"It's always the mother's fault"
Plath, psychoanalysis and the cult of mother blaming
*Contains themes of suicide and mental health, which some readers may find triggering.*
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I have recently been immersed in research into the work and life of Sylvia Plath, on whom I have written many times here on Substack.
Something of great interest to me has been the story of Sylvia’s relationship with her mother, Aurelia Schober Plath, and the complicated nuance of their correspondence, contained within Letters Home, which Aurelia edited in 1976.
Plath has famously derided her mother by utilising close observations of their relationship through her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar. Within this text, protagonist Esther Greenwood rails against her mother’s controlling and perfectionist behaviour towards her, featuring in particular through her ongoing therapy with a young and forward thinking psychiatrist, Dr Nolan, closely based on Plath’s real-life relationship with Dr Ruth Barnhouse during her stay in McLean Hospital in 1953 following her first suicide attempt.
Plath was also critical of her mother within her prolific and meticulously written journals, as well as reportedly telling friends that her mother was a ‘martyr’, who gave away her autonomy first to her own father, then to her husband, Otto Plath, and finally to her two children, Sylvia and her younger brother, Warren. Some of her poetry has also been attributed to her complex emotions around her mother and their relationship, including ‘Medusa’.
‘In any cast, you are always there,
Tremulous breath at the end of my line,
Curve of water upleaping
To my water rod, dazzling and grateful,
Touching and sucking.’1 ‘Medusa’
However, Letters Home also features many examples of Plath referencing her mother in loving tones, claiming that should she have children of her own in future, she would wish to parent them just as Aurelia had done, as well as gushing references, telling her what a ‘superlative mother’ she had been.2
As we sadly know, Sylvia Plath struggled throughout her life with her mental health, including one suicide attempt in 1953 at the age of just twenty, after returning from a gruelling month-long guest editorship at Mademoiselle magazine in New York. She was also deeply affected by the death of her father when she was just eight years old, and again, this fed into much of her later poetry such as the searing ‘Daddy’ (although interestingly, some critics are now suggesting that this may also have contained references to her mother).
Another interesting facet which may have played a part however within the story of Aurelia and Sylvia comes when we consider the psychiatric and psychoanalysis field of the first part of the twentieth century. In Begõna Gòmez Urzaiz’s book The Abandoners: Of Mothers and Monsters, she devotes a whole chapter to examining the ways in which psychoanalysis effectively blamed mothers for their children’s mental health issues well into the twentieth-century, primarily based on Freudian psychology and its later proponents.
In a chapter poignantly titled ‘It’s always the mother’s fault’, Urzaiz points out that ‘mother blaming’ has occurred throughout history, whether attributed to one specific mother or to mother’s generally as a social construct. She claims that, throughout both medical and sociological history, not to mention general public opinion, history has unfalteringly found ways to blame mothers for the behaviour or abuse of their offspring.3
In the first half of the twentieth-century, it was generally believed that mothers with psychological issues would quite literally drive their otherwise perfectly healthy children ‘mad’. Emerging from the work of Sigmund Freud, who suggested the hypothesis that schizophrenia was directly caused by mothers who were considered as either too cold or too over-protective towards their children, (notice how you literally couldn’t win), and followed up by a somewhat flawed study published in 1934, which looked at forty-five children diagnosed with schizophrenia, though as Urzaiz points out, today they would likely have been diagnosed with various disorders. Two of the forty-five were found to have experienced maternal rejection, whilst thirty-three were observed as cases of maternal over-protection. This study appeared to be sufficient to signify decades of belief that both rejection and attention could cause mental disorders in children.
If we take a brief look at the thoughts on psychopathology within the time frame of Aurelia’s early mothering, a history of blaming the mother for psychiatric conditions within their children was popular. As with many of these early analyses, an element of misogynistic rhetoric comes into play, and the effects of such have had, as Urzaiz goes on to discuss, a far-reaching consequence for mother-guilt throughout the twentieth century and beyond.
