Book review: Interiors: A history of psychology in South Africa

Journal of History of the Behavioral Sciences,Vol. 39(2), 183–184 Spring 2003Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10:1002/jhbs.10071� 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

JHBS—WILEY RIGHT BATCH

shortstandard

Base of DF

Top of ID

Base of 1stline of ART

183

B O O K R E V I E W S

Jacob D. Lindy and Robert Jay Lifton. Beyond Invisible Walls: The Psychological Legacyof Soviet Trauma.New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2001, 251 pp. $34.95 (cloth). ISBN1-58391-318-1.

The phone rang. Dr. Katona explained to her long-time colleague, Nora Csiszer, thatthere has been a letter from “colleagues in America, inviting us to write about our experiencesas psychotherapists in Hungary, and asking that we travel to America for a working meeting”(p. 36). Csiszer hesitated, “So they wanted us to tell our story. But, I wondered, can they hearit?” (p. 36).

The working meetings brought together two American clinicians (the editors of thisbook), and several Eastern European and Soviet psychiatrists and psychotherapists. The ed-itors’ aim was to uncover traumas endured by Eastern Europeans and former Soviet citizens,and to make sense of them in terms of “posttraumatic stress disorder” (PTSD) and psycho-analysis. The Eastern Europeans were asked to provide clinical cases that dealt with traumain Eastern Europe. The working meetings provided a forum for discussing and reconstructingthe meaning of the cases in terms of PTSD and psychoanalysis (p. 10). In the subsequentbook, Eastern European authors introduce each chapter with case studies from Hungary, theGerman Democratic Republic, Romania, Russia, Croatia, and Armenia, respectively. Theeditors introduce and summarize most chapters and provide the theoretical framework of thebook. A “Glossary of Eastern Europeans Terms” is provided. Regretfully, the glossary andthe book as a whole are replete with misspellings (e.g. “Wermacht” [p. 235], “Bundesant,”“rereinte Deutscheland” [p. 62]) of foreign terms, giving the unfortunate impression that thebook has hastily been put together.

The editors went through a commendable effort to locate Eastern European practitionersand recover their voices. This psychohistorical approach is an exemplary attempt to do “his-tory from below” by linking individual biographies to political culture. The various contri-butions deal with such diverse aspects as the links between childrearing practices, pathology,and the political system, and the effect of dislocation, war, and torture on individual patients.Some of the chapters (especially the chapter on Romania) can be harrowing reading, attestingto the grossest of human rights abuses.

The editors have set themselves an enormous task in providing a psychohistory of sucha huge geographical and culturally diverse area. They are at times well aware of the culturaland political differences across Eastern Europe, but at other times fall into easy generaliza-tions. For example, Lindy argues that in the Soviet era “political repression became foldedin with war, genocide, famine, natural and man-made disasters, . . . disease” (p. 15) andeven “cannibalism” (p. 17). People were being “brainwashed” (p. 20) and the Soviet system,a “paranoid” (p. 203) “single ecological system of terror” (p. 23), is indeed an “evil” (p. 216)empire. To substantiate all these claims in terms of when, where and how these events tookplace and how many people were effected, is indeed an impossible task for any sized book,but to cite the only evidence for cannibalism as a little girl telling her Armenian mother duringthe 1915 famine that “when I die you can eat my flesh . . . ” (p. 177) is not enough tosubstantiate such harrowing claims.

The authors argue that these conditions marked the psychological landscape of EasternEurope. Based on the case histories the editors argue that the patients, their therapists, and

184 BOOK REVIEWS

LEFT BATCHJHBS—WILEY

shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textindeed the people of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in general suffered from a

variety of psychological ills. Some of these maladjustments include developing a false, in-authentic, dependent, and guilt-ridden self. Such “defensive and adaptive mechanisms” con-stitute the “invisible wall” (p. 2) between East and West and currently affects the ability ofEastern Europeans to integrate into a “freer” (p. 199) and “bright” (p. 27) Western-styledemocracy. Moreover, they suggest that psychiatrists and psychotherapists have collaboratedwith government authorities, reinforcing state ideology and thus participated in the psychiatriclabeling of dissidents.

This characterization stands at times in a somewhat uneasy relation to the stories as toldby the Eastern Europeans. They attest that life behind the Iron Curtain was also marked bystability and routine and they often shared in the dream of building a “good” society. Theydescribe the complex relationship that existed between the individual, the state, and socialistideals. People resisted, recreated, modified, and accommodated to state-backed programs, andimprovised a set of informal practices which remained largely outside the formal commandstructure. They were attuned to the often contradictory requirements of private, public, andpolitical life and behaved accordingly. The editors lament this and proclaim that they thuslacked an authentic, continuous self, which reveals itself irrespective of social context. Thisstance is consistent with the modernist assumptions about selfhood which pervade this book.A different perspective might treat the Eastern Europeans’ effort to navigate their intricate,complex, and contradictory social world as a prelude of the postmodern condition.

This story can be read as not only a psychohistory of Eastern Europe, but also as aboutthe politics of knowledge. The history and sociology of the human sciences suggests thathuman nature is constantly being reconceptualized. Psychological concepts are not indepen-dent from the social and political conditions which give them currency and legitimacy.Whether it is “stress,” “hysteria,” “attention deficit disorder,” “borderline personality disor-der,” or “posttraumatic stress disorder”—these terms serve as a means by which individualscan be made visible, understandable, and treatable. Once these categories are in place, peopletend to see what they expect to see. For the authors to have made visible and made sense ofthe psychological underpinnings of a century of atrocities and to tell the victims’ stories brings“recognition to substantial groups of people who had been ignored” (Thompson, 1998, p.27).

So, I wonder with Csiszer, whom “the Americans” called on to hear her story. “Canthey hear it?” Their exposition certainly bears witness to how the self could became entangledwith fascist and communist polities and it documents how psychological concepts can beused to make sense of a range of historical experiences. But part of what we hear is also theecho of the current preoccupations of Western psychological theory reverberating across the“invisible wall”.

REFERENCE

Thompson, P. (1998). The voice of the past: Oral history. In R. Perks and A. Thomson (Eds.), The oral historyreader (pp. 21–28). New York: Routledge.

Reviewed by CHRISTINE LEUENBERGER, Research Associate, Department of Science andTechnology Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853.

185BOOK REVIEWS


shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of text

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences,Vol. 39(2), 185 Spring 2003Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.10072� 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Mark R. Rosenzweig, Wayne H. Holtzman, Michel Sabourin, and David Belanger.His-tory of the International Union of Psychological Science (IUPsyS).Hove, East Sussex:Psychology Press, 2000. 290 pp. $52.00 (cloth). ISBN 1-84169-197-6.

This book serves to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the IUPsyS, formed in 1951in Stockholm at the 14th International Congress of Psychology. The history of the Union ofcourse goes back to 1889, to the first International Congress of Psychology, organized duringthe Universal Exhibition in Paris. The IUPsyS is the main international body of psychology,in which 66 countries are represented by their national organizations.

The authors used as primary data for the project the published proceedings of everyInternational Congress, the minutes of its assemblies, and of the meetings of the variousexecutive committees. As a result, it is rich in detail that would otherwise be very difficultto trace in the archives of the Union. In the appendices, for example, lists of the membershipof the International Congress of Psychology Committees from 1889 to 1951 appear, as wellas its office bearers since 1951, together with a copy of the “Statutes and Rules of Procedureof the IUPsyS”. Indeed, there is so much detail in here that the book may almost act like aprimary source itself for future researchers. (One casual observation struck me: between 1889and 2000, only 2 of its 27 International Congresses were held in the United States—despitethe U.S.’s dominance of psychology around the world).

The book thus is both a history and a commemorative description of events. As a de-scriptive narrative of what happened between 1889 and 2000, it works well. Also, because itis a commemoration, it contains respectful references like “very successful in fulfilling theirmission,” “sustained focus on its priorities,” “played a constructive role,” “genuine globalexpansion,” and so on.

As history, however, it fares less well, mainly because there is virtually no historicalanalysis presented. That may or may not be an unfair expectation of a book like this, but evenif one does not expect some analytical effort, the way the material is presented does not makefor easy reading. It is so rigorously chronological, and so relentlessly descriptive, that it isnearly impossible to read it like one would normally read a book. I suspect readers might useit either to confirm or look up dates, persons, and events, or to dip into now and again tolook for nuggets of interest.

At the very least, I would have liked the authors to be a little less celebratory about “agenuine global expansion of international psychology” (p. 195), as the International Con-gresses held in Asia (1972), Latin America (1984), and Australia (1988) signified the exportof psychology to the non-Western world. The enthusiasm for being truly global and promotingthe growth of psychology internationally can be juxtaposed with the post-War and Cold Warsocial and intellectual context within which this took place. It was in exactly this context thatstrong political support existed for establishing international scientific organizations. Indeed,in chapter 2 the authors allude to the renewed scientific communication between the formerfoes after World War II, and the establishment of new international unions, linked toUNESCO. This is just one of the instances where I thought the authors missed an opportunityto reflect more on what all of these developments mean in a slightly wider context.

Reviewed by JOHANN LOUW, Professor of Psychology, University of Cape Town, Ronde-bosch, 7701 South Africa.

186 BOOK REVIEWS


shortstandardlong


Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences,Vol. 39(2), 186–187 Spring 2003Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.10073� 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Arnold I. Davidson. The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the For-mation of Concepts.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. 254 pp. $39.95.ISBN 0-674-00459-0.

In this selection of essays, Arnold I. Davidson articulates his approach of historicalepistemology in accounting for the history of sexuality. The book is dedicated, in part, to“the memory of Michel Foucault” (p. iv). Indeed, Foucault’s perspective serves as the guidingintellectual spirit for Davidson’s project. This is not to say that Davidson fully accepts Fou-cault, but he draws on what he considers to be the central tenets of Foucault’s thinking. Healso coherently borrows from other historians of science, most notably Ian Hacking and CarloGinzburg.

In summarizing his approach, the author argues that our cultural understanding of whatconstitutes “sexuality” is connected with the emergence of the science of sexuality in thenineteenth century. In other words, our conceptions of ourselves as sexual beings developedas a result of a new style of scientific reasoning. In several of the essays, Davidson tracespsychiatry’s emergence in the late nineteenth century as an independent medical specialty.Underlying this transition was the move away from linking all diseases to an anatomicaletiology. A new class of functional diseases was identified, which included the sexual per-versions and hysteria. Focusing on the perversions, especially homosexuality, Davidson ar-gues that a new species of diseased individuals was created. Moreover, since all individualshad the potential to become perverts, a new conception of the sexual self emerged. In anespecially well-documented essay, the author demonstrates how Freud was central to thisrupture in scientific thinking.

