Mental Hygiene and Regulation of Problem Children, or Fabrication and Regulation of Difference

• In Event: Educational Reforms as the Making Up and Governing of Difference

Proposal Description

In this paper, I trace the “problem child” as a discursive construct in a new biomedical and politico-economic discourse during the formative years of the Republic of Turkey (1930s and 1940s). I trace the contours of this construct in the international Mental Hygiene Movement, which originated in the United States in the first decade of the twentieth century, as it traveled to Turkey.

I analyze how mental hygienists re/conceptualized “problem child” populations and explore curricular initiatives to “reform” their mind and bodies through analyzing the curricula of institutions for the rescue and correction of these children, established in the designated period. Their curricula, 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 children now classified as “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 solidaristic work ethics, teaching them functional skills, and training them in small industries essential to the economic development of the Republic.

I analyze curricula as historical systems of relations, and as modes of the production of knowledge and experience of normality/abnormality. I do not consider the abnormal body merely as comprising an exclusionary space relative to the normal body. Rather, the abnormality of the child gained full scientific positivity, whose moral problematization gave way to a problematization in terms of scientific medical truth.

I view the “problem child” as constituting the limits of “normal” Republican sociality and citizenship insofar as the child disturbed the ideal healthy and productive citizen imagined in the Republican solidarist discourse. The child was made visible in a solidarist configuration as an organic component of the national body and as an individual with rights of being protected and assisted by society, yet this notion of rights was simultaneously made contingent upon the individual’s social and economic productivity (as an obligation/duty/debt to the collective).

Methodologically grounded in what is called history of present, the analysis in this paper aims to bring into view a way of thinking about the social and individual body as “invented” through multiple historical practices (Hacking, 1986; Popkewitz, 2008; Rose, 1996). Perceiving the “invention” of kinds of people as a historical problem helps to make visible contemporary ways of thinking about ourselves.

References
Hacking, Ian. (1986). Making up people. In T. C. Heller, M. Sosna & D. E. Wellbery (Eds.), Reconstructing individualism: Autonomy, individuality, and the self in Western thought. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Popkewitz, Thomas S. (2008). Cosmopolitanism and the age of school reform: Science, education, and making society by making the child. New York: Routledge
Rose, Nikolas. (1996). Inventing ourselves: Psychology, power, and personhood. New York: Cambrdige University Press.

Author

• Yasin Tunc, University of Georgia