
    brain, they are fairly permanent, and are usually inaccessible to
    the conscious working memory of your prefrontal cortex with which
    you think. LeDoux thus gives a neurobiological basis for the
    psychotherapist's finding that everyone continues to react to
    dissociated early memories as though they were vividly present
    later in adult life. Later communication between the emotional
    and the declarative memory systems is extremely difficult; it is
    only accomplished with effort, by following in psychotherapy the
    associations of memories (that is bundles of neurons) "clumped"
    together in this separate memory module. LeDoux actually shows
    microscopic photos of these new neuronal connections in the
    amygdala, providing direct evidence for the existence of the
    initial amnesia and later recapture of unconscious memories.

    Van der Kolk17 and others have further established that these
    early traumas not only have separate neural modules, but, in
    addition, result in intense overstimulation of neurotransmitter
    neurons in the central nervous system, producing extreme
    hypersensitivity and imbalance in such important
    neurotransmitters as catecholamines and particularly serotonin.
    Coleman18 has seen the serotonin level drop precipitously in an
    11-month-old baby following the sudden death of his 8-year-old
    sister, and has experimentally shown early stress in both animals
    and humans can lower serotonin levels and cause anxious, agitated
    feelings and behavior. Roy has shown the role of low serotonin
    levels in suicide, violence and alcoholism, and Buck has
    successfully reduced these violent behaviors through serotonin
    uptake inhibitors alone.19 In fact, enough is now known about the
    linage between low serotonin levels and aggressive behavior to
    suggest that the best hope for humankind in another nuclear
    standoff like the Cuban Missile Crisis will be to dump massive
    doses of Prozac, a serotonin agonist, into the water supply of
    the capitols of the nations involved.

    Other neurobiologists20 have linked early trauma and
    neurotransmitter imbalances and resulting neuronal receptor
    hypersensitivities with depression, panic attacks, intrusive
    flashbacks to traumatic images, explosive anger and social
    violence. In addition, surges of catacholamines21 plus endogenous
    opioid release, meant to blunt the painful affect, that later
    accompany traumatic memories may produce addiction and restaging
    of the traumas in order to momentarily obtain relief of anxiety.
    This restaging can be accomplished individually, through
    addiction to retramatization, or socially, through trance rituals
    that inflict pain in preliterate groups or in the manic
    restagings of nations such as in wars and revolutions. In all of
    these restagings, people first become hypervigilant and paranoid
    as catacholamine imbalances and serotonin depletion lead them to
    expect attack, then engage in sacrificial restaging rituals that
    are usually both sadistic-inflicting the trauma upon others--and
    masochistic--destroying your own wealth and even sacrificing your
    own lives. The result is a feeling of relief that we have
    survived the apocalypse in our heads plus a feeling of triumph
    produced by the manic opioid surge.

    Thus our early traumas become wired into separate emotional
    memory module and become projected onto the historical stage in
    such a manner that they appear to be happening to the group
    rather than being internal, creating group-fantasies so intense
    and compelling that they take on a life of their own, a life that
    is imagined as happening in a dissociated sphere called
    "society." History, therefore, is a dissociative disorder
    designed to help achieve homoeostasis by discharging increasing
    anxieties experienced in common with others.

    Let us consider a typical example. An anti-abortion demonstrator
    goes home at night after picketing an abortion clinic. He has
    trouble getting to sleep. He falls asleep, then wakes up from a
    nightmare in which he hears a fetus screaming out, "Help! They're
    trying to kill me!" He gets up, goes out to the abortion clinic
    and shoots a doctor.

    What the traumatic restaging model sees in this typical
    "political" act is a person reliving an earlier personal fear of
    being killed, a fear that began with his experiencing some sort
    of terrible distress while a helpless baby or even as a fetus and
    compounded by other traumatic fears during his childhood. These
    early traumas are stored in his early emotional memory module
    which acts as a "trauma sink" to collect his traumatic incidents
    and related defenses so that the fully conscious main part of his
    personality can proceed with daily living tasks.