In the first set of four essays, Davidson elucidates his thesis of the profound influencethat historicized scientific thinking had on our modern concept of sexuality. As he indicates,these essays deal with his philosophical perspective and were written somewhat earlier in hiscareer (between 1987 and 1991). His second set of essays is concerned with historiographyand includes the most significant selection in the book (“The Epistemology of DistortedEvidence”), which was first published in 1994. I refer to the chronological and organizationalsequence of the essays because it is not until the second half of the book, which includesDavidson’s more recent thinking, that I believe readers can fully appreciate the significanceof his work. In this essay on distorted evidence, inspired by the writing of Ginzburg, Davidsonacknowledges a weakness with his earlier position on scientific thinking as the impetus forthe creation of sexual perversions, such as homosexuality. As he states:

It might well be that beginning with the creation of the homosexual by psychiatry,homosexual culture only gradually evolved a life of its own. . . . But it might also bethe case that. . . wehave failed to read the evidence correctly; we have neglected toexploit the gaps, miscommunications, and resistances, and so we have failed to see theexistence, from the beginning of a partially autonomous reality from below. (p. 157)

He goes on to cogently point out that examples from one dominant culture, as in the case ofmedicine, can lead to the neglect of less powerful cultures from below. To counter thisdeficiency, he presents historiographical guidelines directed at searching for and utilizingmultiple sources of conflicting evidence and diverse contexts. Included in this discussion is

187BOOK REVIEWS


shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of texta treatment of the relationship between the historian and the historical reality he or she seeks

to present.The historiography section of the book also contains two significant pieces on Foucault.

One involves a comparison of Foucault with the tradition of Anglo-American conceptualanalysis, while the other contrasts Foucault’s system of archeology with the French traditionof historical epistemology. Although the chronological sequencing of essays presents someproblems in readability, it serves as a revealing example of Davidson’s growth as a thinker.All in all, this is a provocative set of essays that contributes specifically to the philosophyand history of sexuality, and more generally to epistemology and historiography.

Reviewed by HENRY L. MINTON, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, University of Windsor,Windsor, Ontario N9B 3P4.


Ben Shephard.A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists, 1914–1994.London: JonathanCape, 2000. 487 pp. $20.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-224-06033-3; Cambridge: Harvard Uni-versity Press, 2001. xxiii, 485 pp. $27.95. ISBN 0-674-00592-9.

Soldiers suffering from nervous breakdowns became a familiar appearance in the warsof the twentieth century. Described as suffering from shell shock, battle fatigue, or war neu-rosis, these soldiers displayed symptoms ranging from paralysis, mutism, blindness, uncon-trollable stuttering, and trembling to jumpiness at unexpected noise, repetitive nightmares,and anxiety attacks. Other soldiers appeared to hold up well under the strains of battle, onlyto experience depression, irritability, and anxiety disorders years after peace had been rees-tablished. Physicians and soldiers have repeatedly emphasized the psychological costs ofwarfare while armies in a number of countries requested the help of psychiatrists to containthese costs. In his comprehensive overview of the involvement of psychiatrists with the mil-itary, Ben Shephard examines the responses of psychiatrists to mental breakdown in the army,the ideas of military officials with regard to mental breakdown in soldiers and the presenceof psychiatrists in the army, and changes in public opinion about war neuroses. Shephardcommences with the medical and public response to shell shock during World War I in theBritish Army and concludes with more current debates around the nature of post-traumaticstress disorder, the diagnosis which was formulated after the American involvement inVietnam.

Psychiatric perspectives on war neuroses were marked by debates and inner tensions,which are extensively covered in Shephard’s account. Psychiatrists either emphasized thenecessity of screening out recruits who would most likely break down in combat or theimportance of developing treatment methods for soldiers succumbing to war neuroses. Psy-chiatrists treating soldiers were led by the dual motivation of treating and aiding traumatizedsoldiers and of conserving manpower by returning them to combat as soon as was expedient.They debated whether the traumatic neuroses of war originated from combat experiences orwere previously existing neuroses that only had been brought to the surface. They attempted

188 BOOK REVIEWS


shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textto distinguish undeserving malingerers from the soldiers who they thought were no longer

able to face combat and should be relieved from duty. They proposed a variety of treatmentmethods ranging from stern discipline and punitive treatment to cathartic treatment in whicha soldier was encouraged to relive and verbalize his combat experience. More puzzling werethe symptoms of war neuroses in soldiers who had never faced battle; some of them had noteven left the country before breaking down. Such observations made it impossible to settlethe debates on the nature of war neuroses for once and for all.

Psychiatrists and government officials were particularly concerned about the conse-quences of providing compensation in the form of pensions to those soldiers who left the warwith lasting emotional scars. Unfortunately, the acknowledgment of the existence and severityof war neuroses by providing such compensation has often had the effect of transforming itinto a chronic condition. At the end of his study, Shephard presents the rather soberingconclusion that, as far as the suffering of soldiers is concerned, it has not made a greatdifference what type of treatment (if any) has been provided and whether the traumatizingeffects of participating in battle were generally acknowledged or not.

During the last two decades, the nature of trauma has been discussed by psychiatrists,psychologists, historians, and the public in general. Shephard does not embrace one of theextremes in this debate; he refuses to portray soldiers suffering from war neuroses as unwillingand passive victims but emphasizes their unconscious agency in using their medical symptomsas a way of justifying their removal from the battlefield. Shephard’s book is encyclopedic inscope, rich in detail, and provides an overview of psychiatric ideas as they have been devel-oped by psychiatrists in the United Kingdom, the United States, and, to a lesser extent, inGermany. In his exceedingly well-written account, he details the perspectives of Army psy-chiatrists, soldiers, the military command, and the general public.A War of Nervespromisesto become the standard work of the history of military psychiatry for a long time to come.

Reviewed by HANS POLS, Lecturer, Unit for History and Philosophy of Science, Universityof Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia.


Allan V. Horwitz. Creating Mental Illness.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.289 pp. $32.50 (cloth). ISBN 0-226-35381-8.

Allan Horwitz, professor of sociology at Rutgers University and member of the Institutefor Health and Health Care Policy there, has given us the most sophisticated effort to date topresent the “social constructionist” analysis of psychiatric illness in terms that clinicians andstudents of neuroscience will find convincing. Social constructionism, in its extreme form,has a long and unconvincing history of attempts to persuade us that there is no such thing aspsychiatric illness and that so-called mental “diseases” represent societal labeling of the re-bellious or marginal. Worse, the version emphasizing “professionalization” believes that thewhole psychiatric-disease scam is simply an act of self-aggrandizement on the part of themental-health establishment.

Horwitz retains what is useful in that take—the recognition that cultural modeling does

189BOOK REVIEWS


shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textinfluence the presentation of illness—while at the same time carving out a role for underlying

brain dysfunction (he doesn’t use the term “disease”) and acknowledging the existence ofpsychiatric genetics. In his analysis we dance from “mental diseases,” to “mental disorders,”to “mental illnesses,” each representing a different combination of personal distress, brainbiology, and cultural modeling. And what Horwitz does superbly—better than any otherinvestigator who has taken on the sociology of psychiatry—is to show what social forcesand scientific arguments are lined up on behalf of each of these blendings.

He starts out by tracing the expansion of psychiatric diagnoses from the handful ofasylum diseases in the days of Emil Kraepelin—around 1900—to the riot of “disorders”found in the later DSM series: DSM-III in 1980 and beyond. Psychonalysis, in the first halfof the twentieth century, has a lot to answer for, he says, in expanding the scope of illness toinclude the “neuroses,” with such concepts as the “normal neurotic.”

But in the later DSM editions we see a real turning of the page. Horwitz quite correctlybelieves DSM-III and beyond to be much off target. The basic problem, he argues, is DSM’sdesire to see psychiatric complaints as specific diseases rather than as continuous psycholog-ical qualities. “Most valid forms of mental illness manifest themselves through broad, change-able, and continuous symptoms, not discrete disease entities” (p. 113). Thus we have inDSM-IV a document that lists almost 400 psychiatric diseases, whereas Philippe Pinel, oneof the early-nineteenth-century founders of psychiatry, thought there were only four.

Who benefits from this riot of largely artifactual diagnoses? The National Institute ofMental Health, for example, has received a new lease on life by plunging into psychiatricepidemiology, discovering hitherto rare kinds of symptoms to be widespread indeed. “Thelogic of symptom-based diagnoses in community studies considers [many] persons mentallydisordered, regardless of the fact that their symptoms do not stem from internal dysfunctions”(p. 92). This plays perfectly into the niche-marketing strategies of the drug companies andthe need of the patient-support groups for empire building.

One of the most delicious parts of Horwitz’s whole analysis is the section on sexualdysfunction, for which, he says, the real remedy is to change partners rather than go on meds.“There is no valid reason to consider nearly half of women and one-third of men as sufferingfrom the disorder of sexual dysfunction” (pp. 92–93). Just as explosive as the Viagra salescurve has been that of such SSRI-style antidepressants as Paxil for a brand of shyness knownas “social phobia.” All these diagnoses are celebrated in the media, proferred to patients byphysicians, and generally offer models of illness behavior to those with inchoate and disor-ganized dysphoria.

Like Christ throwing the money changers out of the Temple, Horwitz scourges thedisease designers of DSM, the patient-support groups hooked on drug company money, andthe government bureaucrats struggling for a place in the money hail from Congress. All havebeen complicit in the rage of nondiseases that constitute the lot of Main Street psychiatrytoday.

Are there problems with this analysis? I am a bit uneasy with Horwitz’s water-tight wallsbetween “real” diseases such as schizophrenia and manic-depressive illness, and daily un-happiness that gets encoded as depression. In family studies, patients with reactive depressionoften have just as much genetic loading as those with the supposedly more serious disorders.A number of symptoms that Horwitz relativizes on the grounds that they are culturally orhistorically not universal may nonetheless have a neurobiology of their own. Agreed: thepresentation of much depression doubtless owes a great deal to cultural modeling. But let’snot get carried away.

The book relies heavily not to say entirely upon the work of other scholars, rather than

190 BOOK REVIEWS


shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textdigging in the archives of such institutions as the American Psychiatric Association or in the

insider newsletters of the pharmaceutical industry, where he would have found much addi-tional material to boost his case. But that would have meant a different kind of book. Thepresent one makes for engaging reading and constitutes a major building block in the effortsthat scholars such as David Healy (1997) have begun, to make a powerful weapon of thesocial-construction case by integrating it with biology.

REFERENCE

Healy, D. (1997). The antidepressant era. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Reviewed by EDWARD SHORTER, Professor of the History of Medicine and Professor ofPsychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto.


Ron Robin. The Making of the Cold War Enemy: Culture and Politics in the Military-Intellectual Complex.Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001. 277 pp.$39.50 (cloth). ISBN 0-691-01171-0.

