Temat: Ludzie sukcesu - o jednej czy dwóch twarzach
Artur Król:
To powiedziawszy, dziękuję za rozmowę, z mojej strony koniec. Jeśli będziesz kiedyś chciała wrócić do rozmowy z gotowością do podważenia swoich przekonań - zapraszam.
no to może wrócimy, jak widać Alice nie jest jedyna - co ty na to?
The Price We Pay For Shaming Little Boys
The American psychiatrist, James Gilligan, works with the most violent men in U.S. maximum security settings. Gilligan tells us:
One cannot fail to see that the men who occupy the extreme end of the continuum of violent behaviour in adulthood occupied an equally extreme end of the continuum of violent abuse earlier in life. The violent criminals I have known have been objects of violence from early childhood (Gilligan, 1997, p. 45).
For Gilligan the connection between childhood abuse and adult violence is as clear - and as preventable as the connection between smoking and lung cancer. Violent men, says Gilligan, are motivated by shame, an inevitable legacy of child abuse (p. 49).
Michael Lewis (1992) has proposed that severe and frequent child abuse accompanied by debasement results in shame which is so aversive that it is masked by rage. This shame-rage response is activated in conflict situations. Rage and violence are serious consequences of suffering prolonged shame experiences.
Dutton (1998) summarizes his study of "cyclically/emotionally volatile batterers" by concluding that boyhood shaming, primarily by fathers, is the most powerful factor contributing to wife abuse. When physical abuse in childhood was factored out, shaming experiences still were strongly related to adult rage and abusiveness. But the opposite did not hold: physical abuse by the father did not, on its own, predict the sons' anger or abuse. "The lethal combination of shaming and physical abuse was required. Unfortunately, that combination was the rule rather than the exception (p.84)."
This paper is about the connection between childhood shame and adult violence, as witnessed in German history. German children were traditionally raised with a pedagogy which was thorough and exact in its instructions on how to raise an abused child from babyhood. I am not naive about the history of child abuse in my own and other countries. I know the terrible history of child rearing in England, France and the rest of the world throughout the centuries. We have our own horror stories in Canada. My point is that intense shaming of children is built into the schwarze pedagogic of German child rearing. German children were reared according to detailed rules, designed to produce children who were cut off from their own ability to think things through and come to a satisfactory personal decision.
Sulzer, in 1748, explains that humiliation of children is key to producing obedient citizens who are willing to submit to the laws and rules of reason once they are their own masters, since they are already accustomed not to act in accordance with their own will (Miller, 1990, p. 10). Dependence on authority plus the intense shaming of children produced the generation of Germans who obediently followed Hitler into the second World War and found their emotional release in carrying out its atrocities.
I first became aware of how profoundly shamed Germans are when I read James Bacque's account of what was done to the German people by the Allies between 1944 and 1950, after the fighting was over. Briefly, Bacque describes how between half a million and a million Germans starved to death because of Allied policies of revenge. Conditions for German Prisoners of War in American camps were intolerable - far below the standards set by the Geneva Convention.
These camps were described by Lt. Col. Henry W. Allard, who was in charge of the US camps in France in 1945. He said: "The standards of PW (prisoner of war) camps in the ComZ (the US army's rear zone) in Europe compares as only slightly better or even with the living conditions of the Japanese PW camps our men tell us about, and unfavorably with the Germans." To maintain such camps was a crime punishable by death, according to the Americans after the war.
The Allies shot Japanese General Masaharu Homma in 1946 for maintaining camps in approximately the conditions described by Allard. After the German surrender on 8 May, 1945, the American camps grew steadily worse (Bacque, 1997).
Alfred deZayas, human rights expert trained in law at Harvard and in history at Göttingen and Tubingen, specializes in the rights of refugees and minorities. His book, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of East European Germans, 1944-50, (1986) documents the personal accounts of survivors among German settlers who had lived for generations in the eastern provinces such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Hungary. Two million died and fifteen million were displaced in what amounted to horrific ethnic cleansing. The Potsdam Conference of 1945 decided their fate.
