Child development, film evidence, and epidemiological sciences: Elwyn James Anthony and the 1957 Zurich International Congress of Psychiatry

Abstract

In 1957, the British-Indian child psychiatrist Dr Elwyn James Anthony travelled to the Zurich International Congress of Psychiatry to show a film featuring 70 children with such complex symptomatology and behaviour that they betrayed the certainty of contemporary theories of developmental psychology and psychoanalysis. This article examines the significance of Anthony’s film to the creation of new scientific models in international developmental psychology and psychiatric epidemiology. It marked a significant change in the use of filmed evidence that sought to create a truly global and universalist approach to atypical child development based purely on scientific observations. This new observational work was important in shaping new internationally ratified models to study the epidemiology of children’s psychiatric conditions.

Film, observation and the mind

“…Moreover, this work has highlighted the importance of observational methods in creating shared consensus on both diagnoses and theoretical approaches, building on important work on the history of mental symptoms (Berrios, 1996). In fact, the creation of this volume was motivated by the realisation that work in this field could also benefit from an engagement of the longer history of film, and its transformational role in generating new perspectives on typical human actions and behaviour (Doane, 1999;Evans, 2024;Harbord, 2016;Landecker, 2006).…”

“…Anna Toropova has also recently examined the use of film in Soviet psychotherapeutic treatment, revealing the complex ways that film was employed as both observational science, but also therapeutic method in the first half of the 20th century ( Toropova, 2022 ). Recent publications in this journal, including Tim Snelson and William Macauley's edited volume on the psy-sciences in the long 1960s and Katie Joice's article on cinematic microanalysis in the study of mothers and their children from the 1940s to the 1960s, have extended the study of film and psychology into the post-war period ( Joice, 2021 ; Snelson and Macauley, 2021 ), as has Bonnie Evans’ latest article in History of Psychiatry on how film influenced universal approaches to international child development studies in the 1950s ( Evans, 2024 ).…”