The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [163]
Another woman said:
I thought I had to be there every afternoon when they got home from school. I read all the books they were assigned so I could help them with their schoolwork. I haven’t been as happy and excited for years as the weeks I was helping Mary get her clothes ready for college. But I was so upset when she wouldn’t take art. That had been my dream, before I got married, of course. Maybe it’s better to live your own dreams.
I do not think it is a coincidence that the increasing passivity—and dreamlike unreality—of today’s children has become so widespread in the same years that the feminine mystique encouraged the great majority of American women—including the most able, and the growing numbers of the educated—to give up their own dreams, and even their own education, to live through their children. The “absorption” of the child’s personality by the middle-class mother—already apparent to a perceptive sociologist in the 1940’s—has inevitably increased during these years. Without serious interests outside the home, and with housework routinized by appliances, women could devote themselves almost exclusively to the cult of the child from cradle to kindergarten. Even when the children went off to school their mothers could share their lives, vicariously and sometimes literally. To many, their relationship with their children became a love affair, or a kind of symbiosis.
“Symbiosis” is a biological term; it refers to the process by which, to put it simply, two organisms live as one. With human beings, when the fetus is in the womb, the mother’s blood supports its life; the food she eats makes it grow, its oxygen comes from the air she breathes, and she discharges its wastes. There is a biological oneness in the beginning between mother and child, a wonderful and intricate process. But this relationship ends with the severing of the umbilical cord and the birth of the baby into the world as a separate human being.
At this point, child psychologists construe a psychological or emotional “symbiosis” between mother and child in which mother love takes the place of the amniotic fluid which perpetually bathed and fed the fetus in the womb. This emotional symbiosis feeds the psyche of the child until he is ready to be psychologically born, as it were. Thus the psychological writers—like the literary and religious eulogists of mother-love before the psychological era—depict a state in which mother and baby still retain a mystical oneness; they are not really separate beings. “Symbiosis,” in the hands of the psychological popularizers, strongly implied that the constant loving care of the mother was absolutely necessary for the child’s growth, for an indeterminate number of years.
But in recent years the “symbiosis” concept has crept with increasing frequency into the case histories of disturbed children. More and more of the new child pathologies seem to stem from that very symbiotic relationship with the mother, which has somehow kept children from becoming separate selves. These disturbed children seem to be “acting out” the mother’s unconscious wishes or conflicts—infantile dreams she had not outgrown or given up, but was still trying to gratify for herself in the person of her child.
The term “acting out” is used in psychotherapy to describe the behavior of a patient which is not in accord with the reality of a given situation, but