Berkeley Talks: The complicated role of media in motherhood

(Music: “No One Is Perfect” by HoliznaCC0)

Anne Brice (intro): This is Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at Berkeley. You can follow Berkeley Talks wherever you listen to your podcasts. We’re also on YouTube @BerkeleyNews. New episodes come out every other Friday. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

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Stephen Best: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Townsend Center. We’re really pleased to host Hannah Zeavin today. Hannah is the professor of the history of science and new media in the Department of History and the Berkeley Center for New Media. She’s also the founding editor of the journal Parapraxis, associate editor for Psychoanalysis and History, and editorial associate for the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. I was so impressed by all that editorial work. I’m only able to deal with one journal right now. She’s here to discuss her recent publication, Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the Twentieth Century. Hannah is joined by Ramsey McGlazer, who’s a professor in the Department of Comparative Literature.

I wanted to mention a few events that are happening in our Art of Writing program over the course of the next week. Tomorrow, Oct. 16, we’re hosting the Russian writer, Victor Erofeev, who will deliver a talk, “The New Barbarism: Putin, Trump and a Lost World.” That event will take place in this room at 5 p.m. And then next Monday, Oct. 20, the television writer, Sanjay Shah, who’s a Berkeley grad, graduated in 1999, Sanjay will discuss writing for the entertainment industry from breaking into the industry to running a writer’s room. This conversation is intended for students who are interested in working in Hollywood, so I ask that you please spread the word amongst your undergraduates.

Hannah and Ramsey, we’re very excited for your conversation, so you take the mic.

Ramsey McGlazer: Thanks, Stephen, and thanks everyone for being here. It’s really and truly a pleasure and privilege to be in conversation with you, Hannah, my colleague, friend, and role model. Here to share the good news about the book, Mother Media, but I also thought I’d be remiss not to plug Hannah’s first book called The Distance Cure, which is really amazing. If you haven’t already had the experience of reading The Distance Cure, run, don’t walk, to buy it.

I wondered if we could get started by just talking about how writing that first book prepared you to write the second? Whether you see Mother Media as a sequel to The Distance Cure, or you understand that relationship between the two books in some other way?

Hannah Zeavin: Thank you, Ramsey, Stephen, Makayla, and everyone at Townsend Center. Really, it is mutual, and that’s so nice of you. 

Sure. I mean The Distance Cure has a normal story, which is that it was my dissertation book. When you’re a graduate student and preparing to go in the job market, they ask you to furnish a proverbial second project that may or may not be real. 

But a long time ago, there was a project called Mother’s Little Helpers: Technology in the American Family. The book project then in many ways does not resemble this book, though it has all the same keywords, and the Library of Congress would probably categorize the book that never got made and this book the same way.

It was kind of meant to be a sequel, which is that The Distance Cure, which is a history of teletherapy, ends with this coda that I was asked to write because the book starts in 1890, and went through the ’80s, except we had found ourselves in the year 2020. And so suddenly, teletherapy went from this word that no one could pronounce … Literally everyone would say, Hannah, you’re the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Telepathy, which I also am because that is actually a big part of the book so it was accurate, to really knowing what teletherapy was because folks were doing it in their car outside their home to hide from their child and/or whatever.

That book ends by really trying to think with Fanon and Melanie Klein about why people experience not perfect mediated encounters with the analyst differently. If you can take yourself back to that traumatic time, it doesn’t have to be your analyst, but when the Zoom call would glitch or the call would drop. AT&T I believe, or maybe it’s Verizon, has an entire play with this in a commercial. Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? All of those interactions were coming up for folks at the very beginning of the pandemic, and I was interviewing them about their experience in teletherapy. See, I almost just did it myself. It’s totally an honest parapraxis, if you will.

The point there was that Melanie Klein wanted to think about how the external world and the internal world rhyme. People make it out that Melanie Klein is a less political psychoanalyst, and I actually think this is a great political thing she takes on. I was thinking about the media outside the literal Zoom call and the medium inside, the kinds of ways that different people can negotiate being dropped, a really loud psychoanalytic formulation, for someone like Winnicott on the phone. Alongside Fanon who shows us that actually a perfect medium that’s all signal and no noise, A, doesn’t exist, and B, may not be the medium you want.

I was playing with these two things, the medium inside, and I was like, “Right, where would a medium inside come from but the mother?” The first experience, the mother in big scare quotes, but as that loved object, and so that was the start of this book. This book has very little to say about the question that convened it, which is because I learned from experience. The book instead does something totally else and wants to take the observation that media have been called in all the time for child-rearing. The U.S. culture has a very intense feeling about that. That feeling, of course, might be related to the mother. The book wants to make the argument that maybe it’s totally that media and mother are confused aspects of daily life in this nation.

