doctrines we have known and not loved

I took some psychology classes in college, and I couldn't believe the absurdity of much of it, Freud in particular. (Penis envy, what a larf! I do think it would be lovely to pee standing up with out having to squat and worry about peeing on my shoes, but that's the end of it. I can remember seeing my first penis as a child, and rather than becoming consumed with envy, I recoiled with disgust at the wormy, snakelike object. "Eww!" My own body seemed so much superior and tidy).

Every now and then I am amazed by people who accept psychological theory as gospel. (I should clarify that I'm not claiming all psychology is ridiculous; I certainly do not mean to disparage "talk therapy" or group therapy, which obviously help so many people. I'm just dissing the more outre beliefs).

As an urban mommy, I'm certainly exposed to so many people who speak the word "Montessori" with such reverence, but after I read Dr. Maria Montessori's book, "The Montessori Method", I was not enthralled. My theory is there would not be such a fetish for Montessori schools and methods if the founder had been named Lipschitz or Snodgrass. Montessori, oh how it trips off the tongue.

Dr. Montessori's ideas did splendidly with her charges, poor orphans in wartorn Italy, but in my opinion, some of these ideas don't translate well to the modern day. (N.B.: I'm sure there are wonderful Montessori schools with delightful teachers where the children revel; my point is just that some of her ideas strike me as wacky and I find it annoying that people speak her name in such reverence while often being unacquainted with the actual philosophy). For example, Dr. Montessori felt that the best way to teach children about measuring was to weigh them every single day and have them record their weights on charts to be posted publicly. I'm terrified by the idea of my daughters developing an eating disorder, and the idea of getting a child so focused on her weight disturbs me (I wonder if anyone actually follows this stricture of Dr. Montessori's nowadays. A lot of Montessori schools vie for authenticity and for being most in the original spirit, so perhaps some do).

Constantly weighing children in a public way seems wrongheaded, but not wacky like some psychiatric concepts. The Sober Husband's father was a Freudian psychiatrist, and he had at least one extremely wacky idea (his most famous work involved giving LSD to dying people, which seemed to both cheer them up and effectively prepare them for death, and you won't find me dissing that). The idea the SH's husband had which I will diss is that there would be no sibling rivalry if everyone knew their place in the family. The father was the final authority and most important member, and his word was law. Next came the Eldest Son (the Sober Husband won this roll of the genetic dice, lucky for him). When the father wasn't about, the Eldest Son/Sober Husband was the next authority figure. The big loser in all of this was my brother-in-law, just a year younger than the Sober Husband. In any disagreement, big or little, the parents always automatically took the Sober Husband's side. "He's your older brother; you have to do as he says", they would say to my poor brother-in-law (as a youngest child, I automatically feel the pain of my poor brother-in-law). My deceased father-in-law felt that this would preclude any sibling rivalry, and my mother-in-law went along with it. It never bothered her to constantly quash my brother-in-law, but it did bother her once she had her first daughter, who as a girl was automatically a lower class than her brothers. Of course, far from quashing sibling rivalry, it gave my poor brother-in-law a lot of legitimate room for resentment of his older brother.

I asked my mother-in-law about all of this once, and she didn't have much to say. "He said it was Freudian, so I accepted it, but later I read Freud, and I didn't see it in there." My husband, the golden Eldest Son, felt it was all gravy for him, but as a parent, he would never impose this system on our children.

This weekend I read a fascinating memoir, Stephen Eliot's "Not the Thing I Was", which retells Eliot's childhood locked up at famed Freudian Bruno Bettelheim's Orthogenic School, a sort of asylum for insane children based at the University of Chicago. This book was fascinating in many ways. Like the author, I do not wish to dismiss Dr. Bettelheim's work as a whole, he obviously helped a lot of people, BUT some of his ideas were obviously crazy but nonetheless were treated as gospel by his staff and devotees. The one which stands out the most as insane is Dr. B's rule outlawing deodorant. Dr. B. felt that giving his adolescent charges permission to use deodorant would symbolize that his staff felt his young patients smelled bad, and therefore because it was important for the staff to be loving and accepting, they had to forbid deodorants. The author went to some trouble as a 17 year-old boy to smuggle in and hide a contraband deodorant when he was granted permission to leave the asylum to attend high school.

This really seems to say it all. There is a reality, which is that hormonal teenagers sweat and have a natural tendency to smell bad, but that reality has to be ignored for the sake of theory. Hold your nose and keep parroting doctrine!