Advances in the History of Psychology

The Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) has just posted online a number of transcripts from its Oral History Project. Over the course of its 25 year history, the SRCD Oral History Project has interviewed 135 important scholars in the field of child development. Now online are 16 interviews with individuals such as Mary Ainsworth, Eleanor Gibson, and Jerome Kagan (left). A full list of the available oral history transcripts is provided below and efforts are underway to post transcripts of further SRCD oral histories. For those interested in the history of developmental psychology, these interviews will undoubtedly prove an invaluable window into the field.

As described on the SRCD website,

Launched 25 years ago, the Oral History Project of SRCD is now available on this website to members of the Society as well as other interested scholars.  Interviews of 135 major figures in the fields of child development and child psychology, as well as other related fields, are included in the collection.  Sixteen of some of the earliest obtained oral histories are posted here and others will be incorporated in the near future.  Each person was interviewed by someone whom he/she selected, and the recordings were then transcribed, edited for accuracy, and approved before inclusion in the collection.  Some scholars in this project are now deceased, while others are alive and well; many played key roles in the governance or service of SRCD.  Approximately 50 more interviews are now in progress.

The transcripts in this project should be of interest for a variety of reasons, including instruction both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Scholars interested in historical roots and trends in the field and those concerned about the emergence of research, policy, and practice concerning children and families will find a wealth of informative history in these interview transcripts.  An example of how the transcripts may be used is the article by Claire E. Cameron and John W. Hagen (2005), “Women in child development: Themes from the SRCD Oral History Project” (History of Psychology, 8, 289-314, 2005), in which quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted on 47 early oral histories of women who became leading scholars and spokespersons in child development.

Transcripts of interviews with the following individuals are currently available on the SRCD Oral History Project webpage.

Mary Ainsworth
Gerald Patterson
Jack Block
Julius Richmond
Urie Bronfenbrenner
Sir Michael Rutter
Norman Garmezy
Sandra Scarr
Eleanor Gibson
Harold W. Stevenson
E. Mavis Hetherington
Ann Streissguth
Jerome Kagan
Emmy Werner
Eleanor Maccoby
Edward Zigler

Tip’o the hat to Cathy Faye for bringing this to AHP’s attention.

In recognition of the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing‘s birth, 2012 has been declared Alan Turing Year. Centenary celebrations of Turing’s life and work are well underway and will continue throughout 2012 at locations around the world. Turing, a mathematician, logician, and early computer scientist, is probably best known within the history of psychology for his proposal of what has come to be known as the Turing Test. The test proposes that a machine may only be considered truly intelligent if, in the course of a conversation, a human judge can not tell it apart from another human being. It has become a something of a standard within the field of artificial intelligence, in which Turing was a pioneer.

The tragic end of Turing’s life is also well-known. After serving as a codebreaker for the British military in World War Two, Turing was prosecuted by the British government for engaging in homosexual acts and submitted to chemical castration. In 1954, at the age of 41, he died from cyanide poisoning in what was apparently suicide. In 2009, British government issued an official apology for the treatment Turing received.

Full details on the various events to be held in 2012 in celebration of Turing’s life and work can be found here.

The January 2012 issue of the American Psychological Association‘s Monitor on Psychology has just been published online. This month’s Time Capsule article examines the male alternative to the rest cure often prescribed for nervous women in the nineteenth century. The rest cure saw neurasthenic women like Charlotte Perkins Gilman confined to bed, where they were to do little more than eat and avoid all “brain work.”  Gilman recounted her experience with the rest cure in her well-known work, The Yellow Wallpaper (1892). In contrast, as Anne Stiles details in “Go Rest, Young Man,” men treated their neurasthenia by heading to the American west to engage in strenuous physical activity. Among the men who did so were Theodore Roosevelt and Walt Whitman. As Stiles recounts,

Before heading West, Roosevelt’s effeminate looks and high voice provoked comparisons to Oscar Wilde; afterward, he became known for his strenuous brand of masculinity. Roosevelt’s motto, “speak softly and carry a big stick,” sums up the ethos of many Westerns, in which stoic men of action engage in constant battles with nature, Indians and rogue cowboys. Like many men of his generation, Roosevelt felt that masculinity was forged by conflict, an attitude that carried over into his imperialist foreign policy.

