More Than a Noah’s Ark Full of Animals - Childhood, Control, and the Development of American Psychology

The late nineteenth century was a busy time for people considering the human mind. In the wake of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), a litany of American philosophers, educators, and scientists consciously undertook a collective effort to develop what eventually became psychology. As the century turned from the 19th to 20th and psychological science developed, individual children came to occupy a central and privileged place in the development of this mind science. American psychologists explicitly eschewed earlier philosophical, theological, aesthetic, and educational understandings of children. In lieu, individual pre-adults were framed in evolutionary and developmental terms. As a simultaneously scientific and social enterprise, American psychology endeavored to fashion collective life anew through both knowing and engineering children’s minds. Central to psychology’s social endeavor was the school, juvenile court, day care, and developmental clinic. An episodic account linking William James/experimentation, G. Stanley Hall/observation, William Healy/Juvenile case studies, and Arnold Gesell/cinemanalysis is offered to inventory this history. In addition to undertaking a chore in the history of science and an errand in youth studies, this dissertation is an exercise in a Foucauldian method. I rely on Arnold Davidson, Ian Hacking, and what has been termed historical epistemology’s reading of Michel Foucault’s archaeological method. Succumbing to their influence, I attempt an historical and conceptual analysis that examines the maneuverings by which and consequences of childhood becoming a psychological phenomenon. Broadly framed, this dissertation attempts to illustrate the merits of a Foucauldian how over and against any kind of theoretical what. Nearly no contemporary American institution interfacing with children is exempt from psychology’s influence. This dissertation attempts a “history of the present” that analyzes the contingency of existing psychological concepts and juvenile institutions. A description of contemporarily understood ahistorical concepts and practices allows for the possibility of new forms of thought and potentially novel social imaginaries. Children have not always been psychologized. Perhaps, they need not be strictly so in the future.