Child abuse is the abuse of power. We do not have a coherent psychology of power, much is unknown. Soul murder is as old as human history, as old as the abuse of the helpless by the powerful in any group–which means as old as the family. But soul murder has a particular resonance with the twentieth century–with the world of Orwell’s 1984–and a particular relevance to it. This is the century of the computer, the concentration camp, and the atomic bomb, of the presence of such destructive potential that all life on earth is threatened, and of a centralized power so monolithic and intrusive that it has been aimed at mastery over the individual’s mind as well as body. This power has been implemented by twentieth-century discoveries in psychology and communications that have made brainwashing and mind control easily attained effects of terror and torture. Hitler and Stalin have proven that the strongest adults can be broken and deprived of their individuality and even of their humanity. That is one of the lessons of Orwell’s 1984–one that can also be learned from the lives of those who have grown up in the charge of crazy, cruel and capricious parents, in the totalitarian family ambience that Randall Jarrell calls “one of God’s concentration camps”.

Children are easy to be seduce because they want to be seduced. And we have learned that in the terrible circumstances of parents who do not love, are indifferent, or hate, children will turn to seduction, even to provocation to be beaten, to fulfill the imperative need for some parental attention.

–excerpts from Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation by Leonard Shengold, M.D.