The Blame Game: Parenting Edition

After watching a few episodes of Mad Men, it’s clear that Betty Draper isn’t going to win “Mother of the Year” anytime soon. Betty is never seen taking her kids to the park or over to a friend’s house; instead, the only activities she suggests are to “go to bed”, “go watch TV”, “go upstairs”, or even to “go bang your head against the wall”.  The defining of Betty’s parenting is a scene I’m sure none of us will forget: Sally wearing the dry cleaning bag. Clearly not worried that Sally might suffocate, Betty simply says, “If the clothes from that dry cleaning bag are on the floor of my closet, you’re going to be a very sorry young lady.” While the audience is staring at the television screen with its jaw on the floor, Betty continues to smoke a cigarette and gossip with her friend Francine leaving Sally to play with the plastic bag. 

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Betty’s parenting techniques have not gone unnoticed. New York magazine took note of Betty’s questionable parenting skills, putting together a compilation of Betty Draper’s best parenting moments. Watch the video below and be thankful for your mother’s superior parenting:

This video forces us to question Betty’s child rearing: why is she so harsh when it comes to parenting? Recently, Dr. Stephanie Newman released a book entitled Mad Men on the Couch: Analyzing the Minds of The Men And Women of The Hit TV Show, which gives the audience insight on why Betty is so cold when it comes to being a mother. From the New York magazine video, it’s clear that Betty’s missing some sort of an emotional component when it comes to parenting; when Sally or Bobby do something wrong Betty doesn’t ask why, but merely seeks an apology. Newman points out that many mothers fail in the empathy department. In Newman’s book, she mentions a study done by psychoanalyst Harry Harlow about rhesus monkeys, which have tendencies similar to humans, to examine the workings of maternal love. Harlow ultimately concluded that nurturing a child is crucial in the first months of the infant’s life; if the child is neglected emotionally, then he will have problems connecting with others. As a result, babies who were neglected by their parents exhibit the same behavior once they become parents. 

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When looking back at season one, it seems that Betty had a similar upbringing to her own kids. Betty shares with friends that she used to be overweight as a child and how difficult that is for a child to go through but Betty constantly remarks about how Sally looks fat in pictures. When in bed with Don, Betty shares how her mother’s appearance was very important and Betty adopted similar habits, always trying to fit into the mold of the ideal housewife.

What Newman is telling us is that it’s not Betty’s fault that she isn’t a great mother; it’s her parent’s. So the next time you see Bobby reprimanded for touching the record player or hear an insolent comment about Sally’s weight, think about how Betty was treated as a kid. Newman implies that parenting is a skill that’s partly intuitive but mostly a skill indirectly taught by one’s parents. So this serves as a message to everyone who has ever considered having kids: learn from your parent’s mistakes and adjust. I’m sure you’ll be thankful in the years to come.

Sources:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/apologies-freud/201203/why-is-mad-mens-betty-draper-frances-such-cold-mother 

http://video.vulture.com/video/A-Montage-of-Betty-Drapers-Pa-2

Newman, Stephanie. Mad Men on the Couch: Analyzing the Minds of the Men and Women of the Hit TV Show. New York: Thomas Dunne, 2012. Print.

 

Psychiatry in the 60’s: the New Candy Pink Stove? Or the Start of Something Bigger?

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The great Roger Sterling once said, “Psychiatry is just this year's candy pink stove.”

But how factual was the infamous Mad Man’s comment? Was psychiatry really just a housewife in the 1960’s vied for? Or was it the beginning of a serious discipline that millions of people would use to their advantage in years to follow? The history of psychiatry is an extremely rocky one that almost agrees with Roger’s comment.

In the 1960’s psychiatry was brutally attacked. According to Gerald Grob, in his article The attack of psychiatriclegitimacy in the 1960s: Rhetoric and reality, everyone was a critic of the new science. Both sides of the political spectrum actually agreed that it had no legitimate scientific or medical benefit for patients. One of the biggest and most well known sharpshooter was Thomas S. Szasz. He believed there was no such thing as a mental illness; this to which today we all know is extremely inaccurate. People who tried to explain mental disorders were typically liberals. This is due to the decline after World War 2 in Anti-Semitism, there was a rise in Jewish people pursuing careers in psychiatry.

Although psychiatry was on the rise, it was also under attack. Many books were published in the 1960’s that had an immediate negative effect on the discipline. The book Asylums, written by Erving Goffman, was written in 1961. It looked at institutions and presented the ability to generalize in a unique way. An example Goffman provides is slightly paradoxical. For example, patients would be hostile towards the hospital, which showed why they were there in the first place. But these hospitals were staffed in order to maintain the look of the medical service model. Basically Goffman in his book says that mental hospitals are only serviced to keep good face, yet they keep good face because the patients need to be in an asylum.

What were the effects of the attack on psychiatry? Grob concludes they were positive. Because of the constant critiques, psychiatry went through an internal change. Where psychiatry was weak, in areas such as psychodynamic psychiatry and psychotherapy, they influenced other types such as biological psychiatry.

So was Betty Draper following another trend? In the 1960’s it would have looked so. In today’s era we understand that mental illness is a serious issue. Psychiatrists have become much more legitimate, the science has been improved on, and society views it in an accepting way.

