Feelings of incompletion and deprivation in being a girl have been compensated … Her love for the husband who has made such a completion possible deepens. She does not wish the child just for herself but as a meaningful outcome of her relationship to her husband, pleasing him with a gift that is part of him that he has placed in her to nurture but also something of herself that her husband will cherish. To some extent, the baby is herself, loved by a benevolent father.24
Marcel Heiman, an obstetrician much influenced by Benedek, applied the theory of maternal regression to his patients, suggesting that “… more than any other physician, the obstetrician needs to understand intimately feminine psychology.” In a paper entitled “A Psychoanalytic View of Pregnancy,” he wrote:
… regression in the course of pregnancy is universal and normal, and pregnancy has aptly been called a “normal illness”…. just as the regression of the pregnant woman brings to the surface childhood fears, so we find the pregnant woman as suggestible as a child. This is reminiscent of some of the fears children commonly have; all the mother has to do at times is to take the child in her arms and say “Now, there, there …” and thus establish in the child a feeling of security that eradicates the fears.… This is the reason for the success authoritarian obstetricians have with their patients.…25
(Along the same lines, Dr. Spock described women’s greater willingness to take advice and listen to professionals as one of the most basic differences between the sexes.)26
The breakdown of maternal integrity was complete: the mother has herself been turned into a child. Regressed to a psychological replay of her own infancy by the experience of motherhood, she is expected to turn an obedient and worshipful ear to the father figures who will coach her in her new role. Accordingly, the voice of the professional becomes insidiously paternalistic. After commenting modestly that “I cannot tell you exactly what to do, but I can write about what it all means,” Dr. Winnicott, once president of the British Psychoanalytic Association, and author of Mother and Child: A Primer of First Relationships, addressed this condescending reassurance to the young mother:
You do not have to be clever, and you do not even have to think if you do not want to. You may have been hopeless at arithmetic at school; or perhaps all your friends got scholarships but you couldn’t stand the sight of a history book and so failed and left school early; or perhaps you would have done well if you hadn’t had measles just before the exam. Or you may be really clever. But all this does not matter, and it hasn’t anything to do with whether or not you are a good mother. If a child can play with a doll, you can be an ordinary devoted mother.…27
Naturally it was only the wholly domestic, nonworking mother who could hope to release the libidinal unself-consciousness, the blissful ignorance, that was now the sine qua non of good mothering. Working mothers of the late forties and fifties were urged to quit and give in to the instincts they had been fighting. For example, one woman wrote to Child Study (a parent-oriented periodical whose advisory board included Lawrence Frank, Benjamin Spock, and leading psychiatrists René Spitz and David Levy):
I am a professional woman with a son five years old, afraid that in my busy life I’m not giving him all he needs … though I keep planning to quit, so far I haven’t.… Realizing as I do that I’m evidently not the domestic type, I’m not at all sure it would be wise for me to give up my work and try to be just a mother.
After chiding her for that final phrase “just a mother”—the Child Study staff responded encouragingly:
Perhaps you honestly do feel that you lack whatever it takes to give the term “domestic” [this] fuller meaning. If so, you may want to get some help from professional sources in finding out what has caused you to lose confidence in your capacities. It may be that you’re more the “domestic type” than you think and that under the right circumstances your powers as wife and mother could be liberated in the service of your child, your husband and —last but by no means least—for your own enduring satisfaction.28
It was assumed, of course, that all women had husbands and that their husbands could support the family singlehandedly. The mass media poured out the same advice to women of all classes: women who worked, no matter what the reasons, were depriving their children and denying their deepest instincts.
Bad Mothers
Psychoanalytic theory did not linger too long in front of the romantic tableau of the mother-child relationship. Even at the height of libidinal motherhood theory, the suspicion arose that American women were not really natural mothers—and this suspicion only grew stronger in the late forties and fifties. Psychiatrists, after all, are medical men, trained to search for the pathology—the dark lesions, the hidden microbial spores—which lies under the healthiest exterior. As they peered into the rosy picture of the mother-child relationship with the X-ray vision of psychoanalytic insight, a core of hideous pathology revealed itself and came to dominate mid-twentieth-century child-raising theory.
The symptoms abounded in the waiting rooms of school psychologists, psychiatric social workers, and (for wealthier parents) psychoanalysts themselves. There were cranky children, destructive children, withdrawn children, frightened and disturbed children, babies who cried inconsolably, babies who masturbated obsessively, and so on—despite a scientific theory that locked mother and child together in mutual bliss, and despite the honeymoon isolation that the mother and child were now supposed to enjoy in so many middle-class and working-class homes. It did not enter the experts’ minds to question the theory or to be alarmed at the terrible solitude in which most women were now attempting to raise their children.† The theory was solid; the home was sacred; it was the woman who had failed.
