Overprotective Mother Research Articles

The Jewish Mother: Comedy and Controversy in American Popular Culture

comic stereotype of the Jewish mother, from domineering to grotesque, is a cultural construct developed by male writers in the United States in the 1960s, the era of political turbulence that coincided with the second wave of feminism in this country. Among other objectives, feminists hoped that their efforts to expose the misogyny behind negative stereotypes would help to end them. Yet the representation of the Jewish mother both as a nagging guardian of ethnic identity and the embodiment of its worst traits continued to pour forth in newly minted versions from the pens and comedy routines of Jewish men. Some feminist writers like Erica Jong attempted to fight humor with humor while others in novels, screenplays, and essays tried to add complexity and nuance to the image of the Jewish mother. history of the stereotype thus follows a jagged pattern of vilification and vindication, of male action and female reaction, of call and response, that left the caricature firmly ingrained in popular imagination. Overall, feminist responses to men's comic devaluing of the Jewish mother failed to disrupt the persistence of the image. But in recent decades, as Jews' concerns about assimilation have decreased and new cruxes of female identity and vocation have arisen, the expansion of women's roles outside the family has gradually defused the comic exaggeration of the overprotective mother. Not direct critique by feminists and social commentators, but the indirect effects of shifting social expectations and goals have brought solace to the stigmatized figure of the Jewish mother. Feminist critics of several schools of thought have developed ideas about women's laughter as a means of disrupting the structures of patriarchal discourse and ideology. They stress women's creative energy and humor as distinctive features of feminist writing with the potential to unsettle the logocentrism of male authority. Helene Cixous in The Laugh of the Medusa metaphorically describes women's verbal spontaneity, generosity, and jouissance as part of a defiant, liberating stance. Julia Kristeva, from a psychoanalytic perspective, writes that a pre-Oedipal phase linked to the maternal chora can resurface in texts to interrupt the symbolic order of the father. Similarly, the disruptive power of laughter is treated in Patricia Yaeger's theory of play as having political as well as cognitive effects. Contemporary feminist theory, then, valorizes the transformative potential of humor and language to subvert male dominance and regulation of social norms.(1) When the ranks seem to close in around a personification like the Jewish mother, comedy itself can refurbish and redeem her image. This essay, in tracing the gender wars fought over the stereotype of the Jewish mother, examines how that negative image became rooted in popular culture in the 1960s and the difficulties women writers faced in their attempts to intervene and revise it. myth of the manipulative Jewish mother is a complex formulation, ranging from affectionate to hostile, that grew to color perceptions of Jewish womanhood in a way that shows the triumph of comic expediency over social reality, even within a minority group that generally considered itself tolerant and liberal. Whether the Jewish mother is represented as protecting her children or demanding their loyalty, she is seen as exceeding prescribed boundaries, as being excessive. Her claims to affection, her voicing of opinions, her expressions of maternal worry are perceived as threatening in part because she acts as a free agent, not as a subordinate female according to mainstream cultural ideals. Even when she is represented as self-effacing, cast as the martyr, she is interpreted as being manipulative or passive-aggressive, secretly striving to impose her will on others. Jewish-mother stereotype is fraught with contradictions that have not served to deconstruct it, but rather to let critics of the mother have it both ways. …

The social construction of childhood asthma: Changing explanations of the relationship between socioeconomic status and asthma

Hospitalization rates among children with asthma have been rising and are increasingly attributed to the effects of low socioeconomic status in epidemiologic research. A positivist viewpoint would assume that the relationship between socioeconomic status and asthma outcomes has always existed, but a postmodernist would argue that epidemiologic studies characterize populations by selecting discrete ‘risk factors’ for analysis and that these characterizations create images of a person with the disease. By describing ‘what kind of person’ is at risk for asthma, the medical literature serves to construct an image of the ‘asthmatic’. Taking a Foucauldian perspective to critically examine the historical evolution of the medical discourse on socioeconomic status and asthma over the past four decades, and to show how scientific understandings of asthma have been produced in a context of shifting social values about the disease, this paper has identified some remarkable shifts in the understanding of asthma. In the 1940s–1960s the ‘asthmatic’ child is portrayed as the victim of over-protective mothers in upper income families, changing to the asthmatic as ‘Other’, as a child from impoverished and disorganized families in the 1970s–1990s. It is proposed that this change in social construction has occurred subsequent to the transition to outcomes-based asthma research, which has been promoted by the vested interests of the medical profession, governmental bodies and the pharmaceutical industry. Clearly, the empirical link between socioeconomic status and asthma now promoted by the scientific community needs to be examined carefully for its discursive properties. Once an image of the ‘victim’ is firmly entrenched, further research is sometimes self-fulfilling.