The Making of the Cold War Enemyis a thought-provoking contribution to the literatureon Cold War American science. Whereas most previous work focused on the physical sci-ences, Ron Robin examines the social sciences; and whereas most works on the social scienceshave had a strong disciplinary orientation, Robin places the “behavioral sciences” at the centerof attention. Concentrating on defense-supported research at the Rand Corporation and else-where, Robin’s book is also important because it examines work ranging from psychologicalwarfare to counter-insurgency studies rather than the better known efforts of the nuclearstrategists working on game theory and deterrence policy.

This book is most successful in analyzing how an interdisciplinary group of leadingscholars (i.e., Bernard Berelson, Alex Inkeles, Morris Janowitz, Harold Lasswell, DanielLerner, Edward Shils, Hans Speier, Samuel Stouffer, Paul Lazarsfeld, Wilbur Schramm, Na-than Leites, Stuart Dodd, Herbert Goldhamer, and Charles Wolf, Jr., among others) helpedto construct a highly problematic portrait of the Cold War enemy and contributed to ques-tionable, even disastrous, American foreign policies from Korea to Vietnam. In places, Robinsays that behavioral scientists produced “ingenious and intellectually stimulating” work (p.5), but the weight of his analysis shows, rather, how inadequate were their methodologicalpreferences and how impoverished were their theoretical perspectives.

The main problem, Robin argues, was that these warrior scholars failed to recognize thesharp conflict between scholarship and policy and had a “fatal attraction” to physics. As aresult, behavioral scientists embraced quantitative methodologies, built predictive models,and turned out simplistic analyses that ignored important cultural differences and lackedhistorical perspective. Whether studying the soldiers, military leaders, political officials, orpopulations in Korea, Vietnam, or the United States, American behavioral scientists put forthone all-encompassing model, based upon the premise that scientific analysis required the

191BOOK REVIEWS


shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textsearch for universal generalizations. In particular, they elaborated a universal framework

centered on the process of modernization and in which the United States stood as the leadingexample of a modern nation.

Drawing on Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions, Robin also tells the storyof the rise and fall of the behavioral sciences “paradigm” from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s. Interestingly, though not noted by Robin, Kuhn saw social science as scientificallyimmature because it lacked a single dominant paradigm. But did the behavioral sciencesprovide this field of study with a single dominant paradigm, as Robin argues? This is notclear. Scholars within the social science disciplines often disagreed on basic issues such aswhether there was one behavioral science or many behavioral sciences, and whether behav-ioral science represented the one best scientific way or only one among a number of validorientations within the social sciences. Moreover, the scientific legitimacy of the social orbehavioral sciences was widely questioned by outsiders in those years, beginning with skep-tical economists and physical scientists at the Rand Corporation whom Robin discusses, aswell as numerous political detractors, particularly during the McCarthy era.

In explaining the fall of the behavioral sciences, Robin proposes that “internal” scholarlycriticism was just as important as “external” factors like changing politics and patronage. Yet,since he focuses mainly on work from World War II through the Vietnam War that wassupported by defense dollars, that claim is hard to defend. Robins argues (with good reason)that the paradigm’s demise came in the mid-1960s, at the time of mounting criticism ofAmerican foreign policy in Vietnam and the military-intellectual complex. Here, however, itis difficult to separate criticism generated within the paradigm from criticism that had iden-tifiable social or political foundations.

The Making of the Cold War Enemypresents an important perspective with far-reachingmoral, political, and intellectual implications regarding the post-WWII behavioral scienceproject. Though it doesn’t fully answer all of the important questions it raises, this studymakes it clear that we need to pay careful attention to this project as we continue to argueabout the causes, contours, and consequences of Cold War science, social science, and Amer-ican foreign policy. Robin’s book thus deserves our careful consideration.

Reviewed by MARK SOLOVEY, Assistant Professor of History of Science, Arizona StateUniversity West, Phoenix, AZ 85069.


Sven Papcke.Gesellschaft der Eliten. Zur Reproduktion und Problematik sozialer Distanz.Muenster: Westfaelisches Dampfboot, 2001. 409 pp. ISBN 3-89691-496-0.

The study of elites starts with Aristotle who used the termoligarchy to designate therule of the few who exercise power in their own interest. In the same vein, Marx and Engelsheld that in capitalism the state is the executive committee for managing the common affairsof the bourgeois class.

In the twentieth century, the study of the masses and the elites has had a prominent placeboth in social theory and political doctrines. Robert Michels coined the term “iron law of

192 BOOK REVIEWS


shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textoligarchy” to refer to the inevitable tendency of political parties and unions to become cen-

tralized and bureaucratized. Ever since Vilfredo Pareto’s and Gaetano Mosca’s classicalworks, an ever increasing number of studies have discussed various economic, political, andcultural segments of elites, as well as their circulations. The customary distinction is madebetween economic, political, and cultural elites, their intertwining, their rise and fall, and theirnational variations. Empirical studies of economic elites ranges from the “American robberbarons” to C. Wright Mills’Power Elite.The political elites of totalitarian mass societies—fascism and communism—gained importance after the rise and fall of those societies andtheir elites. The study of cultural elites increased in importance with the increasingly domi-nating role of mass media, reaching a world wide audience. The sociological questions to beasked involve such topics as: who elites are and why they exist, democracy and elites, bu-reaucracies as elites, intellectuals and elites, and elites in underdeveloped countries, just toname a few.

Sven Papcke, the eminent German political sociologist at the University of Muenster,offers his investigation of groups at the top and bottom of society and their respective poweror powerlessness, and the elite structures concomitant with societal developments since thedissolution of allegedly egalitarian premodern societies. We may recall Mills’ admonitionabout the problem of middle class sociologists for whom the very top of modern society isoften inaccessible, while the very bottom is often hidden. Papcke asks the important questionwhether we are dealing with a real selection of elites or rather with prominent people whoraised themselves to the level of sociopolitical dominance and the demands of the times. Healso ask questions about the sense and non-sense of social distance and about the risks thatemerge as the result of the gap between elites and the general populace.

Each and every modern society is unique in its makeup and the pattern of the changesof elites; modern German society with its turbulent history, revolutions, and world wars iseven more so. After 1945, the Nazi political–military elite was tried, many of its memberswere executed, while a substantial part of the economic and cultural elite survived and re-turned to prominence in due time. Another theme raised and discussed skillfully by Papckeconcerns questions of counter-elites in the political and cultural sphere, their admissions tothe top and/or co-optation.

This is an extraordinarily impressive book on all accounts, touching on all the major andcentral issues and themes related to elites and masses. Papcke offers the reader his interpre-tation in a highly readable and always engaging style, and illustrates his intimate knowledgeof particular events as well as of major figures of Western history. The book is a tour de forceof scholarly discussion and addresses itself to one of the hottest market areas of the field, tostudents of political sociology, political science, and the history of ideas. This is a book towhich the educated general public will eventually come because, while it is a scholarly work,it is also easy to read and understand, following in the tradition of many great politicalthinkers; it is also a social document that marks an epoch and thus provides an up-to-dateassessment of major social and political issues.

Papcke has given the book a symphonic unity that carries the reader along from begin-ning to end. The study transmits useful information from current German scholarship; thus,a translation of the volume into English would provide great service for English speakingscholars and lay public who are interested in problems of elites in modern societies.

Reviewed by ZOLTAN TARR, Professor Emeritus New York City and Budapest. E-mail:[email protected].

193BOOK REVIEWS


shortstandardlong



Othmar Keel. L’Avenement de la Me´decine Clinique Moderne en Europe (1750–1815).Montreal, PQ: Les Presses de l’Universite´ de Montreal, 2001. 542 pp. CAN$59.95. ISBN2-7606-1822-6.

“The current time is one of these great periods of history, towards which future gener-ations will often turn back their eyes, and of which they will eternally ask to account thosethat can there guide mankind more quickly and more certainly on the roads of improvement.It is given only to few favored geniuses to exercise this great influence: but in the state whereare today’s sciences and arts, there is nobody, in a sense, who cannot contribute to theirprogress” (Cabanis, 1804, p. 436; author’s translation).

In hisCoup d’Oeil sur les Re´volutions et sur la Re´forme de la Me´decine(1804), Frenchphysician and philosopher Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis (1757–1808) had the feeling that histime was a theater for determining changes in the practice and teaching of medicine. AlthoughCabanis was unable to precisely describe what was going on in his own time, he neverthelesswas prescient of Keel’s work by intuitively describing his time as a prominent period in thehistory of modern medicine.

Keel’s book is a one-of-a-kind chapter in the history of modern clinical medicine thatresolutely challenges received ideas. As Cabanis suggested, Keel turns his eyes to the periodsthat both preceded and followed the French Revolution and shows the emerging process ofhospital medicine with a singular and original perspective, as well as a broader and morecomprehensive one. Keel describes two important aspects of the advent of the “new” medi-cine. First, he shows that the changes that took place in the practice and teaching of medicineappeared long before the second decade of the nineteenth century. Second, Keel underlinesthe importance of other figures than those of the School of Paris in this emerging process.What he maintains is that an abrupt change took place by the middle of the eighteenth centurylasting until the first decades of the nineteenth century, not only in France (Paris), but in otherEuropean countries as well. According to Keel’s research, during that period the 23-century-old medical heritage from Antiquity was replaced by new ideas. Briefly, research, teaching,and practice henceforth had the hospital as a framework for their development. The hospitalthus replaced the bedside and became the main arena for the clinical and medical experience.There was an epistemological move from the private to the public sphere.

Keel succeeds well in demonstrating the details of this epistemological turning point thatcharacterized the rise of hospital medicine in Europe. He emphasizes, in an elegant andbrilliantly written text, the structural, technical and institutional dimensions of this extensivemutational process. He places the School of Paris in its much broader European context andconceives the advent of hospital medicine as a complex set of interactions and exchangesamong the different medical schools of the different European countries. Keel shows thatEuropean countries not only shared technical advances and theoretical models, but elementsof medical policies and the societal prerequisites to these. Therefore, the revolution that tookplace in medicine between 1750 and 1815 was a theoretical and practical transformation,concerning medical knowledge as well as the day-to-day practice of medicine. Keel’s bookshould be considered a prelude to a paradigmatic change in the history of modern medicine.

REFERENCE

Cabanis, P. J. G. (1804). Coup d’oeil sur les re´volutions et sur la re´forme de la me´decine. Paris: Crapart.

194 BOOK REVIEWS


shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textReviewed by YVES TURGEON, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Psychology, Northern

Michigan University, 1401 Presque Isle Ave., Marquette, MI 49855. E-mail: [email protected].


Jacob A. Belzen (Ed.).Psychohistory in Psychology of Religion: Interdisciplinary Studies.International Series in the Psychology of Religion, Vol. 12 (J. A. Belzen & J. M.van der Lans, Eds.).Atlanta: Rodopi, 2001. 269 pp. $43.00 (paper). ISBN 90-420-1205-6.

