Madi’s Reviews > Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family > Status Update

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.

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.”

THE ODDS OF a family like this one existing at all, much less one that remained intact long enough to be discovered, seem impossible to calculate.

The most dreadful thing, perhaps, about schizophrenia—and what most sets it apart from other brain conditions like autism or Alzheimer’s, which tend to dilute and dissipate a person’s most identifiable personality traits—is how baldly emotional it can be.

One of the consequences of surviving schizophrenia for fifty years is that sooner or later, the cure becomes as damaging as the disease.

The great break between Freud and Jung took place largely over the issue of the nature of madness itself. Early psychoanalysis’s greatest partnership was over. But the argument over the origins and nature of schizophrenia was only just beginning.