Female or male therapists for women with eating disorders? A pilot study of experts' opinions.

This study assessed the client and clinician characteristics associated with choosing a male or a female therapist for eating-disordered individuals. Participants were 27 clinicians who worked in the field of eating disorders. They were asked to judge whether they would be more likely to recommend a male or a female therapist for an adolescent client presenting with eating problems, given different clinical features. Considering the group as a whole, the client characteristics that were associated with a preference for a female therapist included a history of paternal sexual abuse, body image issues, and an overprotective mother. The recommendation of a female therapist was more likely if the participants were older, and less likely if they were medically qualified. However, duration of experience with eating-disordered patients was not a relevant factor. Future research into the appropriateness of male or female therapists for eating-disordered clients should attend to the complex contribution of both therapists' and clients' characteristics.

Correlates of the objective and subjective experiences of sexual harassment in high school

The present study used retrospective reports of primarily white female university students to examine a number of issues related to sexual harassment in high school. Results indicate that underperception of sexual harassment in high school exists in that reports of objective experiences appear to be quite high and exceed the actual labelling of these experiences as sexual harassment. Those who reported having an overprotective mother, observing fewer positive behaviors between their parents, and experiencing unwanted sexual contact during childhood experienced a greater number of objectively-defined incidents of sexual harassment, than those who did not. Underperception of sexual harassment was associated with a greater frequency of negative behaviors directed toward the father by the mother, but was not related to experiencing unwanted sexual contact during childhood.

Differential classification in school refusal.

It has been argued that school refusal may not be a unitary syndrome, but a common presenting symptom founded on differing underlying dynamics. The paper explores this hypothesis empirically. The clinical files of 100 refusers were scored for several variables which could potentially differentiate between school refusal subtypes, and for several commonly accepted beliefs about school refusal. The data were subjected to a variety of analyses, culminating in cluster analysis. Cluster (C) 1 consisted of children who feared separation from dependent, overprotective mothers. C2 youngsters were perfectionistic and depressed. They dominated mothers who had been deprived in childhood. C3 consisted of extensively disturbed children from multiproblem families, who had suffered early separation or loss, and who were fearful and depressed.

A developmental-psychodynamic model for diabetic control

This paper elaborates a psychodynamic-developmental model as a framework for understanding the wide range of adaptive and maladaptive responses to the self-care requirements of diabetes. Early life experience participates with other factors in influencing the ease with which diabetics implement diabetic control. This model emphasizes the importance of the mother-child interaction during the second phase of development, the toddler phase, at which time the child begins to establish a sense of autonomy and control over his own body and its functions, with bowel training viewed as a paradigm for body control. It is postulated that certain types of mothers such as controlling-intrusive mothers, overprotective mothers, or guilty, indifferent, or rejecting mothers create problems for the child related to the development of autonomy and the sense of comfortable and pleasurable control over his bodily functions. Conflicts generated during this period are reactivated with the onset of diabetes and lead to difficulty in implementing control. In some situations where conflicts with the caretaker figure were predominantly limited to aspects of control, trusting relations acted as a substrate for change and improvement in control in a supportive medical environment. Specific management recommendations based upon this model are presented.

Prognostic factors vs. outcome in male-to-female transsexualism. A follow-up study of 13 cases.

Thirteen male-to-female transsexuals were investigated 6 to 25 years after surgery. Thirty-five prognostic items were compared with each of three outcome variables. Traumatic loss of both parents in infancy was connected with repentance at follow-up. A childhood family of an overprotective mother and a distant father, on the other hand, was prognostically favourable. Contrary to most previous reports, high sexual activity and bisexual experience was associated with fair sexual adjustment and with non-repentance after sex change. The repenting individuals, on the other hand, had been a-sexual or hyposexual before surgery. Completed military service, a history of typically masculine, hard jobs, and a comparatively late (more than 30 years of age) first request for surgery, were found to be negative prognostic factors in sex-reassignment evaluations. The phenomenon of ambivalence or hesitance during the trial period is discussed. Both too much and too little ambivalence may suggest a poor prognosis.

Aberrant parenting and delayed offspring development in rats exposed to lithium

Natural lithium (Li) salts, including those used routinely in manic depressive illness, consist of two stable nonradioactive isotopes: lithium-7 (Li-7) (92.6%) and lithium-6 (Li-6) (7.4%). Female rats (3 months old) were treated with either Li-7 chloride or Li-6 chloride or were untreated prior to and during gestation and lactation. Birth weights were lower for Li-treated animals than for normal pups. Maternal behavior of all Li-treated mothers was altered. Li-7 mothers ignored their pups and nursed them infrequently. Li-6 mothers groomed and nursed their pups more often than normal mothers. All pups showed delays in development, especially in the maturation of depth perception. Although Li-6-treated dams were overprotective mothers, their offspring showed longer developmental delays than those of Li-7-treated offspring.

