journal of visual culture
‘Emergencies of Survival’: Moral Spectatorship
and the ‘New Vision of the Child’ in Postwar
Child Psychoanalysis
Lisa Cartwright
Abstract
Drawing on the writings of Luc Boltanski on moral spectatorship and a
change to Boltanski’s politics in response to images of distant suffering,
this article considers a visual turn in psychoanalysis around the period of
the Second World War, coincident with the emergence of a new international vision of the child as an entity requiring special protections beyond
the purview of the state. Looking beyond the familiar example of child
psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, this article considers the visual techniques
of René Spitz, a psychoanalyst internationally recognized for his work
with institutionalized infants who failed physically and psychically to
thrive and survive despite adequate nutrition and health care, due to lack
of consistent caregiving. The article describes Spitz’s research films which
he turned into media texts to make social interventions internationally in
institutional childcare practice and policy after the war through venues
including the WHO. His work is one of numerous instances of a visual
child psychoanalysis (including Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham,
John Bowlby and James Robertson, Margaret Mahler, and Thelma
Fraiberg) in which child psychoanalysts used film and visual techniques
to exert influence on international child policy and institutional reform.
Keywords
anaclitic depression Anna Freud Dorothy Burlingham emergencies
of survival film moral spectatorship politics of pity René Spitz
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journal of visual culture
Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Vol 3(1): 35-49 [1470-4129(200404)3:1]10.1177/1470412904043597
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A New Vision of the Child
Soon after Sigmund Freud died on the eve of the Second World War, his
daughter Anna Freud and her partner Dorothy Burlingham publicly launched
a new phase of psychoanalysis in which psychoanalysts assumed the role of
moral spectators dedicated to the study and treatment of pre-verbal infants
and young children experiencing crises of survival. Between 1940 and 1945,
with money from the American Foster Parents’ Plan for War Children, Freud
and Burlingham were custodians to a total of 190 infants and children in
nurseries designed safely to house London infants and younger children
passed over in the mass evacuation of two million children to foster care in
the countryside. The children’s parents were dead, alive but homeless,
wounded, or living in the heavily targeted areas adjacent to the arsenals,
docks and munitions factories (Freud and Burlingham, 1973[1939–45]).
After the war, Freud and Burlingham cared for six children raised from
infancy, after the extermination of their mothers, by various nurses and
members of the ‘select’ group of adult Jews who were allowed to survive at
Theresienstadt, then shipped to England in the first transport of 1000
orphans from the camps.1
The writings of Freud and Burlingham (1973[1939–45]) about the war
nurseries and the postwar child refugees from the camps suggest that the
most significant trauma these infants and children experienced was not the
bombings or the war itself. Rather, it was their separation from their primary
caregivers, which produced in some cases pronounced psychiatric and developmental disturbances in the children. The war nurseries run by Freud and
Burlingham served the dual purpose of humanitarian aid and experimental
laboratory, providing opportunities for detailed observation and analysis of
development in infants and children undergoing the trauma of separation.
They marked the public beginnings of an era of psychoanalysis devoted to
the visual study of infants and children undergoing what René Spitz, the
Viennese psychoanalyst who helped Freud and Burlingham in their work
with the camp refugees, called ‘emergencies of survival’. These were emergencies of the ego in which the institutionalized infant’s or child’s health and
ego development flagged and potentially failed in response to the absence or
removal of a consistent primary caregiver, even when adequate nutrition and
physical care were provided.
What was new about this approach in psychoanalysis was not its focus on the
infant and child, as Freud and Melanie Klein had already made this an established area of psychoanalytic practice. Freud, Burlingham and Spitz’s work in
institutions was distinct from previous psychoanalytic work with children in
its sustained focus on circumstances where the infant or child’s relationship
to a stable mother figure was precluded or disrupted, with pathological outcomes for the child’s ego. Child psychoanalysis offered a range of expertise
in abnormality surprisingly free of judgmental and punitive impulses with
regard to the subject. Rather, institutional practice was the object of a
disciplining agenda. Spitz’s work was unique for its focus on the infant in the
first year of life, situated at the threshold of differentiation and language
Cartwright ‘Emergencies of Survival’
acquisition, and for his heavy use of motion picture film both as a medium
for close observation of infant expression, and as a means of promoting his
developmental theories. Spitz’s concern was with the experimental observation of ‘emergencies of survival’ in the ego – the failure of the ego to form,
both as person and as psychical agent, in the context of institutional care.
