Mama's boy
Mother's boy is a colloquial derogatory term for a male person who, due to an overly interdependent and pampering relationship with his own mother, suffers a social deficit over a relatively long period of time and thus tends to avoid effective contact with society. The process of socialization within a society creates anxiety and increases dependence on the mother. Typically, a mother’s boy is perceived as passive and childish, who avoids conflict with others, is unable to make friends and is lacking in initiative . The concept of the mother’s boy is not mentioned in any classification system for medical diagnoses.
The concept of the mother's boy has been known in German since the 18th century . David M. Levy wrote in the 1930s about overprotective mothers who infantilize their children . In 1971, child psychiatrist Aman U. Khan published an article focusing on mother-child interactions called "Mama's Boy" Syndrome . He summarizes the mother-child interactions as follows:
- The mother takes a large part of the child's joy of life . She may not have any other interests or activities and may also be perceived as being more self-centered .
- A relationship that arose during the treatment of a malformation or an illness in early childhood and which requires a close relationship over a longer period of time can continue to exist even after the malformation has been remedied or the illness has been overcome.
- Furthermore, childhood separation of spouses, fear of the outside world and the consequent need to stay together, the mother's passive personality and inability to set boundaries, and the mother's feelings of guilt from the child's actual or imagined rejection contribute to the infantilization of the child.
The conceptualization of the symbiotic relationship (or the degree of fixation of the symbiotic phase ) can be done as a continuum, with mental disorders on one end and a healthy mother-child relationship that does not cause specific social difficulties on the other. The appearance of the mother’s boy could be classified within the two extremes.
literature
- Dunja Hergenröther: Case reports from psychotherapy: 47 examples of successful case documentation in the application process. Georg Thieme Verlag , 2014, ISBN 978-3-13-201501-2 , p. 45 ff.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Mother's son, that. In: Duden online . Retrieved May 13, 2020 .
- ↑ a b c A. U. Khan: "Mama's boy" syndrome. In: The American Journal of Psychiatry. Volume 128, Number 6, December 1971, pp. 712-717, doi : 10.1176 / ajp.128.6.712 , PMID 5147726 .
- ↑ Duden - The dictionary of origin . Etymology of the German language. 6th edition. Duden , 2020, ISBN 978-3-411-91291-9 , pp. 572 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
- ↑ David M. Levy: Maternal overprotection . Columbia University Press, New York 1943, pp. 213-214 .