Looking In and Seeing Out
In the thousands of pages of process notes by the Yale Child Study Center clinicians on Evelyn and her suburban five-member family, we learn that Evelyn’s mother grows restless at devoting all of her time to raising three children. While the children are still young, she gets a job, first as a waitress and then as a substitute grade-school teacher. In her own therapy, she also reveals her diminishing interest in sexual intimacy with her husband. Much of the family’s focus in therapy is on the stormy and disruptive willfulness of the middle child, “Wendy”—our subject’s younger sister—who supplies the impetus for the family to seek a comprehensive therapeutic treatment for their unhappiness. While the parents’ difficulty with Wendy is referred to throughout these records (and indeed, Wendy ultimately runs away from home as a teenager), one of the few comments by the parents that speaks to their motive in committing the entire family to therapy is uttered by the mother early on: “All our family are coming apart at the middle.”1
The turn to psychotherapy itself signifies a rising tide of middle-class introspection, on one hand, and, on the other, growing faith in the expertise of psychologists, psychiatrists, and pediatricians in refining childrearing techniques.2 As we have already suggested, an intense optimism underlay the assumptions of the longitudinal study in particular. Even so, we cannot fail to observe that such optimism permeated much of American life well into the 1960s.3
We offer unabashedly, then, a “world-in-a-grain-of-sand” approach here, for the material not only provides vivid descriptions of everyday life—the complex interactions of a growing family during its children’s entire early years of development—it also records what they (and their therapists) thought about their lives with one another as they were living it and speaking about it with the therapists in the study. Historians, unlike scientists in any field, must rely on what shards of evidence we can find—we cannot manufacture it. In this instance the most compelling feature of the study’s process notes is that they display a multifaceted subject emerging in “real time” and in this instance, under a special lens of psychoanalytically informed therapy. Both the family and the therapist were using the psychoanalytic lens to look closely at their lives as these were lived, felt, and reflected on. However flawed by the imperfections of the study’s design or the loss of Ernst Kris’s guiding hand—however shaped by the individual intellectual biases and predispositions of the clinicians who worked with these families, these materials offer not only a compelling view of the behavior that forms a fine-grained, moving picture of change over time, but also an accompanying “soundtrack” with commentary on their exchanges.
The lure of these materials for historians, then, is the substantiation of cultural change evident in the details of ordinary people’s everyday lives. A similar lure is present for “clinical historians” who seek evidence about their patients’ internal transformations in their stories about the ordinary, and sometimes extraordinary, events and relationships in their day-to-day lives. Such detail is rendered lavishly—indeed, overwhelmingly—by the case records of the Yale Longitudinal Study. Yet what makes this collection so extraordinary is that we have the privilege of “listening in” on what children (and their parents) thought about their exterior worlds—family, neighborhood, school—as well as their interior lives: how children, especially, perceived themselves and others; what they did with the way adults constructed their lives emotionally; how adults equipped them to conquer their fears or feed their fantasies of triumph; and how children armed themselves emotionally against the very adults whose love was the ultimate measure of acceptance and competence. We also are privileged to listen in to how the adults constructed, reconciled, and revised their roles as parents with their own self-identities, how they saw themselves enduring or not in their children, and how as their children grew up, they looked ahead to who they might become after their active parenting roles diminished.
