From its invention, cinema has sought to capture children’s inner worlds and project them on-screen. Read how child psychology has shaped popular films about children from the silent era until today.
Cinema and children's inner worlds
Since the birth of cinema, filmmakers have sought to capture the emotional words of children. Many of the first short documentary films sought to document the surprised reactions on children’s faces, as in Repas de Bébé (1895), which starred Louis Lumière’s infant son Andre.
This was one of the first films shown to a public audience using a camera-projector like the one below.
Quickly developing film technology soon made feature-length and sound films possible, allowing filmmakers to engage with more complex narratives of children’s development. Child characters appeared across a range of genres, including family melodramas, literary adaptations and crime films. For the latter, Hollywood looked to recent developments by social scientists, particularly the University of Chicago’s school of urban sociology, which sought to document and understand where juvenile crime comes from.
Science Museum Group Collection
Gangster films like The Public Enemy (1931) and Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) sought legitimacy by drawing on the Chicago School’s ethnographic research with working-class gangs, to show how young boys’ imaginative play can evolve into a criminal careers. In his 1927 book The Gang, Frederic Thrasher explained that crime movies and dime novels ‘furnish the gang boy with patterns for his play and his exploits’.
Chicago psychiatrist and criminologist William Healy responded to the rise of crime in the 1900s by forming the Chicago Juvenile Psychopathic Institute (1909) and innovating new tests to identify juvenile delinquents. This resulted in his Healy Pictorial Completion Test, invented in 1917, a picture completion test for children used to detect what Healy termed ‘defective and aberrational individuals’.
Play therapy and children's storytelling
After World War One, leading psychoanalysts Melanie Klein and Anna Freud developed techniques for child analysis that focused on the positives of play, seeing it as central to children’s development and a primary way for them to express their emotional worlds. They used play and drawing in their work with children as a substitute for the free association used in adult psychoanalysis.
Melanie Klein images
Melanie Klein's hands, writing
Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0
A selection of children's drawings, circa 1925, used by Melanie Klein for the study of play techniques in analysis.
CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Toys used by Melanie Klein
CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia CommonsMargaret Lowenfeld's 'world' technique
The key innovator of play therapy was not Klein or Freud, however, but British paediatrician and child psychologist Margaret Lowenfeld (1890–1973) who brought play therapy to prominence through the development of her World Technique in 1929. She further developed this ‘sand play’ approach working at her Institute for Child Psychology (formerly the Children’s Clinic established in 1928) in the 1930s.
Lowenfeld provided trays with wet sand and other trays with dry sand and a range of mass-produced toys, including animals, action figures, buildings and vehicles. The World Technique must be understood in the context of the rise of the toy industry in the 20th century, which gave access to an infinite creative resource not only for Lownenfeld and her Institute, but also the many psychologists she subsequently trained in its use.
Image courtesy of Wellcome Collection
Through the creation of these complex Worlds, children played out themes relevant to their lives. The therapy—delivered individually or with groups of children—allowed them to express and work through their emotional turmoil, reflected in the gradual shift across each session from a World marked by disorder to one with more structure in which figures were placed in appropriate habitats.
Postwar filmmakers capture children's worlds
In a speech to the British Psychological Society in 1937 – where Carl Jung observed her technique for the first time – Margaret Lowenfeld identified the cinematic nature of the Worlds children created, explaining ‘[…]they may be vivid and moving suggesting a cinema film more than anything else for the rapidity of movement’. She also maintained that her inspiration for this therapeutic intervention was not psychoanalytic literature but science fiction writer HG Wells’ 1911 book Floor Games.
British cinema had largely ignored children’s psychological perspectives prior to the late 1930s, but the trauma of the Second World War and its aftermath prompted filmmakers to engage seriously with children’s psychological experiences. It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that these filmmakers looked to Lowenfeld, in particular, in seeking to make children’s worlds cinematic. The film No Place for Jennifer (1950) uses Lowenfeld’s technique as a key narrative device to tell its story of a young girl’s traumatic experience of her parent’s divorce.