First person accounts tell of civilian men, women and children being ordered to leave their home, with only twenty-four hours notice, to make their way back to a shrunken Germany, a land they did not even know. The women were raped repeatedly and often killed by their perpetrators. The children starved, their small bodies unable to withstand the deprivation. Poles struck back at these helpless refugees, remembering how cruel German soldiers had been. Czechs, Poles, Hungarians - all looted the German settlers. People who, before the war, had been neighbours and on good terms, now saw these German settlers not as people, but as "the enemy."
What surprised me most, though, was that the German people I have spoken with about this deliberate and immoral cruelty either do not know these facts or have only a hazy awareness of this period in German history. When I first attempted to discuss this with German colleagues and friends, I was bewildered by their reaction. These well educated and knowledgeable people knew nothing of these chapters in their own history. Generally, they expressed amazement, a hazy familiarity with the details or simply uncomfortable refusal to talk with me about what was clearly a forbidden subject.
What is one to make of the fact that few Germans know about this? Why was Daniel Goldhagen's book, Hiltler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and The Holocaust, a best seller in Germany? Why would German readers rather read about the terrible things they did than what was done to them?
My understanding is that no German writers have published books on what was done to Germans by the Allies, at least not through major publishing houses. As far as I know, only two people have written extensively about this period in German history: James Bacque, a Canadian, and Alfred deZayas, an American. I am also told that in Germany anyone who talks about these crimes against the German people is branded a neo-Nazi. As a non-German and a non-Jew I was bewildered by this.
The reluctance of Germans to "know about" what was done to them after the fighting was over reminds me of those three little monkeys: See No Evil, Hear No Evil and Speak No Evil. In my twenty years as a psychotherapist treating survivors of childhood trauma, I am familiar with this tendency of those who were once helpless to minimize the impact abuse has had on their lives. It is the same with my abused clients who trivialize the beatings of their childhood, saying they deserved to be hit, that they were very bad children. People who have been traumatized tend to normalize their traumatic situations.
It is hard for humans to accept that they were powerless to protect themselves from deliberate mistreatment. They are much more likely to take the blame for having been abused. For example, people who have been sexually abused as children tend to blame themselves, at least unconsciously, for somehow causing the abuse by being too sexy or too bad. Part of therapy is to help them realistically assess what was done to them and to what degree they are responsible for the shame they feel. (Of course, children bear no actual responsibility for being abused.) A first step in healing, then, is to accept that you were hurt by the trauma.
What is shame? Gilligan describes it as the absence of a healthy sense of self-esteem self-respect, and self-love which are necessary to survive the inevitable rejections and humiliations which no one can avoid in life. Children who fail to receive sufficient love from others do not build those reserves of self-love. Without feelings of self-love, the self feels numb, empty, and dead. It may be paradoxical to refer to shame as a "feeling," says Gilligan, for while shame is initially painful, constant shaming leads to a deadening of feeling. Shame is like cold. At first it is intensely painful, but when it reaches an intolerable extreme, it results in complete numbness and in the death of the self. The person whose soul has been killed by shame goes through life with an automatic, unconscious reflex for self-anesthetization which is self-deadening.
How, Gilligan asks, can a person who does not experience any feelings himself know that others have feelings or be moved by the feelings of others (pp. 47-52)? Shame leads to later violence. To illustrate the shame/violence cycle I will tell you about the clinical work and research carried out by Dr. Ralph Bierman (1996). Ralph Bierman is a psychologist who has implemented a program for men who are in Canadian jails because they have been violent with their family members, particularly their wives and their children. These men have been screened for their readiness to look inside themselves, following treatment in he correctional center's milieu therapy programme. Inevitably their tough exteriors cover shamed identities.
Shame, says Bierman, involves the fearful anticipation of others' contempt. Shamed identity arises from globally attributing badness to oneself. It arises from thinking about one's self as bad, which may include imagining what others are thinking. Shame contrasts with guilt which focuses on specific performances or behaviors. Bierman differentiates between anger and rage. Anger is a response to the blockage of a goal. Rage is a response to an attack on the self, a response to shaming. Rage and violence are serious consequences of suffering prolonged shame experience.
