Eventual Convergence Research Articles

THE PRE-HISTORY OF CHILD PSYCHIATRY.

Nearly everyone here, I imagine, has either been present at or has read the splendid Maudsley Lecture delivered in 1958 by Professor Leo Kanner (1). In this Lecture Kanner reviewed the various interests, or, as he called them, the loosely scattered segments which by their eventual convergence and fusion resulted in the emergence, between thirty and forty years ago, of child psychiatry. He caused them to pass before our eyes in a vivid and colourful procession—psychiatry, mental deficiency, education, criminology, psychology, psycho-analysis, the child guidance clinics, with paediatrics given a place of its own, though not allowed to march in the procession itself. Now, I have been asked to take up one or two of these segments for closer examination, and give some account of their contents and development during the pre-historic period before they began to converge towards their final synthesis. In so far as I am able to do this, my account will be merely factual; I must leave it to you who are engaged in this field of work to assess the relevance of the material which I am presenting.