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By Root 2069 0

is the expression of unconscious infantile wishes or phantasy. It sounds mystical to say that the unconscious infantile wishes the disturbed child is “acting out” are not his own but his mother’s. But therapists can trace the actual steps whereby the mother, who is using the child to gratify her own infantile dreams, unconsciously pushes him into the behavior which is destructive to his growth. The Westchester executive’s wife who had pushed her daughter at thirteen into sexual promiscuity had not only been grooming her in the development of her sexual charms—in a way that completely ignored the child’s own personality—but, even before her breasts began to develop, had implanted, by warnings and by a certain intensity of questioning, her expectation that the child would act out in real life her mother’s phantasies of prostitution.

It has never been considered pathological for mothers or fathers to act out their dreams through their children, except when the dream ignores and distorts the reality of the child. Novels, as well as case histories, have been written about the boy who became a bad businessman because that was his father’s dream for him, when he might have been a good violinist; or the boy who ends up in the mental hospital to frustrate his mother’s dream of him as a great violinist. If in recent years the process has begun to seem pathological, it is because the mothers’ dreams which the children are acting out have become increasingly infantile. These mothers have themselves become more infantile, and because they are forced to seek more and more gratification through the child, they are incapable of finally separating themselves from the child. Thus, it would seem, it is the child who supports life in the mother in that “symbiotic” relationship, and the child is virtually destroyed in the process.

This destructive symbiosis is literally built into the feminine mystique. And the process is progressive. It begins in one generation, and continues into the next, roughly as follows:

1. By permitting girls to evade tests of reality, and real commitments, in school and the world, by the promise of magical fulfillment through marriage, the feminine mystique arrests their development at an infantile level, short of personal identity, with an inevitably weak core of self.

2. The greater her own infantilism, and the weaker her core of self, the earlier the girl will seek “fulfillment” as a wife and mother and the more exclusively will she live through her husband and children. Thus, her links to the world of reality, and her own sense of herself, will become progressively weaker.

3. Since the human organism has an intrinsic urge to grow, a woman who evades her own growth by clinging to the childlike protection of the housewife role will—insofar as that role does not permit her own growth—suffer increasingly severe pathology, both physiological and emotional. Her motherhood will be increasingly pathological, both for her and for her children. The greater the infantilization of the mother, the less likely the child will be able to achieve human selfhood in the real world. Mothers with infantile selves will have even more infantile children, who will retreat even earlier into phantasy from the tests of reality.

4. The signs of this pathological retreat will be more apparent in boys, since even in childhood boys are expected to commit themselves to tests of reality which the feminine mystique permits the girls to evade in sexual phantasy. But these very expectations ultimately make the boys grow further toward a strong self and make the girls the worst victims, as well as the “typhoid Marys” of the progressive dehumanization of their own children.

From psychiatrists and suburban clinicians, I learned how this process works. One psychiatrist, Andras Angyal, describes it, not necessarily in relation to women, as “neurotic evasion of growth.” There are two key methods of evading growth. One is “noncommitment”: a man lives his life—school, job, marriage—“going through the motions without ever being wholeheartedly committed