In psychoanalytic film theory, as in psychoanalysis itself, the developmental
processes in infancy and childhood are the groundwork for theories of
the adult psyche, but rarely have been subject to direct consideration. For
example, Lacan’s (1977[1949]) concept of the mirror stage as a formative
psychic process in the constitution of the ego, occurring around 18 months,
was widely used in the 1980s and 1990s as an analogy to the screen–spectator
relationship of primary identification in film theory. Jean-Louis Baudry’s
(1975) idea of film-viewing as a state of artificial libidinal regression
(pp. 308–14), or Laura Mulvey’s (1986[1975]) point that film satisfies ‘a primordial wish for pleasurable looking’ (p. 201) have been discussed, revised
and challenged since the 1970s on the basis of theories of the adult psyche.
Revisions to theories of spectatorship, identity and visuality following that
era of work have tended to emphasize subjugated positions or identities left
out of or inadequately theorized in the psychoanalytic framework, leading to
work on female, male, black, gay and lesbian spectatorship and subjectivity
in relationship to film. But we have yet to consider what might differently
constitute the early experience that informs visual practices beyond the normative categories of development and differentiation discussed by Sigmund
Freud and Jacques Lacan, psychoanalysts who carried out few sustained
studies of infants and children, and almost none with children in institutional
care. At the historical heart of film theory informed by psychoanalysis, then,
is a concept of the subject as an entity that has passed through the various
stages of infantile development in normative ways, with its sensory apparatus
intact and with its prior relationship to a primary caregiver and within the
structure of the nuclear family more or less in place. Distinct theories of
subjectivity and identity have been mapped onto this basic structure.
By studying children whose life circumstances fell outside the norm, Freud,
Burlingham and Spitz introduced means to think through the possibility of a
new psychoanalytic theory of the emergent subject, one that takes into
account the place of visuality in development, and ways to think about development and subject formation in cases where these processes go awry from
the norm relative to environmental factors. Visuality concerns me on two
levels here. First, as explained later, Spitz’s work with infants in particular, his
concern with the emergencies of ego survival that he witnessed, prompted
him to adopt looking relationships and visual strategies that broke with
previous psychoanalytic protocols concerning the role of looking, and the
degree and kind of the psychoanalyst’s engagement in the life circumstances
of his subject. Looking, in the psychoanalysis of emergencies of survival, was
a crucial activity. Psychoanalysts broke with professional protocols to actively
engage with their subjects in an exchange of looks and physical interaction
to intervene in the crises they witnessed. I use the term moral spectator to
describe the psychoanalyst who emerges as institutional reformer through
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this sort of visual, tactile and personal engagement. Second, I consider the
ways that the infant’s own looking practices are studied by the observing
psychoanalyst in lieu of speech.
My focus is the film practice of Spitz, the first analyst to undergo a didactic
treatment with Sigmund Freud (in 1910–11). With Viennese psychologist
Katherine Wolf, Spitz produced hours of research footage (his collection
totals 1,876 reels of film) documenting the circumstances of infants in North,
Central, and South American state orphanages and prison nurseries. Shot in
the 1930s, this footage was recycled into 11 didactic films after the war to
promote reform in the care of institutionalized infants and children on an
international scale.
The broader social context of the practices I discuss is the spirit of humanitarian reform shared among psychoanalysts working in the United States and
England, many of them exiled Jews from Hungary and Vienna, in fields
including medicine, social work, psychiatry, child welfare, the penal system
and education. Engaged in discourses of infant and child welfare both
domestically and internationally, the psychoanalytic milieu of which Spitz
was a part was based largely in public institutional contexts including hospitals, detention centers, nurseries and orphanages. This work was performed
in keeping with the sentiment that the dissemination of basic human rights
required globally mandated state and transnational reform in policy and
practice concerning the rights of the child. Events and studies around the
period of the Second World War including the Kindertransports and Freud
and Burlingham’s war work made it clear that psychoanalysis had a role to
play with regard to the special case of children, not only in medicine and
psychology but also in social work, education and law. This sentiment was
articulated in the 1948 United Nations Universal General Assembly
Declaration of Human Rights, a document that left the category of adults
unmarked but named ‘motherhood and childhood’ as deserving of ‘special
care and assistance’.2 It would be elaborated on in detail during the remainder of the decade. The Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), an
international treaty entered into force in 1990, was the outcome of the new
forms and means of child protection implemented on an international scale
across a variety of fields in the decades following the Declaration. The
Convention, the first legally binding international instrument to grant
children civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, articulated, in
UNICEF’s interpretation of its purpose, ‘a new vision of the child’. This vision
was under construction in the second half of the 20th century through practices including those of Spitz, Freud and Burlingham.3 In the era framed by
these two documents and their vision of the global child as autonomous subject protected by rights beyond those mandated by the state, professionals
who engaged in matters of child welfare could proceed with confidence that,
although children were rightfully citizens, the matter of how a government
managed them on its own soil would no longer be solely the nation’s
business. Children gained the special status of subjects with recourse to
protective measures including custodianship from beyond the boundaries of
the state.