As psychoanalytic attention shifted from the normal to the deviant, from the “healthy” to the pathological, the theory of instinctual motherhood quickly lost whatever comfort it might have held for women. The instinct theory asserted, at best, that women did know something about child raising independently of the experts. They did not have to master techniques and methods formulated in the psychologists’ labs or clinics. But with the new emphasis on pathology, “instinct” proved to be a harsher taskmaster for women than discipline and study had ever been. If anything should go awry in the mother-child relationship or in the child’s development the finger of blame would no longer point at the mother’s faulty technique, but at her defective instincts. What really mattered now was not what the mother read or thought, what she wanted to do or tried to do, but what her unconscious motivations were. And instincts couldn’t be faked.
As she played out her subconscious urges through the act of mothering, a woman wrote on the baby’s psyche, as it were, with invisible ink. In time the ink would become legible to the expert, who would read it—and judge.
The emphasis on pathology reinforced the child-raising experts’ heroic image of themselves as public health crusaders—working for a healthy future just as sanitation experts worked for a healthy present. In the period of scientific motherhood, the challenge to child-raising experts as public health officials had been to inform the maternal intellect. Now the challenge was to probe the maternal subconscious, searching for the neuroses which could infect a generation of children with the germs of mental illness. René Spitz led a generation of psychoanalysts in the effort to trace each childhood disorder to a specific disorder in the mother, just as the bacteriologists sought to trace each disease to a specific type of microbe.
Using the language of the pathology lab, Spitz identified the “psychotoxic diseases of infancy.” These were the diseases in which “the mother’s personality acts as the disease-provoking agent, as a psychological toxin.” He devoted a major portion of his book, The First Year of Life, to connecting each of the following maternal attitudes with a corresponding infantile disturbance: “Primary Anxious Overpermissiveness” (which he said produces the three-month colic); “Hostility in the Guise of Manifest Anxiety” (infantile eczema); “Oscillation between Pampering and Host
ility” (rocking in infants); “Cyclical Mood Swings of the Mother” (fecal play and coprophagia); “Maternal Hostility Consciously Compensated” (the hyperthymic child).30
Mothers could seek no escape from the instinctual imperative. A deficient mother would be exposed by the very symptoms of her child’s pathology. So pretending to have a good time washing the baby wasn’t enough—you had to really enjoy it. Psychoanalytic theory identified two broad categories of bad mothers—the rejecting mother and the overprotecting mother—mirror images and equally malevolent. The indictment of the “rejecting mother” became so widespread in clinical practice and popular literature that even psychoanalyst Anna Freud eventually regretted its overuse:
… the idea of being rejected by the mother suddenly began to overrun the fields of clinical work and casework. On the clinical side, more and more of the gravest disturbances (such as autism, atypical and psychotic development, mental backwardness, retardation of speech, etc.) were attributed to the presence of rejection. On the caseworker’s side, more and more mothers were pronounced to be cold, not outgoing, unresponsive, unloving, hating, in short, rejecting their children. This caused much heart-searching and also much self-accusation, especially among the mothers of abnormal children.31
Few mothers could read about the maternal rejection syndrome without a pang of conscience. Every woman has, at some time, turned away from a two-year old’s tenth teasing demand to know “why”; left a toddler alone for an interminable fifteen minutes to cry it out; let her mind wander during a conversation with a four-year-old—or otherwise “rejected” her child. Full-time mothers, struggling to keep a home spotless and tidy, know what it is to resent, and fleetingly hate, an infant or a pre-schooler as if he or she were a full-grown adversary. If motherhood was “fulfillment” then these flashes of hostility must be traitorous, and implicitly destructive of all that was normal, good, and decent. Science could not account for these feelings except as perversions—serpents in the Eden of the mother-child relationship. The result was agonizing self-doubt: the mother who is blamed for her “hostility,” her “aggressiveness,” and also (if she was seeing a child-raising or mental health expert) for “disguising” it, is a mother whose own internal life has been rendered inhuman and unintelligible. As her own wants and needs are interpreted as destructive toxins, she drifts toward actual psychosis. Adrienne Rich, who raised her own children in the fifties and early sixties, writes of “the invisible violence of the institution of motherhood”:
… the guilt, the powerless responsibility for human lives, the judgments and condemnations, the fear of her own power, the guilt, the guilt, the guilt. So much of this heart of darkness is an undramatic, undramatized suffering: the woman who serves her family their food but cannot sit down with them, the woman who cannot get out of bed in the morning, the woman polishing the same place on the table over and over, reading labels in the supermarket as if they were in a foreign language, looking into a drawer where there is a butcher knife.32
Twenty or thirty years later, women gathered in consciousness-raising groups or workshops would discover that suppressed maternal violence was as widespread among full-time mothers as migraine headaches or “excess” pounds. It can be cured, before any overt violence occurs, if day care is available, supportive women’s groups, responsible fathers, etc. (Studies show that mothers who do have help—for example from a grandmother—are “more stable and emotionally consistent” in their responses to their children.) But mid-twentieth-century science had no comfort to offer the average ambivalent mother. In the nineteen fifties, influenced by John Bowlby’s study Maternal Care and Mental Health, the experts posted their final, most devastating accusation against the rejecting mother: the mother who harbored hostile and rejecting feelings for her child was not only planting the seeds of neurosis, she was actually and materially destroying her child. To think of violence, even subconsciously, was to commit it. The intent of John Bowlby’s 1950 study was unquestionably humanistic. At the end of World War II he was commissioned to study the needs of war orphans, children who had been hospitalized for long periods, and children who had been boarded in rural areas to protect them from air raids. Bowlby’s review of the literature on these children makes somber reading: they rated low on Gesell-type development tests and standard I.Q. tests; they were emotionally withdrawn and often autistic, and—perhaps most horrifying—they were likely to be physically stunted and sickly. Describing the homeless infant, Bowlby wrote:
The emotional tone is one of apprehension and sadness, there is withdrawal from the environment amounting to rejection of it.… Activities are retarded and the child often sits or lies inert in a dazed stupor. Insomnia is common and lack of appetite universal. Weight is lost and the child becomes prone to intercurrent infections.33
Bowlby concluded with a series of practical recommendations—ranging from economic aid to mothers in distress to phasing out institutional care in favor of care in loving, homelike situations.
