Author Interviews

Psychotherapy across the Atlantic

HHS Contributor

Psychotherapists fill a unique niche in western society. They are tasked with the care of emotional lives when those lives have become rocky and troubled. Neither the government nor medicine nor the church is particularly good at meeting this need, so this is a crucial function. Every therapist I have ever met believed that theirs is a noble calling. They rarely, if ever, question the intrinsic and self-evident goodness of what they do.

The new special issue of History of the Human Sciences, edited by Sarah Marks, focuses on psychotherapy in Europe. Articles range across the twentieth century, tracing psychoanalysis in Greece, the transnational shaping of Yugoslav psychotherapy, hypnosis in Hungary, the role of suggestion in Soviet medicine, mindfulness in Britain, and Dialectical Behaviour Therapy in Sweden. In parallel, History of Psychology have published a special issue on psychotherapy in the Americas, edited by Rachael Rosner. Here, Marks and Rosner discuss the authors’ contributions, and what’s at stake when writing about the history of psychotherapy. Sarah Marks (SM): Perhaps we can start by tracing how the idea for these issues came about. You and I first met at a conference at University College London in 2013 organised by myself and Sonu Shamdasani on the history of psychotherapy - but the idea for these parallel issues came from you: what was the motivation behind the idea, and the particular focus of Europe and the

Americas? Rachael Rosner (RR): Your conference was a watershed moment for me personally. For years I had been trying to figure out where the history of psychotherapy belonged. The history of science? The history of medicine? The history of the social, behavioral and human sciences? Psychotherapy straddles all of them, but from the standpoint of historians asking shared questions, there wasn’t yet a home base. Your conference was an important step in that direction. Rachael Rosner Sonu followed in 2016 with a mini think-tank on transcultural histories of psychotherapy, which you and I attended. Felicity Callard (who had been at the 2013 conference) had just assumed co-editorship of History of the Human Sciences and Nadine Weidman had just become editor of History of Psychology. It seemed like Felicity and Nadine would likely encourage good work coming out of this nascent community. So the idea just clicked that you and I might guest-edit coordinated issues as a way of continuing the…

Author Interviews

The evolution of Raymond Aron: biological thought and the philosophy of history

HHS Contributor

In France in the twenties and thirties, it was the limits of science that were most instructive to Aron. French biologists couldn’t quite bridge between observations and experiments in the present, and the theory of evolution they believed explained past events. Objectivity became, for Aron, partly about acknowledging the limits of both positivism and philosophical idealism, i.e. a way of negotiating the relationship between the limits of observation and the limits of theory.

In the current issue of HHS, Isabel Gabel, from the University of Chicago, analyses the links between evolutionary thought and the philosophy of history in France - showing how, in the work of Raymond Aron in particular, a moment of epistemic crisis in evolutionary theory was crucial to the formation of his thought. Here, Isabel speaks to Chris Renwick about these unexpected links between evolutionary biology and he philosophy of history. The full article is available here. Chris Renwick (CR):Isabel,we should start with an obvious question: Raymond Aron, the main focus for your article, is a thinker most readers of History of the Human Sciences will be familiar with. But few - and I count myself among them - will have put Aron in the context you have done. What led you to connect Aron and evolutionary biology together?   Isabel Gabel (IG): Yes, this was a real revelation for me too. I knew Aron as a sociologist, public intellectual, and Cold War liberal, but had

never seen his early interest in biology mentioned anywhere. It was actually in the archives of Georges Canguilhem, at the CAPHÉS in Paris, that I stumbled upon a reference to Aron and Mendelian genetics.  In 1988 there was a colloquium organized in Aron’s honor, and Canguilhem’s remarks on Aron’s earliest years, and the problem of the philosophy of history in the 1930s, had been collected and published along with several others in a small volume. At the time, Canguilhem felt that not enough importance had been given to the fact that his late friend had abandoned a research project on Mendelian biology, as he put it. This totally surprised and, needless to say, delighted me.  I quickly found a copy of Introduction to the Philosophy of History, and began reading. As someone who works in both history of science and intellectual history, I frame my research questions to address both fields. Aron’s development as a thinker…