Cartwright ‘Emergencies of Survival’
I use the term moral spectatorship to describe the reform-minded work of
infant and child psychoanalysts as their work moved into the realm of international humanitarian reform in institutions devoted to childcare. This term
is adapted from sociologist Luc Boltanski’s (1999) theory of media spectatorship. Boltanski takes up the problematic of a humanitarian ethos that emerged
in the late 20th century through venues including non-governmental organizations and media discourses of suffering among subjects situated at a
distance from their spectators. The origins of this ethos are traced back to the
French Revolution and what Hannah Arendt described as a ‘politics of pity’
evolving from the middle of the 18th century onwards. This is a politics
distinguished in part by its involvement with spectacles of suffering and its
basis not in action but in practices of observation. The urgency of the suffering witnessed overrides concerns about justice. ‘Who’, Boltanski asks, ‘would
dream of saying that a country ravaged by famine have what they deserve?’
(p. 5).
Boltanski considers responses to suffering, including denial, charitable or
risky action on behalf of witnessed suffering, and perverse pleasure in
spectacles of suffering. His motivating concern is the place of pity and the
idea of morality in response to present-day (late 20th-century) suffering. Few
theories of media spectatorship have addressed the relationship between
rationalized responses to distant events (through humanitarian aid, for
example) and the self-absorption of spectators in the sentiment of pity that
derives from fantasies about distant subjects captured in the video and
photography of distant crises (orphans, child war victims), or the reception
of suffering close to home, particularly in relationship to the spectatorial
responses of denial of responsibility. Boltanski notes that in this relationship
of spectator to representations of victims at a distance, ‘it is action that is
above all the problem’ (p. 5). He is concerned with identifying the variety of
responses and, to a lesser degree, identifying morally acceptable responses
to distant suffering, noting that responses typically take the form of money
(charity) or speech, such as rhetoric in the form of denunciation, or appeal
for reform.
Regarding Spitz, relationships of distance and action are complex. He initially
used film for research before the war, but this footage was converted after the
war into didactic films designed to speak out on behalf of children globally,
advocating for reform of institutional practices. The questions of what
constitutes distance and what qualifies as home for Spitz and his films have
interestingly complex answers. As a refugee from Vienna, Spitz passed
through Hungary and France but took English as his lingua franca and New
York as his home base for most of his career. Even from this global-city base
it is difficult to identify what, if any, geopolitical setting constituted an intellectual locus of home for Spitz, given that he derived from and spoke to a
psychoanalytic and medical diaspora comprised partly of displaced Jews with
a deeply vexed relationship to the very idea of home. To make matters more
complex, Spitz’s research materials represented subjects at a geographic and
cultural distance from all of these sites, in Argentina and Mexico. His personal
papers indicate that his fieldwork and professional contacts also took him to
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institutions in Greece and throughout Europe, where he conducted observational research while promoting his ideas about institutional reform. The
silent prewar research footage served as internationally legible research
records in the postwar period, when it was edited and inter-titled in multiple
language versions to be used as a strategic tool for institutional reform
globally. The World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations and the
British Film Institute acquired these films in the early 1950s, and from the
late 1940s through the 1970s and later hundreds of universities and social
service organizations around the world made active use of them through
rental or purchase through the New York University Film Library, an established distributor of educational film.
