Status Updates From Hidden Valley Road: Inside ...

Michael [5th son] went to the show with a new friend, Butch Trucks, who had just started a rock band with Duane Allman, and he spent much of the year hanging out at Butch’s place. The following year, 1969, Butch and Duane’s band became the Allman Brothers.

So no one was more shocked than John [3rd son] when, on the day of his wedding to Nancy in 1971, Don [father] confided to the bride’s mother, “She got the best of the litter.”

When their twelfth and final child, Mary, was born on October 5, 1965, Mimi [the mother] was forty years old.

THE GALVIN HOME became a place where two different realities existed at the same time: the wrestling pit and the church choir; the wildness of the boys and the model family Don and Mimi believed they had.

Bateson invented this theory without so much as ten minutes of clinical psychiatric experience. But that made no difference. The double-bind, along with the schizophrenogenic mother, helped to turn mother-blaming into the industry standard for psychiatry—and not just for schizophrenia.

The psychologist Suzanne Reichard and the Stanford psychiatrist Carl Tillman described the schizophrenogenic mother as the “prototype of the middle class Anglo-Saxon American Woman: prim, proper, but totally lacking in genuine affection.”

“She wanted everybody to be perfect,” one old friend of the family remembered.

Mimi couldn’t have known at the time how terribly this temperament would end up working against her. By the 1950s, the psychiatric profession had set its sights on mothers like her. The most influential thinkers in American psychiatry all were using a new term for such women. They called them “schizophrenogenic.”