Tag Archives: History of Psychological Disciplines

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

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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

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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

UCL/BPS Talks: Henri Bergson’s Cinematographs & Carl Jung’s Dream Analysis

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Henri Bergson

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 two talks in its spring seminar series. On Monday March 13th Tom Quick will be speaking on “Disciplining Bergson: Cinematographs as Epistemic Devices, 1896-1922” and on March 20th Jacomien Prins will speak on “C.G. Jung’s Interpretation of Girolamo Cardano’s Dreams.” Full details follow below.

Monday 13th March

Dr Tom Quick (University of Manchester)

‘Disciplining Bergson: Cinematographs as Epistemic Devices, 1896-1922’

Henri Bergson’s use of the cinematograph as a metaphor for scientific epistemology had a major impact on twentieth-century conceptions of science: even today, many philosophers of science regard the relation between recording mechanisms and embodied observers as critical to our understanding of objective knowledge. Yet little is known about the extent to which Bergson’s characterization of cinematographs as epitomizing a pervasive ‘fragmentation’ of nature into lifeless ‘snapshots’ reflected actual scientific practice during the early twentieth century. This talk will address cinematographic experimentation by such contemporaries of Bergson as Charles Scott Sherrington, Hugo Münsterberg, and Max Wertheimer. In doing so, it will suggest that as well as expressing a broader trend towards the mechanical analysis of nature, cinematograph-centred experimentation contributed to a disciplinary divergence between psychological and physiological science during the first decades of the twentieth century. It will further highlight how this changing disciplinary structure came to haunt Bergson’s philosophy during the 1920s. Ironically, the prominence that Bergson gave to his to cinematographic metaphor prevented him from adapting his philosophy to a mode of scientific organization that grew up around the devices themselves.

Tickets/registration

Monday 20th March

Dr Jacomien Prins (University of Warwick)

‘C.G. Jung’s Interpretation of Girolamo Cardano’s Dreams’

Between 1936 and 1941, Carl Gustav Jung presented a seminar on children’s dreams and the historical literature on dream interpretation in Zurich. As part of the seminar Jung analysed twelve dreams of Girolamo Cardano. These sessions do not only give a peek into Jungian dream interpretation in practice, but also demonstrate how Jung used Cardano’s dream reports to corroborate his ideas about archetypes, the collective unconscious, synchronicity and the harmonization of opposites. In his book on dreams, titled Synesiorum somniorum omnis generis insomnia explicantes, libri IV (1562), Cardano defends the merits of dream interpretation and offers a philosophical explanation for his views. Central to his dream theory is the idea that the cosmos is a unified, harmonic and animated entity. The universal harmonic interrelations between all cosmic phenomena provide the basis for Cardano’s theory of dream interpretation. In this paper I will investigate how and why Jung used Cardano’s dream reports to revive the Renaissance notion of a unitary harmonic world as the eternal ground of all empirical being. Moreover, I will analyse why Jung was prepared to make a ‘salto mortale’ to appropriate Cardano’s dreams, while at the same time he considered him as ‘a free thinker who was more superstitious than primitives.’

Tickets/registration

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

Time: 18:00-19:30

Nov 24 Talk! BPS History of Psych Disciplines Seminar Series

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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 as part of its autumn  BPS History of Psychological Disciplines Seminar Series. On November 24, Joel Eigen (above) of Franklin & Marshall College will be speaking on “Medical Testimony and the Dynamics of Forensic Diagnosis at the Old Bailey, 1760-1913.” Full details follow below.

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

Location: UCL Arts and Humanities Common Room (G24), Foster Court, Malet Place, London WC1E 7JG
Time: 6pm-7.30pm

Monday 24 November

Professor Joel Eigen (Franklin & Marshall College, Pennsylvania)
“Medical Testimony and the Dynamics of Forensic Diagnosis at the Old Bailey, 1760-1913”

With the enigmatic diagnosis of Homicidal Mania, forensic psychiatric witnesses in late Victorian insanity trials introduced a form of mental derangement that for the first time excluded cognitive impairment. How medical men constructed a disease out of distracted volition and the role played by an administrative change that brought doctor and prisoner before trial is the subject for this talk. The research is based on a study of courtroom testimony given in 1000 Old Bailey insanity trials.

Joel Eigen has written of the origins and evolution of forensic psychiatry in Witnessing Insanity, Madness and Mad-Doctors in the English Court (Yale, l993) and Unconscious Crime, Mental Absence and Criminal Responsibility in Victorian London (Johns Hopkins, 2003). He is currently working on the third and final book in this series, the subject of this seminar.

 

Oct 6 Talk! BPS History of Psych Disciplines Seminar Series

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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 as part of its autumn  BPS History of Psychological Disciplines Seminar Series. On October 6, Roland Littlewood (left) of University College London will be speaking on “The Advent of the Adversary: Negative Power in Certain Religio-Therapeutic Systems?” Full details follow below.

