overdemanding

Present knowledge has come a long way from a generation ago, when childhood asthma was considered a psychosomatic illness caused by an overdemanding mother and a high-strung child.

It has been 30 years since Alfred Hitchcock released "Psycho," his shocking film about a mad motel keeper named Norman Bates who commits murder out of twisted devotion to his overdemanding mother.

"I see my relationship to Whitman as that of a dissident son to an overdemanding father," he would later write, as he moved towards and away from that "vision of the perfection of man" and "the ultimate union in brotherhood" that Whitman came to represent.