Conventional wisdom about familial contributions to substance abuse.

Conventional social-science wisdom about the family background of substance abusers breaks down into three hypotheses. The broken home causes substance abuse; overprotective mothers with or without neglectful fathers cause substance abuse; substance abuse is reinforced by the changes it brings about in family interaction. The broke-home hypothesis attributes substance abuse to sheer absence of a parent, usually the father. The overprotective-mother hypothesis emphasizes the effect of indulgent, dominant mother behavior sometimes combined with ineffectual father behavior. The increased-control hypothesis emphasizes the effects of substance abuser, parents, and siblings on one another. Because investigations of these hypotheses are necessarily correlational, existing research on the family backgrounds of substance abusers suffers from methodological flaws characteristic of weak correlational designs. These hypotheses are logical extensions of Freudian theory, early social-learning theory, and revised social-learning theory respectively. Assumptions that pertinent aspects of the more general theories have been upheld by empirical investigation are not justified.

Influences of maternal overprotection.

While maternal overprotection appears associated with several neurotic and psychotic disorders, little is known about determinants of such a parental characteristic. Several hypotheses have been tested in a large nonclinical sample. Maternal and cultural factors seemed of greater relevance than characteristics in the child. Overprotective mothers gave evidence of marked maternal preoccupations before having children, of showing a capacity to be overprotective after the active stage of mothering, and of having personality characteristics of high anxiety, obsessionality and a need to control. Maternal overprotection appears associated with low, rather than with high maternal care. This has important primary prevention and treatment implications.

Structural family therapy for children of divorce: case reports.

Structural family therapy techniques for treating families with a parental divorce in which a child is symptomatic are described. The family configurations considered are: mother, child, and maternal grandparents; overprotective mother and child; helpless and mildly neglectful mother; father; new family formation; and couples who divorce and marry new spouses.

Childhood asthma: a psychosomatic disorder? Some epidemiological considerations.

Epidemiologists with an interest in bronchial asthma, have given little attention to the psychiatric aspects of this condition, particularly as it occurs in childhood. Clinical impressions, rather than the results of systematic studies, are responsible for the fact that some paediatricians and psychiatrists have come to view the personality of the asthmatic child in terms of a stereotype engendered by a particular type of mother-child relationship (Abramson, 1954). Moreover, there is a general belief that asthmatic children are neurotic and that this neurosis is manifest in their general behaviour, but in fact there is conflicting evidence on this point (Harris and Shure, 1956; Leigh and Marley, in press) and no definitive information is available. Children corres ponding to this stereotype, over-dependent on their over-protective mothers, anxious, tense, shy, afraid to show their emotions, yet at the same time intelli gent, ambitious, and perfectionist, are not un common, but the evidence for the stereotype is lacking (Dubo, McLean, Ching, Wright, Kaufman, and Sheldon, 1961). Studies carried out on total populations (Kraepelien, 1954; Eriksson-Lihr, 1955) have stopped short of the examination of psychiatric correlates, while those that have looked at the prevalence of psychological factors in established asthmatics have in general based their studies on patients attending hospitals (Neuhaus, 1958) or, more rarely, general practitioners (Leigh and Marley, in press). Such patients may well be highly selected from the point of view of personality and neurotic illness, and total population studies have something to contribute in these areas. The findings of a study of this type form the material of the present paper.

Mental health and homosexuality

The importance of a relationship between homosexuality and mental health has often been minimized in the past. Yet, clinical experience with patients has taught us that homosexuality is almost always the reflection of a complex inner conflict which is difficult to reach. As a rule male and female homosexuality are dealt >-ith as though they were a single disease entity, and as though one and the same psychotherapeutic approach could be fruitfully applied to either one of them. Are we justified in making such an assumption? One purpose of the present paper is to shed some light on this question. In the psychiatric literature few clues as to the similarities and differences among the two groups are being offered. It is interesting to note the paucity of publications referring to lesbianism. It is mainly for this reason that the case histories presented below deal exclusively with female homosexuality. It seems to me, on the basis of these case histories, that essentially different factors are operating in the two forms of homosexualitw>-, and that essentially d;fferent factors are responsible for homosexuality developing in the male or female individual. Why is it, for instance, that homosexual women often respond favorably to treatmentX whereas male homosexuals seem to do so less frequently? I cannot help but feel that from many viewpoints ethical, moral and psychotherapeutic ones-it would be important to answer this question. The following comments represent an attempt to do just that. My remarks will be on a tentative rather than definitive basis. Let us ask a preliminary question first. What is homosexuality? Freud ( 1924) found that homosexuality begins invariably with a fixation on the parent of the opposite sex. The unconscious wish to be avenged on the father, for example, may be a significant motive for the girl in maintaining her homosexuality. Looking back for the probable cause for this particular development, we almost always find in early childhood a doting, overprotective mother and a cold, hostile and contemptuous father. It is this constellation that may trigger off the dormant homosexuality in the boy. The common feature under-

On the genesis of male homosexuality: an attempt at clarifying the role of the parents.

