This article examines the use of cinematic microanalysis to capture, decompose, and interpret mother–infant interaction in the decades following the Second World War. Focusing on the films and writings of Margaret Mead, Ray Birdwhistell, René Spitz, and Sylvia Brody, it examines the intellectual culture, and visual methodologies, that transformed ‘pathogenic’ mothering into an observable process. In turn, it argues that the significance assigned to the ‘small behaviours’ of mothers provided an epistemological foundation for the nascent discipline of infant psychiatry. This research draws attention to two new areas of enquiry within the history of emotions and the history of psychiatry in the post-war period: preoccupation with emotional absence and affectlessness, and their personal and cultural meanings; and the empirical search for the origin point, and early chronology, of mental illness.

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James Robertson’s early films of hospitalized children, particularly A Two Year Old Goes to Hospital (1952), are frequently cited in histories of child psychoanalysis and child psychiatry. Much less is known about the later phase of the research he undertook with his wife, Joyce Robertson, into substitute mothering and the nursery setting. This project was documented in the film series Young Children in Brief Separation ( YCBS) (1967), in which the Robertsons acted as foster parents to four children temporarily separated from their mothers. They made a contrasting film, John, about a young boy’s nine-day stay in a residential nursery, where the effects of discontinuous care on the child’s mind are starkly revealed. Drawing on the concept of the narrative self, this article examines the YCBS series for the first time in the historical literature, exploring the films’ clinical and socio-political meanings. In this new account of the Robertson films, cinematic storytelling becomes a means of exposing, and militating against, psychological fragmentation in the mind of the child, carer and film-viewer.

This article casts light on the origins of infant psychiatry by taking a new, interdisciplinary approach to the work of psychoanalyst and film-maker René Spitz. Focusing on his observations of babies living in orphanages, it argues that by undertaking the difficult, and sometimes paradoxical, task of capturing emotional absence and psychological fragmentation on film, Spitz created a new and influential theory of the infant psyche. It considers how this vision of an indeterminate and potentially ‘empty’ infant subject was generated by the institutional care which he sought to undermine. The particular ways in which the institution emerges as a problem and opportunity for child analysts after World War II propelled Spitz into a surprising range of post-war debates on cultural politics. He is revealed as embedded in a complex, interdisciplinary web of discourse, practices and observational strategies, and at the centre of post-war visual research into the environmental origins of mental illness.

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