Some never allowed knives to be left in evidence in the house, some did not dare to carry their children in their arms on the stairs, while boarding trains, or while near open windows.
One never dared to administer a medicine to her little girl "for fear of making a mistake and poisoning her." One did not dare to bathe her child for fear of drowning him "accidentally" in the tub.
Neurotic women who do not wish to become mothers and rebel against motherhood, (which some of them consider as a symbol of woman's inferior role), often compensate for their lack of love by an almost criminal indulgence and weakness toward their children.
Unable to give them genuine love, they pretend to idolise them and are apparently unable to deny any of their wishes. This, in last analysis, is simply a total indifference to the little ones' welfare. That type of mother spoils her children and makes them unfit to face life and its emergencies.
Her extravagant adulation, her outbursts of artificial tenderness, however, do not always deceive the children themselves who feel automatically, thru nervous and muscular imitation, the tensions of their mother's body. The little son of the woman who was obsessed by the fear of drowning him (and who compensated for her murderous cravings by showering the wildest caresses upon him), could not be prevailed upon to ever go near the water until her obsessions, of which, he, of course, had no conscious knowledge, had been removed by psychoanalytic treatment.
Neurotic mother love trains children for a neurotic life.