NEWSLETTER

Society for the History of Children and Youth

First Joint Meeting

ESHHS: The European Society for the History of Human Sciences and

Cheiron:The International Society for the History of the Behavioral and Social Sciences

University College Dublin, Ireland, June 25-29, 2007

Heather Munro Prescott, Central Connecticut State University

The history of childhood and youth was represented by one poster, three papers, the keynote address by Ian Hacking, and one session on the history of child development at this year’s joint meeting of ESHHS and Cheiron.  Renato Foschi of the University of Rome displayed a poster entitled, “Engineering a Free Mind,” which explored the history of the first Montesorri “Children’s House” in Rome, founded in 1907. Foschi demonstrated that the children’s house was supported by Eduardo Talamo, chief executive of the Roman Institute of Real Estates, with the two-fold aim of “moralizing” families in modern methods of child rearing and education, and more importantly, to make the estates of the Roman Institute more profitable. Thus, Talamo’s economic motives and Montessori’s scientific ideas merged to form the “educational experiment” in Rome.

Anna Christina Rose of the University of Oklahoma presented a paper entitled “Puberty and Passions: Ethnographies of Adolescence in French Anthropological Medicine” as part of a session on eighteenth and nineteenth-century human sciences. The main purpose of the paper was to show how comparative anthropology shaped modern understanding of puberty and human development. My paper, entitled “Cultivating Mature Minds and Healthy Personalities,” explored the origins of mental health services at American colleges and universities since the 1920s. This paper built upon the work of Kathleen Jones on college suicides. I argue that G. Stanley Hall’s ideas about late adolescence, as well as the mental hygiene movement more generally, played major roles in shaping the emergence of these services. Laura C. Ball of York University traced the origins and use of the term “genius” in her paper, “Is it All Semantics? The Genius versus Giftedness Debate.” She gave a brief outline of the etymology of the word genius from its roots in the Roman Empire, and focused on the use of word in the psychological literature.

The session on Child Development was composed of three paper presentations which together gave an international perspective on developmental psychology.. The first, “Childrearing as the Behaviorist Views It: John B. Watson’s Advice in Historical Perspective,” by Edward K. Morris and Kathryn M. Bigelow of the University of Kansas, argued that criticism of Watson’s ideas is usually based on selected examples and “predicated on presentist norms.” Their central points were that Watson’s advice “was consistent with that of his day,” and that “purely presentist accounts do not provide a nuanced account of Watson’s advice. The second paper, “A Breakthrough in Scientific Cooperation: Clara and William Stern’s Project on Developmental Psychology,” by Werner Deutsch and Christliebe El Mogharbel of the Technical University of Braunschweig in Germany, examined how the wife and husband team Clara and William Stern collaborated to produce the book “Die Kindersprache,” (child language), published in 1907. The authors argued that the Sterns worked as equal scientific partners to create this work, based on their observations of their children Hilde, Guenther, and Eva. The third and final paper in the session, “Early Vygotskian Psychology after Vygotsky,” by Anton Yasnitsky and Michel Ferrari of the University of Toronto, examined the history of the Kharkov School of psychology in the former Soviet Union. They argued that Vygotsky remained the “spiritual leader” of the Kharkov school even after his death in 1934.

The highlight of the conference was Ian Hacking’s keynote address, “The Earliest Days of Autism,” which traced the origins of this diagnosis and how it was distinguished from the category of childhood schizophrenia. Hacking examined how initially autism was linked with childhood schizophrenia, first by the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuer in the 1910s, and later by Hans Asperger in 1944. He also examined the explosion autism diagnoses in recent years, and the growth of advocacy around the disorder in the late twentieth century. Hacking concluded that this “consciousness raising” by advocates – including individuals with autism – has “immeasurably improved the lives of autists not only by aiding the provision of better services but also by making it possible for others to accept them as they are.