Boltanski remarks with regard to action that, given the distance factor, ‘no
one would suggest that the spectator of distant suffering should drop everything and rush to the unfortunate’s side’ (p. 17). But the rise of travel and
communication, combined with the transnational imperative of the
Declaration, made it easier to do that virtually – to ‘rush to the side’ of distant ‘victims’ professionally, as Spitz did, and to bring professional audiences
to the ‘sides’ (causes) of these children through films that compelled their
viewers to action at home as well as at a distance. Freud and Burlingham did
‘drop everything’ to address the crises of British children in a new national
setting that was only newly and ambivalently Freud’s home. Though they did
not ‘rush to the sides’ of the child camp survivors whose circumstances had
come to light, it certainly can be said that the children were rushed to their
sides for care. The prior Kindertransport movement had been about precisely
that process of using transport and communication systems to bring child
victims home to the British ‘side’ in a political gesture of benevolence whose
ambivalence is reflected in the subsequent internment of some of the
children, along with other German citizens, during the war. My interest,
then, is in the role of psychoanalysts including Freud and Spitz in addressing
such crises of children, home and distance, and in identifying the place of
visuality in this psychoanalytic politics of pity and institutional reform.
Spitz and Wolf: Moral Witnesses of Infant Grief
Spitz was born in Vienna in 1887, coincidentally the year the Archives of
Pediatrics published ‘Hospitalism’, an essay noting unexplained wasting
and deaths among institutionalized infants given adequate physical care.
Spitz would use the same title for a 1945 publication that would stun the
profession by describing the process as an illness and death of the ego, and
by accounting for its cause in simple factors of emotional deprivation in
institutional care.
Infants, Spitz acknowledged, posed certain obvious problems for psychoanalytic practice. The phrase ‘the talking cure’, founded on the analysis by
Joseph Breuer of Bertha Pappenheim (Anna O.) who inspired Freud to
formulate his first psychoanalytic thoughts, captures the importance of oral
speech as both the chief medium and the defining metaphor of classical
Cartwright ‘Emergencies of Survival’
psychoanalysis (Freeman, 1972). With its focus on therapeutic intervention
through speech, psychoanalysis would seem to offer little insight into the
meanings of pre-verbal behavior. Spitz referred to this as a ‘poverty of symptomatology’ in infant psychiatry (Spitz and Wolf, 1946: 326). In its pre- and
early linguistic phases, analysis would seem to be precluded for lack of its
fundamental focus, speech. In his work with infants, Spitz shifted his focus
from speech to appearance and his stance from listener to visual observer.
These shifts entailed foregrounding sight and the visual, those registers so
tightly restricted in the conventional adult analytic setting. He generated
analytic interpretation of visual, observational data, much of which was
compiled on film, or through charts and textual records. The information he
derived was largely based on physical observation, evidence from the body of
the infant that included movement, gesture, gaze, expression, behavior and
growth. In the psychiatrist’s or the psychiatric social worker’s observation of
and interaction with the infant and young child, looking and physical
performance (gesture, touch) supplement or replace oral speech as both
analytic technique and as the primary objects of analytic attention. Perceived
behavior, including the infant’s social activity of looking – receiving looks,
returning them, or not – become key indicators of a child’s psychic and
developmental health. This emphasis on observed physical expression and
behavior made Spitz’s work, in historical retrospect, seem a better fit with
experimental psychology; this is because it follows, for example, the Johns
Hopkins psychologist John B. Watson’s infamous studies of an 11-month-old
boy’s reaction to stimuli such as suffocation, drowning, and exposure to rats,
documented in the film Little Albert (1917). It also precedes Harry and
Margaret Harlow’s studies launched in the late 1950s at the University
of Wisconsin Primate Research Laboratory of monkeys deprived of their
mothers and placed with surrogates, including dolls and mechanical figures
(Harlow, 1971),4 or the work in the 1970s of Sylvan Tomkins and other
experimental psychologists who used video and early computer technology
to record and score facial expression according to changes in affect, and
adapted these tools to the study of infant expression (Ekman et al., 1971).
The observational platform on which Spitz organized his work with infants
and toddlers was constituted explicitly as a visual field in which everything
revolved around relays of looks and touching as stimulus, organization of the
social space for optimal relations of looking, and visual observation as data
source. In this, Spitz broke at least two of the prohibitions of analytic practice: the prohibition against physical contact between analyst and analysand,
and the prohibition against engaging the patient through eye contact and a
dialog of bodily signals.
In his discussion of his ‘infantile setting’ theory, a theory proposing that the
adult analysand regresses to a preverbal stage, Spitz recommends that
the analyst perform diatrophically, as a supporting medium who resists the
impulse to himself ‘act out’ on any register. However, Spitz (1956) is quick
to acknowledge, this is not always achieved in practice. In fact, he proposes, there can be benefits to a situation where the analyst does not remain
in his or her place: ‘The analyst’s acting out can lead to a therapeutic
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interpretation’ and, moreover, ‘when acting out replaces interpretation, the
results will sometimes be spectacular’ (p. 242).
