Psychologie des Kindes (in English: The Psychology of the Child) is a book written by the German psychiatrist and neurologist Robert Gaupp. It was first published in 1907 by the publishing house B.G. Teubner Leipzig Berlin. There were a total of four versions of the book, the last revised version appearing in print in 1917. With this book, Gaupp aimed at providing an up-to-date overview of the main ideas and findings on developmental psychology of the time.
Context Robert Gaupp himself was a German psychiatrist and neurologist. In August 1904, he gave several lectures on the topic of child psychology in Heidelberg and was subsequently approached by the publishing house B.G. Teubner Leipzig Berlin asking him to publish a scientific book on this topic. The idea was to summarise the findings on child development of the time and to make the insights available to a broader audience of non-academic people. Since Gaupp himself was not a psychologist, he keeps appealing to other scientists such as Preyer and especially Stern and summarises their findings. He, however, also brings in his own ideas when it comes to neurological developments as well as his ideas on psychological "abnormal" children and the causes of those abnormalities. In that way, he combines insights from psychology, psychiatry and neurology. To understand the creation as well as the meaningfulness of the book, it is important to know about the historical and societal developments specifically with regards to the changing view people had on children at the turn of the century.
Beginnings of developmental psychology At the end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century the societal view on children was changing. Before that time, the infant mortality due to diseases was so high, that parents did not emotionally invest in their children. People used to have many children knowing and accepting that many of them would not make it into adulthood. From the age of 7, children were already seen as adults and consequently were dressed like adults as well. Only once the infant and child mortality started to decrease in Europe and the United States, parents and also scientists became more interested in the children and in childhood as a developmental stage. From the end of the 19th century onwards, children were also required to go to school. During the Industrial Revolution, child labour rates had increased, but with the developing interest in children, the first laws were passed in Europe protecting children from child labour. In turn, throughout the latter half of the 19th century the fact that more researchers began to study children also let to more awareness of children's welfare. Consequently, more laws protecting children were passed and child education became mandatory in many Western countries. The late 19th century also marks the beginning of psychology as a scientific discipline in general. One of the first scientists to study the relationship between different stimuli and mental responses was the physician Gustav Theodor Fechner. The first experimental lab for psychology was opened by Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig in 1879, which marks the birth date of modern psychology. Both Fechner and Wundt understood the importance of empirical and methodical research. From then on, more scientist and psychologists recognised the importance of systematic observations and planned experiments in the field of psychology. This was also an important advancement for the subfield of developmental psychology as early developmental psychologists were likewise faced with the difficult task of finding appropriate methods to study children. The first version of the book Psychologie des Kindes was written in the beginning of the 20th century. At that time that the field of child and developmental psychology was still in its infancy. One of the first documented systematic observations of children dates back to 1840 when Charles Darwin started to observe and note down the growth and development of his own children. This way of scientifically documenting the behaviour of children was in turn what inspired many European developmental psychologists. The birth of developmental psychology itself is often set to 1882. In that year, William Thierry Preyer published the first textbook on the development of children titled "the mind of the child". One of his successors is the German psychologist William Stern who contributed further to the newly formed discipline with his systematic observations on children.
View on mental illness For most of ancient and medieval history, people suffering from mental illness were treated poorly and excluded from society, because it was often believed that they were possessed by demons. From the end of the 18th century, the societal view on those who are mentally ill was slowly changing. Now, they were placed in asylums, specifically created houses for people with psychological problems. Together with the development of the discipline of psychology in the 19th century, people become also newly interested in mental illness and its treatments. When Sigmund Freud published his ideas on psychoanalysis, he was one of the first to fully focus on treatment options and contributed to the field of psychiatry and therapy. The author of Psychologie des Kindes Robert Gaupp himself was specialised in the areas of mass murder and suicide and published several books on those topics. As a neurologist working at the psychiatric clinic in Breslau, he also looked at the possible relationships between bodily functions and mental illness, despite the fact that the field of neurology was still in its infancy. The late 19th century also marks the time of the beginning of the eugenics movement. Based on the findings of Darwin and his publication of On the Origin of Species, the eugenics movement was interested in genetics, breeding and in improving the genetic quality of the population. Psychology played an important role in that movement, as ideas on mentally ill were spreading and test were developed to assess people's intelligence. Gaupp himself was a proponent of compulsory sterilisation of those who are mentally ill.
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