    This separate, dissociated self begins with our very first
    traumatic memories and feelings and is experienced as a world of
    fantasy, peopled by witches and dragons and heroes and monsters,
    organized by narratives in books and on TV and played out with
    toys and games and in peer groups all split-off parts of the
    psyche, experienced as "not-me" and dissociated From "real"
    personal life, but all nevertheless very real and emotionally
    intense. As the child grows up, he or she begins to integrate
    this fantasy life into his or her social life with peers in
    "play," using cultural content to create scenarios that become
    adult group-fantasies that embody, re-enact and provide defenses
    against early traumatic content. These group-fantasies are
    dissociated and seem to have a life of their own, a life we term
    "social" or "political" or "religious." The process is similar to
    that observed in the creation of alters, or alternate
    personalities, in people who have Multiple Personality Disorders.
    The condition has three criteria: (a) the personalities seem to
    be distinct, (b) the dominant personality at any particular time
    determines the individual's behavior, and (c) each personality is
    complex and integrated with its own unique behavior patterns.22
    There are four core dissociative symptoms: amnesia,
    depersonalization, derealization and identity alteration.23
    Severe, repeated child abuse almost always lies behind this
    dissociative disorder. Kluft says, "Most multiples, as children,
    have been physically brutalized, psychologically assaulted,
    sexually violated, and affectively overwhelmed"24 as Ross puts
    it,

         a multiple personality disorder is a little girl imagining
         that the abuse is happening to someone else. The imaging
         is so intense and subjectively compelling, and is
         reinforced so many times by the ongoing trauma, that the
         created identities seem to take on a life of their own,
         though they are all parts of one person.25

    Alters--often a dozen or more of them--usually have different
    names, handwriting, voices, vocabularies, expressions, even EEG
    alpha rhythms, and are often amnesic of each other's
    activities.26 Often an alter is frozen in time, stuck in the
    trauma that gave it birth, and child personalities will often
    expect to be sexually assaulted by the therapist, who is mistaken
    for the abuser from the past and cower in the corner, fearing the
    inevitable rape.27

    In addition to the host personality, who is often depressed,
    masochistic, compulsively good and suffers from time losses,
    there are alters such as fearful children who recall the traumas,
    inner persecutors, expressors of forbidden impulses, avengers,
    apologists for the abusers, and so on. Sometimes the alter will
    be just a fragment of the past. For instance, one alter of a
    woman was named "Flash," continuously reliving the memory of the
    floodlights used during the pornographic filming of repeated
    rapes when she was three years old or another of her alters who
    was called "Adu," from when she was gang raped at twelve and her
    boyfriend, Andrew, was shot and: she screamed out his name over
    and over, a screaming inside her head that continued for ten
    years.28 The formation of such alters is life-saving, allowing
    the host personality to defend against unbearable trauma and
    continue living. Their tragedy is that these alters restage their
    traumas in adult life, in what Kluft calls "revictimization
    behaviors" or "the sitting duck syndrome," during which they feel
    they are taking control of the abuse and at least ending the
    intolerable agony of waiting for it to happen.29

    The abortion clinic bomber also has an alter who turns his
    helplessness and fears of being hurt as a baby into an act of
    violence toward a scapegoat, the abortion doctor, thereby acting
    out his revenge for his earlier traumas. Many multiple
    personality patients similarly report hearing voices of infants
    crying out or screaming in distress, asking to be rescued.30 The
    main difference is that in the case of the anti-abortion bomber
    many other people in society collude with his central delusion
    that he must avenge fetuses to retain his sanity.

    A group-fantasy, then, is produced by a collection of social
    alters as an agreement by groups of people to pool their traumas
    into a delusional social construction. Social alters have four
    main characteristics:

         (1) they are separate neural memory modules that are
         repositories for traumatic events and accompanying
         feelings frozen in time,
         (2) organized into dynamic structures containing a different
         set of goals, values and defenses than the main self that
         help prevent the traumas and resulting despair from
         overwhelming the one's life,
         (3) split off by a seamless wall of denial,
         depersonalization, discontinuity of affect and disownership
         of responsibility that is maintained in collusion with
         others in society who have similar alters to deny, and that
         are
         (4) communicated, elaborated and acted out in
         group-fantasies embedded in political, religious and social
         institutions.

    Social alters are distinct, separate, complex, integrated, and
    with their own repertoire of behaviors that are dominant in the
    social sphere. The main difference between social alters and most
    alters of a multiple personality disorder is that social alters
    replace the usual denial of recent actions by amnesia by denial
    of emotional connection to these actions, maintained through
    group collusion. Thus, even though one may be co-consciousness of
    the activities and feelings of one's social alter, one has no
    consciousness of the connections between it and the rest of one's
    emotional life; in other words, one always goes to war because of
    the chance appearance of an enemy, never because of anything that
    is currently happening in one's head or heart.