Ramsey McGlazer: You’ve begun to anticipate my next question, which was just going to invite you to lay out the argument and broad strokes of Mother Media. Maybe a place to start might be with just a quick definition of each of the following: mother as medium and then media as mother.

Hannah Zeavin: I feel like it’s my dissertation defense, except we don’t do that here at Berkeley. Yeah, sure, I would love to. If I abandon the idea, not totally, I mean it’s there, but that I wanted to figure out these early mediatic environments for children and how they got recalled later, something did really stick with me. Maybe it’s because I’m on the plane a lot, but this kind of moment where a mother or a parent hands their child an iPad to keep the child quiet because we live in a society hostile to children and their noise, and people turn around to judge that parent. It’s a micro gesture. It’s very quick. But I was really interested in how that came to be as a social conceit, alongside the fact that the last standing public health recommendation in this nation is not to give a child the screen until they’re two years of age because everything else has been gutted by this point. But those were the two things.

I think that I wanted to basically answer how that came to be by looking at two archives that are often basically held apart totally. One is my home literature of psychologists, psychiatrists, pediatricians who are trying to think about very newly after 1938, let’s say, what a mother is and how she should be to produce the best kind of child you can produce. And media technologists, researchers, eventually theorists, media gurus, people involved with Sesame Street, say, how they were thinking about media coming into the home, and doing the proxy labor for mothering. And not just with screen media, which I think is the most overt example, but in fact with the baby monitor starting in the 1930s and so on.

To define, which was the question?

Ramsey McGlazer: The invitation.

Hannah Zeavin: The invitation. The offering. Mother as medium is what I of do to bring together all of the different terms from all of those people, pediatricians, psychologists, psychoanalysts, many of whom totally disagree with each other about literally everything, and would’ve liked to get into fights on alleyways, except for the idea that the mother should be the total conveyance of care. This is represented as universal, immutable, ahistorical on purpose, even though it’s registering actually a whole host of changes in terms of labor, gender, race, and class in the United States, but becomes immutable 1938.

The behaviorists are like, mother, input, for good baby, output. Psychoanalysts are doing something totally otherwise, but they all agree. Media researchers reverse that footing, that instead of thinking of the maternal matrix, say, the synonym for media, they want to think about how media can convene a kind of maternal environment for the child. Do, again, that work of standing in, especially as labor changes. In fact, the media researchers know they’re registering a huge technosociological shift, political shift. The psychoanalysts, unfortunately I have to say, do not. It’s that interaction that the book studies between mother as medium and media as mother.

Ramsey McGlazer: That’s really interesting what you just said about the simultaneous divergence and convergence of the behaviorists and the psychoanalysts. Would you want to say more about that? How does that work? How come they end up figuring the mother in similar?

Hannah Zeavin: Sure. I mean, the other major backbone of the book that never can go away is history of the family. But in 1920, as an example, the kind of major child-rearing manual is by John Watson, behavioralist, who argues that you should not kiss your child ever because you will spoil that child. Oh, and definitely all children should have their own bedroom in a crib because that is how they will become an independent, good, strong American. Now, we can play it for laughs.

But the mother, not the nanny, not the grandparents, not the father — there are no present fathers. Father is a huge absence that I try and deal with by naming it as such and a few other things, but the mother should be that conveyance. From the ’20s and ’30s, all the way until ’45 when Dr. Spock, who is the now still bestselling, undergirds-so-much-of-parenting-literature guy, makes a “revolution” in parenting literature, that’s the thing. Across the entire period, we go from Freud who had actually not cared so much about the mother, very little. It’s very overblown by the New Yorker cartoon that says, “The analyst says that they’re always asking us, ‘Tell me about your mother.’” For Freud, not really. It was like, “Tell me about other stuff and dad, dreams, masturbation, and all this other stuff.”

But a whole new generation, a second generation of psychoanalysts, really did become obsessed with the mother. Again, they also hate each other and don’t agree with each other about anything. They include Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, and also names less known probably to this audience, but who are all really thinking about the maternal so much so that they get called the Maternalists. Firenze is part of that. It’s kind of 1.5 generation.

Even though they totally disagree, they really begin to think that the infant’s either mental picture or their input/output structures will rely exclusively on one person. All of Freud’s interest in the nanny and the governess disappears. All of the interest in cross-class interactions disappears. All of that really becomes narrowed down to there is a dyad. It is a mother-baby. And to quote Winnicott, “There is no such thing as a baby.” There’s just one unit, right? There’s not any separation. You can’t have them apart, and it shows up everywhere.