We might wonder what sort of spectacle Spitz imagines that might result from
the analyst ‘acting out’, breaking the codes of analytic passivity. What might
lie beyond interpretation to constitute, in Spitz’s terms, a spectacular cathartic therapeutic intervention? In what follows, I follow the thread of this
peculiar remark about the results of the analyst’s ‘acting out’ as moral
witness by tracking Spitz’s own performances, his instances of spectacular
‘acting out’ with his infant subjects captured on and through film and in
public forums on behalf of the class of ‘ego-emergent’ children his films
visually document and analyze. It is in the realm of pre-verbal subjects that
Spitz earned a reputation for making ‘spectacular interventions’, introducing
the very idea of infant psychoanalysis on an international scale as a social
intervention in the moral crises he witnessed. In ‘acting out’ a physical and
visual relationship with his subjects, and acting out on film with them for
public evidence, Spitz dramatized previously unseen, unthinkable emergencies of survival. He brought these crises to the screen for professionals who
responded with consternation, rejection and denial. However, some of these
professionals also were driven to action by the images of suffering Spitz
brought them to share with him as collective, professional and moral
witnesses. For his infant psychoanalysis to be spectacularly cathartic required
a reciprocity that broke the codes of analytic neutrality and passivity.
With psychologist Katherine Wolf, Spitz conducted a 5-year study of 164
children in their first year of life between 1936 and 1940. Their sites were a
prison nursery in Argentina and an orphanage for infants in Mexico. The
theories Spitz and Wolf put forth on the basis of these studies are widely
regarded as paradigm shifting internationally in infant psychiatry and
psychology (Spitz, 1945). Their first contribution was to refine and revise
hospitalism, the concept that had entered the North American medical literature through an Archives of Pediatrics editorial a half-century earlier.5
Published in 1945, Spitz’s classic paper on hospitalism refers not to hospitals
per se but to conditions where infants undergo continuous institutional care
from birth (penal institution nurseries, orphanages). Deprived of a consistent primary caregiver in the first year of life, the infants and young children
at the orphanage that he observed with his collaborator Wolf experienced
severe developmental delays and setbacks; they exhibited emotional withdrawal and heightened susceptibility to infection; and, when deprived of
their primary caregiver during crucial developmental stages and for prolonged periods, they died in startling numbers, despite adequate food and
more than adequate hygiene. Thirty-seven percent of the children followed
at the orphanage died within two years; the 21 surviving children are
described as ‘extraordinarily retarded’ mentally and in weight and height
despite adequate nutrition and care. Of these 21 survivors, whose ages
ranged from 21/2 to 41/2 years, only 5 could walk unassisted; 8 children
could not stand alone. Only one child had a vocabulary of a dozen words,
11 had two words, and one child had no words at all. Spitz and Wolf proposed, on the basis of their observations, that absence of a consistent primary
Cartwright ‘Emergencies of Survival’
caregiver and resultant inadequate sensory and emotional stimulation froze
and reversed these children’s development.
The second influential publication of Spitz and Wolf was their 1947 paper
proposing that infants deprived of their primary caregiver for an extended
period of time experienced anaclitic depression. Anaclisis, meaning literally
to rest upon, is a term that was introduced by Sigmund Freud to describe the
early relationship of the sexual instincts to the self-preservative ones.
Anaclisis is used with reference to adults to refer to cases in which the subject chooses a love object on the model of the parental caregiver, a figure
who nourishes and protects. Spitz and Wolf describe this condition in infants as
sharply distinct from adult depression. Anaclitic depression was not exactly a
condition like adult depression forcing the ego into repression, Spitz and
Wolf postulated, because the infant ego was already weak and nascent in the
first year, leaving little room for regression. Rather, what they observed was
‘retardation or paralysis of ego development’, a temporary or sustained
arrest or loss of acquired ego functions that might lead to death of the infant
even in the presence of adequate nutrition and physical care. The factor
needed to nurture the very emergence of an ego that would sustain the child,
providing it with an internal will to survive, was identified as consistent caregiver attention and contact. In short, their theory proposed that these
children failed to emerge as social subjects for want of a consistent mother
figure. Some of Spitz and Wolf ’s colleagues separately found that, after three
years of institutionalisation, the psychopathological and developmental
changes effected in surviving children by the experience of institutionalization were irreversible (Spitz, 1945: 115; see also Durfee and Wolfe, 1933;
Goldfarb, 1944a, 1944b; and Bender and Yarnell, 1947). These findings were
supported by Spitz’s observation that children placed in a better environment after the 15th month failed to improve and in fact continued to
deteriorate progressively (Spitz and Wolf, 1946: 330–1). The emergency of
survival, then, was a grave one environmentally caused and all the more
tragic for its preventability with timely intervention.