Author Interviews

The British Way in Brainwashing: Marcia Holmes in conversation with Rhodri Hayward

Des Fitzgerald

In the July issue of History of the Human Sciences, Marcia Holmes, a post-doctoral researcher with the Hidden Persuaders project at Birkbeck, University of London, used the 1965 film adaption of Len Deighton’s The Ipcress File to demonstrate the close relationship between Cold War fantasies of mind control and the postwar understanding of the media. In her analysis, our familiar understanding of brainwashing as an irresistible form of domination is disrupted and she instead demonstrates how the spy drama which pits a hero against the mechanical forces of scientific control provided a new template through which audiences could re-conceive their relationship to modern media.  Against the idea of the passive and pliant observer, Holmes promotes the idea of the ‘cybernetic spectator’, who plays an active role in controlling the flow of information in order to reorganise their own personality and consciousness.  In this analysis, brainwashing moves beyond being a simple disciplinary mechanism to become a potential technology of the self.  Viewed from this perspective, brainwashing is less a legacy of Cold War struggles than a part of

psychedelic revolution in which consciousness became a subject for personal exploration and transformation.  Part of the joy of Holmes account is that it connects the history of cold war human sciences to the flowering of the counterculture in the 1960s: a relationship that is only just beginning to receive the attention it deserves. Marcia Holmes is here in conversation with Rhodri Hayward, Reader in History at Queen Mary, University of London, and one of the Editors of HHS. The full paper is available open access here: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0952695117703295  Rhodri Hayward (RH): Thanks for speaking to us, Marcia. What first drew you to Deighton’s novel and the Ipcress File film? Marcia Holmes (MH): I admit that I had never seen The Ipcress File (dir. Sidney Furie, 1965), or read Len Deighton’s 1962 novel, until I began researching films that depict brainwashing. Perhaps this is because I’m an American and only recently transplanted to the UK. The film is well-loved…

Author Interviews

“Psychology and psychological facts operate in domains that extend far beyond the long revered space of the laboratory” – an interview with Jacy L. Young

Felicity Callard

We are delighted today to publish a new special issue, 'Psychology and its Publics,' edited by Michael Pettit and Jacy L. Young. HHS editor-in-chief, Felicity Callard, spoke to Jacy about the background  to the issue, and how the question of publics, in particular, may push a heterogeneous collection of interdisciplinary voices to the fore within the history of psychology  Felicity Callard (FC): Jacy, maybe we should start with the genesis of this special issue. Did it start with you explicitly wanting to stage an encounter between research on the history of psychology and research on publics? How has this focus inflected your own research trajectories? Jacy Young (JY): Both Michael Pettit and I have an abiding interest in the manifold ways in which the human sciences have interacted with the public across history. This special issue emerged in conversations in the wake of my doctoral dissertation, a project that was very much concerned with psychologists’ various engagements with the public, specifically in

the context of the history of questionnaire research in American psychology. As we note in our introduction, too often conversations about psychology and the public presume a passive public simply receiving whatever messaging the discipline happens to disseminate. And, the public as an entity is often under-theorized in these discussions. The term is employed but never defined with respect to its parameters and characteristics, its ontology remaining un- or at least under-addressed. The contributions to this special issue speak to these concerns in a variety of ways, expanding the conversation about the public to encompass much more vibrant, active, and multifaceted notions of the public. This is especially so in Kieran O’Doherty’s piece on the construction of deliberative publics. The nature of the public, and the ways in which particular publics are brought into being in interaction with the human sciences continues to be a theme in much of my work, as is the public’s influence on the…

Author Interviews

“I still sense an awkward feeling at the economics faculty at Humboldt when it is reminded of the GDR past, as if things went too far” – an interview with Till Düppe

