The Paris Review currently features a beautifully illustrated piece from historian Andrew Scull. In “Madness and Meaning” Scull discusses the many depictions of mental illness – religious, medical, pharmaceutical – produced through history. Read the full piece, and see all the evocative images, online here.
Category Archives: Other
Call for Participation: Interviews with Archival Researchers
Here at AHP, we’re interested in fostering conversation about historiographic theory and methods, and as we have access to such a vibrant community of historians and allied researchers, I thought I’d forward this query posted on the H-Public discussions section of H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online.
Alexandra Chassanoff from the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is looking for assistance with her doctoral research in the form of participation by “individuals who have used digitized photographs in their scholarly activities (teaching, publications, presentations, or related research pursuits). ”
Here are further details:
The interview should take approximately one hour and can be conducted in person, over the telephone, or online using Go2Meeting. Your responses to these questions will be kept confidential. There is no compensation for participating in this study; however, I am confident that your participation will contribute significantly to this emerging area of research.
If you are willing to participate, please send an email to: achass@email.unc.edu to confirm your interest. I am happy to answer any questions for you as well.
Historians of science (and other academic or professional disciplines) are used to studying how other people conduct research, but rarely have the spotlight turned on their own work. It is always beneficial to be be given the opportunity to take a look at your methodological ‘black box’ and reflect on those processes. If interested, please contact Alexandra.
Bibliography: Laboratories, Instruments, and the Material Culture of Psychology
For anyone interested in exploring the history of laboratories, instruments, and the material culture of psychology more generally, I have put together the following bibliography. Sources have been organized into the following categories: Laboratories, Instruments, Online Resources, Instrument Collections, and Introductory Material Culture Readings. For the purposes of this bibliography, “material culture” has been interpreted quite broadly. Rather than focus solely on writings narrowly confined to this field, a variety of sources that touch on the history of material objects – especially those related to the history of science – have been included here. Other items included in the bibliography also look at unconventional instruments, including paper tools, tests, and organisms as instruments. A number of reference works, photographic collections, and online resources are also provided. The bibliography is by no means complete and suggested additions are welcome and appreciated. And don’t forget to check out the full list of our bibliographies on our Resources page. Happy reading!
Update: The post now includes a section of sources, provided by Ryan Tweney, on instruments, experiments, and replication. Additional readings suggested by Rodrigo Miranda – including many in French, Portuguese, and Spanish – have also been added, as has a reading suggested by Gabriel Ruiz. Our thanks to them all.
Bibliography: Laboratories, Instruments, and the Material Culture of Psychology
Laboratories
General Discussion
Benjamin, Jr., L. T. (2000). The psychology laboratory at the turn of the 20th century. American Psychologist, 55(3), 318–321. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.55.3.318
Capshew, J. H. (1992). Psychologists on site: A reconnaissance of the historiography of the laboratory. American Psychologist, 47(2), 132–142. doi: 10.1037//0003-066X.47.2.132
Garvey, C. R. (1929). List of American psychology laboratories. Psychological Bulletin, 26, 652-660. doi:10.1037/h0075811
Specific Laboratories
Brooks, J. I. (1993). Philosophy and psychology at the Sorbonne, 1885–1913. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 29(2), 123–145. doi:10.1002/1520-6696(199304)29:2<123::AID-JHBS2300290204>3.0.CO;2-C
Cirino, S. D., Miranda, R. L., & da Cruz, R. N. (2012). The beginnings of behavior analysis laboratories in Brazil: A pedagogical view. History of Psychology, 15(3), 263–272. doi: 10.1037/a0026306
Green, C. D. (2010). Scientific objectivity and E. B. Titchener’s experimental psychology. Isis, 101(4), 697–721. doi:10.1086/657473
Koutstaal, W. (1992). Skirting the abyss: A history of experimental explorations of automatic writing in psychology. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 28(1), 5–27. doi:10.1002/1520-6696(199201)28:1<5::AID-JHBS2300280102>3.0.CO;2-X
Lachapelle, S. (2008). From the stage to the laboratory: Magicians, psychologists, and the science of illusion. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 44(4), 319–334. doi:10.1002/jhbs.20327 Continue reading Bibliography: Laboratories, Instruments, and the Material Culture of Psychology
Call for Nominations: History of Psychology Journal Editor
History of Psychology, a journal of the American Psychological Association, has issued a call for nominations for journal editor. David Dunning, PhD has been appointed chair of the search. The nomination deadline is January 11, 2014 and the candidates should be prepared to start receiving manuscripts in 2015. The journal is described as,
History of Psychology features refereed articles addressing all aspects of psychology’s past and of its interrelationship with the many contexts within which it has emerged and has been practiced. It also publishes scholarly work in closely related areas, such as historical psychology (the history of consciousness and behavior), psychohistory, theory in psychology as it pertains to history, historiography, biography and autobiography, the teaching of the history of psychology, and data mining regarding the history of psychology.
