Author: HHS Contributor

Interview: Alfred Freeborn, ECR Prize Winner 2024

Alfred Freeborn (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) was awarded the 2024 History of the Human Sciences Early Career Prize for his essay ‘Testing Psychiatrists to Diagnose Schizophrenia: Crisis, Consensus and Computers in post-war Psychiatry’. The article is forthcoming in the journal. We asked him some questions about the winning text and his future research.

History of the Human Sciences: Congratulations on winning the Early Career Prize. Could you begin by briefly introducing your winning article, situating it in the context of your broader research project?

Alfred Freeborn: My current project looks at the history of psychiatric epidemiology and medical statistics in the 20th century in order to understand how mental health became the global field it is today. I seek to explain how the place and meaning of diagnosis in psychiatry fundamentally shifted in this period from being an act of detective-like intellectual synthesis to something more like automated pattern recognition and statistical analysis. In my article I show how the availability of certain technologies, such as mainframe computers and videotapes, enabled new ways of experimentally dissecting and reassembling the diagnostic procedure, ultimately laying the ground for a new way of evaluating the quality of the diagnostic data produced both in mental hospitals and in research. In a nutshell, the epistemic threshold of psychiatric diagnosis was massively lowered in order to secure professional consensus, and the purpose of diagnosis was increasingly understood as a tool for surveying populations, rather than the identification of natural disease entities.

HHS: What was the US-UK Diagnostic Project (DP) (1965-1975) and how did you come to be interested in it?

AF: The DP was a series of important studies comparing how psychiatrists in these two countries diagnosed people experiencing psychosis, in order ultimately to test the trustworthiness of mental hospital statistics. The basic idea was to take two mental hospitals, one in Brooklyn and one in London, and install a small group of psychiatrists trained to use a standard diagnostic procedure at both. These psychiatrists would diagnose new patients over a set period of time and their results would be compared with the local hospital statistics. The findings revealed that while the local hospital statistics showed more cases of schizophrenia in Brooklyn, the trained psychiatrists from the DP diagnosed more or less the same number in each hospital. In addition to this, a set of patient interviews were videotaped and shown to large audiences of psychiatrists in both countries who were then asked to make a diagnosis. The results in some cases were really dramatic: for one patient, known as Patient F, three-quarters of the American psychiatrists diagnosed schizophrenia, compared with almost none of the Brits. I first really took interest in the DP while working in the UK National Archives with records of the Medical Research Council when I discovered some early exchanges between the American and British sides of the project.

HHS: How is the DP usually remembered by psychiatrists and/or historians?

AF: Among psychiatrists the DP is remembered as a famous study in which the British collaborators undermined the professional credibility of American psychiatrists. It is canonised in the cultural memory of modern psychiatry as having shown that American psychiatrists over-diagnosed schizophrenia. While historians take note of the DP, the US-centric historiography has by and large failed to dwell on the importance of this collaboration. Through my archival work I realised there was another dimension to the DP. While the Americans had the money, machines and manpower and were further along in doing psychiatric epidemiology than the Brits, there was no national system for collecting mental hospital statistics in the US. The UK’s National Health Service and the statistics of the General Register Office were therefore seen as a useful data set by researchers from the American side. The Americans had ambitious plans to establish a research centre for psychiatric epidemiology in London and conduct studies with the UK census data but this was rejected by the Brits. I think the DP was not just an interesting episode in understanding how psychiatric diagnosis works, but was part of a broader struggle over how psychiatry would be reconfigured as a public health problem in the postwar era. In other words, as a struggle over who would count as an expert in the evaluating and planning of the new community care services as mental hospitals started to be closed. 

HHS: How did the DP influence diagnostic reform in psychiatry?

AF: Key players in the DP went on to reform both the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) and the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and in the latter case the DP’s results were used as leverage to replace psychodynamic concepts with ostensibly testable and statistically reliable diagnostic criteria. I also think the focus on schizophrenia in the DP had an impact. On the one hand, the DP was about enabling reliable comparisons of local and national statistics, and the focus on distinguishing schizophrenia and affective psychoses was in response to increasing evidence that lithium salts helped treat mania but not schizophrenia, therefore distinguishing these two disorders had real therapeutic implications. But the DP was also strategically designed to capture the difference between American and British psychiatrists. The very design of the DP Project aimed to highlight and showcase the psychodynamic approaches to diagnosing schizophrenia which were dominant in New York at the time and, unsurprisingly to everyone involved, it was successful in revealing that these psychiatrists in New York did things rather differently than the psychiatrists in London.