Ramsey McGlazer: Your book’s subtitle is Hot and Cool Parenting in the Twentieth Century. I wanted to invite you to just say more about hot and cool parenting. Who were hot mothers and who were cool mothers? It’s period-specific. You don’t mean the cool mom who wants to be friends with her child’s adolescent friends, right? You mean something else? Could you just share with us that history?

Hannah Zeavin: I did this to myself, but we can also blame Marshall McLuhan. But it is operant, right? In fact, the hot mother is also a sexual and over sexualized mother. The cold mother is actually a frigid mother. No, it’s not really the mom. I always think of … What is that movie? Mean Girls, the mom who really, really, really, really wants to be in when we think of that kind of mother, but all of these resonances are actually really important.

There is a pair of chapters at the middle of the book that I think are the center of the book. This comes from the third chapter, which is called “Hot and Cool Mothers,” which wants to understand two things. One from the ‘40s to the ‘60s, psychology writ large, so psychiatry especially, was attempting to do something that is really important in the 20th century, which is to separate out autism from schizophrenia, which were originally the same diagnosis. Autism was a diagnosis that presented early. A synonym would be early-onset schizophrenia and schizophrenia late.

At the beginning of the 20th century in the U.S., schizophrenia was understood to mostly affect white women, upper-class women. I’m going to just keep with pop references. In the not universally loved, but often enjoyed TV show Dickinson of Emily Dickinson’s life where it’s reimagined, her mother goes to the asylum because she hates the idea of having to take care of her husband one more second. There’s a kind of madness of the upper class, of the white woman who is just done with patriarchy. That is a kind of representation of the early 20th century schizophrenic patient, and it would come on in childhood. These are the same idea.

Starting in the ‘30s and ‘40s, this guy, Leo Kanner, who really helps to invent the new discipline of child psychiatry, he’s working at Johns Hopkins. He’s obsessed with historical dental records and syphilis, is like, “Oh, actually what I’m going to do is invent and separate out this brand new diagnosis.” As these things go, it gets called Kanner syndrome. We know it today as autism. He begins to understand that every single person he’s seeing in his clinic is the child of a college-educated mother, and the father is almost always one of his colleagues, so lots of children of psychiatrists.

They’re in Baltimore. The fact of Baltimore doesn’t register at all, right? Every single one of the patients is a Hopkins person and, i.e., white upper class, Jules Gill-Peterson, where it’s a really important history that looks at this clinic across the street. These are the trans children who are being brought there. There’s a very similar story.

All of a sudden, he’s like, “Good, we’ve got it. Autistic children are as if in an ice box that never defrosts.” He starts thinking of the mother as being, again, the medium of care, and thus the entire reason, along with something called genetics, i.e., the mother has passed on both her innate qualities, and it’s a kind of like begetting like. That’s the cold mother.

And the second part is the hot mother. Kanner, too, is responsible for thinking of an opposite kind of mother that’s going to go on to produce a schizophrenic child. That mother is the smother mother in its earliest incarnation, but goes on over across the 20th century to be attached not to whiteness, not to frigidity, not to coldness, but to Blackness. We see the way that this over and over again gets accumulated until we get to the Moynihan Report.

Suddenly, there are two mother types. They are racialized. They’re classed to the point where one of the people I write about in my book, Dorothy Groomer, is going to try and get a diagnosis as a Black woman. Encounters students clinic for her autistic son, and they say to her, “It’s impossible. He could not be autistic.” The reason is because that icebox baby transforms to the refrigerator mother, which we probably know as a sort of signifier that still circulates in the U.S., and refrigerator mothers are all white a priori. It becomes part of the diagnosis.

Then we have what’s called in my field diagnostic apartheid. Autism becomes completely white. As Jonathan Metzl has shown in his really landmark book, The Protest Psychosis, schizophrenia becomes attached politically to Blackness, and this kind of separation is complete first on the grounds of mothers.

I look at that, but I’m also looking at why refrigerator? Why temperature? Yes, we have answers about the Cold War and all of these metaphorics being so intense at that moment, but also registering the shifts in how people were living. The change between literally the icebox and the refrigerator is indexed here and it’s indexed in the home. I can say much more about that, but that’s one of these places.

Over and against that, that group of people is all borrowing language from, and vice versa, Marshall McLuhan, who’s also at the very same time trying to separate out cultures, media objects, and everything between this hot and cool binary that maps directly. By ’62, McLuhan is a household name, which things have changed. But at the same time, Kanner is also and they’re often being cited alongside each other, and so that chapter tries to tell that story.

