Child guidance, dynamic psychology and the psychopathologisation of child-rearing culture (c. 1920-1940): a transnational perspective

Abstract

The historiography of child guidance has focused primarily on the United States, where it first developed before travelling across the English-speaking world. The rapid expansion of child guidance in the interwar years was enabled by private philanthropy, which provided fellowships to foreign professionals to study in the United States. This article focuses upon the transnational transfer of child guidance, the dynamic psychology on which it was based, and the accompanying psychopathologisation of child-rearing culture to a non-English speaking country, the Netherlands. First, it discusses the development of child guidance and the reception of dynamic psychology in the United States and Britain. Next, it analyses the transfer to the Netherlands. It turns out that the Dutch did not copy the American model, but adapted it to fit their conditions and created a more diverse child guidance landscape, in which educational psychology played a less important role than child psychiatry.

The history of knowledge and the history of education

“…Doing so requires taking account also of histories of ignorance and not-knowing, a developing subtheme of the history of knowledge, since knowledge hierarchies necessarily imply unknowns, as well as excluded and devalued knowledges, and often excluded and devalued knowers (Gugerli et al , 2009; Burke, 2012, pp. 139–159; 2020; Mulsow, 2015; Zwierlein, 2016; Keller, 2020; Verburgt, 2020; Burke and Verburgt, 2021). In these domains the history of knowledge has rich existing conceptual resources to draw upon in the history and sociology of science.…”

“…Historians of education have, however, long shared an interest in the ways knowledge is produced and circulated. This common interest finds expression, for example, in work by educational historians on the history of educational sciences, the history of educational psychology, the transnational history of schooling and higher education, and curricula studies that examine how knowledge is transformed and translated into taught forms (Hofstetter and Schneuwly, 2004;Beatty, 2009;Boge and Larsson, 2018;Bakker, 2020;Pietsch, 2013;Fuchs and Rold an Vera, 2019;Ydesen, 2019;Matasci et al, 2020;Popkewitz, 2004;Laats, 2021).…”

Getting On in Gotham: The Midtown Manhattan Study and Putting the “Social” in Psychiatry

“…Srole also qualified Midtown’s findings, suggesting that they would only serve as “temporary scaffolding for constructing new and more focused hypotheses” (Srole et al 1962 :342). His policy recommendations were articulated obliquely and were restricted to initiatives, such as parent education, which had long been established (Grant 1998 ; Jones 1999 ; Bakker 2020 ). 16 Srole later admitted that “investigators who conduct a large scale undertaking like the Midtown Study, incorporate in their scientific roles neither responsibilities nor skills in conveying their findings to the lay community or in implementing their findings on the social policy level” (Srole Papers, Box 1, Folder 69).…”

From talking cure to play- and group-therapy: outpatient mental health care for children in the Netherlandsc. 1945–70

“…The model of the Dutch Child Guidance Clinic was imported from the USA in the late 1920s by Eugenia Lekkerkerker, a young woman jurist who set out to study the treatment of women prisoners there, but came back as a propagandist of child guidance as a prophylactic instrument to prevent young offenders from sliding down towards serious delinquency ( Bakker, 2020 ). The first clinic in the Netherlands was established in Amsterdam in 1928.…”

“…Another deviation from the American model, inspired by the key role of religion in the Dutch school system, consisted in a lack of interconnectedness of child mental health care with school social work, school health services and school psychologists. Unlike the USA and Scotland, in the Netherlands these school-related services referred to but hardly cooperated with the clinics ( Bakker, 2020 ). Did the Dutch continue on this similar but slightly adapted road into post-war decades?…”