In his introductory essay to this stimulating collection, Antoon Vergote provides a re-freshingly broad definition of psychohistory as “the part of historiography that uses psycho-logical concepts and theories for explaining important aspects of past human phenomena andwhich, in doing so, contributes to the understanding of the facts described” (p. 21). Vergoteand editor Jacob Belzen begin by articulating the numerous risks involved in psychohistory:the errors of psychologism and pathologizing; the unavailability of the “subject” of psycho-biography for interviews or psychological testing; the danger of using clinical observationsto argue causality; the risk of ignoring the context of the social environment.

One way to grasp the richness of this collection is to note the great diversity of datasources utilized by these psychohistorians: the sermons of John Henry Newman and Johan-Christian Arndt; private journals, diaries, and letters of Newman, Hitler, Stalin, Freud, St.Ignatius, Van Gogh; official memoranda and correspondence regarding the New MexicoPenitentes, the Beaurain apparitions, and Newman’s conflicts with his mentors; the illustratedPhilippson Bible; biographies and autobiographical sketches; published works of St. Ignatius,Freud, and Erik Erikson; a variety of German novels in Goethe’sWerthertradition, alongwith plays and popular songs depicting suicide; Van Gogh’s self-portraits and related paint-ings; recollections of “disciples”; confidential documents of exorcists and clinical case ma-terial related to demonic possession; estate inventories; legal and ecclesiastical codes; courtand ecclesiastical chapter records; mission reports; Penitente and Jesuit constitutions; annualreports of the [Dutch Calvinist] Association of Christian Care for the Mentally Ill; and notary,psychiatrist, and medical commission reports concerning the 1932–1933 apparitions of theVirgin Mary in Beaurain, Belgium.

Jozef Corveleyn provides an excellent example of how the nine contributors to thisvolume generally realize that the psychohistorian must scrutinize far more than individualmotivation. Corveleyn poses a number of larger psychohistorical questions pertaining to theinstitutional church and the psychological authorities it consulted during its inquiries into theBeaurain apparitions. What psychology was used? What conception of science undergirdedthat psychology? What were the consequences of the apparitions, and the responses of eccle-siastical and medical authorities, for the child seers? He notes that layers of social-psycho-logical and folk-psychological understanding are required to understand the multipleinfluences that shaped public reception to the apparitions.

195BOOK REVIEWS


shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textThe new face of psychohistory was clear in Donald Capps’ application of Hjalmar Sun-

den’s role theory to argue that Newman’s sermons and biographical studies constituted reli-gious role-takings, in Jacob Belzen’s illuminating examination of the mentality of theCalvinist pillar in Dutch society, and in William Meissner’s exploration of Van Gogh’s con-version to unbelief. I was also intrigued by the implicit psychologies of perception in theessays by Capps, Corveleyn, and Meissner.

I had mixed reactions to the psychoanalytic essays. Ana-Marıá Rizzuto argues convinc-ingly that Freud’s antiquities collection, reproducing the illustrations in the Philippson Bible,served to retrieve “a needed paternal presence” (p. 110). Richard A. Hutch successfully ex-amines the role of thenuminosumin the lives of Stalin and Hitler. Arne Jarrick’s fascinatinganalysis of suicide—solidly grounded in public documents—ultimately suffers from an out-dated theory of shame; and Michael P. Carroll’s application of Robert Paul’s core narrativeto the New Mexican Penitentes infuses silliness into an otherwise superb historical overview.

Despite the lack of a subject index, and the gender-insensitive language of Jarrick andCorveleyn, this volume is a “must have” for both psychologists of religion and social histo-rians.

Reviewed by HENDRIKA VANDE KEMP, Independent Scholar, Annandale, VA.

Journal of History of the Behavioral Sciences,Vol. 39(2), 195–196 Spring 2003Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10:1002/jhbs.10094� 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Richard C. Allen. David Hartley on Human Nature.Albany: State University of New YorkPress, 1999. 469 pp. $24.95 (paper). ISBN 0-7914-4234-9.

David Hartley on Human Natureis the product of an incredible amount of work and isso dense with information that it almost qualifies as a reference work. In fact, the author’sbibliography and chronology of Hartley’s life are extensive enough that the book probablywill be used by future Hartley scholars in exactly that way. The book begins with an extendedquotation from Joseph Priestley informing the reader that Hartley is not an author who canbe read over the course of a few evenings. This also turns out to be good advice for Allen’sreaders. Because it is so densely packed and so loosely structured, it is best not to read straightthrough but to treat this volume as a series of entertaining paragraphs and loosely con-nected articles. By my second reading, I began to think of this book as a trick-or-treat bag;every time that I reached in I found something different and was usually pleased with theresult.

Allen covers all the aspects of Hartley’s thought that one would expect—his doctrineof vibrations, his associationist psychology, his neurophysiology, and his speculations onmemory, sensation and perception. What makes Allen’s account unusual is that he includesportions of Hartley’s thought that are usually ignored such as his theories of emotional trans-fer, voluntary action, the origin of language, imagination, ambition, and his classifications ofpleasure and contributions to probability theory. More significantly, Allen discusses topicsthat others pass over not out of simple disinterest but out of feelings of embarrassment or asense that such topics are inappropriate to a history of science, such as Hartley’s moral

196 BOOK REVIEWS


shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textpsychology, his naturalistic theology, his vegetarianism, and his thoughts on self-interest and

benevolence. Because of its thoroughness and scope,David Hartley on Human Naturewilllikely become a standard reference among Hartley scholars.

Allen’s major theses are persuasive. One leaves this book convinced that Hartley is athinker to be taken seriously. Allen is also correct in his assertion that Hartley can only berightly understood if we accept that his theories were simultaneous statements of theologyand materialistic science. Hartley was a naturalistic theologian, and if we remove the theologyfrom his thought we invite misinterpretation. Further, Allen’s suggestion that Hartley’s modelof the human psyche deserves its place next to those of Freud or Kohlberg has merit.

The book’s argument breaks down in its last few concluding pages. Allen wants some-thing more than recognition for Hartley, something much grander than correct interpreta-tion—he wants to revive the naturalistic theology project itself. Hartley’s major work oughtto serve, in Allen’s words as “a paradigm for a textbook in psychology—that is, both atextbook in science and textbook in theology” (p. 404). In a number of passages Allen makesit clear that he understands secular psychology in terms of exclusion and censorship; indeedwhat is wrong with contemporary academic psychology, says Allen, is that it fails to accountfor the spiritual aspects of life. However, this will not persuade those of us who do not find‘spiritual’ to be an especially useful or interesting category. Allen has done an exceptionaljob of convincing the reader that one needs to understand theology to understand Hartley butis considerably less convincing when arguing that psychology needs theology to understandhumanity. Although his concluding remarks disappointed me, they did not change my opinionthat Allen has produced the best book on Hartley I have read thus far.

Reviewed by DAN AALBERS, Ph.D. Candidate in the History and Theory Area, Departmentof Psychology, York University.


Dean K. Simonton. Great Psychologists and Their Times: Scientific Insights Into Psy-chology’s History.Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2002. 554pp. $49.95 (cloth). ISBN 1-55798-896-X.

What makes a psychologist great? In this ambitious book, Dean Keith Simonton reviewshistoriometric findings on this question, addressing psychologists, scientists, and historiansinterested in “the provocative overlap among psychology, science, and history” (p. xi). Ex-tending his 1995 proposal to test metahistorical generalizations published in histories of psy-chology, Simonton examines individual differences and longitudinal changes in “greatness,”as defined by publication counts, citation counts, and rankings by expert psychologists andrelates greatness to an impressive array of personal characteristics (e.g., intelligence, traits,and worldviews), developmental features (e.g., family background and career training), andsociocultural contexts both internal to psychology (e.g., Comtian progress and Kuhnian trans-formations) and external to it (e.g., cultural values and political conditions). He illustratesthese results with many interesting examples of individual great psychologists; unfortunately,

197BOOK REVIEWS


shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textthe subject index does not list them by name. Simonton concludes by discussing implications

for teaching and research.Reviewing studies that span several centuries and many (largely Western) cultures, Si-

monton adopts “an inclusive perspective on psychology’s history” (p. 6) by considering psy-chologists, philosophers, and scientists who have contributed to the field. His own approachto the “scientific history of psychology” is not so inclusive, however; “The researcher tran-scends history by adopting a scientific perspective that is fundamentally ahistorical.” This“scientific ‘transhistorical’ strategy” (p. 21) involves nomothetic and quantitative studies thatseek “universal and abstract laws or regularities” and allow the researcher “to incorporateinto a single data analysis all of the variables that are deemed critical in making a psychologist‘great’;qc (p. 22). Simonton dismisses idiographic historical studies as mere collections of“idiosyncratic facts [that] have no significance beyond the individual to whom they belong”(p. 193), a view that historians and psychologists interested in idiographic approaches willfind unacceptable [see, e.g., Danziger (1995) and Furumoto (1995)].

Simonton’s suggestion to avoid unsupported generalizations in history texts is reason-able. However, many of his “covering laws,” resting on arbitrary and decontextualized vari-able definitions, seem questionable as correctives. For example, he considers psychologists’tendency to acknowledge more consultants than do physicists a measure of psychologists’greater scientific uncertainty (an indicator of lower status in Comte’s hierarchy of sciences),rather than simply an example of his previous finding of psychologists’ greater social ori-entation. Simonton’s “covering laws” often mask considerable transhistorical variation in themeanings and effects of variables. Although he does consider changes in the “gender milieu”in his treatment of gender differences in greatness, his treatment of class and ethnicity (e.g.,his general “law” of Jewish preeminence in psychology) is less contextualized.

Simonton suggests teaching the history of psychology from the perspective of “the psy-chology of science” with “covering laws” to understand individual great psychologists eitheras examples or as exceptions (often a substantial proportion of the sample, as he points out);exceptions in turn illustrate the statistical nature of psychological laws and the effects ofmissing variables. This approach, which makes laws the central focus, may bring the historyof psychology closer to “the science of psychology” (p. 460), as Simonton suggests. Ironi-cally, however, it neglects the methods of the “human science” psychologists his studies findto be the “greatest.” Psychologists and historians who prefer a more inclusive approach andthose who wish to pursue an understanding of exceptions to Simonton’s laws may find hisbook a source of inspiration for detailed studies of psychologists within their historical con-texts.

REFERENCES

Danziger, K. (1995). Neither science nor history? Psychological Inquiry, 6, 115–117.Furumoto, L. (1995). On textbook history of psychology and scientizing history. Psychological Inquiry, 6, 124–

126.Simonton, D. K. (1995). Behavioral laws in histories of psychology: Psychological science, metascience, and the

psychology of science. Psychological Inquiry, 6, 89–114.

Reviewed by NICOLE B. BARENBAUM, Professor of Psychology, University of the South,Sewanee, TN 37383.

198 BOOK REVIEWS


shortstandardlong



Colin Heywood.A History of Childhood: Children and Childhood in the West From Medie-val to Modern Times.Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001. 231 pp. $59.95 (cloth). ISBN0-7456-1731-X. $24.95 (paper). ISBN 0-7456-1732-8.

