Katie Joice (Birkbeck) was awarded a special commendation in the History of the Human Sciences’ Early Career Prize. We spoke to her about her essay ‘Mothering in the Frame: cinematic microanalysis and the pathogenic mother, 1945-67’, which will be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal.
HHS: Congratulations on your History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize commendation for your essay ‘Mothering in the Frame. To begin with I wonder if you could briefly introduce and summarise your essay and say a little about what inspired you to write it.
Katie Joice: Thank you. The essay introduces readers to the different ways in which film was used by anthropologists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts to study mother infant interaction in the post-war period. Historians have recently become interested in the concept of the pathogenic mother, but my specific focus is on how cinematic frame analysis, or microanalysis, enabled clinicians to classify and quantify mother-love. The essay begins with a discussion of how mothers’ ‘small behaviours’, the everyday, repetitive acts that no-one notices, coalesce into a new and influential causal model for mental illness. I then go on to discuss four case studies: Margaret Mead’s work on child-rearing in Bali, Ray Birdwhistell’s body language research, Rene Spitz’s studies of institutionalised babies, and Sylvia Brody’s classification of mothering styles. All four of them used forms of microanalysis, but in different styles, and for their own ends.
In terms of inspiration, I got interested in films about mothers and babies when I first joined the Hidden Persuaders project at Birkbeck. I was researching the visual history of psychosis and came across Spitz’s film, Grief, about the devastating effects of maternal deprivation. At that time memories of my own son’s infancy were fresh in my mind, and I’d already done a lot of thinking about the invisible work that goes into creating subjects or ‘making people’. I realised that our humanity is not a given; it’s something that is constantly being constructed in early childhood, usually by women.
HHS: Would you be able to say a little about your PhD thesis project and situate this essay in relation to your research more broadly?
KJ: The title of my PhD is The Empty Frame: Child Analysis and its Visual Cultures, 1932-67. It examines the visual methodologies that were used in the post-war period to interpret the pre-verbal mind. The first part is on film, and is a much expanded version of this essay. Another part looks at play therapy, particularly the work of psychologist Margaret Lowenfeld. I also discuss the use of art and film in the post-war period to access the mind of children with autism. What I’m most interested in is the cultural history of these methodologies; how the ‘psy’ disciplines became entangled with all sorts of other practices, like film history, art history, philosophy and anthropology.
HHS: You write that ‘In this period, mother-love became a new scientific object, subject to new forms of description and empirical analysis’. How was mothering conceptualised in a distinct way within the social sciences in the post-war period? At the beginning of the essay you state that ‘maternal ‘presence’… became an ontological question for post-war social science’ – could you also expand on that?
KJ: Anthropology, psychiatry and cybernetics were then enmeshed in ways that’s hard to imagine now. Mothering came to be seen as an origin story for social science, partly because of the continued influence of the Culture and Personality school within anthropology, which claimed that child-rearing techniques form distinctive national characters. Anthropologists like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict argued that mothers set certain patterns of behaviour in motion, which were then written into every aspect of that culture. Also of crucial influence within psychiatry was a new psychoanalytic focus on the ‘micro-traumas’ that occurred in the pre-Oedipal stage of childhood. Harry Stack Sullivan in the US, and the English analysts Wilfred Bion and Donald Winnicott were theorists interested in this pre-verbal zone of experience, and its role in triggering psychosis. As the cine-camera became more portable and more accessible to amateurs, film came to offer a new evidential basis for these theories, a means of observing damage as it happened, rather than retrospectively in the therapist’s office.
I think this ‘search for origins’ also chimed with the need for a historical ‘blank slate’ after the war. There was a hope that the calibration of mothering would create a new generation of compassionate and pacifist democratic subjects.
On the question of presence… I’m talking there about how the quality and the reliability of a mother’s responses – actions or messages that might take place in a split second – came to be seen as constitutive, not only of the child’s personality, but also cultural and social habits. Though actually it was mothers’ emotional absence, rather than presence, that became the biggest preoccupation of the thinkers I look at in this essay. The effects of affectlessness, if you like. And the aesthetic and technical questions of how emotional absence might be captured on the screen. I’m intrigued by how these ineffable categories – presence, absence, mother-love, ‘maternal surround’, get translated into codes, scales and statistics.
