It is hard to believe John Lennon has been dead longer than he was alive.
At Daunts Books on Marylebone High Street in London last month, I picked up The Last Days of John Lennon.
This James Patterson-factory produced narrative turned out to be a riveting page-turner chock-a-block with stories and anecdotes I never knew about The Beatles, a band I’m old enough to have seen perform live on The Ed Sullivan Show coming up 60 years ago this February.
A couple of items in the book stand out and, connecting the dots, I walked away with a sense that John Lennon had a premonition of his violent death by gunfire as he followed in the footsteps of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. to give peace a chance.
The most significant indicators: One, his song Happiness is a Warm Gun, with the chorus, “Bang, bang, shoot, shoot.” And two, at the beginning of Come Together, another Lennon composition, he can be heard whispering “Shoot me” several times.
Without realizing it—perhaps subconsciously—Lennon may have been creating his own “group fantasy” by sending out a signal to psychos.
(Could be that another Beatle also had a subconscious death wish. George’s “My Sweet Lord” practically begs for a reunion with his maker: “Really want to be with you, Really want to see you, Lord, But it takes so long, my Lord.” Sad to say, it didn’t take so long after all.)
For more about how Psychohistory works, here is my my Santa Barbara News-Press column from 16 October 2022.
Thirty-six years ago, I happened upon a field of study called Psychohistory.
What in heck, you may ask, is Psychohistory?
For an answer, in January 1987, I called on Lloyd deMause, the inventor of this sub-psychiatric science, at his office in New York City.
“Psychohistory,” Dr. deMause told me, “is the science of historical motivation.”
Meaning?
“What people’s motives are in history.”
As in…
“What motivates people to go to war.”
That day I conducted a lengthy interview with Dr. deMause. It was never published… until now.
With Russian dictator Vladimir Putin threatening the use of nuclear weapons, it seems that what the good doctor laid on me decades ago may be more relevant today than ever before.
Lloyd was educated at Columbia University and did post-graduate work in political science before training at a psychoanalytical institute.
Essentially, as a “psycho-historian,” Dr. deMause presumed to put history on the couch—and taught his techniques of Psychohistory to students at the City University of New York, who would often tell him, “Now I’m scared to death like you are.”
“We look very carefully at what people said to each other during a crisis,” Dr. deMause began, “and what was scribbled on the edges of diplomatic documents as they went back and forth, the telegrams that were sent, and what cartoons appeared in the newspapers. Suddenly, you begin to see things in quite a different way.”
How so?
“You begin to wonder whether sets of different nations might not be influencing other people unconsciously. These unconscious messages pass around all the time.”
Is there someone in control of such messages or their conveyance?
“I don’t think it’s conscious at all, but I don’t make that distinction.”
Then who’s sending the messages? The White House? The media?
“I don’t think it’s just the leaders or the media. If I looked only at ‘Letters to the Editor,’ I’d get the same sort of images. The Group fantasy.”
AND THAT'S THE ESSENCE OF PSYCHOHISTORY
“The group fantasy works in cycles,” Dr. deMause explained. “We pour our bad feelings and unacceptable wishes onto the President, and then it disintegrates, and we must find something abroad to take care of it because he is no longer able to handle our fantasies. Cycles for this tend to be around the 50-year period. Essentially, you go through four general periods: A new child-rearing mode, a number of people brought up a little warmer, a little more individualistic. That group does something new. That’s the ‘20s and ‘60s in America. That’s the Young Romantics of the early nineteenth century. But they start to drive the older classes bonkers. Progress produces enormous anxiety in the older cycle classes. The first thing to arrive is a depression. Eighty-five percent of all major wars that occurred over the last 800 years have been on the upcycle of the wave, because there’s too much progress. After each war you had a depression.”
So, if one is trying to forecast what happens next?
“Since 1945 and the atomic bomb, most of the big nations have been trying to work out new patterns, trying to make do with small recessions, not big depressions, trying to make do with smaller wars, not big wars. A depression is an internal sacrifice. As a historian, I see what we do is a repeat of similar things in earlier civilizations, which emphasized that the reason you have leaders is for sacrifice to the gods.
“That’s true now too. Governments will fall unless they perform their sacrificial function from time to time. They must stop the older classes from being too anxious, give them sacrificial scapegoats for the things they are achieving. I’ve studied societies going on with continuous wars for thousands of years. You’d think they’d kick out the guy who’s making these wars, and yet they go on and on.”
And you’re saying it’s because of poor child-rearing?
“If we all had terrific child-rearing,” says Dr. deMause, “there’d be no reason to continue going through depressions and wars. That’s what I look at in terms of what’s coming from any nation: What they do to their kids. For instance, when children were un-swaddled in the West. Make a list of the dates of un-swaddling and then put it next to the date of the first democratic revolutions. They’re identical.”
Better child-rearing would put an end to depressions and wars?
“That’s the long-term solution. But we have so many big bombs around, we’re not going to get there if we wait for the whole world to do it. And many countries—Arabic fundamentalist countries, for example—are only just going through their reformation. And they’re going to get atomic bombs.”
So, what can anyone DO about it?
