Category Archives: Events

Reminder: Ninth Annual History of Psychology Centre Stories of Psychology Day 7 November 2019

Events, General

On November 7th, 2019 the BPS History of Psychology Centre (HoPC) and the BPS History and Philosophy of Psychology Section are hosting the 9th Annual Stories of Psychology Day. Registration is required for the event. Full details below.

Ninth Annual History of Psychology Centre Stories of Psychology Day 7 November 2019 10am – 4pm

Friends House, Euston Road, London

How have past and present psychologists interacted with the public to provide an understanding of social issues and anxieties, such as the threat of war, economics, technology and political upheaval?

Historians and psychologists will be discussing this issues in front of an audience of members, academics and the wider public.

The first session will consider the changing messages given and the second will focus on the medium used by public psychologists from pre-war BBC radio talks to current multi-channel and social media outlets.

A round table of media psychologists will discuss their current and future role.

Cost £18 including buffet lunch (registration is essential)

For more information and to register www.bps.org.uk/stories

Ninth Annual History of Psychology Centre Stories of Psychology Day 7 November 2019

Events, General

On November 7th, 2019 the BPS History of Psychology Centre (HoPC) and the BPS History and Philosophy of Psychology Section are hosting the 9th Annual Stories of Psychology Day. Registration is required for the event. Full details below.

Ninth Annual History of Psychology Centre Stories of Psychology Day 7 November 2019 10am – 4pm

Friends House, Euston Road, London

How have past and present psychologists interacted with the public to provide an understanding of social issues and anxieties, such as the threat of war, economics, technology and political upheaval?

Historians and psychologists will be discussing this issues in front of an audience of members, academics and the wider public.

The first session will consider the changing messages given and the second will focus on the medium used by public psychologists from pre-war BBC radio talks to current multi-channel and social media outlets.

A round table of media psychologists will discuss their current and future role.

Cost £18 including buffet lunch (registration is essential)

For more information and to register www.bps.org.uk/stories

Grand Opening of the National Museum of Psychology!

Events,

The National Museum of Psychology is opening its doors! The Museum’s grand opening will take place Wednesday, June 27th from 4-7pm. Admission is free for this special event and you can RSVP here. Permanent exhibits exploring psychology’s history as a profession, a science, and agent of social change. Particular exhibit highlights include:

  • the history of mental health and illness
  • explorations of the brain, sensation, and perception
  • the study of animal training and behavior
  • and studies of gender, race, and social learning.

Also featured a rotating gallery, curated by students in the Center’s Museum and Archives certificate program. The Museum will be open regularly starting June 28 on Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday from 11-4 and Thursday from 11-8.

The National Museum of Psychology is part of the Drs. Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology at the University of Akron, which also includes the Archives of the History of American Psychology (be still my heart!).

 

April 30th BPS/UCL Talk: Jung, Psychology and Alchemy

Events, , , ,

The British Psychological Society‘s History of Psychology Centre, in conjunction with UCL’s Centre for the History of the Psychological Disciplines, has announced the next talk in their seminar series. On Monday April 30th Peter Forshaw will discuss “Jung, Psychology and Alchemy.” Those interested in the event can rsvp for free online here. Abstract below.

This paper discusses C. G. Jung’s fascination with the art of alchemy. We shall look at some of the diverse theories and practices that lie behind the monolithic term ‘alchemy’; at the appeal of this ‘hermetic philosophy’ to Jung for the support and development of his psychology, his notion of alchemy as the historical link between ancient gnosis and the modern psychology of the unconscious; and his argument that it acted ‘like an undercurrent to the Christianity that ruled on the surface.’ We shall examine some of the alchemical works from which he drew inspiration and meet some of the authorities (Hermes Trismegistus, Paracelsus, Dorn, Khunrath) who were influential figures not only in the history of alchemy but also in his psychology.

One Boy’s Day Coming to the Stage

Events, Links,

One Boy’s Day: A Specimen Record of Behavior is coming to the stage. The 1951 book, written by psychologist Roger Barker and Herbert Wright, details the life a young boy in Oskaloosa, Kansas. (Barker’s work has also been the subject of a recent biography, The Outsider: The Life and Times of Roger Barker, by Ariel Sabar.) The book

… is the focus of Mikel Rouse’s most ambitious performance to date, a 13-hour durational music, media and participatory installation that will premiere at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Spring 2020.

On April 26, 1949, eight observers, led by social scientists Roger Barker and Herbert Wright from the Midwest Psychological Field Station, painstakingly documented every word and movement of Raymond Birch, a seven-year-old boy from rural Kansas. Heralded as a sociological milestone, their 435-page report aimed to describe “how children actually behave in real-life situations” and offer insight into what makes an “ideal” American community. Divided into seven parts and structured as scenes from a play, the study is a meticulously timed minute-by-minute transcription of Raymond’s every activity from getting up and eating breakfast to playing with his friends, and from studying English and participating in music class to eating dinner and going to bed.