Steven Ozment.Ancestors: The Loving Family in Old Europe.Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 2001. 162 pp. $31.50 (cloth). ISBN 0-674-00483-3. $14.95 (paper).ISBN 0-674-00484-1.

These books offer concise and accessible syntheses of recent work in the history ofWestern childhood and the European family. Drawing on the “social constructionist” frame-work developed by Allison James, Chris Jenks, and Alan Prout, Heywood argues that his-torians must recapture both the adult attitudes and institutions that affect children’s lives andchildren’s perspective and agency. He reviews adult ideas about childhood (cultural history)as a background to the examination of children’s experience (social history), first in the familyand then in the wider worlds of work and school. In response to Philippe Arie`s’s “startlingassertion that the medieval world was ignorant of childhood” (p. 11), Heywood proposes,following David Archard, a distinction between a culture’sconceptof childhood (the notionthat children differ from adults) and varyingconceptionsof the difference between childrenand adults. Instead of a “discovery of childhood,” he discerns recurrent debates around theoppositions innocence/depravity, nature/nurture, dependence/independence, and the relationof age to gender. However, in the long run, social transformations resulted in an intensificationof interest in children, protracted childhoods and adolescences, and a sharper boundary be-tween childhood and adulthood.

Heywood summarizes historians’ findings on the child’s position in the family and withpeers, different approaches to child-rearing, and children’s economic role before and afterindustrialization. He also charts the reduction in both child mortality and fertility, expansionof schooling, advances in child hygiene and welfare, and rising intervention of the state andexperts over the past two centuries. Although the striking improvements in Western children’shealth are undeniable, Heywood stresses the persistence of inequalities along class, ethnic,and regional lines (to “avoid an air of triumphalism” [p. 145]).

A History of Childhoodis organized thematically rather than chronologically, focusing“on ways of interpreting the material rather than the details of what happened” (p. 8). Hey-wood painstakingly assesses arguments advanced by previous historians, but the nonspecial-ists and students to whom the book is primarily addressed would benefit from a stronger,unified argument backed by detailed discussion of fewer examples, that is, more history andless historiography. Readers of an introductory text such as this one may be perplexed byHeywood’s leaps between centuries, countries, and continents and indeterminate use of “thepast” (as in “What was it like to be ill as a child in the past?” [p. 146]).

In Ancestors,Ozment reexamines the account of the European family put forward byhistorians in the 1960s and 1970s in light of the insights of later scholars. He challenges Arie`sand his successors, for whom the “premodern” or “preindustrial” family (patriarchal, imper-sonal, and “sociable”) was replaced by the allegedly superior “modern” family (increasinglyegalitarian, sentimental, private, and child-centered). He questions as well gender historians’condemnation of the early modern period as having confined women in the home and pre-vented them from pursuing other occupations. Ozment in turn develops two arguments: that

199BOOK REVIEWS


shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textfamily archives provide the best access to the family of the past and that the “modern”

(sentimental) family in fact existed in all historical periods.Historians of childhood and the family face different problems with regard to the avail-

ability, reliability, and representativeness of sources. Heywood notes the paucity of recordsleft by children against the relative abundance of official and institutional documents, literaryand polemical texts, visual representations, and adult recollections. Family historians, in Oz-ment’s view, must choose between a quantitative (structural) approach and a qualitative ap-proach based on the analysis of family archives (diaries and correspondence). Ozmentpersuasively claims that in family archives “the people of the past convey both the story oftheir lives and what they personally made of them” (p. 106). The argument would be morepersuasive if it were not cast as an either/or alternative; different kinds of sources and bothquantitative and qualitative approaches are valuable in the investigation of the past. Besides,as Ozment acknowledges, family archives furnish evidence pertaining mostly to literate, urbanelites from the fifteenth century onward, evidence that cannot support his claim that thesentimental family existed before and in all social groups. When Ozment writes that “[f]romancient Roman marriage practices, to seventeenth-century funeral sermons, to advice literatureextending into the twentieth century, historians find abundant features of the ‘modern senti-mental family’ existing from antiquity through the Renaissance” (p. 104), one is at a loss tofollow his logic. Family archives may be treasure-troves indeed, but here Ozment wants themto do work they cannot do.

Heywood and Ozment go to great lengths to defend parents of the past from the chargesof indifference, neglect, and abuse leveled by earlier historians, contending that practices suchas swaddling and wet-nursing must be understood in their specific context and that regardlessof how they appear to twenty-first century readers these practices expressed parents’ care andlove. Both authors find the evidence of widespread violence against children, abandonment,and infanticide adduced by other historians inadequate. Ozment asserts that the main goal ofchild-rearing in the past was to prepare children to “live and work independently” (p. 73);what we perceive as authoritarianism was a manifestation of sincere concern. He reproducesexcerpts from letters written between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries showing that,confronted with “a child who, whether due to weakness, ineptitude, or perversity, stoppedbefore a jumpable hurdle, or succumbed to some self-defeating temptation or folly,” parents“dug in for the duration, dragging their children kicking and screaming into adulthood anduseful citizenship rather than abandon them to their own hapless devices” (p. 80–1). Althoughthis “parents-know-best” agenda is a far cry from the doubts cast on the infallibility of parentalauthority by historians during the rebellious 1960s and early 1970s, in both cases the histo-rians’ concerns cannot be separated from contemporary anxieties about childhood and par-enting. When, with Heide Wunder, Ozment suggests that the “return of women to the home”in the sixteenth century did not impoverish their lives but gave them an opportunity to applytheir creativity to family and children, it is hard not to see this too as an intervention in currentcontroversies on women’s renewed embrace of work outside the home and its purportedeffects on “the family.”

Reviewed by ADRIANA S. BENZAQUEN, Department of History, Mount Saint Vincent Uni-versity, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada B3M 2J6.

200 BOOK REVIEWS


shortstandardlong



Adam Kuper. Among the Anthropologists: History and Context in Anthropology.NewBrunswick, NJ: The Athlone Press, 1999. X� 214 pp. ISBN 0-4851-1536-0.

Adam Kuper occupies a unique position in the landscape of contemporary anthropology.An accomplished ethnographer in the tradition of British social anthropology, he has, overthe last few decades, also become one of that tradition’s premier historians. As a consummateinsider, Kuper’s historiographical style is not exactly Rankean. Far from a dispassionateobserver who carefully weighs archival evidence to arrive at neutral conclusions, Kuper isan eloquent partisan. A South African who trained and spent most of his professional careerin England, he intimately knows the ideas and personalities that shaped British anthropology,and he deploys his historical work in their more or less overtly presentist celebration. Kuper’sbook,Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School,published originallyin 1973 and now in its third edition (1996), is the archetype for this approach. Written witha wit and candor that brings to life the world of Kuper’s teachers and teachers’ teachers, thetext is widely popular among anthropologists. A staple in departmental courses on the historyof the discipline, it strikes a balance between historical information and “native folklore,”and it leaves the reader with a strong sense of British anthropology’s intellectual and politicalpowers.

More recently, Kuper has stepped up his presentist defense of British social anthropol-ogy. Deploying his characteristic historiographical style, he turned his attention to its principalparadigmatic competition—American cultural anthropology. The result,Culture: The An-thropologists’ Account(1999), is a deconstructive history of American anthropology’s centralconcept—a history that doubles as a scathing critique of the ways the discipline is practicedin the United States. Reproducing a long-standing British critique of American anthropology,Kuper identifies the American preoccupation with culture as the articulation of a Germanromantic (read potentially reactionary, certainly apolitical) tradition. Kuper traces that tradi-tion through such figures as Talcott Parsons, Clifford Geertz, and Marshall Sahlins to arriveat a wholesale dismissal of the solipsistic postmodern anthropology they ostensibly spawned.Predictably, the remedy has a distinctly British flavor, a fusion of Radcliffe-Brownian con-cerns for the reality of social structures with a Marxian attention to political economy—anapproach pioneered by such figures as the South African/British anthropologist Max Gluck-mann.

Kuper’s collectionAmong the Anthropologists: History and Context in Anthropologyunites the historiographical celebration of British social anthropology with the critique of theAmerican cultural variant. Comprised of 11 pieces, nearly all of which were originally pub-lished in various European venues in the course of the 1990s, it showcases the strengths ofKuper’s passionate partisanship. Pieces on such British anthropological luminaries as AudreyRichards and Ernest Gellner glisten with a sense of the author’s personal familiarity with hissubjects (Richards is simply “Audrey”), whereas an essay on the hunter-gatherer debate ofthe 1960s and 1970s brilliantly reconstructs the institutional and intellectual dynamics of theCambridge Kuper encountered as a graduate student in the early 1960s. “Culture, Identityand the Project of a Cosmopolitan Anthropology” picks up on Kuper’s critique of Americananthropology, making an eloquent case against its move into the humanities. Against a culturalanthropology that takes as “its object the interpretation of cultural texts,” Kuper thus poses a

201BOOK REVIEWS


shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textsocial anthropology that is a “social science, closely allied to sociology and social history”

(p. 56).Kuper has written about the origins of his intellectual commitments in a particularly

South African constellation before. However, his essay “South African Anthropology: AnInside Job”—aside from an interview the only previously unpublished piece in the collec-tion—treats the topic succinctly and with great effectiveness. In this manner, it recalls thehistory of two competing paradigms: the English-based, universalist social anthropology,institutionalized by Radcliffe-Brown as chair of anthropology at Cape Town in the early1920s and the Afrikaans-based, particularist ethnology (Volkekunde), championed by suchfigures as W. W. M. Eiselen who deployed German romantic principles and the vision ofenduring cultural autonomy to codify and rationalize the Apartheid system. Liberal, Anglo-phone anthropologists like Kuper always saw their work as part of a struggle against thepolitics and epistemologies ofVolkekunde—a project Kuper has extended beyond the SouthAfrican context to other anthropological traditions deriving from nineteenth-century Germanmodels.

Other essays inAmong the Anthropologistsskirt these more presentist debates. However,those pieces—on Darwin’s influence on anthropology, the relationship between psychologyand anthropology, and the function of myths and dreams in Le´vi-Strauss and Freud—alsotend to be less compelling, not least because in the absence of new (archival) research theytend to confirm existing historiographical positions. However, if Kuper’s book does not sig-nificantly change our understanding of anthropology’s past, it still has merit for historians ofthe behavioral sciences. Those merits have to do with the discipline’s present, where Kuper’sAmong the Anthropologistscan serve as a fascinating guide to some of anthropology’s morepressing contemporary debates.

REFERENCES

Kuper, A. (1996). Anthropology and anthropologists: The modern British school (3rd ed.). New York: Routledge.Kuper, A. (1999). Culture: The anthropologists’ account. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Reviewed by MATTI BUNZL, Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL.