HHS: Could you introduce Aubrey Lewis and Morton Kramer and explain the significance of their ‘competing interests’ for your arguments?

AF: So Aubrey Lewis was probably the most influential psychiatrist in postwar Britain: he was clinical director of the Maudsley Hospital in south London and the first professor of psychiatry (from 1946 to 1966) at its medical school, renamed the Institute of Psychiatry in 1946. The hospital and medical school became the leading centre for a methodology-focused form of social psychiatry. Maudsley psychiatrists, led by Lewis, prided themselves on taking meticulously detailed patient case histories and avoiding the theoretical excesses of both organic and psychodynamic approaches. Morton Kramer in contrast was a stats guy. Kramer became Director of the Biometrics Branch of the US National Institute of Mental Health in 1949 with no experience of psychiatry, having been trained in statistics and epidemiology. He was perceived by his more clinically engaged colleagues as a serious epidemiologist who was focused strictly on data about populations, lacking perhaps the concern for the individual patient.

These two figures were by no means the only players in shaping the DP, but I show how their different perspectives on how to reform diagnostic classifications reveal an ongoing tension in our attempts to standardise psychiatric diagnosis. Lewis argued that reliable statistics would only be possible if psychiatrists working across the NHS could be convinced to take diagnosis seriously and use careful and detailed methodology. Kramer argued that a field trial was necessary to create public trust in psychiatrists and that the diagnosis of schizophrenia was the most suitable test case for this task since there seemed to be sufficient consensus on this issue. The DP was a synthesis of these two interests: the Maudsley consensus was used to establish a trustworthy gold standard for schizophrenia diagnosis. But the tension between these two interests endured, as I argue that the creation of these standards in the long run alienated the diagnostic intelligence of the psychiatrist and reduced the role of the expert diagnostician.

HHS: What role did computers and videotapes play in the story your article tells? What does this reveal about the relationship between technology and psychiatry?

AF: There is a wonderful passage I cite in my article where Aubrey Lewis talks about fighting for the “diagnostic souls” of psychiatrists in order to make sure they do not simply apply labels but produce careful and accurate diagnoses. For me, this is a rejection of the idea that psychiatric diagnosis can be treated purely as a technology: it is a recognition that the psychiatrist is as much part of the process of diagnosis as the particular tool they use. The videotape and the mainframe computer were deployed in the experimental dissection of psychiatric diagnosis into two parts: recording mental symptoms and applying a diagnostic algorithm. Both offered analogues for an idealised scenario in which psychiatrists would all observe the same symptoms when interviewing the patient and reliably apply the same diagnostic decision-making tree. In this scenario, the theoretical differences between individual psychiatrists and their concepts of mental disorder were made into comparable statistical differences. Using videotapes to train psychiatrists to diagnose is now completely standard practice. Computers not only enabled the application of totally reliable diagnostic algorithms, but more work intensive forms of statistical analysis to try and identify new clusters of mental symptoms and potentially improve existing classifications. However, by the mid-1970s this approach had already proved more or less a dead end. While engagement with these statistical methods led psychiatrists to re-describe diagnosis as a type of statistical analysis, in reality they made little impact on actual diagnostic classifications, which reflected consensus positions reached by committees of psychiatrists like those in the DP.

HHS: Why was ‘schizophrenia’ such a contested diagnostic category?

AF: In a fundamental sense, schizophrenia or dementia praecox has always been a contested category since its inception as a disease concept at the end of the 19th century; it is more like a set of competing yet overlapping concepts with vague boundaries than a stable or singular entity. But in the 1960s the diagnostic category became the focus of public controversy for several reasons: neo-Freudian, existential and social psychiatric ideas became dominant and challenged older views of schizophrenia as an inherited brain disease; numbers in mental hospitals peaked in the 1950s leading to overcrowding and awful conditions for patients while the mass media was filled with reports from within asylums; the new social movements grew around patient rights and so on. This story is well known by historians of psychiatry. But while most historians have tended to agree with contemporaries that schizophrenia had become a catch-all term under the influence of psychodynamic theories, I turn this on its head by suggesting that in fact in the UK there was widespread consensus on the important symptoms involved in diagnosing schizophrenia.

What do you mean by the ‘methodological imperialism of the Maudsley’?

