"the idea that the social and the psychic were intimately connected and had to be transformed collectively to escape alienation was the fundamental lesson"

Review: Camille Robcis, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021) Janina Klement (University College London) In January 1940, the Catalan refugee psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles who had just arrived in France, was recruited to work with the French psychiatrist Paul Balvet. Since 1937, Balvet had been the director of a dilapidated and overcrowded asylum in the village of Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole in Lozère which, situated 1000 metres above sea level in the mountains, counted itself among France’s most impoverished regions. In a giant communal effort that included the local villagers, they prepped the asylum for the war, piled food reserves and planted and harvested produce together with the patients, ultimately saving the asylum population from starvation. Next to its main function as a sanatorium, Saint-Alban became an assembly spot for persecuted intellectuals who began participating in the therapy of the mentally ill, and soon pushed for theorisation of their practice. In 1941, a manifesto

with first principles emerged but only eleven years later, in 1952, the term “institutional psychotherapy” first appeared in a journal article. With Disalienation, Camille Robcis delivers the first history of the French institutional psychotherapy movement for an anglophone readership. The book’s work is to position institutional psychotherapy as a set of ethics of everyday life and experience, and to read it as a political theory (with the ambition of contemporary applicability) of alienation, the unconscious and institutions, more so than to assess its therapeutic merits. Prior to its denomination and introduction to medical literature, institutional psychotherapy was a humanitarian and intuitive act of care during war-time. The bookcover blurb’s claim that Saint-Alban was the only asylum that ‘attempted to resist’ the Vichy regime’s “soft extermination” programme of the mentally ill through supply shortages conceals a dispute among historians (which remains unrectified by the book itself) whether many psychiatrists across France tried the same thing, but ultimately failed to rescue most…

Review: Emily Hauptmann, Foundations and American Political Science: The Transformation of a Discipline, 1945-1970 (Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas, 2022) John Hsien-hsiang Feng, Wuhan University Money talks. Fundraising campaigns have substantial influence on American public life. Likewise, financial sponsorships have considerable impacts on American political science. Funding matters. Disciplinary development is beyond political scientists’ genealogies and debates. As archival sources become available, one might wonder how funding bodies shaped the discipline in the past. Emily Hauptmann explores such an inquiry in her latest monograph: Foundations and American Political Science: The Transformation of a Discipline, 1945-1970. Hauptmann emphasises “an important material dimension” in the history of American political science (p. 9). She looks at the timespan between 1945 and 1970, namely the heyday of behaviouralism: “[T]he mid-twentieth-century programs of the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller philanthropies influenced academic political science in powerful, lasting ways,” argues Hauptmann (p. 169). Behaviouralism prevailed in the discipline in the 1950s and 1960s.

It wasn’t until David Easton’s 1969 call for a post-behavioural revolution that American political science shifted toward more diversified paradigms. Behaviouralism was intellectually rooted in the work of Charles Merriam during the interwar period. He was the leader of the Chicago School and helped to create the Social Science Research Council. The Chicago School and the SSRC were both vital to the rise of behaviouralism. Giving credit to Merriam, scholars are inclined to take the post-WW2 supremacy of behaviouralism for granted. Rather, Hauptmann skips Merriam’s interwar period and pays attention to the financial circumstances that contributed to the superiority of behaviouralism in the US. The National Science Foundation allocated little budget to political science before the 1970s. According to Hauptmann, the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller foundations filled the lacuna and provided large amounts of subsidies to political scientists for their behavioural research: “From 1950 until 1957, Ford invested $24 million to develop what it called ‘the behavioural sciences’… From 1959 to 1964, Ford…

"Smith insists that patients are best served by a combination of biological, psychodynamic, and environmentalist approaches."

Matthew Smith, The First Resort: The History of Social Psychiatry in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023) Michael N. Healey, Johns Hopkins University For many decades, the history of U.S. psychiatry was likened to a pendulum, one which repeatedly swung between a biological framework and a psychodynamic one. As Jonathan Sadowsky has argued, however, grand narratives such as these obscure more nuanced aspects of the discipline’s past (Sadowsky, 2006). There were many continuities between psychoanalysis and psychopharmacology, for example, as Jonathan Metzl demonstrates in his analysis of medical journals, popular magazines, and related sources (Metzl, 2003). Similarly, some Freudians were surprisingly receptive to somatic methods, as Sadowsky’s own research on electroconvulsive therapy has shown (Sadowsky, 2017). Works like these have broadened the historiography of psychiatry in generative ways, providing us with a richer understanding of this specialty’s development. In his latest book, The First Resort, Matthew Smith makes a similar intervention. He does so, however, not by examining

