Fathers of Emotionally Dysfunctional Adults

The lifelong commitment by a parent to a child who is unable to attain the generally desired autonomy because of developmental defects and/or organic impairment has been a conspicuously neglected area in the mental health field. Parents have been encouraged to place such children in institutions and have seldom been given adequate support in their parenting efforts. Families who have insisted on raising these children at home have had minimal support in carrying out this parental prerogative. Now the same children who have been raised in institutions come back into the community as adults, unequipped to deal with the stresses of daily living, often without a family support structure, and with inadequate community resources. If there is a family support system, it is more frequently the mother who is given and/or takes responsibility for the dependent adult; the father often takes refuge in his work, leaving this difficult situation to the mother. It has been pointed out by sociologists, psychologists, and some psychiatrists that this situation has given rise to “mother-blaming” in the past. The mental health profession has become part of the problem instead of the solution, because of the emphasis on resolution of dependency rather than acceptance of it.

It has only been recently recognized that terminating dependency of the chronically psychotic individual is uniformly disastrous.1 In the 1950s and 1960s, psychoanalytic theories were vigorously applied, with their inevitable role stereotyping. Schizophrenia was looked upon as an oral fixation, an unresolved mother-infant dependency.2 There was little analysis of father's role and he was able to leave himself out of the picture—tacitly encouraged to do so by the mental health profession—instead of being helped to be actively engaged in the relationship with his disturbed child. Either the patient was “treatable” and parents would be peripherally involved, if at all, or the patient was “unbeatable” and placed in an in