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1300
BEAT A CHILD
law brought child-beating into the public domain: “If one beats a child until it bleeds, then it will remember, but if one beats it to death, the law applies.”Most medieval descriptions of beating were quite severe, although St. Anselm, as in so many things, was far in advance of his time by telling an abbot to beat children gently, for “Are they not human? Are they not flesh and blood like you?” -
1500
BAD PARENTS
Bad Parents Giving Their Children To The Devil.
Durer’s fifteenth-century Ritter von Turn and sixteenth-century parents who give the Devil the children they promised to him. -
SWADDLING
pay any attention to infants once they were tied up. As a recent medical study of swaddling has shown, swaddled infants are extremely passive, their hearts slow down, they cry less, they sleep far more, and in general they are so withdrawn and inert that the doctors who did the study wondered if swaddling shouldn’t be tried again. -
DOUBLE IMAGE
Projective and reversal reactions often occurred simultaneously in parents in the past, producing an effect which I call the “double image,” where the child was seen as both full of the adult’s projected desires, hostilities, and sexual thoughts, and at the same moment as a mother or father figure. -
GHOTS
control device-frightening the child with ghosts-in order to discuss its projective character.
The number of ghost-like figures used to frighten children through-out history is legion, and their regular use by adults was common until quite recently. -
STYLE OF CLOTHES
The child, regardless of sex, is often dressed in the style of clothes similar to that worn by the parent’s mother, that is, not only in a long dress, but in one out of date by at least a generation. The mother is literally reborn in the child; children are not just dressed as “miniature adults” but quite clearly as miniature women, often complete with decollate’. -
DARK ROOMS
Children were put in “dark closets, where they were sometimes forgotten for hours.” One mother shut her 3-year-old boy up in a drawer. Another house was “a sort of little Bastille, in every closet of which was to be found a culprit – some were sobbing and repeating verbs, others eating their bread and water . . . ” Children were sometimes left locked in rooms for days. -
ABANDONMENT
abandonment practices, the informal abandoning of young children to other people by their parents occurred quite often right up to the nineteenth century. The parents gave every kind of rationalization for giving their children away: “to learn to speak”, “to cure timidness”, for “health”, or as a payment for medical services rendered.
