The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [116]
What made these twenty strongly maternal women (evidently strength, even aggression, is not masculine when a psychiatrist considers it part of the maternal instinct) produce such pathologically infantile sons? For one thing, the “child was utilized as a means of satisfying an abnormal craving for love.” These mothers freshened up, put lipstick on when the son was due home from school, as a wife for a husband or a girl for her date, because they had no other life besides the child. Most, Levy said, had thwarted career ambitions. The “maternal overprotection” was actually caused by these mothers’ strength, by their basic feminine energy—responsible, stable, active and aggressive—producing pathology in the child when the mother was blocked from “other channels of expression.”
Most of these mothers also had dominating mothers and submissive fathers of their own, and their husbands had also been obedient sons of dominating mothers; in Freudian terms, the castrativeness all around was rather extreme. The sons and mothers were given intensive psychoanalytical therapy for years, which, it was hoped, would break the pathological cycle. But when, some years after the original study, research workers checked on these women and the children they had pathologically overprotected, the results were not quite what was expected. In most cases psychotherapy had not been effective. Yet some of the children, miraculously, did not become pathological adults; not because of therapy, but because by circumstance the mother had acquired an interest or activity in her own life and had simply stopped living the child’s life for him. In a few other cases, the child survived because, through his own ability, he had staked out an area of independence of which his mother was not a part.
Other clues to the real problem of the mother-child relationship in America have been seen by social scientists without ever penetrating the mystique. A sociologist named Arnold Green almost by accident discovered another dimension to the relationship between nurturing mother love, or its lack, and neurosis.
It seems that in the Massachusetts industrial town where Green grew up an entire generation was raised under psychological conditions which should have been traumatic: conditions of irrational, vengeful, even brutal parental authority, and a complete lack of “love” between parent and child. The parents, Polish immigrants, tried to enforce rigid old-world rules which their American children did not respect. The children’s ridicule, anger, contempt made the bewildered parents resort to a “vengeful, personal, irrational authority which no longer finds support in the future hopes and ambitions of the children.”
In exasperation and fear of losing all control over their Americanized youngsters, parents apply the fist and whip rather indiscriminately. The sound of blows, screams, howls, vexations, wails of torment and hatred are so commonplace along the rows of dilapidated millhouses that the passersby pay them scant attention.13
Surely, here were the seeds of future neuroses, as all good post-Freudian parents in America understand them. But to Green’s amazement, when he went back and checked as a sociologist on the neuroses which according to the book must surely be flourishing, he found no known case of Army rejection because of psychoneurosis in the local Polish community, and in the overt behavior of an entire generation in the village “no expression of anxiety, guilty feelings, rigidity of response, repressed hostility—the various symptoms described