Ramsey McGlazer: At the end of that chapter, you refer to this complex of theories as a punitive media theory of parenting. Amazing phrase, punitive media theory of parenting. And then in chapter four, which is really incredible, really highly recommend to everyone here, you move from this punitive media theory of parenting into the punitive space of the U.S. prison system. I’m a literary critic so I’m going to take the liberty of quoting you for a second where you say what you do in that chapter is to show how the following is born out, “That mother might not be the right medium of care became a question raised in the mind sciences and then answered in the carceral system.” I’ll read that one more time, “That mother might not be the right medium of care became a question raised in the mind sciences and then answered in the carceral system.” Could you walk us through as much of that chapter as you’d like to?

Hannah Zeavin: Sure. It’s, again, like in the preceding chapter, where it’s telling three stories at once. This is a weird thing about the book. So many of the actors on the psych side of things are Viennese emigres. Just not anywhere in Austria, they’re Viennese emigres. They were all working with Freud or adjacent to him. René Spitz, who I think is lesser known but was absolutely part of the second generation of psychoanalysts in Vienna, has to emigrate, as they all minus one do in the ‘30s. First goes to Paris, and then to New York City, where also a lot of this book takes place.

This is the answer to why the ‘30s? Why does this change happen in the ‘30s? Spitz is able to work for the first time with all of these children who’ve been separated from their mothers, as Anna Freud is doing in London, because you can’t, although it has happened, of course, you can’t in the 20th century, exactly on purpose, separate children for their mothers for psychiatric research. You have to find the condition where that is already happening. The orphanage is one. The bomb shelter is another. The U.S. prison is another site where these family separations are happening all the time. That is a subtending, very uncomfortable part of the book is that all these different kinds and qualities of family separation are running through it because they can be used over and against control homes, which are always middle-class white families, to say this is where the pathology is.

Spitz is doing this work that’s emphatically on the side of mothers. He’s like, “Children should be with their mothers.” The punitive idea from chapter three is that every one of these mothers, whether you’re a hot mother, you’re a cool mother, you’re a terrible mother, and you’ve created mass pathology, not just in your individual child but literally masse, Spitz is like, “Children need to be with their mothers all the time.” He’s working in the orphanage on reunification. He’s working in the U.S. prison on unification with mothers and children at the same time as he’s advancing his theories about why mothers must be the medium of care for their kids.

And at the same time all of that research is happening — by the way, that research is still ongoing in this prison — there’s all of these different attempts to readvance forms of family separation through the carceral. It became a question for me, it seemed like just sometimes historians were like, “I just got to figure it out which prison Spitz was working in,” because it’s never been described in the literature. The experiment is famous in the history of psychiatry, but where? No.

It turns out it was easy in a way to figure out because there’s only one prison where mothers and babies were allowed to be together in the United States in the 1940s, and it was called Westfield State Farm. It’s now known as Bedford Hills Prison in upstate New York. It’s now most famous for two reasons. One is like San Quentin here, it’s a go-home prison. That’s what that kind of term of art is, so there’s a lot of programming. At San Quentin, for 20-plus years, there’s been this work done by many people at this university, and not only. So it is, too, at Bedford Hills, which is a women’s prison. But also because for a hundred years, they’ve had this mother-infant prison program that has also funded all this psych research, and some of the earliest drug research is happening on these mothers, and on and on. They’re just this captive population who are constantly being turned into actuarial data, so that’s one of the stories that the book tries to tell.

And the other is how then that research that insists that children need the same adult to care for them, their mother, over and over again gets flexibly turned back on that same population. It tries to tell the story of how attachment research in the U.S. prison both is responsible or is used, is mobilized to create many, many more mother-infant prison programs, which it did do. But also how that same research is used to further family separation in the United States, especially as it’s met the digital.

I can tell, say, much more about the current contemporary political stakes of that, but looking at how Spitz’s, again, profoundly, emphatically pro-maternal research has also been used against the very same women he sought to reunite with children over the course of another 80 years. I think that’s what I mean by that and that chapter.

Ramsey McGlazer: When the chapter begins, you’re describing these algorithmic sentencing systems that are truly dystopian in Wisconsin. Would you want to return to that moment?

