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This chapter analyzes the Yale Longitudinal Study (YLS)—which documented the early and middle childhood years of a dozen children in New Haven County, Connecticut—within the context of other similar studies that were carried out during the middle decades of the twentieth century. It shows how the YLS became a popular tool for many practitioners in the field of child psychiatry from the 1950s through the mid-1970s when investigating children's cognitive, social, and emotional development. It also examines the role played by the YLS in the transformation of research on children within the mental sciences in the post-World War II era. The chapter argues that longitudinal research was embraced by child psychiatrists because it offered a means of accurately documenting the psychological phenomena involved in child development, including ego formation, development of individuality, and mother-child interactions.

This chapter presents a sampling of process notes and research summaries from the Yale Longitudinal Study (YLS). The process notes were the result of sessions between the young girl Evelyn and the investigator-cum-therapist Samuel Ritvo. The samples are intended to give readers the opportunity to make their own interpretations of the materials and about Evelyn's emergence into personhood.

This chapter examines the institutional history of the Yale Longitudinal Study (YLS) within its regional intellectual and disciplinary context. In particular, it looks at the so-called “New Haven-Stockbridge Group,” represented by the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and the Western New England Psychoanalytic Society in New Haven, Connecticut. The chapter focuses on a network of behavioral and social scientists with orientation in psychoanalysis, including John Dollard, Erik Erikson, Anna Freud, Jules Coleman, and August B. Hollingshead. These figures are located in a professional landscape that includes the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, the Austen Riggs Center, and New Haven's Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis.

This chapter examines the issues involved in archiving the documents of the Yale Longitudinal Study (YLS). More specifically, it analyzes the documents' provenance and preservation (or neglect), together with the difficulties of offering access to a wider audience. It also underscores the importance for archivists to understand the context and history of the documents they are responsible for preserving and cataloguing. The discussion begins by focusing on how the YLS began, as well as what the study and the resulting documents were expected to provide. It then outlines the archivists' efforts to preserve the anonymity of the YLS's subjects while ensuring the accessibility of the documents.

This chapter examines in detail the process notes of the Yale Longitudinal Study (YLS). The process notes, amounting to thousands of pages, were the result of sessions between the young girl Evelyn and Samuel Ritvo. The chapter focuses on Evelyn's awakening interest in how her status as a female related to the male-dominated social hierarchy that she encountered at each stage of her development. Evelyn's transcripts are an unusually rich source of information about child development at the time the YLS was undertaken. Ritvo and members of the Yale Child Study Center made contemporaneous observations of Evelyn's therapy from 1954 to 1963.

This chapter examines the evidence—the so-called process notes—of the Yale Longitudinal Study (YLS) from the viewpoints of both history and psychology. More specifically, it examines the idiosyncrasy, genius, and blind spots in the conception and execution of the YLS. The study was informed by Freudian psychoanalysis and strongly influenced by Anna Freud's work with children. The chapter also compares the YLS's process notes with material generated by other longitudinal studies not so directly linked to psychoanalysis. Finally, it considers the focus of the process notes: the young girl Evelyn and the investigator-cum-therapist Samuel Ritvo, along with her siblings and parents.

This chapter examines the intellectual background and origins of the Yale Longitudinal Study (YLS). It begins with the establishment in 1911 of the Yale Psycho-Clinic for children at the Yale School of Medicine, headed by Arnold Gesell and devoted to the study and care of children with intellectual and mental disabilities. It then considers the role played by Milton Senn, who brought psychoanalysis to what would become the Yale Child Study Center. It also looks at other individuals who were part of the group that initiated the YLS, including Albert Solnit, Samuel Ritvo, Sally Provence, and Seymour Lustman. Finally, it describes the years after the YLS was undertaken, with particular reference to its impact on child psychoanalysis, adult analysis, child development, and child mental health in America.

This book explores the history as well as the sociocultural context of a unique study that was undertaken between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s: the Yale Longitudinal Study (YLS). Carried out by a team of therapist-researchers at the Yale Child Study Center, the YLS documented the early and middle childhood years of a dozen children in New Haven County, Connecticut. The book analyzes and contextualizes the intellectual worldview of the group involved in the study—which integrates mental health, pediatrics, psychoanalysis, and social science—as well as the important insights it provided about children's developmental trajectories from infancy through middle childhood.

This chapter examines how siblings and families influence a child's development by taking the psychoanalytic psychotherapy of a girl, “Nancy Miles,” as a manageable sample of the data from the Yale Child Study Center's Yale Longitudinal Study (YLS). It offers an interpretation of the process notes resulting from the sessions between Nancy and her therapist. Furthermore, it considers how Nancy's temperamental givens—such as her internal proclivity for passivity and withdrawal in the world outside her family—interacts with external frictions in the process of internalization. It also discusses the role of trauma in child development. Finally, it looks at the therapist's manner of capturing the play narrative involving Nancy.

This chapter examines in further detail the process notes of the Yale Child Study Center's Yale Longitudinal Study (YLS). It looks at more of Evelyn's interactions with Samuel Ritvo, whose “A Dynamic Biography” sums up his sixty-year career as psychoanalytic clinician, educator, and researcher, and includes his work in the YLS. “A Dynamic Biography” is based on direct observations made in the course of Evelyn's psychoanalytic treatment from ages three to eleven, and from follow-up interviews and correspondences during her adolescence, adulthood, and middle age (ages fifteen, thirty-four, fifty-three, and fifty-five).