Book Reviews

Psychiatry’s Neoliberal Philosopher – Review: Thomas Szasz

HHS Contributor

"Although Szasz was often dismissed out of hand by mainstream practitioners, his program shares more with the psychiatric status quo than may be apparent. As early as 1961, Szasz advocated a mental health policy that married conservatism with libertarianism and anti-communism, the main pillars of the Republican party that emerged under Ronald Reagan."

Review: C. V. Haldipur, James L. Knoll IV, and Eric v. d. Luft (eds.), Thomas Szasz: An Appraisal of His Legacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. xv and 298 pp. ISBN: 9780198813491 Alexander Dunst, Paderborn University, Germany 70 years after the publication of The Myth of Mental Illness, the book’s enduring impact can seem puzzling. Built on a series of outrageous simplifications and argumentative slips, Szasz’s polemic generalized its denial of mental illness from an understanding of hysteria as “malingering“, never engaged with the intricacies of long-term care it sought to deny to patients, and upbraided the sick for cheating the healthy. Nevertheless, Szasz emerged as the pre-eminent critic of psychiatry in the United States. He at once relished this status and vehemently distanced himself from the left-wing practitioners and theorists, from Franco Basaglia to Michel Foucault, that he was often lumped with. Szasz’s distinction was to be the only conservative so-called anti-psychiatrist, and his writings were feted by right-wing intellectuals

and the counterculture alike. For patients and radical psychiatrists, The Myth of Mental Illness promised to remove the stigma of disease and seemed to offer freedom from paternalistic institutions. Despite its numerous shortcomings, then, Szasz's work proved useful to a wide range of readers and inspired an institutional practice of mental health that combined self-help, state neglect, and psychopharmacology under the aegis of personal autonomy. Unfortunately, Thomas Szasz: An Appraisal of His Legacy fails to answer, or even seriously ask, how his flawed ideas could have such enormous consequences. The editors and authors are psychiatrists and analytic philosophers and have surprisingly little to say about the real-world contexts of their subject’s writing, either at the height of his career or in our present moment. Neither does the volume contain contributions by former patients, a particularly disappointing oversight because the social movements that formed against institutional psychiatry were an important locus of Szasz’s reception in the United States and abroad.…

Book Reviews

Review: Psychologies in Revolution

HHS Contributor

'Luria eventually succeeds as an exemplary scholar within the tradition of his own social-historical approach, as he is not concerned with describing symptoms in isolation from a person’s whole personality, but to 'allow for the preservation of ‘the manifold richness of the subject’.'

Hannah Proctor, Psychologies in Revolution. Alexander Luria’s 'Romantic Science' and Soviet Social History. Palgrave, 2020; 259 pages, Hardcover £59.99, eBook £47.99; Hardcover ISBN 978-3-030-35027-7, eBook ISBN 978-3-030-35028-4 by Lizaveta Zeldzina Psychologies in Revolution is dedicated to the work of Soviet psychologist and neurologist Alexander Luria: an early enthusiast of psychoanalysis in Russia, and ‘the father’ of Soviet neuropsychology, Luria was known internationally as a prolific writer and experimenter. He was an inspiration to a new generation of scientists in the Soviet Union in the mid-twentieth century, and managed to stay in touch with intellectual currents in the wider world. Together with Lev Vygotsky, Luria has become a figure of intense interest for many scholars of Soviet science, and especially for so-called 'revisionists'. Unlike existing studies, however, Psychologies in Revolution examines Luria in his social and historical circumstances, ‘contending that analysing Luria’s research in isolation from the historical circumstances it emerged from and influenced would be like analysing someone’s personality by examining

their brain on a glass table’ (p. 4). In this text, Proctor provides us with our first detailed history of Luria's ideas and his work. Psychologies in Revolution entails the discovery of a previously unknown Luria. The text is structured around his major scientific projects: studies of the criminal, the ‘primitive’ (Uzbek peasants with no formal education), the child, the aphasic (brain-injured Red Army soldiers) and the synaesthete. Eponymous chapters move the reader chronologically from the Revolution of 1917 to the late 1970s, opening out new dimensions for critical inquiry. Proctor shows how Luria, ‘developed a form of scientific writing capable of fully attending to the utterances and experiences of the people he dedicated his career to observing, understanding and treating’ (p. 22). But she makes this claim by considering the inherent constraints on such an approach within Soviet Russia in the early and mid-twentieth century. As Proctor emphasizes, the contribution of her study is not to draw our…