Hannah Zeavin: Recently, maybe it was like seven months ago or something but time is so weird now, there was a lot of attention in the popular press to this runoff in Wisconsin around a judicial seat. People are like, “Why Wisconsin? Why is it getting so much attention?” Yes, Elon Musk was involved, but it’s because Wisconsin, on the question of sentencing via algorithms and a few other things, is basically the highest court in the United States because the Supreme Court has refused to hear those cases, and they have gone through appeal at the Supreme Court of Wisconsin. It becomes a strange court to watch politically, not just because they’re people living in Wisconsin and they are our comrades known and unknown to us, but because actually it’s law of the land.

Wisconsin heard a case five years ago that was about the question of predictive sentencing, and in turn, making a new amendment to a law that said that if a mother or a father were to be separated from their child for more than six months and we could predict it would happen again, they would lose their custody rights forever. It passed, and it passed while I was working on the Spitz. That’s how it became the beginning because when you look through the kinds of testimony, et cetera, they’re mobilizing attachment research to say that children need stable figures of attachment. If there’s any idea that this person would not be stable, at the same time as the government and the system has ensured that this will happen via all these other attendant algorithms, then we will also be terminating parental rights. All of that, that is law in Wisconsin. Very similar thing was happening in Indiana two years later when I was living there and so on. This is a change.

And so I wanted to register both how that idea came to be around stability and securitizing infants away from their parents, and how it was being mobilized in our present. There are a few moments that the book does that. It really doesn’t go past 1980, except for when it does, to say that like the hot cold mother and the trad wife now or the helicopter mother now or all of these things, we do have echoes into our present, but this one is a straight continuity. All of these legal cases are the precedent for our contemporary moment.

Ramsey McGlazer: A question that invites that kind of thinking across the 20th century and the present moment. Another arresting sentence of yours that I’d like to read twice, if the audience will indulge me, comes from the introduction. Of the mother, so you’re speaking about the mother or the figure you sometimes just call mother which I really like, you say, “She is judged on the ratio of her signal of care to the noise of herself.” I’d like to read that one more time. It’s really well done. “She is judged on the ratio of her signal of care to the noise of herself.” What happens to this noise in the 20th century and as we enter the 21st? Do you think we’re still living in the world that mid-20th-century media made, or have new media altered the experience of mothering and pressures brought to bear on it? Big questions for you.

Hannah Zeavin: I know. This is the best dissertation defense. I recently wrote an essay for, of all places, The Financial Times — weirdly, they’re all right. There are fewer and fewer places you can write for on the distracted mother, which actually is very much working across with the paradigm from chapter four as we’ve just described it. As Dorothy Roberts calls it family policing in the United States, what constitutes the distracted mother? But includes also thinking very much about some sociological facts, right?

One which always gets people is that mothers, again, and all of the question of mother in the U.S. context has all been deeply thought through and problematized in the introduction as well, spend more time today with their children doing more “maternal labor” than that icon of the 1950s, the housewife, which Angela Davis will tell us already is a partial reality and Stephanie Koontz will say was the way we never were. Nonetheless, at the real numbers, it’s just exploded.

In essence, in a way, yes, except there’s more signal and there’s also more noise which would keep the ratio, which is I think the word I used, the same maybe, right? Because also at the same time, and these are these places where we really registered the change, many of the mothers in this book are also in moments like joining the labor force for the first time. In chapter six, I register women who are recording stenography loops on eight track to play while they take phone calls to sound like they’re in an office as an early instance of telework. This is a lot of what’s happening. Then they’re trying to hide their children by using these sounds to cover over so that they can both labor and mother at once. Or to think about Arlie Hochschild, professor emerita here, telling us about the second shift, or then further feminist correction has been the third shift, where yes, those compounding kinds and qualities of labor have only increased, and we can put that against real wages and inflation. In a way, that’s part of it.

But the other way to put it would be a woman I interviewed for that essay who’s talking in a very different register. She’s not an academic, and I’m just asking her about her experience of mothering. She says, “The problem is now that we’re just finally able to have something of ourselves and know who we want to be, there’s this other distraction, the problem, the kid.” I think I mean that sentence both ways, right? There’s so much pressure at the economic, labor, et cetera, psychological surveillance of mothers, other parents, and other caregivers because the book starts also with waged caregivers, not with mothers who are triply surveyed. At the same time, there’s the psychological and emotional resonance, which is Winnicott tells me there’s no such thing as a mother. I’m always supposed to be mother-baby. What about just me? I think that the sentence is actually trying to capture multiple senses of that pain.

Ramsey McGlazer: We’ll open the conversation up to audience questions in just a minute. But first, as in the moment in the podcast where the guest is invited to tout current projects and upcoming achievements, for those especially in the room who know you as the author of The Distance Cure and the founding editor of Parapraxis, I’m wondering if you might want to talk about what you’re working on now, how it comes out of this project or maybe doesn’t follow directly from this project?