AF: The phrase first occurred to me when interviewing the American psychiatrist William Carpenter Jr. about his time working on the WHO International Pilot Study of Schizophrenia (1965-1973), a study which used many of the same methods developed in the DP. He recalled how as a young psychiatrist he was deeply impressed and intimidated by the Maudsley psychiatrist John Wing’s knowledge of German psychopathology and that Wing reminded him of Colonel Nicholson from The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). This comparison really stuck with me. In the film the Colonel orders his men to build a bridge for their Japanese captors in order to maintain their morale and professional image as soldiers, but in the process lets his enthusiasm for this technical project and following the rules obscure his sense of the bigger conflict and values. Looking at the longer history of diagnostic reform in psychiatry and its failure to identify valid disease concepts or lead to better treatments, the comparison is striking. In this article I wanted to use the phrase to evoke how the methodological authority of the British psychiatrists in this period was perceived by their American colleagues. I think there is something more to say here analytically, but that will have to wait for another paper.

HHS: What do you conclude was most historically significant about the DP?

AF: The argument I am making in the article concerns in particular how psychiatric diagnosis was evaluated: it describes changes in methodological concepts, rather than changes in everyday clinical practice. This is not because I am not interested in clinical practice, but that I think too often historians gloss over the difficulty of actually making generalisable claims about diagnosis in clinical practice. The historian seeking to make such claims must make use of the statistical data from the time and faces the same methodological challenges as their historical actors who doubted the accuracy of these numbers. Other historians have already argued that the real changes in diagnostic practices in the UK and USA were most likely shaped by changes in health insurance and pharmaceutical companies, not the official classification systems. What I think is important is that the DP showed that to create reliable statistics on psychiatric diagnosis required small groups of trained psychiatrists conducting lengthy and detailed interviews, and this approach was clearly not suitable for everyday clinical practice. Rather than solve the problem of whether we can trust mental hospital statistics, the DP helped usher in a new way of evaluating psychiatric diagnosis in statistical terms – the tensions of which remain with us today.

HHS: Finally, I wonder if you could briefly discuss what you’re currently working on and what your next project might be?

I recently hosted a conference in Berlin on the history and legacy of the WHO studies of schizophrenia which was a wonderful experience: we not only had historians of psychiatry, but anthropologists, philosophers and psychiatrists from the field. I am now working on turning that into a collected volume. I am also currently working up revisions on my first monograph Biomedical Madness: Schizophrenia and the Making of Biological Psychiatry which will hopefully appear with University of Chicago Press next year. As in my article, which is based on a chapter from the book, I use the British context to develop new perspectives on the history of postwar biological psychiatry. 

Interview by Hannah Proctor.

Review: Cult of Creativity

Review: Samuel W. Franklin, The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023)

Gavin Miller (University of Glasgow)

As cultural historian Samuel W. Franklin points out in this thought-provoking book, the value of “creativity” is taken for granted in contemporary society. Creativity is good for you, good for business, and good for the world. It makes you happier, fuels innovation, and provides solutions to those wicked problems that plague us. Not only that, we are all potentially creative people, whose creative ability can be optimised by education and training. This is why Franklin, in his introduction, characterises creativity as “a cult object” (p. 5) that is beyond reproach within our contemporary culture.

Despite its celebrated status, creativity, as Franklin shows, emerged after the Second World War in the United States, where it became “a topic, an object of academic study and debate, an official personality trait, a goal of educational and economic policy, [and] an ideal of personal transformation” (pp. 6-7). The story begins in the 1950s when psychological research on creativity was fuelled by two aims. Firstly, enhanced creativity was seen as a way of maintaining US economic and military dominance, particularly over the Soviet Union. Secondly, creativity was a way to preserve and promote human individuality in the age of so-called “organisational man”. Funding flowed into psychology, prompting a boom in creativity research. A new psychometrics arose that displaced research, much of it eugenically inspired, on general intelligence. Creativity was operationalised in supposedly measurable phenomena such as divergent thinking, which measured inventiveness of responses to a challenge, such as uses for a housebrick. Creativity soon turned from something attributed to products into something that was attributed first and foremost to persons as a trait. Moreover, the use of “eminence as a proxy for high creative ability” (p. 38), and a focus on a narrow range of middle-class professions dominated by white men, threatened to make creativity an elite rather than democratic endowment.