Before Freud, homosexuality was usually thought to have constitutional causes. Indeed, some recent studies have again proposed that genetic factors play an important role in its aetiology. Kallmann (1952), for instance, studying forty male homosexuals with identical twins, found that 39 of the twins were also homosexual. Slater (1962) suggests that homosexual patients tend to be the younger children in their families and to have elderly mothers, so that they might have been born with chromosomal abnormalities. There is, however, a growing tendency to assume that one of the causes of homosexuality is the lack of normal childhood relations with the parents. Fenichel (1946) suggests that homosexuals tend to be mother-fixated and to have identified with their mothers because, while their fathers were weak, their mothers were domineering, and psychoanalysts, in general, agree with his views. West (1959), who compared homosexual and heterosexual in-patients in a mental hospital, found that the combination of an over-intense relationship with the mother and an unsatisfactory relationship with the father is typical for the homosexual. Bieber et al. (1962) compared homosexual and non-homosexual patients in psychoanalysis. They claim that in the majority of cases the behaviour of the mothers of homosexuals toward their sons was seductive and over-indulgent, domineering and inhibiting, while the behaviour of their fathers was hostile, ambivalent or indifferent. O'Connor (1964) compared homosexual patients with heterosexual neurotic ones, all of whom were serving in the Air Force. He found that a high proportion of the homosexuals had, in their childhood, poor relations with their fathers and had been more attached to their mothers, though some had not got on well with their mothers either. He also reports that a number of the homosexual patients were raised in foster-homes, while none of the heterosexual ones were. The main difference between his two groups was that a much greater proportion of the homosexuals did not have normal relationships in their childhood with their fathers. West (1959) quotes Liddicoat (1956), whose subjects were non-patients and who found that unsatisfactory relations with the father were more common in her sample than undue attachments to the mother. So did Westwood (1960), whose subjects were also recruited from among non-patients, and who states that many homosexuals from his sample had over-possessive or over-protective mothers, but even more had inadequate or absent fathers.

The Affective Response of a Patient with Chronic Ulcerative Colitis to Cortisone

It is now well recognized that psychogenic factors playamajor role in the onset and course of chronic ulcerative colitis.I3 The personality of patients with this disease has previously been described by Murray,· Groen6 and Daniels.6 It has been our observation7 that These patients have usually had an unhappy childhood often with a domineering, abusive, aggressive father and a possessive, overprotective mother. 6 • S Early in life they leam to avoid trouble by being submissive and becoming dependent, usually upon the mother.s, g In other words, at an early age they leam to put up a false front to face the world. Tbis dependency is carried into adulthood and rarely are these patients completely emancipated from parental ties until the death of the protective parent.s. 9 They usually avoid marriage as long as possible and rarely make successful marriages. 9 Often of an immature physical development they almost invariably are emotionally immature.l • 6 They try to appear intellectually brilliant but are usually only of average intelligence.6 They are meticulous3 • 6 and egotistical. Extremely sensitive, they are inelined to brood over imagined insults.6 They frequently manifest hysterical trends. They have little drive and live a passive rather than an active life. 9 They have little initiative and are reluctant to accept any responsibility (even the ordinary daily responsibilities of adult life). They are cautious and as StewartS has described them 'subservient but subversive.' Groen6 has shown that ulcerative colitis appears and usually recurs at times when the patient's 'false front' has been exposed by some member of bis intimate cirele of family or friend. The following case is an example of a typical personality type encountered in patients with chronic ulcerative colitis. The gradual downhill course of this patient while being treated with antibiotic preparations and other conventional measures was followed by dramatic improvement after the administration of cortisone. It is of special interest that the first effect noted was striking improvement in the patient's affective responses. This became apparent 48 hours after treatment was begun and preceded by one week any significant improvementin the physical or vital signs or in the colon as seen by proctoscopic examination. Hoefer and GlaserIo have shown that electroencephalographic changes, as weIl as alterations in mood, affective responses and behavior, were demonstrable within the first three days in patients with rheumatoid arthritis treated with ACTH.