Hannah Zeavin: Sure, my pleasure. That’s what I was doing this morning. I’m like, yes, how to talk about Wilhelm Reich’s children? I’m working on a book called All Freud’s Children: A Story of Inheritance.

Maybe I’ll do something else afterwards. Let’s see. But in some ways, follows very much from the first and the second book, and is a kind of synthetic gesture. In other ways, not. It’s being written for Penguin Press, so it will also read very differently. But is also the most demanding research I’ve had to do to date because it’s trying to take very seriously this just omission in the history of science, which is that in the 1980s, we went through the Freud Wars. Fred Cruz, who’s also emeritus and recently passed, was a major instigator in the English department of those wars. Freud lost, Cruz won.

What Cruz had done is his major tool of winning that war was to use Freud’s biography to totally discredit him. Historians of science after the ‘80s have turned deeply away from biography or family life or intimate questions in order to answer their questions about the history of psychoanalysis better. But it’s produced a pretty wild omission, I think, which is that we just haven’t looked at how the first and second generation of analysts all analyzed their children, who then are the literal subject matter of theories we are told are supposedly universal. That criticism, that psychoanalysis is only about the fin-desiécle, bourgeois family in Vienna, it’s all white, it’s all Jewish, and it’s all upper middle class is actually even more true. It is actually about 10 kids.

But then that theory begins to really travel and change, and the book also really wants to take that seriously. In fact, it’s not just Freud who analyzed at least one, but maybe actually two of his children. It’s not just Melanie Klein who didn’t analyze all three of her children. It’s the big corrective I try and issue. Wilhelm Reich’s children, but it also looks at psychoanalysis as a revolutionary family. It looks at the family structure made by Francois Tosquelles, Catalan psychoanalyst with Frantz Fanon, with Félix Guattari and Jean Oury, who are all moving around both Spain, France, Algeria, and Tunisia, and to try and trace out how theories of the literal families actually were, as an intellectual history, kind of the same thing. Yes, there’s some really good high gossip, but that’s just coming along the way.

Ramsey McGlazer: Are you doing more interviews for that?

Hannah Zeavin: Yeah, I was just talking about that this morning because I’m now working with material recorded with living children. I’ve interviewed Anna Freud’s step-grandchildren who are still living. Melanie Klein’s grandchildren are still living. Wilhelm Reich’s children were alive. One is still alive, one has died since I began the book and interviewed her. I’ve spent time in Saint-Alban with Marie Rose Tosquelles, who is now in her late ‘80s and a really good dancer, with Fanon’s work in Blida, and have been to Algeria and then the work there. Yeah, all of these, actually, is a very living history. Many of my subjects are in their ‘60s or ‘50s, but there are also people who are inaccessible, which has made things both more difficult but also easier because finally the Freud Archive is completely open. For those of you who know, that took about 50, 60 years. Yeah.

Ramsey McGlazer: That’s amazing. Well, thank you so much. As you know, I had a question related to my 18-month-old nephew, but I’ll save that.

Hannah Zeavin: Ramsey was going to make me wild analyze him right …

Ramsey McGlazer: That’s true.

Hannah Zeavin: … and that was really exciting to me.

Ramsey McGlazer: We’ll save it though, because I’m sure there are many questions. Maybe we should take two at a time starting here. I think there’s a mic. Thank you so much.

Audience 02: Thanks. I’m thinking of the way that you’re framing motherhood also in terms of whiteness in the cases that you’re presenting, but also thinking about Black feminist thought and the book on revolutionary mothering that Alexis Pauline Gumbs … like other forms of mothering. It’s also in my mind, the way, for example, that mothering is being weaponized with anchor babies and immigrant mothers as this sort of invading force.

I’m thinking also not just the history of it, but the future of it and how white motherhood is put on a pedestal, but then all other kinds of motherhood that are racialized are often criminalized and weaponized, especially with this xenophobic rhetoric. I’m wondering what do you see this line as it’s going forward in the times that we’re living with the research that you’ve been doing and the dangers of mothering as a weapon?

Hannah Zeavin: Yeah, thank you so much for this question. I’m really hesitant always to take the past and try and just move towards predicting the future, but I think about the future and I think about our present all the time.

One place that I want to look at very much is how the mind sciences have absolutely stayed part and parcel with those questions. In terms of enforcing separation at the border, and many borders, both the U.S. border, borders in Palestine, on and on, that has not changed. That is a continuity. The very same work that’s being done in Bedford Hills — definitely not majority on white women; the super majority is not white in that prison — has absolutely continued to circulate through these kinds of dragnet algorithmic operations that are increasing sentences. All of that has just remained operant.

