A Girl’s Childhood examines the history of a unique longitudinal study during the 1950s—a time when the bound aries between childhood and adulthood crisply, if briefly, came into focus across the U.S. social spectrum for the first time. Somewhat implausibly, Milton Senn, director of the Yale Child Study Center, assembled a team of psychoanalysts, developmentalists, pediatricians, and educators to initiate an intensive observational study of children and their parents. This eclectic group produced a remarkably detailed record of children’s developmental trajectories from infancy through middle childhood. Their ambition was to devise a general psychoanalytic theory of child development based on careful, skilled observations. The narratives they created in weekly or biweekly sessions in multiple venues were recorded on audiotape and transcribed, then summarized, interpreted, and distributed for weekly and monthly group discussions by the team. The process notes from these sessions and the team’s discussions would form an extraordinarily rich archival record. The project was singular in the expanse of the description it offered, for the depth and vintage of its analysis, and for the insights it still provides into early and middle childhood material in the post–World War II era. But it was also remarkable in its anticipation of many aspects of the contemporary scholarly landscape in developmental studies. As developmentalist-historian Frank Kessel has observed of the study, its emphasis on “widespread discourse and institutional action surrounding ‘inter’- and even ‘trans-disciplinarity’” was precocious in its integration of mental health, pediatrics, psychoanalysis, and social science. The coalescence of the study’s investigators represented a historic convergence of U.S. psychoanalytic, behavioral, and pediatric science under the guiding influence of Ernst Kris, a rising star among the intellectual émigrés fleeing Nazi Europe. Kris’s group exemplified the kind of “team science” that was to become the mark of innovation in psychological research toward the end of the twentieth century. Similarly, remarks Kessel, the study exhibits “current moves towards ‘mixed methods,’ [or] greater openness to qualitative methods (for example, ethnography) in social science disciplines where those had been until quite recently taboo.” In what would become known as the “Yale Longitudinal Study” (YLS), such divergent approaches were well, if unevenly, represented. The study’s methods of data collection, corpus of documents, and process notes, specifically, represent a unique “scientific” and humanistic contribution by an unprecedented collaboration of psychoanalysts at the peak of their intellectual and professional influence in American academic research and medicine.1
Yet the study was hampered in a number of ways. Kris, who was its leading light and who was recruited by Senn to organize the study, died suddenly only a few years after its launch. In addition, its protocol was not laid out in the manner of experimental developmental science that was typical of the time or thereafter. It was, as Andrew Fearnley has pointed out, “action research,” in which experiment and therapy were iterative and open-ended—a research design that would be unrecognizable today. How the researcher-clinicians related to one another is also unclear. Kris was their guiding force, but Anna Freud consulted with the group periodically and it remains for a future scholar to assess her influence on the orientation and conduct of each researcher-clinician. Certainly Anna Freud’s interest in the mother-child bond and the concept of “lines of development” are evident throughout, but each staff member brought his or her own psychoanalytic preoccupations (and particular theoretical emphasis from his or her training) to bear on the material. Samuel Ritvo, the psychiatrist who saw the primary subject of this book (“Evelyn”) over the course of a decade, pursued in their weekly sessions his career-long interest in the resolution of aggression, which he believed to be universal and fundamental to human developmental work. The role of aggression, as any reader of the process notes will see, guided both his interactions with Evelyn and his interpretation of her path through childhood.2
The field of psychoanalysis was both at high tide as an intellectual force in North American intellectual life and approaching the peak of its popularity with the U.S. public. This no doubt had its own shaping, even sometimes distortive, effect on the interests of its chief players and the character of their interactions as researcher-clinicians.3 But it also undoubtedly played a part in the way that therapists utilized and leaned on the rest of the YLS staff: preschool teachers, social workers, and the group’s pediatricians. Earlier in the century, the medical profession had yielded to the authority of educational psychologists and public school officials in determining the care and destiny of so-called feeble-minded children (children with special needs). But even if the educational and therapeutic custodianship of the “feeble-minded” had been resolved by the 1920s, the landscape of expertise on the health and development of children shifted dramatically during the interwar years. The field of child health and welfare became at once more medicalized and increasingly concerned with the trajectory of children’s psychological, emotional, and cognitive growth. Academic psychology was ascendant, in general, but within psychology departments in the United States, research, whether funded by foundations or by the federal government, needed to be justified scientifically. Breakthroughs in American medicine during the interwar period and just after had enhanced the prestige of the American medical profession and in turn the “mental sciences,” such as psychiatry and psychoanalysis, since both required their practitioners to receive medical training.
