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Contemporary mental health practitioners often lambast our government for its failure to provide sufficient funding for child mental health services. Although we might yearn for a more psychologically committed Minister of State for Health, we must recall that, by comparison to previous centuries, young people in the twenty-first century have never received such magnificent care and attention.
As Lloyd deMause (1973, 1974, 1982, 1988, 1990, 1991, 2002), the pioneering historian of childhood, has argued in a stream of scholarly publications over many decades, prior to the birth of psychoanalysis, most mothers and fathers in human history treated their children with abominable cruelty. Only in recent years has parenthood become transformed from a practice of punishment and discipline of young people to one in which little babies can be encouraged to flourish and can, when troubled, receive sensitive help and guidance.
DeMause demonstrated the many ways in which the ancient Greeks and Romans would perpetrate acts of infanticide on a regular basis, often sacrificing their children to the gods (cf. Lefkowitz and Fant, 1977; Tierney, 1989; Miles, 2010), while their medieval successors would wrap their babies in tight swaddling clothing for days at a time, endangering the lives of their offspring, encasing them in their own excreta. In addition to swaddling, which contributed to the development of tremendous passivity, grown-ups subjected young people to cruel treatments. For instance, in 1356, Richard Cook, a London child, had to endure being imprisoned by a clerk from Southwark called Nicholas. In consequence, young Master Cook lost his mind and began to hallucinate evil spirits (Arnold, 1985; cf. Orme, 2001).
In his remarkably chilling study of medieval suicide, Professor Terence Murphy (1986) detected a vast number of cases of children and adolescents who, fearing punishment from their parents or their masters, forfeited their own lives. In 1519, William Smyth, a fifteen-