Lloyd deMause: Most

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

Lloyd deMause: 40 quotes0 likes

“Historians are presumed to be unable to "do psychology," which is "mystical" anyway, so they are forced to accept the most "rational" explanations… "and it is on these that history is built."”

Source: Foundations of Psychohistory (1982), Ch. 2, p. 88.

“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.

“Indeed, most of what is in history books is stark, raving mad —the maddest of all being the historian's belief that it is sane. For some time now, I often cry when I watch the evening news, read newspapers, or study history books, a reaction I was trained to suppress in every school I attended for 25 years. In fact, it is because we so often switch into our social alters when we try to study history that we cannot understand it —our real emotions are dissociated. Those who are able to remain outside the social trance are the individuals whose personal insights are beyond those of their neighbors.”

Source: The Emotional Life of Nations (2002), Ch. 5, pp. 108-109.