Mental Hygiene, Psychoanalysis, and Interwar Psychology
The Making of the Maternal Deprivation Hypothesis
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3481332 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Bican Polat (0000-0003-4216-2633), L Bican Polat (0000-0001-5233-8925, Tsinghua University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 112 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 266-290 |
| Publication date | 2021-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Isis (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-1753 • E-ISSN: 1545-6994 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/714599 |
| OpenAlex | W3170249957 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 40 |
The maternal deprivation hypothesis was arguably the most discussed debate in midcentury psychiatry. Combined with the gender ideology prevalent in America and Britain, it solidified the idea that the mother-child relationship had formative influence on personality development. This essay explores the formation of this hypothesis by situating its knowledge claims against an institutional innovation set to prevent juvenile delinquency and promote mental hygiene, the establishment of child guidance clinics on both sides of the Atlantic in the late 1920s. It then tracks the development of investigative agendas by child guidance practitioners, examining the practices they adopted to construct psychological knowledge claims in conformity with preventive objectives and positivist standards. Shifting the historiographical focus toward the clinical scenes in which psychological assertions were made, the essay examines how investigators sought to determine the "pathogenic" influence of early parental environment by way of estimating its emotional qualities. It argues that it was this positivist-determinist effort to achieve preventive goals that foregrounded the role of the mother in the etiology of personality disturbance and marked the knowledge field that came to be called the maternal deprivation debate
Conformity · Criminology · Developmental psychology · Historiography · Ideology · Juvenile delinquency · Personality · Political science · Politics · Positivism · Psychoanalysis · Social science · Sociology · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology
Constructing the Subject
The Psychiatric Persuasion
Anaclitic Depression
Hospitalism
Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
Interprefactions
Thorns and Thistles
The dangerous age of childhood”
Infant rearing as a factor in foster home replacement
Psychological privation in infancy and subsequent adjustment
Infant rearing and problem behavior
Personality distortion and early institutional care
The social nature of the mother's tie to her child
The scientific claims of British child guidance, 1918–45
The Nature and Nurture of Love
Meyer's dealings with Jones
Divergences in American psychiatry during the Depression
The infantile disorders of hospitalism and anaclitic depression
Types of One
Bowlby before Bowlby
The rise and crisis of psychoanalysis in the United States
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |