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Psychology’s perennial favourite—blaming Mum—seems to be an
increasingly threadbare ideology: long-term studies, for instance, have
recognised that mental health often depends on how well babies fit
temperamentally with both their parents. James Park’s Sons, Mothers and Other
Lovers (Abacus, £7.99, ISBN 0 349 10740 8), a look at men’s fear of
intimacy, wags a finger at extremists in the men’s movement and neglectful
fathers; but the focus is firmly on mothers, whose combination of power and
otherness leaves boys, Park says, in a state of virtual womb envy. The
labels—”demanding” mothers, “lovelorn” sons— don’t help.