Advances in the History of Psychology

The February 2010 issue of the APA’s Monitor on Psychology contains an article on the teaching of the history of psychology. The article explores the status of history of psychology in North American psychology programs, noting that,

many educators believe the history of psychology should be required as part of every student’s training at the graduate and undergraduate levels. Studying the field’s successes and mistakes, alongside today’s emerging findings, teaches students how to think critically about psychology…

Despite this, some institutions, including Columbia University, Stanford University and Claremont McKenna College, have stopped offering a course on the history of psychology. While noting this trend in the training of psychologists, the article goes on to discuss efforts to grow the field, including the Society for the History of Psychology’s organization of a full track of history of psychology programming at the Eastern Psychological Association’s annual conference, to be held next month in New York. The full article on the teaching of the history of psychology can be found here.

The leading medical journal of the UK, The Lancet, has formally retracted the article by U.S. physician Andrew Wakefield that claimed the Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) vaccine causes autism in some children.

A statement by the The Lancet says:

several elements of the 1998 paper by Wakefield et al are incorrect, contrary to the findings of an earlier investigation. In particular, the claims in the original paper that children were “consecutively referred” and that investigations were “approved” by the local ethics committee have been proven to be false…

The original article had prompted panic among many parents in both the UK and the US, and had fueled a movement by thousands to refuse vaccines for their children.

The retraction follows an investigation into the article by the General Medical Council (GMC) of the UK. According to the Guardian, the GMA reported that

Children had been subjected to invasive procedures that were not warranted, a disciplinary panel ruled. They had undergone lumbar punctures and other tests solely for research purposes and without valid ethical approval.

Although the article has now been scratched from the public record, the conclusions of neither the GMC nor The Lancet spoke directly to Wakefield’s claim that MMR and autism are linked. This claim has been the subject of intense criticism by members of the scientific and medical communities, as AHP reported on here.

The soon-to-appear February 2010 issue of History of Psychology is the journal’s first issue under the editorship of Wade Pickren. Pickren, also currently president of the Society for the History of Psychology, Division 26 of the American Psychological Association, has been kind enough to provide AHP’s readers with an overview of his vision for the journal, as well as a sneak peak at the content of the first issue. He writes,

As the new editor of History of Psychology, I want to be careful to keep the high quality that Michael Sokal and James Capshew maintained over the first 12 volumes. At the same time, I will introduce several new features that I think will enhance our readers experience and contribute to our field of scholarship. In this first year, we will have a special issue on the international historiography of psychology, with reviews of historical scholarship from the Czech Republic, Italy, Brazil, Argentina, and Spain. To celebrate the 150th anniversary of Gustav Fechner’s Elemente der Psychophysik, we will have a special section co-edited by David K. Robinson.  A new feature that will appear in each issue is a regular contribution on teaching the history of psychology. The history of psychology scholarly community has much to offer our colleagues who teach the history course, but who do not have specialty training or involvement in the field. Read the rest of this entry »

A founder of the Baby Einstein series of videos, has taken the University of Washington to court to force the release of raw data from a study that found that small children who watch television are more likely to develop cognitive deficits.

According to an article in the New York Times,

A co-founder of the company that created the “Baby Einstein” videos has asked a judge to order the University of Washington to release records relating to two studies that linked television viewing by young children to attention problems and delayed language development. Read the rest of this entry »

Over 750 years ago, a small priory just outside of London — St. Mary’s of Bethlehem — opened its doors. Soon after, it began taking in and caring for the mad. The institution, later know simply as Bethlem (or Bedlam), gradually became the most famous (and sometimes notorious) mental asylum in the English speaking world. It moved several times over the centuries, and now exists as the Bethlem Royal Hospital in Kent, a short train ride southeast of London.

The history of this venerable institution is now on display in the gallery at the hospital’s current site in the form of an exhibition of antique prints from the personal collection of Michael Trimble, an emeritus professor of behavioral neurology. According to an article about the exhibit in the Guardian, Trimble says:

Starting my training in psychiatry at the Bethlem immediately made me aware of the proud and ­fascinating ­history of psychiatry, and the elegance of some of its associated architecture…. This led to my building up a library of antiquarian books in ­neurology and psychiatry. These ­pictures and prints relate to the history of one of the most important intellectual disciplines within medicine.

The exhibit continues only until the 12th of February.