The dramatic difference between the Rest and West Cures suggests their prescriptive nature. Both cures existed to reinforce “proper” sexual behavior, serving to masculinize effeminate (and possibly homosexual) men and discourage women from entering the professions. Both were supported by the authority of science in an era that emphasized the biological differences between men and women.

The full article can be read online here.

In 1913, Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Köhler moved from Germany to the island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands. In Puerto de la Cruz on the island of Tenerife, Köhler assumed the directorship of the Prussian Academy of Science Anthropoid Research Station where he conducted important early work on tool use in apes. Famous images from Köhler’s ape research include that of apes stacking wooden crates to reach bananas hanging out of research. His research with apes led him to argue that it was insight rather than trial-and-error that allowed apes to problem solve. In 1917 he published his findings as the book, The Mentality of Apes.

Today the Tenerife research station still exists, but in a state of disrepair. The station has been classified as a cultural interest site by the Spanish government and the Wolfgang Köhler Association is working toward the site’s restoration. The videos above show the site as it exists today, interspersed with film clips from Köhler’s original research and is it part of an ongoing documentary project, INSIGHT. Though the film’s audio is in Spanish, the images are striking.

Tip ‘o the hat to Gabriel Ruiz for bringing these videos to AHP’s attention during a recent discussion on the Cheiron (the International Society for the History of the Behavioral and Social Sciences) and Society for the History of Psychology (Division 26 of the American Psychological Association) listserves.

The Sociedad Española de Historia de la Psicología (Spanish Society for the History of Psychology) has issued a call for papers for its forthcoming 25th annual symposium to be held in Santiago de Compostela in May 2012. Full details follow below.

Announcement and Call for Papers: 25th Symposium of the Spanish Society for the History of Psychology (SEHP)

The XXV Conference of SEHP will be held in Santiago de Compostela (North Spain) from May 10-12 at the University of Santiago. Submissions for papers and posters are invited. Although the main language in the symposium will be Spanish, English contributions are also welcome.

Possible submissions may deal with any aspect of the history of psychology or related historiographical and methodological issues.

Abstracts submission deadline: February, 15, 2012.

Instructions for submitting proposals: Please, send a 500 to 700-word abstract in English or Spanish in case of an oral presentation. For poster presentations a 150 to 300-word abstract is required.

Submitted abstracts will be judged according to the quality and originality of the work described. The corresponding author will be notified when a decision has been made. Accepted abstracts will be included in the proceedings, to be distributed at the symposium

Additional instructions for submitting proposals, as well as registering at the conference, and other useful information may be found at http://www.usc.es/congresos/xxvsymposiumsehp/index.htm.

For further information, please contact: sehp.2012@gmail.com

The December issue of the American Psychological Association‘s Monitor on Psychology is now online. This month’s Time Capsule section features a piece, “Lessons from Bird Brains,” by Cathy Faye on the work of Eckhard Hess on imprinting. Faye writes,

In the 1950s, Hess and A.O. Ramsay, a high school biology teacher from Maryland, began studying imprinting in the laboratory with papier-mâché mallard ducks fitted with off-center wheels that mimicked waddling. The researchers created a great variety of model ducks to experiment with, including ducks with moving heads and ducks with built-in heaters.

By means of pulleys and cords operated from a distance, Hess and his colleagues released newly hatched ducklings from a small cardboard box. The model duck would emit a sound — either a tape-recorded duck call or a human mimicking one — and move around a runway via a motorized arm. Levers on the runway floor kept track of the ducklings’ steps to measure their following behavior. At the end of the experiment, a trap door in the runway’s floor returned the ducklings to their box.

