"The environment as a cause of disease in children": Josef Friedjung's transnational influence on modern child welfare theory.

Abstract

Josef K. Friedjung's Advanced Pediatrics--A Companion to Traditional Textbooks (Erlebte Kinderheilkunde--eine Ergänzung er gebräuchlichen Lehrbucher), published in 1919 in Vienna, has cast a long but nearly-vanished shadow over modern child welfare theory. The originality of his focus on "the whole child" was in some ways a commentary on Sigmund Freud, but its overtly progressive political character gave Friedjung's argument visible applicability within the field of urban social welfare. As a pediatrician and an ardent cosmopolitan, Friedjung was willing to consider conflicting values between traditional family systems and the state. Had the Nazis not forced him into exile in Palestine, where he died in 1946, Friedjung's pioneering oeuvre would have joined our child welfare narrative long ago. Fortunately today archival evidence on which this study draws, fragmented as it is in both German and English, does confirm that the first and second generation psychoanalysts, Friedjung among them, built a mental health movement around a social justice core closely allied to the cultural context of central Europe from 1918 to 1933. In many ways, child welfare as we know it emerged as a practical implementation of that ideology.