Papers by Felix E Rietmann
History of the Human Sciences, 2023
This article examines cinematographic observational studies of infants conducted by a loosely con... more This article examines cinematographic observational studies of infants conducted by a loosely connected group of female psychologists and physicians in the USA from the 1930s to the 1960s. Largely forgotten today, these practitioners realized detailed and carefully planned research projects about infant behavior in a variety of settings—from the laboratory to the well-baby clinic. Although their studies were in conversation with better-known works, such as John Bowlby’s research on attachment and René Spitz’s films on institutionalized infants, they differed in a close examination of individual characteristics of babies and a critical attitude toward contemporary notions of ‘pathological mothering’. In closely following the work of several researchers, including but not limited to pediatrician Margaret Fries (1898–1987), the clinical psychologist Sibylle Escalona (1915–96) and her team members—child psychiatrist Mary Leitch (1914–?) and avantgarde photographer Ellen Auerbach (1906–2004)—and psychologist Anneliese Korner (1918–2010), I argue that their cinematographic works shed a more nuanced light on the landscape of infant research and child psychiatry in the mid 20th century, and open a way for alternative readings of gender, psychoanalysis, and scientific observation at that time.
KulturPoetik [cultural poetics], 2022
This paper explores depictions of child health and pedagogy in the German periodical press from t... more This paper explores depictions of child health and pedagogy in the German periodical press from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, focusing on children’s periodicals and illustrated magazines. Examining narrative, structural, material, and visual properties, I argue that journals facilitated specific functions in evolving cultural conversations about child health and education: they participated in a growing market of health; created new audiences for scientific and medical knowledge; and articulated, negotiated, and scrutinized pedagogical styles and medical ideas. I trace these functions to two main sites: first, I suggest that children’s periodicals underwent a process of narrativization and differentiation during which the Enlightenment association of physical and moral education was severed in favor of consumer appeal and literary entertainment. Second, I point out that this development contributed to a broader public scrutiny of educational styles and medical ideas: illustrated magazines drew on recent techniques of intermedial and intertextual dramatization to stage and actively modify predominant medical opinion. From this perspective, I suggest that journals can be considered structural elements in the ‘medicalization’ of childhood and pedagogy, providing a cultural counterpoint to the medical history of health and illness in the early nineteenth century. The article is a first step in a larger project exploring the material and media culture of child health in the early nineteenth century.
ISIS, 2018
Even so, this revival has been linked up to the present day with a shift in its reference frame, ... more Even so, this revival has been linked up to the present day with a shift in its reference frame, owing to which Fleck is made to appear as a representative of an irrationalist conception of science. The point is rather this. Fleck used for his point of orientation a concept of rationality of the sort expressed in an analytical theory of science that at the time was just being brought into being. That is why he felt compelled to characterize as irrational structures of experience that lead one beyond that particular concept of rationality. He says, for instance: "The necessity of being experienced [Erfahrenheit] introduces into knowledge an irrational element, which cannot be logically justified. Introduction to a field of knowledge is a kind of initiation that is performed by others. It opens the door. But it is individual experience, which can only be acquired personally, that yields the capacity for active and independent cognition" (pp. 95-96 [pp. 125-126]). If, in contrast, one does not confine one's concept of rationality to elements that can be legitimated by logic, then such aspects of the historical development of systems of knowledge can surely be represented as fully rational and as adequate to the empirically given. Fleck offers important hints that address the challenge of formulating such a concept of historically developing rationality.
BJHS, 2017
This round table discussion takes the diversity of discourse and practice shaping modern knowledg... more This round table discussion takes the diversity of discourse and practice shaping modern knowledge about childhood as an opportunity to engage with recent historiographical approaches in the history of science. It draws attention to symmetries and references among sci- entific, material, literary and artistic cultures and their respective forms of knowledge. The five participating scholars come from various fields in the humanities and social sciences and allude to historiographical and methodological questions through a range of examples. Topics include the emergence of children’s rooms in US consumer magazines, research on the unborn in nine- teenth-century sciences of development, the framing of autism in nascent child psychiatry, German literary discourses about the child’s initiation into writing, and the sociopolitics of racial identity in the photographic depiction of African American infant corpses in the early twentieth century. Throughout the course of the paper, childhood emerges as a topic particu- larly amenable to interdisciplinary perspectives that take the history of science as part of a broader history of knowledge.
