Rene Spitz: Emotional

Deprivation of Infants and

Children
Marie Angelique Gelvezon
Y3 Resident
About Rene Spitz
 Professional Life
Born: January 29, 1887 in Vienna, Austria
Died: September 11, 1974 (aged 87) in Denver, Colorado

Professional Life:

• taught psychoanalysis at the École

Normale Supérieure in Paris, France

• worked as a psychiatrist at the Mount Sinai

hospital

• visiting professor at several universities,

before teaching at the University of Denver
and eventually settling in Colorado
 Contributions
Ego Development - Spitz noted three organizing principles in
the psychological development of the child:

1) the smiling response, which appears at around three

months old in the presence of an unspecified person
2) anxiety in the presence of a stranger, around the eighth
month
3) semantic communication, in which the child learns how to
be obstinate, which the psychoanalysts connect to the 
obsessional neurosis

Spitz adopted the term anaclitic depression to describe the

child’s reaction of grief, anger, and apathy to partial emotional
deprivation.
 Emotional Deprivation in Infancy
● In 1945, Spitz investigated hospitalism in children in a foundling
home
● He found that the developmental imbalance caused by the
unfavorable environmental conditions during the children's first
year produces irreparable psychosomatic damage to normal
infants
● Another study of Spitz showed that under favorable
circumstances and adequate organization a positive child
development can be achieved
● Psychogenic Disease in Infancy (1952)
The Visual Psychoanalysis of Rene Spitz

The film Grief: A Peril in Infancy, a documentation

of Spitz and his colleague Katherine Wolf’s
observation, of infants in institutional settings, was
said to be an evidence of the Psychoanalytic theories
of development.
 Emotional
Deprivation of
Infants and Children
 Peculiarities in Infancy
• Infancy development takes place from a quasi-animal to
human level
• Characterized by problems of communication and
adaptation
• Infant’s environment is widely restricted
• The infants social environment is practically restricted to
one single person (the mom or her substitute)
Spitz Position on Emotional Development

• Emotions are not present ready-made from birth

• At birth - the first emotion visible is a state of diffuse excitation in
the nature of displeasure and no pleasurable emotion is
observable as its counterpart, only a state of quiescence
• First two months of life - they appear to correspond to pleasure
and displeasure
• Third month – the infant smiles in response to a human
partner's face; displeasure also is manifested in response not
only to physical, but also to psychological stimulation
• Sixth month - negative emotions take the lead
Observations on Children Raised in
Foundlinghomes
• Infants raised by their own mothers generally grow up with
strong emotional interchange compared to those raised in
foundlinghomes
• Children raised in foundlinghomes showed a downward trend
in their developmental quotient
• Foundlinghomes showed higher mortality rate in children
compared to nursing homes
 Effects of Emotional Deprivation

 Anaclitic depression describe the child’s reaction of grief,

anger, and apathy to partial emotional deprivation (the loss of a
loved object) and proposed that when the loved object is
returned to the child within three to five months, recovery is
prompt.

Hospitalism describes the situation when a child will show

symptoms of increasingly serious deterioration, usually taking
place after five months of emotional deprivation.
 Changing Interpretations of Hospitalism
• Over the years, hospitalism has become more an issue of how
institutions were run rather than whether they should exist or not
in the first place
• Advances in the care of infants – from aseptic care to prevent the
spread of diseases to wet nursing were implemented; various
individuals and interest groups also advocated for infant welfare
movement and medicalized solution to make residential care safe
for babies.
 The mother-child
relationship is the central
ecological factor in infant
development in the course
of the first year.
 References
Weitzenkorn, R. (2020). Boundaries of reasoning in cases: The visual psychoanalysis of René Spitz.
History of the Human Sciences, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695120908491

Spitz, R. A. (1949). THE ROLE OF ECOLOGICAL FACTORS IN EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN INFANCY1.

Child Development, 20(3), 145–155. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.1949.tb04685.x

Wikimedia contributors. (2020, May 18). 1940s: Spitz – Parenting and Family Diversity Issues. Pressbooks.
Retrieved February 23, 2022, from
https://iastate.pressbooks.pub/parentingfamilydiversity/chapter/spitz/#return-footnote-40-2

Rowold K. (2019). What Do Babies Need to Thrive? Changing Interpretations of 'Hospitalism' in an

International Context, 1900-1945. Social history of medicine : the journal of the Society for the Social History
of Medicine, 32(4), 799–818. https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkx114