1422 



HORMONAL REGULATION OF BEHAVIOR 



maternal instinct seemed to bridge. One of 

 the chief difficulties in studying humans 

 has been the practical one of observing in- 

 dividuals systematically and carefully over 

 a long period of years. Moreover, many 

 psychoanalytic and psychiatric studies have 

 dealt with maternal attitudes rather than 

 with mothering behavior in its broadest 

 sense. Brody (1956) made a scholarly and 

 comprehensive review of the literature per- 

 taining to maternal behavior as of that 

 date, dividing her survey into three main 

 categories: (1) experimental studies in sub- 

 human species, (2) anthropologic reports, 

 particularly as they pertain to the feeding 

 and handling of young children, and (3) 

 clinical data culled from the literature of 

 pediatrics, clinical psychology, psychiatry, 

 and psychoanalysis. She noted with con- 

 siderable relevance that the bulk of the ma- 

 terial in the literature on human maternal 

 behavior pointed to the interest of investi- 

 gators in finding etiologic factors for the 

 character disturbances and other psycho- 

 pathologies,^^ and that there was a dearth of 

 systematic investigation of the mothers 

 themselves. 



In an effort to devise a systematic method 

 for the investigation of some significant 

 aspects of maternal behavior, Brody made 

 a content analysis of the behavioral records 

 of 32 mothers whose behavior with their in- 

 fants was observed for an approximately 

 4-hour period under standard conditions. 

 Her research was also intended to test the 

 hypothesis, namely, that the mother-infant 

 interaction during feeding is the salient in- 

 dex of maternal behavior, "serving better 

 than any other activity as a model of a 

 mother's over-all behavior toward a given 

 infant." Making use of explicitly defined 

 quantitative methods, the observational rec- 



" The empiric data bearing on those theories 

 alleging that certain features of parental care of 

 infants determine adult personality was reviewed, 

 as of 1949, by Orlansky (1949). "Orlansky found 

 much to doubt and criticize in the widely popular 

 psychoanalytic opinions and emphasized instead 

 the importance of constitutional and cultural fac- 

 tors as well as post-infantile experience in person- 

 ality formation. In recent years, however, so much 

 has been published concerning the inter-related- 

 ness of parental and child behavior that cognizance 

 must be taken of this variable in personality de- 

 velopment. The question is no longer whether but 

 how such influences act to structure personality. 



ords were subjected to systematic classifica- 

 tion and comparison. The 32 maternal rec- 

 ords lent themselves to classification into 

 four groups, each group having a statisti- 

 cally distinctive pattern of general maternal 

 behavior. From this general typology four 

 types of maternal feeding behavior were de- 

 scribed. Although the hypothesis regarding 

 feeding as an index of general maternal be- 

 havior was not proven for mothers of in- 

 fants as young as 4 weeks of age, it was 

 convincingly proven for mothers of older 

 infants. Brody's work demonstrates the 

 feasibility of quantitative examination and 

 evaluation of parental behavior. 



Sears, Maccoby, and Levin's (1957) study 

 of the child rearing practices of 379 Ameri- 

 can mothers is another important recent 

 contribution toward filling the hiatus in our 

 knowledge of parental behavior in humans. 

 The relevance of such studies to a better 

 understanding of psychosexual development 

 was referred to in an earlier section. 



Present day psychiatric thinking about 

 ]iarental behavior has been importantly 

 structured by psychoanalytic theory. Freud 

 regarded motherhood as the culmination of 

 psychosexual development, the course of 

 which he considered to be impelled by in- 

 stinctual drives. Subsequent workers op- 

 erating in the psychoanalytic frame of ref- 

 erence using, a 'priori, a concept of a 

 maternal instinctual drive have further de- 

 veloped these ideas {e.g., Bonaparte, 1953; 

 Deutsch, 1945). 



On the other hand, there have been work- 

 ers who have sought to prove that the psy- 

 chologic manifestations of the maternal 

 state are to be understood only in terms of 

 the influence of social institutions and ideol- 

 ogies. Briffault (1931), representing an ex- 

 treme in this point of view, maintained that 

 all social feelings are derived from the 

 mother-child relationship and considered 

 the complexity of human social organiza- 

 tion to be a direct correlate of the prolonged 

 period of dependency of the human infant 

 on his mother. 



Until recently, the purely biologic factors 

 in human maternal behavior have been 

 subjected to very little direct scrutiny. 

 Benedek (1949) postulated that the mother- 

 child symbiosis begins at conception and 

 continues through and beyond parturition 



