Psychiatry’s Neoliberal Philosopher – Review: Thomas Szasz

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. Instead, the chapters largely focus on his philosophical influences, extend Szasz’s reflections on psychoanalysis, suicide, and schizophrenia, or apply his writings to legal and theoretical issues in contemporary psychiatry.

A historical appraisal of Szasz’s legacy must therefore move along the edges of the volume’s dominant concerns. Many of its contributors note the significant impact The Myth of Mental Illness had on their professional development and testify to their lasting friendship with its author, lending the publication the air of a posthumous Festschrift. Even the contributors that disagree most strongly with Szasz assert his importance to critical debates within a field dominated by biomedical assumptions. Such personal testimonies reveal Szasz’s continued appeal to a small minority of philosophically minded psychiatrists. Coming from a generation of researchers that underwent graduate training in the 1960s or soon thereafter, these comments also emphasize the historical situatedness of Szasz’s critique. Writing with real rhetorical verve, Szasz attacked institutional psychiatry where and when it was weakest, exploiting the uncertain etiology of major mental illnesses as the psychodynamic consensus of the postwar years unraveled.

Throughout his writings, Szasz built on the central opposition between physical and mental illness. Adopting Rudolf Virchow’s definition of disease as cellular pathology, Szasz denied that psychological suffering could constitute an illness, or that it involved any suffering to begin with. If all illness was physical in this purposefully narrow sense, then mental illness was merely a metaphor or myth—a rhetorical ploy “to force others to provide for one’s needs“ (Szasz 171). This notion of myth was inspired by Gilbert Ryle, who saw the mind as a philosophical category mistake. Yet, it seems to have been Szasz, rather than any of his conservative forebears, who reinforced this argument with a psychiatric voluntarism that was breathtaking in its lack of empathy: So-called mental illness was merely an abdication of personal autonomy and society owed little to those who shirked responsibility in this manner. There was one decisive exception for Szasz—involuntary treatment. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he founded two organizations that fought forced hospitalizations in court. The results, coming as large psychiatric hospitals closed, were decidedly mixed. Although some wards were rife with abuse and the quality of treatment varied considerably, Szasz and his followers saw no need to extend care to those freed from hospitalization. The only person worthy of attention became the freely contracting participant in a capitalist marketplace, the individual who paid for therapy out of their own pocket.

Several contributions to the volume point to the fallacies of this philosophy—Szasz’s misreadings of Virchow, Thomas Hobbes and Ryle, and his naive positivism that at once idealized medical science and denied any role for public health. In a memorable passage, the psychiatrist Allen Frances recounts that Szasz refused to treat severely ill patients during his residency in Chicago. When ordered to do so, he moved to Syracuse where he exclusively saw outpatients for the rest of his career. The man who routinely dismissed mental suffering, who railed against the laziness and stupidity of people with severe psychological problems, never actually worked with them.

Given these accounts, it’s difficult to agree with the praise accorded Szasz throughout the book, from describing his unmatched analytical rigor to lionizing him as the greatest defender of patient rights since Philippe Pinel. In part, these adulations stem from shared commitments, such as rejecting “statist medicine” (60). This opposition to public healthcare is widely shared in the United States, where it extends to a medical establishment that benefits from the inflated costs charged by private hospitals and resident doctors, pharmaceutical and insurance companies. 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. Reagan had already implemented drastic cuts for psychiatric care during his time as governor of California, and state budgets have only shrunk further since. On the one hand, these measures have instituted a modern version of laissez-fare capitalism, with intensive psychotherapy for wealthy individuals and cheaply produced but highly profitable medication for the masses. On the other hand, a punitive regime has built on the moral condemnation that Szasz personified, pushing the desperate and needy into poverty and homelessness. For thousands, prison terms have replaced the mental hospitals that campaigners decried as incarceration. Szasz himself might have found punishment more palatable than treatment. For their part, patients and mental health workers proved pawns in a cynical, yet effective, game of cutting costs while crying freedom.

References

Szasz, T. S. (1971) The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct. New York: Harper & Row.

Review: Psychologies in Revolution

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 attention to new primary sources or texts, but to offer a new reading of Luria’s existing texts, already published in English, and thereby rehabilitate Luria as a potentially important figure for contemporary scholarship.

In the Chapter ‘The Criminal’, based on experiments from Luria’s The Nature of the Human Conflicts, Proctor shows how Jungian theory was embedded in the criminology and associative techniques involved in the development of a predecessor of the polygraph machine. The devastation caused by the October Revolution had resulted in a wave of crime, and the details of criminal acts available to Luria often seemed senseless: “a baker accused of killing his wife; a man found in a pile of snow having been hit with a sledgehammer; a factory worker who broke a window at his workplace to steal a ventilator; a man who killed his fiancée and threw her dead body into water tied to a cast-iron wheel” etc. (p. 48). Luria’s ambition was to incorporate psychoanalytic theory into his work as a Soviet psychologist, even though it was to criminals rather than patients that he turned. Proctor notices, though, that Luria’s focus was on whether the people he observed had commited murder, rather than on why they had commited murder. Thus, Luria consequently failed to reflect on the role of the social order in fostering criminal behaviour, being focused instead only on the application of psychological theories, and in experimental proofs of his associative technique. The author also points out that his theoretical views expressed in the paper ‘Psychoanalysis as a System of Monistic Psychology’ in 1924 are in conflict with his later clinical writings.

In Luria’s defence, this lack of social reflection may have derived from his own need to shield himself from the devastating loss and disruption which accompanied the post-Revolutionary years. Besides, between the 1920s, a period of active involvement in the psychoanalytic movement in Russia and the publication of The Nature of Human Conflicts in 1932, significant changes occurred. The experimental psychoanalytic project Detski Dom (or International Solidarity Laboratory) and the State Psychoanalytic Institute in Moscow was shut down in 1925 by decree of Narkom RSFSR. It was a time of growing attacks on psychoanalysis, and Luria resigned from the Russian Psychoanalytic Society in 1927, the year of the exile of Trotsky, a political associate of psychoanalysis. Then, in 1930, Psychoanalytic Society was shut down. These socio-historical circumstances of Luria’s career are downplayed in the book.

To Proctor, Luria’s psychological approach was never primarily psychoanalytic. Luria’s ambition to engage psychoanalysis with Marxism and other psychological theories, such as Gestalt, resulted in an alternative model, which “paradoxically failed to retain the elements of Freud’s theory… praised for being dialectical in the first place (the ongoing tension between the life and death instincts)” (p. 43). The paper she refers to is Luria and Vygotsky’s introduction to the Russian translation of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle published in 1925. My reading of this paper is different. I’d argue that Luria and Vygotsky’s failure is not in their impossibility to retain to the dialectic of life and death drives, as there is no sign in this text that they deny this tension. The resulting ‘third’ in this dialectical tension for them – the belief in the possibility of sublimation of the death drive – is what constitutes their failure for Proctor. She contrasts this theoretical optimism with the apparent regression that has occurred in society as a result of the revolutionary movement. This illuminates further that their theoretical hopes for the ability of psychoanalysis to provide a basis for monistic psychology were dashed more by the growing reality of Stalinism than by their theoretical failure to remain faithful to psychoanalysis.

The chapter ‘The Primitive’ explores Luria’s failure to find his place under the Soviet political regime. Central Asian expeditions of 1931 and 1932, were, as Proctor writes, Luria’s most explicit political endeavour: an attempt to demonstrate the cognitive benefits of collectivisation. The results, however, did not satisfy the State and his work was denounced before he published his findings. While not being able to contribute to the First Five Year Plan, Luria’s findings in this expedition were for Vygotsky of the highest importance and deepened his understanding of the interrelations between language and thought. Proctor’s analysis of the interrelations between ‘primitive’ people and the Soviet idea of collectivisation in Luria’s work elaborates the nuances of the revolutionary movement in its oppressive rather than ‘progressive’ character.

The chapter ‘the Child’ illuminates the period of Luria’s experimental work with children and his published work with Vygotsky. Conducted between 1923 and 1936, a time of relative freedom of thought and the institutionalisation of psychoanalysis in Russia, as well as progress in pedology, these observations and experiments focused on the the future citizens of the Soviet state, and therefore with understanding the processes of child development. Proctor covers an extraordinary range of material, providing not only a clear picture of Luria and Vygotsky’s position on the role of language, play and historical context for mental development, but also vividly imagining the atmosphere in which Soviet children were raised, the toys they played with, the tales they read, and just how many of them survived without parents. We also learn how the Soviet state gradually abandoned its ‘kids’, as successive decrees constricted Luria’s and Vygotsky’s scientific activity.

By the late 1930s, a period when psychology as a discipline disappeared in Soviet Russia, and calling Freud by his name was equated with high treason, Luria lost both of his foundations – psychology and psychoanalysis, and also lost his dear colleague Vygotsky. He found shelter in medicine, and the patriotic appeal of World War II left him no choice but to discover a new object of research – the brain. However, some of Luria’s work on the brain kept its distance from dry neurological language and instead, as Proctor notes of his late case histories, ‘Luria composed the text in a self-consciously literary style.’ I would argue that this was possible due to the relative freedom of after-Stalin years, which allowed for more open expression of Luria’s long-standing beliefs.

The chapter ‘the Aphasic’ focuses on a rather unusual story of a brain-injured patient, Zasetsky. It shows how far Luria the neurologist was from studying the inanimate tissues of the brain, and how close he was instead to questions about the animate vicissitudes of the individual. It is no wonder, as Proctor writes, that Oliver Sacks in the introduction to The Man with a Shattered World, claims Luria’s work was ‘always and centrally concerned with identity’ and suffused with ‘warmth, feeling and moral beauty’. ” (p. 169) I would suggest that an optimistic belief in the ability of ‘monistic psychology’ to hold to the ‘dialectic of the whole organism’ was still alive for Luria, and resulted in his approach to brain injuries. At that time Luria was also in favour of the idea of functional systems. According to this theory, restoration of lost functions was possible through compensation and reorganisation of nervous connections. Luria’s texts Traumatic Aphasia and Restoration of Function after Brain Injury illustrate this approach and demonstrate successful results of restorations of functions after brain damage, including the restoration of a sense of self. Luria’s approach to aphasia departs from the localisation of damages and, I would argue, his understanding and classification of aphasia are based on the same principles as proposed by Freud in 1891. Luria’s later texts could be read fruitfully alongside Freud’s texts, despite Proctor’s suggestion that their theoretical grounds had moved apart. This fact is also noted in the article of Solms (2000), to whom Proctor refers in a previous chapter, but who is left unmentioned in this one.