EVELYN’S FAMILY, THE YALE STUDY, AND NEW HAVEN’S ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL HISTORY
Born in 1951, Evelyn began her therapy when she was three-and-a-half years old and her work with her therapist, Samuel Ritvo, continued for over nine years, until she was twelve. Evelyn was the eldest of three girls. When she began therapy, her sister “Wendy” was two years old and “Tammy,” the youngest, was a four-month-old baby. Evelyn’s parents were lower-middle class. Her father’s family were of northern European descent and had migrated to the United States many generations earlier. Her mother’s family were from Denmark and solidly middle class. It is notable that much of the father’s material in therapy deals with his “feelings of inferiority,” feelings that the clinicians periodically referred to when observing his complex relationship with Evelyn. Process notes from his therapy suggest that his low self-esteem was grounded in his relationship with his own parents. His father demeaned him as inadequate and insufficiently masculine, and had deprived him of a college education in favor of his older sister. His mother, with whom he was close, nonetheless inculcated in him a distrustful attitude toward other women.4
While factors such as socioeconomic status, religion, ethnicity, and race were not included in the protocol for recruiting subjects for the Yale Longitudinal Study, there was a self-conscious effort to attract a pool of subjects in rough proportion to the city’s demographic composition. Indeed, the new field of medical sociology had been forged at Yale and its medical school during the middle decades of the century. Precedent for the graphic representation of an “ecology” of socioeconomic status in New Haven during the 1930s had been advanced by Yale sociologist Maurice Davie, who had published a small handbook on socioeconomic status modeled on the work of the Chicago school of sociology. Davie composed a statistical portrait of New Haven’s population and social status, which he mapped onto the city’s political wards. Immediately after World War II, Yale sociologists August Hollingshead, Jerome K. Myers, and Bertram H. Roberts worked with psychiatrist Frederick C. Redlich of the Yale School of Medicine to devise an index of socioeconomic status utilized specifically to correlate social stratification with mental illness.5 Their efforts pioneered the incipient field of medical sociology. Hollingshead’s team carried out a ten-year, two-volume study of mental illness in New Haven’s population from the late 1940s to the late 1950s. So again, although the sample size of the children recruited into the study, the expertise of the Yale Child Study Center staff, and the explicit goals of the study diluted any meaningful attempt at fielding a demographically representative child/family study, the social differences of the families’ backgrounds (and between spouses and their families of origin, for instance) informed the observations made by its clinician-researchers.6
New Haven’s population peaked in 1910, when 25 percent of its residents were of Italian descent. It was a city whose economy and population had been built on making carriages, specialized hardware, clocks, rubber, and munitions during the nineteenth century.7 These industries relied heavily on the kind of semiskilled labor that fueled the demand for immigration across the industrial Northeast and Midwest in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the end of World War II, however, the structure of the city’s economy and demography had shifted profoundly. Carriage manufacture, which had been dependent on sales to southern states before the Civil War, never truly recovered the predominance it had enjoyed during its antebellum expansion; and of course with the introduction of inexpensive, massproduced automobiles by the early twentieth century, carriage-making and ancillary metal-making went into sharp, permanent decline in New Haven. Munitions manufacture ascended in importance, however, as the plant that made Winchester weapons boomed during World War I, becoming the largest employer in New Haven County. The health of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company was sustained through World War II, and though it declined thereafter, the company continued to be an important source of jobs and wealth through the Korean War. With the demise of heavy industry, the garment industry took up the slack during the early and middle decades of the twentieth century, again employing mostly semi-, and unskilled workers, and primarily women. But large-scale manufacturing at mammoth industrial sites was fading and in its place emerged dozens of smaller-scale operations run out of former factories and warehouses. As the garment industry was unionized in New York during and after World War I, so-called runaway shops sprang up overnight north and south of New York City along the coastlines of Connecticut and in New Jersey. Garment makers of all kinds along the Eastern Seaboard employed the cheap labor and skills brought by immigrant women from southern and eastern Europe. With the coming of World War II, male workers were siphoned into the armed services, so jobs previously reserved for nonimmigrant males in New Haven’s manufacturing plants like Winchester and Sargent’s (the city’s prominent lock and hardware manufacturer) became available to adult workers who had not been drafted into military service. Increasingly these were African Americans involved in a pattern of chain migration from the Carolinas, as well as second-generation immigrant women. The Great Migration, which had barely touched New Haven during its most transformative phase (before World War I and the Great Depression) began pushing northward into Connecticut. Munitions and other industries that had previously discriminated against African Americans were forced to open their doors and offer opportunities to employ, and even promote, workers in the most menial occupations into semiskilled and skilled positions. As a consequence, the character of New Haven’s population began to shift dramatically.8 Notably, then, while the very small sample of families recruited into the Yale Longitudinal Study was diverse socioeconomically, educationally, religiously, and ethnically, there were no African American children participating in the study. Clearly “self-selection” played a role in the recruitment process.
