Mothering in the frame: Cinematic microanalysis and the pathogenic mother, 1945–67

Katie Joice

doi:10.1177/0952695120924266

Abstract

This article examines the use of cinematic microanalysis to capture, decompose, and interpret mother–infant interaction in the decades following the Second World War. Focusing on the films and writings of Margaret Mead, Ray Birdwhistell, René Spitz, and Sylvia Brody, it examines the intellectual culture, and visual methodologies, that transformed ‘pathogenic’ mothering into an observable process. In turn, it argues that the significance assigned to the ‘small behaviours’ of mothers provided an epistemological foundation for the nascent discipline of infant psychiatry. This research draws attention to two new areas of enquiry within the history of emotions and the history of psychiatry in the post-war period: preoccupation with emotional absence and affectlessness, and their personal and cultural meanings; and the empirical search for the origin point, and early chronology, of mental illness.

Highlights

How much or how little does it take to be definitively changed or irretrievably damaged in the formative period of infancy? How does the presence, absence, or confusion of maternal emotions, as expressed in facial expressions, gestures, and holding patterns, affect this change? And how much weight, epistemologically and socially, can be History of the Human Sciences 34(5)brought to bear upon changes that occur at a barely perceptible, micro level of analysis? These are questions that preoccupied many British and American psychiatrists during the post-war period, as psychoanalytic, environmental, and interactionist theories came to replace racial and genetic concepts in the search for the aetiology of mental illness
New advances in film technology, its increased portability, enabled child psychiatrists and analysts to enter into the very interstices of the mother–child relationship, and to interrogate the constituent elements of mother love itself
By examining these films frame by frame, the micro-expressions and gestures that were deemed to inflict damage – at an almost subliminal speed – could be identified and potentially corrected. In his 1959 pamphlet Can I Leave My Baby?, British child psychiatrist and attachment theorist John Bowlby advised anxious mothers to avoid absences from their infants of more than two days, and to keep these occasions to a minimum, in order to prevent psychological harm to their children. Bowlby and his colleague James Robertson produced a series of films of young children experiencing temporary separation, which were among the first visual documents to systematically explore the phenomenology of preverbal experience

Summary

Introduction

How much or how little does it take to be definitively changed or irretrievably damaged in the formative period of infancy? How does the presence, absence, or confusion of maternal emotions, as expressed in facial expressions, gestures, and holding patterns, affect this change? And how much weight, epistemologically and socially, can be History of the Human Sciences 34(5)brought to bear upon changes that occur at a barely perceptible, micro level of analysis? These are questions that preoccupied many British and American psychiatrists during the post-war period, as psychoanalytic, environmental, and interactionist theories came to replace racial and genetic concepts in the search for the aetiology of mental illness.

Results

Conclusion