The chapter ‘the Synaesthete’ continues to draw on the ‘brain’ period of Luria’s career and his synaesthetic patient Solomon Shereshevsky, going back and forth in time describing his friendship with Eisenstein and his engagement with Freud’s texts and the lost tradition of ‘romantic science’. In these case histories, 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’. In my view, the case histories discussed in these two chapters are an illustration of the historical continuity of theoretical views of Luria.

Psychologies in Revolution is indeed so much more than just a study of Luria’s heritage or a socio-historical analysis of the period in which he lived. Proctor’s main proposal is that Luria’s ‘romantic’ science offers a model for approaching human nature and can therefore contribute to the current rupture between the ‘brain’ and the ‘subject’, and the departure of the neurosciences from the social sciences. It is a pertinent study offering Luria’s ‘romantic science’ to scholars in the neurosciences and medical sciences searching to approach their subjects in a more humane way. However, the complexity of the Soviet years remain to be explored further, and it is still necessary to investigate archival resources and personal connections of Luria beyond those who are already well known, and to translate more of his theoretical heritage into English. It would also be interesting to bring his neuropsychological studies back into discussion within the psychoanalytic field. There is still much scope for incorporating Luria’s ideas into a contemporary theory of mind.

Lizaveta Zeldzina is a psychologist and a PhD candidate at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research is dedicated to the vicissitudes of psychoanalysis in Soviet Russia 1930-1980. It explores Soviet studies of the unconscious in psychology and physiology, and theoretical engagement with the psychoanalysis of Alexander Luria, Bluma Zeigarnik, Pyotr Anokhin, Filipp Bassin and Dmitry Uznadze in the socio-historical context of their times.

Review: Physics and Psychics

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 from the broader community of spiritualists, conjurers and psychical researchers also interested in the study of psychical phenomena. ‘Psychic’ (also called ‘psychical’, ‘supernormal’ or ‘paranormal’) refers to a wide range of phenomena not contemplated by mainstream science and often labelled as ‘supernatural’, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis, levitation and spirit materialisation. To physical-psychical scientists like Oliver Lodge, William Crookes and William F. Barrett, however, there was nothing ‘supernatural’ in all this. Indeed, they endeavoured precisely to demonstrate, by empirical means, that psychical phenomena belonged to the realm of nature and, therefore, constituted legitimate objects of scientific inquiry.

The heyday of physical-psychical research coincided with the formative period of modern scientific disciplines, when the boundaries of such fields as physics and chemistry were relatively fluid and constantly challenged in light of new discoveries, methods and theories. Physical-psychical scientists argued that a systematic study of psychical phenomena could not only expand the purview of the physical sciences beyond the recognised spheres of matter and energy but, ultimately, revolutionise our understanding of the universe, of life and death. Who were the British physical scientists interested in psychical investigation? What drove their enthusiasm for the subject? How did they negotiate their position as physical scientists and psychical researchers? To what extent did their achievements in physics profit from their studies in psychics, and vice-versa? These are some of the main concerns running through Physics and Psychics.

Noakes draws on  a remarkable wealth of primary sources, ranging from diaries and personal letters to specialised journals, wide-circulation newspapers, illustrations and books. The methodological sophistication of Physics and Psychics also deserves praise. In contrast to studies that tend to label such subjects as psychical research, spiritualism and Theosophy as ‘superstition’ or ‘pseudoscience’, Noakes favours ‘alternative sciences’ as a framework through which to accommodate disciplines or subjects not contemplated in fin-de-siècle scientific orthodoxy. As a medical historian working on psychical research and the occult in early twentieth-century China, I find the category of ‘alternative sciences’ particularly valuable. It helps historians of China appreciate the emergence of ‘Spiritual Science’ (xinling kexue 心靈科學) – the Nippo-Chinese offspring of the Anglo-American psychical research – in the 1910s not as a backlash reaction to science and modernity but rather as an alternative to scientific materialism, ontological dualism and the worldview that everything in the universe is mere matter and motion. Indeed, my reading of Physics and Psychics is concerned primarily with the transnational history of fin-de-siècle psychical research, particularly its development in East Asia.

The book is divided into six chapters. It begins in the first half of the nineteenth century, the formative period of the physical sciences. Chapter 1 explores how mesmerism, Karl von Reichenbach’s theory of od and the emergence of Modern Spiritualism in the mid-nineteenth century inspired British physical scientists to appreciate the scientific study of psychical and occult phenomena as extensions of the nascent discipline of physics. They celebrated Mesmer’s discovery of a new physical force – animal magnetism – as having the potential to revolutionise people’s understanding of the human body, reconcile science and religion, and eventually clarify the underlying causes of such ‘inexplicable’ and ‘remarkable’ phenomena like mind-reading, thought-transference and spirit materialisation. The potential to investigate psychical phenomena through scientific means led a group of eminent British scientists and intellectuals to establish the Society of Psychical Research (SPR) in London in 1882. Centred on the SPR, chapter 2 teases out the identities and networks of physical-psychical scientists. Dissatisfied with the limitations of Christian orthodoxy and scientific materialism, this group included not only official members of the SPR but a broader community of high-ranking scientists whose interest in psychics often predated the Society’s foundation, and whose sustained commitment to psychical investigation went beyond the Society’s umbrella.

The next three chapters look at the physical-psychical scientists’ view that psychical phenomena belonged to the natural (=material) realm and, therefore, deserved scientific investigation. Chapter 3 examines how those scientists envisaged the relevance of the physical sciences – their theories, methods and experiments – to clarify the mechanisms of the psychical world. The physical sciences offered not only a scientific framework through which to investigate psychical phenomena but also furnished a set of tools for physical-psychical scientists to draw analogies between the visible and invisible realms of existence. Their latest achievements in electricity, telegraphy and ether, for example, suggested that psychical phenomena were not as impossible or ‘supernatural’ as some might have once assumed, and that physical experiments could enhance our understanding of the same. Indeed, Fukurai Tomokichi’s 福来友吉 (1869–1952) invention of thoughtography – the ability to imprint mental images onto photographic plates – in the mid-1900s,[2] and the myriad of early twentieth-century Japanese and Chinese articles and books explaining the reality of telepathy and clairvoyance in terms of electricity, ether and wireless telegraphy indicate that the analogies proposed by British physical-psychical scientists enjoyed an impressive transnational audience.

Following, Noakes turns to the laboratory as a shared space for physical and psychical investigation. While the use of scientific instruments yielded some positive evidence for the reality of certain psychical effects – like table-rapping and telekinesis – experimental work also posed new challenges. The unavailability of reliable mediums or difficulty to see, control and replicate paranormal phenomena in the laboratory led many practitioners of the physical sciences to doubt the feasibility of psychical research. Despite this, psychical experimentation inspired creative uses of the physical sciences to an extent far greater than historians have so far recognised. Not everyone agreed that physical scientists were the most suited to study psychical matters, though. Chapter 5 examines the debates between spiritualists, psychologists, psychical researchers, conjurers and physicists regarding who could claim authority in psychical investigation. Unsurprisingly, the most outspoken defenders of the physical expertise were the same familiar individuals who were engaged in shaping the boundaries of the physical sciences in Britain’s public sphere. Physical theories, methods and experimental work, they declared, ranked as the most appropriate to decipher the puzzles underlying the cause and reality of psychical effects.

The final chapter is probably the most insightful to scholars working on the popularisation of psychical research beyond the United Kingdom. Noakes turns from the debates taking place in laboratories and scientific journals to the engagement of physical-psychical scientists in the dissemination of psychical research – its methods, achievements and social uses – through mass media and popular scientific literature. Focused on Oliver Lodge, Noakes shows how wide-circulation newspapers, popular books and lecture halls became important venues where physical-psychical scientists could expose ideas deemed inappropriate in secularised scientific settings, such as the reconciliation of science and religion, the survival of the soul after death, and the physical effects happening in spiritualist seances.

Persuaded by Noakes’s argument that Lodge stood as a prominent figure in early British radio broadcasting often called upon to illuminate the latest discoveries in physics to a broader audience, I looked for some visual evidence to satisfy my curiosity about what had made Lodge’s public appearances so special – the ‘thing’ written records cannot fully capture. Searching on YouTube, I was thrilled by a short video titled ‘Sir Oliver Lodge Renders Science Intelligible’, originally aired on British Movietone on 31 December 1930.[3]

Praising Lodge as ‘one of the greatest scientists of modern times’ who ‘needs no introduction to British audiences’, the film presents a charismatic old man in his early 80s playing with a device wherein a highly magnetic piece of cobalt steel seems to be levitating or ‘floating in empty space in vacuum.’ To demonstrate magnetic attraction and repulsion, Lodge then brings two pieces of steel up to each other. ‘As we can see’, Lodge explains, the piece ‘runs away’, they ‘don’t like each other; they chase each other’. But when he reverses them, then ‘they like each other very much.’ Using everyday experiments and lively language, Lodge illustrates what Noakes explored thoroughly in this book: how insights in physics – here, in magnetism – can help illuminate the causes and reality of psychical phenomena, if not life and death as a whole. If we understand ‘all the actors in the relation between ether and matter, or let’s say, between space and matter, we might begin to understand something more of what life and mind really are.’ After the proper appraisal of scientific evidence, Lodge concludes, ‘if the result is that personalities continue to exist then they must have a physical vehicle for that existence,’ a substance or entity ‘which fills space and which is a far more important thing than any form of matter’, which becomes ‘a trivial thing in comparison.’ That revolutionary thing refers to Lodge’s cherished ‘ether’.[4]

By the 1920s, some of Lodge’s most best-selling books in physics and psychics – including The Substance of Faith Allied with Science,[5] Survival of Man[6] and Raymond or Life and Death[7] – had already been rendered into Japanese alongside hundreds of newspaper articles and interviews on science and religion, ether and psychical research. An important channel for Chinese elites fascinated by hypnosis, telepathy and clairvoyance, Japan played a key role in the dissemination of Western psychical research in China. Publications about the latest achievements of British scientists like Lodge, Barrett and Crookes featured prominently in the Chinese popular press during the first half of the twentieth century. These typically comprised book excerpts and newspaper articles translated from English into Japanese, and then from Japanese into Chinese. These publications were decisive in the formation of Spiritual Science therein. For instance, in a review of the Claude’s Book – prefaced by Lodge – a Chinese writer praises the British scientist as ‘the physicist of the afterlife’, whose ‘established reputation had encouraged us to take the subject of psychical phenomena seriously’.[8]

Despite Noakes’ flowing prose, Physics and Psychics is dense reading. But while focused on the British context, the book is a must-read to anyone working on the transnational history of spiritualism and psychical research. Noakes makes an important contribution to a recent body of work, which calls for spiritualism and psychical research to become legitimate subjects in the history of science, medicine and religion. It sheds much-needed light on the question of how religion and the occult have helped shape the boundaries of modern science, a concern with global implications.   