“As a psycho-historian, I try to call attention to these unconscious fantasies. It is only possible to live out unconscious fantasies if they remain unconscious. As soon as they become conscious, it’s very difficult to act them out. I liken what we do to a suicide hotline. When a guy calls and he wants to jump out a window, there’s no time to cover all his childhood problems. But what you can do is stop him from jumping by talking to him and make him aware of his anger, make him aware of the difference between fantasy and reality. I don’t think I’m going to save the world. But sometimes small things make big differences.
CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS
“I’ll never forget Bobby Kennedy’s role in the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Dr. deMause continued. “They were sitting in the White House Situation Room and there’s a hundred-mile line drawn around Cuba, and JKF said we would sink the next Russian ship that crosses it. A guy walks in and says, well, a Russian ship is coming across, shall we sink it? Khrushchev said that if a Russian ship was sunk, they’d launch their missiles, World War III.
“A bunch of images came to Bobby’s mind: The image of his brother [Joseph, who died in World War II], images of children dying, which is the essence of war. He tapped into his own unconscious and the unconscious of the whole nation. For no reason at all, he came up with an answer, turned to JFK and said, Let’s redraw the line to 50 miles and give them a little more time, and JFK said okay.
“In the space of 50 miles the Russians changed their mind. The only hope we’ve got is to be conscious. The brain stem is where the unconscious is, our reptilian brain, and it leads us astray. That’s where all our childhood material is, and it drives us into these irrational solutions.”
How does the group fantasy work?
“Groups form their unconscious collective—the group fantasy—through their communications. I’m always astonished that the same idea or image of a cartoon will appear in Seattle and New York on the same day—two different cartoons projecting an identical image.”
What do you attribute this to?
“A basic stock of images we all have, like falling off a cliff. The imagery of a dragon comes from way back when you’re in the womb. The placenta itself has veins and you’ve got a snake-like umbilicus. Serpentine monsters and octopus are imagery from the womb. When I see a president [in a cartoon drawing] grabbed and strangled by a monster called inflation, I know we’re about to consider a war solution. We’re being strangled like we were in the womb.”
THE PROCESS
What is your method, I asked, for detecting the meaning of the imagery around us that produces the group fantasy?
“Essentially,” Dr. deMause elucidated, “you pick out all the emotional words, all the metaphors, all the similes, and leave out all the objects. Leave out the nouns unless it’s a family image. It is the emotion, the active verbs you’re going for, and the adjectives.
“The most astonishing thing is that you can’t miss the fantasies. A group fantasy runs for a month or two. And it’s overwhelming. I was teaching at City University when President Reagan was shot. For three weeks before he was shot, all my students were gathering images. The front page of U.S. News & World Report headlined ‘Too Much Waste—Reagan’s Next Target.’ My students kept coming in and saying ‘Look, they’re going to kill Reagan!’ We went for a couple weeks that way. I went back and found images prior to JFK’s assassination—images that would suggest to an assassin to kill him.”
As in Manchurian Candidate?
“If you want to get a message through, you slightly hide it. You get it past our censor, our unconscious mind. You say, ‘Waste Reagan’ in a funny way, you put a dash in between, and you show Reagan with the word ‘target’ next to him.”
And you’re saying the editor who created that headline had no idea of the unconscious impact?
“Unconsciously, the editor was fully attuned to the group fantasy. That’s why certain cartoonists are good, others are not. The cartoonist who doesn’t tap into the group fantasy loses his job. The front cover is the most discussed thing at Time and Newsweek. They discuss it in secret behind locked doors. And yet, the number of times they come out with the same image is astonishing.”
So, the editors devising the headlines, the cartoons and cover imagery are not consciously aware of the group fantasy they are promoting?
“No, the group fantasy is unconscious.”
What about the person who picks up the hidden message—how does that occur?
“A disturbed person—let’s use John Hinckley [who shot Reagan] as an example. He had been stalking someone else, but nothing legitimized it. Then he sees all these messages on the newsstands… whether he was going to shoot Reagan or someone else was determined by the group fantasy at that time. Take Sirhan Sirhan, RFK’s [accepted] assassin. He has always claimed he adored Robert Kennedy but somehow got hypnotized into shooting at him. You’ve always got, at any given time, 20,000 crazy nuts out there to pick up the message.
“Maybe someplace, when someone’s just about ready to say, ‘I can’t lose face, we’ve got to launch the missiles,’ somebody will say, I remember this guy deMause in New York…’”
If only.
As this country is strangled by inflation—the sign, claims Lloyd deMause, that war is looming—one hopes world leaders will come to their senses and, as Bobby Kennedy did during the Cuban Missile Crisis, give more time for those losing face to get fully conscious and come to THEIR senses.
AND SPEAKING OF VLADIMIR PUTIN...
How was the Russian tyrant reared as a child?
The answer, in the context of Dr. deMause’s theories, is dangerously chilling.
Mad Vlad grew up in St. Petersburg, a city devastated by the Nazis, in an apartment infested by rats, no hot water or bathtub, no heating, two older siblings who perished—and he was regularly bullied by other kids.
As reported last March by Aces Too High News: “Hitler, Stalin and Mao Zedong all suffered years of merciless beatings and other unconscionable abuse in childhood and went on to be responsible for the deaths of millions of people.”
Scary Stuff