The History of Childhood: Edited by Lloyd DeMause. New York: The Psychohistory Press, 1974. 450 pp.

The ten psychohistorians contributing to this scholarly volume have presented us with a survey of childhood in the Western world from 200 A.D. to the nineteenth century. Recognizing the nuclear significance of the first years of life and the paucity of relevant historical research, they collated widely diverse source material in their reconstruction of the ways of interaction of different generations of parents and children. This ambitious undertaking was the result of five years of research sponsored by the Association for Applied Psychoanalysis.

In the first chapter, the editor, Lloyd DeMause, outlines his "psychogenic theory" of history, asserting that the central force for change is neither technology nor economics, but "the psychogenic changes in personality occurring because of successive generations of parent-child interactions" (p. 3). Psychic structure is passed from generation to generation through the narrow funnel of childhood. A society's approach to child rearing is the very condition for the transmission and development of all other cultural elements, with