another convergence of biological and psychodynamic approaches, but by contrasting them to another paradigm entirely: social psychiatry. While the term itself has existed for well over a century, and has been used in a variety of contexts, The First Resort largely focuses on a cohort of U.S. psychiatrists that practiced after World War II, and the diverse group of allied professionals with which they collaborated. Indeed, to Smith (and many of his actors), it was this interdisciplinarity – in mental healthcare, yes, but primarily in research – that characterized social psychiatry during these “magic years” (as the title of an unpublished manuscript by APA president Daniel Blain cited by Smith characterized the era). Accordingly, the book revolves around his analysis of four classic studies: Robert Faris and H. Warren Dunham’s research on schizophrenia in Chicago, Illinois; August Hollingshead and Frederick Redlich’s research on class and mental health in New Haven, Connecticut; and the Midtown Manhattan and Stirling County projects,…

"The social nature of experimental psychology, Martin emphasizes, does not only lie in the relations between researchers. The experiments that are conducted are themselves thoroughly social events."

Review of Emily Martin, Experiments of the mind: From the cognitive psychology lab to the world of Facebook and Twitter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021) Maarten Derksen (Theory & History of Psychology, University of Groningen) Experiments of the mind is the result of a ten year-long project studying experimental psychology ethnographically, as a participant-observer in four laboratories. Emily Martin sat in on lab meetings, interviewed researchers, participated in experiments, and even tried her hand at running them. It has resulted in a book that contains many insightful observations. Martin went into this study with an admirably open mind. Whereas her anthropology colleagues' thought experimental psychology is a boring topic, she realized that the project of experimental psychology -- to produce objective knowledge stripped of the subjectivity that both researchers and experimental subjects bring to the process -- is fascinating, whether or not you think it is a worthwhile thing to strive for. Her open-mindedness allowed Martin to make the

familiar strange: to alert the reader to aspects of experimental psychological practice that seem unremarkable or do not get noted at all. To her surprise, studying the individual mind is an intensely social activity. The culture of experimental psychology is one of collaboration, mutual support, and frequent informal gatherings (much more so than in anthropology, she notes). In fact, Martin seems to have found especially social and collaborative labs. Not only are the psychologists who she studied without exception presented as very nice people (as becomes clear from the 'dramatis personae' that the book opens with), there is also an almost complete absence of conflict and competition. The labs are friendly, wholesome places, and there seems to be no scarcity. The post docs do not worry about finding another position after their current contract ends. There are no complaints about reviewer two, and the researchers do not struggle to get their work published or to get funding for the next…

"Coghe’s well-documented study on health in Angola is recommended reading for medical historians, historians of Lusophone Africa, or indeed anyone interested in health strategies in Angola and former African colonies."

Samuël Coghe: Population Politics in the Tropics: Demography, Health and Transimperialism in Colonial Angola (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022) 317 pp. ISBN 978 1 10894 3 307 Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger (Giessen) In Population Politics in the Tropics, Samuël Coghe studies the population politics of the Portuguese government in colonial Angola from 1890 to 1945, instigated due to its fear of depopulation. In view of the abolition of slavery, the indigenato-system was set up in 1870, which implied a system of forced labor leading to a formerly unknown regional mobility of African people (The transatlantic slave trade was abolished in 1836 but continued along illegal routes until the end of the century. Slavery was officially abolished in 1875). In times of an increasing influx of Portuguese farmers and traders to “modernize” the colony, especially after the Berlin Conference of 1884/85, smallpox and famines increased because of the breakdown of the ecological control of the lands, based on centuries

of long-established modes of agriculture. Now, with the construction of the railway and the introduction of different agrarian cultivations for export, the organization of the land gradually changed and the traditional knowledge of ecological landscapes faded away. Consequently, a “racial disease” (p. 31) spread, known as the sleeping illness, to which native Angolans were especially vulnerable, which made the Portuguese even more convinced of their inferiority. However, the high numbers of sicknesses and deaths made intervention necessary to avoid losing the African working force. This background explains the rise of biomedical interventionism in the region, that took the form of a call for medical assistance and led to the development of the discipline of tropical medicine. In 1902, the Escola Medicina Tropical (EMT) was set up in Lisbon, specializing in sleeping sickness, later followed by the initiative of the Asistência Médica aos Indígenas (AMI) in 1926. These issues, in a nutshell, are what Coghe's book investigates, not forgetting that the relationship between Portugal and Angola…

"Love’s book... raises pertinent and disconcerting questions about why queer theorists and social psychologists have been so drawn to affect as a meta-theory for the past twenty years despite their very different political commitments."