Luis Fernando Bernardi Junqueira (林友樂) is a PhD student in the Department of History at UCL. Funded by the Wellcome Trust, his research project investigates the transnational history of spiritualism and psychical research in early twentieth-century China. It looks at the formation of ‘Spiritual Science’ (xinling kexue 心靈科學), its impact on healthcare and religious experience. His areas of interest include modern Chinese history, medical history, esotericism, and science and technology studies, and he has published in Portuguese, Chinese and English. 

[1] Popper, Karl R. The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Basic Books, 1959); Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); Feyerabend, Paul. Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (London: Verso, 1975).

[2] Tomokichi, Fukurai. Clairvoyance & Thoughtography (London: Rider & Company, 1931).

[3] British Movietone, “Sir Oliver Lodge Renders Science Intelligible and Mr Sanger – Sound,” YouTube Video, 4:29, 21 July 2015, https://youtu.be/A4uOdx_dQBs.

[4] On Lodge and ether, see Noakes, Richard, “Making Space for the Soul: Oliver Lodge, Maxwellian Psychics and the Etherial Body,” in Jaume Navarro, ed, Ether and Modernity: The Recalcitrance of an Agonising Object in the Early Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 88–106; Noakes, Richard, “Glorifying Mechanism: Oliver Lodge and the Problems of Ether, Mind, and Matter,” in James Mussell and Graeme Gooday, eds, A Pioneer of Connection: Recovering the Life and Work of Oliver Lodge (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), 135–152.

[5] Kagaku yori mitaru shinkō no honshitsu 科学より観たる信仰の本質, trans. Ōno Yoshimaro 大野芳麿 (Tokyo: Rakuyōdō, 1921).

[6] Shigo no seizon 死後の生存, trans. Takahashi Gorō 高橋五郎 (Tokyo: Genkōsha, 1917); Shinrei seikatsu 心霊生活, trans. Fujī Hakūn 藤井白雲 (Tokyo: Dai Nihon bunmei kyōkai kankōsho, 1917).

[7] Reimondo meikai tsūshin レイモンド 冥界通信, trans. Takahashi Gorō (Tokyo: Uchū reizō kenkyū kyōkai, 1918); Takai ni aru aiji yori no shōsoku 他界にある愛児よりの消息, trans. Nojiri Hōei 野尻抱影 (Tokyo: Shinkōsha, 1922).

[8] “Weilai shenghuo zhi xinjieshi 未來生活之新解釋” (New Explanations on the Afterlife), Dongfang zazhi 17, no. 6 (1920): 53–54.

Histories of sexology today – interview with Katie Sutton

‘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.

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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 that asked, among other things, how we might use concepts like translation to push those a bit further.

In your introduction you discuss the historiography of sexology, which, as you point out is still relatively young – how do you see the essays in this collection as intervening in or extending this historiography?

Firstly, in a geographic sense. The essays extend a historiography that has often focused on Western European and specific national contexts. For example, they shed light on how Eastern European sexologies and sexologists crossed the iron curtain during the Cold War era, or the prominence of North American thinkers at various key moments.

Secondly, they extend it by looking backwards and forwards in time. We’ve got essays such as Benjamin Kahan’s, which looks right back to the mid 19th century in the US, but we also have pieces that look forward through to the post World War II era. These expand the parameters of a historigoraphy that has tended to focus on the early 20th century.

But as well as pushing at conventional limitations of space and time, we were interested, as I’ve already noted, in approaching questions of disciplinarity in more open ways. For example, one essay engages explicitly with animal studies, and shows how scientists turned to the natural world to make new kinds of arguments about human sexual and gender diversity. As Ina Linge shows in this essay, animal research has always been part of the sexological project, but it has been a decidedly neglected aspect of historical scholarship. Other essays in this issue explore the porous boundaries between sexology and various traditions of psychotherapy (both Western Freudian traditions and Eastern European traditions of Pavlovian psychotherapy), as well as with fields more at the edges of scientific tradition, such as phrenology and transcendentalism.

How do you see scholarship on the history of sexology as contributing to explorations of ‘the relationship between sexual knowledge and sexual politics’?

Ina Linge’s piece is a good example of this. It shows not only how research into intersex moths and butterflies in early 20th century Germany was used to make arguments about the naturalness of sex and gender variation, but also how the scientists very consciously applied their experimental findings to quite politicized arguments around decriminalizing homosexuality, particularly during the Weimar Republic.

Another good example is Kate Davison’s essay, which opens up questions around the understudied context of sexual politics in the Cold War. Sexologists in socialist countries were examining homosexuality just as their colleagues on the other side of the iron curtain were. Yet the history of gay “conversion” therapies in Czechoslovakia points to more progressive paths than were taken elsewhere. Researchers there argued for legal reforms around homosexality, but their ideas were taken in much less politically progressive directions when they were drawn on, selectively, by scientists in the West. 

These essays also contribute to thinking about sexual politics and sexual science in relation to race. Scholars such as Heike Bauer and Laurie Marhoefer have shown that racializing frameworks have always been a critical, if often invisible, part of how sexual scientific knowledge was produced and conceptualized. Such ideas have continued to shape our thinking, though often in quite implicit ways, such as by feeding the colour blindness of much contemporary LGBTQ politics. Even someone quite progressive like Magnus Hirschfeld, who is often lauded as a left-wing pioneer of gay rights, was very much tied up in imperialist and rationalizing frameworks, from which we haven’t quite extricated ourselves, even in the present. Benjamin Kahan’s piece is an example of work that furthers this project by pushing at the racial dimensions of some of the earliest sexological thought, and showing how this was tied up with discussions in other fields such as phrenology that were thoroughly infused with underlying racializing and racist thought.

Finally, recent work has started to pay more attention to rethinking the place of pleasure and desire in the history of the sexual sciences. What are the political implications of bringing pleasure and ideas of the erotic back into the equation? Sarah Bull’s piece on the complex relationships between sex researchers and erotic and explicit print cultures does this particularly well, but this is a question that has often been sidelined.

As you underline in the introduction, one of the strengths of the issue is its emphasis on transnational conversations between sexologists –what was significant about these kinds of exchanges?

We’ve tended to do research that has been quite constrained by national boundaries, or sometimes by the linguistic boundaries of the German speaking world or the English speaking world. We’ve also often tended to assume that there was a distinctly German origin of modern sexual science. But if we pay a bit more attention to the conversations that were always going on, such as between North American and European researchers in the mid 19th century, we can develop a more nuanced account of sexology as a field that has always looked beyond national boundaries, even from its earliest beginnings.

The trade in erotic books and the non-scientific circulations of medical and scientific writing on sex discussed by Bull is a good example here. Erotic book trade dealers in North America saw a strong market in trading in European sexual scientific works in the 1930s and 1940s, and publishing new editions of works by sexologists like Havelock Ellis. These kinds of circulations brought ideas that had been originally formulated in a distinctly medical-scientific space to a much wider mid-century US audience of lay readers.

Ina Linge’s essay explores how research into ‘intersex butterflies’ influenced sexologists at the Institute of Sexology in Germany. What are the implications of the case she makes for ‘paying attention to non-human actors in the history of sexology’?

Ina Linge’s essay, which we touched on earlier, makes a strong case for paying more attention to non-human actors in the history of sexual science. Many of us may know that Kinsey, for example, made a name for himself studying insects before he turned his attention to his students at Indiana University and human sexual behaviors, but in general, animals have been sorely lacking from the historiography of sexology, and that’s not really justified. When you look at the earliest sexological journals, animal research, along with ethnological comparisons, were frequently used as reference points. What was naturally occurring in animals could be used to argue for what was also naturally occurring in humans, and for what by extension could be considered “normal” or legally justifiable. Similarly, my co-editor Kirsten Leng has shown that German feminists in this era were busy drawing on nature comparisons to justify their political demands as in line with what nature intended.

Linge points out that pop culture today is really fascinated with stories about queer animals, such as penguins showing same-sex desires. Those comparisons tend to be used to argue for the naturalness of sex and gender variation in humans as well, and what Linge does that is new is to situate these comparative moves in that early 20th century moment. She draws on what Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal have referred to as the ‘moral authority of nature’ to show how some scientists were starting to advocate for more progressive sexual politics. Jewish German geneticist Richard Goldschmidt knew very well when he was publishing his research on intersex moths that this might be drawn on to make political points about humans as well, especially when it came to defending homosexuality. These kinds of analogy were intensely politicized in Germany at that time because of the criminalization of gay sex under Paragraph 175. At the same time, Linge’s essay shows how these ‘natural is normal’ arguments could be put to more sinister use, such as by those arguing against interracial sexual contact or in favor of sterilizing homosexual men.

figure
A series of intersexual females of Lymantria dispar, R. Goldschmidt, The Mechanism and Physiology of Sex Determination (1923)

Sarah Bull’s contribution, which explores the relationship between sexual science and erotic print culture, raises questions about respectability and the sources of scientific knowledge – what light does this shed on what she describes as the ‘porous’ boundaries of sexology as a discipline?

Sarah Bull’s piece really problematizes those border areas between sexual science, on the one hand (with practitioners working to establish a respectable scientific field of inquiry not weighed down by older notions of religion, morality and taboo), and on the other hand, ways of looking and talking about sex that were more aligned with traditions of erotica and pornography. From the late 19th century British sexologists in particular were constantly vulnerable to censorship, prosecutions and to their works being labeled obscene, although censorship was also an important factor shaping the development of sexual science elsewhere.

Bull shows that sexual scientists were both loudly disavowing any connection to these seemingly dubious realms of smut and porn, but, at the same time, they were absolutely dependent on those “grey” areas of the publishing world for their evidence. They were also dependent on them for disseminating new kinds of knowledge about sex, including across national boundaries, as I mentioned earlier. She points out that the borders between these fields were always porous, but they were also always policed, with appeals to “science” often used to justify protecting work from the censors.

She points to some interesting examples of that porosity over time, especially as erotic literature traders began republishing older sexological works and circulating across their original national origins in ways that targeted less specialist audiences. By the 1970s sexologists were themselves publishing in erotic magazines like Playboy. There is still a lot that we don’t know about these interplays between the “erotic” and the “scientific” in the history of sexology.

You highlight the importance of ‘balancing sexology’s global dimensions with its regional specificities’. Both your essay and Benjamin Kahan’s contributions examine sexology in the US at different historical moments – what was distinctive about the trajectory of sexological research in North America? 

This is a really interesting question and I like how you bring those two pieces together, because they do speak to different ends of the history of sexology in North America, which has often played second fiddle to its European counterparts.

