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Lloyd deMause | |
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| Born | (1931-09-19)September 19, 1931 Detroit, Michigan, U.S. |
| Died | April 23, 2020(2020-04-23) (aged 88) |
| Occupation | Psychohistorian |
Lloyd deMause (pronouncedde-Moss; September 19, 1931 – April 23, 2020) was an American laypsychoanalyst andsocial historian, best known for his pioneering work in the field ofpsychohistory.
He graduated fromColumbia College and did graduate work inpolitical science atColumbia University and later trained as a psychoanalyst. He taught psychohistory at the City University of New York. He is the founder of theJournal of Psychohistory.
Beginning in the 1970s, DeMause began conceiving ofpsychohistory, a field of study of the psychological motivations of historical events, and their associated patterns of behavior. It seeks to understand the emotional origin of the social and political behavior of groups and nations—past and present—by analyzing events in childhood and the family, especiallychild abuse.
In a 1994 interview with deMause inThe New Yorker, interviewerStephen Schiff wrote that "to buy into psychohistory, you have to subscribe to some fairly woolly assumptions [...], for instance, that a nation's child-rearing techniques affect itsforeign policy", but confessed that "deMause's analyses have often been weirdly prescient."[1]
Contributing to his ostracization from psychoanalytic circles, deMause was a contributor to theSatanic ritual abuse hysteria of the early 1990s, in part via the circulation of his article "Why Cults Terrorize and Kill Children",[2][3] where he labelled skeptics of reports of the abuse "molesters" and "pedophile advocates".[4] The article was used as a reliable source by ritual abuse proponents.
DeMause published over 90 scholarly articles and several books.
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