Analyzing Psychiatrists’ Kids : In a New Book, Sons and Daughters of Analysts Sound Off on the Perils of Life With Freud

Thomas Maeder’s childhood was ruled by the minute hand. Between 10 minutes of the hour and the hour, he could not leave his room to go downstairs because that was when his parents’ patients came and went.

Children of psychiatrists, like Maeder, often live in terror of violating taboos surrounding their parents’ in-home offices. One child has described her analyst mother’s office as “very much a sacred place, like a chapel.”

But now, in Maeder’s new book, “Children of Psychiatrists and Other Psychotherapists” (Harper and Row), psychiatrists’ kids finally get the chance to symbolically storm these formerly off-limits sanctuaries.

Maeder invited 200 children of mental-health professionals to make themselves at home on Dad’s analytic couch, to flip through the pages of Mom’s books by that guy named “Frood,” and--ultimately--to tell the world what was going on up in the children’s wing while the folks were sequestered in a sound-proof room.

Maeder’s subjects claim they suffered an assortment of childhood miseries related to their parents’ profession. Many report feeling over-analyzed, emotionally invaded and intimidated by their parents’ perceived omniscience. They are confused by their parents’ patients, the strangers who seem to want to possess the mother or father that children think belong only to them.

High on their list of grievances also is the pressure these children felt to appear emotionally healthy at all times. “Psychiatrists’ kids are not supposed to be a mess,” said one woman who was interviewed for the book. “I was constantly being told I was a very happy child.”

Although the book has angered some in the psychiatric community, at least some of the adults Maeder interviewed are grateful to him for giving them a chance to compare notes with other children of psychiatrists.

“I used to think it was just the nature of childhood that parents had this certain kind of authority in defining reality,” said a Bay Area artist who asked not to be named out of deference to her psychiatrist parents who are still practicing. “I’m glad he (Maeder) brought this up. I think it’s a service to us.”

Ben Little of Mill Valley, Calif., said: “It was very helpful to me to see there were other people in the world who had experienced problems of a similar nature.” His father, now dead, was a Hollywood psychiatrist.

Myth About Psychiatrists’ Kids

According to Maeder, there has been little written until now on the particular problems of psychiatrists’ children, although Maeder found that nearly everyone he interviewed could cite the folk belief that psychiatrists’ kids are crazy. (When asked why this myth exists, 47% of Maeder’s subjects said it was because there was some factual basis to the assumption.)

Maeder, who lives with his wife and three children in Narberth, Penn., is the son of a psychiatric social worker and a psychoanalyst. He started work on his book, he said, because he thought it ironic that a segment of society that many would consider best-equipped for child-rearing might actually be making a mess of the job.

Maeder, 37, set out to find subjects for his study by contacting presidents of regional psychiatric associations. Many of his subjects came to him by more informal means; a friend, for example, scanned wedding announcements in the New York Times for brides and bridegrooms who claimed a psychiatrist parent.

Other than a brief reference to his own parents in the introduction, Maeder leaves himself out of book. “I didn’t really feel like talking about myself that much,” he said in a telephone interview. That his parents are deceased probably made it easier for him to write the book without feeling he was betraying them, he said.

That response was shared by many of his subjects, who were willing to bare their own psyches but were protective of their parents’ privacy. Most of the anecdotes in the book are anonymous, Maeder said, for that reason.

A believer in the “wounded healer” concept, Maeder says the shortcomings of psychiatrist parents have much to do with the kind of people who take up the profession in the first place. Thus, he writes: “The bad effects of therapist parents are predominantly the result of flaws that afflict them as people rather than by-products of their training.”

One critic of Maeder’s views, Dr. Harvey Ruben, public affairs chairman of the American Psychiatric Assn. in Washington, finds the “wounded healer” stereotype offensive and misleading.

“At best, Maeder’s book is irrelevant and at worst it’s damaging,” said Ruben, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Yale University and the father of three children.

Proceeding from a small, self-selected sample, Ruben said, Maeder makes generalizations about 220,000 or more mental-health professionals nationwide, condemning them in their roles as professionals and as parents.