According to Spitz and Wolf, anaclitic depression was a condition distinct
from the depressions, melancholia and mourning described by Sigmund
Freud and others in the psychoanalytic literature. The infant went ‘far
beyond mourning, and even beyond pathological mourning’. In the
foundling home, they concluded, there existed ‘a phenomenon more grave
than melancholia’ (p. 313). Characteristics of the syndrome included: weight
loss; weepy behavior giving way to withdrawal; indifference; a frozen stare
or watchful countenance; weeping, and/or screaming in response to the
approach of the experimenter (with whom previously the child had smiled
and interacted); insomnia; greater susceptibility to infection; and a decline in
developmental quotient.6
In the film Grief: A Peril in Infancy (1947), Spitz presents six cases from a
foundling home identified in the film as ‘outside the country’ (Casa de Cuna
is printed on the sheets). The viewer is informed through inter-titles that the
children may become ‘impaired, asocial, criminal, or insane’ due to their
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deprivation of a stable primary caregiver. The infants are shown in sequence,
each progressively developing the symptoms Spitz and Wolf describe in their
work on anaclitic depression. The first case is Jane, a black baby who, in the
first set of shots taken from above and to the side of her crib, turns her gaze
upward to meet the slowly nodding gaze of Spitz as he enters the room and
leans into her crib, engaging her in direct face-to-face contact. In the last shot
from this sequence, taken a month later, Jane is inconsolable. She averts her
gaze from Spitz’s face. In this shot, Spitz breaks with his previous practice of
contact through the gaze alone. He reaches into the crib to consolingly
stroke the infant. In another sequence, a white 6-month-old girl smiles when
Spitz comes in. He lifts her and nods; she gazes back at him. Inter-titles
inform us that her mother is ‘taken away’ for three months. We see the infant,
now markedly diminished in size and vitality, cowering in a corner of her
crib, her face a frozen mask and her eyes staring. Spitz once again lifts the
child out of the crib and strokes her, this time on the head and face. She
becomes silent but does not engage with him visually. At this point, Spitz turns
to face the camera, looking directly into it with an imploring gaze. If the
infant’s face is a mask of grief, Spitz’s own face might be described as a
mirror of that look in its expression of stricken pity. He replaces the child in
the crib and turns to leave, but her display of misery is repeated. Spitz returns
to her and repeats his performance of consolation. The next child we see is
shown in a close up that moves in on the frozen stare and the grimacing
mouth which Spitz elsewhere describes as a kind of ‘smile’ of grief (see Spitz
and Wolf, 1946).
Boltanski’s spectator imagines the suffering observed but does not become
involved, does not identify with the victim or even imagine him- or herself in
the position of a personal bond with the unfortunate. This spectator is, in
Boltanski’s words, a split subject insofar as he watches himself, acting as
impartial moral guide to the self as bystander from a distance. On the one
hand, assertion of suffering as fact rather than as opinion is the morally
acceptable form for the spectator to take in speaking about the misery
observed. On the other hand, the spectator must take into account the social
prohibition against detached reporting. The detached, observant spectator of
distant suffering must also be an ‘introspector’, someone who recognizes
and describes his own feelings in any account of the suffering observed.7
Spitz, as spectator of these children in the period before the war, was exactly
such a split subject in his impartial observations. The films make obvious the
fact that he did not intervene in the circumstances directing these infants’
downward-spiralling course to anaclitic depression. Yet, in looking out at the
camera, he demonstrated his role as introspector, describing in his solicitous
look out toward the camera his own state of grief over the suffering he
witnessed.
In turning these films into didactic professional lecture materials in the late
1940s, Spitz hailed a newly constituted collective of moral spectators. By
1947, the year Grief was produced, the diaspora of professionals Spitz
engaged with had expanded beyond the psychoanalytic community to
include social workers, teachers, and hospital administrators and nurses.