Mothers were routinely blamed for causing psychopathology, particularly in the area of child psychiatry, but also venturing into adult psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia, as previously mentioned. Such psychoanalytic theories emerged primarily from major key figures such as Sigmund Freud, and continued with the work of Leo Kanner, Silvano Arieti and John Bowlby, amongst others.
In his fascinating paper on the history of mother blaming, Michael Fitzgerald points out that, within the nineteenth century and earlier, a mother’s focus was primarily based on the needs of the child due to large cases of infant mortality. This led to a general criticism of mothers based on the physical care of the infant. However, as infant mortality declined into the twentieth century, the focus turned towards children’s psychological care.4
Psychoanalytic papers began to indicate issues with over-anxious mothering, whilst some psychologists even damned all mothers, claiming they were incapable of bringing up a healthy child, advising against giving a child too much love or intimacy. This put me in mind of my grandmother’s generation, who were often heard scolding younger mothers for picking up and ‘cosseting’ their newborns in the belief that this would somehow ‘spoil’ the child.
I found this element of research interesting when reading Aurelia Plath’s introduction to Letters Home, where she appears almost heartbreakingly keen to assure the reader that Sylvia received all the love and attention it was possible for her to give from an early age. She also stresses her late husband’s interest and pride in his young children, despite being less involved in their day-to-day care. I wondered whilst reading whether Aurelia was keen to convince the sceptical reader, familiar with her daughter’s vociferous claims against her mother of being too cold following the death of her husband, appearing not to grieve, as simply untrue. However, within the psychoanalytic thinking of the time, her assurances may have been in vain, particularly when we consider, in her own words, that she shared with her daughter a kind of ‘psychic osmosis’; a level of intimacy, likely due to the necessity of single-parenting of her young daughter, of which early psychoanalysis was likely to disdain.
David Levy, an important proponent of these theories, produced a 1931 paper setting out the damage of maternal overprotection, placing mothers in a no-win situation where they were required to walk a thin line between being over- or under-involved with their children.
The 1940’s, when Sylvia Plath would have been approaching adolescence, saw the most severe criticism of mothers yet when Philip Wylie published a hugely important book called Generation of Vipers, in which he coined the term ‘Momism’, suggesting the ‘psychic damage that bad mothering could inflict on individual offspring and ultimately on the state of the nation’, using the examples of ‘weakness’ in soldiers who had not been shown how to stand on their own two feet by their mothers. Again, this would fit with Aurelia’s own consideration that the psychic osmosis shared between mother and daughter had led to an almost unnatural, claustrophobic sense of closeness from which both women suffered.
Strecker took this further in 1946 when he used the word ‘Mom’, ascribing this to a woman who was ‘not a mother’ as she had failed to prepare her offspring emotionally, binding her child to herself. Interestingly for our consideration of Aurelia, he described the typical ‘moms’ as ‘self-sacrificing’, ‘Pollyanna’, ‘protective,’ and ‘pseudo-intellectual,’ and claimed that she was ‘the source of pain, the ruthless thwarter and frustrator.’ As my research has shown, Sylvia Plath saw her mother as self-sacrificing to both the central men in her life (first father, then husband) and then to her two children, for whom she worked several jobs following her widowhood and denied herself new clothing and other ‘luxuries’ in order to ensure both children had all they needed, as well as a good education at leading Ivy League universities.
Seemingly in opposition to this idea however, Lundberg and Farnham, (1947), stated that, ‘contemporary women in very large numbers are psychologically disordered, (and that), the problems of modern society – including war and depression – could be traced to the fact that women had left the home,’ feeling that the ‘proper’ woman should be, ‘domestic and self-subordinating’. So this would have fitted Aurelia during her marriage, when she openly admits to subordinating herself to her husband in order to keep the peace. However, once she became a widow, she would then have fallen into Lundberg and Farnham’s remit of causing undue stress for her children by leaving the home to work and support the family.
