Madness and the Family Before Freud: the View of the Mad-Doctors

Abstract

The antipsychiatry movement of the 1960s, led in Britain by R. D. Laing, construed the bourgeois family as psychogenic, in particular blaming mothers for the double binds typical of schizophrenia. This article searches out the (partly) Freudian roots of such beliefs. Its main aim, however, is to offer a rapid survey of how psychiatric writing and practice had approached family dynamics from the time of Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) up to the close of the Victorian era. It finds that in the pre-Freudian tradition, blame tended to be affixed to the deviant family member, and therapy was geared toward reintegrating that person within the bosom of the "normal" family.