Lloyd deMause, pronounced de-Moss (born September 19, 1931 in Detroit,
MichiganMichigan is a U.S. state located in the Great Lakes Region of the United States of America. The name Michigan is the French form of the Ojibwa word mishigamaa, meaning "large water" or "large lake"....
), is an American social thinker known for his work in the field of
psychohistoryPsychohistory is the study of the psychological motivations of historical events. It attempts to combine the insights of psychotherapy with the research methodology of the social sciences to understand the emotional origin of the social and political behavior of groups and nations, past and present...
. He did graduate work in political science at
Columbia UniversityColumbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
and later trained as a lay psychoanalyst. He is the founder of
The Journal of PsychohistoryThe Journal of Psychohistory is a journal in the field of psychohistory published by the Institute for Psychohistory. It aims to provide "a new psychological view of world events — past and present"...
.
Academic work
DeMause has made major contributions to the study of
PsychohistoryPsychohistory is the study of the psychological motivations of historical events. It attempts to combine the insights of psychotherapy with the research methodology of the social sciences to understand the emotional origin of the social and political behavior of groups and nations, past and present...
which is the study of the psychological motivations of historical events. It seeks to understand the emotional origin of the social and political behavior of groups and nations, past and present. Its subject matter is childhood and the
familyIn human context, a family is a group of people affiliated by consanguinity, affinity, or co-residence. In most societies it is the principal institution for the socialization of children...
(especially
child abuseChild abuse is the physical, sexual, emotional mistreatment, or neglect of a child. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Children And Families define child maltreatment as any act or series of acts of commission or omission by a parent or...
), and psychological studies of
anthropologyAnthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
and
ethnologyEthnology is the branch of anthropology that compares and analyzes the origins, distribution, technology, religion, language, and social structure of the ethnic, racial, and/or national divisions of humanity.-Scientific discipline:Compared to ethnography, the study of single groups through direct...
.
In a 1994 interview with deMause in
The New YorkerThe New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
, the interviewer wrote:
"To buy into psychohistory, you have to subscribe to some fairly woolly assumptions [...], for instance, that a nations's child-rearing techniques affect its foreign policy".
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