Angela N. H. Creager, Elizabeth Lunbeck, and Londa Schiebinger (Eds.).Feminism inTwentieth-Century Science, Technology, and Medicine.Chicago: University of Chi-cago Press, 2001. 264 pp. $65.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-226-12023-6. $20.00 (paper). ISBN0-226-12024-4.

This text is a welcome contemporary assessment of the role of feminism within theconstellation of science, technology, and medical practice. Its greatest contribution is thisthree-pronged approach within a literature (and a politic) that tends to keep them separate

202 BOOK REVIEWS


shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textand distinct. The collection also provides a much-needed American analysis of feminism and

technology with very useful overviews combined with specific, “on the floor” examples fromengineering, industry, and so forth. The two main weaknesses of the collection are the pre-dominant American focus (important work from abroad is ignored or downplayed) and ashallow working definition of feminism that runs throughout the first two sections (scienceand technology). Overall, the text is an important contribution to feminist scholarship,women’s studies, and the sociology and history of science and technology. It also revitalizes,and to some extent, updates debates involving gender, science, and technology.

The text is divided into the three sections reflected in the title. Both in the clear anduseful introduction to the collection (drawn from a 1998 workshop of the Women’s Caucusof the History of Science Society held at Princeton University) and throughout most of theentries, is a treatment of feminism that is both problematic and innovative. The innovationlies in the detailed assessments of the effect feminism has had on the three main areas. Thisprivileging of feminist practice over feminist theorizing, however, reduces feminism andwomen’s movements along the lines of what Pamela Mack calls “difference feminism” and“equal-rights feminism” (very loosely tied to the first- and second-wave women’s move-ments). Londa Schiebinger’s “tools of gender analysis,” a sort of practical application ofgender issues to professional practice, features in several entries. This analytical frameworkasks questions such as, “What are scientific priorities?” and “How does representative sam-pling function to exclude women from studies?” There are references to key texts in theburgeoning literature on gender, science, technology, and medicine (such as those by DonnaHaraway and Cynthia Cockburn), and many accomplished scholars including Alison Wylie,Evelyn Fox Keller, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Emily Martin, and Evelynn Hammonds are con-tributors. However, there is little analytical engagement with the established literature, es-pecially with the many theoretical twists and turns (such as science cultural studies,technoscience, and agential realism that are only picked up in the last section) and how theyinteract with political movements. In part, this is due to the commitment, especially in thefirst two sections in the collection, to detailed and varied analyses of feminist practices withinthe professions. When assessed on this basis, these sections shine. It is only two-thirds of theway through the book, however, in the consideration of feminism in medicine, that a balancebetween feminist concepts and the detailed practices within the field under criticism is made.

Reviewed by ANNETTE BURFOOT, Associate Professor of Sociology, Queen’s University,Kingston, Ontario, Canada K7L 3N6.


K. N. Cissna and R. Anderson.Moments of Meeting: Buber, Rogers, and the Potentialfor Public Dialogue. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. xxv� 323pp. $71.50 (cloth). ISBN 0-7914-5283-2. $23.95 (paper). ISBN 0-7914-5284-0.

This is the second of two volumes that Professors Kenneth Cissna and Rob Anderson

203BOOK REVIEWS


shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of texthave devoted to the dialogue between the great Jewish philosopher Martin Buber and the

great American psychologist Carl R. Rogers—a dialogue that I moderated at the Universityof Michigan in April 1957. If anything, this second volume is more meaningful and valuablethan the first.

One of Cissna and Anderson’s main concerns is to demonstrate that Rogers’s under-standing of “empathy” is actually close to Buber’s concept of “inclusion” in that it involvesrelation to others without giving up one’s own ground. Another is to suggest that Rogers’sstress on the emotional congruence of the therapist in relation to the client is comparable toBuber’s concept of “confirmation.” By both emphases they mean to obviate the criticismsthat I have made in my comparison of Rogers’s teaching of “self-actualization” and Buber’steaching of “dialogue” (Friedman, 1992, p. 40).

Persuaded byMoments of Meeting,I freely admit that Rogers was and is more dialogicalthan I thought. I am particularly impressed with Cissna and Anderson’s statement aboutRogers: “The wisdom of the dialogical perspective he shared came less from . . . priorphilosophical commitments than from the always changing practice in which he saw trustemerge under extraordinarily trying circumstances” (p. 97).

While recognizing that Rogers’s use of “empathy” is sometimes close to Buber’s bipolarconception of “inclusion,” I cannot agree with our authors’ conclusion that the differencebetween Rogers’s use of “empathy” and Buber’s use of “inclusion” is “more semantic thanconceptual” (p. 90). Also, when Buber uses the term “over against,” he does not mean thedifference and comparison (that characterize the I– It relation), as our authors hold (p. 102f.) but the face-to-face uniqueness of the I– thou relationship.

After counting some 90 times when Buber used the word “cannot” in his dialogue withRogers, Cissna and Anderson coined the phrase “rhetoric of cannot.” I do not doubt theircalculation, but I do differ most emphatically as to the motive that they ascribe to Buber forthis rhetoric. “Therhetoric of cannot,” they claim, “far from a rhetoric of invitation, is morelikely to be heard as a request to acquiesce to authority” (p. 166); “Buber’s rhetoric of cannotmay have discouraged active exploration of ideas, if its central message was that he wasalready certain of the nature of dialogic reality, and that through this conversation, he wasexpected to teach the correct conceptual distinctions” (p. 171).

In innumerable lectures and seminars that I heard Buber give in the course of a decade,I never heard him use a “rhetoric of cannot” in the service of trying to impose his ownexpertise as the foremost philosopher of dialogue! What I can say is that Buber got theimpression early on that Rogers believed in some sort of full mutuality between therapist andclient (and not that “normative limitation of mutuality” that Buber spoke of in the Postscriptthat he wrote for the second, 1958 edition ofI and Thou). Although originally I too felt thatRogers was claiming some sort of full mutuality, later I became convinced that actually allRogers was claiming was that his clients were aware of the “unconditional positive regard”that he brought to his work with them and that this awareness helped them change in a positivedirection.

REFERENCE

Friedman, M. (1992). Dialogue and the human image: Beyond humanistic psychology. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Reviewed by MAURICE FRIEDMAN, Co-director, Institute of Dialogical Psychotherapy, Pro-fessor Emeritus of Philosophy, San Diego State University.

204 BOOK REVIEWS


shortstandardlong


Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences,Vol. 39(2), 204 Spring 2003Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.10100� 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Owen Bradley.A Modern Maistre. The Social and Political Thought of Joseph de Maistre.Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. 320 pp. $65.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-8032-1295-X.

Owen Bradley aims to clear the French counter-revolutionary, Joseph de Maistre, of twocharges: first, that Maistre was an uncritical celebrant of violence for the sake of preservingorder, and second, that his traditional commitments to monarchy and papacy make his ideasunsuited to the analysis of contemporary social and political issues. Although the book’s title,AModern Maistre,suggests Bradley means to refute only the second charge, he devotes muchof his attention to the weightier problem of Maistre’s position on violence.

The majority of the book’s chapters discuss Maistre’s analysis of punishment, war,power, legitimacy, and sovereignty. Anyone wishing to understand how Maistre fits into lateeighteenth- and early nineteenth-century social and political thought will be on familiarground here. However, in the two chapters most central to the argument of the book, thoseon sacrifice and providence, Bradley focuses on how Maistre analyzed social and politicalphenomena in explicitly religious terms. How might the conclusions of such analysis still becompelling to those who reject its grounding in traditional religion? Bradley argues thatMaistre’s analysis of social and political life can still be compelling indeed, largely becauseMaistre was so quirky and unconventional a traditionalist. Not only is Maistre modern becausehe recognized the French Revolution made a return to the old order impossible; more im-portantly, Bradley argues, Maistre is a modern because of his interest in how social order ismaintained by symbol, ritual, and transgressive violence. In these areas, Bradley sees an“uncanny resemblance” between Maistre’s work and that of twentieth-century figures likeGirard, Foucault, and Bataille (pp. xi, 30, 58–60, 70–71, & 79–86).

Bradley is persuasive in presenting Maistre as a modern, but as he acknowledges, he ishardly alone in doing so—a number of well-known commentators on Maistre (most notablyIsaiah Berlin) have said the same (pp. xv–xviii). By contrast, establishing that Maistre neitherwholly endorsed nor relished maintaining order by sacrificial violence but rather only theo-rized this pattern, is by far Bradley’s more formidable challenge. In my view, the greatestdifficulties with the case Bradley wishes to make for Maistre here grow out of his undisguisedadmiration for his subject. Because Bradley is so anxious to show that Maistre deploredexcessive violence and did not think just any order worth maintaining, he does not allow hisreaders to see the full sweep of how Maistre theorizes the place of violence in human life.Instead, Bradley attempts to forestall criticism of Maistre by presenting some of his principalideas as if they were unquestionable truths. For example, Bradley writes of Maistre’s analysisof sacrifice, “an awareness of man’s destructive nature . . . leads [Maistre] toward an ethicof the minimization of violence” (p. 39). Bradley then focuses his discussion on how Maistreargued for the containment of violence through state-controlled ritual sacrifice, rather thanbeginning with the more crucial point of how Maistre theorized the place of destructivenessin human nature in the first place. To accept Bradley’s “fundamental thesis” that Maistreought to be read as “a theorist of political violence” rather than as someone who glorified it(p. 120), however, we need to know more about how Maistre justified his belief in humanlife’s inevitable “bloodiness” (p. 146) than Bradley is willing to tell us.

Reviewed by EMILY HAUPTMANN, Associate Professor of Political Science, Western Mich-igan University, Kalamazoo, MI.

205BOOK REVIEWS


shortstandardlong



David Edmonds and John Eidinow. Wittgenstein’s Poker: The Story of a Ten-MinuteArgument Between Two Great Philosophers.New York: Ecco Press, 2001. 340 pp.$24.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-06-621244-8.

Lively and well-researched (except for a few details), this semipopular book centers ona face-to-face clash between Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein over whether or not thereare philosophical problems. The authors argue that the clash was emblematic of wider con-flicts in their intellectual backgrounds. Wittgenstein had two philosophies: in the first hesolved all philosophical problems; in the second he held that philosophy was a kind of lin-guistic confusion, or even a kind of sickness, that invited therapy. Popper, by contrast, con-sistently held that philosophical problems were inescapable general issues that arose out ofscience. Thus viewed, both of Wittgenstein’s philosophies were grave mistakes. Invited tospeak in Cambridge in 1946, Popper expected Wittgenstein to be present so he courted con-frontation by choosing as his topic, “Are there philosophical problems?”

The authors sketch vividly the biographical and intellectual backgrounds of the twoViennese philosophers before they were transplanted to Britain. Wittgenstein was the scionof a wealthy family; Popper was that of a successful lawyer.Wittgenstein was restless, intense,and rather mystical. Popper was focused, also intense, and devoted to science. Each belongedto an originally Jewish family that had converted to Catholicism and Protestantism, respec-tively, the Wittgensteins in the first half of the nineteenth century, the Poppers sometimebefore World War I. Wittgenstein was old enough to serve in the Austrian army during thatwar; Popper was too young but old enough to be marked by the upheavals of its aftermath,including his family’s impoverishment.

