A version of Freudianism-lite permeated American society. As Nathan Hale states, Freud was ‘sanitized and made the author of most of the gifts of liberal culture–progressive education, psychiatric social work, permissive child-raising, modern psychiatry and criminology’. Benjamin Spock’s Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care of 1946 had sold some twenty million copies by 1965. It put a narrative of Freudian child development and anti-disciplinary practice into every home, introducing in plain commonsensical language Oedipus, the family romance and sibling rivalry, alongside the need for hugs.
Meanwhile, on Broadway and in the movies, the psychoanalytic story was reiterated in any number of variations, most of them optimistic. Badness was largely a matter of bad parenting and misadaptation, which therapy could somehow put right. In the musical West Side Story, the ‘delinquents’ standing up to arresting officer Krupke replay a mid-twentieth-century American version of that old dilemma of mad versus bad. Mocking themselves, and the whole apparatus of state control–the police, the doctors, the courts, the social workers–they both parody and play up to those who would tell them they are either ‘psychologically disturbed’ or ‘socially sick’. With mothers who are junkies and fathers who are drunks, they never had the love that every child needs, after all. So it’s no wonder they’re misunderstood punks, shunted around from one professional’s office to the next.
Deriding this world where awareness will magically initiate improvement, West Side Story nevertheless asks us to understand rather than condemn. When the ensuing decades of American history fought back against the Freudian psychoanalytic myth–first because its overemphasis on the individual buried the McCarthyite politics of the Cold War, then for its complicity in condemning women to ‘penis-envy’ and second-class lives, and finally for its disregard of the supposed neurological, genetic or biological underpinnings of mental illness–they forgot that the Freudian moment in America had come with a hope that understanding rather than punishing the ‘bad’, or demonizing it into ‘evil’, might engender a better society. If the psychological society carried its own constraints and categories–some of which emptied themselves out in the democracy of popularization–the impetus to reform hardly deserves the wholesale flagellation it received from subsequent generations. Medicalizing or psychologizing ethical dilemmas may not have provided the best answers, but to treat a soldier for war neurosis was, after all, better than to shoot him.
FREUD MEETS MOM
This widespread belief in the psychological nature of illness, encouraged by the popular media, had a particular effect on women, whose role as pioneering mothers and keepers of culture had always been important. Exalted as the all-American mothers of our boys at the front, as the makers of apple pie and the backbone of the nation, they were to suffer a backlash of scapegoating proportions from the mind doctors who blamed them for the weakness of their ‘boys’. The castrating Mom, the pop-culture version of Freud’s purported penis-envier, was born.
In 1946 Dr Edward Strecker, Surgeon General of the Army and Navy, published Their Mothers’ Sons. The book indicted the American Mom for the majority of men who were either rejected for military service or discharged on neuropsychiatric grounds, often after only a few days. These men lacked ‘the ability to face life, live with others, think for themselves and stand on their own two feet’. And the fault, of course, was Mom’s–whether she was an empty-headed ‘addlepate’ following a cult of beauty, or a ‘pseudo-intellectual’ forever taking courses:
A mom is a woman whose maternal behavior is motivated by the seeking of emotional recompense for the buffets which life has dealt her own ego. In her relationship with her children, every deed and almost every breath are designed unconsciously but exclusively to absorb her children emotionally and to bind them to her securely. In order to achieve this purpose, she must slam a pattern of immature behavior on her children…
…the emotional satisfaction, almost repletion, she derives from keeping her children paddling about in a kind of psychological amniotic fluid rather than letting them swim away with the bold and decisive strokes of maturity from the emotional maternal womb…Being immature herself, she breeds immaturity in her children and, by and large, they are doomed to lives of personal and social insufficiency and unhappiness…
This tirade against the mother, now for being overattached, came hand in hand with the injunction for women to be mothers and nothing else. To be a housewife and mother had become both all-consuming obligation and an internalized ideal, difficult to escape.