Kahan’s piece, which we touched on earlier, shows how mid-19th century American researchers such as Elizabeth Osgood were highly influential in coining key terms in sexual science, as early as several decades before terms like ‘Sexualwissenschaft’ were introduced in Germany. My own work as a cultural historian of Germany, meanwhile, has tended to follow the narrative around the German “invention” of modern sexuality—an explanation that sees the German speaking world as crucial in coming up with many of the identity categories, such as “homosexual” or “trans” identities, that have stayed with us in into the present. But Kahan’s work shows that if we pay more attention to North American actors, and to what was going on in science-adjacent fields like phrenology and transcendentalism, then we can develop much more nuanced and transnational narratives of the sexual sciences.

My piece hones in on Kinsey’s research in the late 1940s and 1950s. I do see sexology as shifting its global centre of gravity in this period, from the German speaking world following the rise of the Nazis across the Atlantic to North America. Many Jewish medical practitioners, analysts, and scientists emigrated from Europe to North America, and they shifted these conversations in very distinct ways. By the mid twentieth century North America had become the international centre of both sexology and psychoanalysis, but we also need to examine the distinctly national interests that shaped these disciplines in that context, such as the fundamental shifts in US psychoanalysis compared to early Freudian thinking due to the prominence of a certain brand of Protestant Christianity.

Finally, would it be possible to reflect on how work into the historiography of sexology engages with the ‘normal’ and the ‘natural’ as historical categories?

I would say that 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. There are some really interesting connections between the essays in this special issue and those in another issue coming out soon in the History of the Human Sciences on the history of normality (edited by Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens). Their work and work by scholars such as Laura Doan shows that the “normal” has always been a contested and contingent idea, and one that only really came to carry the meanings it does now in the mid 20th century. Some of this critical attention on the “normal” is now also shifting to the “natural”, with scholars pushing at how the natural and the normal are sometimes seen as interchangeable categories, but also how and where they can, or must, be teased apart.

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

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 the concerns of the journal. You can’t think of the human sciences without thinking about the relationship of cases to broader ways of understanding human beings, understanding human nature, understanding humanity. I think it’s quite rare that you get such a fundamental part of that way of understanding humans that’s so fundamentally brought to light in one essay and that spawns so many lines of thought that shoot off in different directions. Actually part of the problem with putting this special issue together was that it almost became unmanageable in its fertility, in the way that it provoked so many different people to run off with it in different directions. There’s just so much richness that it became almost bewildering at times, but in a good way.

HP: How did this special issue come about?

I was the reviews editor at the time and the essay collection Thinking in Cases landed on my desk. I didn’t know John Forrester personally but knew that he had died recently and I thought there were so many people that I knew working in and around the human sciences and around the history of psychiatry and psychosis who were working in ways that connected with this book so I thought let’s have a review symposium responding to it. And because the original essay was first published in History of the Human Sciences I thought that would be really apt. It’s all just snowballed from there. We ended up asking for contributions, I think of 3000 words, and people came back to us asking if they could write more. It was really driven by people who wanted to contribute and who had so much to say. It powered itself foremost. Scholars gave their time so freely, gave so much of their time and effort to producing these pieces and that’s what made it difficult, but also really wonderful to work with.

HP: I was struck re-reading Forrester’s essay that he emphasises in his discussion of psychoanalytic cases that the disclosures in any case are always matched by silences. Perhaps in some sense no case can ever really ‘succeed’ and failure is a theme that unites several of the contributions to the special issue – what is revealed when cases fail? Can failure take different forms? Can failures be generative?

CM: Yeah, I think when things fail or break down it’s almost more interesting than when they succeed, because success doesn’t lead you to question your premises but failure often does. Failure is a really emphatic event that lays bare the machinery of how the case is supposed to work. I think Erik Linstrum’s piece especially is about failure and it helps understand things like power. Sometimes in a Foucaultian idea of power, it ends up being so all encompassing that you wonder how things ever change at all. And yet when they fail you don’t have to look very hard for grounds for resistance or grounds for agency, which are the things that normally recede in that crude Foucaultian telling.

So, yes, failure is significant, but the impossibility of success is also significant, and I think they’re usefully kept distinct. I think what Matt ffytche’s article on the ‘impossible case’ of Luisa Passerini shows is that success isn’t always possible. But that impossibility is more interesting than thinking of it necessarily as a failure in conventional terms.

HP: Yeah, it’s such a good example of a new genre that emerges because the existing genres are not really adequate to the material.

CM: Yeah and ffytche’s article is a wonderful analytical survey of this these kinds of writing and the ways that when you push at the boundaries of autobiography or self-case making or autoethnography, or examine the way human beings narrate about themselves, it’s such a rich vein that spans disciplines. You know, you tend to think ‘oh this is about psychoanalysis and it’s probably about anthropology’ but there are so many other ways of human beings writing themselves and narrating themselves that show how even your most secure sense of who you are just collapses under the slightest bit of interrogation.

HP: The pieces in the special issue are striking in terms of their disciplinary range (which is also reflected in Forrester’s essay) – does this say something about the relative hetereogeneity of ‘case thinking’?

CM: The real gift in that paper and in all the essays in the book, was the ability to show that in any place where human beings are being talked about or are talking about themselves you can you can start to break them down to see how they work.

I don’t think we consciously decided this was going to be an interdisciplinary project. I don’t actually particularly like the word, which I think has become diseased by funding calls, going back 30 years, where you’re prizing interdisciplinary just because. But it’s a real credit to the flexibility and the richness of that essay that when we sent the call out and people responded, that we had no idea that people were working with and around cases or on Forrester in those ways. I think that’s one of the real bonuses of doing an open call but also having channels of circulation through a mailing list that can reach out to places and get cross posted in ways that that wouldn’t have been possible 25 years ago.

Mary Morgan’s paper, for example, is a really challenging and a really fantastic riffing off Forrester’s title in a way that I just found almost virtuosic and she wasn’t somebody who we would necessarily have had in mind to approach as our original call was aimed at early career researchers, but she responded. It was that enthusiasm where people, even though they weren’t necessarily being spoken to, wanted to come on board. They wanted to contribute. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that really before. People really love this essay, even if they have problems with it, they really want to talk about it.

HP: Many of the contributors reflect on the case history as a genre – both in terms of what that opens up but also in terms of its limitations – Maria Böhmer discusses the capacity of the case to ‘travel’, while Michael Flexer emphasises the linearity of case thinking and points to historical instances that ‘thinking in cases’ acted as a constraint – how do these interventions extend or challenge Forrester’s work on cases?

CM: I think the way that cases travel is really quite basic to their utility, in that they are a nice sort of parcelling up of either an exemplar or as an illustration of a particular principle. What Maria Böhmer’s essay does is it puts really useful empirical flesh on those bones. People wouldn’t be necessarily surprised that a case travels and circulates in networks, but when you have to dig down and find the examples, those examples can push back on how you thought the case travels: across from medicine to the more journalistic. The sensational ways in which the particular case of the man who crucified himself that she discusses were talked about. Getting into those empirical examples can be really useful.

Michael Flexer’s paper, which I’ll admit I found difficult, rattled around in my head for weeks after reading it because he’s trying to strip the case back to its bare bones. He’s asking, what is it that makes something emerge as something that might be made into a case in the first place? So it’s not taking the case as the starting point but is asking, how do we even know how the raw material emerges to get made into a case? What he does really clearly is show how even before you think you have a case you’re getting locked into a particular direction of travel, where a lot of other assumptions can very easily plug you in and push you forwards. He discusses the example of the AIDS pandemic, where all those prejudices around particular communities of men were just laid bare, especially because people could not understand where their case reasoning was pushing them.

HP: Erik Linstrum’s contribution discusses colonial cases and the challenge the kinds of individual traumas they documented posed to colonial rulers. Linstrum discusses how the kinds of testimonies contained in cases conflicted with the ideologies of the colonial rulers, suggesting that the case might be a disruptive genre that can exceed or confound attempts to generalise. Does this analysis point to ways case histories be treated as historical documents?

CM: Often when people talk of power in the human sciences, they’re talking about thoughts and ways of thinking and expertise and advice. All of that is real and effective, of course, but we’re not often talking about machine guns and police forces that keep people in place. I think part of what what Erik Linstrum’s paper does is it looks at the – I don’t want to call it soft power because I mean something quite different – but it look at the intellectual power relations that are involved in making people into cases and subjecting them to expertise.

And that just doesn’t work in an environment that is strafed by a very different kind of power and a very different kind of resistance. When you put different kinds of power and different kinds of attempts to enforce governance together – so here there’s the governance of the psychoanalytic overarching framework that puts people into a particular relationship with power but there’s also the militarised imperial power – and those just don’t fit. That really shows us, I think, something quite important about how power works, but also how it doesn’t. I think that what’s really in illuminating there is that failure of the case to do anything but sort of say, ‘Well, here’s some ‘natives’ and they have very strong murderous impulses towards their leaders. Oh, well, hang on a minute. No, we can’t say that.’ The colonial elite simply can’t use the case they’ve produced because it documents something that is impossible for them to acknowledge.  

This essay, like many in the Special Issue, I’ve read and proofed and been very close to and every time I re-read it I notice different things and find my head is spinning with connections. I don’t know if that’s solely a testement to Forrester’s work but it’s amazing that it’s generated such generorous and constructive responses. They bring his insights to their work. You don’t have to pull Forrester out of shape to have him talk to your work because it’s so open.

HP: Matt ffytche approaches the question of genre from a slightly different perspective, by focusing on an example of what he calls an ‘exploding’ or ‘impossible’ case – Luisa Passeri’s Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968. Here the individual case history is destabilised by the forces of history, which seems to demand a different kind of narrative.  In Autobiography of a Generation, ffytche oberves, ‘the personal and the social… act as metonyms for each other’, but I wondered if that was also true of all cases in some sense?

CM: I’m fascinated by how people use ‘the social’ and the things that they think inhabit it and the power that it has and also doesn’t have. It’s sort of like a case in the way that it’s this incredibly amorphous thing that explains everything and therefore explains nothing.

I love Passerini’s book partly because it’s such a traumatic and chaotic mess that I think, well, if you can turn a chaotic mess into something brilliant then I’ve got some hope for some of my life. It’s so – I don’t want to say honest because honest makes it seem weirdly confessional – but it lays bare its own wiring in a way that I think is really powerful. And I think it makes it difficult because you’re never quite sure that you’ve got it. It never closes, it never satisfies, it never gives you that neat finish. And that’s life.

Being able to put that into a book – when every sinew of you when you’re writing a book is trying to close it and finish it and get it into this disciplined form – for a book to manage not to do that really impresses me.

I’m going to go back to the original thrust of the question about the comparison with the social. Whenever you write a human or a group of humans you’re always in the middle of personal agency and social/structural agency. There are so many frames of reference that are always already there, pulling out of focus. Going in and being able to think about the person and the social and history, about the way history impacts individuals without collapsing the social when you go down to the individual and without erasing the individual when you go to the structural but existing in neither and both of these spaces at the same time, I think that’s what she what she’s trying to do. She does have to flip between her psychoanalysis and her interviews and a broad sense of the history and it is chaotic but it’s not chaotic because she is a bad writer. It’s chaotic because the project she is trying to do can never actually succeed (to go back to the point we were discussing before).