I think to the same side, as you’re saying, as a new form of white maternity is being put on a pedestal, as there’s been mass rollback on feminist gains from the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, I lived for a year in a state where abortion was illegal not that long ago, all of it is part and parcel of the same picture. The mind sciences, the human sciences have played their role, and it hasn’t stopped. It just hasn’t stopped.

It will be 30 years before we have the archive access, but there are some really intense presentist indicators. Those psychologists will go and talk about their work, cooperating with ICE. They’ll go and talk about their work with the IDF, and so that’s something I do track in the present. My fear is that it’s getting more dragnet, more punishable.

At the same time the other thing is that, as I said, family separation subtends the entire book. From natal alienation onwards, it’s a major theme. In that way, it’s also a continuity. I really also want to caution against the idea that … Not that this is at all coming from you, but I’ve been asked a version of the question that would be like, “But it was really good under Biden,” or something. I’m like, “No.” In fact, it’s been really, really very much a piece of itself and part of American family ideology for 400 years. That is something that’s very stressed in the book, how the human sciences hooks into that ongoing political contest, both when it’s Renee Spitz and a better figure, when it’s Leo Kanner, and when it sets up the Moynihan report. It’s really there. Psychologists have never really practiced neutrality even as they’re the same analysts who might say that they do. Yeah.

Audience 02: Thank you.

Ramsey McGlazer: More questions? Yeah, we have one up front. Thank you.

Audience 02: Thank you. Yeah, this is super interesting. I’m wondering if you can say a little bit more about the shift from Freud to his successors in terms of this focus on the mother-child dyad? To what extent was that descriptive of what was happening in social practices? There was less of a reliance on a nanny or somebody else was taking care of the children. Or to what extent was it instructive? Was it really trying to urge mothers to spend more time with their children?

Hannah Zeavin: Thank you. Wonderful question. This is both. It was overdetermined, the really fun answer you can always give when you work on the history of psychoanalysis, but is also true. It’s a few things. In the interwar period in the U.S., as well as in the UK where these people are largely working by that point, they’re already leaving Austria a little bit. They’ve all fled Berlin.

After 1933, there were only a few communist psychoanalysts basically remained in Berlin as long as they could, so it’s really already emigrated. There’s this kind of massive social change. The way I explain it to my students is I’m like, “Remember Downton Abbey and there’s all this worry from the very rich about people leaving the service because people are like, ‘Absolutely fuck this’?” Yes, that is occurring. There’s, on the one hand, a real change in terms of labor. But at the same time, there’s a huge panic that’s introduced over and over and over again from reconstruction onwards about purity in the family.

This would also hook up to the question of the present, what makes a family not pure, and thus gives us the idea of the nuclear family, something that doesn’t exist until the 1930s as an idea is immense. And so yes, there’s all of this pressure to keep the family “pure,” whether it’s from — and this is part of the mother as medium history — the thoughts of others, the expressions of others, what a child will learn from these people or those people, in our present, it’s the iPad as represented by my iPhone, vaccines, what kind of school, don’t give the 18-month-old nephew the screen because, again, this kind of dispurity mediation as part of that.

When you read them, Winnicott, for instance, is highly prescriptive, but he’s also registering this social change that has taken place. He just doesn’t name it as such, right? He’s never like, “There has been a social change that has taken place. What I’m talking about is specific.” He’s like, “This is how it’s always been.”

The family is weirdly one of these places where the idea of immutable universal just seems to work on people. I was just revisiting this with a student of mine yesterday. When I teach history of the family, the first thing I make them do is read the most boring historiographic debate from the 1980s and ’90s about demography and registering social change. I warn them that it’s going to be really a slog, but it helps them see immediately, even in the ’80s and ’90s, how freaked out historians were to admit that it hadn’t always been a mother of father and 2.2, an impossible number, children living behind a white picket fence. Winnicott and the other analysts are really bad at accepting that.

My third book is going to try and help explain why that is, I hope, why psychoanalysis is interested in the immutable universal aspects of its theory, even as it’s not so. Winnicott had no children, so that’s not why. But yes, he has worked lots with children.

Ramsey McGlazer: We have time for one or maybe two more questions, so let’s take both of these back-to-back.

Audience 01: Hi, Hannah. Huge fan of your work. I’m sorry if this is a boring question, but I just would love to hear you tell us a little bit about the methodology of the book. You write as a materialist, as a psychoanalyst through social theory, and you’re able to draw together an astonishing range of archival and contemporary work. If you could just say a little bit about how you go about your research, I’d love to hear.