A new English translation of Ludwig Lange’s important German language work “Neue Experimente über den Vorgang der einfachen Reaction auf Sinneseindrücke” has been posted to the “Classics in the History of Psychology” website. It was in this work that the distinction between sensory and muscular reections was first proposed, eventually leading to much debate among American psychologists over the veracity of mental types. Christopher Green, the administer of the “Classics” website, writes,

I am very pleased to announce that I have recently posted to the “Classics in the History of Psychology” website a new English translation, by David D. Lee, of Ludwig Lange’s 1888 article “Neue Experimente über den Vorgang der einfachen Reaction auf Sinneseindrücke” [New experiments on the process of the simple reaction to sensory impressions], first published in Philosophische Studien, 4, 479-510.

This particular article, by Wundt’s future assistant, is significant because it attempted to resolve apparent anomalies in the reaction time data then being generated in Wundt’s Leipzig laboratory by claiming the discovery of  distinct “sensory” and “muscular” types of reaction.  In doing so, Lange unintentionally set off a debate among Cattell, Baldwin, Titchener, Angell and others that ultimately led to the founding of the American school of Functionalism.

David kindly provided his considerable translation skills gratis for this project, and I am deeply indebted to him for this generous contribution. It extends further the aim of “Classics” project, which was to make primary source material easily and freely available to the many students and researchers working on the psychology’s history.

The Neuro Times blog has reviewed Warwick Anderson’s The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen. Anderson’s volume details the history of the neurological disorder kuru, focusing on the interactions of the Fore people of Papua New Guinea with scientists and anthropologists beginning in the 1940s and 1950s. According to The Neuro Times,

This marvelous book deliberately forces us to re-imagine the meaning of sojourn, scientific discovery, colonialism, and sorcery, while at the same time providing us with an account of the discovery of Kuru, a lethal neurological disease, and the science that ultimately determined its etiology. In a narrative grounded in sources found in archives in Papua New Guinea, Australia, and the United States, and further developed through oral histories with scientists, anthropologists, and the Fore people, Anderson shows us that the prion – an infectious protein supposedly discovered in the laboratories of Britain and the United States – was a thing constructed first through colonial aspirations and global imaginations

The full review can be found here. Tip o’ the hat to Mind Hacks for alerting me to this item.

The first issue of the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences for 2010 has just been released online. The winter 2010 issue of JHBS includes four all new articles which explore topics as diverse as mesmerism, race relations, and the golden section, as well as eight book reviews.

In “Merton as Harvard Sociologist: Engagment, Thematic Continuities, and Institutional Linkages” Lawrence Nichols, Professor of Sociology at West Virginia University, examines the importance of the years sociologist Robert Merton (pictured at right) spent at Harvard University. Early intersections of mesmerism and Asian mind-body practices are explored in “The Mesmerists Inquire about “Oriental Mind Powers”: West Meets East in the Search for the Universal Trance,” by David Schmit, of the Department of Psychology at St. Catherine’s University, while in “The Individual and “The General Situation”: The Tension Barometer and the Race Problem at the University of Chicago, 1947-1954″ Leah Gordon, of the School of Education at Stanford University, investigates the triumph of individualistic conceptions of the cause of racial oppression in the post-war United States. In the final article, John Benjafield, Professor Emeritus at Brock University, explores the use of the concept of the golden section in early American psychology. Read the rest of this entry »

The winter issue of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine has just been released online. Included in this issue are two articles on the history of psychiatry in the twentieth century United States.

The first of these articles, by Laura D. Hirshbein, assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Michigan, investigates the diagnostic category of involutional melancholia. Ascribed to post-menopausal women with depressive symptoms and particular personality traits, this diagnosis was incorporated into the more general diagnosis of major depressive disorder in the latter half of the twentieth century. The social and medical circumstances surrounding involutional melancholia’s emergence and eventual disappearance are charted in Hirshbein’s article.

In the second of these articles, Dennis Doyle, of Mississippi State University, documents the existence of a Harlem psychiatric facility in the late 1940s and 1950s. The article looks at the Lafargue Clinic, named after the french Marxist Paul Lafargue (pictured at right), and documents the diagnostic decisions undertaken at this interracial clinic. Read the rest of this entry »

The New York Times has published an interesting essay by Ethan Watters claiming that the spread of Western psychiatry has paradoxically spread characteristically Western kinds of mental illness to other parts of the world where they were rarely seen before.

The essay is adapted from Watters forthcoming book, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche.

According to Watters,

For more than a generation now, we in the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental illness around the world. We have done this in the name of science, believing that our approaches reveal the biological basis of psychic suffering and dispel prescientific myths and harmful stigma. There is now good evidence to suggest that in the process of teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we’ve been exporting our Western “symptom repertoire” as well. Read the rest of this entry »