Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T02:09:08.789Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Historicizing Mind Science: Discourse, Practice, Subjectivity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Mitchell G. Ash
Affiliation:
Department of HistoryThe University of Iowa

Extract

It is no longer necessary to defend current historiography of psychology against the strictures aimed at its early text book incarnations in the 1960s and 1970s. At that time, Robert Young (1966) and others denigrated then standard textbook histories of psychology for their amateurism and their justifications propaganda for specific standpoints in current psychology, disguised as history. Since then, at least some textbooks writers and working historians of psychology have made such criticisms their own (Leahey 1986; Furumoto 1989). The demand for textbook histories continues nonetheless. Psychology, at least in the United States, remains the only discipline that makes historical representations of itself in the form of “history and systems” courses an official part of its pedagogical canon, required, interestingly enough, for the license in clinical practice (see Ash 1983).1 In the meantime, the professionalization of scholarship in history of psychology has proceeded apace. All of the trends visible in historical and social studies of other sciences, as well as in general cultural and intellectual history, are noe present in the historical study of psychology. Yet despite the visibility and social importance of psychology's various applications, and the prominence of certain schools of psychological thought such as behaviorism and psychoanalysis in contemporary cultural and political debate, the historiography of psychology has continued to hold a marginal position in history and social studies of science.

Type
Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ash, Mitchell G. 1983. “The Self-Presentation of a Discipline: Discipline of Psychology in the United States between Pedagogy and Scholarship.” In Functions and Uses of Disciplinary Histories (Sociology of the Sciences, vol. 7), edited by Graham, Loren R., Weingart, Peter, and Lepenies, Wolf, 143–89. Dordrecht: Dordrecht.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ash, Mitchell G. 1990. “Psychology in Twentieth-Century Germany: Science and Profession.” In German Professions, 1800–1950, edited by Cocks, Geoffrey and Jarausch, Konrad H., 289307. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Ash, Mitchell G. 1992. “Cultural Contexts and Scientific Change in Psychology: Kurt Lewin in Iowa.” American Psychologist 47:198207.Google Scholar
Ash, Mitchell G., and Ulfried, Geuter, eds. 1985. Geschichte der deutschen Psychologie im 20. Jahrhundert. Em Überblick. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bazerman, Charles. 1987. “Codifying the Social Scientific Style: The A.P.A. ‘Publication Manual’ as a Behaviorist Rhetoric.” In The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences: Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs, edited by Nelson, John S., Donald, McCloskey and Megill, Allen, 125–43. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Brown, JoAnne, and van Keuren, David K., eds. 1991. The Estate of Social Knowledge. Baltimore: Baltimore Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Burnham, John C. 1987. How Superstition Won and Science Lost: Popularizing Science and Health in the United States. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Cambell, Joan 1989. Joy in Work, German Work: The National Debate, 1800–1945. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cocks, Geoffrey 1985. Psychotherapy in the Third Reich: The Gpring Institute. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Cool, Deborah J. 1992. “Testing the Limits of Sense and Science: American Experimental Psychologists Combat Spiritualism, 1880–1920.American Psychologist 47:143–51.Google Scholar
Danziger, Kurt 1985. “The Origins of the Psychological Experiment as a Social Institution.American Psychologist 40:133–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Danziger, Kurt 1990a. Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Danziger, Kurt. 1990b. “Generative Metaphor and the History of Psychological Discourse.” In Metaphors in the History of Psychology, edited by Leary, David E., 331–56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Dehue, Trudy 1991. “Transforming Psychology in the Netherlands I: Why Methodology Changes.History of the Human Sciences 4:335–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Devereux, Georges 1967. From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences. The Hague: Mouton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elias, Norbert [1939] 1978. The Civilizing Process. Translated by Jephcott, E., 2 vols. New York: Urizen Books.Google Scholar
Febvre, Lucien [1938] 1973 “History and Psychology.” In A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre, edited by Burke, Peter, 111. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Furumoto, Laurel 1989. “The New History of Psychology.The G. Stanley Hall Lecture Series 9:534.Google Scholar
