Shaping the Child’s Mind

The enormous human loss and displacement brought about by the Second World War caused many children to grow up without mothers and fathers within institutions, substitute families, or cultures radically different from their own. This provided the ‘psy’ professions with the rare opportunity to observe the development of infants in vivo. How do notions of thought control, autonomy and freedom change when we consider not only the psychology of adults, but of children and adolescents – and with what effects for pedagogy, parenting, mental health or therapy? We examine how questions of nurture rather than nature became vitally important after 1945, as societies began to construct a moral vision for a new generation of Cold War babies. We also explore the legacies of these debates for visions of the self, and for child psychiatry and psychotherapy today.