Psychologie des Kindes
Psychologie des Kindes (in English: The Psychology of the Child) is a book written by the German psychiatrist and neurologist Robert Gaupp.
With this book, Gaupp aimed at providing an up-to-date overview of the main ideas and findings on developmental psychology of the time.
[1] 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.
[3] 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.
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.
[10] One of his successors is the German psychologist William Stern who contributed further to the newly formed discipline with his systematic observations on children.
[13][10] 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.
[15] 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.
[14] 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.
[16][17] Psychology played an important role in that movement, as ideas on mentally ill were spreading and test were developed to assess people´s intelligence.
[17] Gaupp himself was a proponent of compulsory sterilisation of those who are mentally ill.[2] The first version of the Psychologie des Kindes is divided into and introduction and three main parts.
In the preface of the second book, dating back to 1909, the author mentions that the first version sold so fast that after only two years a new edition had become necessary.
[26] Robert Gaupp and many other leading psychiatrists of the time believed that mental illness was hereditary and promoted compulsory sterilisation thus.
[28] From 1924 onwards a local group in Tübingen belonging to the German Society for "race hygiene" (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene) were advocating sterilisation for those who are ill, which also included those who were mentally ill.[28] One year later, Gaupp himself published another booked called Die Unfruchtbarmachung geistig und sittlich Kranker und Minderwertiger (English: Sterilisation of mentally sick and inferior).
[28] Even before the Nazis created a legal basis, the directors of the psychiatric clinic, at which Gaupp was working until 1936, were carrying out sterilisation.
[27] On July 14 in 1933, the "Gesetzt zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses" (English: Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring) was enacted by Hitler, now legally justifying sterilising mentally ill people against their will.
