Lloyd deMause

Lloyd deMause, pronounced de-Moss (born September 19, 1931 in Detroit, Michigan), is an American social thinker known for his work 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.

DeMause has made major contributions to the study of Psychohistory which is the study of the psychological motivations of historical events. It seeks to understand the emotional origin of the social and political behavior of groups and nations, past and present. Its subject matter is childhood and the family (especially child abuse), and psychological studies of anthropology and ethnology.

In a 1994 interview with deMause in The New Yorker, interviewer Stephen Schiff wrote: "To buy into psychohistory, you have to subscribe to some fairly woolly assumptions, for instance, that a nations's child-rearing techniques affect its foreign policy, yet deMause's analyses have often been weirdly prescient.

Psychohistorians endorse trauma models of schizoid, narcissistic, masochistic, borderline, depressive and neurotic personalities.