EVELYN’S FAMILY RELATIONS
Evelyn’s mother seemed like an unhappy woman—she was characteristically described by the clinicians as “tense”—and it was not clear how stable her own parents’ marriage had been.9 Evelyn’s mother found Evelyn difficult and hard to understand, though objectively, sister Wendy was far more troublesome and temperamental. In the clinical material, the conflict between Evelyn and her middle sister is most prominent while considerations of the younger sister were in the background. Soon after Evelyn joined the study, the entire family was seen by the staff’s psychotherapists, but Evelyn’s mother left treatment after a few years, finding it to be too time-consuming with the new demands imposed by a part-time job that she had taken in a restaurant. Her husband remained in therapy, however, even after the family had moved a couple of suburbs away from the Yale Child Study Center and at the cost of considerable effort, for to do so he had to assume primary responsibility for transporting the children back and forth to their sessions.
In general, the father was perceived by Evelyn as volatile and capable of unpredictable and intense anger. While it was never articulated by the parents, Evelyn came to believe over the course of several years that her parents had wanted one of their children to be a boy and that her father in particular was disappointed about having had no sons.10 He frequently felt and pointedly expressed irritation with Evelyn, whom he identified as most resembling his own inclination toward indirectness and dissembling in dealings with others. Evelyn’s mother similarly voiced concern about what she called Evelyn’s “slyness” in her attempts to “get her own way.” Like her husband, she disliked what she perceived to be Evelyn’s manipulative style of gratifying her wants, but she was not as annoyed about this tendency in Evelyn as he was.11 Clear “favorites” among the children were verbalized by the parents. Revealingly, Wendy, the middle child, who seemed to be aggressive and boisterous with everyone, was the father’s favorite; he admired the very aspects of her personality that he admittedly lacked, that is, her assertiveness and straightforwardness. The mother favored the youngest daughter but she appreciated Evelyn’s obedient nature and her frequent attempts to understand the mother’s feelings. She interpreted Evelyn’s efforts to anticipate her desires as mostly genuine, even though these same tendencies irked her at times. The mother also expressed an almost inexplicable fury at Evelyn from time to time. Perhaps as a result, many of Evelyn’s strategies in dealing with others appeared as attempts to deflect anger or to “get what she wanted without asking for it.”12
AGGRESSION AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF GENDER: EXCERPTS FROM THE CLINICAL RECORD
We offer the following three excerpts from Evelyn’s clinical record—“snapshots” from Evelyn’s therapeutic interactions with Ritvo at ages five, seven, and ten—to illustrate the kind of material available from the study for historical review. These excerpts of Ritvo’s original process notes include Ritvo’s statements summarizing his formulation of a session. We chose to present the therapeutic process materials because they are the most detailed records in the collection and they comprise the majority of the entire recorded data from the longitudinal study.
