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Article ID: CBB985125919

Mother Love and Mental Illness: An Emotional History (2016)

Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 31
Issue: 1
Pages: 94-115

DOI: 10.1086/687559

URI: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/687559

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Mothers and children Pathology Emotions; passions Medicalization Mental disorders and diseases 20th century

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.

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Article Otniel E. Dror; Bettina Hitzer; Anja Laukötter; Pilar León-Sanz (2016) An Introduction to History of Science and the Emotions. Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 1-18). unapi

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