Dear H-Madness readers,

You may be interested in the recently published article Reel worlds: Reconstructing the history of postwar child psychotherapy through fiction film, by Tim Snelson, which appeared in the journal History of Psychiatry. The article is freely downloadable. Below is the abstract of the article.

“This article uses British drama film No Place for Jennifer (1950) to argue for the evidential value of staged content of real psychotherapeutic places (Institute of Child Psychology) and practices (Margaret Lowenfeld’s World Technique). In the absence of ‘real’ documentary footage, discoveries of recreated therapeutic spaces within largely forgotten genre films can help reconstruct histories of the ‘psy’ sciences whilst offering insight into the contestations specific sites and practices provoked. Employing Baron’s reformulation from ‘documentary’ to ‘archival document’, it demonstrates that content extracted from previously disregarded films can fill archival lacunas whilst expanding both ‘what can be said’ about the past and how it can be said”.