Medicine: Wanted: Mothering

For most people, the very word “hospital” has emotionally disturbing overtones, and by the time they are admitted as patients they have symptoms that have nothing to do with their medical or surgical problems. So writes Psychologist Ernest Dichter in The Modern Hospital. His main conclusions after a nationwide survey:

“The mature adult, finding himself in a situation and environment totally different from . . . normal life, becomes uncomfortable and therefore insecure. His personality changes, and he becomes a child, emotionally . . . [This] shows up in the patient’s constant complaints about food, bills, routine, boredom, personnel—that is in the general patient irritability.”

Hospitals which try to change their routines get nowhere. The complaints go on. Says Dichter: it is not really bad coffee or the early awakening that bothers the patient but a basic emotional need for being mothered. However, this must be done with the greatest care: even when an adult is behaving most like a child, he resents any apparent slight to his “mature individuality.” He seems to feel: “Care for me. But also respect me.”

Warns Psychologist Dichter: the hospital patient’s typical emotional crisis affects not only his recovery, but “such decidedly practical matters as the rate of payment of bills [or] the success of fund-raising drives.”