What's Wrong with the Poor?

Psychiatry, Race, and the War on Poverty

Mical Raz

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781469627304, 9781469608877
• eBook ISBN: 9781469608884
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Psychiatry & Mental Health

In the 1960s, policymakers and mental health experts joined forces to participate in President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. In her insightful interdisciplinary history, physician and historian Mical Raz examines the interplay between psychiatric theory and social policy throughout that decade, ending with President Richard Nixon’s 1971 veto of a bill that would have provided universal day care. She shows that this cooperation between mental health professionals and policymakers was based on an understanding of what poor men, women, and children lacked. This perception was rooted in psychiatric theories of deprivation focused on two overlapping sections of American society: the poor had less, and African Americans, disproportionately represented among America’s poor, were seen as having practically nothing.
Raz analyzes the political and cultural context that led child mental health experts, educators, and policymakers to embrace this deprivation-based theory and its translation into liberal social policy. Deprivation theory, she shows, continues to haunt social policy today, profoundly shaping how both health professionals and educators view children from low-income and culturally and linguistically diverse homes.

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, published in 1951. It was “essential for mental health,” Bowlby argued, that “the infant and young child should experience a warm, intimate, and continuous relationship with his mother (or mother-substitute) in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment.” If this relationship was absent or insufficient—what Bowlby termed “maternal deprivation”—serious consequences for the child’s future mental health and character development would ensue.² An adapted version of the report appeared in 1953 as Child Care 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, became a household name on both sides of the Atlantic, and American newspapers 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 other possible factors led British psychoanalyst and feminist Juliet Mitchell to quip that “evacuee children were ‘maternally deprived’—bombs and poverty and absent fathers didn’t come into it.”⁶

“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 popular and were used to describe a wide spectrum of phenomena. This focus on the necessity of sensory stimulation for normal early development soon led mental health experts to reexamine theories that highlighted the dangers of maternal deprivation. Experimental psychologists, basing their hypotheses on animal experimentation, questioned the accepted view of mother love as the crucial component in normal infant development. Instead, they proposed 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 of sensory stimulation. Some researchers 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 as they are demonstrated in debates over day care in the United States. An economically stratified approach to deprivation emerged—middle-class children 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 how these concepts were applied selectively according to race and class. While the following chapters deal with racialized views of deprivation that emerged in the early and mid-1960s, this chapter focuses mainly on socioeconomic biases in the controversy over whether maternal deprivation was simply one form of sensory deprivation or was a unique psychological phenomenon.

Maternal Deprivation Theorists Respond to Sensory Deprivation

Psychologist Mary Salter Ainsworth was one of the most influential figures in maternal deprivation research. After receiving her doctorate from the University of Toronto in 1939, Mary Salter served in the Canadian Women’s Corps, obtaining the rank of major. She then joined the psychology department faculty at her alma mater and pursued research on psychological testing and Rorschach evaluations. Newly married in 1950, she followed her husband, an army veteran and graduate student in her department, to London, where he completed his doctorate. Although Ainsworth’s dissertation had examined children’s sense of security, she had never been particularly interested in psychoanalysis. Yet an advertisement in the London Times led her to a research position at the Tavistock Clinic, where she worked with John Bowlby on a project examining the effects of maternal deprivation. Upon Leonard Ainsworth’s graduation, Mary Ainsworth followed her husband to Uganda, where she spent two years performing observations on mother-infant interactions. In 1955, Leonard Ainsworth’s work took the couple to Baltimore, where Mary Ainsworth worked her way from an adjunct position involving psychological testing and clinical supervision to professor of development psychology at Johns Hopkins University. Following a painful divorce in 1960, Mary Ainsworth never remarried and had no children of her own.⁹ Much of her remarkable career was devoted to the evaluation of mother-infant relations, and she became a pioneer in the nascent field of attachment theory, examining how the interactions between infants and parents shaped lifelong psychological relations. Ainsworth worked closely with Bowlby throughout her career, considering him a mentor, and shared his perceptions of the necessity of maternal care. The two corresponded and collaborated until Bowlby’s death in 1990, and their letters provide valuable insight into how the main proponents of maternal deprivation viewed the emerging field of sensory deprivation and how this view changed over time.

