Foundations of Psychohistory. Lloyd DeMause. New York:  Creative Roots. 1982,  v + 336 pp.

This work is a collection of deMause's essays published over the past decade, presented here without any updating. For example, a footnote of chapter two refers to “my article ‘The Evolution of Childhood’ in The History of Childhood” when in fact that article is reprinted as the first chapter of the book under review. This lack of any melding of the book's parts makes the reviewer's task more difficult, as the various chapters contain very different ideas and present more a panorama of the development of the author's thought than a unified approach to probing the past. There is no way to judge whether deMause any longer holds some of his early ideas or would still give them the emphasis he once did.

There are at least two major theses contained between the covers of this work, and they are not precisely compatible. The first major thesis is that history moves psychogenically, by psychological changes in groups which have been raised in different childrearing modes: the infanticidal, abandoning, ambivalent, intrusive, socializing, and helping modes, each of which can be identified as a predominant way of dealing with children in a past, present, or future epoch. The older modes persist into the present and give rise to conflicts between the “psychoclasses,” which have been reared in very different ways. Rather than economic and technological forces shaping consciousness, as the Marxists would have it, deMause sees psychogenic change as a precursor of technological change and the essential conflict is between psychoclasses, a conflict of different personality types produced by different childrearing practices.

The second thesis finds the origins of group dynamics in prenatal life. “The nurturant placenta … becomes the earliest object of fetel mental life” and “just as the satisfying and grateful emotions associated with the Nurturant Placenta form a prototype for all later love relationships, so too, the polluting-asphyxiating experiences produce an attitude of fear and