Book Reviews

Review: Physics and Psychics

HHS Contributor

"physical-psychical scientists... endeavoured precisely to demonstrate, by empirical means, that psychical phenomena belonged to the realm of nature and, therefore, constituted legitimate objects of scientific inquiry."

Richard Noakes, Physics and Psychics: The Occult and the Sciences in Modern Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019; 403pp; Paperback £24,99; ISBN: 978-1-107-18854-9 Luis Fernando Bernardi Junqueira What is ‘science’ – and, as a corollary, ‘non-science’? What does it mean for something to be called ‘scientific’? And is ‘science’ an objective, singular entity, or is it conditioned by culture? These questions have provoked some of the most fascinating scholarly debates over the past two centuries, precisely the period during which ‘science’ (however defined) gradually became the standard of truth in most societies across the globe. These concerns – sometimes called ‘the demarcation problem’ – far exceed the immediate purview of philosophers and historians of science, having lasting consequences in fields such as education, medicine and public policy. Philosophers like Karl R. Popper, Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend have shown that to define ‘science’ is far more complicated than we might initially assume.[1] Over the past few years, their

(often contrasting) views have inspired a wave of ground-breaking historical works on the ‘fringe sciences,’ those disciplines and subjects – such as mesmerism, spiritualism, psychical research and parapsychology– rejected by ‘mainstream’ scientists for not conforming with their own ideological agenda. Physics and Psychics belongs to this revisionist tradition of scholarship in the history of science and technology. Richard Noakes has for years looked at the cooperation and contention between the physical sciences – fields like chemistry, physics and astronomy – and the occult in fin-de-siècle Britain. Physics and Psychics not only reunites his latest works on telegraphy, ether and psychics but also goes beyond, calling into question the popular, hasty definitions of ‘science’ and ‘non-science’ (or ‘pseudoscience’). It centres on the lives and activities of eminent British physical scientists who split their time between physical experiments and psychical investigation. Noakes calls these individuals ‘physical-psychical scientists’, an etic category that highlights their primary background as practitioners of the physical sciences while distinguishing them…

Interviews

Histories of sexology today – interview with Katie Sutton

Hannah Proctor

'...work on the historiography of sexology has played a key role in encouraging researchers working across all sorts of fields, not just the history of sexuality, to engage more critically with ideas of the ‘normal’ and the ‘natural’ – to ask how these categories have changed over time and to recognise that they've always been historically contingent.'

‘Histories of sexology today: Reimagining the boundaries of scientia sexualis’ is the current issue of History of the Human Sciences, guest edited by Kirsten Leng and Katie Sutton. Special issue co-editor Katie Sutton spoke to the journal’s web editor Hannah Proctor about how the essays in the issue contribute to extending our understandings of histories of sexology. - HHS: First of all, could you say a little about the genesis of the Special Issue? What did you, as editors, hope to achieve with this collection of essays? KS: Kirsten Leng and I have both been working in various areas of the history of sexology for some time and with this special issue we really wanted to push some of the boundaries of the field. Michel Foucault influentially turned his attention to the history of sexual science in the History of Sexuality and since then there's been a tendency to prioritize certain kinds of analytical questions within the field – for

example, how has our understanding of homosexuality developed over time? Or, how have scientists gone about diagnosing “deviants”? This has been a history with a decidedly Western, male, white and European focus. The history of sexology has also often been limited to the “medical” and “scientific”. We were interested in opening up the historiography in more interdisciplinary directions, including by problematizing the disciplinary boundaries of the field from its very early days onwards. We were also interested in how we could use this issue to explore more of the transnational connections that have influentially shaped this field across time, as well as pushing further at questions around gender and intersectionality that historians have been turning their attention to in recent years. In these respects, this issue connects in interesting ways to a debate that was published a couple of years ago in this journal between Heike Bauer and Ivan Crozier, a back and forth about the disciplinary limits of sexology…

Interviews

Thinking in, with, across, and beyond cases with John Forrester – interview with special issue co-editor Chris Millard

HHS Contributor

"I think of cases as telling us nothing and everything. They tell us nothing at all and far too much because of the way that they can connect to everything. They can explain everything and they can be explained by everything in a way that makes you really have to make some pretty serious choices analytically before you even start. You'll never exhaust the case."

