Introduction
to the Revised Edition

“In my beginning is my end.”

—T. S. ELIOT

Ghosts from the Nursery: Tracing the Roots of Violence was a superb book in its first edition, one and a half decades ago. The new edition of this significant book incorporates the relevant major advances in the field of human development since then. This book focuses on clearly explaining our rapidly increasing understanding of the importance of connection and attachment between an infant and his or her parents in the very earliest days and months of life, and how that absence of process plays out violently later in childhood and many decades later.

The authors capably state, “The popular belief in the United States is that the baby, let alone the fetus, is exempt from thought and the capacity to record enduring experiences. Nothing could be further from the truth. . . . As is true of most ghosts, these aspects remain invisible, at least to the naked eye. And in that invisibility lies the power of these forces to continue to haunt us.” They then proceed in an eminently understandable manner to explain the processes and mechanisms by which neurodevelopment proceeds to leave as socially visible records those children who are the hallmarks of capable parenting or who are the hallmarks of infants who were born but not raised.

The core organization of Ghosts from the Nursery involves a careful description of selected violent lives, coupled with a detailed analysis of their origins. A moment’s reflection on the usual news media’s approach to the latest horror story of a school shooting, gang violence, or a teen suicide makes us realize that meaningful information is almost always absent about the parents and the earliest lives of those individuals, as though the gentleman’s agreement of our time is to be totally avoidant of this disturbing realm. Instead, poverty, race, and genetics are routinely used as convenient scapegoats, raising the question, “Do we really want to know?”

Again quoting Ghosts, “Violence begins in the brain, and the brain begins in the womb.” This important observation is seriously uncomfortable for all parents to acknowledge, since the vast majority of us are never taught what is involved in supportive parenting, and a great many have never experienced it. How then would we learn about such matters? And yet we have hints of awareness at some primitive level by our use of expressions like “The baby is the father of the man,” or “As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.” Moving us smoothly beyond commonplace realizations, the authors take us through the current scientific understanding of the origins and mechanisms of human development and the origins of violence to a basic contact with psychoneuroimmunology. Repeatedly, they help us see that the necessary intermediary mechanisms whereby life experiences become neurologically inscribed in our brains are not to be confused with basic causes. The universally important topics in this book about human development and the very early origins of violence are successfully presented in a remarkably clear, interesting, and understandable manner. Don’t look away.

—Vincent J. Felitti, MD

Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program

Clinical Professor of Medicine, University of California