Over the next two years, director and composer Mikel Rouse together with video and set designers Jim Findlay and Jeff Sugg, lighting designer Hideaki Tsutsui, sound designer Christopher Ericson, music arranger Matthew Gandolfo and producer FuturePerfect Productions will transform Barker and Wright’s text into a multi-media playground and music concert precisely following the day-long observations made by Barker and his associates. Students and teachers from each venue’s local community will be invited onstage to occupy mimetic models of the boy’s home, school, playground and town courthouse.

Holiday Reading Round Up: Imperfect Children, Sociobiology, Rationality, Communications, & More

Books, Events, Journals, , , , ,

As 2017 comes to a close, we’ve rounded up some recent releases for your reading pleasure. And if you find yourself in Amsterdam January 9th, 2018 swing by the release of Jaap van Ginneken’s new biography of Kurt Baschwitz. Best wishes for the new year!

Kurt Baschwitz: A Pioneer of Communication Studies and Social Psychology, by Jaap van Ginneken, Amsterdam University Press. Event: January 9, 2018, 17:00-18:30 in Amsterdam. Register here.

It was a century ago, that a young Jewish-German journalist rushed overnight from Hamburg to Rotterdam, to replace a predecessor correspondent who had been arrested and accused of espionage – halfway he First World War. Baschwitz was appalled by the mass propaganda he witnessed, and began to develop a book about ‘mass delusions’ – that became an immediate bestseller upon his return. Thereafter, he became a respected journalist under the Weimar republic, rose to become the editor-in-chief of the influential weekly of newspaper publishers, later published a book about the key role of the mass press in history.

In 1933, he fled to Amsterdam, where Baschwitz was made ‘private lecturer’ at the university, worked for a confidential agency gathering information about the rise of Anti-semitism in Germany: resulting in the ‘Wiener collection’, and the current Holocaust Museum in London. As well as for the newly founded International Institute of Social History, that smuggled the archives of socialist pioneers out. He also published books on mass politics and mass persecutions.

Halfway the war and occupation, Baschwitz was arrested in a raid, sent to the notorious Westerbork transit camp, for deportation to the East and certain death. But his daughter brought him papers that got him out for the time being. He went into hiding, she joined the resistance.

After Liberation, Baschwitz was made professor, and helped found the new faculty for political and social science in Amsterdam. Within it, he built a series of key institutions: a rejuvenated press museum, a national press library and a press studies department, as well as journalist courses.

Isis, December 2017

“Pax Technologica: Computers, International Affairs, and Human Reason in the Cold War,” by Joy Rohde. Abstract: Continue reading Holiday Reading Round Up: Imperfect Children, Sociobiology, Rationality, Communications, & More →

Dec 11 BPS/UCL Talk: Fernando Vidal “Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject”

Events, General,

The British Psychological Society‘s History of Psychology Centre, in conjunction with UCL’s Centre for the History of the Psychological Disciplines, has announced the next talk in their autumn seminar series. On Monday December 11th, Fernando Vidal will be speaking on “Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject.” Full details below.

Monday 11 December

Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject

Professor Fernando Vidal (Centre for the History of Science, Autonomous University of Barcelona)

Are we our brains? Starting in the “Decade of the Brain” of the 1990s, “neurocentrism” became widespread in most Western and many non-Western societies. Formidable advances, especially in neuroimaging, have bolstered this “neurocentrism” in the eyes of the public and political authorities, helping to justify increased funding for the brain sciences. The human sciences have also taken the “neural turn,” and subspecialties in fields such as anthropology, aesthetics, education, history, law, sociology, and theology have grown and professionalized at record speed. At the same time, the development of dubious but successful commercial enterprises such as “neuromarketing and “neurobics” have emerged to take advantage of the heightened sensitivity to all things neuro. Skeptics have only recently begun to react to the hype, invoking warnings of neuromythology, neurotrash, neuromania, and neuromadness. While this neurocentric view of human subjectivity is neither hegemonic nor monolithic, it embodies a powerful ideology that is at the heart of some of today’s most important philosophical, ethical, scientific, and political debates. Being Brains critically explores the internal logic of such ideology, its genealogy, and its main contemporary incarnations.

Register here

Location:
SELCS Common Room (G24)
Foster Court
Malet Place
University College London

Time: 18:00-19:30

Nov 27th BPS/UCL Talk: The Pope and the Unconscious

Events, General, , , , , , , , , ,

The British Psychological Society‘s History of Psychology Centre, in conjunction with UCL’s Centre for the History of the Psychological Disciplines, has announced the next talk in its autumn seminar series. On Monday, November 27 Marco Innamorati will be discussing the pope and the unconscious. Full details below.