While we have chosen to feature sessions illustrating a theme that was particularly strong in the cultural currents of the time—changing gender roles and how women or girls could and could not be assertive and aggressive—Ritvo was very interested in aggression and in gender development. Aggression, in particular, was the overarching theme in his clinical/intellectual work and at the very least, we need to acknowledge that he was more inclined to record this type of material and perhaps to elicit this in Evelyn as he engaged with her on this thematic playing field.13 Theoretical shifts in psychoanalytic developmental theory and clinical practice with children in the next two decades mean that present-day clinicians might well see the material Evelyn presents in these excerpts through different filters—those dealing with her concern about her relationships and attachments to others and her worry about being left alone, unloved, or rejected in favor of her adored, though fiery, middle sister.14 The latter emphasis reflects a so-called object-relations perspective that began to influence psychoanalytic work with children by the mid-1960s. Indeed, the family focus of the Yale Longitudinal Study reflects the emerging influence of the object-relations perspective, which describes the process of developing an individual mind or psychic organization in relation to other persons in the individual’s environment. Further, the object-relations perspective emphasizes that individuals relate to others and to experiences according to how they were shaped by their family experiences in infancy and childhood. An individual who experienced, for example, a neglectful upbringing might as an adult expect similar behavior, especially from those persons who consciously or unconsciously remind that individual of someone from their childhood. Further, these internalized schemas or representations of people become the templates by which a person anticipates the behaviors and feelings of others in his or her present relationships. Therapists observing through this filter might well have emphasized different aspects of Evelyn’s material in their notes and formulations and indeed, might have elicited different material in their work with Evelyn. Hence, this clinical material not only reflects Evelyn’s larger cultural and social world; it also is a measure of the larger theoretical and professional world of child analysis and psychotherapy in the 1950s.
An additional caveat is important here. We are presenting only material from Evelyn’s work with her therapist, but the value of the Child Study Center’s longitudinal study was that other therapists were simultaneously documenting interactions with the children’s parents. With a few exceptions—for context—we have chosen not to present parallel material from parents’ therapies or interviews so as not to overwhelm our method’s objective: to demonstrate how a historian might fruitfully use clinical material such as therapeutic process notes of interactions with a child. Records from more than one family member add to the complexity of the historian’s task but do not change its intent or focus.
A word about the “normative” developmental arc for a child five to ten years of age will be helpful here. Children of this age are starting to enter a broader social world with their entry into school. They encounter other children and adults beyond their family. Indeed, for children from Evelyn’s time, entry into school represented an even more dramatic shift in peer relations than is currently true, inasmuch as many fewer children in the 1950s and 1960s first attended preschool programs or out-of-home child care. Children of this age are also developing cognitive skills for more logical and complex symbolic thinking. They begin to take on the values and beliefs of the adults around them and start to struggle with complex feelings like shame, guilt, and disgust. They come to understand that others have a different point of view and different knowledge than they have, and that these differences have consequences for how others behave and for their interactions with others. They become curious about what others think and feel, that is, about the mind of other persons in addition to what they can directly observe about others’ behavior. During this developmental period, children begin to develop a more defined sense of self and compare themselves to others. Their widening peer group in schools facilitates exposure to social comparison and competition. They begin to recognize disparities and differences in their abilities relative to other children, and self-esteem and self-worth become important developmental themes. In this comparison of abilities, gender is key—children are investigating the typical or expected gender roles for boys and girls. In each of these respects, Evelyn appears to be a typically developing child.
The records of the Yale Longitudinal Study afford us a closer look at Evelyn’s internal world—and especially how she is defining who she is vis-à-vis others—than might be available by typical observational studies in middle childhood. The first passage we highlight is from the process notes and comes from the spring of 1956, after a year-and-a-half of therapy. Evelyn is struggling with what it means to be angry and aggressive. She is just five years old now and is more often using imaginary play as a way of conveying her worries and thoughts.