The orientation of the physicians in the YLS had been etiological. Their domain was mental disease and health in individuals. The YLS, moreover, was their project and it was underwritten by the major private foundation concerned with juvenile health at that time, the Commonwealth Fund, which poured millions of dollars into Yale University between 1921 and 1982. Since the medical school was the primary recipient of its largesse at Yale, and the locus of the YLS was the medical school’s Child Study Center, we can safely assume that the contributions of YLS staff members were framed in terms familiar to the professional hierarchies and jealousies of the day. Educators involved with the study, then, were likely to have yielded to the medical authorities in these discussions even though the group’s method was supposed to be interdisciplinary and collaborative.
A half century later, we the authors of A Girl’s Childhood have set out to show how “the concept of ‘the child,’ the status of developmental studies of children, and the nascent methodology of longitudinal sampling are historical, sociocultural constructions that reflect contextually-grounded assumptions, values, interests, and ideas.”4 It is our hope, therefore, that despite the limitations of the Yale Longitudinal Study, this book will be of interest to historians of contemporary America, historians of childhood and family life, and specialists in the history of child psychiatry and developmental psychology. Similarly, the nature of the material as well as the combined historical and clinical analysis of this study and its documentation will make the volume useful for sociologists and anthropologists examining changes in the American family during the second half of the twentieth century. But we also expect that practicing child therapists, child psychoanalysts, and developmentalists interested in observational accounts of children’s imaginary play, as well as mental health clinicians-in-training, who have few opportunities to discuss the work of experienced clinicians, will find it uniquely useful too—and will be sufficiently intrigued to want to access the archival material for use in their clinical teaching and writing.
The purpose of this book, then, is twofold. The foremost is to highlight the extraordinary character of the records of the YLS, which document the early and middle childhood years of a dozen children in New Haven County as they interacted weekly with a team of therapist-researchers at the Yale Child Study Center between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s. The “raw” transcripts of their visits offer extraordinary views into the unfolding capacities of children’s cognitive, emotional, and social growth at a time in the United States when white, middle-class family life was held up as an ideal both in the dominant culture of postwar America and as a significant component of Cold War ideology abroad. Two-parent, nuclear families living in single-family dwellings, with stay-at-home-mothers, breadwinning fathers, and evenly spaced children born early in their mother’s child-bearing years, imbued a pervasive cultural aspiration with sufficient truth to impugn anyone whose race, sexual orientation, or marital status deviated from the new norm.5 But “the family” of this era and the childhood it promised its children were the short-lived culmination of peculiar, converging historical circumstances. The childhood touted by 1950s-style families was a fragile construct, subject to long-term demographic, economic, and social forces that eventually relegated this newly fabricated cultural ideal to the realm of historical mythmaking.6
Our second purpose is to reflect on, analyze, and contextualize the intellectual worldview of the therapist-researchers involved in the study as a window on the history of post–World War II child-development, child-psychiatric, and child-psychoanalytic theory. One of our authors offers an insightful assessment of the history of developmentally oriented longitudinal studies, and another illuminates the context of psychoanalytic practice in postwar western New England and New Haven, but we do not offer a comprehensive history of developmental science generally in the mid-twentieth century. Instead what we present here is intended to supplement a probing, provocative literature that extends back to the work of Ellen Herman twenty-five years ago and contributions more recently by Nikolas Rose, Elizabeth Lunbeck, Eva Moskowitz, Barbara Beatty, Emily Cahan, and Julia Grant. Deborah Weinstein’s compelling look at the role of psychiatry in pathologizing American family life during the post–World War II period offers a complementary and much more thorough examination of the sibling field of family therapy over the same years.7
The domains of children’s mental health and developmental science grew in complementary directions after mid-century. Until then, as Fearnley notes, developmental issues (specifically cognitive development and endowment) and pathology were viewed by child psychiatry as distinct domains. But after World War II, two shifts occurred. The ascendance of psychoanalysis in American psychiatry heightened attention to children’s development, particularly in light of work by Anna Freud, John Bowlby, and others on the significance of the mother-child relationship in shaping normal as well as disturbed psychological outcomes. At the same time as this “developmental paradigm” was taking form, child welfare advocates and those in the emerging multidisciplinary field of child development were increasingly focusing on the mental health of children.
The emerging developmental paradigm had several defining features: a declining faith in children’s innate resiliency and pre programmed constitutional strength in favor of a view of children as fragile and highly sensitive to their environments; a scheme of children’s development as stage-like with consequential outcomes—which thus reinforced the importance of intervention at earlier ages; the rise of a corps of professionals (academic, research-oriented psychologists, psychiatrists, pediatricians, and educators) who stressed the need for parental vigilance and the influence of parental care; and finally and perhaps most significantly, an expanded cohort of middle-class mothers conversant in childrearing literature, who zealously applied the lessons of the most contemporary parenting techniques.8 The group assembled at the Yale Child Study Center was decidedly focused on the problem of identifying developmental outcomes and the sources of mental health and pathology in the child’s interaction with her or his environment. The orientation of their observations dovetailed well with claims made by family therapists about psychiatric disorders, since the field was moving away from an exclusive concentration on pathology to an emphasis on the healthy development of the individual child and to understanding pathology through the lens of normal development.9
We think of the rich, multifaceted material in A Girl’s Childhood as a kind of “meta” case study, and so have organized the book around a selection of YLS process notes, which appears at its center. We invite readers, then, to wade midstream into young Evelyn’s middle childhood years with their own questions and purposes.
