Cold War Emotions: Mother Love and Human Nature in Postwar America

Following WWII, there was an explosion of research on human emotions and their biological underpinnings, instincts. Through scholarly and popular writings, psychoanalysts, ethologists, and psychologists studying child development succeeded in bringing instincts back into scientific and social debates. In my paper I will explore their influential work on emotions and instincts within the social and cultural context of the Cold War by focusing on scientific views about mother love. I argue that the main factor leading scientists to explore the impact of mother love on an individual's psyche was the rising concern about emotions after WWII. In search of an explanation for human destructiveness, the scientific and popular imaginations turned to the non-rational causes of human behavior, the emotions. Assuring a peaceful world order required controlling human emotions, and to do this one first needed to understand them. In seeking out the source of an individual's emotional nature, scientists soon found the mother. The reasoning went like this: personality is a direct result of the individual's emotions; emotions are created in childhood; children are raised by their mothers. The mother thus became the foundation of a healthy personality. I show that the concern about the mother-child relation epitomized widespread postwar anxieties about the formation of a stable self and emotionally mature individual amidst the disintegrating forces of the modern world. Unless properly held in check, these authors noted, the forces of modern society could destroy humanity. In this view, the civilizing, modernizing, artificial forces of the mechanical world were destroying the natural needs of men, women, and children. In this context, reasserting the power of mother love was a way of reasserting the human over the machine, and the natural over the artificial traps of modern civilization.