Category Archives: Other

Keys to Our Past: Mental Health Film Series Premiere Oct. 4th!

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AHP readers in the Toronto area will be interested in the upcoming premiere of a new film series on the history of mental health care in Canada. Keys to Our Past premieres the evening of Wednesday, October 4th at Humber College, the site of the former Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital. RSVP for the free event here and watch the series trailer above. Full details below.

Keys to Our Past: Mental Health Film Series Premiere
Wednesday, October 4, 2017
7-9pm (doors at 6:30pm)

Join us on the grounds of the former Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital for the premiere of KEYS TO OUR PAST, an original film series about the history of mental health care in Canada created by the Waypoint Centre for Mental Health Care in partnership with the Lakeshore Grounds Interpretive Centre. Hear about the creation of the asylum system, changes in treatments over time, and the continuing challenge of stigma directly from the writers, producers, and directors of this unique project.

Help Kickstart the National Museum of Psychology!

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Kurt Lewin, Edward Tolman, and Clark Hull.

The Cummings Center for the History of Psychology has launch a Kickstarter campaign to help fund the National Museum of Psychology at the Center. In just a few days the campaign has raised more than $17,000 of their $250,000 goal. Donations at every level come with rewards, including a number of fun history themed items (Stanford Prison Experiment t-shirt anyone?) and the opportunity to sponsor an aisle of the archives, a table in the reading room, and more.

Head on over to Kickstarter to back the project and help #KickstartHistory! (And don’t forget to spread the word to your friends and colleagues about this worthy and important endeavour!)

New MA programme in Theory/History of Psychology at Groningen!

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The University of Groningen is now offering a master’s degree, Reflecting on Psychology. As the number of degrees offered in the meta-psychological sub-fields has been notably reduced over the past few decades, this is exciting news indeed!

The included course offerings are conducted in English, and look stellar: philosophy of psychology, sociology of mental health, controversies in psychology, boundaries of psychology, and reflecting on science.

We look forward to the work that comes out of this new community!

 

 

The Psychologist: Madness from the Outside In

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The December 2015 issue of The Psychologist, the British Psychological Society‘s flagship magazine, is now online. This month’s “Looking Back” column, written by Gail Hornstein, explores artistic depictions of madness, among them Agnes’ jacket (pictured above). As Hornstein notes,

Since at least the 13th century, artists have been fascinated by insanity. There are literally hundreds of images, most stylised and stereotypic, of ‘madness’ and ‘the madman’ (or woman). When asylums spread across 19th-century Europe, providing a captive population of mad people, artists began to use actual patients as models for their drawings and paintings. These images are often less extreme than earlier portraits, but their typically grotesque emotionality is just as dehumanising.

Patients are treated as specimens, devoid of any context, like tumour cells in a pathology manual. Even in the works of progressive physicians like Pinel or Esquirol, madness is depicted as brutality or as generalised deterioration. Esquirol’s particular interest in pathological types influenced the thinking of generations of psychiatrists and reduced the patient’s whole life to one main symptom (e.g. mania). Of course, today we take this idea far more literally than Esquirol did in the 1830s – current images of madness don’t even show the person, just their hypothesised brain defect.

Masculinity in Mid-20th Psychology in the New Osiris

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The 2015 volume of special topic publication Osiris is now available and dedicated to the theme of “Scientific Masculinities.” Among the plethora of interesting pieces in the issue, is one specifically on the history of psychology: “Maintaining Masculinity in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Psychology: Edwin Boring, Scientific Eminence, and the ‘Woman Problem'” by Alexandra Rutherford. The abstract reads,

Using mid-twentieth-century American psychology as my focus, I explore how scientific psychology was constructed as a distinctly masculine enterprise and was navigated by those who did not conform easily to this masculine ideal. I show how women emerged as problems for science through the vigorous gatekeeping activities and personal and professional writings of disciplinary figurehead Edwin G. Boring. I trace Boring’s intellectual and professional socialization into masculine science and his efforts to understand women’s apparent lack of scientific eminence, efforts that were clearly undergirded by preexisting and widely shared assumptions about men’s and women’s capacities and preferences.

Dafne Almazán Anaya, 13 year old Psychologist

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dafne-almazan-1_655x438-400x267In honour of Ada Lovelace day, a quick feature of Dafne Almazán–who at the age of thirteen has been awarded a degree in psychology this month by the prestigious Mexican university Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey! This past summer, Almazán was named on Forbes’ list of the 50 most powerful women in Mexico, and she is now being lauded by international outlets as the world’s youngest psychologist (a title to which, as far as we know, the addendum “of all time” could be added!?).