YoungWittgenstein came to England beforeWorld War I and soonmoved to Cambridgeto study with Bertrand Russell. He was eventually made a professor there. Popper fled Austriain the 1930s to escape the Nazis, alighting first in New Zealand and then moving to theLondon School of Economics in 1946. An enigmatic and charismatic figure, Wittgensteinwas surrounded by devoted followers, some of whom attended the meeting being discussed.While in New Zealand Popper had written a widely discussed book,The Open Society andIts Enemies,but he had at the time no philosophical following to speak of, and certainly nosupporters with him on his visit to Cambridge.

Wittgenstein chaired the meeting and was the lead interlocutor. All accounts agree thatPopper tried to show examples of philosophical problems and that Wittgenstein dismissedeach one. In draughty England, the room was heated by an open fire that Wittgenstein fromtime to time tended with a poker. He likely gestured with it when speaking. He left themeetingbefore it was formally closed. Either before then or just after, Popper, challenged to give anexample of an ethical rule, offered: “not to threaten visiting speakers with pokers.” This wasclearly a joke, but whether Wittgenstein appreciated such jokes is to be doubted.

By 1946 Wittgenstein had already become a “hidden king of thought,” that is, a philos-opher who published almost nothing but whose reputation as profound and brilliant was thetalk among young philosophers. Soon after his death in 1951 his executors began translatingand publishing volume after volume of his writings. He became easily the most influentialand discussed of professional philosophers in the English-speaking world. Despite this, hewas not much read by the general intellectual public, which had difficulty summing up hiscontribution. Popper, by contrast, lived a long life and published a great deal under his own

206 BOOK REVIEWS


shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of texthand. He translated his early work,The Logic of Scientific Discovery,and was much discussed

by philosophers of science, scientists, and the general intellectual public. He lectured andtaught all over the world. Above all he stood for a clear set of challenging ideas in knowledgeand in politics. He was without enigma or charisma in his writing and person. He eventuallyhad followers, but nearly all registered some degree of dissent from his ideas, which washardly surprising, given his teaching about the value of criticism.

What actually happened in the meeting is reconstructed in great detail. It takes on aRashomon-like quality as the various witnesses disagree. Fascinating though it is, the authors’detective work is toWittgenstein’s Pokerwhat Hitchcock called a ‘McGuffin’ in a film: auseful plot device but not the point of what is going on. According to Edmonds and Eidinow,the point of what was going on was indeed whether there were genuine philosophical prob-lems. Wittgenstein and his followers had shown some to be pseudoproblems and some to beartifacts of language. However, the authors aver, Popper’s view that there remain genuinephilosophical problems out of science, metaphysics, and ethics is now more or less uncon-tested. Philosophy as mere therapy has not gained the day. Wittgenstein’s followers quarrelamong themselves about the great man’s legacy. This book is remarkable in trying to saywhat the score is. Not since Ernest Gellner’sWords and Thingsof 1959 have these mattersbeen so successfully broached for the general intellectual public.

Reviewed by IAN JARVIE, Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy, York University,Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canada.


Mark S. Micale and Paul Lerner (Eds.). Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, andTrauma in the Modern Age, 1870–1930.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2001. 334 pp. $60.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-521-58365-9.

The eleven contributors to this volume comprise a new generation of trauma scholars.In their opening historiographic essay, editors Marc S. Micale and Paul Lerner point out thatwhile most historical accounts of trauma have used history to illuminate our present under-standing of the concept, this volume has taken the further step of using the historical studyof trauma to illuminate history. The concept of trauma is thus ably used to explore railwaytravel, accident insurance, the welfare state, gender identity, class politics, World War I, theAmerican Legion, and American and European society between 1870 and 1930.

The caliber of the research is uniformly high, and in some cases exceptionally so. Thevolume’s first contribution by Ralph Harrington recreates the nineteenth-century world ofEnglish railway travel with the skill of a gifted novelist. As if not to be outdone, Eric Caplandescribes America’s early experience with trains, litigation, and trauma in an erudite and swiftmoving account. There is also a characteristically masterful historiographic essay by Micaleon Jean-Martin Charcot and a sensitive analysis by Bruna Bianchi on the psychiatric expe-riences of Italian soldiers during World War I.

The articles collected in this volume were first presented at a conference on the historyof trauma and medicine in March 1996. A lot has changed since then, however, thanks

207BOOK REVIEWS


shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textespecially to the work of Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen (1996, 1997, & 2000). In resurrecting the

ideas of the great Belgian psychologist Joseph Delboeuf (1831–1896), Borch-Jacobsen has,in my opinion, succeeded in showing that trauma—along with hypnosis, upon which theconcept of trauma is based—does not exist. By the word “trauma” I do not mean the distressthat follows an emotionally disturbing event, but the idea ofunconsciouspsychic traumawithout which trauma studies would have no raison d’eˆtre.

Micale seems to be implicitly aware of this possibility because he tends to minimize thedebt trauma owes to hypnosis in his flagship essay. For example, although he recognizes theimportance of Charcot’s work for Pierre Janet’s and Freud’s conceptualizations of trauma,he nonetheless criticizes Charcot for “his use of the hypnotic parallel to account for the mentalprocesses of traumatic-symptom-formation [which] led to more confusion than enlighten-ment” (p. 133). However, had it not been for such hypnotic parallels, as Freud himself ac-knowledged, there would have been no concept of psychic trauma to be confused about.Micale also states that “trauma was central to Pierre Janet’s ideas about psychological dis-sociation” (p. 135) when exactly the reverse was true—it was Janet’s ideas about hypnosisthat led him to trauma (LeBlanc, 2001). These small but significant oversights reveal howwell Micale senses what is at stake; as he well writes, “In the grand movement of the agefrom somatogenic to ideogenic models of the mind, the role of the study of trauma was key”(p. 136). However, if Borch-Jacobsen and Delboeuf are right, then the grand historical ques-tion becomes the following: why has it taken us over a hundred years to rediscover thefundamental truth about hypnosis and trauma? In line with the general orientation of thisimportant volume, I think the answer to that question will teach us a lot about the twentiethcentury and ourselves.

REFERENCES

Borch-Jacobsen, M. (1996). Remembering Anna O. A century of mystification. New York: Routledge.Borch-Jacobsen, M. (1997). L’effet Bernheim (fragments d’une theórie de l’artefact geńeralise). Corpus, 32, 147–

173.Borch-Jacobsen, M. (2000). How to predict the past: From trauma to repression. History of Psychiatry, 11, 15–35.LeBlanc, A. (2001). The origins of the concept of dissociation: Paul Janet, his nephew Pierre, and the problem of

post-hypnotic suggestion. History of Science, 39, 57–69.

Reviewed by ANDRE LEBLANC, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of the Historyof Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138.


Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn. Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training, andNew Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution.New York: W. W. Norton,2001. 267 pp. $25.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-393-04873-X.

In Race Experts,Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn provocatively argues that the goals and idealsof the Civil Rights movement were derailed by the therapeutic sensibility that came to dom-inate American society since the 1960s. According to Lasch-Quinn, “Finding one’s identity

208 BOOK REVIEWS


shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textbecame more important than the political project of attaining equality or building community”

(p. 64). For this shift in priorities, she blames an “army of race experts” (p. xii)—teachers,social workers, and psychiatrists—who created new professional roles as interracial etiquetteadvisers, co-counselors, and diversity trainers. She claims that they distracted activists andthe public from the moral universalism of the early Civil Rights crusade with “half-baked,contradictory, quasi-scientific pseudo-truths” (pp. xiv–xv) that reinforced a new race-con-sciousness and racial double standard of behavior reminiscent of the era of Jim Crow.

Although scholars and contemporaries have extensively documented the intricacies ofinterracial relations under slavery and segregation, Lasch-Quinn points out that little attentionhas been given to how such etiquette has changed in the generation since integration. Throughinsightful analysis of a broad array of cultural evidence including scholarly works, confes-sional literature by black authors, popular films, etiquette manuals, diversity training videos,counseling guidelines, and children’s books, Lasch-Quinn convincingly shows how a pre-occupation with identity, emotional catharsis, and personal growth became entangled in oureveryday understandings and practices of race.

Rather than resolve old tensions, Lasch-Quinn claims that therapeutic methods, whichwere aimed at liberating whites from their “alleged racism” (p. xv) and blacks from their“assumed bondage of low self-esteem,” (p. xv) created new misunderstandings and breathedfresh life into racial stereotypes. In particular, she identifies the “harangue-flagellation ritual”(p. xv) as emerging in the mid-1960s and governing interracial interactions with its dissem-ination in encounter groups and later diversity training programs in workplaces, schools, andelsewhere. This ritual called for expressive assertiveness on the part of blacks, usually in theform of rage, and restrained submission on the part of whites, usually through the admissionof guilt of their racism. She contends that race experts who continue to popularize this ritualignore the real revolution of the Civil Rights movement in achieving significant improvementsin race relations and instead perpetuate a vision of society in which virulent racism continuesto divide the world into white oppressors and black victims. She asserts that the culture oftherapy encourages hypersensitivity to all imagined slights and traps us in a cycle of recoverywith no end in sight. What is worse, these therapeutic methods hamper our ability to assesswhich problems we have overcome and which remain to be tackled, preventing further pro-gress toward true democracy and racial equality.

Lasch-Quinn provides a valuable service by bringing together two vital, but too oftenseparate discussions—on therapeutic culture and race—and by exploring the effect of oneon the other. Her tone is combative, and she does not give much consideration to the realpsychological and emotional effects of racism or to genuine attempts to grapple with suchproblems. By relying on critics (such as herself) who find the therapeutic methods of thehuman potential movement to be meaningless, she sidesteps the reality of thousands of or-dinary Americans who have indeed derived profound personal meaning from such experi-ences. This does not undermine her critique of the debilitating effect of the therapeuticsensibility on the quest for racial equality, but it does open up other questions for furtherexploration and understanding of the nature of this widespread phenomenon.Race Expertsis sure to provoke discussion over the ways in which we see and deal with race and thepervasive question of identity and is thus essential reading for all.

Reviewed by LAURA KIM LEE, Ph.D., Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME 04011.

209BOOK REVIEWS


shortstandardlong



Daniel P. Todes.Pavlov’s Physiology Factory: Experiment, Interpretation, Laboratory En-terprise.Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. 512 pp. $58.00 (cloth). ISBN0-8018-6690-1.