All Bierman's men suffer from post traumatic stress disorder. Naturally, the results of PTSD deepen their shame as adults. Imagine how difficult it is for a tough guy to be having nightmares he cannot control; to be haunted by fear which threatens to break through if he feels any emotions; to not be able to function as well as he thinks he should in the world. Alice Miller provides a dramatic description of Hitler's night terrors as witnessed by his followers when der Führer would wake at night with convulsive screams, yelling for help like a frightened child, hallucinating that "he" was there in the room (p. 174).
Fathers' contempt for their sons produces men who believe they are worthless, who are hyper-vigilant to signs of disdain, who are defensively ready to attribute negative intent to others, and who find a quick fix for making themselves worthwhile by degrading those less powerful than themselves, such as their wives. They believe they can make themselves feel some worth by making someone else lower than themselves.
In Bierman's programme, therapeutic procedures based on Eugene Gendlin's Focusing enable the participants to work through their own remembered physical or emotional abuse. The men are encouraged to let their feelings happen, to resist telling themselves what they should feel and to stop judging their feelings. They are taught to quietly put their attention into the part of their body where they usually have their feelings.They are instructed to let go controlling and to simply follow what is happening inside. For most of us the physical sensation connected to a feeling occurs as a tight knot in the stomach, a choking in the throat or a heaviness in the chest. Bierman trains the men to pay attention to these physical body signals which provide a way into unconscious knowing (Gendlin, 1996).
Gilligan refers to Nazi Germany's collective violence as a "pure culture of violence." He says:
That is why it is so relevant to note the centrality of shame as the main motive force, behind one of the most lethal forms of collective violence in this century or any other. Hitler came to power on the campaign promise to undo "the shame of Versailles" - and clearly that promise, and the sensitivity to shame from which it derived its power, struck a responsive chord in the German people as a whole. . .Hitler offered them a way of re-establishing their status and sense of power (p..67).
Germany's people have been severely traumatized by two world wars, by the humiliating and bloody defeat of 1918 and the subsequent shame of Versailles, by the horrors of the Second World War and the revenge the Allies took once the fighting was over. Add to this the traditional harshness and humiliation of child rearing in Germany! Besides, Hitler had told them that if they lost the war it was their own fault for not fighting bravely enough, and that they deserved whatever punishment came to them.
In the methods of schwarze pedagogik, the child never experiences hatred for the father. When it is not possible to admit and express hatred for a parent, the rage gets projected onto others. As with Ralph Bierman's battering men, those who are weak and vulnerable (the way the batterer was as a child) become targets for this pent up rage. The adult who is filled with rage and shame becomes the perpetrator making others feel the way he felt when he was helpless.
This shame/violence cycle clearly played itself out when Germans who had been traumatized in childhood took out their rage on Jews and others who reminded them of themselves when they were helpless children. They projected onto others all their own "bad" qualities which they had never been able to accept in themselves. Jews became dirty, greedy schemers, plotting to overthrow the rightful authorities. Concentration camp guards had the perfect opportunity to restage their own childhood traumas. Prisoners were helpless to defend themselves or to escape.
Their captors, urged on by the state, indulged in humiliating defenseless Jews. In fact, every German's repetition compulsion seems to have found a place in the hierarchy of terror which characterized the Nazi period. Men who had once been shamed as children now had the opportunity to demand from others, the cadaver-like obedience their fathers had exacted. They, in turn, gave automatic, unthinking obedience to their masters in The Third Reich's hierarchy of terror.
Dissociation helps people forget what is too horrible to remember. Has the traumatization of the German nation resulted in nationwide dissociation? Perhaps that is why they did not recall the terrible chapter of their history between 1944 and 1950. In the 1990's, Johannes Heising published a book about his experience as a prisoner in the US camp at Remagen. After the book was published, Heising was talking with another former Remagen prisoner, Franz-Josef Plemper, who reminded him of something Heising had left out of the book. One night the Americans bulldozed living men under the earth in their foxholes. Plemper described this scene to him.
One night in April 1945 I was startled out of my stupor in the rain and mud by piercing screams and loud groans. I jumped up and saw in the distance (about 30-50 meters) the searchlight of a bulldozer. Then I saw this bulldozer was moving forwards through the crowd of prisoners who lay there. In the front it had a blade making a path way. How many of the prisoners were buried alive in their earth holes I do not know. It is no longer possible to ascertain. I heard clearly cries of "you murderer."(Bacque, p.63)
And then Heising remembered.
