Lloyd deMause: Feel

Lloyd deMause is American thinker. Explore interesting quotes on feel.

Lloyd deMause: 40 quotes0 likes

“Although one anthropologist mentioned that "undoubtedly these rituals are exceedingly painful," they are not usually considered traumatic to children. Since empathy with children's feelings is nearly absent, gratuitous mutilation of the children is common, such as tightly binding newborn infant's heads for months to elongate the skull, or […].”

Source: The Emotional Life of Nations (2002), Ch. 7, pp. 276-277.

“Most ethnologists scrupulously avoid describing how these children feel about participating in the killing or eating of their siblings.”

Source: The Emotional Life of Nations (2002), Ch. 7, p. 261.

“Psychohistory, like psychoanalysis, is a science in which the researcher's feelings are as much or even more a part of his research equipment than his eyes or his hands. […] Weighing of complex motives can only be accomplished by identification with human actors, the usual suppression of all feeling preached and followed by most "science" simply cripples a psychohistorian as badly as it would cripple a biologist to be forbidden the use of a microscope. The emotional development of a psychohistorian is therefore as much a topic for discussion as his or her intellectual development.”

Source: Foundations of Psychohistory (1982), Ch. 2, p. 100.

“Most historians have been as little able to feel empathy for infants sent to wet nurses as the mothers themselves were.”

Source: The Emotional Life of Nations (2002), Ch. 8, p. 318.

“I no longer believe that most traditional historians are emotionally equipped, even with training, to use their feelings as psychohistorical research tools, although there is a whole new generation of psychohistorians just now beginning to write who are able to do so. To expect the average historian to do psychohistory is like trying to teach a blind man to be an astronomer […]. Whenever I speak to a scholar of the emotional development necessary to make a good psychohistorian and get a blank look of total incomprehension, I try to find a way to leave the subject of psychohistory altogether. My listener usually is in another world of discourse where emotional reactions are not considered crucial to the results.”

Source: Foundations of Psychohistory (1982), Ch. 2, ibid.