This narrowing of creativity was though resisted by the craze for brainstorming in the late 1950s, which had been created by self-help author Alex F. Osborn and his Creative Education Foundation. Brainstorming, with its emphasis on rapid group creation of ideas with minimal sifting, was divergent thinking’s vulgar sibling, and closely linked with an ideal of individual entrepreneurship. As Franklin explains, “Osborn was in many ways perpetuating the republican ideal of the yeoman farmer, but instead of little plots of land people had their minds, and ideas were the crops” (p. 57). By using brainstorming, you could find out how to get rich, beat the Soviets and tame juvenile delinquents. Although both business and academia came to disagree, brainstorming nonetheless cemented the demand for creativity, and the need to solve its mystery.

The humanistic psychology of Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow and Rollo May also focussed on creativity in its quest to understand the positive psychological phenomena of human growth, thriving and fulfilment. Humanistic psychology refurbished an essentially Romantic image of the creative individual epitomised by Maslow’s fetishisation of epiphanic peak experiences. But despite this genealogy, humanistic psychology also staked its claim in the defence of US society. Democracy was best supported by a creative personality that could be detected in features such as a preference for asymmetrical figures and abstract art, and a tolerance of ambiguity, disorder, the irrational, and one’s inner femininity (the creative person was still stereotypically male). Franklin perceptively notes Maslow’s call for the US to become a nation of improvisors better suited to a society in constant change and endless dislocation.

The improvisor was also best suited to organisational forms required in an emerging form of playful, imaginative capitalism that had to create consumer demand for new types of products. In a fascinating case study, Franklin shows how in the 1960s the United Shoe Machinery Corporation employed Synectics, Inc., a new consultancy that specialised in creative innovations. Its founders used a method inspired (however loosely) by group therapy to access the creative pre-conscious via a kind of free association of analogies to a proposed problem (which could be as mundane as “designing a new hair dryer or a wheelchair or a marketing plan” (p. 112)). More predictably, Madison Avenue was also a key locus in the consolidation of creativity via the so-called “creative revolution” of the late 1950s. In an entertaining narrative, Franklin shows how managers, rather than copywriters and artists, fretted over the best way to liberate creative energies stifled by a “scientific approach” characterised by “a careful process of research, statistical analysis, and vetting” (p. 141). In this way, the professional identity of the “creative” was born – an expert who could manufacture the desires and meanings required for new commodities.

School educators also found much that was appealing when the “creative child” was invented as a category in the 1960s. The creative child could not be identified by IQ tests, nor was he or she suited to the strict discipline of conventional schooling. Psychologist Ellis Paul Torrance promoted the category widely through his “Torrance Tests for Creative Thinking”, a pencil and paper instrument that became widely established as an operationalisation of creativity. The test was highly attractive to teachers and parents who worried about the squandered potential of children who were not conventional scholastic performers. Ellis also pioneered educational interventions that promised to enhance creativity for all children.

By the mid-1960s though, enthusiasm for creativity was beginning to wane. Critics argued that psychologists had failed to provide a shared definition of the term, let alone a distinct mental capacity for creativity, or a creative personality type. Other, more mundane explanations for creativity threatened the bubble: hard work, wealth, high intelligence. Creativity clung on though as a concept in wider public discourse. Franklin shows clearly how it imbued technoscientific progress with “personal, expressive values” that ameliorated “overlapping concerns about white-collar alienation, militarism, and the moral limits of a technocratic society” (p. 183). To take one of Franklin’s many striking examples, an “Aloca Chemicals ad featured a brightly colored, cubist rendering of four missiles jabbing up into the sky” – painted by an artist who would “provide similar abstract images for the covers of the Dave Brubeck Quintet’s Take Five and Charles Mingus’s Mingus Ah Um” (p. 180).

Franklin rounds off his book with a chatty survey of creativity since the late-1960s, covering such developments as creativity in the higher education curriculum and the paradigm of the creative economy. He also offers caveats on the cult of creativity, such as its obsession with novelty, and its propensity for psychologised remedies to social problems. But the main contribution of Franklin’s book is as a history of US developments in the 1960s. The Cult of Creativity is a fascinating account of the origins of contemporary creativity discourse that is sure to inspire further research in this area. The book is full of striking visual and verbal illustrations of a time, place, and context that made “creativity” a commonsense concept and a taken-for-granted value. The book will interest a wide readership, including of course historians of the human sciences, but also those active in other, putatively creative disciplines, as well as the interested general reader.

