The key to the meaning is already in the word: Hospitalism is understood as psychological, mental and physical damage caused by prolonged hospital or home stays (often as early as 3 months). Mainly babies and children in the first years of life, mostly without parents and caregivers, are affected. Due to the lack of any emotional relationships, they suffer serious developmental disorders that are difficult to recover from. These include, for example, restlessness of movement (rocking with the head or body), reduction in expression of gestures and facial expressions, slowing of physical and mental development, depression, and a general poor state of health.
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In the 1960s, the Viennese psychoanalyst René A. Spitz (1887-1974) observed the importance of maternal attention in orphanages and infant wards of women’s prisons, among other places, and spoke in this context of an “emotional deficiency disease.” Due to our improved living conditions and not least the investigations of modern psychoanalysis, the clinical picture of hospitalism is today almost a thing of the past. What remains is the extremely important realization of a loving and responsible upbringing of infants and children.
