Emotional Deprivation in Infancy :: Study by Rene A. Spitz 1952

Psychogenic Disease in Infancy
Illustrates a series of psychogenic diseases and attempts to relate them to the infants' relationships with their mothers.

Vgl.: Vom Säugling zum Kleinkind. Naturgeschichte der Mutter-Kind-Beziehungen im ersten Lebensjahr, Klett-Cotta Verlag, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 360891823X (englische Erstausgabe: The First Year of Life, 1965).

Die Orignalstudie wurde als „Hospitalism: An Inquiry into the Genesis of Psychiatric Conditions in Early Childhood, in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, Bd. 1 (1945), und „Hospitalism: A Follow-Up Report, in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, Bd. 2 (1946) publiziert.

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[mrjekyll09]

Some people are really thick, it angers me that everybody is blaming the researcher when he's actually had a positive input. This is the simplest way to understand what's going on: he did NOT design this experiment, he was trying to prove everybody wrong; because you can call the nurses "stupid, heartless" or you can say "it's obvious babies need love, even an old woman knows it" but truth is at that time as long as babies were fed and bathed, they were classified as having enough care.

[moixamo]

Spitz was filming what was common practice in hospitals and orphanages to show the public how WRONG it was. He was not experimenting, he took the victims of the system and brought them to the public eye. Do your research, it's thanks to people like him that this things happen less every day.

[Vyselink]

How about we call you a fucking moron for not understanding how the Dr. in this study worked?

[Norma Garcia]

Xeokym, you are right, if these children where exposed to chronic stress, their young and developing brains would be affected even as adults. The chronic release of cortisol to their young brains would impair growth and development to their young brains affecting them even in adulthood with regard to affect regulation, trust, intimacy and even learning.....

[ellandelachapelle]

Exactly. My mother told me this. And how enraged she was with the doctors. (she even wrote down her reactions years later. How it was when I was put in hospital at age 2 in 1952. How I survived a whole year of this I do not know.)

[elppa284]

If they were studied "without care", then these studies wouldn't have existed in the first place. It's an interesting paradox, for sure, but these observations were made precisely because the researchers cared.

[elppa284]

Just to add on to this: During that time, I believe many doctors actually encouraged parents not to form overly intimate attachments to children as well. They encouraged schedule-based feeding and limited touch-based interaction. It might be obvious that babies need love now, but it wasn't so obvious back then, and the reason we think it's so logically obvious now is because of studies like this.

[AtrocityStudios]

Did you even read any of the other comments or notes on what was really going on? This was a video examination of children that had been left in orphanages and hospitals without visiting hours. This was an expose, silly!

[Tatjanak1989]

i heard, because of his research they actually stopped having visiting hours at most hospitals for children -so they wouldn't have to be separated from their parents..

[tee1992x]

And that happened with genie.

[Zadig651]

Les réactions émotinnelles sont bien compréhensives mais il ne faut certainement pas en rester là ! Il faut surtout se rappeler que c'est grâce à René Spitz aujourd'hui à prévention des séparations précoces est devenue un fait commun. Youtube est riche mais on ne peut pas se contenter de l'image. Il faut aussi lire pour avoir de l'histoire une vision un tant soit peu réaliste.