    Social alters are organized neural modules providing emotional
    suitcases into which we stuff our most traumatic split-off fears
    and feelings, containing our continuing lives as traumatized
    children, abuser apologists, inner persecutors, heroic avengers,
    and other consciously intolerable parts of ourselves. Except for
    a few psychopaths and psychotics, most of us keep these suitcases
    in the closet with the door locked, seemingly away from our daily
    lives, but we lend the keys to group delegates whom we depend
    upon to act out their contents for us so we can deny ownership of
    the actions. Periodically, when our despair becomes too great to
    dump into others and our alters seem too distant so that we feel
    depleted of vital parts of ourselves, these suitcases explode,
    and their fearsome contents are loosed upon our everyday life in
    what we term wars or revolutions or other social violence.

    Even the language of social alters is special, since they must
    communicate with other social alters in elliptical form in order
    that their unacceptable true content may remain hidden to our
    main selves. Therefore, group-fantasies are often conveyed by
    subliminal embedded messages rather than clear, overt language.
    Groups speak this embedded language when they are in a group
    trance. Leaders of groups must therefore be adept at trance
    induction techniques in order to accomplish their delegated
    tasks.

    It is not difficult to see face-to-face members of a small group
    switch into their social alters. As the group gathers, people
    chat, laugh, argue and interact from their central selves. At a
    certain moment, however, "when the time comes for the group to
    form," individuals switch into their social alters a
    group-trance31 forms, language and demeanor change, people feel
    somehow detached, estranged from their usual range of feelings,
    deskilled of critical faculties, a leader is imagined to be "in
    control" and to contain a life-sustaining fluid, group boundaries
    are imagined, enemies arise, factions form to act out splits, and
    empathy diminishes. it is now acceptable, in fact necessary, to
    exploit and abuse others. Scapegoats volunteer for sacrifice, a
    group bible and group history and group spirit and other
    delusional group-fantasies form, and group life begins, seemingly
    a more emotionally vital life than everyday life, despite a
    certain sleepiness that is a result of the group trance. When the
    group "ends," often with a trance-breaking clap of hands termed
    applause, people switch back to their central personalities,
    experience a tremendous emotional let-down as vital parts of
    themselves are lost, are disoriented for a moment and mourn the
    group's ending--in the same manner as multiple personalities
    often feel more connected to their real feelings when they are
    "in" their alters.

    Nations, home of our social alters, act out what seems to be a
    nonpersonal history because social events appear to exist "in
    reality" but seem not to be a result of the intentions or
    emotions of any individual. Since the emotional connections
    between society and self are amnesic--nations appear to operate
    sui generis--individuals can deny responsibility for what they do
    and social events can appear to be wholly without motivation.
    Thus historians can write tens of thousands of volumes on war
    without ever once mentioning the word "anger." The world has
    agreed to apply these emotional only to individual actions, and
    collude in saying that wars are fought only by abstract entities
    called nations that do not feel anger, groups that are alters to
    us because they embody and carry out our group-fantasies. The
    "nation" part of us never talks to our "real" self and is
    considered to be not really part of us. Soldiers who kill in
    wars, for instance, are not personally called murderers and
    politicians who cut off welfare to children are not personally
    child killers because these actions are imagined to be part of a
    different reality system, a dream-world of pooled social alters
    that is not really our responsibility, somehow not really "us."

    That we can all switch between our central selves and our social
    alters so easily without anyone noticing it is a testimony to the
    power of the social trance. It is not difficult to watch C-Span
    on TV and see politicians switch back and forth between their
    central selves and their social alters. For instance, I recently
    watched on C-SPAN as Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich stood on
    the floor of Congress and spoke for hours about the necessity for
    cutting all kinds of government allowances for children, actions
    that would deprive millions of children of basic food and
    shelter. Then, in a blink of an eye, I watched him switch from
    his social alter back to his main self and call for government
    tax credits for poor children to buy laptop computers so they
    could get on the Internet.

