Baby-bashing
Sir: What a pity John Linklater mixes fact and fiction so fullsomely in his misleading column on 'Baby Bashing' (Spectator, August 10). Does he really believe that Klaus and Kennel "demonstrate scientifically and quantitavely that maternal archetypes are indeed crystalised" by close mother/baby contact?
Allthey suggest is the innate response potentiality which mother and baby possess. The rest is learning, not archetypes, and the third fact is that many battering mothers have an impaired capacity for establishing that learned bond with sufficient strength to resist the frustrations which all mothers probably feel at some time, faced with the implacable crying infant. Why their capacity is impaired we are trying to find out. That unwanted pregnancy, and indeed any pregnancy, lowers their resistance' to frustration is far from being "salacious" as current research is beginning to establish.
As for "basic rules of conduct" to which reference is made, suggesting that "baby battering is inevitable in a permissive society in which self-indulgent hedonism has replaced self-restraint," John Linklater is wider still off the mark. Battering mothers, in so far as generalisation is possible, may be impulsive and immature, but the image of self-indulgence he raises is grotesque.
Living in one or two rooms, with an unwanted infant, and partnered by a man often working punitively long hours and even when home of an unsociable unsupportive temperament, is a curious ambiance in which to indulge the hedonistic life.
Facts are so hard to come by in this field. It is intolerable to see the few we have distorted beyond recognition by purple-proseci journalism.
Clare A. Hyman Consultant Clinical Psychologist, National Advisory Centre on the Battered Child, Denver House, The Drive, Bounds Green Road, London N11
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