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Spitz’s crucial essay on anaclitic depression was published almost 10 years
after the footage for Grief was shot, but in the same year as the didactic film’s
production. The release of the film and the essay coincided exactly with
the worldwide climate of consternation in response to the making visible of the
realities of the holocaust. It coincided with broadening concerns about the
repercussions of this past experience on child camp refugees. It coincided
with the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights.8 Spitz went to great lengths
to make his message a global one, trying for example to get the WHO to act
as global distributor of his films when they agreed to acquire some prints.
Invoices and request letters in the Spitz collection show that the film
circulated broadly among rural child guidance centers to the Jewish Board of
Guardians, to intellectuals (including Bruno Bettelheim and Margaret Mead),
to the American Medical Association, the US Public Health Service and
the National Institutes of Mental Health. Grief continued to be used in
psychology classes at least into the late 1990s.
Spitz’s Attachment
The film documents of grief in anaclitic depression depict an interesting
problematic with regard to the idea of anaclisis, a concept that would be
taken up by British child psychoanalyst John Bowlby as attachment. I do not
have space here to describe Bowlby’s own documentary films produced by
James Robertson, the Scottish boilerman for the Hampstead war nurseries
who trained informally in psychoanalysis under Anna Freud and later earned
a degree in psychiatric social work. Robertson’s fieldwork through the
Tavistock Clinics informed some of Bowlby’s best-known theories (1940,
1947). For this essay’s purposes, I adopt the concept of attachment to
describe Spitz in his empathetic expression of pity as documented in Grief.
Spitz engages in an observational protocol that by its own design prohibits
interference in the filmic process. Spitz initially does not interrupt the
process he documents as it unfolds in the experimental setting, except in
ways pre-designed to elicit information. However, as the process of wasting
unfolds in the child and on film, we see Spitz increasingly engaging with his
subjects outside the terms of the experiment in order to interrupt the
process he is appalled to see unfolding before his eyes: the child withdraws,
regresses, stops growing, averts its gaze or looks through him with frozen
stares, and ultimately dies. The researcher responds to this unfolding plight
by introducing increasing displays of attachment behavior. First he engages
her with looks, then with physical contact. Later, when the child diminishes
in size, health, and sociality, he lifts her from the crib, stroking her grimacing
mask of a face with his hands. The child’s withdrawal is met with escalating
displays of compassion and empathy, escalating attachment behaviors.
The pity response provoked in Spitz and Wolf by these children becomes a
feature in these films, making them documents not only of the unfolding
processes of depression in the infant that Spitz wishes us to observe, but also
of the intervention of the observer as moral agent in this process. The
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researcher models compassionate interaction and the very processes of introspection and empathy so stunningly unforthcoming even in a nascent form
in the infants who waste away before our eyes. The moral imperative to intervene with compassion goes against the expectations of objectivity and
distance built into both the film process and the scientific process.
Observation of the detached subject – the infant who is unable to attach, to
identify, to empathize, to summon communicative expression or introspection, and thus to emerge as a social subject beyond the basic expression
of suffering – elicits exaggerated displays of researcher attachment and
involvement. Spitz enters the room and reaches out for the infant, holding
her close to his heart and stroking her head and cheek as he looks briefly but
solicitously, imploringly into the camera and then lowers his gaze to her, over
and over as if to draw us into her plight and its resolution. Ironically, introspection is precluded for the infant in its regression back to a near ego-less
state. In the absence of a caregiver, his or her fate lies in the hand of the professional spectator, the psychoanalyst focused on the spectacle for purposes
of observation and tied to a profession that mandates analytic neutrality.