HHS Contributor

We were delighted in our current tissue, to publish Till Düppe's new article, "The generation of the GDR: Economists at the Humboldt University of Berlin caught between loyalty and relevance." The article is an account of a particular generation of economists at Humboldt - socialized in Nazi Germany, growing up through during the Second World War and the Stalinist period, becoming committed to a state career in the GDR, but whose careers then ended very suddenly, in the 'ultimate reform' of 1989. The article draws on Karl Mannheim's theory of generations to present a very particular historicization of the GDR, one that limns the tension between 'the ideological and productive functions of knowledge in socialism, that is, between loyalty and relevance.' Angus Nicholls, one of the editors of HHS, spoke to Till about the GDR economists. Angus Nicholls (AN): Till, can you tell us a little bit about your own academic career, and how and why you came to be interested in economists in the German Democratic Republic (GDR)? Till

Düppe (TD): I’m trained in continental philosophy and in economics which led me into the history and philosophy of economics. In my previous work, I was interested in how economics became mathematical, and how that development was related to the U.S. during the Cold War. In this paper I am working on the same period, but on a very different group of people, GDR economists, who I met during my post-doc in Berlin. But they are in fact not so different from the American mathematical economists: both operate within rather closed discourses, such that there is little understanding of how they see themselves. This is how I felt when I was at the faculty in Berlin (at Humboldt) from which the GDR generation had been excluded after German reunification, even though they still feel attached to ‘their’ institution. I try to create more understanding, Verstehen, just as I did when I was working on mathematical…

Author Interviews

On the unexamined presence of psychotherapeutics- an interview with Sarah Marks

Des Fitzgerald

From the mid-century up to the present, psychoanalysis has had some extremely militant challengers to the throne, which have, in some cases, exceeded it in terms of institutional power. Behavioural and cognitive approaches are the obvious candidates here, especially in the way they have mobilized trials and ‘evidence base’ for their cause. But there are others: Rogerian counselling has been ubiquitous at particular moments, and, increasingly, Mindfulness-based approaches. And there is an excellent emerging literature coming through that is beginning to address some of these gap. But the fact that non-psychoanalytic approaches have had very little historical interrogation, thus far, has quite significant implications given the status they’ve acquired.

We were delighted in April 2017 to publish a special issue of History of the Humans Sciences, 'Psychotherapy in Historical Perspective,' edited by Sarah Marks, currently based at Birkbeck, University of London, as part of the Wellcome Trust-funded Hidden Persuaders project. HHS Web editor, Des Fitzgerald, spoke to Sarah about the special issue - and about how we might (re-)think the history of the psychotherapeutic complex today.  Des Fitzgerald (DF): Sarah, thanks for taking the time for this interview. Why a history of psychotherapy, now, in 2017? Sarah Marks (SM): The history of psychotherapy does seem to be having something of a moment right now. There’s recently been the Other Psychotherapies conference at Glasgow, the Transcultural Histories of Psychotherapy conferences at UCL, special issues of this journal, and forthcoming issues of History of Psychology and The European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling. So I’m happy to say that this seems to representative of a blossoming field. The seed for this issue came about a few years

back, though. As a graduate student I was very surprised at how fractional the literature seemed to be by comparison with work on, say, psychiatric diagnostics and the 'Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorder,' psychopharmaceuticals, or asylums and institutions. I thought there must be others out there working on it, and there were. It’s probably particularly relevant that I came to it initially from trying to figure out how Cognitive Behaviour Therapy become such a significant force in the UK. I don’t especially privilege ‘histories of the present’ as an approach, but I think psychotherapies as interventions – and psychotherapeutic knowledge in broader terms – do have something of an unexamined presence in contemporary society and policy, in various forms. I note that there is currently a growing critique, or even backlash against this in Britain, including from therapists themselves.  So taking a historical approach now makes good sense – it reminds us that these are by…

Author Interviews

“The fact that we all assume that instantaneous photos of a smile are the only way to represent a smile tells us a lot about how pervasive the notion of the instant has been” – an interview with Beatriz Pichel

Des Fitzgerald

Charles Darwin, Duchenne de Boulogne and others described the process of producing an emotional expression, but they didn’t show this process: photographs displayed just one instant that summarized that process. This instant is not conceptualized as such in their books, but was nonetheless materialized in the photographs. These photographs were later appropriated by others such as the psychologist Georges Dumas and the physiologist Charles-Émile François-Franck, who also followed their photographic methods. By doing this, Dumas and François-Franck were implicitly assuming the principle of the instant: that the smile was that frozen moment that they were seeing in the photographs.