Michael Pettit, York University, Toronto Heather Love, Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021) In Underdogs, Heather Love offers a densely argued, at times counterintuitive, and yet highly persuasive rereading of how her own field of queer theory relates to its own intellectual past. Love argues queer theory, despite its professed deep historicism, is in denial about its own history, much to its detriment when it comes to making both theoretical and political interventions. She offers Underdogs as something of a remedy to this collective amnesia. In her telling, queer theory as an anti-humanist humanities field is predicated on the notion of rupture: its leading practitioners see it as a field with neither a true academic parent nor a comfortable disciplinary home. Queer theory (and theorists) always stands alone, outside, without friend, kin, or even community. Love identifies this widespread sensibility with the field’s proximate roots in the radical oppositional politics of gay liberation, the women’s health

movement, and especially 1980s AIDS activism. In this political crucible, the field disavowed any kinship with earlier social scientific, “empirical,” studies of sexuality (whether of the human animal or other species). Most importantly for Love’s story, queer theory denied its debts to mid-century, observational, qualitative, microanalyses of social interaction. Yet these sociologists of deviance profoundly informed how queer theorists understood both (social) normativity and their own outsider status as intellectuals. Her book seeks to excavate these lost linkages to challenge and enrich contemporary queer theory. If Underdogs pivots around making uncomfortable kinship between deviance studies and queer theory, Love astutely traces how these two fields operate with very different politics of representation. Contemporary queer theory is predicated on the disruption of all norms and foundations. A profound, skeptical destabilization of all received notions is the field’s primary political intervention. In contrast, mid-century sociologists of deviance sought to uplift alternative forms of social life by making them legible. They…

"Haven offers a panoramic view of Girard’s impressive career and his bold and influential ideas. But, knowing more about his life, are we expected to understand these ideas any differently?"

Cynthia L. Haven, Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2018) Michael C. Behrent, Appalachian State University “How is a philosophy embodied in the man who espouses it? … How does a man’s being—the sum of his knowledge, experience, and will—‘prove’ his knowledge? Can we ever devise a philosophy, even a theory, wholly apart from who we are, and what we must justify?” (144). These are the questions that drive Cynthia L. Haven’s engaging biography of René Girard (1923-2015), the French scholar whose influential studies of mimetic behaviour, violence, and scapegoating proposed a complete reinterpretation of religion and a comprehensive theory of human nature and society. The nexus between thought and life promises to be a particularly fruitful vantage point for assessing Girard’s thought: unlike so many of his generation, particularly in his home discipline of literary studies, Girard’s interest was not in how texts “functioned,” but in what they described. “I’ve always been a realist,” he

once asserted. “I have always believed in the outside world and in the possibility of knowledge of it” (127). Drawing, perhaps, on this claim, Haven reconsiders Girard’s thought from the standpoint of its interaction with the “outside world” that shaped it. Haven’s book is not a conventional biography, objectively recounting its subject’s life history. It is, rather, a whimsical exploration of Girardian thought, a play in which René Girard is the leading but by no means solitary actor, and in which the biographical narrative is interwoven with more chronologically disparate episodes. Haven, moreover, incorporates herself into the story, using her relationship with Girard, as well as his family and friends, to explore his character and trace the multiple ramifications of his thought. Though undoubtedly biographical, the precise subject of her book is difficult to pin down. It is not, strictly speaking, an intellectual biography, rigorously focused on the conception and development of Girard’s most distinctive ideas.…

"The relationship between mothering and the human sciences in the twentieth century – in which Mother features as Origin Story and Causal Principle – is hugely complex..."