[Evelyn] says she’s no longer afraid of witches . . . She told me that she had gotten over them “last night,” that it [her dream?] involved clowns and witches, that the clowns chased the witches. When they caught the witches they tied them up and when they got all the witches they changed clothes and places with them and became witches themselves. When I asked about the sex of the witches and clowns, she told me the witches were men and the clowns were women. The witches were men who wore witches’ wigs. . . . I talked with her further about the clowns and witches’ changing roles and changing the sex and she told me that women can change into men and I showed an interest in how and when this takes place. She intimated that it takes place when a girl is very, very small. That it has already taken place in Tammy. Tammy is a boy who has hair like a boy but she does not have a penis yet. Wendy only pretends she is a boy. About herself, Evelyn says that there are times when she would like to be a boy but she is not going to change. When she grows up she is still going to be an actress but is going to be married too and have children in addition to being an actress.15
In this excerpt, Evelyn’s play about very fluid gender—a boy can be a girl and a girl can become a boy—is typical for her age but also for Evelyn. Only a few months earlier, it should be noted, Evelyn had expressed the opinion that a woman could only do one or the other, but not be both a mother and an actress/breadwinner. She had also remarked in earlier sessions that she wanted to be an actress when she grew up but did not think that it was compatible with being a mother. Again, gender roles in her family tend to be fraught with difficult choices—being one gender means giving up some behaviors, feelings, and even desires. Also, as in her later material, aggression as with witches is a male trait, though the clowns are able to subdue the witches and then steal from them—they become witches in clown’s clothing and fool everyone. Recall too that this is Evelyn’s personal struggle in her family—her sister Wendy torments her and, in her eyes, “takes” from her. How can she subdue her sister and at the same time recover some of her assertiveness to win back her mother’s admiration? Is it possible, too, to see this material as reflective of the broader cultural dilemma for women of this era? Can they take on the career and professional aspirations of their male partners and at the same time seem feminine? If they continue to appear feminine, even stereotypically so, can they fulfill their silent, assertive aspirations without the world seeing them and branding them witch-like and surely not sufficiently feminine or attractive?
We turn now to a second excerpt. This comes from three years into Evelyn’s treatment, during her visits in November of 1958. Evelyn is seven years old, Wendy at the time is five, and Tammy, three. For several weeks Evelyn has been playing about aggression and fighting, angry feelings, and how to deal with being angry. She has also struggled with the prohibitions she seems to perceive about girls fighting, feeling angry, or being assertive—this is the province of boys and men or of very evil women (witches and so on) who perhaps in the totality of their evilness are not really women but a heinous, genderless mix.
Evelyn picks up the doll, says it is “stupid,” and throws it out the window (after two attempts). The therapist asks why she did this and she says because “it’s stupid.” “What’s the doll’s name?” he asks. She replies, “Matilda.” (This is the name he had given the “mean aunt/witch” the day before.) She wouldn’t answer further inquiries about what the doll had done. Her therapist writes:
She screamed back at me and I said maybe Matilda had made too much noise [reference to Evelyn’s singing the day before, causing the mother to react furiously] and that’s why she had to be thrown out. Evelyn continued shouting, looking fierce and angry at me and although this was always in a mock and playing way, the feeling portrayed was extremely intense. . . . She was very bossy and angry with me, she went into the play where she was the teacher and I was the bad boy. She complained to my mother about me, hit me with a ruler, tied my hands, made me stand in the corner, shot at me and finally burned me. Every motion and sound . . . I made was immediately shouted down while she glowered at me ferociously and kept attacking me . . . I said that I thought the teacher was being very mean to me, that she was behaving like a witch and that I was frightened when she looked at me with that horrible angry expression on her face.
She asked who was “boss” of the Child Study Center. She insisted that the “boss of the whole place must be a man who must be older than anybody else.” We talked about “who is the boss” in various places. Her aunt is the boss at school [she was her school’s principal] because she was born before every body and her father is the boss at home because he was born before the mother.
Age has its privileges, and remember that Evelyn is the oldest in her family. Thus there seems to be a contradiction as to who is the boss. At first it was the man; then it seemed to be the oldest one. The therapist wonders,
[W]hom the mother gets angry at and scolds at home? . . . and she told me that it’s not often at Tammy [the youngest] but most often at Wendy and sometimes at herself. . . . It seemed to me that this hour related to the mother’s temper and anger at the children . . . especially as Evelyn was the one that the mother attacked yesterday.16
The next week Evelyn continues her explicit play about gender and aggression as described again by her therapist:
In the [role] play she is again the woman who performs and is the one who is running a business. It seems to me that this may have connections with the mother’s having done some outside work for money in recent months [she works in a restaurant now]. It is as though the woman now is not only the boss but an important provider as well.
