1. People's attitudes and the development of their personality are crucially and lastingly imprinted by their families.
2. These developments do not only occur through the conscious educational styles and goals of the parents but rather through their unconscious motives and unconscious psycho-social competency and maturity.
3. There exists as a rule a persisting mutual exchange between the values and norms of a society and the expectations of parents in regarding their children. The society influences the families which then imprint the children and these children then in their turn influence the society as adults.
4. Pathological mis-developments, whose pathology is mistaken for "normality", can thus occur since there exists an accordance in values and norms between parents, child and society. (ex: nationalsocialism, stalinism)
5. Most lasting are the deficiencies and traumas of the early parent/mother - child relationship (pregnancy, birthing, the first three years of infancy)
6. So-called "early disorders" are appearing massively today and are leading to social mal-developments in a disastrous and ominous way (i.e. excessive structures of effort and competition, narcissistic society, addictive society, structures of violence)
7. Social structures (even if they are pathological) render a secondary security and represent mechanisms of compensation for an insecuritity as to one's identity and a weak ego resulting from "early disorders".

8. Changing societies (for example EU) result in a great lability of the existing (supplementary) identities and a resurfacing of former deficiencies. This can lead to aggressive social acting-out (fights over distribution, thinking in animosities, fear or hatred of all that is foreign).
9. A "therapeutical culture" is what is needed, that above all focuses on the situation of the families and children, like

• Schools for Parenthood
• Soft, natural birth
• Education within relationships rather than as drill
• Feeling rather than acting out (knowledge of feelings)
• More experience than teaching

8. The prevention of possible social, cultural, religious conflicts is mainly up to families and the way how children are accepted and guided.
9. Even an "inner democracy", i.e. the way in which someone can be democratic on an inner mental level and subsequently is capable of shaping one’s individual relationships in a democratic way – and this being the prerequesite for a stable "outer democracy" – is essentiallly influenced in the families and through "education".
10. Therefore appropriate family politics must gain central importance in Europe.

Biography

Hans-Joachim Maaz is a neurologist and psychiatrist as well as a psychotherapist and psychoanalyst. He has written on the psycho-social consequences of authoritarian conditions in the German Democratic Republic, on consequences of the GDR’s ‘Wende’ (turnaround) and the unification of Germany, on the background of violence, racism and ultra-rightism in Germany and on the problem of guilt.

Since 1980 Hans-Joachim Maaz has been head physician of the Psychotherapeutic Clinic of the Evangelical Deaconary Organization in Halle. Since 1984 he has headed the Section Dynamic Individual Psychotherapy within the Society for Psychotherapy, Psychosomatics and Medicinal Psychology. He furthermore worked as chief instructor for psychodynamic individual therapy, the GDR’s form of psychoanalytical therapy. After 1989 he was elected first president of the ‘Academy for Psychodynamic Therapy and Depth Psychology’ which was later expanded to become the ‘German Society for Analytical Psychotherapy and Depth Psychology’.

Besides analytical individual therapy, Hans-Joachim Maaz’s work centres on dynamic group therapy and body oriented psychotherapy. Among his publications rank ‘Emotional Blockage’, 1990, ‘The Overthrown People’, 1991, ‘Indignation’, 1992 and ‘Unity Starts With Two’ (with Lucas Moeller), 1991. Hans-Joachim Maaz is Member of the Advisory Board of the Society of Founders of the International Peace University.