Mother Love and Mental Illness: An Emotional History

Abstract

This essay aims to illuminate the historical origins of psychiatric concern with mother love – and especially mother love gone wrong. It looks particularly at ways in which a combination of wartime research, postwar social concerns and new tensions between psychoanalysis and hospital psychiatry worked together to create a range of theories and practices predicated on the idea that specific forms of pathological mother love could lead to specific forms of mental disorder, including (and perhaps especially) schizophrenia. It also tells the story of how mothers of the schizophrenic patients in particular rose up – in the name of love – to challenge the view that they had caused their children’s illness, and why this happened.