2 Items From History: Good For Discussion

RonPrice

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The History of Child Abuse by Lloyd deMause in TheThe Journal of Psychohistory 25 (3) Winter 1998. Originally this article was a speech given at the National Parenting Conference in Boulder, Colorado, on September 25, 1997. I recommend this article.
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During the past three decades, I have spent much of my scholarly life examining primary sources such as diaries, autobiographies, doctor's reports, ethnographic reports and other documents that document what it must have felt like to have been a child--yesterday and today, in the East and the West, in literate and preliterate cultures.

In several hundred studies published by myself and my associates in The Journal of Psychohistory, we have provided extensive evidence that the history of childhood has been a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes--and the further away from the West one gets--the more massive the neglect and cruelty one finds and the more likely children are to have been killed, rejected, beaten, terrorized and sexually abused by their caretakers.
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The 2nd historical "event" is a comment on history----as follows:
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REALITY

History is not just a pile of facts, something dressed up for the movies or a story in a book. It functions like the potter's clay and has a genuine significance for our lives when its facts live in the present through the meaning they bring to the present, through how they illumine the present. It is this sense of history that makes it, what Canadian historian John Rolston Saul calls, reality. History is the product of how we handle this reality.1 It is this sense of history, among several other essential senses of that discipline, that inhabits my poetry in a complex set of ways. -Ron Price with thanks to John Rolston Saul, Reflections on a Siamese Twin: Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century, Penguin, Toronto, 1998, pp. 499-504.

Here was a bit of history,

came across it the other day

in a bookshop: some letters,

letters written by Van Gogh.



He was writing about

his ultimate goal

and feeling that he was

on the right track---

firmly convinced he was---

so convinced that

he paid little attention

to what people said of him.

He painted what he felt

and felt what he painted.



This is my story, too, of poetry....

except that......

few people say anything about my poetry

and I never know if I am exactly on track,

if I write precisely the best, the most apt

that can be written.



But.....

I fit my emotions around my assumptions:

that this poetry is at the core of my life,

that it expresses my essential relationships

with all that I know and love--

and I write--this is my faith.

-Ron Price 14/3/02.
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enough for now!
 
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Welcome Ron Price ...I share some of your interests and look forward to exchanging ideas with you

:)

Lilly
 
I wonder what your opinions are of child labor and whether you think we are doing enough to help these child slaves who essentially are to work for life because they have been sold by their parents in order to pay a debt of a mere five dollars.

How about the view that points out that if it wasn't for employers employing small children then they would have nothing to eat and would therefore be worse off?


BTW: Nice poem.
 
How about the view that points out that if it wasn't for employers employing small children then they would have nothing to eat and would therefore be worse off?


That is an important point. While researching an animal issue I came in contact with several well informed sources who articulated that view.
 
Yes, it's a crazy world and very complex. I wish I could write all the answers here but, I'm afraid, as I get older, the simple answers I once thought would fix things will require much more---an immense injection of truth into the world to work them out and people to work through the complexities of that truth. That's all for now.-Ron
 
It has been more than 7 years since I was last on this thread, but the issues and the questions are as alive as ever. I'll add some more on Lloyd deMause; this is where this thread started more than 7 years ago now. DeMause was born in 1931, and is an American social thinker known for his work, as I indicated, in the field of psychohistory.

He did graduate work in political science at Columbia University and later trained as a lay psychoanalyst, which is defined as a psychoanalyst who does not have a medical degree. He is the founder of The Journal of Psychohistory. All I want to do here is encourage others, yet again, to read his work and read in the field of psychohistory. This reading will place so many contemporary issues in relation to child abuse and domestic violence in a helpful historical perspective.-Ron Price, Australia
 
Does he say anything about the selfish spoiled child? Is that also considered child abuse?

Today's kids seem to only care about themselves and expect everything handed to them.
 
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Yes, it's a crazy world and very complex. I wish I could write all the answers here but, I'm afraid, as I get older, the simple answers I once thought would fix things will require much more---an immense injection of truth into the world to work them out and people to work through the complexities of that truth. That's all for now.-Ron

There is much truth in this. I wish more people realized their own limitations as such. It is often those that begin with good intentions (but don't think things completely through) that end up causing harm.

While some people are better off today than they once were, and in part it is due to changes made, there are many who suffered as well. How many is too many? Are the "saved" ones enough to make up for the ones who weren't saved? Was there a better way?
 
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