ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Film and the Translation of Psychological Concepts of Child Development: from Switzerland to Britain and Beyond

• In Event: Film and the Mind Sciences at the Margins: Research, Diagnosis, Popularisation

English Abstract

This paper explores how film technologies influenced international developmental sciences prior to the 1960s, focusing on Switzerland and Britain. The 1920s witnessed rapid developments in the filming and treatment of children’s stages of psychological development. In 1920, the Swiss Neurologist Edouard Claparède collaborated with filmmaker Jean Comandon to make Scènes de psychologie de l’enfant; the first ever film of intelligence testing methods then being developed by Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon. This film helped identify which children should become the subjects of the burgeoning psychological sciences, which were becoming increasingly powerful in the 1920s as governments employed them worldwide in management of human populations. In most European contexts, Swiss research in child development was regarded as the most accurate in terms of its observational authenticity in the 1920s and 1930s. Psychologists around the world travelled to Claparède’s Institute Jean Jacque Rousseau where Jean Piaget’s observations of children’s learning became an important reference point for child developmental sciences internationally.
After the Second World War, the World Health Organisation encouraged new approaches in the developmental sciences to not only integrate observational exactitude, but to give greater emphasis to children who did not meet typical developmental standards. The invention of videotape in 1951 granted new opportunities for psychologists to observe and record these children, and to create new treatments and approaches. In 1957, Jean Piaget’s student, the British-Indian child psychiatrist, Elwyn James Anthony, travelled from London to Zurich to present his film of children who did not easily slot into Piaget’s developmental models devised from the 1920s. Anthony’s film employed new techniques being developed in television and film to capture psychological depth, whist simultaneously attempting to provide scientific accuracy on developmental stages. The resulting film, Aspects of Childhood Psychosis, focused on the classification of atypical child behaviour and became a vital source for expanding studies of childhood autism in the 1960s. This paper argues that film was an important medium for the international translation of psychological concepts. It demonstrates the vital role it played in enabling international comparisons and establishing an international language of developmental psychology.

Author

• Bonnie Evans, University of Manchester