Early Infanticidal Childrearing - The Model

The Model

This model is a psychological concept that aims to understand anthropological data, especially from such societies as the Yolngu of Australia, the Gimi, Wogeo, Bena Bena, and Bimin-Kuskusmin of Papua New Guinea, the Raum, the Ok, and the Kwanga, based on observations by Géza Róheim, Lia Leibowitz, Robert C. Suggs, Milton Diamond, Herman Heinrich Ploss, Gilbert Herdt, Robert J. Stoller, L. L. Langness, and Fitz John Porter Poole, among others. While anthropologists and psychohistorians do not dispute the data, they dispute its significance in terms of its importance, its meaning, and its interpretation.

Supporters attempt to explain cultural history from a psycho-developmental point of view, and argue that cultural change can be assessed as "advancement" or "regression" based on the psychological consequences of various cultural practices. While most anthropologists reject this approach and most theories of cultural evolution as ethnocentric, psychohistorians proclaim the independence of psychohistory and reject the mainstream Boasian view.

This "infanticidal" model makes several claims: that childrearing in tribal societies included child sacrifice or high infanticide rates, incest, body mutilation, child rape, and tortures, and that such activities were culturally acceptable. Psychohistorians do not claim that each child was killed, only that in some societies there was (or is) a selection process that would vary from culture to culture. For example, there is a large jump in the mortality rate of Papua New Guinean children after they reach the weaning stage. In the Solomon Islands some people reportedly kill their first-born child. In rural India, rural China, and other societies, some female babies have been exposed to death. DeMause's argument is that the surviving siblings of the sacrificed child may become disturbed.

Some states, both in the Old World and New World, practiced infanticide, including sacrifice in Mesoamerica and in Assyrian and Canaanite religions. Phoenicians, Carthaginians, and other members of early states sacrificed infants to their gods, as described in the table of the psychopathological effects of some forms of childrearing.

According to deMause, in the most primitive mode of childrearing of the above-mentioned table, mothers use their children to project parts of their dissociated self onto their children. The infanticidal clinging of the symbiotic mother prevents individuation so that innovation and more complex political organization are inhibited. On a second plane, supporters maintain that the attention paid by mothers of contemporary primitive tribes to their children, such as sucking, fondling, and masturbating, is sexual according to an objective standard; and that this sexual attention is inordinate.

The model is based on a reported lack of empathy by infanticidal parents, such as a lack of mutual gazes between parent and child, observed by Robert B. Edgerton, Maria Lepowsky, Bruce Knauft, John W. M. Whiting, and Margaret Mead, among others. Such mutual gazing is widely recognized in developmental psychology as crucial for proper bonding between mother and child.