This article explores the historical emergence of educational psychiatry in schooling in Scandinavia in the period 1920-1950. Drawing on a comparative perspective, the article explores how psychiatry, along with psychology, emerged as a discourse of differentiation in the welfare state in the interwar years in Norway, Sweden and Denmark. Whereas the role and rise of educational psychology in the differentiation processes have been examined, educational psychiatry in schooling as an independent field has so far been largely unexplored when it comes to the Scandinavian case. By using the comparative perspective, we aim to track possible agents, meetings and institutional settings across the borders, and thus to examine whether the rise of educational psychiatry primarily took place as independents national initiatives or whether there were signs of mutual Nordic influence between the countries.

Concerning the national cases, the article aims to address the following questions: When and how did child-psychiatry emerge as an independent field at hospitals, municipalities and universities? Who were the important agents? When and how was the contact established between the first educational psychologists and the psychiatrists regarding the question of solving the issue of a scientific legitimation of the sorting of students? What were the first experiences regarding the first collaborations between these two fields of experts of schooling? Where were the potential conflicts and hierarchy between the fields in the sorting of children? Were there any common influences between the educational psychology, child-psychiatry and progressive educators? What characterized the perception of the child in the emerging child-psychiatry as opposed to former ideas of the child as being degenerated? 

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