Iowa-trained psychologist Leon Yarrow was among the first maternal deprivation theorists to address the possible role of sensory deprivation. In 1951, Yarrow had abandoned a promising university career to join the U.S. Children’s Bureau, where he pioneered longitudinal studies on adoption. His work served as the basis for a change in official governmental policy recommendations, favoring placing children for adoption as early as possible, thus minimizing time spent in institutions or foster homes. This interest in the care of orphaned children led Yarrow to the field of maternal deprivation.¹⁰ In a 1961 review in the Psychological Bulletin, Yarrow delineated three different types of deprivation that occurred in the institutional setting: “sensory deprivation, social deprivation, and emotional deprivation.” He relied on animal studies to argue that severe impairment could result from a child’s early deprivation of sensory experience. Tying animal studies with observations on institutionalized children, Yarrow argued that even the most “extreme institutional environments” created sensory deprivation to a lesser degree than that described in animal studies. Still, he maintained, “developmental retardation is found, with the extent of retardation corresponding to the degree of sensory deprivation.”¹¹

For Yarrow, sensory deprivation was a major reason why institutional care of young infants should be avoided. Still, he criticized attempts to conflate maternal and sensory deprivation as well as efforts to isolate the components of maternal deprivation into variables of tactile, auditory, and visual deprivation, which he saw as reductionist endeavors that promoted overly simplified interpretations of experimental findings. It was likely, he added, “that not all aspects of the mother-child relationship can be meaningfully reduced to such simple variables.”¹² Although Yarrow adopted much of the sensory deprivation language, he still assigned a specific role to the concept of mothering that could not be reduced completely to a form of stimulation.

Ainsworth had mixed feelings about these developments in the field. Although she did not comment directly on Yarrow’s 1961 piece, she had previously commented on Yarrow’s work in her letters to Bowlby. Describing Yarrow’s presentation at the American Psychological Association, she noted that he gave “considerable emphasis to the ‘sensory deprivation’ aspects of the institutional experience with . . . inadequate attention to the fact that it is in interpersonal interaction, especially with the mother, that the infant and young child experiences most of its ‘sensory stimulation.’”¹³ Ainsworth criticized in even stronger terms the responses of two leading figures in the field of educational psychology, Robert Sears and Joseph McVicker Hunt, whom she claimed

welcomed the divorce of sensory stimulation from the child’s relationship with his mother, as though it were personally satisfactory to think of a component that was free from the sentimental glorification of the child-mother relationship. It seems to me that this, which represents a fairly common viewpoint in American psychology, misses the whole point of trying to understand how it is that the child’s relationship with his mother is so important for his development. When they find a variable such as sensory stimulation–deprivation they say “Aha! Here is something that is important that is impersonal and objective and for which the mother [as] such is not necessary.” Instead it seems to me they should say “Here is a component of the child-mother relationship which we can identify, and which helps us understand why it is that, under usual conditions, maternal care is necessary for health development.” . . . However, I got the impression that Yarrow, Sears and McV. Hunt felt that the sensory deprivation component quite accounted for all instances of impairment of intelligence attributable to separation. And certainly they quite ignore the clinical evidence pointing to the fact that repeated disruptions of the mother-child relationship may lead to very severe disturbances quite in the absence of institutionalization and “sensory deprivation.” I found the whole thing quite discouraging.¹⁴

In a later letter to Yarrow, Ainsworth emphasized her preference for conceptualizing the role of maternal care in terms of the mother’s relationship to the child rather than through biological or functional explanations. She was “uncomfortable,” she explained, with Yarrow’s “use of the term ‘stimulation’ when I would prefer the term ‘interaction.’” Still, she conceded that “both the definitions you give of your maternal care variables and your discussion of your findings makes it clear that there is no substantial difference in our viewpoints.” Both agreed that sensory deprivation research was an important component in the evaluation of maternal deprivation.¹⁵

While Yarrow and additional psychologists viewed maternal care within both biological and psychological frameworks, others focused solely on mothers’ functional roles. In 1961, psychologist Lawrence Casler published “Maternal Deprivation: A Critical Review of the Literature,” in which he effectively claimed that the detrimental effects attributed to “maternal deprivation” by Spitz, Bowlby, and others were in fact a result of reduced perceptual (or sensory) input. He suggested using “perceptual deprivation” rather than “the too-broad and yet too-specific term, ‘maternal deprivation.’”¹⁶ In particular, he argued that it was unlikely that maternal deprivation could occur in children under the age of six months, as a basic level of psychological matureness was necessary for the child to be able to respond to this form of deprivation.”¹⁷ Rather, the impediments to psychological and intellectual development that could be seen in institutionalized infants, he argued, resulted from a lack of sensory stimulation. His review extensively cited experiments from the field of sensory deprivati...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• What’s Wrong with the Poor?
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One A Mother’s Touch?
• Chapter Two Cultural Deprivation?
• Chapter Three Targeting Deprivation
• Chapter Four Deprivation and Intellectual Disability
• Chapter Five Environmental Psychology and the Race Riots
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index
• Series