“He’s saying, ‘If your parents are helpers, they’re probably scarred,’ ” Ruben said, adding that Maeder’s conclusions are “skewed and lopsided.”

Maeder himself uses the word lopsided to describe his book because, he said, he was most interested in looking at the negative influences of psychiatrist parents on their children. As he puts it in the book’s introduction, “By observing how things can go wrong, we are better equipped to perceive how they might go right.”

“I do not claim that most therapists harm their children more than other people do, nor that therapists mostly do harm to their children,” he writes. “Most therapists, most of the time, act like anyone else, for better or worse.”

But Ruben worries that, in reinforcing the commonly held belief that psychiatrists are emotionally unbalanced, Maeder’s book could dissuade troubled people from seeking treatment.

It does seem that an anti-psychiatry bias exists in many of Maeder’s subjects. For instance, one son of a psychiatrist concludes, “Psychiatry is probably nonsense.”

Author Is Surprised

The author appears hurt and surprised by the critical reaction to his book. “I didn’t set out to trash psychotherapists, despite what many of them seem to think now,” said Maeder, who has written three previous nonfiction books, including a history of the insanity defense.

Maeder said the first question everyone wants to ask of a psychiatrist’s child is: Did your parents analyze you?

Many of Maeder’s subjects answer “Yes.” They noted that the very language that shaped daily interaction in their households tended to be analytical; one subject remarked on the number of times the word hostile crept into ordinary conversations.

The Bay Area artist said, “If I dropped my fork at dinner, my parents said: ‘What’s going on? What are you angry at?’ when I may have just dropped my fork.”

Not only did the parents of his subjects often analyze their children, Maeder found, but they fairly routinely subjected them to the analysis of others at an early age. So entrenched is the expectation that all children go to therapy that one psychiatrist’s daughter said when she got married one of her first thoughts was: “Now I have to start saving for my kids’ analysis.”

But Maeder said, “I got a lot of complaints from people who thought they had been made much worse by being sent to therapy as children.”

Being rushed to therapy prematurely can “magnify small problems,” he added.

Little, for example, said that his parents, when he was a child, chose to send him to a a psychiatrist; what he says he really needed, in retrospect, was help with his homework.

Some of the complaints mentioned in the book are by no means exclusive to therapists’ children, Maeder said. Psychiatrists are not the only parents who want to give people the impression their kids are perfect.

“Psychiatrists are just a little more invested in that,” he said.

Similarly, Maeder’s subjects describe a power imbalance that exists to a degree in almost any parent-child relationship. But the situation is exacerbated, Maeder said, when the parent belongs to an “implied priest class” believed to possess rare and mysterious powers.

Psychiatrists come to parenting with an arsenal of intellectual theories and jargon that can be used to silence children who are just beginning to trust their own instincts. One man told Maeder that when he or his siblings rebelled, “We got hit with a Freudian whip.”

Children of psychiatrists reported that the infliction of psychoanalytic punishment made them feel stripped of any privacy. “I was very scared by the idea that (my mother) could know me better than I know myself,” said a psychoanalyst’s daughter, who added that she is now “determined that nobody know me better than myself.”

Maeder’s book does not advise young psychiatrists on ways to avoid making mistakes common to psychiatrist parents. Yet the subjects of the book hope his work will be the first step in improving the lot of “PsyKs” as Maeder calls psychiatrists’ children, a variation of the abbreviation for preachers’ kids, sometimes referred to as PKs.

Despite the bleak picture painted by his book, Maeder said psychiatrists’ children are really not so bad off when the full range of childhood trauma is considered. “They’re not sick. They just have certain problems,” he said. “But they’re actually pretty privileged. Their problems are sort of ethereal compared to some.”

One advantage to being a psychiatrist’s child is that they almost uniformly feel they have been raised in a more enlightened, stimulating environment than that of their peers. Maeder’s subjects suffered no shortage of museum visits, piano lessons or fascinating tales of strangers’ troubles at the dinner table.

About a third of those Maeder interviewed went into the arts; another third into mental health professions. The artist from the Bay Area said in a telephone interview that she vacillated between both professions, but settled on art. She said it allows her the “spontaneity of expression” she was denied as a child.