Seasonal Affective Disorder: What to do with Freud?

I suppose I jumped onto the Freudian bandwagon without thinking twice when I was younger. And now I’m stuck with this odd little dilemma. What should we make of “parent bashing” (as Lilienfeld likes to say)? Was he completely wrong? I think we should always stand on centre ground. It’s a big cliché but we must listen to all sides before coming to a judgement – yes, even to people who commune with sagacious beings in Mars.

I don’t think we should ignore the effects of parenting on children. I think that is still important. In “Unstrange Minds” by Grinker, he describes the experiments by Harlow with a certain distaste (pointedly noting that the experiments bordered on animal cruelty). In brief, Harlow studied the effects that abnormal mothering can have on baby rhesus monkeys. He replaced the mother with mechanical monkeys made of wire, cloth, with and without milk bottles etc. His results showed that monkeys deprived of their mothers were emotionally disturbed.

Now, does this actually lend proof to Freudian ideas, as Grinker claims it did? Does it support the idea that bad mothering can cause crazy children? Yes and no. I think we should look at this clearly. What Harlow did was to provide a very distressing upbringing environment to the baby monkey. The baby has more or less been orphaned. So, I think parents who don’t provide the basic necessities and at least some sort of attention, and who abuse their children will increase the chances of emotional and psychological problems.

But, I think the effects will be small beyond such extreme conditions. Whether your dad was stricter than usual, or your mum was more controlling. I don’t think these are the causes for psychopathologies. But they will probably have some sorta effect on the person as a whole. Take for example a series of experiments by Meaney and colleagues. They basically compared the difference between rat mothers that gave high and low levels of licking, grooming and arched-back nursing (LG-ABN) to their pups. What they found was that the children of rat mothers which gave low levels of LG-ABN showed higher stress reactivity. There is a lot more to this series of experiments and its implications are many. However, for the purpose of this topic, suffice to say that the behaviour of parents does affect the behaviour of their children. But, from these studies, it seems that the effect is not enough to account for huge modifications in personality, and certainly not enough for pathologies as the offspring of low LG-ABN mothers still exhibited normal behaviour.

So, just to summarise: in my opinion, children brought up in terrible conditions may turn out to be psychopathological (note that they are at higher risk and not guaranteed to be dysfunctional), but other less extreme conditions (e.g. when the child begins toilet training, when they start sleeping alone etc.) will probably not push a person over the edge.