The medical philanthropy of the Romanovs, the Crimean War, and a rabid dog namedPluto each contributed to Pavlov’s abrupt rise as Head of Physiology in Russia’s ImperialInstitute of Medicine. By 1904, Ivan Pavlov had been nominated for the Nobel Prize fourtimes, but each time the committee hesitated because it wasn’t sure the work was Pavlov’s.Todes’s excellent scientific biography uses a factory model of science to explain why. Pavlovmanaged knowledge production in a “physiology factory.” HisPraktikanty,physicians whoreceived special incentives to spend time doing scientific research, were a vital feature of thefactory. They flocked to Russian laboratories, and the result was a huge labor force that Pavlovused as his “borrowed senses.” However, they also allowed the Nobel committee to questionwhether the research was really Pavlov’s.

Going well beyond description implied by the term “factory,” Todes contrasts Pavlov’sscientific vision with the managerial vision by which Pavlov, the manager, maintained tightintellectual control over the knowledge the factory produced. Todes’s outstanding scholarshipsucceeds admirably in presenting the conflicts that plagued Pavlov, the person, a scientificidealist with an irascible temper, and his factory amid the social and philosophical debatesthat surrounded the institute. Pavlov’s scientific vision was “Bernardian” and passionatelyexperimental; it integrated the contrasting influences of Claude Bernard and Karl Ludwigwith the work of Pavlov’s methodological hero, physiologist Rudolf Heidenhahn. The “Ber-nardian” Pavlov rejected metaphysical materialism (and any ontological speculation) in favorof methodological precision carefully tuned to a “biological” level of analysis. Committed todeterminism, he nonetheless avoided the reduction of living phenomena to physics. Althoughthey “obey” the laws of physics and chemistry, organisms are too complex to be explainedby them. Explanation required levels of analysis, like organ and organism, that captured thepurposeful activity of the whole. Pavlov himself used the factory as his scientific metaphor,depicting the digestive system as a chemical factory in which coordinated action worked toachieve the goal of digestion. Pavlov’s assessment of this purposeful coordination requiredboth the controlled disruption of experimental analysis and reintegration of the whole. Thisproduced tensions between analysis and synthesis and between mechanism and purpose. Theformer led to Pavlov’s preference for chronic experiments in which an animal was surgicallymodified in a chronic procedure that permitted recovery and “normal” physiological function.The latter reveal the prominent, if sometimes vague, use of psychological concepts in turn ofthe century physiology. Todes argues elegantly that the notions of “normalcy” and psychepermitted a wide interpretive range that loosened Pavlov’s tight experimentalism and medi-ated the tension between his desire for precise quantitative measures and the purposefulnessand variability of life. Dogs’ psyches were often used as causal factors to explain data ongastric secretions; critical experiments with Pavlov’s favorite data dog, Druzhok, for example,were interpreted in terms of appetite, personality, taste, mood, and “broad self-esteem”(p. 144). However, at other times personality or mood was used to discard findings thatcontradicted the protostatistical construction of stereotypical “characteristic secretory curves”(p. 161).

There is a great deal here beyond Pavlov the physiologist and discoverer of the condi-

210 BOOK REVIEWS


shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of texttional reflex. One also learns about the attempts to modernize Russian culture with positivistic

science, about the technological tensions of nineteenth-century physiology, about the originsof “big science” and its commercial application, and about the tight reciprocal connectionsbetween experimental physiology and scientific psychology as lawful regularity in the psychiccauses of digestion involving judgment and volition (“the mind of the glands”) gave way,through Wundtian concepts, to the less mental and more automatic conditional reflex. Todes’sexcellent work takes its place among the histories of experimentation that place empiricalanalysis and precision within the context of social relations, politics, institutions, and person-alities, in this case, dog as well as human.

Reviewed by CHERYL A. LOGAN, Professor of Psychology and Biology, University of NorthCarolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC 27402.


Juliet Mitchell. Madmen and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria.New York: Basic Books,2000. xiii � 381 pp. $30.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-465-04613-4. $18.00 (paper). ISBN 0-465-04614-2.

Historically, psychoanalysis and hysteria are inseparable. Yet, in our era hysteria seemsto have disappeared; indeed, it has been expunged from the diagnostic classification system.In this broad-ranging book, Juliet Mitchell, a practicing psychoanalyst and a respected fem-inist theorist, endeavors to revitalize the concept of hysteria. In her view, hysteria is a “uni-versal phenomenon, a possible response to particular human conditions that can arise at anytime or anywhere” (p. 3).

Mimesis is at the heart of hysteria. Hysteria has assumed diverse forms in different timesand places—the “wandering womb” of classical Greece, possession states and ecstatictrances, the conversion symptoms that played a part in the birth of psychoanalysis, and thebattle neuroses of World War I. If hysteria now has vanished, Mitchell insists on asking,“Where has it gone?” She argues that hysteria has fractured into its constituent parts. Thediverse phenomena that once came under its umbrella—multiple personality, borderline per-sonality disorder, eating disorders, and trauma syndromes—are now erroneously regarded asdistinct disorders. Mitchell attributes the disappearance of hysteria to a cultural and profes-sional repudiation of it. Because of the stigma placed on hysteria, it is most often ascribed tomembers of denigrated social groups. In the Western world, women and girls have been thecustomary recipients of the diagnosis.

Madmen and Medusasnot only explores the manifestations of hysteria; it also offers afresh reading of its origin and psychodynamics. Psychoanalysis has focused attention on thevertical axis of the family. In classical theories, the Oedipal father played a pivotal role inthe child’s psychic development; in the developmental accounts of object relations theorists,the mother–child dyad is pivotal. In either case, the sibling–sibling axis is largely ignored.However, sibling relations evoke powerful and complex feelings and fantasies. Amongthem—and key to Mitchell’s account of the development of hysteria—are feelings of dis-placement and the threat of parental abandonment.

211BOOK REVIEWS


shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textMitchell explores the dynamics of sibling relationships by re-analyzing several classic

case studies. She inserts information about analysands’ siblings (e.g., births, deaths, illnesses,and miscarriages of brothers and sisters) and infers the consequences for the young child’spsychic life and family dynamics. For example, Mitchell rereads the “Fragment of a Case ofHysteria in a Male,” inserting into the account information about the birth and death of Freud’sbaby brother Julius. She reinterprets Dora’s analysis by foregrounding Dora’s competitivestance toward her brother Otto. She also offers several amalgamations of case material drawnfrom her own practice. The case accounts that Mitchell offers are sketchy, however. There isno verbatim record of the interchanges between patient and analyst in the classic cases, andshe opts not to provide such material for her own cases. Often even a chronology of thetherapeutic work is not provided. This makes it close to impossible for readers to evaluateMitchell’s interpretations or to formulate their own alternatives.

Madmen and Medusaswill be most appreciated by readers already immersed in psy-choanalytic thought and sympathetic to its style of argument and theorization. Such readerswill appreciate Mitchell’s meticulous and perceptive discussion of the differences amongBritish, Continental, and North American variants of psychoanalytic thought. As one mightexpect, her exploration of the diverse schools of British psychoanalytic thought are especiallynuanced and illuminating. Her spirited critique of Frederick Crewes’s notorious attacks onpsychoanalysis and its relation to recovered/repressed memory is worthwhile reading foranyone interested in contemporary psychological theory.

Madmen and Medusasis a broad-ranging book. It is composed of a series of looselyconnected essays that circle around hysteria and its various manifestations. Mitchell shines aspotlight on a number of episodes in the lives of Freud and other revered figures that usuallyare tactfully left in shadows. This is a rich, intriguing, and provocative text.

Reviewed by JEANNE MARECEK, Professor of Psychology, Swarthmore College, Swarth-more, PA 19081.


Henry L. Minton. Departing From Deviance: A History of Homosexual Rights and Eman-cipatory Science in America.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. 360 pp.$65.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-226-53043-4. $20.00 (paper). ISBN 0-226-53044-2.

Henry L. Minton, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Windsor, haswritten an exciting account of the scientific study of homosexuality in the twentieth centuryand the ways that homosexuals have become not merely “passive victims of scientific andmedical inquiry, but also active agents in utilizing scientific research as a vehicle for homo-sexual rights” (Minton, 2002, pp. ix–x). Minton shows how homosexual men and womenworked to shape, conduct, assist, and inspire researchers in understanding homosexual life inAmerica. Beginning with a fine summary and overview of the study of homosexuality toabout 1935, the author goes on in subsequent chapters to deal with the major works on sexresearch dealing with homosexuality including George Henry’sSex Variants,Alfred Kinsey’sreports on American sexuality, and Evelyn Hooker’s studies on the mental health of homo-

212 BOOK REVIEWS


shortstandardlong

Top of RHBase of RHTop of textBase of textsexual men during the 1950s. In each case Minton carefully examines the preconceptions of

the work under review and details the picture of homosexuality offered in the work.The most obvious comparison for Minton’s work is with Jennifer Terry’sAn American

Obsession(1999). Minton and Terry both define the manifold ways that scientific study shapesthe understanding of homosexuality for both social control and emancipation. A detailedcomparison would be impossible here, but a compressed summary would be that Terry’swork stresses the former tendency, whereas Minton’s stresses the latter. Consequently, Mintonalways considers the work of well-known researchers in connection with homosexual menand women who offered otherwise unavailable insights into homosexual life. Jan Gay pro-vided George Henry with a wide range of data and contacts among lesbians. Alfred Grossworked with George Henry on several projects, including making possible his study of maleprostitution. In fact, the relationship between Gross and Henry became symbiotic in manyways, with Gross authoring reports over Henry’s name and using the psychiatrist’s reputationto make possible limited social services for homosexuals in postwar New York City. Twochapters focus on Thomas Painter and his relationship to the work of Alfred Kinsey and theKinsey institute. Although Painter’s work never gained recognition beyond Kinsey and hisinner circle, his ethnographic work, and the detailed account he kept of his own life, servetoday as valuable and rare insights into gay male culture prior to the 1970s. Finally, Mintonfollows the work of homosexual activists who prodded the scientific establishment from the1950s onward to recognize the legitimacy of homosexual individuals and communities. Min-ton demonstrates that despite the limits to true collaboration between scientists and homo-sexuals, homosexual men and women have often welcomed scientific study as a means ofcreating greater understanding in the general community and as an opportunity to advancethe goals of tolerance and, ultimately, homosexual rights.

Two issues, neither of which can detract from the value of Minton’s work, neverthelessrequire some attention. Other than the discussion of Jan Gay, Minton has little to say aboutlesbian researchers or research about lesbianism. This reflects the overwhelming preferenceof scientific study for male homosexuality. Minton might have discussed this discrepancy andprovided some insight into the ways that the gay-male focus may have shaped emancipatoryscience. Minton might also have developed the distinction between sexual liberalism andhomosexual identity. Although the issue makes appearances in these pages, Minton couldprofitably have discussed the impact of these views on scientific research.

REFERENCE

Terry, J. (1999). An American obsession. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Reviewed by JOHN C. SPURLOCK, Professor of History, Seton Hill University, Greensburg,PA 15601.

Copyright of Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences is the property of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and

its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's

express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.

Book review: Interiors: A history of psychology in South Africa

Documents