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

Location: UCL Arts and Humanities Common Room (G24), Foster Court, Malet Place, London WC1E 7JG
Time: 6pm-7.30pm

Monday 6 October
Professor Roland Littlewood (UCL)

“The Advent of the Adversary: Negative Power in Certain Religio-Therapeutic Systems?”

New ‘religio-therapeutic systems’ commonly start with a relatively straightforward ethical injunction or healing faculty. With time, recognised failures, together with internal or external criticisms, appear, for which the action of a new countervailing power or principle, formerly opposed to the initial one, provides the explanation. The two together form a new dynamic of power and counter-power. The instances considered here are Christian Science, Reichian energetics, Freudian psychoanalysis and – arguably – their source in Christianity. Some speculations on this complementary opposition are offered.

July Talk! BPS History of Psychological Disciplines Seminar Series

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The British Psychological Society’s History of Psychology Centre, in conjunction with UCL’s Centre for the History of the Psychological Disciplines, has announced another talk as part of the BPS History of Psychological Disciplines Seminar Series. On July 21st Vincent Barras, of the University of Lausanne, will be speaking on “Plays between Reason, Language and Gods: The Case of Glossolalia 19th-20th Centuries.” Full details follow below.

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

Location: UCL Arts and Humanities Common Room (G24), Foster Court, Malet Place, London WC1E 7JG
Time: 6pm-7.30pm

Monday 21 July
Professor Vincent Barras (University of Lausanne)
“Plays between Reason, Language and Gods: The Case of Glossolalia 19th-20th Centuries”

Glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, plays a surprisingly important role in discussions between theologians, psychologists and psychiatrists at the turn of the 20th century on the relationships between religious psychology, mental automatisms, subliminal
processes and inner language, and in the formation of modern psychology itself. Its role in the formation of modern psychology will be reconstructed, with particular emphasis on the debates around the Swiss theologian Emile Lombard’s masterpiece of 1910, “Concerning glossolalia in the early Christians and similar phenomena.”

Jan. 22: BPS History of Psych Disciplines Talk!

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A further event in the continuing 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. Saulo de Feitas Araujo (left), of the newly established history and philosophy of psychology graduate program at Universidade de Federal de Juiz de Fora in Brazil, will speak on “The role of philosophy in Wundtian psychology: Towards a new interpretation of Wundt’s psychological project.” Further seminars for the Spring 2013 term remain tba. Full details follow below.

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

Time: 6pm-7.30pm

Tuesday 22 January Professor Saulo de Freitas Araujo (Universidade de Federal de Juiz de Fora, Brazil), The role of philosophy in Wundtian psychology: Towards a new interpretation of Wundt’s psychological project.

Despite the numerous and important contributions brought by Wundt scholarship in recent decades, some aspects of his work remain unclear and poorly understood. The aim of this talk is to explore one of these aspects; namely, the relationship between philosophy and psychology in Wundt’s thought. To this end, we shall discuss an important yet neglected moment in Wundtian psychology, which remains unexplained to date: why did Wundt abandon his early theory of the unconscious? According to the interpretation offered here, this can only be adequately explained by his intense philosophical studies in the period preceding the publication of the Grundzu?ge in 1874, especially in relation to Kant. Finally, we will point out some implications of this analysis to the general interpretation of Wundt’s psychological project.

More BPS Hist. of Psychological Disciplines Talks!

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The British Psychological Society‘s (BPS) History of the Psychological Disciplines Seminar Series (discussed previously on AHP here) has two events scheduled for later this month. Organized by the BPS’s History of Psychology Centre and University College London’s (UCL) Centre for the History of the Psychological Disciplines, the events take place at 6pm at UCL. If you’re in the London area, be sure to stop by (no registration necessary). Full details follow below and can also be found on the seminar series’s website.

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-7.30pm

Wednesday 14 November
Professor Ramón del Castillo (Universdad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid), “Madness and rules: A case for Wittgenstein.” The abstract reads,

This talk explores Wittgenstein’s philosophy of psychology through exploring his  work on comedy, tragedy, jokes and humour, showing the connection between his  understanding of these and his conception of philosophy. Wittgenstein one said that a serious and philosophical work could be written that would consist entirely of jokes. His philosophical work was serious and included some jokes. However he was not a good joker, and his perception of social life was as limited as his sense of humour. It argues that Wittgenstein’s later ideas on rules and language-games are better understood if we think in terms of different types of jokes. It explains the diverse types of what Wittgenstein called ‘gramatical jokes’ (from the logical ones to the performative ones), and also indicates the relevance of certain types of humour in illuminating the background of linguistic games (using examples from sports and social acts).

Wednesday 21 November
Dr Maria Teresa Brancaccio (left) (Maastricht University), “War trauma in France and Italy (1920s-1980s).” The abstract reads,

In the twentieth century, medical-psychological theories on the health effects of war- related suffering as well as their social recognition presented large variations in different European countries. Focusing on the medical debates and on the diagnostic categories adopted in France and in Italy in the aftermaths of the two World Wars, the paper will investigate how changes in medical, social and political thinking influenced the understanding of war trauma in the two countries.