What's Wrong with the Poor?: Psychiatry, Race, and the War on Poverty

Chapter One: A Mother’s Touch?: From Deprivation to Day Care

10 Chapter One A Mother’s Touch? From Deprivation to Day Care In 1950, eminent British psychoanalyst John Bowlby was appointed as a short-term consultant to the World Health Organization on the subject of homeless children in post–World War II Europe. This position proved to be a turning point in his career. Bowlby, who had previously conducted research on the impact of children’s separation from their mothers or mother-substitutes early in life, had a long-standing interest in what he later came to call deprivation.1 Drawing from the available research on children in institutions as well as his own findings, he prepared his report, Maternal Care and Mental Health,publishedin1951.It was“essentialformentalhealth,” Bowlby argued, that “the infant and young child should experience a warm, intimate,andcontinuousrelationshipwithhismother(ormother-substitute) in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment.” If this relationship was absent or insufficient—what Bowlby termed “maternal deprivation”—serious consequencesforthechild’s futurementalhealthandcharacterdevelopment wouldensue.2Anadaptedversionofthereportappearedin1953asChildCare and the Growth of Love, quickly becoming a best seller, and the volume was reprinted six times within ten years and translated into fourteen languages.3 Bowlby, at the time the deputy director of the Tavistock Clinic in London, becameahouseholdnameonbothsidesoftheAtlantic,andAmericannewspapers closely followed his research findings.4 Although Bowlby himself had referred to mothers or “mother-substitutes,” his work further perpetuated traditional gender roles. Later critics have characterized Bowlby’s work as a reactionary theory designed to pressure women into staying at home with their children for fear of risking serious health consequences.5 Bowlby’s insistence on the crucial role of mothers while ignoring a whole spectrum of otherpossiblefactorsledBritishpsychoanalystandfeministJulietMitchellto quip that “evacuee children were ‘maternally deprived’—bombs and poverty and absent fathers didn’t come into it.”6 A Mother’s Touch? 11 “Maternal deprivation” rapidly gained currency among American mental health and child development experts. Bowlby’s report had surveyed the work of prominent American researchers, most notably psychoanalytically trained psychiatrists René Spitz and David Levy. The popularization of maternal deprivation in the early 1950s drew further attention to these studies and provided the scientific impetus for subsequent observation studies of infants designed to elucidate the wide-reaching detrimental effects of this form of deprivation.7 Concurrently, concepts of sensory deprivation had increasingly become popularandwereusedtodescribeawidespectrumofphenomena.Thisfocus on the necessity of sensory stimulation for normal early development soon led mental health experts to reexamine theories that highlighted the dangers ofmaternaldeprivation.Experimentalpsychologists,basingtheirhypotheses on animal experimentation, questioned the accepted view of mother love as thecrucialcomponentinnormalinfantdevelopment.Instead,theyproposed that a lack of sensory stimulation was the immediate cause of psychological damage. Conversely, psychoanalytically oriented researchers in the field of maternal deprivation cited findings of sensory deprivation experiments as proof of the necessity of maternal care. Thus blossomed a new cooperation between psychologists and child development experts from entirely different theoretic backgrounds. While many welcomed this interdisciplinary cooperation , other psychoanalytically inclined experts expressed concern at attempts to replace the abstract concept of mothering with specific variables ofsensory stimulation.Someresearchers viewed the two theories as complementary , commenting on the potential for mutual benefit from reliance on insight gleaned from different theoretical and experimental approaches. In their 1963 book, Growth Failure in Maternal Deprivation, pediatricians Robert L. Patton and Lytt I. Gardner devoted the entire first chapter to the topic of sensory deprivation and its relationship to maternal deprivation, voicing their hope that “scientists in biology and in the behavioral sciences might find useful this study of the organic manifestations of” maternal deprivation, which they called “a special form of sensory deprivation.”8 Here, I analyze the adoption of the basic premises, experimental methods , and terminology of sensory deprivation research into maternal deprivation theory. I examine how leading figures in the field of maternal deprivation —most notably, Mary Ainsworth and René Spitz—gradually accepted the sensory deprivation theory. I then evaluate the practical implications of the interrelations between theories of sensory and maternal deprivation A Mother’s Touch? 12 as they are demonstrated in debates over day care in the United States. An economicallystratifiedapproachtodeprivationemerged—middle-classchildren in day care programs were seen to be at risk for maternal deprivation, while day care programs targeting low-income and minority children were seen as therapeutic, combating sensory deprivation, and not carrying the risk of maternal deprivation. I conclude by analyzing President Nixon’s 1971 veto of a bill designed to provide universal day care, which exemplifies the tension between maternal and sensory deprivation and demonstrates...