Ramsey McGlazer: Thank you so much. And then could we also take the question over here, please?

Audience 02: I really liked what you said about the me, where is the me in the attachment? I think attachment is often viewed mostly from the child lens where their life is determined by the attachment type they have to their mother. But I think I’ve also recently been seeing mothers who feel like they’re attached to the child in that reverse direction. They feel a lot of meaning from their kids. I work in a housing office, and I’ve been noticing this phenomenon where mothers are calling our office because they just can’t get ahold of their kids. Kids are ignoring phone calls, text messages from the mother. I think that’s a big worry for me in our conception of what the family looks like here in 2025. I’m just wondering if you can comment on this phenomenon, what you think is happening?

Hannah Zeavin: Yeah, so much. Really amazing opposite kinds of questions, and they’re both wonderful. Thank you. To Charmaine’s question, how do I do my research? I think, at this point, there’s a deep texture and familiarity with the PSY side of things. Between the distance here and the beginning to really write this book in earnest, I did have to go acquire an entire field, which was history of the family, which played zero role in my Ph.D. training and is a huge field, huge.

The question also of U.S. maternity is the most overridden part of that field, in part because to go back to, oh, left now, but there are very particular kinds of maternity that have at highly sentimental literatures that have been made on the American family, the American mother. Again, dad is absent everywhere. And so it was very much about trying to bring together a sociopolitical, and therefore, economic understanding of what is happening in the picture with labor. What’s happening in the picture with the PSY sciences? How are those things interacting for the first half of the book?

Then as psychology proper drops away, and now it’s media research time, almost all of those people were first psychologists or sociologists. Then it’s to pick up that archive and see how they shake hands. It just involved a lot of pairing this is happening here. What is it registering? What is Winnicott talking about when he says it’s now only a mother and a baby? And being like, oh, lo and behold, it turns out there’s this massive change in family life, and also in the labor market. Winnicott gives us none of that, for instance, just to keep with that example, and doing that again and again and again.

Or another example, why do we get a baby monitor in the 1930s? I pose this kind of question. I’m trying to look in these two literatures or three literatures to begin to assess it out. Yeah, I think that is how I formulate this book, which is again, very different from the book I’m currently writing so it’s hard to access. Thank you.

And then, oof, this question.

Audience 02: Sorry.

Hannah Zeavin: No. I mean, it’s an amazing question because one thing that’s very difficult is that I can join with everyone in that question. I can join with you, who’s fielding these calls, being like, “Oh my God. I can join with the child who’s like, “I’m 20 and just stop air tagging me.” And I can also join with the mother function, the parent function, who has been told they’re nothing but that function for 18 years, and it’s just impossible to turn off.

That person who’s also been filled with, and a lot of these stories are in the book, all of these panics about what happens if you don’t survey. I write at the beginning of the book that it is, I think, one of the great pains of our nation that the most famous child separation from a parent is the Lindbergh baby kidnapping when it happens every second that we’re sitting here. Then for a hundred years, parents being like, “Well, if I look away, the worst thing ever will happen.” Many different forces have stoked that, even as it’s completely separated from what I might call a reality principle. Yeah, if you can’t get a hold of your kid, that’s going to freak you out if you’ve been told these things.

But one thing I want to bring is from someone else, which is that recently I was speaking with a bunch of psychoanalysts, and maybe this would be an almost wild analysis place to end for Ramsey, too, and the analyst was saying to me, “None of the children I work with, who are teenagers,” a little younger than in the housing office here, “none of them want to go hang out in person.”

And as I sat with them, I wanted to figure out why that was. It turned out they know that if they go hang out in person, they’re being surveyed. But if they hang out at a distance, each in their own bedroom and online, they can’t be. They can outsmart their parents. In fact, they don’t want to go to the third place that we have this mass social panic about. They just want to feel a feeling of liberation.

What makes me most sad about that story is, of course, that everyone kind of loses, it sounds horrible, and I’m very sorry, but I think that’s a bit what might be happening in that scene.

Audience 02: Yeah, I think Sherry Turkle says in one of her books that when the parents are home with the kids, no observation. But then when they go out, it’s helicopter time, which is this weird duality now.

Hannah Zeavin: Yeah, absolutely.

Ramsey McGlazer: There’s a beautiful discussion of the figure of the helicopter in this book also. Thank you so much, Hannah. Please join me in thanking Hannah Zeavin.

(Music: “No One Is Perfect” by HoliznaCC0)

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