Emergencies of Survival’: Moral Spectatorship and the                ‘New Vision of the Child’ in Postwar Child Psychoanalysis

Cartwright, Lisa

doi:10.1177/1470412904043597

Cited by 24 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…This spotlight was infused with an anxiety about the nation's falling population in which post-war pro-natalist ideas were driven by a political determination to improve the material conditions of motherhood (Finch and Summerfield, 1991). At the same time, psychological and psychoanalytic research and writing from the inter-war and war years were increasingly shaping debates about the emotional needs and development of children (Riley, 1983;Thom, 1992;Urwin and Hood-Williams, 1998;Hendrick, 2003;Cartwright, 2004). Burlingham and Freud's (1942) study Young children in wartime: A year's work in a residential nursery and Isaacs' (1941) The Cambridge Evacuation Survey had indicated, for example, that it was the separation of young children from their home and primary caregivers, rather than the experiences of the actual war, which had been detrimental to children's wellbeing.…”

Section: Film Studies and Social Contextsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Questions of innocence and guilt: child abduction and the representation of mothers in post-war British cinema

Fink

2012

Families, Relationships and Societies

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The figure of the missing child is a recurrent and highly visible feature of past and present culture, not only the concern of extensive reporting in the media but also a frequent motif in the cinema, theatre, popular fiction and autobiographical memoirs. This article is focused on the ways in which British feature films of the 1950s and 1960s portrayed the experiences of losing a child through kidnap or abduction, exploring in particular how mothers were represented. Through an examination of the complex and contradictory discourses through which motherhood and the maternal role were constituted in these films, the article considers what they reveal about the shifting meanings of the mother-child relationship and the dynamics of gender relations in the home and post-war society more generally. The films discussed are Lost (1956), Tomorrow at Ten (1962) and Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964).

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Section: Film Studies and Social Contextsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Questions of innocence and guilt: child abduction and the representation of mothers in post-war British cinema

Fink

2012

Families, Relationships and Societies

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“…However, in 1960, Spitz joined two other senior members of the psychoanalytic community, Anna Freud and Max Schur, in a public and critical response to Bowlby’s research (Spitz, 1960). These public critiques permanently marginalized attachment theory in the psychoanalytic milieu (Cartwright, 2004; Van der Horst, 2011; Vicedo, 2013). All three took issue with Bowlby’s use of psychoanalytic language, but more importantly, they each argued that his evidence for mourning in infancy was both insufficient and not psychoanalytic.…”

Section: The Individual In Behavioural Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These disturbances of both psychoanalysis and objective observation are what make the films so effective for didactic purposes, and reveal the researcher as what Cartwright calls a moral spectator. They document not only the deterioration of the infants, but also the ‘intervention of the observer as moral agent in the process’ (Cartwright, 2004: 45). The films, for Cartwright, show the ways the observation of external suffering elicits a response in the observer, one that causes a split between witnessing at a distance and intervening.…”

Section: Visualizing the Doctor–patient Relationshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Boundaries of reasoning in cases: The visual psychoanalysis of René Spitz

Weitzenkorn

2020

History of the Human Sciences

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This article argues that the foundational separation between psychoanalysis and experimental psychology was challenged in important ways by psychoanalytic infant researchers. Through a close examination of American psychoanalyst René Spitz (1887–1974), it extends John Forrester’s conception of reasoning in cases outside classic psychoanalytic practices. Specifically, the article interrogates the foundations of reasoning in cases—the individual, language, and the doctor–patient relationship—to show how these are reimagined in relation to the structures of American developmental psychology. The article argues that the staunch separation of experimental psychology and psychoanalysis, reiterated by philosophers and historians of psychology, is flimsy at best—and, conversely, that the maintenance of these boundaries enabled the production of a cinematic case study. Spitz created films that used little language and took place outside the consulting room with institutionalized infants. Yet key aspects of the psychoanalytic case, as put forth by John Forrester, were depicted visually. These visual displays of transference, failure, and interpersonal emotions highlight the foundations of what Forrester means by reasoning in cases. The article concludes that Spitz failed at creating classic psychoanalytic evidence, but in so doing stretched the epistemology of the case.

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“…However, this argument obscures the fact that psychoanalytic theory was itself reshaped in this period by microanalysis. Lisa Cartwright, for example, in a series of essays on James Robertson and René Spitz, has highlighted the importance of film in constructing a new visual epistemology for post-war child psychoanalysis (Cartwright, 2004(Cartwright, , 2010. Both Geoghegan and Cartwright's forms of intra-disciplinary analysis in fact overlook the pervasive culture of 'small behaviours' that conditioned Anglo-American psychiatric research as a whole in the post-war period.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mothering in the frame: Cinematic microanalysis and the pathogenic mother, 1945–67

Joice

2020

History of the Human Sciences

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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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Emergencies of Survival’: Moral Spectatorship and the ‘New Vision of the Child’ in Postwar Child Psychoanalysis

Cited by 24 publications

References 6 publications

Questions of innocence and guilt: child abduction and the representation of mothers in post-war British cinema

Questions of innocence and guilt: child abduction and the representation of mothers in post-war British cinema

Boundaries of reasoning in cases: The visual psychoanalysis of René Spitz

Mothering in the frame: Cinematic microanalysis and the pathogenic mother, 1945–67

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