![]() Experts began to argue how therapeutic it would be especially for poor children of colour to be removed from their mothers and placed in day care facilities, even as those same experts cautioned that middle-class white children would likely suffer from such separation from mothers. Only when the discussion turned to the topic of federal funding for day care programmes did racial and socioeconomic considerations get mixed in. Yet as sensory deprivation theories began to take on medical meaning for psychoanalytically-informed theories of child development, issues of race and class still remained unstated. When psychoanalysts entered the conversation, they linked sensory deprivation notions to the psychic deficits supposedly exhibited by orphaned children and enthusiastically took up psychoanalyst René Spitz's famous claim about the ‘somatic consequences of emotional starvation in infants’ (p. ![]() But by the early 1960s, Hebb's research on sensory deprivation had jumped disciplinary tracks. Given its obsession with ‘brainwashing’, the intelligence community paid close attention as well. Hebb's research generated tremendous excitement and was soon replicated with human subjects. Raz opens her book with a striking description of the sensory deprivation experiments psychologist Donald Hebb conducted on dogs in the 1950s. What Raz's research clearly illuminates are the many overlapping ways in which unsubstantiated and incoherent theories about the ‘deprivations’-whether cultural, maternal, nutritional, or environmental-supposedly suffered by low-income persons of colour came powerfully to frame a national conversation about the pros and cons of ‘compensatory’ educational programmes. On the other hand, Raz's book succeeds largely due to its novel focus on a previously unacknowledged though key aspect of 1960s medical and public health discourse about race and poverty. Readers acquainted with Daryl Michael Scott's devastating account in Contempt and Pity (1997) will instantly recognise the outlines of Raz's own story about how the good liberal intentions of medical professionals and mental health experts in the 1960s came so often to rely on problematic racial concepts. On the one hand, it will come as no surprise that unreflected assumptions about black culture and black family life as pathological permeated the Cold War policies and programmes that sought to provide assistance to poor African Americans. ![]() The story Mical Raz tells in this thoughtful book will likely be both familiar and fascinating to scholars of post-war American social and intellectual history.
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