Clearly, not only Germans were playing out their violent fantasies ..less prisoners.
This paper deals with shaming in the childhood of Germans. But this is not specifically a German problem. It is a problem throughout the world. It is my hope that once we better understand the underlying causes of violence, we will be able to find some solutions.
How do we protect little boys from being shamed and abused by their fathers? This is a generational problem. It is self-perpetuating. Men who have been abused and shamed by their fathers tend to shame and abuse their small boys. As a society, we must find ways of cutting into this cycle of abuse where fathers humiliate their boys and passive mothers stand by without interfering on behalf of the children. But before we will be able to do this, we will have to accept whatever we ourselves experienced as children, as well as the ways in which we act out of our own traumatic experience.
Mary Armstrong
wtorek, września 09, 2008
If I Blow Myself Up and Become a Martyr, I’ll Finally be Loved
For an audio version of this article, click here.
If I Blow Myself Up and Become a Martyr, I'll Finally be Loved
by Lloyd deMause
A recent study published in the scholarly journal Child Abuse and Neglect reported on a careful survey of 652 Palestinian undergraduates about their memories of being sexually abused by a family member, a relative or a stranger. The study concluded that 18.6% were used sexually by a family member, 36.2% by a relative and 45.6% by a stranger.1 Since these figures add up to more than 100%, some of those questioned obviously were abused by two or three of these categories. But the figures are so much higher than anything I have found in my extensive research over the past three decades into the history of child abuse2 that they confirm other evidence that the Palestinians, like other Islamic cultures, routinely abuse their children, sexually, physically and emotionally, from birth.3 In fact, it would seem that these figures from undergraduates are actually underreported for Palestinian society as a whole, since (a) they are just for the more wealthy families who can afford to send their children to college, who are likely to be somewhat less abusive, (b) they are self-reports, which means that just from shame alone they are usually understated, and (c) they are reports only of conscious memories, so that any repressed memories and seductions too early to remember are usually not reported. I have found these three kinds of underreporting often can double the reported figures, meaning that Palestinians actually sexually abuse by far the majority of their children. The report also finds "significantly higher levels of psychoticism, hostility, anxiety, somatization, phobic anxiety, paranoid ideation, depression, obsessive-compulsiveness and psychological distress" in those reporting sexual abuse.
Raped children are said to have "brought it upon themselves", and girls particularly who are raped are actually blamed for their victimization, on the grounds that "women who don't ask to be raped will never be raped".4 In general, using young girls sexually fits the patriarchal Palestinian view of females as "the source of all evil, anarchy and deception."5
That the Palestinian figures reveal "no significant differences between females and males"6 in sexual abuse rates is an extremely unusual condition which, again, is often reported in Islamic societies- boys in Western societies usually being molested and raped only one quarter as often as girls. That Islamic boys are routinely sexually abused, usually by anal penetration, has been reported by many throughout history. According to an Arab sociologist, men regularly keep young boys in their extended families for pederastic use in Islamic societies, since women are considered "unclean", using little boys anally avoids what is considered the "voracious vaginas" of women, and, after all, "the mere sign of pretty boys is regarded... as terribly tempting". 7 One ex-PLO terrorists, Walid Shoebat, reported that "Palestine is a strange society. Homosexuality is forbidden, but if you're the penetrator, not the penetrated, it's okay... Once, on a hiking trip, I saw a line of shepherd boys waiting for their turn to sodomize a five-year-old boy. It was unbelievable... teenage boys prey upon younger children; older male relatives prey upon pre-adolescent and adolescent boys and girls."8 Although Shoebat says "most Arabs and Muslims will deny that this is so," my own research confirms that it is widespread in the Islamic nations of the Middle East.
