A new issue of the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences has just been released. This issue includes an article by Elizabeth R. Valentine, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of London. Valentine’s article is entitled, “‘A brilliant and many-sided personality’: Jessie Margaret Murray, founder of the Medico-Psychological Clinic.” The article abstract reads:

This paper outlines the life and career of Jessie Margaret Murray, the moving spirit behind the foundation of the Medico-Psychological Clinic, the first public clinic in Britain to offer psychoanalytic therapy and training in psychoanalysis. Biographical details of Murray and her close friend and collaborator, Julia Turner, are presented, and possible routes by which the two women may have met are explored. Murray’s role in the suffragist movement is described, as well as other networks and professional societies in which she was involved, in particular the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, and her relationship with Marie Stopes. An account is given of events leading up to the founding of the Clinic, its activities, Murray’s death, and other factors contributing to its demise. Finally, the Clinic’s heritage and implications of the personalities of Murray and Turner for understanding the subsequent development of psycho-analysis in Britain are considered.

This issue also contains two articles on the history of American sociology, which may be of interest to those readers of AHP with an interest in the history of social sciences more generally. The first article, “The emergence of sociology from political economy in the United States: 1890 to 1940,” is authored by Cristobal Young. The abstract reads:

Professional sociology in the U.S. began as a field area within economics, but gradually emerged as a separate discipline. Using new data on joint meetings and the separation of departments, I track interdisciplinary relations through three phases: sponsorship (1890-1905), collaboration (1905-1940), and disengagement (post-1940). In the early years, sociology was mostly a branch of economics departments. With the formation of the American Sociological Society, relations with economics began to be more characterized by professionally autonomous collaboration. The 1920s saw a large wave of sociology departments separating from economics. Still, joint annual meetings (including joint presidential addresses) remained the norm until 1940. Paradigmatic conflict between institutional and neoclassical economists was the major force that sustained the economics-sociology collaboration. As institutionalism faded from the scene in the late 1930s, so went interdisciplinary contact.

Finally, the issue of JHBS also includes an article on the development of sociology at the University of Chicago. The piece, “Influence and canonical supremacy: An analysis of how George Herbert Mead demoted Charles Horton Cooley in the sociological canon,” is authored by Glenn Jacobs, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts. The abstract reads as follows:

This analysis assesses the factors underlying Charles Horton Cooley’s place in the sociological canon as they relate to George Herbert Mead’s puzzling diatribe – echoed in secondary accounts – against Cooley’s social psychology and view of the self published scarcely a year after his death. The illocutionary act of publishing his critique stands as an effort to project the image of Mead’s intellectual self and enhance his standing among sociologists within and outside the orbit of the University of Chicago. It expressed Mead’s ambivalence toward his precursor Cooley, whose influence he never fully acknowledged. In addition, it typifies the contending fractal distinctions of the scientifically discursive versus literary styles of Mead and Cooley, who both founded the interpretive sociological tradition. The contrasting styles and attitudes toward writing of the two figures are discussed, and their implications for the problems of scale that have stymied the symbolic interactionist tradition are explored.