Madness and the Family. Parent-Child Relationships in English Language Pathographies About Mental Disorders

Abstract

Many English-language illness narratives dealing with the experience of madness address the issue of parent-child relationships and their role in the development of mental disorders and their treatment. These texts closely reflect psychological theories about the aetiology of mental health problems dominant in the time of writing. Thus, the aim of this study is to compare the way family relationship are depicted in illness narratives written in the last fifty years. The article first looks at the pathographies penned during the popularity of anti-psy­chiatry, which blamed faulty parenting for the rise of psychosis (such as Mary Barnes’s auto­biography co-authored with her psychiatrist Joseph Berke, R.D. Laing’s collaborator). Later, it analyses texts which reflect the controversial findings of the so-called recovered memory movement, which claimed the experiences of childhood sexual abuse are often repressed and lead to multiple splitting of personality. The classic example of such a book is Flora Rheta Schreiber’s Sybil. Finally, more contemporary memoirs are presented, such as the works of Elizabeth Wurtzel or Marya Hornbacher as well as books written by parents whose children have been diagnosed with mental illness and who often had to battle prejudice attributing their children’s problems to neglect or cruelty on their part. Comparing these pathographies proves that writers interpret their life experiences according to the prevailing cultural script.