Apart from further consolidating the idea that mother’s cannot win in this game of blame and shame, this is interesting in a consideration of Aurelia’s mothering. She seemingly gave too much love and attention to her daughter by some psychoanalytic theories, and yet, as a single mother, was forced to leave her children in order to work full-time to support them following the death of her husband. This is something Sylvia also both criticised her for, as well as felt forever guilty of the sacrifices she had made, which some critics suggest was a reason she pushed herself so harshly in all of her academic endeavours, shouldering the responsibility of both her mother’s economic difficulties and the support of her patrons.
The 1940’s went on to fuel mother-guilt in its proclamations of mothers being blamed for a host of psychological conditions and traits, including the aforementioned schizophrenia (Frieda Fromm-Reichman), an idea which went on to persist for many decades, causing enormous guilt and worry for mothers; and autism, (Kanner), who suggested that this was due to the lack of maternal ‘warmth’, propagating the idea of the ‘refrigerator mother’.
By the time Bowlby pointed out, in the 1950’s, that full-time employment of mothers caused untold damage to their offspring, indicating an emphasis of keeping mothers within the home, Sylvia was already a young woman suffering severely with her own mental health.
But I wonder how much of this conflicting, blame-rhetoric affected Aurelia’s parenting, or later, her concerns in light of Sylvia’s final, successful suicide attempt in 1963. Or for that matter, how much fed into Sylvia’s own ideas during her therapy sessions with Ruth Barnhouse, and led its way into her searing poetry and even worries over her own capabilities of mothering.
If we take any of the psychoanalysis of the time into account, we can see that Aurelia would have been ‘blamed’ either way and that Sylvia, in receiving psychotherapy through her meetings with Ruth, may have come to understand much of her breakdown as the responsibility of a mother who did not get things right. The mother/daughter relationship must have been something confusing on both sides; closer than close, due to the lack of a father and husband within the household, and with both women having shared passions of literature and art, they also struggled to gain enough emotional distance. It feels clear from Sylvia’s writing through her journals, poetry and her single novel that this closeness was suffocating for her as a woman, and that she felt the constant need to mask these feelings, in order to please the woman who had given her so much.5
Seen from the other side of psychotherapeutic thought, it appeared that Sylvia also harboured resentment at Aurelia not being like the other mothers in the middle-class Wellesley, where she moved to live with her young family. Sylvia often felt shame amongst her smart college friends, making unkind comments towards her mother with regards to her second-hand or tatty clothing as compared to the other girls’ mothers.
What is also interesting is the focus on the ‘self-sacrificing’ theories. Sylvia makes many comments on this element of her mother’s personality and life, something she clearly found distasteful, even reportedly calling her mother a ‘martyr’ amongst her friends.
Whether Aurelia contributed to Sylvia’s breakdowns is not necessarily a black and white subject. Thankfully, mental health is now far better understood, but the issues Sylvia developed as she became a young adult certainly appear to have been complicated by her close bond with her mother. In one confession to her brother Warren, Sylvia reportedly stated that she felt she must always give her mother the edited highlights of her life, showing a young woman eager to please the mother who had sacrificed all for her children, whilst her resentment bubbled beneath the surface.
What is interesting is the consideration of Sylvia’s own attitude to mothering when she broke free from her mother’s care into marriage and motherhood herself.
In her 1963 novel The Bell Jar, the young narrator Esther Greenwood struggles to think of a future in which she would wish to become a mother, and expresses her negativity towards such a role. In Esther, Plath’s own concerns are revealed, yet it is interesting to note that much has been recorded of Plath’s success at being a loving and dedicated mother to her own two young children.
This discrepancy is something which I have always found fascinating about Plath, as both her earlier journals and her novel indicate the turmoil she felt that she could not conceive of combining her writing ambitions with the traditional demands of marriage and motherhood, asking questions such as ‘Why was I so unmaternal and apart?’ and fearing a conflict between maternity and creativity, referring to married women with children feeling ‘brainwashed’.