A new double special issue of History of the Human Sciences edited by Felicity Callard and Chris Millard has just been released. Chris Millard spoke to Hannah Proctor about how the special issue came about and how the contributions responded to, extended and celebrated the work of John Forrester. HP: The special issue celebrates the work of the late John Forrester and specifically his essay ‘If p, then what? Thinking in cases’, published in History of the Human Sciences in 1996. The introduction to the special issue contends that the essay transformed understandings of what a case was – could you explain what was so significant about the essay? CM: I think the essay managed to bring into focus the case, which is a particular part of the armory of the human sciences, a way of talking about a particular life or even a particular instance that has significance. Forrester ranges across disciplines looking at cases, looking at case

law and, of course, looking at the psychoanalytic case that was extremely close to all of his work. And it gave people a way into a whole host of questions about how cases do the work that they do. I don't necessarily think that Forrester, answered the questions he posed. I don't think that the essay was intended to answer questions. It was intended to to provoke. I still find the essay challenging and incredibly rich – new things come up whenever I reread it. The real power of it is that it doesn't pretend to settle any questions, but it makes you aware of questions you were only half aware of before. HP: Do you also think the essay is significant in terms of how it chimes with the overarching concerns of the journal? CM: Yes, as I said I think it was about one particular weapon in the armory of the human sciences and so absolutely it resonates with…

Book Reviews

Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene

HHS Contributor

For Renn, the ‘anthropocene’ offers a mantle for a renewed ‘unity of science’ movement and the framework within which the natural sciences and the human sciences can be more closely integrated. Among the few concrete proposals for the future, Renn restyles an argument first put forward by Vannevar Bush in the 1940s that the internet can be harnessed to support an interactive and public worldwide web of knowledge. This wikipedia-on-steroids will aid the decompartmentalization of scientific knowledge and its reorganization for facing new challenges...

Jürgen Renn, The Evolution of Knowledge: Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene. Princeton:  University Press, 2020; 584pp; Hardcover £30; ISBN: 9780691171982. By Alfred Freeborn The year 2012 marked the 50th anniversary of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a book which profoundly shaped the historical study of science. The then director of Department II of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin, Lorraine Daston, reflected that one unintended result of the book’s influence was that ‘most historians of science no longer believe that any kind of structure could possibly do justice to their subject matter.’[i] Daston proposed that the path to a new intellectual structure, sight of which had been lost among the growing plethora of detailed micro-histories, lay in the turn from a cultural history of science to a historical theory of knowledge.[ii] Down the corridor from Daston’s office the director of Department I has been busy charting just such a path. Jürgen Renn’s The Evolution of

Knowledge: Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene is a guidebook for a new historical theory of knowledge. It is not so much a contribution to the growing literature on how society might tackle global climate change, but uses this context to give urgency to the daunting task of synthesizing a common theoretical structure for a discipline that has lost its way. As the title of the book suggests, the structure of knowledge is not revolutionary but evolutionary. Renn takes his theoretical model from the biological theory of evolution and its explanatory concepts from the cognitive sciences. An evolutionary theory of knowledge seeks to do for the human sciences what Darwin’s theory of evolution did for the biological sciences by conceptually linking the morphology of the organism with its environmental conditions. It hopes to conceptually link experimental studies of individual cognitive development with the historical study of socially shared knowledge. The binding thread is, like in Darwinian evolution, the…

