i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

170 / The Extended Familyanticipates concerns that would be voiced by the later feminist and psychoanalyticinvestigations of the writers Adrienne Rich and Nancy Chodorow. BothOf Woman Born and The Reproduction of Mothering address motherhood as acultural phenomenon, as learned behavior that “does not come by instinct.” 19For Rich, the con„ict between the mother’s need for self-preservation and hermaternal feelings was experienced as “a primal agony.” 20 Chodorow describedthis con„ict from the point of view of object-relations analysis: at ƒrst the childdoes not differentiate at all between self and nonself (the mother), after which“The mother functions, and is experienced, as the child’s ‘external ego’ . . . thechild behaves as if it were still a unit with its mother . . . The infant’s behavior isfunctionally egoistic, in that it ignores the interests of the mother... 21 Counteringthe view predominant in psychoanalysis that, “Just as the child does notrecognize the separate identity of the mother, so the mother looks upon herchild as part of herself and identiƒes its interests with her own,” 22 Chodorowcontends that a mother’s experience of her infant is informed by her relationshipto her husband as well as her societal expectations. 23The mother/child relationship to the male guardian ƒgure is the subject ofNeel’s most excruciating drawings and watercolors from 1940 to 1942, four ofwhich record Sam beating her year-old son. In a lost drawing from 1940, Samand Richard (ƒg. 174), Neel depicts Sam as what we now term a “child abuser,”venting his rage on the terriƒed infant. To the right Neel scrawls a surrealistautomatic drawing situating this scene within the realm of uncontrollable impulse.This is not the psychoanalytic Oedipal drama, but a lived trauma.Although a common occurrence, neither spousal nor child abuse has beenpictured as part of family life until recently. According to the sociologist RichardGelles, it was not until Henry Kempe and his colleagues published theirpaper on the “battered child syndrome” in 1962 that the issue of child abusegained national attention. 24 When Gelles began his research in the 1970s hewas surprised to ƒnd that despite the predominance of violent subjects in themedia, child abuse was never portrayed in normal, average families, but onlyin deviant ones. 25 Thus, Neel’s image is unprecedented not only in Americanart but in American culture at large in 1940, for she represented it before it hada name. 26 Because it would be another thirty years before statistics would begathered to document its widespread practice, Neel could do little more at thetime than to serve as a “silent witness” (as she titled one painting). Her portraitof Richard at Age Five (1944, ƒg. 175) could bear the same title. Solemn andrigid, his face, like Margarita’s in The Spanish Family from the previous year,is a rigid mask of suppressed pain.In another drawing from the 1940 series, Neel borrowed from the Minotaurtheme from Picasso’s Vollard Suite (1937) (Minotaur, 1940, ƒg. 176). Here,Sam, with claw-like hands and horned head, bars access to the helplessly cry-