‘Racial differences have to be considered’: Lauretta Bender, Bellevue Hospital, and the African American psyche, 1936-52

Abstract

This paper examines one US psychiatrist's engagement between 1936 and 1952 with a racialist strain of evolutionary thought. When Lauretta Bender began working with Bellevue Hospital's disproportionately black population, the psychiatric literature still circulated the crude evolutionary proposition that blacks remained stuck at a more primitive stage of development. In the 1930s, drawing insights from holistic, mechanistic and environmentalist thinking on the relationship between mind and body, Bender developed her own more circumspect racialist position. Although she largely abandoned her underdetermined version of racialism in the 1940s for an approach that left out race as an active factor of analysis, this paper contends that she probably never wrote off black primitivity as a theoretical possibility.

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

“…These treatments were given with the same rationale as similar treatments for adults in this period, and were a continuation of those used at the same hospital by Frances Cottington from 1941 ( Cottington, 1941 ). Bender had also written extensively on the ‘primitive’ minds of her African-American patients in a manner that was unselfconscious, privileged and racially motivated ( Doyle, 2010 ). None of this sat well with a growing international community facing up to the realities of World War II, challenging racism and constructing new understandings of children’s developmental needs and rights in collaboration with UNESCO, UNICEF and the WHO.…”

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

“…Similarly, the popular pediatric textbook Holt's Diseases of Infancy and Childhood stated that behavior problems could be due to ‘faulty heredity or faulty environment’ or, most commonly, a mix of the two ( Holt, 1936 : 759). Even if increasingly criticized, hereditary theories of mental illness intersected with racial ideology and biological theories of racial difference ( Doyle, 2010 ; Dwyer, 2006 ; Gambino, 2008 ; Klineberg, 1935 : 241–52; Weizmann, 2010 ). In her publications, Fries did not engage with hereditarian or racialist thought but used a broad notion of constitution based on assessments of physical condition, nervous development, and infant behavior.…”