Granqvist reports that most infants in Palestine are tightly swaddled during their first six months.9 The physical battering of both girls and boys from birth for small misdemeanors is widespread throughout Muslim societies. Visitors to families report on the "slapping, striking and thrashing" of children. A typical report of Islamic cultures says, "A large number of children face some form of physical abuse, from infanticide and abandonment of babies, to beating, shaking, burning, cutting, poisoning, holding underwater or giving drugs or alcohol, or violent acts like punching, kicking, biting, choking, beating, shooting, or stabbing."10 Islamic schools regularly practice severe corporal punishment.11 "Honor killings" of girls who are blamed for their own and others' sexual abuse are said to be widespread in Palestine.
All this routine child abuse is said by most academic scholars to have no effect upon the adults in the society. Typical is the opinion of the academics in the recent book Psychology of Terrorism,12 who find that "interviews with terrorists rarely find any disorder listed in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders." In other words, if a terrorist is able to function at all, even if they are suicidal and homicidal, they are "normal". Terrorists are not psychopaths, these academics say, "since they are able to trust each other," so it is claimed that "30 years of research has found little evidence that terrorists are suffering from psychopathology." Most recent books on Palestine suicide bombers that purport to look at their motivations-like Mia Bloom's Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror13- propose that suicide terrorists are just using an "effective bargaining tactic," surely an easily disprovable notion since killing innocent Israelis, mainly women and children, has only worsened the amount of violence and decreased the ability to live together and benefit from trade. Bloom assures us that terrorists "are not suffering from mental illness or personality disorders", and suggest that "high unemployment rates" might be the central cause of their violence.14
Fortunately, there are two psychohistorians in addition to myself who have found from extensive research exactly the opposite. Joan Lachkar and Nancy Kobrin believe that terrorists are borderline personalities, "walking time bombs" from continuous child abuse, with absent fathers "forever connect to their 'mother of pain'", forming relational bonds that are destructive and painful (traumatic bonding). "As horrific as the emotional pain is, it is preferable to a black hole." They say, "At least I know that I am alive. I feel excited. I have meaning and purpose to my life... it's done 'for Allah's sake, hurts less than a gnat's bite'".15 Lachkar concludes that Islamic cultures, like borderlines, "are dominated by shame/blame defenses, have defective bonding and dependency needs, are extremely envious, and will retaliate at any cost. They are lacking in impulse control, have poor reality testing, and... suffer from profound fears of abandonment and annihilation, as well as persecutory anxieties."16 Their relationship with their loveless mothers are repeated in their fantasies about Allah: "If I pray five times a day, kill myself, sacrifice my needs/desires, I will be loved by Allah." Mothers often announce that they are raising martyrs who will die for Allah, even picking which son should die and which must remain alive to support her in her old age.17 Speckhard reports, "In Palestinian territories, there currently exists a 'cult of martyrdom'. From a very young age children are socialized into a group consciousness that honors martyrs... posters decorate the walls of towns and rock and music videos extol the virtues of bombers... the bombers describe their psychological state (with their bombs strapped on) as one of "floating" or "bliss" [disassociation]."18 The terrorists, says Lachkar, "conjure up an imaginary companion or "idealized" father like Allah to die for, saying "I'm going to meet the Lord of the universe." All imagine they would still be around to watch their parents be sorry they had killed themselves. 'Every time my father sees my photo, he'll cry.' This is an obvious dialogue with a long-lost father object, a severe yearning for contact. The cries are for the love they had missed all their lives".19 They are not wrong. Their parents do want them to kill themselves. Mothers of martyrs are often reported as happy that their sons died because they then could feel like their sons would never leave them. As one mother of a Palestinian suicide bomber who had blown himself to bits put it, "with resolutely cheerful countenance,"
I was very happy when I heard. To be a martyr, that's something. Very few people can do it. I prayed to thank God. I know my son is close to me.20
The son had been about to graduate from the university, about to separate from his mother, to individuate, to self-activate. The mother was about to "lose" him. So when he killed himself, she was happy about his suicide, because now he would always be "close to her," like a comfort blanket.