On the Psychology of Madison Avenue

In Adam Curtis’s “EXPERIMENTS IN THE LABORATORY OF CONSUMERISM 1959-67”, we are given a brief account of the two warring camps on Madison Avenue and the individuals pivotal to this era in mass market consumerism. Particularly, we are given some of the major figureheads which some Mad Men characters are based on. For instance, one warring camp called the “USP” or “unique selling point” had the perspective that an advertisement should have one particular trait that “penetrated” the masses and created a sense of brand loyalty. By doing so, this product would, according to this philosophy, stand out the most. This was an idea enumerated by Rosser Reever who coined the term “It’s toasted” for Lucky Strike and serves as inspiration for Donald Draper. On the other hand, there is an account of the “Motivational Research” which was rooted in psychology. One such example was the “empathy” technique which elicited feelings of connection with the consumer and the product. This field was particularly influenced by the post Viennese generation of Freudians who came to the USA. One, Dr. Herzog, stands as the most important, and she was later parodied by the doctor in the first episode. Then there comes the inspiration for Peggy Olsen which was based off a girl a young and rising copy writer who wrote numerous ads for women’s products. Finally there is a brief discussion of Bill Bernach and his brand of “anti-advertising” which was a satire of the consumerism at the time and strove to link public mistrust with advertisements. For example, the “lemon” Volkswagen Beetle that Don does not like uses this technique. It employs the distaste of a used car and reverses the expectations of the consumer as it captures their attention.



I knew of Curtis’s research on consumerism after I watched his documentary called A Century of the Self which outlined the various psychological theories in the advertising world after Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, started to work and incorporate his Uncle’s ideas of the unconscious and animalistic drives into mass media. Though the article contains a wealth of information and useful images of products to further explicate the point of this past history, it does sometime lose its focus within the thesis on the Madison Avenue individuals. Throughout the article, one notices that the author sometimes loses his focus as he tries to bring in more and more people to talk about. One notices that there are references to modern TV shows and other advertisement agencies which have no correlation to Madison Avenue. For some reason, the author chose to even reference an actor who plays a role in the TV vampire drama, Buffy the Vampire Slayer because he uses the phrase “ka-ching” in a television ad. In this case, it is evident that Curtis brings superfluous evidence to this article.

Still, the article is strong as it stands as a useful foundation for new viewers of this show. One is able to understand and appreciate the parallels that Matthew Wiener incorporated within this drama. Moreover, understanding the subtle psychological and selling techniques that maybe lost to a new viewer provides for a deeper and richer experience.

Sources referenced: "EXPERIMENTS IN THE LABORATORY OF CONSUMERISM 1959-67." Web log post. The Medium and the Message. Ed. Adam Curtis. BBC, 20 Aug. 2010. Web. 12 Feb. 2011.

Dr. Wayne Has No Ethics

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When I watch Mad Men I am constantly reminded of the stark contrast between the world we live in today and the world that existed in the 1960s. Although the stories of Don Draper and the Madison Avenue advertising agency are certainly fictional and highly exaggerated, there are aspects present in the show which constantly remind me how different modern day society is when compared to that of the 1960s. Some of the most obvious differences lie in the change of fashion over time and how much less people smoke and drink in social situations today. But something I noticed which truly shocked me was the lack of respect men had for women at the time. This lack of respect spread so deep that not only would women be treated as second class citizens but were not even granted their basic ethical rights when visiting a medical doctor! Mad Men portrays Betty’s psychiatrist Dr. Wayne as breaking his Hippocratic oath and disclosing Betty’s confidential medical information with her husband Don. Seeing this kind of complete disregard for Betty’s confidentiality – a basic ethical right which should be granted to all patients, truly enraged me as a viewer. 



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The concept of “doctor-patient confidentiality” derives from English Common Law – something conceptualized around the 12th or 13th century. Although it is technically based on ethics and not law, this concept can be traced as far back as the Roman Hippocratic Oath! What is even more interesting is that the Hippocratic Oath is still taken by all physicians out of medical school to this day. An important part of the oath is:

“Whatever in connection with my profession [as a doctor]...I will not divulge as reckoning that all such should be kept a secret...and that those things which are sacred, are to be imparted only to [other doctors]; it is not lawful to impart them to [non-doctors].”

After reviewing this Oath, I could not simply dismiss Dr. Wayne’s lack of ethics as a result of the fact that “things were different in the ‘60s”. I could not believe that the lack of respect for women had infiltrated so far into society that even doctors did not hold their confidential information as sacred. I figured that there had to be some law somewhere which made this violation in ethical behavior illegal. 



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After some research, I was surprised to find out that there hadn’t been a law in the 1960s that made the doctor-patient relationship a legally binding concept. In fact, it wasn’t until 1996 that Senator Kennedy sponsored HIPAA in congress, which was a bill which basically said that unless a patient signed a waiver saying otherwise, a doctor couldn’t mention anything you say to a parent, friend or spouse unless it had to to with personal safety or someone else’s safety. Although the bill was passed in 1996, it took until April 14th 2003 for the “Privacy Rule” amendment to pass which said that “an individual who believes that the doctor-patient confidentiality rule is not being upheld, can file a complaint with the Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights”. 

It is certainly common knowledge that the doctor-patient relationship is central to the foundations of contemporary medical practice. Especially to a viewer who has grown up in the age of this rule being enforced, it is understandable that Dr. Wayne’s actions were disturbing to modern day viewers. But even though there was no law at the time which deemed Dr. Wayne and Don’s conversations illegal, they were still unethical, and I feel that Betty deserved better. Medicine is and has always been a sacred profession, and Dr. Wayne and Don’s lack of respect for Betty doesn’t only bring shame on the medical field but brings shame on the male gender as well.