‘Mother’s Little Helper’: The Crisis of Psychoanalysis and ...

Mother s Little Helper : The Crisis of Psychoanalysisand the Miltown ResolutionJonathan MetzlIn the 1960s and 1970s, psychopharmacological medications seemed toburst onto the American scene. Popularised and problematised in thenotion that these drugs were Mother s Little Helpers , the pills becameknown as the treatments of choice for the pressures of motherhood, single-hood and other historically specific forms of essentialised womanhood. Doctor please/Some more of these sang the Rolling Stones in the song Mother s Little Helper .1 Jaqueline Susann suggested that psychopharma-ceuticals were a woman s best friend when it came to dealing with thepressures of working in a man s world, while Barbara Gordon informed millions of Americans about the untoward effects of a woman s treatmentwith, addiction to, and withdrawal from most important, nearlyall of the research supporting the notion that psychopharmacologicalmedications were over-prescribed to mothers was conducted during thebenzodiazepine craze between 1965 and is wholly understandable, then, that many social scientists, culturalcritics and

wrote in the Journal of Pharmacological and Experimental Therapies, ‘possesses a muscle relaxant and sedative action of an unusual kind. It has selective action on those specific areas of the brain that represent the biological substrate of …

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