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There are few scholars more conservative than historians. It took half a century for Marx to penetrate American historical writing; it has taken even longer for Freud to do so. As late as 1957, when American Historical Association president William Langer said that the historian's “next assignment” should be to learn to use the insights of applied psychoanalysis, few heeded his advice.
It is against this background that the recent amazing influence of Erik Erikson's books and seminars on historical writing must be measured. In the past few years, a group of young historians has begun to use Erikson's “life stages” approach to applied psychoanalysis, and David Hunt's exciting book on childhood in 17th century France represents the finest of these efforts to write a new kind of “psycho-history.” Hunt's book closely follows Erikson's developmental timetable for the growth of the ego, whose tasks Erikson says are the establishment of basic trust (vs. mistrust) in the oral period, autonomy (vs. shame) in the anal period, and initiative (vs. guilt) in the oedipal period. In all these stages, parents in 17th century France are found noxious: starvation and binding are the common traumas of the earliest period, whippings and enemas the lessons of the second, and seduction and abandonment the content of the third.
With great skill and sensitivity, Hunt marshals the scattered historical materials to reconstruct the terrors of 17th century childhood, depending heavily on the uniquely rich documentation found in the daily diary of Louis XIII's pediatrician. Mothers are shown to have viewed child rearing as an unrewarding, obnoxious task best given over to nurses, a practice encouraged by the father, who saw the infant primarily as a potential rival for his wife's affection. As nursing the child