The result of all this early abuse and violent training to be a suicidal terrorist is as might be expected. For instance, one Palestinian psychologist, Dr. Dhafiq Massalha, conducted an experiment recently with a random sample of 150 boys and girls aged ten and eleven to whom he had distributive notebooks, asking them to record their dreams. "The results, though predictable, were still shocking. A Palestinian girl aged eleven dreamt she went into a market in Israel with bombs all over her body. She stopped in the crowd of shoppers, counted to ten, then blew herself up, according to an account of his findings. He found that 78% of the dreams were political, and most of them included physical violence. Half of the children dreamed of becoming suicide bombers."21 That Arafat and others endlessly told children they should become martyrs and that these messages have been daily shown on TV even in between children's cartoons is just a later version of the parental dicta telling their children it is their duty to kill themselves and others "for Allah". 22 Palestinian children are often given suicide belts by their parents to march around and in practice their suicides.23 And that there is a parallel between the sexual submission of young boys to older men in Palestinian society and their later submission to the will of Allah is emphasized by scholars who notes that "love for the divinely beautiful boy is clearly mixed with a love of the Creator" in Muslim religious poetry.24
Even the terrorist's choice of exploding themselves has childhood roots, since they restage the explosive sexual assaults they experienced when being raped his children. As one psychiatrist who interviewed many terrorists reported:
We have to study their fantasies to understand these men. The sexual importance is sometimes striking. For some, when a bomb goes off, it is like an orgasm... One fellow told me he felt "liberated" every time he heard a bomb explode. Some others told me they would place a bomb, then sit out on a balcony and listen. When the "boom" came, it was a great relief.
What happens in neurobiologically during early child abuse is that the child's pain and fears are implanted in a disassociated state in amygdalan fear networks in their brain. Later in life they hear the voices of their Punishing Parents every time they try to individuate, to experience their own needs and develop their own selves, every time they do something the parent for which themselves were punished as children-all forbidden activities.25 A child being sexually abused can only conclude that they are "bad" inside-indeed, they are told all the time their own sexual needs are "bad"-and so, what they do is fuse with their Punishing Parents in their own heads (experienced as God) and find others to victimize, to kill. As Palestinian suicide terrorists kill, they fuse with their Killer Parent alter in their heads and shout ""Allabu akbar," "God [Mommy, Daddy] is greatest!" and experience "an expression of empowerment" during the fusion with their powerful Killer Parent alter. Thus the Hamas goal of "death in the service of God" is in fact a death in the service of the Killer Parent and "death to the Israelis" means death to their own "bad boy" self.
That abusive childrearing practices have a profound effect on producing suicide terrorists is certain. But in addition the overt violence experienced by children living in a war zone or in depriving refugee camps simply adds to the traumatic distress of their childhoods. As high as one-fifth of Palestinian children are chronically hungry today,26 hundreds of Palestinian children have been killed in Israel's attempt to crush the intifada, and children exposed to bombardment and demolition has been found to have severe post-traumatic stress disorders.27 Children whose parents are killed in the violence or who are otherwise separated from them are set to "quietly cry."28 and their early losses cannot help but increase the need for violence in the future. What can be done to prevent all these children who are badly traumatized by their families and societies from growing up as human time bombs?
Prevention of terrorism rather than revenge should be our goal for the future. Rather than backing military solutions to Palestinian terrorism, America and Israel should instead to back a UN-sponsored Marshall Plan for them, designed to reduce the abusive childrearing that is creating the terrorists. Just as the Marshall Plan we created for Germans and Austrians after WWII allowed families to evolve far beyond those that produced Nazism, we must put real money and organized effort into a Palestinian Parenting Plan that will help families get better parenting to their children. There are, in fact, several parenting centers in Palestine, like the Palestine happy Child Center in Ramallah, which was established in 1994 as a grassroots non-governmental organization to promote the welfare of young Palestinian children "through a holistic approach to child development".29 The center operates now on grants from The Jerusalem Fund, but if Centers could even be supported by Israeli and American funds they might reduce the sense that Israel and America are simply "against Palestinians".