The full piece can be read online here.

AHP is please to present an interview with Annette Mülberger (left) and Thomas Sturm (right), editors of a fantastic forthcoming special issue of Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences on the long history of crisis declarations in psychology. The issue is the culmination of a larger research project on crisis debates in psychology. Although the issue itself has not yet been released, the articles comprising it can now be accessed online in their entirety. Read on to discover how the issue came to be, which crisis declarations are addressed in the issue, why such declarations matter, and much more!

Titles, authors, and abstracts to the issue’s articles follow below the interview.

AHP: Can you tell Advances in the History of Psychology’s readers, briefly, about the topic of this special issue of Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences?

Annette: The topic is the manifold crisis declarations and discussions psychology has seen – and partly suffered – since the late nineteenth century. It’s a topic that has not been studied very systematically by either philosophers or historians of the field. Instead, some psychologists have dealt with it, pursuing reflections on the methodological or theoretical or practical problems of psychology.

AHP: How did the issue come to be?

Thomas: The topic was originally Annette’s idea. I needed about three seconds to accept the project because of its potential for integrating historical and philosophical investigations, something I think is necessary. Not always, but often. The topic also presented an occasion for me to work on the Viennese psychologist and philosopher Karl Bühler and his student Karl Popper, a relation I had found interesting. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences is a great journal for such a topic. The editors accepted our proposal quickly.

AHP: Who are the contributors to the issue?

Thomas: An international group of historians and philosophers of psychology, of course. Next to ourselves, these are Christian Allesch, John Carson, Cathy Faye, Uljana Feest, Horst Gundlach, Gary Hatfield, and Ludmila Hyman. We looked deliberately for people who had, in their previous work, shown sensitivity to both disciplines. Needless to say, some contributions put a little more weight on the historical than the philosophical dimensions, or the other way around. We had to push each other to give sufficient weight to both aspects, and that was instructive for all of us – and even fun.

AHP: What instances of crisis declarations in psychology do the articles in the special issue address?

Annette: The contributions begin with the first explicitly so-called declaration of a crisis in psychology by the nowadays mostly unknown Swiss philosopher-psychologist named Rudolf Willy, stemming from 1897 and followed by a whole book in 1899. Read the rest of this entry »

In case you missed it yesterday, the Center for the History of Psychology (CHP) has posted on their blog a 8 minute clip of a home movie by psychologists Harry and Leta Stetter Hollingworth. The clip is narrated by CHP Reference Archivist Lizette Royer Barton, who reads from Harry Hollingworth’s autobiography over the course of the film (below).

The Center is currently collaborating with the University of Akron Press and will release Harry Hollingworth’s two volume memoir – Roots in the Great Plains: The Applied Psychology of Harry Hollingworth (Vol. I) and From Coca-Cola to Chewing Gum: The Applied Psychology of Harry Hollingworth (Vol. II) – in the new year.

As previously reported on AHP (here and here) the British Psychological Society’s History of Psychology Centre, in conjunction with UCL’s Centre for the History of the Psychological Disciplines, is putting on a fall seminar series. Two more talks in this series have just been announced. On November 30th, Egbert Klautke will be speaking on the German repudiation of Völkerpsychologie and on December 14th Thibaud Trochu will speak on the psychological experiments of John Garth Wilkinson (right). Full seminar information, including abstracts, follow below.