    What had happened psychologically was something like this.
    Gingrich had just been inaugurated as Speaker of the House,
    becoming world famous and appearing on the covers of all the
    newsweeklies, and had just received a book contract for $4.5
    million. The success of his central self made his social alter,
    needy-baby Newt, son of an unwed teenage mother who could not
    give him love,32 feel jealous and cry out "ME TOO! I NEED SOME!"
    His central self was threatened with being overwhelmed with the
    memories of deprivation and despair and dependency that he had so
    long walled off. Rather than feel this despair, he handled it by
    dumping it into millions of children and letting them feel it for
    him, saying sufficient food and shelter would make them feel "too
    dependent." Others accepted his delusional actions as "social,"
    not "personal," never asking why suddenly the nation's most
    important agenda was to pass federal legislation punishing
    children--one even prohibiting states from paying for baby
    diapers.33 Other Congressmen began calling welfare recipients
    living in poverty "alligators" and "wolves;" one waved a sign on
    the floor of Congress that said "Don't feed the alligators."34

    If helpless people are hallucinated to be vicious alligators,
    then obviously scapegoats exist as "poison containers" to feel
    our memories of hunger and despair at being unloved. Without
    poison containers, we would have to feel them for ourselves.
    Gingrich knew he was acting as a delegate for millions of other
    Americans who, like himself, had been feeling successful recently
    (corporate profits had just soared 40 percent, the stock market
    was up 20 percent) and who now wanted poor children to feel their
    emotions for them, so his speech was full of his manic
    excitement. To emphasize the point that it was our abused child
    alter that was the target, legislation to repeal the Child Abuse
    Prevention and Treatment Act was passed. After Gingrich finished
    his anti-children speech, he felt better, having punished his
    "greedy" child alter, and then switched from his angry, detached
    alter voice back into his more friendly-voiced main personality
    and talked about giving ghetto children computers, which he
    himself enjoys using to surf the Internet.

    Each Gingrich personality was amnesic to the meaning of what the
    other said. His main self was separated from his social alter by
    a wall of denial that others colluded with him in maintaining.
    Millions of people watching him or reading about his speeches the
    next day agreed not to notice that two very different Gingriches
    had spoken. They either nodded in agreement with his ideas or, at
    most, said that providing laptop computers for ghetto kids while
    cutting off their food was a "crazy" idea. One journalist whose
    column was headed "Newt to Poor: Let Them Eat Laptops,"35 pointed
    out that ghetto children don't have much use for tax credits
    since they don't pay taxes, but even he wasn't curious how
    Gingrich could simultaneously champion both starvation and
    computers for poor children. Like early observers of multiple
    personalities, we often label other people "crazy" when they
    reveal social alters that aren't logical, but we never really
    analyze how and why and when they move in and out of these
    "crazy" alters.

    It is useless to point out to people who are dissociated and in a
    social trance that dependent children or any other poison
    containers are helpless human beings who are the victims of their
    political actions. The Nazi commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoss,
    when asked if the Jews he killed had deserved their fate, replied
    that "there was something unrealistic about such a question,
    because [we] had been living in an entirely different world,"
    that is, the world of social alters. Jews weren't personally
    hated. Their blood had to flow in order to purify the blood of
    Germany. They weren't human, real. How could one ask if they
    deserved to be killed? "It never even occurred to us," he said.36

    Poison containers live in a different world, a world of alters.
    It is the task of leaders to make them appear real rather than
    being just in our heads. As Louis Farrakhan often tells his
    followers, "You really are being persecuted, Let me help you by
    naming your persecutors. [You'll] realize that the source of
    aggression and evil is out there, in the real world. And you
    thought it was all in your head!"37 By making social anxiety
    seem real, leaders help us regulate our neurotransmitter
    imbalances through social action, using "society" as an inner
    homeostatic regulator.

    It is only because our social alters merge with the perpetrators
    in our heads that such massive cruelties as social exploitation
    and wars can be inflicted without the central self being
    overwhelmed by personal guilt. The switch to one's social alter
    is particularly dramatic in those who have powerful conversion
    experiences, like the one Paul had at Damascus. This involves an
    apocalyptic moment when the person has a vision-like "inner
    voice" (alter) conversion experience that (a) all their
    difficulties in life have been caused by Evil, (b) they
    themselves have been sinful, (c) merging with a violent leader is
    necessary to save them, (d) a final battle with Evil is near and
    (e) they have been chosen to fight this final battle.38 There is
    evidence that this apocalyptic merging with the aggressor was
    experienced, for instance, by Hitler,39 in a "supernatural
    vision" that produced an "inner rapture," presumably the feeling
    generated by merging with the father that beat him regularly with
    a hippopotamus whip when he was a little child. Further, most of
    the Nazis who wrote their autobiographies for the book Why Hitler
    Came to Power had similar conversion experiences in which they in
    periods of personal despair imagined they had merged with
    Hitler.40 So, too, most of the American "militia" members have
    had this merging-with-the-perpetrator "conversion" experience.

