ARE WE RIGHT BACK WHERE WE STARTED, FIFTY YEARS AGO?

Sigmund Freud's mommy issues might have manifested themselves in his elaborations on "Anatomy of the Mental Personality," and a lot of the intellectual work of second-wave feminists went into changing the paradigm.

Back then, psychoanalysis and psychopharmacological interventions were criticized; both Freud’s focus on sexual fantasies and the use of “mother’s little helpers” (benzodiazepines) came under fire. Critics drew from second-wave feminism to refocus on the role of women in mental health.

Radicals criticized psychiatry for reinforcing notions of the dutiful mother and obedient housewife, suggesting psychiatry (and pharmaceuticals, yes) were a means to regulate women. Those women who did not behave “properly” risked ending up in psychiatric care and possibly chemically sedated, or worse. Works like Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, for instance, suggested that mass tranquilizer use during the 1950s had pacified women and had facilitated women assenting to the limits imposed on them.

Other books displayed the complicity and willing participation of mainstream psychiatry in disciplining women and placing constraints on what was regarded as unfettered emotional, sexual, and artistic activity. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, published in the United States in 1971, as well as Virginia Woolf’s five-volume diaries (1977–1984), underlined women’s experiences with mental illness and raised awareness of the dangers women faced at the hands of the mental health system.

Altogether, these books humanized the suffering and the social controls that women had to deal with if they didn’t act according to the so-called norm or accept their role in American society.

The article is instructive reading, including this: "Radical women in the 1960s and 1970s pushed back against orthodoxy in mental medicine, but also against wider patriarchy in the country. They challenged cultural and medical norms."

To what end?  "The abstract of a scientific study published in 1991 has been making the rounds on social media, and it is shocking on two levels. The first wave of shock (although not surprise) comes at you from what the study discovered: the mothers of gender dysphoric boys tend to suffer from a host of mental illnesses of their own."  The article appears in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, and I don't have a Social Science Citation Index or Science Citation Index to hand to see what sort of response it elicited over the years, and a short article based on sixteen mothers of boys with gender identity disorder, the term of art thirty years ago, compared with seventeen mothers of normal boys, a small sample; and the authors might be making too strong a conclusion, given the sample size, with their "The findings of this pilot study are sufficiently strong to call for a comprehensive study of psychopathology in parents of children with GID."

Athena Thorne at Pajamas Media called attention to the paper with a clickbaity headline.  Whether there has been subsequent academic research clarifying or refuting its claim, or whether, as she suggests, "At that point, you are struck by the full weight of the precise extent to which discourse and honest research into this subject has been smothered, and it’s breathtaking. You want to weep for the deliberate blinding of intellectual inquiry,"  I don't know.  Google Scholar didn't give me much on the search string "psychopathology parents children with GID," and nothing within the last year.

Is it time to dust off the Freud?