It really illuminates the case by sort of showing it up, by showing how it is both inadequate and also kind of super adequate in that there’s too much in it. It’s like that classic Joan Scott thing about gender being an empty and overflowing category. 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.

I think one of the things that used to annoy me when I was an undergraduate and postgraduate student when I looked at psychoanalytic practitioners who I was researching is that everything is so overdetermined. It used to really annoy me that there are 5678910 reasons for why one thing happened and then more and then more and more. That irritated me for whatever reason, but then you begin to see how everything makes some kind of sense because of the power of that that reading strategy, the strategy of reading everything through it and I ended up not hating it quite so much, but just being being really interested in what that does for your analytical possibilities.

HP: Did revisiting Forrester’s essay and reading these responses to it change or nuance how you think about cases?

CM: I think it has to have done. I mean, one of the things I think we haven’t touched on is how long this project has been in the works. Initially I think we sent out a call at the very beginning of 2018 so it’s been a long time. So yeah my thinking has absolutely changed.

I first read the essay, I think in the first year of my PhD ,and then again during my postdoc, and then again teaching. Every single time new things leap out to me and that isn’t always the case with even very good articles.

Having this group of people writing in their own different directions has really shown is the impossibility of case thinking even though it’s a very useful and usable concept. I still think it’s an impossible concept because case thinking is far too broad. It’s almost as if it’s so broad that it should collapse on itself and become useless but somehow it isn’t and so somehow it doen’t. I’m trying to write a book at the moment about how personal experiences of the things you’re studying might impact or be made clear or be made explicit in writing histories and how personal experiences are always already there and your case, the case of yourself, that’s always there in every history. And I think I’d go as far as to say, at least if this were on Twitter, I would say all history writing is displaced autobiography. I’m not ready to defend that actually but I still believe it and I think that ‘Thinking in Cases’ has really helped me show up what’s important in history writing and writing in general about humans in a way that I never would have imagined when I first downloaded it. This is a difficult essay. It’s really interesting but my god I don’t really get it and here I am still not really getting it 10 years later. Some essays are difficult because they’re difficult and some essays are difficult because they’re brilliant and I think Forrester’s essay is the latter.

I love Julie Walsh’s re-doing of Forrester’s essay ‘Inventing Gender Identity: the Case of Agnes’. I’ve read and reread it. I would never have thought that something as chaotic [as a case] could be as generous and as meaningfully generous that it could generate that reading of how gender identity is a process. There’s an awful lot of heat and not a lot of light around that issue at the moment. Julie Walsh’s essays cuts through that so beautifully and, again, in a way that reading Forrester’s original essay you’d think, where the hell’s that come from? I love how open and generous complexity and nuance can be, how the impossibility and the unfinishedness of cases can be bewildering and chaotic but it can be generous and open and compassionate.

Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene

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 survival of the species, with knowledge understood as a value that emerged within the ecology of human life but which now threatens to fatally disrupt that ecology. What matters for the history of science reframed within the global evolution of knowledge is not the emergence of a progresive form of rationality, but the long-term accumulation of ‘earth-changing knowledge’. There is no single structure to scientific development in Renn’s world. Scientific achievements stabilize within complex architectures of knowledge governed by historically specific knowledge economies, but importantly, they do so in a shared cognitive world.

The book is divided into five parts. The first two lay out the methodological and historiographical tools for Renn’s vision of the history of knowledge. In parts three and four, we see how these tools can be put to work in telling longue durée histories of knowledge across its intellectual, material and social evolution. In the final part, the author turns towards the present ecological crisis. The case studies that form the bulk of the book mainly cover episodes from the history of mechanics, the focus of Renn’s department, which he embeds within a global history of the natural sciences. Towards the end of the book, Renn describes the need for a future transdisciplinary venture which he calls ‘geoanthropology’. This research domain would synthesize insights from the evolutionary history of knowledge with large-scale data gathering and modelling of contemporary human-earth systems. 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.

Renn presents his theoretical framework as an alternative to Kuhn’s Structure. Unlike Kuhn’s book-length essay, however, Evolution has the stature of a textbook, with its own illustrations, text-boxes for important theoretical digressions and a glossary of concepts seventeen-pages long. The book is a densely complex web of cross-referenced ideas and case studies bookended by detailed discussion on the meaning of the anthropocene, staggering in its breadth of scholarship. But one doubts whether Evolution will enjoy the persuasive celebrity that Structure has exerted over the luminaries of our current knowledge economy. In 2015 Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, selected Kuhn’s Structure as his book of the year, recommending it to his followers on the largest social media platform in the world. In doing so, he joined a long list of notable American figures who have praised the book, including Al Gore and Bill Clinton. Renn dispels the ideas of dramatic paradigm shifts and scientific revolutions which helped make Kuhn’s book appear as a lightning rod for intellectual change. But perhaps what our present needs more than revolutions is intellectual common ground. For that reason alone, this book should be required reading for all who consider themselves students of the history of knowledge.

[i] Daston, Lorraine. “History of Science without Structure”, in Robert J. Richards and Lorraine Daston, Kuhn’s “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” at Fifty: Reflections on a Science Classic (University of Chicago Press, 2016), 117.

[ii] See chapter above and also Lorraine Daston, “The History of Science and the History of Knowledge,” KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge 1, no. 1 (March 1, 2017): 131–54

Alfred Freeborn (@Alfred_Freeborn) is a doctoral candidate in the History of Science at Humboldt University, Berlin. His research focuses on the history of biological psychiatry in postwar Britain, North America and Germany, with a special focus on the changing field of schizophrenia research – and he has published on the history of the Mind and Brain Sciences in HHS. He is a member of the junior research group “Learning from Alzheimer’s disease: A History of Biomedical Models of Mental Illness” (2015–2020)

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

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 Sciences (subject to the essay passing through the journal’s peer review process). The intention is to award the prize to a single entrant but the judging panel may choose to recognise more than one essay in the event of a particularly strong field.

Deadlines

Entries should be made by Friday 29th January 2021. The panel aims to make a decision by Friday 30th April 2021. The winning entry will be submitted for peer review automatically. The article, clearly identified as the winner of the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Prize, will then be published in the journal as soon as the production schedule allows. The winning scholar and article will also be promoted by History of the Human Sciences, including on its website, which hosts content separate to the journal.

Previous Winners

2019-21’s winner was Danielle Carr (Columbia) for their essay, “Ghastly Marionettes and the political metaphysics of cognitive liberalism: Anti-behaviourism, language, and The Origins of Totalitarianism”. The committee also awarded a special commendation to Katie Joice (Birkbeck) for their essay “Mothering in the Frame: cinematic microanalysis and the pathogenic mother, 1945-67”. You can read more about these essays in interviews with Danielle and Katie on this website.

To Apply

Entrants should e-mail an anonymised copy of their essay, along with an up-to-date CV, to hhs@histhum.com. 

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

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 a given; it’s something that is constantly being constructed in early childhood, usually by women.

HHS: Would you be able to say a little about your PhD thesis project and situate this essay in relation to your research more broadly?

KJ: The title of my PhD is The Empty Frame: Child Analysis and its Visual Cultures, 1932-67. It examines the visual methodologies that were used in the post-war period to interpret the pre-verbal mind. The first part is on film, and is a much expanded version of this essay. Another part looks at play therapy, particularly the work of psychologist Margaret Lowenfeld. I also discuss the use of art and film in the post-war period to access the mind of children with autism. What I’m most interested in is the cultural history of these methodologies; how the ‘psy’ disciplines became entangled with all sorts of other practices, like film history, art history, philosophy and anthropology.

HHS: You write that ‘In this period, mother-love became a new scientific object, subject to new forms of description and empirical analysis’. How was mothering conceptualised in a distinct way within the social sciences in the post-war period? At the beginning of the essay you state that ‘maternal ‘presence’… became an ontological question for post-war social science’ – could you also expand on that?

KJ:  Anthropology, psychiatry and cybernetics were then enmeshed in ways that’s hard to imagine now. Mothering came to be seen as an origin story for social science, partly because of the continued influence of the Culture and Personality school within anthropology, which claimed that child-rearing techniques form distinctive national characters. Anthropologists like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict argued that mothers set certain patterns of behaviour in motion, which were then written into every aspect of that culture. Also of crucial influence within psychiatry was a new psychoanalytic focus on the ‘micro-traumas’ that occurred in the pre-Oedipal stage of childhood. Harry Stack Sullivan in the US, and the English analysts Wilfred Bion and Donald Winnicott were theorists interested in this pre-verbal zone of experience, and its role in triggering psychosis. As the cine-camera became more portable and more accessible to amateurs, film came to offer a new evidential basis for these theories, a means of observing damage as it happened, rather than retrospectively in the therapist’s office.

I think 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.

On the question of presence… I’m talking there about how the quality and the reliability of a mother’s responses – actions or messages that might take place in a split second – came to be seen as constitutive, not only of the child’s personality, but also cultural and social habits. Though actually it was mothers’ emotional absence, rather than presence, that became the biggest preoccupation of the thinkers I look at in this essay. The effects of affectlessness, if you like. And the aesthetic and technical questions of how emotional absence might be captured on the screen. I’m intrigued by how these ineffable categories – presence, absence, mother-love, ‘maternal surround’, get translated into codes, scales and statistics.

HHS: Why was film deemed to be the most appropriate medium for capturing the ‘small behaviours’ of the mother? And why was this form of microobservation so central to the analysis of mothering?

KJ: Mother-infant interaction was only one field in which film was being experimented with as a diagnostic and documentary tool in this period. Film was seen more generally as a utopian technology that might reveal the hidden truths of behaviour. It was used extensively within animal studies, psychiatry and cybernetics research, to break behaviour into units which then could be analysed by the researcher, and sometimes used curatively by patients as well. Film could be slowed down, reduced to stills, re-watched and cross-analysed by a number of observers, and could bring the intimacy of conversation or breastfeeding into a lecture hall. And it encouraged particular forms of reflection: Rene Spitz and Sylvia Brody both said that they felt the cameras shielded them from the intensity of the emotions that they were observing. Film also allowed child analysts to think about different qualities of time: fleeting movements could be identified and counted, or particular thresholds in development ratified. A whole childhood could be compressed into a single film. The relationship between the analytic potential of film and the temporalities of early development is what compelled these thinkers.

HHS: Why do you think that the non-verbal was accorded such significance in this period?