[S]he gives a rather remarkable summary of the cleavage lines in her own family: she said that Tammy is her mother’s favorite, Wendy is the father’s favorite, and first she said that she was the father’s favorite but then changed it and said that she [Evelyn] was the grandmother’s favorite. When I asked her about this switch, she said that at one time she was her father’s favorite, but the father preferred boys and therefore preferred Wendy because she plays like a boy.17
In this material, Evelyn’s therapist is keenly tuned into his patient’s concerns about being assertive and about defining her role in her family—who likes whom better, does standing up for oneself make a girl more or less likeable, is being the boss a privilege for boys only, can she boss her therapist around and still have him like her and see her? From the clinical perspective, Evelyn is able to represent these questions symbolically in her play and in direct questions/conversations with her therapists—at least from these records, she seems developmentally age-appropriate. Is Evelyn’s attention and worry about how girls can be assertive particularly heightened in her as she sees her mother turning more toward her younger sister—and by her mother’s belief (as she stated in an interview before Evelyn began her therapy) that boys are “brutal and attacking by nature”? Or were we to have had the advantage of this high magnification in the lives of many school-age girls from the late 1950s, would we have seen similarly intense worries and confusions? Does Evelyn mirror only timeless, age-expected efforts to understand the essence of being one gender or another? Or are her efforts granted a particular urgency not only because of her own family’s concerns, but also because of the cultural overtones of the time?
Our third excerpt comes near the end of Evelyn’s therapy in January of 1961. She is nearly ten years old. Her style of dealing with irritation and anger was to hide her feelings, pretend that she was not upset, while at the same time subtly working out her way. Her mother had taken a job outside the family in a restaurant, and her middle sister Wendy seemed more and more like their mother, at least according to Evelyn, who was still preoccupied with gender-specific behaviors.
Evelyn tells how the girls play doctor at home. . . . Wendy is the doctor, Evelyn wants to play nurse but often Wendy doesn’t let her. Evelyn asks her therapist if they can “change her day off so she can go to the gym class [her school doesn’t have a gym], then withdraws her request, giving the impression that she wants to show me how good she is by giving up something. . . . Getting peanuts, she tried to make it appear that I wanted them and she’s getting them for me.” This was again [acquiring] something for herself by making it appear that she was getting me something I wanted. I pointed this out to her and said how hard it seemed to be for her to say she wanted something, letting another person see she wanted it, she behaved as though she felt this was not the right thing to do.18
Evelyn has developed sophisticated and effective strategies for disguised assertiveness—she gets her way by appearing to nurture and care for others, a stereotypically feminine role that would only a few years later be repudiated by the early feminists. Her adaptation is a fragile one, for it is not always so effective with her middle sister or her mother. Nonetheless, it is a practiced and already integrated part of her personality. Again our questions—can we view this material both as an individual and a cultural narrative regarding gender differences in assertion, aggression, and the expression of any negative or angry emotions? May we view this narrative as a window on the cultural themes of the time and the dilemma facing many young girls as opportunities were beginning to widen for women in the workforce and as more women were becoming better educated?
Clifford Geertz has written that “societies, like lives, contain their own interpretations. One has only to learn how to gain access to them.” Putting aside the “only” in this epigram is of course an impossibility. For gaining access to interpretations, whether they inhere in societies or lives, is the entire point in trying to understand the past or children’s development. Indeed, each of our collaborations seeks its opposite in Geertz’s simile.19
Our method is to “read out” from a life—or more accurately, the representation of a life—to the society that shapes, supports, and tears at it. Our “sample,” such as it is, is miniscule. Yet the authors of the process notes that constitute the text, which now stands for that life, produced an enormous amount of information for us to interpret. If only we can learn “how to gain access” to the interpretations this life/text contains. So our method is also to try to understand how this developing girl (and her family) made use of the cultural discourse available to her to make sense of her self and of her world. How did she understand what was possible for her? How did she comprehend her future—its limitations and its promises? Much of how she understood was through the lens of gender. She grew up in a world in which females were portrayed as both the victims of men and the objects of their protection. Males were direct, active, aggressive, and even violent; females passive, yielding, surreptitious, and even sneaky.