Uncategorized

History of the Human Sciences – Early Career Prize 2020-21

Hannah Proctor

History of the Human Sciences– the international journal of peer-reviewed research, which provides the leading forum for work in the social sciences, humanities, human psychology and biology that reflexively examines its own historical origins and interdisciplinary influences – is delighted to announce details of its prize for early career scholars. The intention of the annual award is to recognise a researcher whose work best represents the journal’s aim to critically examine traditional assumptions and preoccupations about human beings, their societies and their histories in light of developments that cut across disciplinary boundaries. In the pursuit of these goals, History of the Human Sciences publishes traditional humanistic studies as well work in the social sciences, including the fields of sociology, psychology, political science, the history and philosophy of science, anthropology, classical studies, and literary theory. Scholars working in any of these fields are encouraged to apply. Guidelines for the Award Scholars who wish to be considered for the award are asked to submit an up-to-date two-page CV (including a statement that confirms eligibility for the award) and an essay that is a maximum of 12,000 words long (including notes and references). The essay

should be unpublished and not under consideration elsewhere, based on original research, written in English, and follow History of the Human Science’s style guide. Scholars are advised to read the journal’s description of its aims and scope, as well as its submission guidelines. Entries will be judged by a panel drawn from the journal’s editorial team and board. They will identify the essay that best fits the journal’s aims and scope. Eligibility Scholars of any nationality who have either not yet been awarded a PhD or are no more than five years from its award are welcome to apply. The judging panel will use the definition of “active years”, with time away from academia for parental leave, health problems, or other relevant reasons being disregarded in the calculation. Prize The winning scholar will be awarded £250 and have their essay published in History of the Human…

Author Interviews, ECR Prize

‘Mothering in the Frame’ – an interview with Katie Joice

Hannah Proctor

"Mothering came to be seen as an origin story for social science... this this 'search for origins' also chimed with the need for a historical 'blank slate' after the war. There was a hope that the calibration of mothering would create a new generation of compassionate and pacifist democratic subjects."

Composite stills from Sylvia Brody’s Mother-Infant Interaction (1967) Source: U.S. National Library of Medicine.

Katie Joice (Birkbeck) was awarded a special commendation in the History of the Human Sciences' Early Career Prize. We spoke to her about her essay 'Mothering in the Frame: cinematic microanalysis and the pathogenic mother, 1945-67’, which will be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal. HHS: Congratulations on your History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize commendation for your essay ‘Mothering in the Frame. To begin with I wonder if you could briefly introduce and summarise your essay and say a little about what inspired you to write it. Katie Joice: Thank you. The essay introduces readers to the different ways in which film was used by anthropologists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts to study mother infant interaction in the post-war period. Historians have recently become interested in the concept of the pathogenic mother, but my specific focus is on how cinematic frame analysis, or microanalysis, enabled clinicians to classify and quantify mother-love. The essay begins with a discussion

of how mothers’ 'small behaviours', the everyday, repetitive acts that no-one notices, coalesce into a new and influential causal model for mental illness. I then go on to discuss four case studies: Margaret Mead’s work on child-rearing in Bali, Ray Birdwhistell’s body language research, Rene Spitz's studies of institutionalised babies, and Sylvia Brody's classification of mothering styles. All four of them used forms of microanalysis, but in different styles, and for their own ends. In terms of inspiration, I got interested in films about mothers and babies when I first joined the Hidden Persuaders project at Birkbeck. I was researching the visual history of psychosis and came across Spitz's film, Grief, about the devastating effects of maternal deprivation. At that time memories of my own son's infancy were fresh in my mind, and I'd already done a lot of thinking about the invisible work that goes into creating subjects or 'making people'. I realised that our humanity is not…

Author Interviews, ECR Prize, Interviews

‘Ghastly Marionettes’ – interview with Danielle Judith Zola Carr, winner of History of the Human Sciences’ Early Career Essay Prize

Hannah Proctor

"The approach that I take in the essay is part of my overarching method, which is to treat the history of science as intellectual history. The goal is not just to read the history of science alongside intellectual history, but to say we can do intellectual history within the sciences."

Experimental psychiatry team tests a protocol with a lab subject. Photo by Danielle Carr.

