Read Online Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker - Free Book Online Page A

balance of some parents.”
    The mystery of schizophrenia is, apparently, solved: The eugenicists are wrong. People aren’t born with schizophrenia at all. Their mothers and fathers are to blame.
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    AS EARLY AS 1940, Fromm-Reichmann had sounded the alarm over “the dangerous influence of the undesirable domineering mother on the development of her children,” calling such mothers “the main family problem.” It was eight years later, the same year that Joanne Greenberg became her patient, that Fromm-Reichmann came up with a term that would stick to women like Mimi Galvin for decades: the schizophrenogenic mother.It was “mainly” this sort of mother, she wrote, who was responsible for the “severe early warp and rejection” that rendered a schizophrenia patient “painfully distrustful and resentful of other people.”
    She was far from the first psychoanalyst to blame the mother for something. Freud’s approach, after all, was to explain practically every mysterious impulse as the end result of childhood experiences coloring the unconscious mind. But now, in the postwar years, the dawn of a new era of American prosperity, many therapists had something new to worry about: mothers who refused to behave like the mothers of a previous generation. “A schizophrenic,” a Philadelphia psychiatrist named John Rosen wrote, within a year of Fromm-Reichmann’s invention of the term schizophrenogenic mother, “is always one who is reared by a woman who suffers froma perversion of 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 calledthe “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