Adding to this complexity is her collection of poems within Ariel, which she was furiously working on for the last few months of her life, rising early whilst her children slept, as many mother-writer’s do. This has often been lauded as her most accomplished and prolific work. Within what must have been the darkest and most painful period of Plath’s life, her genius for words illuminates the page, with many of the poems inspired by her children such as ‘Morning Song.’
‘Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.’ ‘Morning Song’
What also interests me, as a researcher into the narratives of women’s experiences, are the ways in which these ideas still feed into our contemporary lives.
Though many of the psychoanalytic thoughts circulating at the time relating to the cause of mental disorders being passed through mothering have been disproved, even as late as the end of the 1980’s, two Canadian psychologists who studied one hundred and twenty five articles around children’s mental health, found that seventy two of the one hundred and twenty five held mothers primarily responsible for all manner of psychological disorders. One 1987 study even blamed mothers for their young daughter’s poor grades in mathematics.
Furthermore, the ways mothers are still blamed within society, as Urzaiz goes on to discuss in her enlightening study of mothers, show that this kind of rhetoric prevails, leading to the mother-guilt many women express.
As Urzaiz astutely points out, new studies appear all the time, linking everything from the mother’s weight during pregnancy causing future obesity in her unborn child, to the mother’s stress causing her child’s anxiety, and even the air pollution the future mother breathes in during her pregnancy causing issues later down the line. As she says, these are of course presented as scientific reports to allow for better choices during pregnancy, but nobody seems to figure in the guilt that this can induce in a prospective mother.
Professor of Science and Gender Studies Sarah Richardson, who has made the study of maternal science her speciality, culminating in a book The Maternal Imprint, posits that the science community are often too quick to draw conclusions from data. She has also suggested, quite rightly, that studies might want to include fathers from time-to-time, since they obviously contribute to the fetus. Importantly, as Urzaiz points out, the class hypocrisy in these sorts of situations is also a factor worth more consideration, stating: ‘A working-class mother doing twelve-hour shifts during her pregnancy and grabbing something from McDonald’s on her way home has little use for a lecture regarding her diet and lack of rest.’
Although much of this research has been beneficial for new mothers’ understanding of the implications of healthier choices during pregnancy, the fact that almost everything a pregnant woman does can have an impact on her unborn child, not to mention the damage their mothering can do to that child once they enter the world, can put an overwhelming burden of responsibility onto her shoulders alone.
Urzaiz brings this discussion to a close by considering where she falls on the mum-guilt merry-go-round. When quizzed on whether she cried as she left her son at nursery for the first time, she admits to lying: what she actually felt was a sense of gratitude and relief. Struggling to work as a freelance journalist with two young children had been no picnic, and she worried she had lost her grasp of language along with her placenta.
Similar to Sylvia Plath back in the nineteen-fifties, who feared that she would feel ‘brainwashed’ after becoming a mother, Urzaiz ends with a quote from Deborah Levy:
‘Now that we were mothers we were all shadows of our former selves chased by the women we used to be before we had children.’
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Sylvia Plath, Ariel, (Faber & Faber: London, 1965), (all further poems from this edition).
Sylvia Plath, Letters Home (Faber: London, 1976), Selected and edited with commentary by Aurelia Schober Plath, (all future references are to this edition).
Begõna Gòmez Urzaiz, (Trans. Lizzie Davis), The Abandoners: Of Mothers and Monsters, (The Borough Press: London, 2024), (all future references are to this edition).
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338697489_The_History_of_Blaming_the_Mother_for_Psychopathology_in_Psychiatry (all further psychoanalytical references are to this copy).
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, (ed. Karen V Kukil), (Faber & Faber: London, 2001).
If it were only so clear cut and dry, but it's not. It's complicated. There is not fault, only interactions.
Thank you for your research and insights.
Isn’t everyone messed up to some extent?
I agree with the psychologist Oliver James in that parenting is very much an exercise in damage limitation.