Spanish and Portuguese

This paper visits the disputed place of children pain between the late 19th Century and the early 20th Century from the perspective of the History of Emotions. It explores how the emotional expression of children suffering, chiefly represented by cries and screams, was subject to different interpretations de- pending on the different professional bodies invested with the performative authority required to shape its meaning. A comparison between the discourse of scientists and psychologists and that of pediatri- cians allows to infer how, whereas the former claimed children were essentially insensitive to pain and had in general a lower vulnerability to pain than adults, pediatricians used pain as a path to diagnose children sickness.

This conference aims to stimulate interdisciplinary debate on the question of what images and material objects can tell us about the subjective experience of being a child in the past. It will explore the ways in which non-written evidence – in particular that which comes under the heading ‘material culture’ and ‘visual culture’ – can be used to open up new possibilities for the study of the history of childhood.

Exploring the ways in which the sight of children's suffering—the aesthetics of pain—was mitigated, justified, rationalised, and subjected to emotional control during World War II, this essay examines how psychoanalytic theory and practice conceived and dealt with the pain of separation. It also explores how the image of the child in pain was made and remade in various cultural and political contexts and seeks to reconstruct the controversy over the emergence of a new object of study in psychology and medicine, that of the child with emotional pain. The story of separation anxiety has been written in the context of the " subjectification " which took place in psychoanalytic practice around the time of the war. 1 It is, however, important to note that the figure of the child in pain during World War II was not the exclusive preserve of the sciences and this article therefore considers the figure of the uprooted child in political discourse and propaganda as well as in medical and scientific texts. Two contrasting images of the wartime child in pain— the child subjected to the physical pain and material destruction brought by the bombs, and the evacuee who suffers emotional pain—are examined, in the social and political contexts of the times. 2 Against these representations generated by the political sphere, the pain of the child with separation anxiety—the special concern of psychoanalysts—did not find an echo. This article reconstructs the controversy over the impact of war (in this case, World War II) on children's mental and physical health as a history of emotions, exploring how the signs of children's physiological and emotional pain were conceived, conceptualised, contested, and diagnosed. Patrick's case was read and understood in different ways by various interest groups and scientific bodies. Psychoanalysts saw fragile children suffering from emotional disturbance caused by both bombs and evacuation, others saw unruly children who spread diseases through their dirty habits, while others still saw the same children as victims of poverty and social injustice. Meanwhile, the government—through the images of the War Artists Advisory Committee—projected a symbol of British resistance and courageous civilians. This article explores the image of the child in psychoanalysis, medicine, and official photography, showing how the emotional expression of children's pain was subject to different interpretations and representations by the various professional bodies that possessed the performative authority required to shape its meaning. 1 According to Michel Foucault, " subjectification " is the representation, via the discourse of experts, of childhood, motherhood, fatherhood, parental conduct, and family life in a way that " infuse[s] and shape[s] the personal