BPS History of the Psychological Disciplines
Seminar Series – Autumn term 2011

The British Psychological Society History of Psychology Centre in conjunction with UCL’s Centre for the History of the Psychological Disciplines

Location: UCL Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, Room 544,* 5th Floor, 1-19 Torrington Place, London WC1E 7HJ (map)

Time: 6pm

30 November 2011
“The Repudiation of Völkerpsychologie in Germany,” by Dr Egbert Klautke (UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies). The abstract reads,

My talk will focus on the ‘last’ representative of the once honourable discipline of Völkerpsychologie in Germany, Willy Hellpach. I will present his contribution to the field – his textbook Introduction to Folk Psychology (1938) – as part of his personal strategy to adapt to the conditions of the Third Reich, despite later claims to the contrary by Hellpach and some of his sympathetic interpreters. In the second part of the paper, I will outline the conditions and results of the slow repudiation of his Völkerpsychologie after World War II, and outline the problems which academics critical of ‘national character studies’ encountered.

14 December 2011
“Psychological Experimentation in the Nineteenth Century: John Garth Wilkinson (1812-1899), Physician, Mystic and Radical,” by Thibaud Trochu (University of Paris 1, Sorbonne). The abstract reads,

Though quite forgotten nowadays, Dr J. J. Garth Wilkinson was once a widely known intellectual figure in Victorian Britain. Praised by his contemporaries as a fine scholar, a first-rate writer, and a highbrow public ethicist, he was notorious for stirring controversy and debate – most often against the grain. His personality and thinking revolved around two passionate feelings: deep-seated religious yearnings – though quite unorthodox ones – on the one hand, and on the other, an inclination to mistrust and to defy all forms of established authority – be they religious, medical or political – which he accused of narrowing the horizons of self-conscious practitioners and free citizens. His medical career, strongly entwined with his ‘spiritual’ quest, was thus coloured by a radical political tone. This led him to carry out numerous experiments in his daily practice of the art of healing, such as homeopathy, hypnotism and other forms of ‘psychological analysis’, whilst establishing himself as an opponent of what he saw as the dominant trend of medical materialism, ‘dogmatic objectivism’ and authoritarianism. At a time of triumphant scientific medicine, Wilkinson saw himself as – in his own words – ‘smashing its institutional structure’.

The January 2012 issue of the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences has just been released online. Included in this issue are a number of articles that may be of interest to historians of psychology and related fields. A special issue devoted to recent developments in the intellectual history of medicine, the issue includes articles on sexual inversion, shell shock (right), koro as a culture-bound syndrome, and the rise of hypnosis in Germany, among other topics. Titles, authors, and abstracts follow below.

“Recent Developments in the Intellectual History of Medicine: A Special Issue of the Journal of the History of Medicine,” by Chiara Beccalossi and Peter Cryle. An extract from this introduction to the special issue reads,

The history of medicine is probably best thought of as a wide range of different types of inquiry, rather than a single, well-defined field. It can involve, among other things, the history of institutions, technologies, and outstanding individuals. The articles gathered in this special issue are offered specifically as contributions to the intellectual history of medicine. Each shows, in its own way, how a particular disorder became conceptualized or how a particular set of difficulties was made into a topic of debate. Inquiry of this kind is not quite the same thing as a history of ideas—if by the latter one understands only the study of ideas as they traverse medical writing—since our concern is not with major ideas in the field of medicine, as such. One of our working assumptions is that intellectual history ought to be no grander an enterprise than social history at its most focused, or cultural history at its most closely bounded. We will simply examine ways of thinking that prevailed at given points in history, indicating the material consequences to which they gave rise. By seeking to articulate thought, writing, and professional practice, we are responding to the challenge Michel Foucault laid down for historians. But the histories offered here are not “Foucauldian” in the manner of histories that focus primarily on articulating epistemic “rupture” and unprecedented conceptual “invention.” The point of our contributions is to examine the contexts in which new kinds of thinking emerged gradually, and often unevenly. We seek, as Foucault did at his best, to highlight the circumstantial nature of thought and the intellectually productive nature of circumstance.

This special issue had its beginnings in a seminar series conducted in 2009 by the Center for the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland…

“Female Same-sex Desires: Conceptualizing a Disease in Competing Medical Fields in Nineteenth-century Europe,” by Chiara Beccalossi. The abstract reads, Read the rest of this entry »