For the latest in our series of author interviews, we spoke to Beatriz Pichel, Wellcome Trust Fellow in Medical Humanities, at the Photographic History Research Centre, De Montfort University. Dr Pichel works between the history of photography, the history of emotions, and the medical humanities; she is currently working on the relationship between psychological theories of the emotions and photography at then turn of the nineteenth century. Her new paper, 'From Facial Expressions to Bodily Gestures: Passions, Photography and Movement in French 19th-Century Sciences' is available, open access, in the current issue of History of the Human Sciences. Dr Pichel spoke to HHS Web Editor, Des Fitzgerald.  Des Fitzgerald: The fundamental claim of your paper, as I read it, and if you’ll forgive a radical simplification, is that the history of the emotions is also the history of photographic technology. Why was it that attention to the emotions, particularly, became so associated with photographic technology? Or should we understand what’s going on here as only one story within a broader history

of visual technology in the history of psychology? Beatriz Pichel: In the second half of the nineteenth century, psychologists and physiologists started to measure emotions in terms of bodily changes (breath, blood pressure, pulse, etc.). But some of them nonetheless still used photographs to see the external changes in the body. This is interesting because, at this time, the imaging of emotion is the only use of photography that I have found in the group of psychologists that I’m looking at. So yes, I would suggest that there is a special connection between photography and emotions in the history of psychology – although, of course, the uses of photography in psychology cannot be reduced to this. But there is a further question, which relates to what we understand by the ‘history of emotions’ more broadly. In my article, I refer to the history of emotions as a discipline, and I claim that part of this history should…

Author Interviews

“We might have a brighter future if we stopped conceiving of ourselves as an epistemic counterculture” – An Interview with Nicolas Langlitz

Des Fitzgerald

Philosophically, one of the goals of science studies was to show that there was no clear demarcation of science from society, that scientists were human beings like you and me, and that their claims to objectivity were unfounded. Expert knowledge was put in its place and subordinated to a democratic process. When science studies were established as a field in the 1980s, we were certainly not ruled by philosopher kings and nobody felt the need to show how Derrida and Rorty had fabricated their truth claims ­– not least because these philosophers didn't make any. But technoscientists did assert their expertise and transformed our world in powerful ways. So we started the Science Wars.

Nicolas Langlitz is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research in New York City. His work lies at the intersection of anthropology and the history of science, where he has been especially engaged with the epistemic cultures of the neurobiological and psychopharmcological sciences. His most recent monograph, 'Neuropsychedilia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research Since the Decade of The Brain' is available from the University of California Press. At the beginning of March, Des Fitzgerald, HHS Web Editor, caught up with Nicolas about his recent article in History of the Human Sciences, 'On a not so chance encounter of neurophilosophy and science studies in a sleep laboratory.' Des Fitzgerald: We’ve had a lot of reflection lately on how disciplines like anthropology and sociology intersect the natural sciences (and especially life sciences); one of the things I found especially valuable about your article was its attention to a very different set of interdisciplinary relations – those between social scientists and philosophers. Why do you think there has been relatively little attention to these interactions? And where do you see their future? Nicolas Langlitz: That's true.

Social studies of science, including anthropology and sociology, have not paid much attention to philosophy. I think there are political reasons for why the humanities and the social sciences attracted less interest. In his article "What Happened in the Sixties?", Jon Agar located the birth of science studies in the long 1960s and the countercultural upheaval against technocratic government. Philosophically, one of the goals of science studies was to show that there was no clear demarcation of science from society, that scientists were human beings like you and me, and that their claims to objectivity were unfounded. Expert knowledge was put in its place and subordinated to a democratic process. When science studies were established as a field in the 1980s, we were certainly not ruled by philosopher kings and nobody felt the need to show how Derrida and Rorty had fabricated their truth claims ­– not least because these philosophers didn't make any. But technoscientists did assert their expertise and transformed our world in powerful ways. So we started the…