Long ago, when I was in college and mental health treatment was still highly stigmatized, I heard a speaker talk about her experience with depression. She explained that she and her therapist had traced the root of the problem to an episode from her early childhood. Her mother had gone away, and as a toddler she lacked the ability to understand that the separation was temporary. She assumed her mother was dead, and the buried grief caused depression 35 years later.
A few years after that I read a book called The Fragile Bond, in which a different woman asserted that her depression had also been caused by an early separation from her mother, who went away for a week without her.
I believed their explanations; I accepted it as received wisdom that a mom taking a solo trip could scar her toddler for life. When my own kids were small I was very cautious about leaving them, because what if I scarred them for life?
Just recently I realized that this idea warranted some additional scrutiny.
Why weren’t people developing depression after being raised by traveling salesman dads? Why would it only matter if the mom were traveling?
if toddlers are too unsophisticated to get their minds around “Mom is coming back in a week,” how could they get a handle on “Mom is dead, and dead is permanent”?
Wasn't it more likely that those cases of depression were actually caused by midlife fluctuations in brain chemistry?
Was this just one more way for people to blame 1950s moms for their children’s struggles? Was it one more place where the patriarchy needed smashing?
i turned to Google, expecting to find that the idea had been debunked. But the actual story seems to be more complicated. It looks like the theory of maternal separation as a causal factor for mental illness was controversial even in the era in which I was hearing it put forth as fact. It also looks like animal studies suggest that early separation can have long-lasting neuroendocrine effects. It looks like there are some associations reported in recent human studies between early separations and later behavioral concerns.
I am still at my parents’ house, googling (and typing this post) on a small screen, skimming abstracts instead of tracking down full texts. I’d love to learn more. Is this an idea that you absorbed too? What do we know about the real story?
PS I drafted this post thinking about optional separations in which kids stay with loved ones, not the recent barbarism at the border. That seems likely to be a whole ‘nother kettle of fish.
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