    The dream-world of the social alter, then, is the ultimate source
    of the emotional life of all groups, including nations. When
    America's central group-fantasy is a castrating Lorena
    Bobbit/Hillary Clinton, as it was in Clinton's first two years,
    we know that the bloodthirsty mommy in our social alter is our
    main concern. When, ever since O.J. grabbed that knife away from
    Lorena Bobbit and plunged it into Nicole's neck, our dominant
    group-fantasy is Connie Chung and other women in cartoons with
    knives stuck in their backs, and we know we have shifted to our
    revenge alter and are now in a manic merging with the aggressor
    phase. And when America sends its troops into Bosnia, we will
    have shifted to our sacrifice the child upheaval phase.

    Trying to investigate and integrate these deep emotions of our
    social alters is a therapeutic task of considerable dimensions,
    involving the establishment of new neural connections between our
    conscious declarative memory system and our dissociated emotional
    neural network. This is why it is essential that the
    psychohistorian consider social alters as valuable subjects of
    study. Psychotherapists, sensing the depth of irrationality in
    their clients' social alters, shy away from examining their
    political and religious opinions, their social alters, and
    thereby miss confronting their earliest memories and most
    primitive defenses. Psychohistory must take up this task and
    carry out this voyage of self-discovery under the conviction that
    nothing can ever be discovered about society "out there" until it
    is first seen as existing "in here."

    References:

    1 Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology. Glencoe, Ill.:
    Free Press, 1951; Incest: The Nature and Origin of the Taboo. New
    York: L. Stuart, 1963.

    2 Masson, Ed. Letters, p. 40-41.

    3 Kriill, Freud and His Father, p. 12.

    4 Freud, Standard Edition. Vol. II, p. 133.

    5 Ibid, Vol. I, p. 356; Vol. III, p. 167.

    6 Ibid, p. 30.

    7 Ibid, p. 28.

    8 Karl Abraham, "The Experiencing of Sexual Traumas as a
    Form of Sexual Activity." In Selected Papers of Karl Abraham.
    London: Hogarth Press, 1948, p. 48.

    9 Ibid, p. 54.

    10 Alfred Kensey, Wardell Pomery and Clyde Martin, Sexual
    Behavior in the Human Male. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders
    Co., p. 121.

    11 Walter B. Pomeroy, "A New Look at Incest." Penthouse Forum,
    November, 1976, p. 10.

    12 Allen Edwardes and R. E. L. Masters, The Cradle of Erotica.
    New York: The Julian Press, 1963, p. 22.

    13 Schultz's keynote speech at the first national conference on
    the sexual abuse of children is cited in Sam Janus, The Death of
    Innocence: How Our Children Are Endangered by the New Sexual
    Freedom. New York: William Merrow & Co., 1981, p. 126.

    14 See the list of books and Journals-particularly The Journal of
    the History of Sexuality and The Journal of Homosexuality cited
    in deMause, "The Universality of Incest," p. 131.

    15 Joseph Nicolosi, NARTH Bulletin, April 1995, p. 1.

    16 Joseph E. LeDoux, Scientific American, June, 1994, pp. 50-57.

    17 H. A. van der Kolk, Psychological Trauma. Washington, D.C.:
    American Psychiatric Press, 1987.

    18 Mary Coleman, "Environmental Effects on Serotonin in
    Children." Unpub. paper; Mary Coleman, "Platelet Serotonin in
    Disturbed Monkeys and Children." Clinical Proceedings of the
    Children's Hospital. f27(1971): 187-194.

    19 A. Roy, M. Virkkunen, M. Linnoila, "Serotonin in Suicide,
    Violence, and Alcoholism," in E. F. Coccaro, D. L. Murphy, Eds.
    ASerotonin in Major Psychiatric Disorders Washington, D.C.:
    American Psychiatric Press, 1990; Owen D. Buck, "Sertraline for
    Reduction of Violent Behavior." American Journal of Psychiatry
    152(1995): 953.