Details of the nomination procedure follow below.
Candidates should be members of APA and should be available to start receiving manuscripts in early 2015 to prepare for issues published in 2016. Please note that the P&C Board encourages participation by members of underrepresented groups in the publication process and would particularly welcome such nominees. Self-nominations are also encouraged.
Nominate candidates through APA’s EditorQuest website.
Prepared statements of one page or less in support of a nominee can also be submitted by email to Sarah Wiederkehr, P&C Board Search Liaison.
Deadline for accepting nominations is January 11, 2014, when reviews will begin.
Four Floors + a Gift Shop: A History of Psychiatry Roadtrip
This is a special post co-authored by Jennifer Bazar and Jacy Young and published simultaneously at both the Advances in the History of Psychology (AHP) and FieldNotes blogs.
The 45th annual meeting of Cheiron was held at the end of June in Irving, Texas – 22 hours didn’t seem like a long enough a drive, so we decided to detour a few hours to swing through St Joseph, Missouri. What, you may be wondering, would draw two historians of psychology so eagerly to Missouri? Why, the Glore Psychiatric Museum of course!
The Glore Psychiatric Museum is the largest psychiatric-focused museum (that the two of us know of) in North America. It is frequently named a “must see” on lists of unusual museums and was named in the book 1,000 Places to See Before you Die in the USA and Canada. It has likewise been featured in a number of televised documentaries on The Learning Channel, The Discovery Channel, The Discovery Health Channel, PBS, Fox News, The Science Channel, and Superstation WTBS. You can understand our willingness to re-route our drive down to Texas!
Continue reading Four Floors + a Gift Shop: A History of Psychiatry Roadtrip
The Expert: A Novel Based on the Life of Rosalie Rayner
Author Andromeda Romano-Lax has crowd funded, through USA Projects, a book in progress on the life of Rosalie Rayner (left). Tentatively titled The Expert, Romano-Lax’s the novel will be a fictionalized account of Rayner’s short life (1899-1935). Most famously, Rayner was John Watson’s graduate student assistant during the Little Albert study. Following a scandal caused by their affair, while Watson was married to someone else, they married and had two children.
As described on the project’s now closed fundraising site,
He was the founder of behaviorism and the most influential American psychologist of his day—a famous parenting “expert” who counseled mothers never to kiss or cuddle their children, and who went on to apply behaviorist principles to Madison Avenue advertising. She was the 19-year-old graduate student who assisted his research—and within a year, found her own career derailed when their steamy affair made front-page news in the East Coast newspapers.
John Watson is well known in psychology circles, but his second wife, Rosalie Rayner, the narrator of this based-on-real-events novel, is known mostly as a textbook footnote—a woman involved in scandal who retreated from her own career ambitions to support her larger-than-life, controversial husband before dying at the tragically young age of 35. Rayner’s own little-known story (informed by the stories of other women psychologists and professionals of the same time period) aims to shed light on the life of a 1920s Vassar-educated woman and mother, part of a post-suffragette, interwar, Jazz Age generation that looked to science, technology, and corporate slogans for expert answers on how to live.…
….I will use project funds to continue the first phase of research (which began with a visit to Baltimore MD, Washington DC, and Poughkeepsie NY and continues with ongoing follow-up historical research) necessary to write dramatically about a woman of cultural and scientific significance who left almost no paper trail. It would be easier to write about her famous husband, but it is the little-known quality of Rosalie’s life – and the story of forgotten women like her – that draws me to this project. To recreate Rosalie Rayner’s life, I will continue to seek out scarce primary sources on Rayner, visit places that were formative to her development, and also continue to learn more about women psychologists and Baltimore life from 1900 to the mid-1930s.
