Abstract
Most scholarship on the medicalization of emotions has focused on projects that locate emotions, one way or another, within individual brains and minds. The story of mother love and mental illness, in contrast, is a medicalization story that frames the problem of pathological emotions as a relational issue. Bad mother love was seen as both a pathology (for the mother) and a pathogen (for her vulnerable child).Moreover, different forms of pathological mother love—smothering love, ambivalent love, love that masked an actual desire to dominate and control—were supposed to have different effects on children, ranging from lack of fitness for military service to homosexuality to juvenile delinquency to outright psychosis, especially schizophrenia. Understanding why mother love came to be associated with mental illness—and, equally, what led to this viewpoint’s rapid decline into disrepute—requires us to go beyond simply invoking the trope of “mother blaming” and leaving things at that. This essay is a first effort at a richer narrative, one that blends perspectives from the history of emotions and the history of science and medicine.
Highlights
This essay aims to illuminate the historical origins of psychiatric concern with mother love – and especially mother love gone wrong
It looks at ways in which a combination of wartime research, postwar social concerns and new tensions between psychoanalysis and hospital psychiatry worked together to create a range of theories and practices predicated on the idea that specific forms of pathological mother love could lead to specific forms of mental disorder, including schizophrenia
"The mother-child relationship is so important for ensuing pathology that it has probably received more attention than any other aspect of child psychiatry" (Franz Alexander and Sheldon Selesnick, The History of Psychiatry: An Evaluation of Psychiatric Thought and Practice from Prehistoric Times to the Present, 1966)
Summary
“Mother Love and Mental Illness: An Emotional History.”.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