As Betty Friedan pointed out in her ground-breaking study The Feminine Mystique, paving the way for feminism in the late sixties, Strecker’s book was used in any number of articles and speeches to persuade women that they must once more nurture their femininity and ‘rush back home again and devote their lives to the children’, even if, in fact, he had been saying exactly the opposite.
The blinding mystique of postwar femininity had taken over. The American woman was enjoined into the suburban home, characterized as the only possible site of fulfilment and of marital happiness. Here the woman could be a perfect (rather than good-enough) maternal giver, with a child appropriately attached to each apron string, though with the rising birthrate, she would have needed four or five of these.
Uneasy in the shadow of the Cold War, America tried to turn back the clock to a mythic period of domesticity. The rule of McCarthyism coincided with the widespread desire of new immigrants to adapt to their new country, to produce an era of abject conformity. In a parallel with Victorian England, the sign of success and middle-class decency was the stay-at-home wife devoted to her children. The proportion of women at universities, let alone in medical schools, declined significantly in these years.
The baby boom, however, was on its way and would last into the sixties. This was not only a matter of our boys coming home to rut and of a widespread tendency to counter death with reproduction. There was an ideological impetus shaping consciousness here. The combined force of media and experts signalled that home and motherhood were where satisfaction lay. Teenage pregnancies rose by 165 per cent between 1940 and 1957; the number of women with three or more children doubled. Most surprising of all, educated women led the family stakes, often producing an above-average three or more children. Women were dropping out of university to marry; if they went to work, it was to support their husbands through their degrees. Half of all American women had tied the knot by the age of twenty. So strong was the collective need to stigmatize working and particularly educated women that, unconsciously or not, trends were misinterpreted. When early figures of Kinsey’s reports on American sexuality were released and showed a correlation between frustration and level of education in women, these were misinterpreted as indicating that nearly 50 per cent of university-educated women had never experienced orgasm. Ten years later, Kinsey’s full statistics were published and corrected these early reports: women of ‘upper educational backgrounds’ had far higher rates of orgasm in every period of marriage, it was now announced.
Idealized in her perfect kitchen with her four or five scrubbed children and hardworking hubby who would come home to a fulfilling kiss, prey to her own much publicized myth, Mom was also to find herself split apart into a desexed virago of horrific proportions–as if Melanie Klein herself had orchestrated the split.
Written at the very same time as Dr Strecker was gathering his notes on neurotic soldiers, Philip Wylie’s Generation of Vipers (1942) showed how that all-American creation, Mom, was a social disaster. By 1955, the book had gone into twenty editions. Once the shining-haired, starry-eyed, ruby-lipped Virgo aeternis or Cinderella, by menopause Mom was all-powerful and all-demanding, even if brainless and destructive. No one, not even women, liked her. Accused of misogyny, Wylie, in later editions, defended himself with sardonic verve:
I showed her as she is–ridiculous, vain, vicious, a little mad. She is her own fault first of all and she is dangerous. But she is also everybody’s fault. When we
and our culture and our religions agreed to hold woman the inferior sex, cursed, unclean and sinful–we made her mom. And when we agreed upon the American ideal of Woman, the Dream Girl of National Adolescence…we insulted women and disenfranchised millions from love. We thus made mom…Freud has made a fierce and wondrous catalogue of examples of mother-love-inaction which traces its origin to an incestuous perversion of a normal instinct. That description is, of course, sound. Unfortunately, Americans, who are the most prissy people on earth, have been unable to benefit from Freud’s wisdom because they can prove that they do not, by and large, sleep with their mothers. That is their interpretation of Freud.
The period’s interpretation of Freud played an important part in furnishing the ideology that kept women chained to maternity and home, simultaneously enshrining them and attacking them in that biological identity which is motherhood. The psychologists and their popularizers had made the whole business of sexual satisfaction and child-rearing so exacting that it precluded the desire, let alone the ability, to be human.
Enjoined to a watchful, nurturing love for her children, to be attentive to nursing and weaning, to toilet-training, sexual arousal, masturbation, to the meanings of food–not to mention its careful, loving preparation–to sibling rivalry, and to the too much and too little of everything–all this even before hardworking hubby, who worked just for her and the kids, came home–the American mother both complied with and felt frustrated in her confinement to a role that might be wrapped in mythical banners, but locked her out of full participation in the world. Helene Deutsch and her followers’ insistence on a fundamental female passivity, even when glossed as activity directed inward, together with a masochism which underpinned all the functions that made women female, began to chafe and irritate educated women, even if they might at first accept the premises. When the feminism of the late sixties and seventies took wing, Freud and the psychologists would be in the front line of attack.
The exactions of idealized psychological motherhood apart, the doctors played an even crueller trick on mothers. In a replay of the attachment–separation axis, American mothers, responsible or not for any of the number of crimes that parenthood inevitably brings in its trail, found themselves targeted as disease agents. The psychosomatic understanding of the body, in which emotional conflicts were seen as attacking specific organs, meant that someone had to be responsible for those emotional conflicts. Enter all-powerful Mom, maker of asthma, as well as autism, schizophrenia and a host of other mysterious ills.
The argument, where asthma was concerned, went like this. No somatic base or cure for asthma had been found. Children’s asthma was observed to lessen when they left home and worsen when they returned–even, in one sample of children, when dust from their homes was sprayed into their hospital rooms. Franz Alexander speculated that asthmatics suffered from ‘excessive, unresolved dependence’ on the mother, a deep-seated conflict between independent and dependent impulses. Asthma attacks were a substitute for feelings of intense anxiety. The ‘asthmatogenic’ mother was pathologically over-protective or, as the case may be, unconsciously hostile and rejecting, so that the child became increasingly clinging. Though these generalizations were soon challenged as simple-minded and the ‘bacillicus asthmaticus psychosomaticus’ ridiculed, Mom’s relationship to her child remained the seedbed of other ailments.
AUTISM
Autism was a category Eugen Bleuler had used in 1908 to identify a type of abnormally introverted behaviour he associated with the group of schizophrenias. His adult sufferers were withdrawn and didn’t respond to social cues. Infantile autism was first described by the Austrian-born Leo Kanner, one of the first American child psychiatrists. In 1943 he published his paper, ‘Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact’, in which he described what for him was the altogether unusual case of Donald, a child who would never make eye contact or recognize faces, and who spoke, but not in order to communicate. ‘Donald wandered about smiling, making stereotyped movements with his fingers…He shook his head from side to side, whispering or humming the same three-note tune constantly…he completely disregarded the people and instantly went into objects, preferably those that could spin. He angrily shoved away the hand which was in the way.’
At the age of two and a half, Donald had been able to name all the presidents of the United States in order both backwards and forwards; as well as the twenty-five points of the Presbyterian catechism. He was upset by changes in routine and was hypersensitive to loud noises.
Kanner decided that Donald’s condition stemmed, at least in part, from his mother and her lack of warmth and responsiveness. He designated her as a ‘refrigerator mother’–a bit of nomenclature that caught on both in the literature and in the popular imagination. Mothers now had a new potential stigma: if they weren’t attached enough to their children, they could produce autism.
Bruno Bettelheim then entered the field. A talented writer, with the authority of a survivor of Dachau and Buchenwald, Bettelheim ran the Orthogenic School for the rehabilitation of emotionally disturbed children at the University of Chicago. Many of the children there were diagnosed as autistic or schizophrenic. Bettelheim linked both to bad parenting. Indeed in his The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self (1964), prefaced by Leo Kanner, the refrigerator mother is akin to a guard in a concentration camp, the child, her prisoner. ‘The difference between the plight of prisoners in a concentration camp and the conditions which lead to autism and schizophrenia in children is, of course, that the child has never had a previous chance to develop much of a personality.’ Which could be taken to indicate that prisoners were rather better off than Bettelheim’s autistic children with their improperly attached moms, and had more hope…The condition itself, as Bettelheim understood it, was a kind of defence mechanism against bad parenting–a process of reasoning that anti-psychiatrist R.D. Laing was simultaneously initiating on the other side of the Atlantic in implicating the family as the crucible of schizophrenia.