Freudenthal, Gideon 1986. Atom and Individual in the Age of Newton. Dordrecht: Reidel.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Galison, Peter 1987. How Experiments End. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Geuter, Ulfried 1987. “German Psychology During the Nazi Period.” In Psychology in Twentieth-Century Thought and Society, edited by Mitchell, G. Ash and Woodward, William R., 165–88. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Galison, Peter. [1984.] 1992 The Professionalization of Psychology in Nazi Germany. Translated by Holmes, Richard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Giere, Ronald E. 1988. Explaining Science: A Cognitive Approach. Chicago:University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hildebrandt, Helmut 1991. Zur Bedeutung des Begr der Alltagspsychologie in Theorie und Geschichre der Psychologie: eine psychologiegeschichtliche Studie anhandder Krise der Psychologie in der Weimarer Republik. Frankfurt am Main: Lang.Google Scholar
Hornstein, Gail A. 1992. “The Return of the Repressed: Psychology's Problematic Relations with Psychoanalysis, 1909–1960.American Psychologist 47:254–63.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jaeger, Siegfried 1985. “Zur Herausbildung von Praxisfeldern der Psychologie bis 1933.” In Ash and Geuter 1985, 83112.Google Scholar
Jaynes, Julian 1976. The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
JÜttemann, Gerd ed. 1986. Die Geschichtlichkeit des Seelischen: Der historische Zugang zum Gegenstand der Psychologie. Weinheim: Psychologische Verlags-Union.Google Scholar
JÜttemann, Gerd, Sonntag, Michael, and Wulf, Christoph, eds. 1991. Die Seele. Ihre Geschichte im Abendland. Weinheim: Psychologische Verlags-Union.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno 1987. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno. 1990. “Postmodern? No, Simply Amodern! Steps Towards an Anthropology of Science.Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 21:145–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leahe, Thomas H. 1986. “History without the Past.Contemporary Psychology 31:648–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lear, David E. 1987. “Telling Likely Stories: The Rhetoric of the New Psychology 1880–1920.Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 23:315–31.3.0.CO;2-V>CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lenoir, Timothy 1986. “Models and Instruments in the Development of Electrophysiology, 1845–1912.Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 17:154.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lenoir, Timothy 1988. “Practice, Reason, Context: The Dialogue between Theory and Experiment.Science in Context 2:322.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lepenies, Wolf [1985] 1988 Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology. Translated by Hollingdale, R. J.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
von Mayrhause, Richard T. 1987. “The Manager, the Medic and the Mediator: The Clash of Professional Psychological Styles and the Wartime Origins of Group Mental Testing.” In Sokal 1987, 128–57.Google Scholar
von Mayrhause, Richard T. 1991. “The Practical Language of American Intellect.History of the Human Sciences 4:37 194.Google Scholar
Morawsk, Jill G. 1988a. “Impossible Experiments and Practical Constructions: The Social Bases of Psychologists' Work.” In Morawski 1988b, 7293.Google Scholar
Morawsk, Jill G. ed. 1988b. The Rise of Experimentation in American Psychology. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Morawsk, Jill G., and Hornstein., Gail A. 1991. “Quandary of the Quacks: The Struggle for Expert Knowledge in American Psychology, 1890–1940.” In Brown and van Keuren 1991, 106–33.Google Scholar
Nitzschke, Bernd ed. 1989. Freud und die akademische Psychologie. Beiträge zu einer historischen Kontroverse. Munich: Psychologie Verlags-Union.Google Scholar
O'Donnell, John M. 1985. The Origins of Behaviorism: American Psychology, 18901920. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Olesko, Katherin. In press. “The Meaning of Precision: The Exact Sensibility in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany.” In The Values of Precision, edited by Wise, M. Norton. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Rabinbach, Anson 1990. The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Rose, Nikolas 1985. The Psychological Complex: Psychology, Politics and Society in England, 1869–;1939. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Shapin, Steven 1990. “The Mind Is Its Own Place': Science and Solitude in Seventeenth-Century England.Science in Context 4:191218.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Roger 1988. “Does the History of Psychology Have a Subject?History of the Human Sciences 1:147–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sokal, Michael M. ed. 1987. Psychological Testing and American Society. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Staeuble, Irmingard 1991. “‘Psychological Man’ and Human Subjectivity in Historical Perspective.” History of the Human Sciences 4:417–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Toulmin, Stephen and Leary, David E.. 1985. “The Cult of Empiricism in Psychology, and Beyond.” In A Century of Psychology as Science, edited by Koch, Sigmund and Leary, David E., 594 617. New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
van Strien, Pieter J. 1991. “Transforming Psychology in the Netherlands 11: Audiences, Alliances and the Dynamics of Change.History of the Human Sciences 4:351–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wise, M. Norton 1988. “Mediating Machines.Science in Context 2:77113.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Young, Robert M. 1966. “Scholarship and the History of the Behavioral Sciences.History of Science 5:151.CrossRefGoogle Scholar