Imagining the Child’s Mind: A two-day international conference: Conference programme and abstract booklet

In the period following the Second World War, several (international) ini­tiatives brought the issue of children’s mental health to the forefront. The political will to address this area – undoubtedly shaped by an awareness of the war’s impact on new generations – was accompanied, affirmed, and in some respects even anticipated by developments in various academic and scientific fields that took on the task of understanding, guiding, and treating the “child’s mind.” Notably, the “psy” disciplines, pedagogy, crimi­nology, social work, sociology, and anthropology entered into a shared and evolving dialogue on this subject. Child psychiatry established itself as a distinct medical discipline. Psychological perspectives contributed to a shi­ft in the paradigm of childhood and suffering, partially supplanting earlier frameworks focused on morality and education. The following decades witnessed an explosion of research into childhood mental disorders, their diagnosis, and classification – developments that certainly did not take place in a political, social, or cultural vacuum. Since both the concept of mental health and that of childhood – individually and in their interrelation – are historically, culturally, and socially constructed, the definitions and strategies used to address issues in relation to children’s mental health have differed across contexts and over time. The conference Imagining the Child's Mind aims to deepen our understanding of these distinctions through insights from researchers in the fields of history and related disciplines, with particular attention to the dynamics of change after 1945.