The book is divided into three parts: historical, documentary, and interpretive. In the first section, Stephen Lassonde qualifies the meaning of “the child” as a historically constructed subject. He reminds us that the boundary between child and adult in its now-familiar form was only recently delineated, that its acceptance and enforcement across the social spectrum even within specific societies is even more novel, and that the definition, use, and experiences of children have varied widely across the world.
In the same vein, Andrew Fearnley places the Yale Longitudinal Study in the context of other longitudinal studies during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Fearnley observes that the longitudinal study filled a gap: in the absence of systematic ways to study children’s cognitive, social, and emotional development and the later emergence of sub-specialist residency programs, it became the “method of choice” for many child psychiatrists from the 1950s through the mid-1970s because it fit their “interest in epidemiological techniques, preventative forms of intervention, and new ideas about disease etiology.” More important, Fearnley asserts, the YLS reflected a signal moment in the study of children within the mental sciences. Before the middle decades of the twentieth century, he points out, “most mental-health professionals associated childhood with mental deficiency, rather than mental illness, posing questions about children inspired by the recapitulation perspectives of an earlier generation of natural scientists.” In the post–World War II era, he writes, children’s “capacity for intellect, an independence of action and thought, autonomy and rationality” became fundamental to the study of children as objects of scientific inquiry and of “childhood” itself.
David Carlson’s essay recreates the institutional history of the YLS within its regional intellectual and disciplinary environment: the so-called “New Haven–Stockbridge Group,” represented by the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and New Haven’s Western New England Psychoanalytic Society. Carlson skillfully limns a network of psychoanalytically oriented behavioral and social scientists ranging from John Dollard, Erik Erikson, and Anna Freud to Jules Coleman and August B. Hollingshead. He locates these figures in a professional landscape that includes the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, the Austen Riggs Center, and New Haven’s fledgling Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis. Their shared affiliations and jealous rivalries resemble the narratives of dynastic feuds nested within some of the preeminent research incubators of the day, such as the Commonwealth Fund, Yale’s Institute of Human Relations, and Yale’s formidable medical and law schools.
Viewed from one angle, the YLS can be seen as a kind of microenvironment constituted by the personalities and collective expertise of Yale Child Study Center staff. Linda Mayes’s chapter offers a complement to Carlson’s, a prosopography, if you will, of the Yale Child Study Center from Arnold Gesell to young clinician and future head Albert Solnit. Mayes shows how the YLS was confected from a unique concoction of fate, historical contingency, and the savvy recruiting instincts of its director, Milton Senn.
Clinical and developmental psychologist Virginia Demos of the Austen Riggs Center and John Demos, renowned U.S. historian, collaborate to examine the methodology of the YLS. In their concluding chapter to the first part, they explore the idiosyncrasy, genius, and blind spots in the conception and execution of the study while describing the merits of its process notes as historical documents.
In the second part of the book, Diane Kaplan from the Manuscripts and Archives division of the Yale University Library undertakes a more literal examination of the documents as archival records, discussing their provenance and preservation (or neglect), as well as the difficulties of offering access to a wider audience. She also illustrates how important it is for archivists to understand the context and history of the documents they are responsible for preserving and cataloguing. To this end and expanding on Mayes’s chapter, Kaplan begins with a closer examination of how the YLS began, focusing on what the study and the resulting documents were expected to provide. The responsibilities of professional archivists often include a description of the “architecture,” purpose, and constraints of a body of documents, but Kaplan also offers a very useful discussion of the archivists’ efforts to preserve the anonymity of the study’s subjects while helping make these enormously rich documents accessible. Rounding out the book’s second part is a sampling of the process notes from Ritvo’s sessions with Evelyn, a sampling that is intended to allow the reader to interpret for her- or himself this little girl’s emergence into personhood. These are, we think, a highly evocative set of records, the centerpiece of this book and the very reason for bringing these materials to light.
