Person
Katherine Wolf
Katherine (Käthe) Wolf was a Viennese child psychologist who studied philosophy at the University of Vienna and worked closely with Charlotte and Karl Bühler, helping to develop the Viennese baby tests and writing with Hildegard Durfee an early study of how institutional care affects infants. After emigrating to New York in 1941 she became René Spitz's collaborator in his research on hospitalism, anaclitic depression and the smiling response, helping with the observations and the statistical interpretation of the data.
Influence
Affinity
- collaborated with René Spitz
Wolf worked with Spitz on his infant studies of the 1940s, helping with the observations and the statistical treatment of the data, and co-wrote the papers on anaclitic depression and the smiling response.
Works
- 1946
Anaclitic Depression: An Inquiry into the Genesis of Psychiatric Conditions in Early Childhood, II
The second part of René Spitz's inquiry into psychiatric conditions in early childhood, written with Katherine M. Wolf and published in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child in 1946, following his paper on hospitalism. Observing infants in the nursery of a penal institution, the authors describe a syndrome that appeared in children who had enjoyed good relations with their mothers for at least the first six months of life and were then separated from them. Weepiness and clinging gave way to withdrawal, loss of weight, insomnia, greater susceptibility to illness and a fall in the developmental quotient. They name the syndrome anaclitic depression, after the infant's dependence on the mother as its first object, and compare it with depression in adults. The condition lifted when the mother returned within a few months, while longer separations threatened lasting harm. The paper sets the syndrome beside hospitalism: anaclitic depression follows a partial and reversible loss of the mother, hospitalism a total deprivation of her.
- 1946
The Smiling Response: A Contribution to the Ontogenesis of Social Relations
In this monograph René Spitz and Katherine Wolf study the infant's smile as a contribution to the ontogenesis of social relations. From about the third month, they report, infants smile at a human face seen from the front and in motion. They smile even at a mask that keeps the forehead, eyes and nose, but not at a face seen in profile. In the second half of the first year the smile becomes selective and is withheld from strangers. The authors read the smiling response as the infant's first active turning towards a human partner and an early step in the development of social and object relations.
References
- Anaclitic Depression: An Inquiry into the Genesis of Psychiatric Conditions in Early Childhood, II1946Evidence for a relation
- The Smiling Response: A Contribution to the Ontogenesis of Social Relations1946Evidence for a relation