KJ: I think it emerged out of the anthropological and psychoanalytic trends that I’ve already mentioned, as well as a new interest within linguistics in the secret codes of gesture and dance. There was a peculiar paradox at work in non-verbal communication research – on the one hand it was anti-humanist, in that it focused on free-floating ‘cybernetic’ codes which moved through an animal-human-machine continuum. But it was also an expression of pan-humanism, of a desire to create a universal behavioural science which transcended language barriers. That desire was fuelled by the tensions of the Cold War. For example, Edward Hall who invented proxemics, theories about how humans use space to communicate, was secretly funded by the CIA. There was a lot of political potential in non-verbal communication research.

HHS: Returning to something you just mentioned, could you say something more about the specific temporalities of early infancy and motherhood and how you see this as relating to the specific temporalities associated with film? Is the temporality of the former as historically contingent as the latter? By which I mean: is there a clash here between something understood to be universal, on the one hand, and a novel technology that ushered in new ways of thinking about or representing time, on the other?

KJ: It’s true that films such as Spitz’s transformed professional and public perceptions of infant experience and infant suffering: the documentary and diagnostic power of the technology enabled people to ‘see’ something that had in fact always been there. We might see this as part of the civilising process, a relatively recent extension of humanity to the pre-verbal child. On the other hand, we can never truly disentangle our biological parameters from environmental influence or our changing norms of selfhood. There is no universal infant. Balinese or American middle-class mothering-styles, like the institutionalisation of babies, are all products of history. What we can say is that practitioners of microanalysis assumed, and still assume today, that in infancy ‘small behaviours’ have potentially enormous effects. So in that sense, the microanalytic method matches the model of mind that is being advanced.

As for the temporalities of motherhood, I think mothers’ experiences were generally brushed under the carpet by these maternalist thinkers. They were much more interested in defending the infant against the mother, rather than delving into the social causes of maternal anguish. But the point I wanted to underline is that someone has to do the imaginative and emotional work of creating subjects. And I think that often scares the hell out of people. It’s something that’s rarely talked about. As a society we talk a lot about the practical problems of childcare, but not the existential ones.

HHS: Your first case study is Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson’s work in Bali. You claim they were the first to put ‘mothering in the frame’ and argue that their work was foundational for infant psychiatry – could you summarise the significance of their work for the phenomenon you’re analysing?

KJ: Mead and Bateson’s work was funded by an influential interwar funding body called the Committee for Research into Dementia Praecox, which was a pre-war term for schizophrenia.

This committee was looking for big answers to the problem of mental illness and institutionalisation. Mead and Bateson set out to make ambitious claims about what the small behaviours of mothering might mean, arguing that Balinese culture was essentially schizoid, but that it was saved from collective madness by ritual and trance. Mead made tendentious comparisons between the tiny finger movements of Balinese babies or Balinese mothers’ blank expressions, and institutionalised schizophrenics in the West. But the very exuberance of her claims threw down the gauntlet to a generation of researchers and clinicians that were interested in the significance of mothering styles. The books that emerged from their research in Bali, Balinese Character and Growth and Culture were also aesthetically compelling: peculiar juxtapositions of art, gesture, and expressions. Mead was suggesting that academic research could be presented non-discursively as well, that it could rely on a language or grammar of images.

HHS: Your next case study focuses on Ray Birdwhistell – what do you see as the impetus for his attempts to quantify affect and notate emotion through ‘kinesis’? How does this compare to what you describe later in the essay as Sylvia Brody’s ‘Taylorism of mothering’?

KJ: Birdwhistell was an anthropologist who was hugely influenced by linguistics, particularly the work of Edward Sapir. He wanted to reveal a hidden dimension of communication –kinesics or body language, that often ran counter to verbal communication. He created an immensely complex notation system based on the fine slicing of films of interpersonal behaviour. Mothers interested him because like Mead and Bateson he thought that their small behaviours were potentially pathogenic to young children. But he ended up mired in his methodology, splitting cinematic images into ever smaller temporal and spatial units.

In contrast, Sylvia Brody was a practicing psychologist and a pragmatist. She used film to count and evaluate the actions of mothering – such as touching, looking, speaking – with the aim of categorising mothers into a small number of types, some of which were pathogenic and in need of treatment. I use the term ‘Taylorism of mothering’ because efficiency, which we associate with Taylorism, was one of her ideal mother’s qualities. Paradoxically, it’s a model of efficiency that has to be underpinned by right feeling. The observer can count and dissect mothers’ movements, but a mother who who treats feeding mechanically becomes inefficient at satisfying her baby. Like Taylor and Gilbreth’s time and motion studies, the clock is prominent in Brody’s film footage; it splices the action.

HHS: Finally, I was wondering about overlaps between the kinds of social scientific applications of film you’re considering and film’s more artistic uses. I thought, for example, of the artist Maya Deren’s films shot in Haiti and her involvement with Bateson and other anthropologists. In your analysis of Rene Spitz’s films, for example, you discuss the angles from which the films were shot that excluded the institutional context to focus entirely on the child, emphasising this as an aesthetic decision. I was wondering how you think about these more aesthetic questions both in terms of how the films were composed and in terms of your own methodological approach to analysising them and how that relates to you claim in the conclusion that film in these studies became an ‘arbiter of authenticity’.

KJ: As I expand on this essay in my thesis I’ve been asking myself how these films resonate with the visual cultures of their times. And notions of authenticity were central to those visual cultures. This was the time of cinema verité in France, Free Cinema in Britain and Direct Cinema in the US, promising new access to ‘raw’ psychological states and to overlooked aspects of social life. In the course of working on a longer piece on Rene Spitz, I discovered that his film was shown at a New York avant-garde cinema club called Cinema 16, headed by film curator Amos Vogel. Much like Maya Deren, Vogel believed cinema should offer the viewer an altered state or conversion process, rather than entertainment, and Spitz’s film fitted into this manifesto.

What’s interesting about many of these film-makers, like Mead and Bateson, Spitz and also James Robertson in Britain, who made A Two Year Old Goes to Hospital and Young Children in Brief Separation, is that they were ‘auteurs’ in a sense. Their films were artful, singular and idiosyncratic. What happens in the era of Sylvia Brody and Mary Ainsworth is that cinematic studies of mothers and babies become much more laboratory based, and more standardised and static. Conventions emerge and settle over time, but their pre-history is often surprisingly heterogenous.

I’ve also been thinking about how to present my own research in visual form. I am collaborating with my colleague Ian Magor from the Hidden Persuaders project on a short teaching film which incorporates footage from the films discussed here. We’re hoping it will be published on the Hidden Persuaders website in the autumn and act as a visual accompaniment to my essay.

HHS: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.

Interview conducted by Hannah Proctor.

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

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 this liberalism that happens in the postwar period going into the Cold War and how is it distinct from early twentiety-century liberalism? In the early twentieth century, there is a lot of space for thinking about technocracy, technologies and human engineering in relation to  the Progressive-Era emergence of social science, largely funded by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundation. There are critiques of the idea of engineering the human, but they are coming from the religious right and the labor left, not the liberals. What’s really distinctive about postwar liberalism is that this friendly relationship to social engineering disappears. Suddenly, Cold War liberals are thinking about the human as being something distinct from technology, as a being not determined by the same sort of push-button responses that you can use to control machines.

I thought that that gave an interesting vantage on to a question that is relevant to the history of cybernetics: why did cybernetics fail, while cognitivism was successfully taken up as a scientific movement? Many times, when we are thinking about information theory in the history of science, it’s easy to say that cybernetics is the basis of contemporary information sciences. Cerrtainly in some ways that’s true – particularly if we are thinking about the role of cybernetics in developing information theory and influencing the computerisation of many scientific fields. But equally, there’s something key about cybernetics that fails to take hold. What my essay tries to do is to show that there’s something going on in what we could call Cold War liberalism that makes that political project incompatible with cybernetics, but that makes it form the conditioning ground for cognitivism.

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. This makes sense as an approach, because this is a moment when science has been popularised for mass consumption: the cybernetics conferences are being covered by major newspapers, for example, and you have this efflorescence of popular writing in the postwar period as ordinary people become interested in technology. The atomic bomb is this huge moment in American consciousness. You have a spate of high profile technologies that emerged through the infusion of federal funding into the sciences driven by the war. With the rapid ascent of the sciences, suddenly everyone is reading Norbert Weiner’s Cybernetics, and there is an exploding popular market for writing about science. This is also a moment of profound interdisciplinary fusion between the social and physical sciences, as Jamie Cohen-Cole has shown. So Origins of Totalitarianism—and liberal political thought in general—is happening in a moment in which the political thinkers are reading the scientists and the scientists are reading the political thinkers. It makes sense to take an historical approach  which thinks of these groups as literally talking to each other, because they were.

HHS: Before I ask you more about the essay itself I wonder if you could briefly talk about your PhD dissertation project and situate this essay in relation to your research more broadly.

DC: My dissertation is about a weird historical stutter: brain implants for a psychiatric disorder are invented for permanent intercerebral use in humans in the 1950s, then disappear after the 1970s, only to reemerge again in the early 2000s with no reference to their Cold War past. You have to understand, brain stimulation for psychiatric research and treatment was not a fringe technology in the fifties. The people who were working on it were going to conferences with all the other neurophysiologists; they were leaders in the field. This goes on into the 1970s, as people try to find the neurological basis for hunger, sex pleasure, aggression, and so on. As you go into the 1970s, this becomes explicitly political, as people are trying to find things like the neurological basis of race riots. For instance, here in LA, there was a collaboration between the justice department and the neurophysiologists who wanted to start a research centre to find the neurological basis of aggression, which is of course, a racialised aggression. And so in the 1970s, the question of neurological control becomes a political problem. There were literally congressional hearings about this specific technology, which then disappears and then comes back in the early 2000s with no reference to its contested history.

What the PhD thesis asks is this: why is that brain implants for psychiatric states—a technology that was technologically possible since the 1950s– politically impossible, politically incompatible with what we want to think of as liberalism. And why, moreover, is it now compatible with regnant political ideologies of the subject once again? This essay tells a little piece of that story, the part that has to do with what’s happening in the 1950s around ideas of determinism, mechanism, language, and freedom. It lays out how it came to be the case that, by the 1970s, this technology is seen as the limit case of Big Brother government, as technocratic overreach. It was like the apotheosis of what the antipsychiatry movement was going against. In its current revivification, the people behind it are data capitalists and DARPA, the science branch of the US military. And I think that tells us something about how political ideology has accomodated and conditioned itself  to changes in the value production from liberalism to neoliberalism—or however you want to periodize the 1970s to the present.

HHS: When you were introducing the essay, you were talking about this moment where behaviourism is dominant and then briefly challenged by cybernetics, but cybernetics doesn’t really succeed and cognitivism eventually ‘wins’, so to speak. You are clear that Arendt was not (and could not have been) a cognitivist but nonetheless suggest that she could be understood as a kind of proto-cognitivist in some sense.

