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Except for a Bureau of Public Assistance student placement almost 20 years ago, I have never worked with the minority-group urban poor. So, like so many of us, I speak from no experience with families such as those described by Dr. Perman.
What constitutes parental rejection in families where there are ten or twelve children? (forgetting their names?); where food, clothes, and fathers are scarce; where mothers work; where there are no baby sitters (except sometimes grandma, who is worn out, or older siblings out of school); where children are unaccountably, hopelessly surrendered to the jungle when they're two, and can already toddle down the tenement stairs? Perhaps a child is only owned and protected during pregnancy? And what does pregnancy mean when, like loaves and fishes, it just is? (Vacation from work, from too-casual sex, a little extra attention from the local clinic, extra food, laundry starch, candy bars?)
Where is a control group of women who have had fewer pregnancies, or a sample of girls who chose not to be pregnant all the time?
Dr. Perman notes that some of these mothers who suffer from postpartum psychosis turn violently against their infants. This is a not-uncommon component of this psychosis, in any social group. Also, the battered-baby syndrome occurs in all groups. The psychoanalytic allusions and fragments in Perman's paper seem tenuously to relate to his point that the early sex and pregnancy of the ghetto are always the result of emotional disturbance, and always connected with maternal rejection. (Is that his point?) “These affairs offer excitement and pleasure, but most important they gratify the enormous unconscious need for perceptual and physical contact.” Well—we all have this “need” and that's partly what sex is about at any age. Early sex and pregnancy are typical of some cultures,
without special psychopathology; and late sex and pregnancy have caused plenty of trouble for us educated ones. But it may be that early sex is less of a