After a delay, today I will be showing the Bette Davis classic, Now, Voyager. In this 1942 film Bette Davis stars as Charlotte Vale, a dowdy, repressed woman who, overwhelmed by her domineering mother, is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She finds help at a sanitarium from a kind psychiatrist (Claude Rains), who turns her into a beautiful, confident woman. As a new person, she takes a pleasure cruise, where she meets Jerry (Paul Henreid), an architect trapped in an unhappy marriage, saddled with a troubled daughter. The two fall in love, but, of course, the romance is doomed. Yet their paths cross on occasion, and, despite their feelings, Charlotte finds satisfaction in helping Jerry's depressed child.
In the 1940s and 50s, some severe mental problems were held to be the result of bad mothering. This view was so fervently held by some mental health professionals that, for them, the very existence of the disorder was proof of faulty parenting. Today, of course, we believe that severe mental problems result from a far more complex interaction of factors, including genetic influences as well as a variety of childhood and adolescent experiences and life events in addition to quality of parenting.