The refrigerator-mother explanation of the aetiology of autism was soon disputed, notably by the father of an autistic child: the psychologist Bernard Rimlaud argued that his own son had had the condition from birth. Bettelheim drew on opposing proof from the psychologist Harry Harlow. The refrigerator mother and autism thesis now found backing in monkey experiments, just as attachment had found reinforcement in ethology.
Harry Harlow had begun to work with rhesus monkeys in 1957. He devised a set of experiments which studied child–mother bonding or attachment. Taking baby monkeys–born more independent than humans but still needing to be nursed–away from their biological mothers, he put them in cages with a hard wire ‘mother’ fitted with a milk-producing nipple and an electric light for warmth; as well as with a second softer cloth-and-cardboard ‘mother’, who had no bottle. The monkeys spent far more time clinging to the cloth mother, whom they markedly preferred, playing with her, manipulating her odd face, cuddling, while they used the wire mother only for quick nourishment. When ‘monsters’ were introduced and the monkeys frightened, they invariably ran to the cuddly mother. Frequent and intimate contact with the mother’s body, Harlow’s experiment seemed to prove, was far more important than food. Nursing was more about the first than the second. He also noted that the experimental monkey’s love for the cuddly mother was no less than the ordinary monkey’s love for his real mother.
A year on, however, the monkeys raised by these surrogates displayed odd and troubled behaviours. They clutched themselves, rocked back and forth, bit themselves, self-harmed–indeed, displayed ‘autistic’ features. Their sexual lives were equally disturbed. They didn’t know the correct mating postures; females attacked males. Harlow had to retract some of his pronouncements. As for mothering when their time came, the ‘motherless mothers’ were either negligent and failed to comfort or protect their young, or abusive, biting and injuring their babies and eventually killing them.
In Bowlbyesque style Harlow concluded t
hat early deprivation resulted in the failure to create secure attachments later in life, and with their own offspring. It also drove the monkeys mad. They were akin to Bettelheim’s autistic children. In 1971 in the Journal of Autism and Childhood Schizophrenia, Harlow compared his tortured monkey infants to human infants. Both exhibited ‘marked social withdrawal’. They retreated to a corner to ‘avoid social contact’ and to shut out all outside stimulation. Deprived of maternal affection, the isolated monkey was a mirror image of the autistic child.
There is little doubt that children who are cruelly treated and severely deprived can develop later emotional or mental disturbance. However, that ‘refrigerator mothers’ produce autistic children is now generally discredited. Mothering cannot be held responsible for everything.
Navigating the good ship Mom between the Scylla of early warmth and the kind of attachment that would serve their children appropriately and the Charybdis of suffocation if separation was inappropriately timed, women also had to confront the frustrations of everyday psychosexual life. Cold, unavailable, detached, they could find themselves labelled frigid or castrating by the mind doctors; or, most hideously of all, schizophregenic–producers of poor, blighted schizophrenic children. If they erred on the side of warmth or too much actively expressed desire, they were not merely sluts but nymphomaniacal. With a kind of iatrogenic effect, the growth in mind-doctoring and its diagnostic formulae resulted in the growth of the need for therapy, and not only of the retail variety rampant enough in this time of Stepford Wives. As the gulf between prescribed ideals of behaviour and satisfaction widened, the perception spread that therapists could step in to assuage the misery. Male or female, they often enough became America’s good-enough mothers, the ones who could help where the family had failed.
Mad, Bad, and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors Page 37