A note about who is being hailed by this imploring gaze is in order. Spitz
closely monitored and regulated the audiences for his films, allowing only
medical ‘men’ and professionals engaged in child welfare to rent them, and
only limited professional and student audiences to see them, always with
accompanying lectures and discussion. In a text commemorating Spitz’s
career, psychiatrist Robert Emde (1983) wrote:
The story is told that when Spitz first showed Grief to a group of New
York psychiatrists a number became teary and expressed agony because
of a compelling empathetic response to the suffering infants. In recent
years we have found that a more common experience is for viewers
seeing these films to become anxious. Furthermore, if the viewers are
not prepared for what they see, they may struggle to avoid feelings of
sadness by ‘making light’ of the films by focusing on inappropriate
details, or by not paying attention. (pp. 426–7)
In its time, Spitz’s Grief called viewers to action – to reform of institutional
practice, reform of psychoanalytic method. Cultural difference was traversed
in a humanitarian response that helps a ‘host of substitutes’, to evoke
Boltanski’s concept of who is served by humanitarian action on behalf of
witnessed suffering. Spitz’s performance of moral witnessing aided not
Anna and Jane, two of the children his films document, for the films were
publicized when these children, had they lived, would have been teens – too
late, in Spitz’s schema, to be helped. However, as Emde’s statement suggests,
Spitz’s Grief is not only the grief of his infant subjects, but the grief generated in professional adult viewers drawn in by Spitz’s silent call for empathy as he looks out at film spectators with the eyes that he has proposed are
the earliest locus of human expression. The modern witness of the postwar
films responds, according to Emde, by ‘focusing on inappropriate details’, or
by ‘not paying attention’. The late-century observer of the postwar moral
Cartwright ‘Emergencies of Survival’
spectator of child ‘emergencies of survival’ evokes the classical psychoanalytic response, averting his or her gaze not only from the scene of suffering, but also from the embarrassing sight of the mid-century analyst’s
too-intense identification with his subjects’ failure to thrive, in which perhaps
he saw the limits of psychoanalysis itself.
Notes
1. See Writings of Anna Freud (1968), Vol. IV, Ch. 8; see also the biography by
Peters (1985). On the Kindertransport movement that brought 10,000 Jewish
children from the camps and private homes into Great Britain between 1938
and 1940, see the website of the Kindertransport Association (KTA) at
http://www.kindertransport.org/; also the documentary films My Knees Were
Jumping: Remembering the Kindertransports (Melissa Hacker, 1998) and Into the
Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (Mark Jonathan Harris, 2000).
2. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 217 A(III), 10 December 1948;
quoted in Article 25(2).
3. The 1990 Convention defines children (18 and under) explicitly as autonomous
subjects, neither solely the charges of their parents nor the passive objects of
charity, in a global milieu whose authority may override the state’s in
determining rights and protections. It remains unratified by two countries: the
United States and Somalia, a factor that fails to reflect the role of US
governmental policies and nongovernmental organizations based in the US as
moral forces and arbiters of this new international vision. See UNICEF (2003), FAQ.
4. Harlow, Learning to Love (1971). See also the Harlow Collection at the American
Archives of the History of Psychology (Spitz collection, including films) and some
of the extensive Harlow monkey footage used in Rock A Bye Baby, a Time Life
Documentary (Lothar Wolff, 1970), which explicitly compares the rocking
movements of institutionalized children, blind children and monkeys. The latter
film is available for online viewing with RealPLayer7 at http://www.violence.de/
tv/rockabye.html
5. See Crandall (1887); Zahorsky (1905) addresses the problem of public display
for profit of babies requiring the nurture of these mechanical care-surrogates for
survival.
6. Spitz’s other work with Wolf included documenting the importance of the face,
and especially the eyes, in the baby’s first recognition of an other, concluding in
that project that babies do not discriminate on the basis of skin color or gender.
See Smile of a Baby (film, 1948), ‘The Smiling Response’ (Spitz and Wolf, 1946),
and The First Year of Life (Spitz, 1966).
7. His emphasis on psychological outcomes would inform the work of authors such
as Alice Miller (1985) who proposes that disorders of the ego and attachment
deriving from child-rearing practices may help to explain the actions of Nazi
figures such as Klaus Barbie, the former teacher and allegedly kind father who
volunteered to inflict torture and humiliation.
8. Spitz (undated) recommends showing the film twice – once before the lecture,
once after, and slowing down frames for analysis. On the films, see the annotated
filmography in Emde (1983) and Fisher and Stone (undated), ‘Explanatory
Notes’. The WHO and the UN (Geneva) purchased the films Grief and Somatic
Consequences in 1951 (handwritten anonymous note in Folder 78 of Box M
2137, Spitz Papers). This correspondence includes letters from Spitz petitioning
the WHO to act as international film distributor, a role that fell to the private
service of the NYU Film Library.
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Lisa Cartwright is Associate Professor and Graduate Advisor in
Communication and a member of the graduate Science Studies Program
faculty at the University of California at San Diego. She is the author of
Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (University of
Minnesota Press, 1995), co-author of Practices of Looking: An Introduction
to Visual Culture (Oxford University Press, 2000) and has recently completed
‘Moral Spectatorship’, a book on disorders of communication and agency in
technological visions of the child.
Address: Department of Communication 0503, University of California, San
Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA. [email: [email protected]]
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