So far so good. But Bowlby nimbly leaped beyond his data base to the child in the home. His conclusions imply that the dire consequences of maternal deprivation can occur wherever there was less than single-handed, full-time provision of maternal attention. For example, in an analysis of why families fail, he lists “Full-time employment of mother,” without qualification, on a par with such items as “Death of a parent,” “Imprisonment of a parent,” “Social calamity—war, famine,” etc.34
Even within the home that had not been visited by the calamity of maternal employment, there could be insidious “partial deprivation” due, of course, to maternal rejection. Bowlby did not define “partial deprivation,” but the standard he set for “good mothering” left an enormous amount of room for it:
Just as the baby needs to feel that he belongs to his mother, the mother needs to feel that she belongs to her child and it is only when she has the satisfaction of this feeling that it is easy for her to devote herself to him. The provision of constant attention day and night, seven days a week and 365 in the year, is possible only for a woman who derives profound satisfaction from seeing her child grow from babyhood, through the many phases of childhood, to become an independent man or woman, and knows that it is her care which has made this possible.35
Bowlby believed that child-guidance counselors should search out these cases of partial deprivation and “give as much time to the therapy of the parents as to that of the children.” He called for a public health campaign to detect cases of deprivation on a mass scale, likening such an effort to the turn-of-the-century public health campaigns which had focused on microbial disease-bearers:
Deprived children, whether in their own homes or out of them, are a source of social infection as real and serious as are carriers of diphtheria and typhoid.…36
Bowlby’s followers continued the search for “deprivation” in the average American home. Writing in Deprivation of Maternal Care: A Reassessment of Its Effects, a volume of professional commentary on Bowlby’s original monograph, child psychiatrists Dane Prugh and Robert Harlow observed solemnly
… it is to be emphasized that instances of “masked” or covert deprivation may have as devastating effects upon emotional development as the more gross maternal deprivations highlighted by Bowlby.37
Psychologists demonstrated the noxious effects of maternal deprivation on baby monkeys, baby rats, and baby ducks, including weight loss, enlarged adrenal glands, heightened susceptibility to infectious diseases and chemical poisons, and stunted growth. In the logic of the experts, it followed that the mother who failed to meet their exaggerated standards of mother-love might as well be watering her baby’s milk.
Popular books on child raising began to feature ominous references to orphaned animals and institutionalized children:
The best of food and shelter, the finest medical care will not suffice him [the child]—without love. In a foundling hospital babies have been known to wither away and die, not that the doctors and nurses did not try
their scientific utmost to save them, but because there were not enough loving arms to cuddle and comfort them.38
If the mid-twentieth-century studies of maternal deprivation did not lead to any striking improvements in public care for neglected children, they did impress on the average mother’s mind the tragic picture of the maternally deprived child—sunken eyes above wan cheeks, limbs thin and flaccid, prey to every passing infection—all, presumably, for lack of “constant attention day and night, seven days a week and 365 in the year.”
The second specter to haunt the sweet maternal ideal was the feared and hated “overprotective” mother—the mirror-opposite of her “rejecting” sister. The ubiquitous “overprotective” mother had immersed herself in child care—too much. In fact, she seemed to have taken advantage of her domestic isolation, and her husband’s absence, to increase her own power and influence over the children.
In 1943 Dr. David Levy singled out this problem-mother for attention, and gave the syndrome a name with the publication of Maternal Overprotection. According to his diagnosis certain women had “made maternity into a disease” which had “symptoms … as clearly as organic symptoms.”‡ 39 Levy had culled through thousands of case records at the family guidance center he directed, and specially selected out twenty cases of what he considered “pure” overprotection (in nineteen out of twenty of the cases, the overprotected children he singled out were boys).
These overprotecting mothers proved to have little in common; their methods ran from extreme authoritarianism to extreme permissiveness. Not at all deterred by this finding, Levy divided the mothers into two broad categories; the “submissive” mother and the “domineering” mother. Predictably enough, the children of the domineering mothers were submissive, while those of the submissive mothers were dominating. The “symptoms” of the overprotected, then, ran from tyrannical aggression all the way to docility to “too good” behavior. Levy lumped all these symptoms together as “infantilization” by mothers who refused to let their children grow up.
For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women Page 27