History of the Human Sciences is delighted to announce Danielle Judith Zola Carr (Columbia University) as the winner of the journal’s first Early Career Essay Prize for her essay ‘Ghastly Marionettes and the political metaphysics of cognitive liberalism: Anti-behaviourism, language, and The Origins of Totalitarianism’. Katie Joice (Birkbeck, University of London) was awarded a commendation for her essay ‘Mothering in the Frame: Cinematic Microanalysis and the Pathogenic Mother, 1945-67’. Congratulations to both scholars. 'Ghastly Marionettes' was included in our Special Issue on Cybernetics, published in February 2020, guest edited by Stefanos Geroulanos and Leif Weatherby. We spoke to the author about the essay, Hannah Arendt, Cold War liberalism and the place of intellectual history within the history of the human sciences. HHS: First of all, congratulations on winning the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize for your essay ‘Ghastly Marionettes and the political metaphysics of cognitive liberalism: Anti-behaviourism, language, and The Origins of Totalitarianism’. Can you tell

us a bit about the piece? DC: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure to publish with the journal. The essay actually originated as an early 2017 post-Trump piece, when I think everyone was reading The Origins of Totalitarianism. It was my first time reading it, and I was struck by how infused the book is– especially in its last third–with a castigation of the Pavolovian imaginary of the human, and how that imaginary of a human determined by stimulus and response was equivocated with this new Cold War concept of totalitarianism. So I started looking into that realised that nobody seemed to have written about that specifically in relation to Arendt I think Arendt is a good figure to think with, because she encapsulates this emerging Cold War common sense– what many scholars now are starting to think about as Cold War liberalism. One of the questions in thinking about Cold War political ideology is this: What is…

Book Reviews

The Arabic Freud

HHS Contributor

'The Arabic Freud, at one level, offers a richly researched intellectual history of an encounter between psychoanalysis and Islam which took place in Egypt over the 1940s and 1950s, reconstructing how a generation of philosophers, psychologists, and criminologists sought to cross-fertilise Freud with pre-analytic Arabic and Islamic traditions. On another level, however, El Shakry recuperates these thinkers not simply as objects of historical inquiry, or as mere products of their political context, but producers of theory in their own right, whose arguments and ideas can enrich and expand our understandings of the self and the other, intuition and ethical cultivation, and psychoanalysis and Islam, today.'

Omnia El Shakry, The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017; 206 pages, Hardcover £30; ISBN: 9780691174792 By Chris Wilson ‘Out of the darkness my eye glimpses a faint light. I see my small hand as it reaches for the moon from atop my mother’s shoulder. What a memory! How often have we reached for moons that are no less unattainable? I recall the tremendous effort I once expended trying to take hold of my mother’s nipple, only to be thwarted by something with a bitter taste…’[i] By the 1940s, the Oedipus complex, along with a host of other Freudian notions, would have been familiar to an Egyptian reading public. Naguib Mahfouz’s The Mirage (al-Sarab), published in 1948, offered readers one of the most evocative portrayals – and starkest warnings – of the perils of an excessive, pathological, and ultimately destructive attachment to the mother, in the story of Kamil Ru’ba Laz.

So unattractive was this portrait of Kamil that when an acquaintance was informed that Mahfouz had based the character on him – the problem in his life, Mahfouz later recounted, as in Kamil’s, was his relationship with his mother – he pulled out a revolver and made threats against the future Nobel Prize winner.[ii] Together with radio shows hosted by practising psychoanalysts, the introduction of psychological and intelligence testing into the military, and a flurry of other novels, plays, and films which dealt in similarly Freudian themes, Mahfouz’s novel was one of the many ways in which psychoanalysis became ‘nothing short of ubiquitous in postwar Egypt’.[iii] Yet rather than attempt a comprehensive reception history, Omnia El Shakry’s The Arabic Freud – the much-anticipated monograph-length sequel to her article of the same name, published in Modern Intellectual History back in 2014[iv] – has its sights set on a different aim, one at once more focussed and more ambitious. The Arabic Freud,…