Although this crowd funded project is a literary endeavour — one that just happens to overlap with the history of psychology — this kind of funding initiative raises questions about the future of funding for historical work more generally. What role, if any, will crowd funding have in future research in the history of psychology?
March 12th BPS Hist. of Psych. Disciplines Talk!
The next presentation as part of British Psychological Society’s History of Psychology Centre, in conjunction with UCL’s Centre for the History of the Psychological Disciplines, History of the Psychological Disciplines Seminar Series will take place in London next week. On Tuesday March 12th, Hereward Tilton (left) will be presenting on “The Path of the Serpent: Gnosis, Alchemy and the Esoteric Antecedents of Analytical Psychology.” Full details follow below.
Location: UCL Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, Room 544,* 5th Floor, 1-19 Torrington Place, London WC1E 7HJ
The Path of the Serpent: Gnosis, Alchemy and the Esoteric Antecedents of Analytical Psychology
C. G. Jung influentially asserted that the alchemical corpus constituted the missing link in an ‘uninterrupted intellectual chain’ leading from ancient Gnosticism to his own analytical psychology. Nevertheless, recent studies in the history of Western esotericism have problematised both Jung’s interpretation of alchemy and his historiography. Although certain doctrines and practices within the ancient Gnostic milieu can legitimately be considered distant precursors to analytical psychology, in this seminar we will discover that the chief conduit of their transmission to modernity was the Kabbalah in its Jewish, Christian and post-Christian occult incarnations. Particular attention will be directed to techniques for the attainment of heavenly ascent, conceived as a reversal of the cosmogony in the microcosm of the human body and depicted within Gnostic and Kabbalistic traditions – as in Indo-Tibetan Tantra – as ‘the path of the serpent’. Although it would be misleading to use the term ‘alchemy’ to describe what is essentially a species of theurgy, we will also explore the emergence of nineteenth-century Freemasonic and Theosophical notions of ‘spiritual alchemy’ from the Christian Cabalistic tradition of conceiving this heavenly ascent in alchemical terms. As I will argue, it is this alchemically conceived theurgy rather than alchemy per se that truly constitutes the ‘secret thread’ of esotericism leading to Jung’s work.
Happy Holidays!
Happy Holidays from all of us at AHP! (And, of course, from Santa Claus – AKA psychologist E. G. Boring – at Harvard’s 1940 Christmas party.)
*Images via the Center for the History of Psychology blog.
Revisiting Francis Galton’s Anthropometry
AHP readers may be interested in a recent post by Efram Sera-Shriar on Dissertation Reviews that details his efforts to recreate the kind of anthropological – and more particularly anthropometric – data collection practices at use in the late-nineteenth century. Coming on the heels of his dissertation, Beyond the Armchair: Early Observational Practice and the Making of British Anthropology 1813-1871 (soon to be published as The Making of British Anthropology, 1813–1871), this project seeks to gather the same kind of data that was privileged by Victorian anthropologists, including Francis Galton (above).
As Sera-Shriar describes,
There is much to be gained by looking at the techniques utilized by nineteenth-century researchers …. I thought that it would be illuminating to attempt to recreate a Victorian research practice for acquiring anthropological data and see what kind of results it produces. There were many different kinds of methods to choose from but I decided that it would be interesting to write a kind of guidebook that seeks to collect descriptive information about different people (including photographs) from around the world. Now many of you will be thinking that such an experiment will generate all sorts of problems. After all, Victorian anthropologists were not known for their cultural sensitivity. To avoid exploiting or subjugating anyone, it is necessary to modernize certain aspects of this experiment. These changes are instructive because they bring to the fore some of the problems associated with Victorian anthropology. At the same time, however, by trying to utilize nineteenth-century research practices we can learn a lot about the strengths and weaknesses of these older methodologies. In a sense, this recreation is a kind of exercise in participant observation, allowing us to better understand — with limitations — the analytical processes of Victorian anthropologists.
Full details on Sera-Shriar’s project, and how you might contribute your own data to the project, can be found online here.
Summer Vacation
The AHP Blog is taking its annual summer vacation since our bloggers are off to conferences, archives, and even an internship this summer. Who knows, some of us may even make it to the lake for a day or two. As always, AHP will return in September with all your news, notes, and sources on the history of psychology.