Article Analysis: Cissy Houston on Whitney

The article, “Cissy Houston on Whitney: ‘She was raised well, she knew better’ than to use drugs” is about Whitney Houston’s mother talking about Whitney’s childhood. Whitney’s mother is still mourning for her loss, but tough minded about her drug addictions. She believes that good parents do not always have good children and vice versa. Whitney’s mother says it is the person’s responsibility, when they reach a certain age, to choose to be a bad or good person. Cissy discussed how she raised Whitney in a good home and gave her the tools to choose not to do drugs. Cissy thinks that being called “Whitey” early in the music business and her marriage to Bobby Brown may have led to her drug abuse.(1)
The article relates to nature versus nurture. Nature is a person’s biological makeup, and nurture is the experiences that we have during our lives. The heritability of a characteristic is the proportion of the observed differences on characteristics among people that is due to genetics.(2) Throughout the article, Cissy Houston is trying to convince the reader that Whitney’s drug addiction was not due to her nurture as a child. Cissy hints towards Bobby Brown being the cause of her addictions. This would be the nurture side of her marriage. Another part of psychology that this article relates to is psychodynamic psychology, which is an approach to understanding human behavior that focuses on the role of unconscious thoughts, feelings, and memories.(2) Sigmund Freud was a pioneer in this branch of psychology that had much to do with a person’s childhood and what their mother was like. If Cissy is correct about Whitney’s childhood and her choices, then this would make the principles of psychodynamic psychology incorrect. Cissy says that she was a good mother, but her daughter ended up making poor choices that ended in an early death.
This article relates to my life from the psychodynamic perspective. This article demonstrates that even if I had a great childhood, the choices