Preserving the (White) Nuclear Family: Grete Bibring’s Studies on the Psychology of Pregnancy and Its Effects on the Mother–Child Relationship

Focusing on the postwar period, this paper explores how investigations into the psychological processes of pregnancy and its relationship to the psychosomatic development of infants and children relied on and reinscribed normative conceptions of the heterosexual, white, upper- and middle- class nuclear family. To do so, this paper examines the work of Grete Lehner Bibring, an Austrian-American psychoanalyst and the first female full professor at Harvard Medical. Beginning in the 1950s, Bibring initiated a series of studies on the psychological aspects of pregnancy at the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston in order to understand how the poor psychological health of the mother contributed to the multitude of serious developmental and psychosomatic problems of infancy and early childhood. As a result, her work fit squarely within larger developments in psychology that linked family relations and a child’s mental health with the social stability and progress of the nation. While previous investigations argued that pregnancy simply unveiled underlying mental health pathology, Bibring positioned pregnancy itself as a crisis that affected all expectant mothers, no matter their state of psychic health. As a result, Bibring advocated for the integration of psychological care as part of prenatal programs in order to enable the development of a healthier mother-child relationship and the reduction of development and psychosomatic disorders among children. While Bibring’s conclusions aimed to transform the nature of care for all expectant mothers, I argue that her conceptualization of what constituted normal pregnancy, family, psyche, and mother-child dynamics were inherently centered on white middle-class subjectivities. This had the effect of rendering non-white families and women either invisible, or inherently problematic. Consequently, the potential developmental or psychosomatic disorders that affected these children were naturalized and implicitly understood as compromising the nation’s prosperity.