Monday November 27th

The Pope and the Unconscious. The speeches of Pius XII on Psychotherapy in 1952-1953, Agostino Gemelli’s Commentary, and Psychoanalysis in Italy

Professor Marco Innamorati (University of Rome, Tor Vergata)

The attitude of the catholic environment towards Psychoanalysis followed a strange historical trajectory. The first period, from the first Italian psychoanalytic writing until about 1950, was marked by a complete opposition. After World War II, there were attempts outside Italy to integrate Psychoanalysis within catholic culture, while the Italian Catholics stayed clear from Freud for quite a long time. A very important role was played by the two speeches about Psychotherapy given by Pius XII in 1953, at the opening of two congresses: the World Congress on Psychotherapy, in Rome, and a medical congress in France. The speeches showed an open attitude towards psychotherapeutic practices in general, but contained admonishing words against reductionist and materialist theories. They were interpreted differently in Italy and abroad. In the United States it seemed obvious that Pius XII wanted to open the doors to Psychoanalysis; in Italy the same words were interpreted as an absolute and total prohibition of psychoanalytic therapy. Such a “non expedit” was factually effective until the pontificate of Paul VI. The second interpretation was expressly suggested by Agostino Gemelli, who at the time was the most influent personality of Catholic psychology in Italy. Gemelli published a book containing an in-depth hermeneutics of the Pope’s words, deducing an opposition towards Freud’s psychoanalysis and Jung’s analytical psychology. Actually, the Vatican did not refute neither the American interpretation, nor Gemelli’s. Our talk will deepen the historical context and the reasons for this hermeneutical divide.

Tickets/registration

Location:
SELCS Common Room (G24)
Foster Court
Malet Place
University College London

Time: 18:00-19:30

Nov 13th BPS/UCL Talk: The Psychologies of Utopia and Reality. E. H. Carr, 1919-1939

Events, General, , , , ,

The British Psychological Society‘s History of Psychology Centre, in conjunction with UCL’s Centre for the History of the Psychological Disciplines, has announced the next talk in its autumn seminar series. On Monday November 13th Alex Woodcock will be speaking on “The psychologies of utopia and reality. E. H. Carr, 1919-1939.” Full details below.

Monday November 13th

The psychologies of utopia and reality. E. H. Carr, 1919-1939.
Alex Woodcock (UCL)

How do theories from across human and social science disciplines connect, merge, and inform one another? In the early to mid-twentieth century, Edward Hallett Carr was one of Britain’s most visible and controversial public intellectuals. His legacy had dwindled to being little more than an academic signpost within History and International Relations. However the turmoil of twenty-first century political world and the hundredth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, on which he was an authority, have led to a resurgence of interest in his work. This presentation explores in detail Carr’s relation to his own academic, political, and intellectual context. It will look to understand his life and work from 1919 to 1939 in terms of prevailing trends and formative theories derived from the psychological disciplines. Understanding his intellectual formation in this way allows one to appreciate the nuances and depths of his milestone 1939 IR text, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-1939, as well as giving an insight into how and why Carr arrived at his historical and political conclusions. Moreover, such a view speaks to wider issues regarding the specific importance of the ‘history of the psychological disciplines’ within the human and social sciences.

Tickets/registration

Location:
SELCS Common Room (G24)
Foster Court
Malet Place
University College London

Time: 18:00-19:30

Oct 30th BPS/UCL Talk: Meditation, Imagination, Psychotherapy and Spiritual Practice in the 1930s

Events, General, , , , , , , , ,

The British Psychological Society‘s History of Psychology Centre, in conjunction with UCL’s Centre for the History of the Psychological Disciplines, has announced the first talk in its autumn seminar series. On Monday October 30th, Martin Liebscher will be speaking on Meditation, Imagination, Psychotherapy and Spiritual Practice in the 1930s. Full details below.

Monday 30th October

C. G. Jung and the Berneuchen Movement: Meditation and Active Imagination in Jungian Psychotherapy and Protestant Spiritual Practice in the 1930s

Dr. Martin Liebscher (UCL)

Active imagination is one of the methodical corner stones of Jungian therapy. Evolved from his self-experimental phase after 1913, Jung tried to establish a psychological and cultural framework for this method. In his university lectures of the late 30s Jung showed the parallels between active imagination and forms of spiritual meditation in Buddhism, Tantrism, and Christianity. During this period, he was in contact with leading clergy men of the Berneuchen circle, a movement that sought to reintroduce meditative spiritual practice in the German protestant church. Using hitherto unknown archival material I will follow the dialogue between Jung and main representatives of the Berneuchen movement and reveal the traces it left in his understanding of spiritual meditation and active imagination as well as in the practice of pastoral care of this protestant group.

Tickets/registration

Location:
SELCS Common Room (G24)
Foster Court
Malet Place
University College London

Time: 18:00-19:30