Most scholarship on the medicalization of emotions has focused on projects that locate emotions, one way or another, within individual brains and minds. The story of mother love and mental illness, in contrast, is a medicalization story that frames the problem of pathological emotions as a relational issue. Bad mother love was seen as both a pathology (for the mother) and a pathogen (for her vulnerable child).Moreover, different forms of pathological mother love—smothering love, ambivalent love, love that masked an actual desire to dominate and control—were supposed to have different effects on children, ranging from lack of fitness for military service to homosexuality to juvenile delinquency to outright psychosis, especially schizophrenia. Understanding why mother love came to be associated with mental illness—and, equally, what led to this viewpoint’s rapid decline into disrepute—requires us to go beyond simply invoking the trope of “mother blaming” and leaving things at that. This essay is a first effort at a richer narrative, one that blends perspectives from the history of emotions and the history of science and medicine.

中文翻译：

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母爱和心理疾病：情感史。

大多数关于情感医学的奖学金都集中在将情感以一种或另一种方式定位在个人的大脑和思想中的项目。相比之下，母爱和精神疾病的故事是一个医学化的故事，将病理性情感问题视为一个相关问题。糟糕的母亲之爱既被视为一种病理（对于母亲而言），又是一种病原体（对于其脆弱的孩子而言）。此外，多种形式的病理性母爱（窒息之爱，矛盾的爱，掩盖了控制和控制的实际愿望的爱）被认为会对儿童产生不同的影响，从缺乏服兵役到同性恋到青少年犯罪到彻底的精神病，尤其是精神分裂症。了解为什么母爱会导致精神疾病-并且，导致这种观点迅速沦为声望的原因-要求我们超越简单地援引“母亲责备”的说法，而把事情留在那儿。这篇文章是第一次丰富的叙述，它融合了情感史，科学和医学史的观点。