15 December 2012

implicating parents go back all the way through history

"So, I think that we have a long history of thinking that things are caused by parents. We thought that autism was caused by parents, "refrigerator mothers" were the ones who caused it. Schizophrenia was apparently something that you developed because your parents had an unconscious wish that you not exist.

If you go back 100 years further, there was the idea of imaginationism, which said that the reason your child was a dwarf or had deformities was because the mother had lascivious longings which were expressed in the deformities of her child. These theories of implying - implicating parents go back all the way through history, and a lot of them have been dismissed. But crime is the one area in which people seem not to be able to let go of that idea."

from an NPR interview transcript with Andrew Solomon, author of Far From the Tree.