the maternal instinct.”
In her own writings, Fromm-Reichmann remarked with unease at how “American women are very often the leaders, and men wait on them as wives wait on their husbands in European families,” and how “the wife and mother is often the bearer of authority in the family group.” She particularly disliked how fathers, like Don Galvin, become the confidants and pals of their kids, while mothers, like Mimi Galvin, become the disciplinarians. But once Fromm-Reichmann gave such mothers a name, the concept caught fire. John Clausen and Melvin Kohn from the National Institute of Mental Health described the schizophrenogenic mother as “cold,” “perfectionistic,” “anxious,” “overcontrolling,” and “restrictive.” The psychologist Suzanne Reichard and the Stanford psychiatrist Carl Tillman described the schizophrenogenic mother as the “prototype of the middle class Anglo-Saxon American Woman: prim, proper, but totally lacking in genuine affection.”
These descriptions seemed to lack a certain coherence. What, precisely, were these mothers doing to these children? Were they domineering or weak? Suffocating or withholding? Sadistic or apathetic? In 1956, Gregory Bateson, an anthropologist—and the husband of Margaret Mead—collected the various alleged sins of the schizophrenogenic mother into a theory he called the “double-bind.” The double-bind, he explained, was a trap that certain mothers set for their children. A mother says, “Pull up your socks,” but something about the way she says it projects the contradictory message, “Don’t be so obedient.” Now, even if the child obeys, the mother disapproves. The child feels helpless, frightened, frustrated, anxious—ensnared, with no way out. According to the double-bind theory, if children get caught in that trap often enough, they develop psychosis as a way of coping with it. Tormented by their mothers, they retreat into a world of their own.
Bateson invented this theory without so much as ten minutes of clinical psychiatric experience. But that made no difference. The double-bind, along with the schizophrenogenic mother, helped to turn mother-blaming into the industry standard for psychiatry—and not just for schizophrenia. In the 1950s and 1960s, it became hard to find any emotional or mental disorder that was not, in one way or another, attributed by therapists to the actions of the patient’s mother. Autism was blamed on “refrigerator mothers” who failed to show enough affection to their infants. Obsessive-compulsive disorder was blamed on problems in the second to third year of life, clashing with the mother around toilet training. The public conception of madness became hopelessly intertwined with the idea of the mother-as-monster. When, in 1960, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho placed the blame for the most famous delusional homicidal maniac of cinema, Norman Bates, squarely on the shoulders of his dead mother, it made all the sense in the world.
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THIS IS WHAT the Galvins would be up against when their boys started getting sick: an emboldened therapeutic profession seizing the moral high ground, doing battle with the devils of eugenics and surgery and chemical experimentation, and more than ready to search for a different way to explain the disease—a cause much closer to home. In 1965, Theodore Lidz, a prominent Yale psychiatrist best known for attributing schizophrenia to a patient’s family dynamics, said that schizophrenogenic mothers “became dangerous figures to males,” and had “castrating” relationships with their husbands. As a general rule, Lidz recommended that schizophrenia patients be removed from their families entirely.
Parents of Don and Mimi Galvin’s era didn’t have to know about the double-bind theory or the schizophrenogenic mother to understand that anything wrong with their children would raise questions about them. What happened to those children when they were in their care? Who let them become this way? What sort of parents were they? The lesson of the times was clear. If something seemed off about your child, the last thing you should do is tell a doctor about it.
* The idea of sterilizing the insane and “feeble-minded” had caught on in America many years earlier. Eugenics was a hallmark of the turn-of-the-century Progressive Era in America, influencing Kallmann and Rüdin and, among others, the Nazis.
DON
MIMI
DONALD
JIM
JOHN
BRIAN
MICHAEL
RICHARD