HHS: Why was film deemed to be the most appropriate medium for capturing the ‘small behaviours’ of the mother? And why was this form of microobservation so central to the analysis of mothering?
KJ: Mother-infant interaction was only one field in which film was being experimented with as a diagnostic and documentary tool in this period. Film was seen more generally as a utopian technology that might reveal the hidden truths of behaviour. It was used extensively within animal studies, psychiatry and cybernetics research, to break behaviour into units which then could be analysed by the researcher, and sometimes used curatively by patients as well. Film could be slowed down, reduced to stills, re-watched and cross-analysed by a number of observers, and could bring the intimacy of conversation or breastfeeding into a lecture hall. And it encouraged particular forms of reflection: Rene Spitz and Sylvia Brody both said that they felt the cameras shielded them from the intensity of the emotions that they were observing. Film also allowed child analysts to think about different qualities of time: fleeting movements could be identified and counted, or particular thresholds in development ratified. A whole childhood could be compressed into a single film. The relationship between the analytic potential of film and the temporalities of early development is what compelled these thinkers.
HHS: Why do you think that the non-verbal was accorded such significance in this period?
KJ: I think it emerged out of the anthropological and psychoanalytic trends that I’ve already mentioned, as well as a new interest within linguistics in the secret codes of gesture and dance. There was a peculiar paradox at work in non-verbal communication research – on the one hand it was anti-humanist, in that it focused on free-floating ‘cybernetic’ codes which moved through an animal-human-machine continuum. But it was also an expression of pan-humanism, of a desire to create a universal behavioural science which transcended language barriers. That desire was fuelled by the tensions of the Cold War. For example, Edward Hall who invented proxemics, theories about how humans use space to communicate, was secretly funded by the CIA. There was a lot of political potential in non-verbal communication research.
HHS: Returning to something you just mentioned, could you say something more about the specific temporalities of early infancy and motherhood and how you see this as relating to the specific temporalities associated with film? Is the temporality of the former as historically contingent as the latter? By which I mean: is there a clash here between something understood to be universal, on the one hand, and a novel technology that ushered in new ways of thinking about or representing time, on the other?
KJ: It’s true that films such as Spitz’s transformed professional and public perceptions of infant experience and infant suffering: the documentary and diagnostic power of the technology enabled people to ‘see’ something that had in fact always been there. We might see this as part of the civilising process, a relatively recent extension of humanity to the pre-verbal child. On the other hand, we can never truly disentangle our biological parameters from environmental influence or our changing norms of selfhood. There is no universal infant. Balinese or American middle-class mothering-styles, like the institutionalisation of babies, are all products of history. What we can say is that practitioners of microanalysis assumed, and still assume today, that in infancy ‘small behaviours’ have potentially enormous effects. So in that sense, the microanalytic method matches the model of mind that is being advanced.
As for the temporalities of motherhood, I think mothers’ experiences were generally brushed under the carpet by these maternalist thinkers. They were much more interested in defending the infant against the mother, rather than delving into the social causes of maternal anguish. But the point I wanted to underline is that someone has to do the imaginative and emotional work of creating subjects. And I think that often scares the hell out of people. It’s something that’s rarely talked about. As a society we talk a lot about the practical problems of childcare, but not the existential ones.
HHS: Your first case study is Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson’s work in Bali. You claim they were the first to put ‘mothering in the frame’ and argue that their work was foundational for infant psychiatry – could you summarise the significance of their work for the phenomenon you’re analysing?
KJ: Mead and Bateson’s work was funded by an influential interwar funding body called the Committee for Research into Dementia Praecox, which was a pre-war term for schizophrenia.
