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Abstract

When the ‘Girl Problem’ Became a ‘Psychopath Problem’: a Local Perspective on the Mobilization of Psychiatric Knowledge at a Danish Re-education Home for Adolescent Girls

In my dissertation I study the changing perceptions of and practices towards delinquent and wayward adolescent girls under residential care in 20^th century Denmark with focus on the emergence of the diagnosis ‘psychopathy’ in the interwar period.

Taking the point of departure in the archive of Vejstrup Re-education Home for Girls (1908-1962) the thesis studies the changes in the management of young girls from a local perspective. During the 1910s and 1920s psychiatric diagnoses were mobilized to draw boundaries between categories of ‘abnormal’ adolescent girls at the re-education home and during the 1920s the diagnosis ‘psychopathy’ was increasingly used to explain the problem of ‘incorrigibility’ among the young girls at Vejstrup. The increased use of ‘psychopathy’ coincides with a detachment of psychopathy from theories of degeneration and mental deficiency in psychiatric theory. This process could thus be explained by changes in psychiatry. However, I will argue that everyday problems in the management of the girls at the local level were an important factor in the extended use of the diagnosis. What seemed to be a failure of the educational work could with the use of ’psychopathy’ be explained as a result of defect in the girls and not a problem related to the re-education methods. In addition, the diagnosis offered a solution to the everyday problem of ‘incorrigible girls’ since it implied that the most difficult girls did not belong at the re-education home. During the 1920s and 1930s, staff members at Vejstrup lobbied for the establishment of a psychopath institution.

In regards to Danish re-education homes for boys the problem of misbehaving pupils led to the establishment of a prisonlike closed ward for young boys already in 1914. While everyday problems at boys’ re-education homes were addressed with punitive methods, this was not the case when it came to girls’ re-education homes. The lack of punitive institutional resources may have played a vital role in bringing about the expanded use of the diagnosis ‘psychopathy’ at Vejstrup.

In the post-war years the diagnosis ‘psychopathy’ was challenged by social psychological perceptions of so-called ‘antisocial behaviour’. While the proposed psychopath institution for girls therefore never became a reality, the lobby work for such an institution resulted in political attention to the problems of ‘incorrigible girls’. Gradually a political consensus was reached that the re-education homes for girls were in need of psychiatric expertise. In 1962 Vejstrup was thus abandoned and a new re-education home for girls led by a male psychologist in close cooperation with psychiatrists from a nearby mental hospital was established. This process can be seen as a legacy of the use of the psychopath diagnosis in the interwar years.