DC: One of the axes that I wanted to grind is this paper was to more clearly elucidate the relationship between behaviourism and cybernetics. It’s not just that cybernetics goes against behaviourism, displaces it, and wins. It’s that cybernetics tries to replace behaviourism and fails, because it tries to replace the wrong thing– that’s what dooms it. Metaphysically– and this is really an essay about political metaphysics – cybernetics stays in the thrall of what it is about behaviourism that’s going to be nixed by cognitivism. And that’s an metaphysics that does not particularly allow for freedom. Of course, freedom and creativity are the things that dog cybernetics as the problem that it’s going to have to solve in order to be compatible with Cold War liberalism. What cybernetics shares with behaviourism is that it is premised on a metaphysics without transcendence.

Arendt is in many ways a good bellwether for what is shared in common by many postwar liberals. She is specifically saying that you have to have an outside to the world of mechanistic cause and effect; you have to have a space of non-determinism. That “outside” to the ordinary world is where we’re going to locate politics. So for Arendt, that space of the “outside” is going to be language, and language is not going to work mechanistically. I’m not saying that Arendt is a cognitivist, but I am saying that the pieces for cognitivism to succeed are already in place by the 1950s, by the time that she publishes The Origins of Totalitarianism. Cognitivism is taken up because it solves precisely the problems that she’s laying out.

HHS: Almost like it’s waiting in the wings.

DC: Exactly. There are two bad ways of doing the history of scienced. The first one—one that we all already know is wrong, is to look at a period of scientific contestation say, ‘Well, the scientific truth succeeded and the good guys won.’ But the second mistake—one that isn’t as clearly bad but that can be pernicious—is to solely focus on scientific practice, looking at what happens in the lab and identifying alliances between groups of people, instruments and object (blah blah blah, Latour). And I want to say that there is a way to let politics as such back in. It’s not that there is not a determining relation between political ideology and scientific thought, but there is a conditioning role between political ideology and scientific practice. This is especially true when we’re talking about the history of the human sciences that are asking questions like ‘what is the human?’

HHS: From reading your essay it seems that language is central to Arendt’s understanding of freedom. Could you explain why language had this significance for her and how it relates to her valorisation of spontaneity?

DC: As an anthropologist, I know this history best in terms of what happens with structuralism in the midcentury. There’s a move away from physicality and the material—this is the decline of functionalism–  and the rise of the idea that what’s human about the human has very little to do with the body or the physical environment. In French structuralism, particularly French structuralism, the human is comprised of symbolic systems. The subject is comprised in language. So you have a general movement away from the material and into what I call “linguistic idealism.” Arendt is part of that intellectual movement to say that what is human about the human is not tool use, it’s language.

Your question is also picking up on something that I was trying to do, which is to connect this fixation on language as a non-deterministic space with the resurgence of postwar vitalism. For midcentury liberals, there’s something about life, language and the cognitive subject that does not operate according to mechanism. And the fact that it isn’t determined by material laws has a political valence of “good,” basically. Language is key in all of these kinds of different sites as being the place where this political metaphysics is going to ratchet open a metaphysical space for the kind of freedom that’s central to Cold War liberalism.

HHS: What did Arendt mean when she spoke of the ‘psychic life of totalitarianism’? Or would it make more sense to say that she understood totalitarianism as the absence of psychic life or the negation of the psyche? You mention other contemporaneous projects that sought to understand totalitarianism from a psychological perspective – how was The Origins of Totalitarianism distinct from these?

DC: For Arendt, there is no psychic life of totalitarianism because it is the operation of totalitarianism to destroy what she would recognise as the psyche. And the way this idea of the mind as the zone of freedom comes together will be crucial in shaping the next thirty years of political common sense in the United States. Something interesting happens from the fifties to the seventies:  this idea that totalitarianism relies on an evacuated mind—one that is overdetermined by external forces– becomes key what will become the kind of antibureaucratic, proto-libertarian movement, that, by the 1970s becomes Silicon Valley ideology. There’s a wonderful book by Fred Turner called From Counterculture to Cyberculture that charts this development. You can also see it in, for instance, Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man and the critique of the bureaucratised, mass consumptive subject that happens in the Frankfurt School.

What you see happening is a kind of dialectical formation, such that, by the time you get to the seventies, the antipsychiatry movement– which is basically libertarian– is able to make strange bedfellows with the residue of this Cold War liberal discourse. One of the reasons that I picked Arendt to be my interlocutor here is not because she’s saying anything particularly fringy, but that she’s really giving voice to this ambient common sense: to think is the opposite of totalitarianism because for the behaviourist there is no such thing as the thinking subject, there’s no inside, there’s no mind. So the very presence of mind is a political presence.

HHS: I was intrigued by the term the ‘laboratory of behaviourism’ in the essay and wondered if you could define that or talk about how Arendt defined it.

DC: One of the craziest things that shakes out of doing close reading of Origins of Totalitarianism is that when Arendt talks about the camps as being a laboratory, it’s not a metaphor. She’s not saying the camps are like the behaviourist’s laboratory, she’s saying the camps are the behaviourist laboratory. This connects with stuff that will begin happening in psychology in the early 1960s, where people look at, for instance, Stanley Milgram’s experiments and say “You’re not showing us anything about totalitarianism; what you’re doing is totalitarianism.” This is where a lot of what will, by the 1980s, become bioethics begins to come from. It’s the idea that science is not necessarily telling us something about the world occurring elsewhere outside of the lab; politics and the creation of a certain form of human subject is occurring in the laboratory. One of the things I wanted to do was to connect what will become bioethics in the US with Arendt saying that the camps are a laboratory.

HHS: This also made me think of antipsychiatric discourse and its obsession with institutions and the question of how institutions relate to society or are metonyms for society.

DC: Completely! You see an anxiety about the possibility of creating a new form of the human in discourses like, for instance, Goffman’s idea of “total institutions.” This idea that there’s something fundamentally artificial about these institutions and that can be connected with what is happening in the 1920s and 1930s. Rebecca Lemov’s book World as Laboratory is really excellent on this, where you begin from the scientists end to say, we can use the world as a laboratory. We can run experiments on an entire town. The world itself becomes an experiment.

HHS: You cite Arendt discussing Pavlov’s dogs and I wondered if it’s significant for her that this is the dominant paradigm in the Soviet Union.

DC: Definitely. One of the crucial features of The Origin of Totalitarianism– and Cold War liberalism generally– is this formation of the concept of totalitarianism, specifically as a way of making equivalent the Soviets and the Nazis. The revisions to her book made just before it goes to publication show that she quickly added a lot of stuff about the Soviet Union in order to underline this equivocation. You have to remember, Pavlov is one of the leading scientists of the Soviet Union, and one of their claims to an illustrious scientifi heritage, and this matters in the scientific and ideological race with the Soviets.

HHS: At the beginning of this interview you said this originated as a post-Trump essay. I was wondering about parallels or analogies (or indeed the lack of them) that you see between the historical moment you’re analysing and the present moment. You talk about the collapse of liberalism and its postwar resuscitation, but you also have spoken about how Cold War liberalism was distinctive and I wondered how this relates to liberalism today.

DC: I think liberalism has a fundamental contradiction at its core. There is the idea that the body is something that’s common to all humans; this common body is going to be the basis of common knowledge and by implication also freedom and choiceboth epistemic democracy (like science) and political equivalence (like human rights). There’s an idea that a common body equals a common humanity. But the problem is that once you start taking the body seriously as something that can be governed and known through science, the question of whether the human is actually free emerges. The fundamental contradiction of liberalism continually reasserts itself and has to be solved: Foucault calls it the tension between discipline and ideologies of freedom. I want to suggest that this tension relates to the fact that liberalism is a political ideology that is perpetually collapsing.

What we’re seeing in the current moment is yet another implosion of liberalism. It is not identical, to but certainly has features that are in common with, earlier collapses of liberalism. My essay charts one attempt to recover liberalism from an earlier collapse, in this case Cold War liberalism’s attempt to salvage the wreckage of the failure of early 20th century liberalism. We are facing a similar problem today, one that should cause us to seriously reckon with whether liberalism is something we even want to attempt to reconstruct.

You have to hand it to Cold War liberals, at least they understood that something had gone fundamentally wrong, and there was going to have to be a metaphysical recalibration in the heart of what liberalism was in order to fix it. Our problem now is that for current liberals, all their answers to this crisis are nostalgic. Liberals today don’t understand that the crisis is structural, fundamental and integral. They don’t understand that what liberalism is is going to have to be reconstituted. There’s a general failure of liberals to apprehend the magnitude of the failure that Trump represents.

There’s a lot of talk now about QAnon and conspiracy theories and this almost mystical side of American fascism. I think that we have to think about that as being a response to the evacuated technocratic forms of governance that marked liberal governance from Clinton to Obama. It’s a form of governance in which you have this ascent of elite technocratic knowledge that says “There’s no need for politics here, experts will decide everything because the technocrats know best.” And as is always the case with technocracy, it has produced a hunger for politics as such. So I would say that it is possible to make sense of the present moment as a rupture of political theology—that is, of metaphysics.

In my view we have to accept that there is a resurgence of the political and directly incorporate it into our work. What this looks like for historians of the human sciences is not just a fixation on infrastructure studies or actor network theory, both of which are ways of trying to get ‘reality’ back into the humanistic inquiry that has been dominated by exactly the sort of linguistic idealism that I discuss in the paper. There’s no way out except to directly reckon with politics. So, in short, we need to become historical materialists.

HHS: That seems like a great place to conclude – thank you!

(Interview conducted by Hannah Proctor)

The Arabic Freud

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, 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. We can learn from, not only about, academic psychologist Yusuf Murad, Sufi shakyh and philosopher Abu al-Wafa al-Ghunaymi al-Taftazani, and criminologist Muhammad Fathi, El Shakry argues. If these twin ambitions sometimes appear to tug The Arabic Freud in different directions, the tension is a productive one. This is a short text, at only 115 pages, but a densely argued one, and one which will reward multiple re-readings.

While one might be forgiven for wanting to dive straight into The Arabic Freud, it is worth lingering a moment on its stunning jacket art. Featuring a lithograph of one of the ceramic tiles created by Rachid Koraïchi as part of his 1998 travelling exhibition Letters of Clay: Homage to Ibn ‘Arabi, it is an apt gateway to El Shakry’s text. In an interview in July 2018, Koraïchi explains his recurring interest in the great Sufi masters like Ibn ‘Arabi, Jalaluddin al-Rumi, and others, as stemming in part from a desire to puncture a (mis)representation of the Islamic world as being in crisis, or as a source of unease, tension, and violence, by showcasing instead ‘the tolerant and sophisticated writings of the great Muslim poets and sages who have left such a large imprint on succeeding generations’. Letters of Clay, underlining this point, retraced in reverse order Ibn ‘Arabi’s own life itinerary, starting with his resting place in Damascus and ending at his place of birth, Murcia.

