The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [168]
In another clinic, a therapist spoke of a mother who was panicky because her child could not learn to read at school, though his intelligence tested high. The mother had left college, thrown herself into the role of housewife, and had lived for the time when her son would go to school, and she would fulfill herself in his achievement. Until therapy made the mother “separate” herself from the child, he had no sense of himself as a separate being at all. He could, would, do nothing, even in play, unless someone told him to. He could not even learn to read, which took a self of his own.
The strange thing was, the therapist said, like so many other women of this era of the “feminine role,” in her endeavor to be a “real woman,” a good wife and mother, “she was really playing a very masculine role…. She was pushing everyone around—dominating the children’s lives, ruling the house with an iron hand, managing the carpentry, nagging her husband to do odd jobs he never finished, managing the finances, supervising the recreation and the education—and her husband was just the man who paid the bills.”
In a Westchester community whose school system is world famous, it was recently discovered that graduates with excellent high-school records did very poorly in college and did not make much of themselves afterwards. An investigation revealed a simple psychological cause. All during high school, the mothers literally had been doing their children’s homework and term papers. They had been cheating their sons and daughters out of their own mental growth.
Another analyst illuminates how juvenile delinquency is caused by the child’s acting out of the mother’s needs, when the mother’s growth has been stunted.
Regularly the more important parent—usually the mother, although the father is always in some way involved—has been seen unconsciously to encourage the amoral or antisocial behavior of the child. The neurotic needs of the parent…are vicariously gratified by the behavior of the child. Such neurotic needs of the parent exist either because of some current inability to satisfy them in the world of adults, or because of the stunting experiences in the parent’s own childhood—or more commonly, because of a combination of both of these factors.11
Those who have observed and tried to help young delinquents have seen this progressive dehumanization process in action, and have discovered that love is not enough to counteract it. The symbiotic love or permissiveness which has been the translation of mother love during the years of the feminine mystique is not enough to create a social conscience and strength of character in a child. For this it takes a mature mother with a firm core of self, whose own sexual, instinctual needs are integrated with social conscience. “Firmness bespeaks a parent who has learned…how all of his major goals may be reached in some creative course of action…”12
A therapist reported the case of a nine-year-old girl who stole. She will outgrow it, said her protective mother—with a “permissiveness born of her own need for vicarious satisfaction.” At one point, the nine-year-old asked the therapist, “When is my mother going to do her own stealing?”
At its most extreme, this pattern of progressive dehumanization can be seen in the cases of schizophrenic children: “autistic” or “atypical” children, as they are sometimes called. I visited a famous clinic which has been studying these children for almost twenty years. During this period, cases of these children, arrested at a very primitive, sub-infantile level, have seemed to some to be on the increase. The authorities differ as to the cause of this strange condition, and whether it is actually on the increase or only seems to be because it is now more often diagnosed. Until quite recently, most of these children were thought to be mentally retarded.