‘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, a

the 1950s’, in the way of outcome studies, cost-benefit analyses, or other means by which gender-imbalanced prescription patterns would later be ... for Mother’s Little Helpers in the decades to come.9 In what follows, I explore this marriage of mothers and medications through the rhetoric surrounding Miltown (meprobamate), the ‘miracle ...

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