A Family Science: The Baby Biography in Imperial Germany

Abstract

round the turn of the twentieth century, scientifically minded men and a few women in Germany, as elsewhere in Western Europe and North America, scrutinized the very youngest members of society, for they believed that chil- dren were the key to deciphering the entire process of human development and were the crucial site for producing highly functioning adults. Researchers recognized an important investigative tool in the human child, who under their scientific gaze yielded a vast amount of developmental information. Early developmental psychologists often combined raising their children and practicing scientific research, ultimately rooting normal child development in the bourgeois homes where infants could—and should, they emphasized—be closely monitored by observant parents and staff. In this essay, I elucidate the baby science of such innovators in Germany in the field of developmental psychology as William Preyer (1841-1897), who published in 1882 one of the most important works in developmental psychology, Die Seele des Kindes (The Mind of the Child), and the husband and wife team William Stern (1871-1938) and Clara Stern nee Joseephy (1878-1945), who coauthored in the early twenti- eth century two monographs that went on to define the field, Die Kindersprache (Children's Language) and Erinnerung, Aussage und Luge in der ersten Kindheit (Recollection, Testimony, and Lying in Early Childhood). 1 Preyer's and the Sterns' twinned capacities as parents and scientists complicated the pursuit of objective knowledge and their objectification of research subjects. 2 The focus of research became blurry as everyone in their developmental laboratories, their house- holds, was revealed to be under scientific scrutiny. Preyer wrote in the preface to his well-known work, is hard to discern and to decipher the mysterious writing on the mind of the child. It is just that which constitutes a chief problem of this book. 3 To scientific observers like Preyer and the Sterns, the child's mind, which was both imprinted by previous generations,