The cultural discourse of the day—the “tool kit” of her consciousness—was, as we have suggested, a paradox, for the era that glorified marriage at a young age, self-fulfillment through childrearing, home-ownership, consumerism, and asymmetrical gender roles was perhaps the briefest “period” in America’s cultural history. One could realistically cite the years 1954 to 1958 as precisely those that most closely resembled the ideal of family life held out to upwardly mobile white Americans after World War II, when all the ingredients of family building came briefly into alignment. Marriage was seemingly stable, home ownership at an all-time high, divorce at a decades-long low, the proportion of male breadwinners was historically large, parents were young, and children were born and raised in close sequence during a very narrow span of the family’s life cycle. These were the mythical 1950s but the cultural ideals they enshrined were understood as very real for girls learning how to accommodate themselves to the expectations of their gender, not just during these few years of the mid-1950s but also for many years afterward.
In Evelyn’s material as processed by her therapist, we see those cultural ideals as lively constructions in her mind and her development. Her mother embraced these ideals and passed that legacy on to her daughter. Evelyn struggles, sometimes agonizingly, to decide what she, as a girl, could do and be. How assertive and demanding could she be before she would lose this ideal of femininity and if she crossed some invisible cultural, family line, would the price nonetheless be worth the gain? Perhaps a young girl today worries about the same questions in general, but chooses other cultural icons to represent them and the lines are not between feminine and non-feminine stereotypes but rather motherhood-career boundaries. How will she raise her children in a corporate, increasingly global, world and a world in which education looms large in determining so many outcomes related to definitions of success among contemporary middle-class Americans? Will she choose to raise children at all and how does this choice affect her sense of self and her visions of personal fulfillment? In other words, how will she advance in her work and begin her family? For a young white, middle-class girl today, it’s not whether she needs to give up an idealized feminine role but when or if she assumes motherhood alongside a profession. Across the generations, the developmental issue is the same; it is just expressed or represented using the cultural material most at hand.
So why is this observation important and why does it define the nature of the collaboration between historians and developmental clinicians? We suggest first that this collaboration goes beyond those skilled in each field learning the basic language and premises of the other—it is more than professional appreciation and respect. Rather, looking at lives up close to understand culture is like the prospector sifting patiently through a plate of ore looking for the gold flecks as clues to the lode that must lie upstream. How children and adults talk about their lives in and out of the clinical setting provides the gold flecks that lead us to the social-cultural vein. It is neither that cultural currents shape developmental themes nor that developmental themes exist outside of culture. There is an interaction—one shapes the other—and to understand and study this phenomenon, we need a lens that moves from the fine-grained detail to the large picture and back again. The records of the Yale Longitudinal Study offer us one way to use that lens to consider both a time of great sociocultural change in American family life and an era of transformation in our understanding of child and family development.
NOTES
1. Yale Child Study Center, Longitudinal Study YRG-37E (96-A-082), box 1 (October 31, 1955), 2, Yale Manuscripts and Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, New Haven. The interest in the parents’ sexuality was not unique to the psychoanalysts in this study but rather was part of an emerging “enlightenment” about human (and specifically female) sexuality during the postwar years. Recall that the Kinsey Report on human sexuality had been published only a few years before this study began, and as mentioned earlier in this volume, opinions about men’s and women’s divergent perceptions, experiences, and knowledge of sexuality varied greatly. See Alfred C. Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 1948); Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 1949); and Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton, 1963). For historical accounts of sexuality of the era, see John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), chaps. 11–13; Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Linda Gordon, The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), chap. 11; and Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Viking, 2005), 251–52.