    20 John P. Wilson, Trauma, Transformation, and Healing. New York:
    Brunner/Mazel, 1989; Jan Volavka, Neurobiology of Violence.
    Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 1995.

    21 22 For the various DSM III, DSM IIIR and proposed DSM VI
    diagnostic criteria, see Richard P. Kluft, "Multiple Personality
    Disorder." In David Spiegel, et al, Dissociative Disorders: A
    Clinical Review. Lutherville, Maryland: The Sidran Press, 1993,
    pp. 79-80.

    23 Marlene Stinberg, "Systematizing Dissociation: Symptomatology
    and Diagnostic Assessment." In David Spiegel, Ed. Dissociation:
    Culture, Mind, and Body. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric
    Press, 1994, p. 60.

    24 Richard P. Kluft, "Basic Principles in Conducting the
    Psychotherapy of Multiple Personality Disorder." In Ray
    Aldridge-Morris, Multiple Personality: An Exercise in Deception.
    London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1989, p. 45; Frank W.
    Putnam, Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder.
    New York: Guilford Press, 1989, p. 48.

    25 Colin A. Ross, The Osiris Complex: Case-Studies in Multiple
    Personality Disorder. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994,
    p. vii.

    26 Bennett G. Braun, Ed. Treatment of Multiple Personality
    Disorder. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 1986;
    Frank W. Putnam, Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality
    Disorder. New York: Guilford Press, 1989; David Spiegel, et al,
    Dissociative Disorders: A Clinical Review. Lutherville, Maryland:
    The Sidran Press, 1993; Colin A. Ross, Multiple Personality
    Disorder: Diagnosis, Clinical Features, and Treatment. New York:
    John Wiley & Sons, 1989; Richard P. Kluft and Catherine G. Fine,
    Eds. Clinical Perspectives on Multiple Personality Disorder.
    Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 1993; Philip M.
    Coons, "Psychophysiologic Aspects of Multiple Personality
    Disorder: A Review." Dissociation 1(1988): 47-53; David A. Oakley
    and Lesley C. Fames, "The Plurality of Consciousness." In David
    A. Oakley, Ed., Brain and Mind. London: Methuen, 1985, p.236.

    27 Colin A. Ross, The Osiris Complex, p.22.

    28 Ibid, p. 145-146.

    29 Richard P. Kluft, "Basic Principles in Conducting the
    Psychotherapy of Multiple Personality Disorder." In Richard P.
    Kluft and Catherine G. Fine, Eds. Clinical Perspectives on
    Multiple Personality Disorder, p. 39.

    30 Frank W. Putnam, Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple
    Personality Disorder, p. 62.

    31 Lloyd deMause, Foundations of Psychohistory. New York:
    Creative Roots, 1982, p. 192.

    32 Lloyd deMause, "Shooting at Clinton, Prosecuting O.J. and
    Other Sacrificial Rituals." The Journal of Psychohistory 22
    (1995): 388.

    33 The New York Times, April 17, 1995, p. Al.

    34 New York Post, March 25, 1995, p. 4. The references were to
    the government having fed alligators and wolves who then could
    not hunt for themselves; that infants cannot be expected to
    hunt for themselves is lost in the projection of blame into
    them as scapegoats for the nation's hungry memories.

    35 Mitchell Moss, "New to Poor: Let Them Eat Laptops." New York
    Newsday, January 29, 1995, p. A30.

    36 Morris Berman, Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the
    Hidden History of the West. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989,
    p. 289.

    37 Cited In C. Alford, Melanie Klein and Critical Social Theory.
    New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989, p. 70; see Robert Godwin,
    "On the Function of Enemies: The Articulation and Containment of
    the Unthought Self. The Journal of Psychohistory 22(1994):
    79-102.

    38 Morris Berman, Coming to Our Sense: Body and Spirit in
    the Hidden History of the West. New York: Slmon & Schuster, 1989,
    pp. 269-273; Charles B. Strozier, Apocalypse: On the Psychology
    of Fundamentalism in America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994, pp.
    43-45; Lloyd deMause, "On the Apocalypse in Our Heads." The
    Journal of Psychohistory 23(1995): 18-25.

    39 Rudolph Binion, Hitler Among the Germans. New York: Elsevier,
    1976, pp. 3-6, 120-26, 136-38.

    40 Theodore Abel, Why Hitler Came to Power. Cambridge: Harvard
    University Press, 1986 [1938].

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