Mental Hygiene and the Regulation of "Problem Child" Populations as Limits of Republican Subjectivity

• In Event: 44.029 - Making Up People: Futurities, Fear, and Hope

Abstract

In this paper, I study “problem child” populations as a discursive construct in a new biomedical and politico-economic discourse during the formative years of the Turkish Republic (1930s and 1940s). I trace the contours of this discourse in the international Mental Hygiene Movement, originated in the United States in the first decade of the twentieth century, as it travelled to Turkey. It was one of the most organized movements that worked toward reforming the bodies/conditions of street children – vagrant and homeless children – so that they became re/productive citizens of the Republic.

The period in question witnessed the growth of a pervasive fear that these children presented a threat to the physical, mental, and economic modernization of the nascent Republic. Newspapers of the period regularly touched upon the issue, alerting the public and the State officials to the increase in their number in the streets and in crime and other troubles caused by these “little miserables.” The language of these newspaper articles was an amalgam of humanitarian sentiments, as well as fears that necessitated their social and moral control in order that they become productive citizens of the Republic. The visibility of these child populations embodied both of these discourses simultaneously yet in a new nationalized public space and supplemented with a new quasi-scientific discourse.

I analyze how mental hygienists helped re/conceptualize these populations and explore curricular initiatives to “reform” their mind and bodies through analyzing the curriculums of a modern child rescue institution and a correction institution. Their curriculum, I argue, aimed to achieve two ideals simultaneously through strong moral and vocational components. The moral component helped to reproduce and maintain the normal social order by disciplining these “psychopaths” who were thought to have stepped outside or challenged social and moral boundaries of the society. The vocational component aimed to reproduce and maintain the economic order of the nascent Republic by imbuing these children with solidarist work ethics and teaching them functional skill and training them in small industries that were essential to the economic development of the Republic.

I view the “problem child” as constituting the limits of “normal” Republican sociality and citizenship insofar as the child disturbed the ideal healthy and re/productive citizen imagined in the Republican solidarist discourse. The child was made visible in a solidarist configuration that viewed him/her as an organic component of the national body and as an individual with rights of being protected and assisted by the society, yet it simultaneously made this notion of right contingent upon the individual’s social and economic re/productivity (as an obligation/duty/debt to the collective). In this sense, the inclusion of the “problem child” populations in the national body politic depended on the reformation of their body and mind.

Methodologically grounded in what is called history of present, the analysis in this paper aims bring into view a way of thinking about the “pathological” and “normal” body as invented through multiple discursive and non-discursive practices.

Author

• Yasin Tunc, University of Georgia - Athens