Shaul Bar-Haim, The Maternalists: Psychoanalysis, Motherhood and the British Welfare State (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) ISBN 9780812253153 Katie Joice During the last two years, we have had ample opportunity to reflect on the capacity of the state to care for its population: to warn us of imminent harm, to nurse us back to health when danger strikes, and to show compassion when the worst happens. As Shaul Bar-Haim skilfully outlines in his introduction to The Maternalists, for several generations,ever since Margaret Thatcher began to shift responsibility for the care of the vulnerable and dependent back onto the family, 'the nanny state' has become an epithet of right-wing scorn. Those who mourn the unravelling of the post-war settlement may be hoping that the collective suffering of the pandemic has exposed the need for a more interventionist, 'motherly' politics, one which fully compensates for human frailty. Bar-Haim's study of maternally-minded psychoanalysts, and their influence on post-war social policy, is

therefore a timely one, in which questions of theoretical inheritance open onto a series of urgent debates about our own historical moment. Bar-Haim's story begins in Budapest during the 1920s, where Sandor Ferenczi, one of Freud's protegées, advocated a radically new style of analysis. Ferenczi was the yin to Freud's yang, or as Jung, another of Freud's rebellious students, might have put it, the anima to his animus. Whereas Freud practiced with cool, paternalist detachment, Ferenczi fostered affection, mutuality, and intuition in his clinical relationships. He encouraged patients to revisit the traumatic experiences of earliest childhood, and famously cradled them in his arms, claiming that there was 'progression in regression'. By shifting the analytic focus away from the Oedipus conflict and phallocentrism towards the sensuous bond between mother and infant, Ferenczi opened up new terrain for analysts of an egalitarian, emancipatory bent. Infancy was characterised here both by vulnerability to trauma and an original psychic freedom, a halcyon period before…

Mark Solovey, Social Science for What? Battles over Public Funding for the ‘Other Sciences’ at the National Science Foundation (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 2020). 398 pp. $50.00 (pb). ISBN: 978-0-262-53905-0. Lucian Bessmer, Harvard University Social Science for What? is a remarkably detailed history of the National Science Foundation (NSF) from 1945 to the late 1980s that makes a compelling case for the influence of the Foundation on American social science. Those familiar with author Mark Solovey’s Shaky Foundations will recognize the care that he has put into presenting an account built on rich archival materials to “follow the money” in order to show the impact of what he calls the “politics-patronage-social science nexus” (10-12). Where Shaky Foundations examined how the Ford Foundation, the U.S. military, and the NSF shaped the social sciences, Social Science for What? delves deeper into the NSF in an attempt to address a gap Solovey identifies in the literature: the role of civilian agencies as patrons of social

science. This in itself makes this book an important contribution to the large body of work on Cold War scientific patronage, which generally focuses on the relationships between science, the military, and intelligence agencies. But the more ambitious claim of Social Science for What? is that the NSF played a significant part in positioning the human sciences as participants in the “unified scientific enterprise” (12). Solovey argues that mimicking the methods and epistemic justification of the natural sciences may have enabled the social sciences to carve out a tiny redoubt in the NSF, but ultimately it created barriers to their health and development, disincentivizing the most beneficial aspects of these fields. The book’s ten chapters offer a roughly chronological investigation of how stakeholders of the social sciences, both inside and outside of the NSF, sought to legitimize a collection of fields that were treated with skepticism at best and as a menace to American society at worst. Solovey…

"Overall, The Sense of Movement is a key contribution not only to understand the sense of movement but also as a general reflection on the senses more broadly."

Roger Smith: The Sense of Movement. An Intellectual History (London: Process Press, 2019) Sonsoles Hernández Barbosa, University of the Balearic Islands  The Sense of Movement addresses bodily perceptions of movement over the last four centuries. The work begins by presenting philosophical debates about movement as a vital force which emerged in parallel with the birth of modern science in the seventeenth century, linking these with modern notions about the operation of the human brain. As the author points out, the study of movement and its conceptualisation involves setting up a dialogue between current and past understandings of the sense of movement. Although The Sense of Movement begins with these reflections about the operation of the world of the senses connected with the scientific revolution in the seventeenth-century, some of its arguments reach back much further in time, specifically to the Aristotelian classification of the five senses. The very use of the expression ‘sense of movement’ implies a direct confrontation with

the Aristotelian philosophical tenet, which held that movement could only be understood in relation to the sense of touch. Indeed, the extent to which we can refer to a sense of movement that is independent from touch is one of the main issues addressed by the book. Many of the historical difficulties raised by this issue are to do with the fact that the sense of movement and that of touch cannot be pinned down to a specific organ, insofar as the skin covers the whole body. Today, however, a conceptualisation of the senses that goes beyond the five traditional senses, including the perception of pain, temperature and even time, is widely accepted.[1] Smith, whose areas of specialisation straddle the fields of philosophy and the history of science, argues that it was around 1800 that philosophy began to address the issue of human movement, when muscular motion was first recognised as a specific sense, distinct from touch. Charles Bell, who…