2. See, e.g., Julia Grant, Raising Baby by the Book: The Education of American Mothers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Barbara Beatty, Emily D. Cahan, and Julia Grant, eds., When Science Encounters the Child: Education, Parenting, and Child-Welfare in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Teachers College Press, 2006); on the possible moral/philosophical implications of this trend, see Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (New York: Harper & Row, 1966).
3. For survey data on postwar optimism, see, e.g., John Modell, Into One’s Own: From Youth to Adulthood in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 219–20.
5. See Chapter 3, David Carlson’s essay in this volume, on the role of Redlich in particular in the emergence of Yale Child Study Center as a focal point of psychoanalysis in the United States during its heyday.
6. Maurice R. Davie, “The Pattern of Urban Growth,” in G. P. Murdock, ed., Studies in the Science of Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937), 132–61; August Hollingshead and Frederick C. Redlich, Social Class and Mental Illness: A Community Study (New York: Wiley, 1958); and Jerome K. Myers and Bertram H. Roberts, Family and Class Dynamics in Mental Illness (New York: Wiley, 1959). See Chapter 3, as well as the research note by Hans Pols on the significance of the relationship between social stratification and mental illness by Hollingshead and Redlich: Hans Pols, “August Hollingshead and Frederick Redlich: Poverty, Socioeconomic Status, and Mental Illness,” American Journal of Public Health 97, no. 10 (October 2007): 1755; and Julia Adams and David L. Weakliem, “August B. Hollingshead’s ‘Four Factor Index of Social Status’: From Unpublished Paper to Citation Classic,” Yale Journal of Sociology 8 (Fall 2011): 11–20.
7. Famously, the major weapons maker in New Haven, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, had descended from the Eli Whitney gun manu-factory, where Whitney had refined the concepts of interchangeable parts used to such revolutionary effect on his more famous invention, the cotton gin; see Douglas W. Rae, City: Urbanism and Its End (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
8. See ibid.; on Italian immigrants and the rise of the garment industry in New Haven, see Lassonde, Learning to Forget, chaps. 3–5.
9. For more background on both parents, see Chapter 9.
10. See “Evelyn Olsen,” Yale Child Study Center, “Yale Longitudinal Study,” January–February 1956, YRG-27 E Yale Child Study Center Collection, box 1. It was common for Italian immigrants and their children to favor male over female children; see Lassonde, Learning to Forget, chaps. 4–5.
11. YRG-27 E Yale Child Study Center Collection, 96-A-082, box 1.
12. Evelyn’s therapist raised this issue repeatedly over the course of the nine years he treated her; see ibid., boxes 1–7.
13. Marianne Kris and Samuel Ritvo, “Parents and Siblings—Their Mutual Influences,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 38 (1983): 311–24; Samuel Ritvo, “Object Relations,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 10 (1962): 102–17; Samuel Ritvo, “Correlation of a Childhood and Adult Neurosis: Based on the Adult Analysis of a Reported Childhood Case,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 47 (1966):130–31; Samuel Ritvo, “Late Adolescence—Developmental and Clinical Considerations,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 26 (1971): 241–63.
14. See, for instance, the observations of Virginia and John Demos in Chapter 5 about changing therapeutic and theoretical lenses since this era.
15. Yet a few months earlier, Evelyn had revealed to her therapist that she at first thought that he was scary and resembled a clown. See YRG-27 E Yale Child Study Center Collection, 96-A-082, boxes 1–7 (April 11, 1956).
16. YRG-27 E Yale Child Study Center Collection, 96-A-082, boxes 1–7 (November 6, 1958).
17. Ibid., 96-A-082, boxes 1–7 (November 14, 1958).
18. Ibid., boxes 1–7 (January 17, 1961).
19. Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” in Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 453.