In part three, Mayes and Lassonde interpret Evelyn’s process notes, focusing on her awakening interest in how her status as a female relates to the male-dominated social hierarchy that she encounters at every stage of her growth. Evelyn, as noted elsewhere, had the most enduring involvement with the study, which makes her transcripts an unusually rich source of information about children’s development at this time. Ritvo and members of the Yale Child Study Center contribute contemporaneous observations of Evelyn’s therapy from 1954 to 1963 that were reworked for this volume by Ritvo just months before he died.10 Finally, Wayne Downey, clinical professor at the Yale Child Study Center, offers his own reflections on the process notes of another child in the study whose involvement was of briefer duration and certainly more tumultuous than Evelyn’s. Downey’s analysis provides an intriguing contrasting approach and the materials of the child he writes about offer an interesting counterpoint to Evelyn’s interactions with Ritvo. Downey, we hasten to note, worked as a bursary student at the Child Study Center while an undergraduate at Yale during the study and was tasked with transcribing tapes to text in triplicate. His own contribution to the YLS, then, spans his entire career and the existence of the process notes is owed quite literally to his laborious efforts.
The accumulated day-to-day records and weekly summaries of the observations of the children and parents in this study provide a massive, granular accounting of the moment-to-moment interactions among therapists, children, and parents. Evelyn’s case study presents an arresting view into the way one child came to understand herself in relation to the world around her. Interactions with family, friends, neighbors, church members, and teachers reveal an unfolding sense of self across the decade of her involvement in the study—against the backdrop of a highly gendered social order and the rapidly changing configuration of social class in post–World War II America.11 Our collaboration as historians and developmentalists explores the socio cultural context of the Yale Longitudinal Study in Eisenhower’s America—one in which heightened awareness of gender roles, a rapidly expanding middle class, the acceleration of migration from cities to suburbs, and rising levels of education prepared the ground for a social and cultural revolution that, within the decade, contributed to the civil rights and feminist movements, the contraceptive pill, zero population growth efforts, pacifism, and a “youth revolt.” By bringing these materials to light and reflecting on their value to historians and developmentalists, we hope to contribute to a clearer understanding of the fascinating contradictions that emerged during these years.
NOTES
1. Frank Kessel, draft of commentary on manuscript for Mayes and Lassonde, August 24, 2010.
2. See Chapter 4. Note that “Evelyn” is the pseudonym that Ritvo and other members of the YLS team used to refer to “Beth,” their study’s subject. The process notes refer to her as one or the other, but published manuscripts from the study often refer to her as “Evelyne,” but occasionally as “Cathy.” A family name of “Olsen” was also assigned to Beth’s/Evelyn’s family but it was just as common to refer to them as “Parr” in the process notes, or just as commonly “Mrs. P.,” for Evelyn’s mother, and published articles at times referred to her as “Mrs. L.” Apart from the many “flavors” of psychoanalytic theory that differentiated this group of clinicians, pervasive was the importance of maternal love and the sway of the mother-child bond above all others. See Marga Vicedo’s illuminating discussion of concepts of “mother love” during this period in The Nature and Nurture of Love: From Imprinting to Attachment in Cold War America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), esp. chap. 5.
3. On the popularity of psychoanalysis during the first few decades after World War II, see Deborah Weinstein, The Pathological Family: Postwar America and the Rise of Family Therapy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 24; also see Nathan Hale, The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States: Freud and the Americans, 1917–1985 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Jonathan Freedman, “From Spellbound to Vertigo: Alfred Hitchcock and Therapeutic Culture in America,” in Jonathan Freedman and Richard Millington, eds., Hitchcock’s America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 77–98; and Michael Sulman, “The Humanization of the American Child: Benjamin Spock as a Popularizer of Psycholanalytic Thought,” Journal of the History of Behavioral Science 9 (1973): 258–65, all cited in Weinstein, Pathological Family.
4. Kessel commentary, August 24, 2010.
5. The classic formulation of this is Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988).
6. “Family and Demography in Postwar America: A Hazard of New Fortunes?” in Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig, eds., A Companion to Post-1945 America (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 3–19.
7. See Chapters 2 and 3. On the history of psychoanalysis, the rise of “therapeutic culture,” and developmental science in twentieth-century America, see Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Free Association Books, 1989); Elizabeth Lunbeck, The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Eva S. Moskowitz, In Therapy We Trust: America’s Obsession with Self-Fulfillment (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Barbara Beatty, Emily Cahan, and Julia Grant, eds., When Science Encounters the Child: Education, Parenting, and Child Welfare in 20th-Century America (New York: Teachers College Press, 2006); and Weinstein, The Pathological Family.
8. See Stephen Lassonde, “Age, Schooling, and Life Stages,” in Paula Fass, ed., The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World (London: Routledge, 2013), 211–26.
9. See Weinstein, Pathological Family, esp. chaps. 1 and 3.
10. Ritvo’s son, David, has contributed a very appreciative assessment of his father’s work with Evelyn, which we have included here as well.
11. Wayne Downey offers his own perspective in this volume on a second child who participated in the study for a much shorter period; see Chapter 10.