There are three kinds of support for parents that have become very successful in vastly reducing child abuse when implemented in American cities. All of these have been regularly reported on in The Journal of Psychohistory. The first is Robert McFarlane's 23-year-old Community Parenting Center in Boulder, Colorado. Their mission is to "relieve the isolation, reduce the stress of parenting and prevent child abuse and neglect by providing outreach and a place where families can receive support, education and develop a sense of community."30 The Center provides lectures for parents by other parents, play groups for children with puppet shows demonstrating parent-child interactions, postpartum depression assistance, support groups that help with coping with behavioral problems without hitting the child, help for unmarried mothers and immigrants, talks on setting limits for toddlers, and even the free home visits to new mothers by volunteers who give pediatric and psychological help. The Parenting Center is free to all who want to use its resources, and is quite inexpensive to run, especially since it has been shown that for every dollar invested in better parenting by the Center the state saves perhaps a hundred dollars in later costs of social services, hospital costs, and jails. The same welcome results have been shown by centers in other states, such as the Parent Child Center Network in Vermont and the Hawaii Healthy Start Program.31
A second child support program is the Home Visiting Program run by the state of Colorado in conjunction with the Boulder Parenting Center. This program, (see
http://nccfc.org) sends nurses to meet regularly with mothers who might abuse children during their pregnancy and continuing until the child's second birthday. "This has arguably been one of the most effective and demonstrably successful child abuse prevention interventions yet studied and replicated."32
A third effective program was recently started in New York City by Margaret R. Kind, M.D., a psychiatrist, who taught a course on parenting in the city school system to 30 high school classes. It is, of course, extremely revealing that although parenting is one of the most important jobs in every nation in the world, there has until now never been actual courses teaching it in any school. Students learn about children's needs for love, attachment, commitment, admiration, toleration and empathy, and learn how to have discipline without distress-causing punishment, discomfort or physical pain. In this way children are not being taught maladaptive or antisocial responses to others' behaviors.
In this program, students are surprised to learn how important early relationships are to the infant, and use an excellent textbook (The Six Stages of Parenthood by Ellen Galinsky) to go through the parenting stages. They are frequently surprised also by how much time caring for an infant takes, and begin to plan their own lives so they can be available to the child as they grow up. What is most astonishing is how enthusiastic the students are about taking the course; I myself read a large stack of their final comments about the course and they were not only praising of how they learned both what not to do and what they could do, even if it were different than what their parents did, but they said, "Now I can be a successful parent! I was not sure before that I could" and "I think more people should have the opportunity to take a course like this, and avoid a lot of mistakes... mistakes that are a matter of life and death." As Kind puts it, "The students loved the course and they, themselves, suggested that it be mandated that it be taught to all high school students! Their enthusiasm was remarkable, well expressed, and gratifying."33
Kind calls her program "A Primary Prevention Program." I propose that a Palestinian Marshall Plan that supports Parenting Centers, Home Visiting Programs and High School Parenting Courses-plus any other family assistance programs that Palestinians can propose-will be effective "primary prevention" that will reduce terrorism and other social violence in the future. It may seem too long-term, but if-as I found during my four decades of research-child abuse and neglect are the central causes of wars, terrorism and social violence,34 Prevention of terrorism can only be accomplished by helping the family to be more loving, more nurturing and more respectful of their children's independence.
Lloyd deMause is editor of The Journal of Psychohistory, President of The International Psychohistorical Association and author of The History of Childhood, Foundations of Psychohistory and The Emotional Life of Nations.
[transcriber's note: This article was first published in The Journal of Psychohistory, April 6, 2006. This PC text document is a transcription taken from the original paper journal; any errors in transcription accuracy are solely the responsibility of me, David Bockman. Please feel free to forward any errors to david.bockman@gmail.com. For more information on Lloyd deMause, The Institute for Psychohistory, and The Journal of Psychohistory, please visit
http://www.psychohistory.com.
An audio version of this article, narrated by Stefan Molyneux, may be downloaded from
http://www.freedomainradio.com, at the following link:
http://www.freedomainradio.com/Traffic_Jams/FDR_1131_P...]
begin footnotes:
1Muhammed M. Haj-Yahia and Safa Tamish, "The rates of child sexual abuse and its psychological consequences as revealed by a study among Palestinian university students." Child Abuse and Neglect 25 (2001): 1301-1327
2Lloyd deMause, "The Universality of Incest," The Journal of Psychohistory 19 (1991): 123-164; Llyod deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations. New York: Karnac Books, pages 285-380
3Lloyd deMause, "The Childhood Origins of Terrorism," 29 (2002): 340 – 349.
4S. Tamish, "Misconceptions About Sexuality and Sexual Behavior in Palestinian Society: Proceedings of Workshops in the West Bank and Gaza Strip." Ramallah, Palestine: The Tamer Institute for Community Education, 1966.
5Muhammed Haj-Yahia and Safa Tamish, "The rates of child sexual abuse ...", p. 1304.
6Ibid., page 1318.
7Abdeiwahab Bouhdiba, sexuality in Islam. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985, p. 32; Fatna A. Sabbah, Women in the Muslim Unconscious. New York: Pergamon Press, 1984, p. 28.
8Phyllis Chesler, Front Page Magazine, May 3, 2004 (
http://nospank.net/chesler.htm). See also Nancy Kobrin and Yoram Schweitzer, The Sheik's New Clothes: The Psychoanalytic Roots of Islamic Suicide Terrorism. Forthcoming.
9Hima Natalia Granqvist, Birth and Childhood Among the Arabs; Studies in a Mohammadan Village in Palestine. Helsingfors; Soderstrom, 1947, p. 100.
10Samra Fayyazuddin, Anees Jillani, Zarina Jillani, The State of Pakistan's Children 1997. Islamabad: Sparc, 1998, p. 46.
11Ibid., p. 51.
12Clark McCauley, "Psychological Issues in Understanding Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism," in Chris E. Stout, Ed., Psychology of Terrorism, Condensed Edition: Coping With the Continuing Threat, Westport Connecticut.: Praeger, 2004pp. 39-38.
13Mia Bloom, Dying to Kill: The Lure of Suicide Terror. New York: Columbia University press, 2005.
14 Ibid., pp. 35, 42.
15Joan Lachkar, "The Psychological Makeup of a Suicide Bomber," The Journal of Psychohistory 29 (2002): 349 – 367; Nancy Kobrin and Yoram Schweitzer, "The Sheik's New Clothes: The Psychoanalytic Roots of Islamic Suicide Terrorism. Forthcoming.
16Ibid., p. 352.
17Nicholas D. Kristoff, "Kids With Bombs," The New York Times, April 5, 2002, p. A23.
18Anne Speckhard and Khapta Akhmedova, "Talking to terrorists." The Journal of Psychohistory 33 (2005): 130.
19Joan Lachkar, "The Psychological Makeup of a Suicide Bomber," p. 361
20Joseph Lelyveld, "All Suicide Bombers Are Not Alike." The New York Times Magazine, October 28, 2001, p. 50.
21Kenneth R. Timmerman, Preachers of Hate. New York: Crown Forum, 2003, page 189.
22Ibid, p. 188.
23Anna Marie Oliver and Paul F. Steinberg, The Road to Martyr's Square: A Journey Into The World of the Suicide Bomber. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, page xxiii
24Stephen O. Murray, "Corporealizing Medieval Persian and Turkish Tropes." In the Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe, Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History and Literature. New York: New York University Press, 1997, p. 133.
25Lloyd deMause, The Emotional Life of Nations. pp. 383 – 4.
26Justin Huggler,
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/on....
27A. A. Thabert, Y. Abed and P. Vostanis, "Emotional Problems in Palestinian Children Living in a War Zone." Lancet, May 25, 2002, p. 359.
28Laurel Holliday, Children of Israel, Children of Palestine. New York: Pocket Books, 1998. Page 46.
29
http://www.thejerusalemfund.org/humanitarianlink/pales...
30Robert B. McFarland, "Creating a Community Parenting Center." The Journal of Psychohistory 32(2005): 326.
31George W. Brown, "Starting a Community Parenting Center: All Children Need More." The Journal of Psychohistory 32(2005): 338.
32John Fanton, "Promoting Parenting in Your Community." The Journal of Psychohistory 32(2005): 330.
33Margeret R. Kind, "Parenting Education in a Public High School System: A Primary Prevention Program." The Journal of Psychohistory 32(2005): 358.
http://blogs.myspace.com/davidjbockmanSabina Gatti edytował(a) ten post dnia 02.01.10 o godzinie 17:55
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