Mother Love and Mental Illness
An Emotional History
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3924712 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Anne Harrington (0009-0002-3803-8218, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 31 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 94-115 |
| Publication date | 2016-07-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Osiris (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0369-7827 • E-ISSN: 1933-8287 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/687559 |
| PMID | 30125077 |
| OpenAlex | W2529848994 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
| References cited | 38 |
Most scholarship on the medicalization of emotions has focused on projects that locate emotions, one way or another, within individual brains and minds. The story of mother love and mental illness, in contrast, is a medicalization story that frames the problem of pathological emotions as a relational issue. Bad mother love was seen as both a pathology (for the mother) and a pathogen (for her vulnerable child).Moreover, different forms of pathological mother love-smothering love, ambivalent love, love that masked an actual desire to dominate and control-were supposed to have different effects on children, ranging from lack of fitness for military service to homosexuality to juvenile delinquency to outright psychosis, especially schizophrenia. Understanding why mother love came to be associated with mental illness-and, equally, what led to this viewpoint’s rapid decline into disrepute-requires us to go beyond simply invoking the trope of “mother blaming” and leaving things at that. This essay is a first effort at a richer narrative, one that blends perspectives from the history of emotions and the history of science and medicine
Ambivalence · Developmental psychology · Literature · Medicalization · Mental health · Mental illness · Narrative · Psychiatry · Psychoanalysis · Schizophrenia (object-oriented programming · Scholarship · Trope (literature · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History of Emotions Research · Psychology
Isis Current Bibliography of the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences 2019
He agreed to take in both children and committed to caring for and educating them” social work reports on fathers in Mandatory Palestine
Neurobiological limits and the somatic significance of love
Mothering in the frame
Mother-blaming revisited
Shatter Not the Branches of the Tree of Anger
Hospitalism
Object Relations, Dependency, and Attachment
For Her Own Good
Return from the Natives
Mama's Boy
Vitamins for the soul
Holding blame at bay? ‘Gene talk’ in family members’ accounts of schizophrenia aetiology
Marguerite Sechehaye and Renee
Constructing Mothers
Motherhood in Black and White
Politics in an Age of Anxiety
The Nature and Nurture of Love
Toward a theory of schizophrenia
Techniques of the Brain and the Paradox of Emotions, 1880-1930
Sexism and Social Science
| Unique citing works | 6 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,75 |
| Citation span | 2018 - 2026 (9) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 6 |