Neuropsychiatrie de l’enfance et de l’adolescence, 2016
Over the last forty years, video has become an almost ubiquitous tool in child psychiatric practi... more Over the last forty years, video has become an almost ubiquitous tool in child psychiatric practice. The increasing presence of moving images poses difficult questions from a philosophical and historical perspective: how do we know what happens in the mind of the child? This paper addresses the question in inquiring into the historical conditions of possibility for the emergence of video as a method for generating child psychiatric knowledge. It proposes a genealogy of moving images that draws on both the history of science and film history. The article sets out with a discussion of the work of the French neurologist Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne (1806–1875) as a first historical example for an interest in employing chrono-photographic means for the electro-physiological study of emotions in children. I suggest that Duchenne's work points to an ambiguous position of the child in the late nineteenth century, constituting a figure of both identification and alterity. I then show how Charles Darwin's study of infants re-situates the child in an evolutionary perspective, now taking a pivotal position for the anthropological understanding of the human condition. Darwin's work spurred experimentation with babies and infants and led to a cultural preoccupation with theories of recapitulation, as I will illustrate with the research of the British physician Louis Robinson (1857–1928). Part and parcel of this development was an interest in visualizing and recording children in both scientific and popular culture. The chrono-photographic studies of Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) and the 1895 film Repas de bébé by the Lumière brothers both testify to this new observational paradigm. I follow the paradigm into the twentieth century with the example of the filmic work of Arnold Gesell (1880–1961) that can be considered a precursor to current practices of video-based microanalysis. Finally, I present the point of view shot and the subjective camera as an alternative, or rather, a supplementary mode of visualization that seeks to understand the child's perspective through sympathetic insight. Films by Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) and recent scientific studies using eye-tracking methods will be set into this tradition. Overall, the paper argues that the crossroads of child studies and moving images at the turn-of-the-century have contributed to the emergence of two visual traditions that, until today, negotiate cultural ideas about the child, and, in this sense, participate in the construction of a fiction about the mind of the child.
French: Au cours des quarante dernières années, la vidéo est devenue un outil quasi quotidien pour la recherche et la clinique pédopsychiatriques. L'omniprésence des images en mouvement pose cependant des questions complexes d'un point de vue philosophique et historique : comment savoir ce qu'il se passe dans l'esprit du petit enfant ? En proposant une généalogie des images qui s'appuie à la fois sur l'histoire des sciences et sur l'histoire du cinéma, cet article tente de montrer comment serait née l'idée que l'observation vidéo pourrait permettre d'émettre des hypothèses sur ce que « pense » l'enfant. Les pratiques actuelles ont pour origine la conjonction de deux mouvements qui se développent à la fin du XIX e et au début du XX e siècles : l'essor des études sur l'enfant et l'intérêt scientifique croissant pour l'image en mouvement. Cette conjonction a contribué à l'émergence de deux traditions visuelles qui transmettent des conceptions culturelles sur l'enfant aujourd'hui encore et font dans ce sens partie de la construction d'une fiction sur l'esprit de l'enfant.
Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science, 2011
The Fifth Joint Workshop on Integrated History and Philosophy of Science asked participants, “Wha... more The Fifth Joint Workshop on Integrated History and Philosophy of Science asked participants, “What is HPS for?” This clearly instrumental question generated a welcome spectrum of practical responses. Examples of “HPS-in-action” included the concept of complementary science, suggestions for new pedagogical strategies and investigations into the socio-political dimensions of science. On the other hand, a more theoretical underpinning did emerge in a discussion of the pros and cons of pluralism. This emphasis on pluralism not only underlies complementary science, but may also provide a pragmatic working basis for developing a more active role for HPS in both science and society.
Uploads
Papers by Felix E Rietmann
French: Au cours des quarante dernières années, la vidéo est devenue un outil quasi quotidien pour la recherche et la clinique pédopsychiatriques. L'omniprésence des images en mouvement pose cependant des questions complexes d'un point de vue philosophique et historique : comment savoir ce qu'il se passe dans l'esprit du petit enfant ? En proposant une généalogie des images qui s'appuie à la fois sur l'histoire des sciences et sur l'histoire du cinéma, cet article tente de montrer comment serait née l'idée que l'observation vidéo pourrait permettre d'émettre des hypothèses sur ce que « pense » l'enfant. Les pratiques actuelles ont pour origine la conjonction de deux mouvements qui se développent à la fin du XIX e et au début du XX e siècles : l'essor des études sur l'enfant et l'intérêt scientifique croissant pour l'image en mouvement. Cette conjonction a contribué à l'émergence de deux traditions visuelles qui transmettent des conceptions culturelles sur l'enfant aujourd'hui encore et font dans ce sens partie de la construction d'une fiction sur l'esprit de l'enfant.
French: Au cours des quarante dernières années, la vidéo est devenue un outil quasi quotidien pour la recherche et la clinique pédopsychiatriques. L'omniprésence des images en mouvement pose cependant des questions complexes d'un point de vue philosophique et historique : comment savoir ce qu'il se passe dans l'esprit du petit enfant ? En proposant une généalogie des images qui s'appuie à la fois sur l'histoire des sciences et sur l'histoire du cinéma, cet article tente de montrer comment serait née l'idée que l'observation vidéo pourrait permettre d'émettre des hypothèses sur ce que « pense » l'enfant. Les pratiques actuelles ont pour origine la conjonction de deux mouvements qui se développent à la fin du XIX e et au début du XX e siècles : l'essor des études sur l'enfant et l'intérêt scientifique croissant pour l'image en mouvement. Cette conjonction a contribué à l'émergence de deux traditions visuelles qui transmettent des conceptions culturelles sur l'enfant aujourd'hui encore et font dans ce sens partie de la construction d'une fiction sur l'esprit de l'enfant.