The scientific claims of British child guidance, 1918-45

This article examines the British child guidance movement's claim to scientific status and what it sought to gain by the wider acceptance of such a claim. The period covered is from the movement's origins in the 1920s to the end of the Second World War, by which point it had been incorporated into the welfare state. This was also an era when science commanded high intellectual and cultural status. Child guidance was a form of psychiatric medicine that addressed the emotional and psychological difficulties that any child might experience. It thus saw itself as a form of preventive medicine and as a component of the international movement for mental hygiene. Child guidance was organized around the clinic and employed the knowledge and skills of three distinct professions: psychiatrists, psychologists and psychiatric social workers. Its claim to scientific status was underpinned by the movement's clinical and organizational approach and in turn derived from developments in the laboratory sciences and in academic medicine. There were, however, those even within the movement itself who challenged child guidance's purported scientific status. Such objections notwithstanding, it is suggested here that at least in its own terms the claim was justified, particularly because of the type of psychiatric approach which child guidance employed, based as it was on a form of medical holism.