Koraïchi’s work is an apt starting point because El Shakry,too, continually returns to the medieval Sufi philosopher Ibn ‘Arabi (d.1240), and shares a concern with how a thinker might travel. More fundamentally, both seek to contest a misrepresentation of Islam. El Shakry’s interlocutors here – the Tunisian analyst Fethi Benslama, Bulgarian-French philosopher Julia Kristeva, and Syrian psychoanalyst Rafah Nashed – contend no dialogue is possible between Islam and psychoanalysis. It is, to take the words of Benslama, a tale of mutual ignorance. Yet El Shakry decisively shows how psychoanalysis and Islam were brought into a mutually transformative conversation in postwar Egypt, by deftly tracing the epistemological resonances and elective affinities between the two as living traditions. Indeed, what is methodologically impressive about The Arabic Freud is the careful even-handedness with which it stages this encounter, such that psychoanalysis in Egypt is never reduced to a mere importation from the West. Individual chapters unfold in a way that underlines this point; starting with a broad-brushstroke account of infantile sexuality, for instance, which leads a reader to think that Murad, al-Taftazani, and Fathi are simply glossing Freud, before digging deeper and revealing the complex ways in which these thinkers wove together Freud and Ibn ‘Arabi, Melanie Klein and Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d.1111), Karen Horney and Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d.1209).

The Arabic Freud is in two parts. The first – The Unconscious and the Modern Subject – puts philosophical and ethical debates about the nature of the soul, self, and psyche under a microscope; the second – Spaces of Interiority – follows psychoanalysis into more pragmatic areas such as adolescent sexuality and criminal psychology.

The first chapter, Psychoanalysis and the Psyche, examines key concepts – integration and unity, insight and intuition, the self and the other – as elaborated on the pages of Yusuf Murad and Mustafa Ziywar’s journal, Majallat ‘Ilm al-Nafs (‘The Journal of Psychology’), which ran from 1945 to 1953. It sets out Murad’s distinctive integrative (takamuli) approach to psychology, which figured the self as a unity of psychic, bodily, and societal aspects. In his emphasis on unity, Murad was drawing on Gestalttheorie as well as Ibn ‘Arabi; there is more than an echo of Fanon here too, in the importance in a context of decolonisation which attached to a project of reconstituting the psychic life of the colonised from the scattered and fragmented elements left in the wake of colonialism.

The second chapter, The Self and the Soul, shifts the focus from Murad to Abu al-Wafa al-Ghunaymi al-Taftazani, Sufi shaykh and professor of philosophy at Cairo University. Parallels between Sufism and psychoanalysis are numerous – traditions of dream interpretation, the analogous relationships between shaykh/disciple and analyst/analysand, and a highly specialised vocabulary of the self and its topography. Indeed, the ease with which similarities are drawn is suggestive of psychoanalysis’s own debt to the mystical traditions, an instance in which reconstructing this specific encounter between psychoanalysis and Islam might enrich our understanding of the psychoanalytic tradition more generally.

One danger amidst all these parallels, and potential criticism of The Arabic Freud overall, is that its focus on affinities, resonances, and hybridisations means it passes over points of tension and disconnect, but in this chapter, El Shakry is careful to note that the stakes in the encounter between Sufism and psychoanalysis were very different. The aim of the former, after all, was not so much self-knowledge, as knowledge of God, and belief in divine transcendence carried over into thinking on the self, such that the presumed hallmarks of modern selfhood – interiority, autonomy – did not replace but rather coexisted with the heteronomous subject of premodern orthodox religious discourse. The question of the status of the secular subject when psychoanalysis travels is a central one, not only in relation to Islam or the Middle East. As Christiane Hartnack has noted, in her study of psychoanalysis in colonial India, Freud himself was privately concerned psychoanalysis would not travel easily. When the ivory statue of Vishnu sent by the Indian Psychoanalytic Society to mark his seventy-fifth birthday began to develop cracks, he mused in the privacy of his diary: ‘Can the god, being used to Calcutta, not stand the climate in Vienna?’[v] El Shakry recasts the cracks feared by Freud as openings towards a creative encounter of ethical engagement.

The third chapter, The Psychosexual Subject, develops some of these themes further, arguing that the postwar Egyptian subject was defined both by autonomy and heteronomy, neither fully religious nor fully secularised. But it is also a sharp intervention in a debate over what happens to sexuality in the history of the Middle East. Responding to the idea that sexual pleasure and desire, common in premodern Ottoman texts on sexuality, had either been silenced entirely by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, or displaced by a scientific sexology aimed at regulating sexual contacts and pleasure along bourgeois lines, El Shakry convincingly argues that sexual pleasure and desire never went away; rather, the emergence of psychoanalysis in the postwar period was able to breathe new life into earlier premodern classical literature centred on desire and the appetites, and on the ethical cultivation of the child – a far cry from the incommensurability alleged by Benslama indeed.

The final chapter, Psychoanalysis before the Law, digs into a set of debates sparked by attempts to have psychoanalysis admitted as evidence in the court of law. A central figure here is Muhammad Fathi, professor of criminal psychology, who became convinced in the 1940s that psychoanalysis – rather than biomedicine – held the key to ensuring that law and justice aligned in the courtroom. Yet while many of his colleagues shared his hope of mitigating criminal responsibility by pointing to contributing psychological factors, Fathi found himself embroiled in deep disagreements with Mahmud al-Rawi, Mustafa Isma’il Suwayf, and Murad himself over where exactly to look for these contributing factors. Fathi emphasised the individual’s (in)ability to resolve historic, mostly sexual complexes; his contemporaries were more inclined to give weight to present-day explanations, which took account of social and environmental considerations.

The above summaries only sketch some of the arguments made in these chapters, which touch on a bewildering array of subjects, including insight and intuition, love and same-sex desire, and the problem of the properly feminine subject. Though densely argued, El Shakry writes in a way which brings along the reader; the subheadings too prevent the reader from being overwhelmed. Certain unifying themes help knit the text together, too, notably the question of translation. The question of translation was a central one to Murad, a member of the Academy of Language, in particular, and the first issue of Murad and Ziywar’s new journal provided a list of the Arabic equivalents to key terms in the field of psychology and psychoanalysis. Murad reached back into classical Arabic texts for his translations, with the unconscious (al-la-shu’ur), for instance, taken from Ibn ‘Arabi; rather than reading these translations as simply grafting new concepts onto old, El Shakry is attentive to the epistemological resonances between these older classical and newer psychoanalytic usages, and the ways in which these pre-existing meanings stretched or even dyed the fabric of psychoanalytic terms. Nafs – glossed as soul, spirit, psyche, self – smuggled into the idea of the self a spiritual core; al-la-shu’ur too carried over its meaning as a place where God could be manifested. Yet I wondered about another kind of translation: that between clinical practice or the case study, and theory. In The Arabic Freud, psychoanalytic theory floats – with notable exceptions – largely free of practice. Yet, as El Shakry has since demonstrated in a compelling complementary article on Sami Mahmud Ali, translator and psychoanalytic theorist, thinking about the translation from clinical practice into theory can be extraordinarily productive, opening up the possibility, for instance, of figuring incarcerated female prostitutes as the co-creators of psychoanalytic theory.[vi]

A second thread which ties together The Arabic Freud is a shuttling between belief in the opacity and transparency of the human subject. At points, psychoanalytic theorists and practitioners argued for a transparent human subject; this was especially the case in the courtroom, where psychoanalysis promised to render visible criminal intent. At other points, it was the opacity and unknowability of the human subject which loomed large, influenced both by Lacan as well as a Sufi topography of the self, one element in which was the sirr, the secret held between God and his servant alone. El Shakry warns that the former was liable to be seized upon by a postcolonial state hungry to render all visible – and malleable – under its technocratic gaze, and notes that in other ways, too, the stress in Murad’s integrative psychology on harmonious totality fed into the political ambitions of the Free Officers who seized power in 1952. Yet these connections between the intellectual history of the encounter between Islam and psychoanalysis, and the politics of this tumultuous period in Egyptian history, are alluded to, rather than fully developed.

However much the reader might like to know more about these connections, in resisting pursuing these, El Shakry holds true to the wider principle that these thinkers and their ideas can and should be taken seriously not as just another exemplar in a global history of psychoanalysis, nor as merely epiphenomenal to political history, but as theorists and intellectual productions in and of themselves. If Murad, al-Taftazani, and Fathi are El Shakry’s interlocutors, rather than just objects of historical study, then it may be appropriate to credit the decision to step back from the political history at least in part to the influence of Murad himself. In The Arabic Freud, Murad is depicted as a bridge between an older generation of intellectuals who were proponents of an enlightened liberal literature molded in the image of Europe, and a younger generation of vanguardist radicals for whom decolonisation and engagement were the intellectual currency of the day; he emerges as a thinker always more interested in ideas for their own sake, and not merely as means to a political end, like the production of the national or socialist citizen-subject; less interested in national health than in self-integration. The Arabic Freud, in a sense, follows suit, by taking the encounter between Islam and psychoanalysis in postwar Egypt on its own terms. One suspects Murad would have approved.

Chris Wilson (@cw498) is a lecturer in the history of the modern Middle East at the University of East Anglia. His research focuses on the history of colonial psychiatry and mental illness in Palestine under the British mandate. Parts of this research were published last year in The Historical Journal, The Jerusalem Quarterly, and Contemporary Levant . More recently, he has drawn parallels from the history of psychiatry with Covid-19’s impact on care homes for The Conversation.

References:

[i] Naguib Mahfouz, The Mirage (originally published 1948, Cairo: American University of Cairo, 2015, trans. by Nancy Roberts 2009) p.17.

[ii] Gamal al-Ghitani, The Mahfouz Dialogs (trans. by Humphrey Davies, Cairo: American University of Cairo, 2007), p.95.

[iii] Omnia El Shakry, The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017), p.4.

[iv] Omnia El Shakry, ‘The Arabic Freud: The Unconscious and the Modern Subject’, Modern Intellectual History 11, 1 (2014), pp.89-118.

[v] Christiane Hartnack, ‘Colonial Dominions and the Psychoanalytic Couch: Synergies of Freudian Theory with Bengali Hindu Thought and Practices in British India’, in Warwick Anderson, Deborah Jenson, and Richard Keller, eds Unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p.108.

[vi] Omnia El Shakry, ‘Psychoanalysis and the Imaginary: Translating Freud in Postcolonial Egypt’, Psychoanalysis and History 20, 3 (2018), pp.313-35.