Reordering Jennifer's inner world
When Jenny’s increasingly erratic behaviour alerts her school to her inner turmoil, her father is encouraged to send her to the London-based ‘Institute of Child Psychology’, where she is treated by a doctor modelled on Lowenfeld. The doctor shows Jennifer the ‘Mess and Paint Room’ and ‘Water Room’—both features of the real Institute of Child Psychology—before introducing her to a third room where a number of children are engaging with the Worlds Technique.
Jennifer favours the sand tray play, which allows her, with the help of the Lowenfeld character, to ‘get things straightened out together’. With the doctor’s guidance, Jenny works through the stages of chaos, struggle and resolution expressed in the gradual ordering of her World. This is evidenced by the eventual removal of a tiger figure.
Although a family melodrama, No Place for Jennifer also incorporates stylistic elements of post-war documentary films as part of its intent to be serious and scientific. In its focus on a middle-class girl’s experiences of psychological rupture through divorce, the film can be understood in the context of John Bowlby’s emergent attachment theories. Bowlby’s discoveries came from research into the effects of separation on child evacuees during wartime, and recognised that children’s early bonds with their caregivers have huge impacts throughout their lives.
Science Museum Group Collection
Image source
for A group of young children wearing name tags stand on a pavement
Lowenfeld's other psychological interventions
At the Institute of Child Psychology, Margaret Lowenfeld used and developed a number of other tests and techniques for understanding how children made sense of the world in non-verbal and creative ways. This included adapting the Healy Pictorial Completion test for work with traumatised children, rather than trying to identify ‘delinquent’ traits. She also developed her own diagnostic and capability tests which used tiles and blocks. This included her Mosaics (1948), which allowed the psychologist to interpret the patterns the child created, and her Kaleidoblocs (1960), used to explore the psychological capabilities of children.
1960s science fiction and 'extraordinary children'
As HG Wells’ work had influenced Lowenfeld, so child psychology and Lowenfeld’s interventions became significant plot devices and props in British science fiction films of the 1960s. In the opening of the Children of the Damned (1964), a gifted child’s completion of a block capability test in record time in front of an observing child psychologist is the first indication that something other-worldly is going on.
Conversely, a number of play therapy and child capability tests, including Lowenfeld’s World Technique, are employed by a team of clinicians in the science fiction drama The Mind of Mister Soames (1970). These are misguidedly (and inaccurately) used to a rush a man who has been in a coma for 30 years through the stages of child development, with disastrous results.
© 1969, renewed 1997 Rearguard Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of Columbia Pictures
While child psychology and child psychologist characters continue to feature in entertainment films, particularly supernatural horror, filmmakers have innovated new ways to express children’s inner worlds. Disney Pixar’s Oscar-winning Inside Out (2015) uses computer animation to explore the inner workings of a young girl’s mind as she experiences the disruption of her family's relocation. Set almost exclusively inside her head, the five key emotions driving her behaviour (joy, sadness, fear, disgust and anger) are depicted as animated characters who need to work together to restore order to her inner world.
From Lumière to Pixar, filmmakers working across three centuries have employed and combined the latest cinematic innovations and psychological ideas in trying to represent children’s interior worlds.
Find out more
Online
- The Dr Margaret Lowenfeld Trust
- Deborah Hutton. ‘Margaret Lowenfeld’s ‘World Technique.’ Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry. 2004;9(4)
- Laura Tisdall, ‘We have come to be destroyed’: The ‘extraordinary’ child in science fiction cinema in early Cold War Britain. History of the Human Sciences. 2021;34(5)
Books
- Margaret Lowenfeld, The World Technique, 1979
- Cathy Urwin and John Hood-Williams (eds). Child Psychotherapy, War and the Normal Child: Selected Papers of Margaret Lowenfeld, 1988
- Richard Maltby, ‘Why boys go wrong: gangsters, hoodlums and the natural history of delinquent careers’, in Mob Culture: Hidden Histories of the American Gangster Film, 2005
- Janet Fink, “They don’t really care what happens to me”: Divorce, family life and children’s emotional worlds in 1950s’ British cinema’, in Portrayals of Children in Popular Culture: Fleeting Images, ed. by Vibiana Bowman Cvetkovic and Debbie Olson, 2013
This story was created by Demons of the Mind, an AHRC-funded project exploring the interactions of the ‘psy’ sciences (psychiatry, psychoanalysis and psychology) and cinema in the long 1960s.
