young.
We must remember that it has been only a very short time that the family
has taken the form that wo find so normal. In almost every society before

industrialization people lived in far more extended groups than the mama-papa-baby

unit we now know. It has only been since factories and offices became men’s work
places, requiring them to group around them in small units and breaking down the
extended family that people have lived so isolated, cooped in tiny apartments or »

‘deadly commuter suburbia, the children isolated with only those two people.

And upon: Se i in we must say that this form of living together and
raising. children has been a dismal failure. Presently the nuclear family is
so rife.with pathology that it is close to breakdowm. One of the main causes
of this pathology is the fact that this unit has long been based on the isolation

and therefore stunting and crippling of one of its members, the mothor. | It is

at the moment of this event, supposed to be tho most fulfilling in ‘a young girl's
life, that this crippling process begins, as the mother is cut off from previous
activities and friondships and sources of stimulation she knew before.

' Tt is no accident that the development of modern psychology parallels the

“formulation of the post-industrial nuclear family. Almost all of Freudian

psychology is aimed at treating and oxplaining the neurosis ‘eroated in the young
by dependency on those two individuals, mother and father. The basic assumptions
of psychology were created by the new industrial society and at the same time go
hand, in hand with the maintenance of the social relations of this small family

“anit.

It is this vsocial grouping, the nuclear home, that must indeed be the area
of most violence in our society, wherein frustrated and guilt-ridden young mothers
daily wroak: terrible violence upon their children. This is not the ideal ‘picture
of madonna=like motherhood we are taught to always portray. Surely to paint |
motherhood as anything else is to strike at the most sacred myth of our society.

And yet who among us has not had an ambivalent mothor? And what mother who
has spent years, even ono year, one to one with a small child can truthfully say
that she has never lost her temper and done something terrible?

Each ambivalent mother is beset with that emotion so rampant in advsnced-
industrial man and woman: guilt. If the mother feels even the smallest twinge of
the child rejecting her she feels that something is wrong with her. In fact,
her often very powerful feelings of resentment against the child as the obvious
source of her: entrapment make her feel a monster. She feels that there must be
something terribly wrong and abnormal about herself if she does not love her ow
child. And so, unable to admit her feelings to herself, she represses them and
so begin the subtle double-bind situations, the silent or open blows against the
child which ultimately fill the mental hospital wards. It is so hard to describe
well---many of us know intuitivoly what I mean by the subtle actions of the
ambivalent mother-=-the woman who is full of fear because she is without a single
self-validating experience.in her day. Nothing affirms her humanity, nothing lets
her know her mind is alive. :

Full ‘of terror because’ she does not and will not ever look like the fashionablo
mothers in the women’s magazines. Full of dissatisfaction because her house does ©
not and cannot ever look like the happy homes pictured in the magazines. BEvory
cell of her body telegraphs to the child her overwhelming anzioty, rooted in her
self=hatred, about any form of physical contact whatever. And she stoops and

commands, because it is expected, "come over here and give mama a kiss.” And

this is violence.

I know that I paint a terrible picture of thenuclear home. And yet all sta-
tistics comfirm the pathology: the alcoholism of housewives, their addiction to
tranglillizers, the empty consumerism, the child beatings. And the $ of all
hospital beds which are mental beds, the majority of them for schizophrenia, that
"disease" which progressive experts see less and less as individual, and trade to
the ambivalent mother. Many social ills cause mental illnoss, of course, and
yet we must still say that the nuclear family Mee be nearly se most repressive