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

Abstract

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.

The visualization of autism: Filming children at the Maudsley Hospital, London, 1957–8

“…If kinesics expanded the semiotic field of meaning to include manifold movements of the body, systems theory introduced the idea of feedback loops, continuous communication wherein meaning is incrementally and rhythmically produced between participants: that is, meaning is immanent to the participants and emergent in the situation. For Katie Joice, Birdwhistell's method was complicit in the identification of maternal affectlessness as a pathological factor in an infant's development, an instance wherein the communication loop is incomplete (Joice, 2020). Mothers, she argues, ‘particularly emotionally absent mothers, formed the ontological, and social, backdrop to his research’, a foundation upon which a model dividing healthy from pathological communication could be situated (ibid.: 110).…”

Mothers’ Milk and Mothers’ Time: Childcare Advice and the Conceptualization of Demand Feeding in Post-1945 Britain and Italy

“…The notion of an affective and self-sufficient relationship between mother and baby suggested maternal 'readiness' and knowing. 65 Winnicott explained in one of his broadcasts that no one could get to know the baby as well as the mother; mothering was 'an entirely personal knew perfectly well whether their babies were hungry or not. 67 Moreover, the psychoanalytic insistence on 'babies as human beings' implied that babies were individuals already.…”

Mother-blaming revisited: Gender, cinematography, and infant research in the heyday of psychoanalysis

“…Importantly, Fries, Escalona, and Korner were not alone in challenging predominant sexist tropes and practices within the field. Historians Laura Hirshbein and Katie Joice have recently pointed to similarly critical approaches to contemporary ideas about mothering in the work of psychiatrist Stella Chess and psychologist Sylvia Brody ( Hirshbein, 2021 : 803; Joice, 2020 ). There is also evidence of personal networks between these individuals: Brody began her career in Escalona’s team, Escalona was a teacher of psychiatrist Daniel N. Stern, and Korner and Escalona were former classmates and had epistolary exchanges.…”

“…However, this article argues that the historiographical focus on mother-blaming has obscured the fact that resistance to an exclusive emphasis on mothering came not only from without but also from within the psychiatric and psychological professions. Joining recent calls for a ‘cautiously revisionist’ history of child psychiatry, I draw attention to cinematographic studies of infants undertaken by a loosely connected group of female psychologists and physicians in the USA from the 1930s to the 1960s ( Hirshbein, 2021 ; Joice, 2020 : 125). Specifically, I focus on the work of pediatrician Margaret Fries (1896–1987), the clinical psychologist Sibylle Escalona (1915–96) and her team members—child psychiatrist Mary Leitch (1914–?)…”