Dafne has expressed interest in researching bullying, but has also asserted that any professional practice she undertakes in psychology will have to wait as she’s intending to pursue graduate work in education.

Her impressive achievement of an advanced degree as a minor is only one of a variety of accomplishments including being an active pianist, practicing Taekwondo, and holding a teaching level proficiency in Mandarin. Go Dafne!!

CfP: Special Issue of HoP on History of Psychotherapy in North and South America

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A call for papers has been issued for a special issue of History of Psychology on the history of psychotherapy in North and South America. Guest edited by Rachael Rosner, the issue will be released in parallel with a special issue of History of the Human Sciences on the history psychotherapy in Europe (guest edited by Sarah Marks). The deadline for submissions is January 1st, 2016. The full call for papers follows below.

The history of psychotherapy is a topic that cuts across disciplines and cultures. In North America, psychotherapy pre-dates Freud in the faith healing and liberal protestant movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century, even as Freud took the limelight, the practice passed through many professions including neuropathology, psychiatry, social work, the ministry and clinical psychology, as well as marriage and family counseling, nursing, and a host of others. Psychotherapy also became the darling of cinema and literature. And yet, psychotherapy has never been a licensed profession. Anyone can hang out a shingle as a “psychotherapist.” Psychotherapy has thus been both a staple of, and a lens onto, medicine, science and culture for nearly 125 years.

How can we make sense of this ubiquitous and yet historically elusive practice? This special issue of HOP opens up the conversation to historians from a broad spectrum of specialties. We welcome contributions on any aspect of the subject in North or South America, but ask contributors to keep within the time-frame of late 19th century (when the term “psychotherapy” originated) to the present. Continue reading CfP: Special Issue of HoP on History of Psychotherapy in North and South America →

The New Yorker: “The Real Lesson of the Stanford Prison Experiment”

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The New Yorker has just posted an article on “The Real Lesson of the Stanford Prison Experiment.” A new feature film The Stanford Prison Experiment, starring Billy Crudup as psychologist Philip Zimbardo, provides the impetus for the piece.

On the morning of August 17, 1971, nine young men in the Palo Alto area received visits from local police officers. While their neighbors looked on, the men were arrested for violating Penal Codes 211 and 459 (armed robbery and burglary), searched, handcuffed, and led into the rear of a waiting police car. The cars took them to a Palo Alto police station, where the men were booked, fingerprinted, moved to a holding cell, and blindfolded. Finally, they were transported to the Stanford County Prison—also known as the Stanford University psychology department.

They were willing participants in the Stanford Prison Experiment, one of the most controversial studies in the history of social psychology. (It’s the subject of a new film of the same name—a drama, not a documentary—starring Billy Crudup, of “Almost Famous,” as the lead investigator, Philip Zimbardo.) The study subjects, middle-class college students, had answered a questionnaire about their family backgrounds, physical- and mental-health histories, and social behavior, and had been deemed “normal”; a coin flip divided them into prisoners and guards. According to the lore that’s grown up around the experiment, the guards, with little to no instruction, began humiliating and psychologically abusing the prisoners within twenty-four hours of the study’s start. The prisoners, in turn, became submissive and depersonalized, taking the abuse and saying little in protest. The behavior of all involved was so extreme that the experiment, which was meant to last two weeks, was terminated after six days.

Read the piece online here.

Contribute to The Psychologist’s “Looking Back” Column!

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The British Psychological Society’s magazine, The Psychologist, is looking for brief contributions for its regular history column “Looking Back.” Previous articles from the column are largely open access and can be read online here.

If you are interested in contributing a piece of 1800-3000 words, on the history of psychology or the psychology of history, get in touch with Managing Editor Jon Sutton at jon.sutton@bps.org.uk or engage with the magazine on Twitter @psychmag.

 

Community Announcement: Cummings Center for the History of Psychology Expansion

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The Center for the History of Psychology at The University of Akron, which houses the Archives of the History of American Psychology, a Museum of Psychology and hosts public chp_building_full_coloreducation and outreach programs, will be closing to all researchers from September 1, 2015 through September 1, 2016 to undergo major reconstruction.

Thanks to a $3.5 million dollar gift from Drs. Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings, the renamed Cummings Center will include a substantial renovation of the museum, a new library and offices for visiting scholars, as well as an endowment for an associate director. Currently, the museum only displays a small fraction of the holdings that have been donated to the center, a situation which will be rectified through its expansion from 1,800 to 8,500 square feet.

We are highly anticipating these exciting developments! Also, if you have immediate need to access the Center’s materials for your research, be certain to do so during the summer before their temporary closure!

Find out more about the Center’s reconstruction plans and the Cummings’ donation here from the article on Ohio.com