12 quotes
It is no wonder that historians have chosen to hide, deny and whitewash the record here uncovered.
The Emotional Life of Nations (2002)
Psychohistory, as a science, will always be problem-centered, while history will always remain period-centered. They are simply two different tasks.
Foundations of Psychohistory (1982)
Most ethnologists scrupulously avoid describing how these children feel about participating in the killing or eating of their siblings.
The Emotional Life of Nations (2002)
Most historians have been as little able to feel empathy for infants sent to wet nurses as the mothers themselves were.
The Emotional Life of Nations (2002)
Anthropologists have concluded that "child abuse...is virtually unknown" in New Guinea.
The Emotional Life of Nations (2002)
Historians are presumed to be unable to "do psychology," which is "mystical" anyway, so they are forced to accept the most "rational" explanations... "and it is on these that history is built."
Foundations of Psychohistory (1982)
Anthropologists have promulgated the myth of the peaceful savage so effectively that when actual deaths by war are tabulated for prestate simple societies, one is astonished by how such a notion can continue to be taught to students.
The Emotional Life of Nations (2002)
Written history may, in the course of its narrative, use some of the laws established by the various sciences, but its own task remains that of relating the essential sequence of historical action and, qua history, to tell what happened, not why.
Foundations of Psychohistory (1982)
But until my Journal of Psychoanalytical Anthropology began to be published and until my book The Emotional Life of Nations came out, few realized how much anthropologists distorted mothering in their tribes.
The Origins of War in Child Abuse (2010)
That dissociated selves were an everyday part of life in antiquity and the Middle Ages is a much-denied fact of historians, just as anthropologists deny that their subjects are dissociated personalities who live in an animistic world full of alters inhabiting animals, objects, and dead ancestors.
The Emotional Life of Nations (2002)
Sociologists and historians have avoided looking for the family sources of wars and social violence. Whenever a group produces murderers, the early parental relationship must have been abusive and neglectful. Yet this elementary truth has not even begun to be considered in historical research; just stating that poor mothering lies behind wars seems blasphemous.
The Emotional Life of Nations (2002)
There is, for instance, only one page at the beginning of Runciman's three-volume History of the Crusades describing how the participants decided to begin four hundred years of wars, and then several thousand pages devoted to the routes, battles and other events which make up the "history" of the Crusades.
Foundations of Psychohistory (1982)