Lloyd deMause (pronounced de-Moss; September 19, 1931 – April 23, 2020) was an American lay psychoanalyst and social historian, best known for his pioneering work in the field of psychohistory. He graduated from Columbia College and did graduate work in political science at Columbia University and later trained as a psychoanalyst. He taught psychohistory at the City University of New York. He is the founder of the Journal of Psychohistory.

Psychohistory

Beginning in the 1970s, DeMause began conceiving of psychohistory, 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, especially child abuse.

Legacy

In a 1994 interview with deMause in The New Yorker, interviewer Stephen 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 its foreign policy", but confessed that "deMause's analyses have often been weirdly prescient."

Controversy

Contributing to his ostracization from psychoanalytic circles, deMause was a contributor to the Satanic ritual abuse hysteria of the early 1990s, in part via the circulation of his article "Why Cults Terrorize and Kill Children", where he labelled skeptics of reports of the abuse "molesters" and "pedophile advocates". The article was used as a reliable source by ritual abuse proponents.

Publications

DeMause published over 90 scholarly articles and several books.

Books

Articles (selection)