This committee was looking for big answers to the problem of mental illness and institutionalisation. Mead and Bateson set out to make ambitious claims about what the small behaviours of mothering might mean, arguing that Balinese culture was essentially schizoid, but that it was saved from collective madness by ritual and trance. Mead made tendentious comparisons between the tiny finger movements of Balinese babies or Balinese mothers’ blank expressions, and institutionalised schizophrenics in the West. But the very exuberance of her claims threw down the gauntlet to a generation of researchers and clinicians that were interested in the significance of mothering styles. The books that emerged from their research in Bali, Balinese Character and Growth and Culture were also aesthetically compelling: peculiar juxtapositions of art, gesture, and expressions. Mead was suggesting that academic research could be presented non-discursively as well, that it could rely on a language or grammar of images.
HHS: Your next case study focuses on Ray Birdwhistell – what do you see as the impetus for his attempts to quantify affect and notate emotion through ‘kinesis’? How does this compare to what you describe later in the essay as Sylvia Brody’s ‘Taylorism of mothering’?
KJ: Birdwhistell was an anthropologist who was hugely influenced by linguistics, particularly the work of Edward Sapir. He wanted to reveal a hidden dimension of communication –kinesics or body language, that often ran counter to verbal communication. He created an immensely complex notation system based on the fine slicing of films of interpersonal behaviour. Mothers interested him because like Mead and Bateson he thought that their small behaviours were potentially pathogenic to young children. But he ended up mired in his methodology, splitting cinematic images into ever smaller temporal and spatial units.
In contrast, Sylvia Brody was a practicing psychologist and a pragmatist. She used film to count and evaluate the actions of mothering – such as touching, looking, speaking – with the aim of categorising mothers into a small number of types, some of which were pathogenic and in need of treatment. I use the term ‘Taylorism of mothering’ because efficiency, which we associate with Taylorism, was one of her ideal mother’s qualities. Paradoxically, it’s a model of efficiency that has to be underpinned by right feeling. The observer can count and dissect mothers’ movements, but a mother who who treats feeding mechanically becomes inefficient at satisfying her baby. Like Taylor and Gilbreth’s time and motion studies, the clock is prominent in Brody’s film footage; it splices the action.
HHS: Finally, I was wondering about overlaps between the kinds of social scientific applications of film you’re considering and film’s more artistic uses. I thought, for example, of the artist Maya Deren’s films shot in Haiti and her involvement with Bateson and other anthropologists. In your analysis of Rene Spitz’s films, for example, you discuss the angles from which the films were shot that excluded the institutional context to focus entirely on the child, emphasising this as an aesthetic decision. I was wondering how you think about these more aesthetic questions both in terms of how the films were composed and in terms of your own methodological approach to analysising them and how that relates to you claim in the conclusion that film in these studies became an ‘arbiter of authenticity’.
KJ: As I expand on this essay in my thesis I’ve been asking myself how these films resonate with the visual cultures of their times. And notions of authenticity were central to those visual cultures. This was the time of cinema verité in France, Free Cinema in Britain and Direct Cinema in the US, promising new access to ‘raw’ psychological states and to overlooked aspects of social life. In the course of working on a longer piece on Rene Spitz, I discovered that his film was shown at a New York avant-garde cinema club called Cinema 16, headed by film curator Amos Vogel. Much like Maya Deren, Vogel believed cinema should offer the viewer an altered state or conversion process, rather than entertainment, and Spitz’s film fitted into this manifesto.
What’s interesting about many of these film-makers, like Mead and Bateson, Spitz and also James Robertson in Britain, who made A Two Year Old Goes to Hospital and Young Children in Brief Separation, is that they were ‘auteurs’ in a sense. Their films were artful, singular and idiosyncratic. What happens in the era of Sylvia Brody and Mary Ainsworth is that cinematic studies of mothers and babies become much more laboratory based, and more standardised and static. Conventions emerge and settle over time, but their pre-history is often surprisingly heterogenous.
I’ve also been thinking about how to present my own research in visual form. I am collaborating with my colleague Ian Magor from the Hidden Persuaders project on a short teaching film which incorporates footage from the films discussed here. We’re hoping it will be published on the Hidden Persuaders website in the autumn and act as a visual accompaniment to my essay.
HHS: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.
Interview conducted by Hannah Proctor.