Gavin Miller is Reader in Contemporary Literature and Medical Humanities at the University of Glasgow.

Interview: Libby O’Neil, ECR Prize winner 2024

Libby O’Neil (Yale University) was awarded the 2024 History of the Human Sciences Early Career Prize for her essay ‘Thinking in Systems: Problems of Organization at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the Society for General Systems Research, 1950-1957’. The article is forthcoming in the journal. We asked her some questions about the winning text and his future research.

History of the Human Sciences: Congratulations on winning the Early Career Prize for your article ‘Thinking in Systems’. Could you begin by briefly introducing your winning article, situating it in the context of your broader research project?

Libby O’Neil: The article emerged from a chapter of my dissertation that I’m working on right now. My broader dissertation project is called ‘The Sciences of Unity: Organicist Systems Thinking Between Vienna and the United States’. My project is trying to trace a series of questions about the unity of science, about reductionism and holism, the mind-body problem and the nature of life across the 20th century. I do this by focusing on the careers of several Central European émigré scientists and philosophers. Part of my method has been to follow around Ludwig von Bertalanffy, who appears in my paper. He’s an idiosyncratic figure, who, I think, has been relatively understudied in the English language history of science literature because he was didn’t fit into the disciplines very traditionally. This has taken me to several interesting places, and one of those places is the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, where he was one of the 1954-1955 research fellows.

In 2023, I spent a few weeks in Palo Alto working with the archival collections there, which is currently held at Stanford Special Collections. That’s when I started thinking about trying to pair together the histories of the Ford Foundation’s Center for Advanced Study and the Society for General Systems Research. I argue that both were important for thinking about interdisciplinarity and the organization of the sciences, especially the human and social sciences, and that both were looking for ways to scale between the social scientific laboratory and the national or international system. In both cases, I highlight a reflexive turn that came up during the study of these problems of organization. Both groups found that the most ready to hand laboratory for studying organization was their own organization.

HHS: How would you define ‘general system theory’ and how did you come to be interested in this?

LO: There were a lot of different interdisciplinary programs that were using the phrase ‘systems theory’ in the US around 1950. It is often tied to cybernetics by historians, for good reason. But while introducing his ‘general system theory’ or Allgemeine Systemlehre to American audiences in 1950, Bertalanffy claimed a slightly different genealogy for systems theory that drew on his training in philosophy and theoretical biology in interwar Vienna. His thinking about interdisciplinarity emerged from his study of biological growth and dynamic equilibrium. Although there are many varieties of systems theory, and a lot of them do emerge out of interdisciplinary wartime research, Bertalanffy offered a slightly different genealogy that created productive tensions within the American context.

HHS: What was the role of the Ford Foundation in shaping work in the behavioural sciences (via the creation of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences)? How did this fit within the broader context of social scientific research at this point in the period?

LO: I think something I’m always struck by when I’m reading the writing of a lot of my actors is this really close relationship they draw between the atomic bomb and the social sciences. There was simultaneously hubris and anxiety around the relationship between science and society. The Ford Foundation was one of several institutions that saw reforming the social scientific research apparatus as the key to managing some of these tensions. Beginning in the late 1940s, the Ford Foundation carried out studies of various universities, looking at their training for social scientists, human scientists, behavioural scientists and trying to understand what the gaps were. This was related to the Ford Foundation’s “Area Five” of their overall research program, which focused on interventions within the sciences to promote human welfare.

A lot of this history has been detailed by other historians. Historians like Mark Solovey, Hunter Heyck, and Jamie Cohen-Cole, for example, discuss the Ford Foundation in the broader context of social scientific funding by foundations during this time, for example. But what I focused on is how they specifically came to decide in the early 1950s that they needed a dedicated centre where they could offer advanced training for social scientists. During the planning process, foundation officials had all these arguments about the tension between humanists and scientists within the academy. Throughout there was tension between quantitative and qualitative work and explicit debate about what interdisciplinarity actually means. Is it a team with one sociologist, one anthropologist, one biologist, etc? Or is it a project that spans across the individual boundaries of disciplines? That’s the context in which they decided to found this centre. My archival work reveals how some of those tensions really persisted throughout the first few years of its operation.

HHS: You’ve spoken a little already about Ludwig von Bertalanffy. Could you introduce Kenneth Boulding and describe what was distinctive about the work they did together.

LO: Boulding is a fascinating figure. He was born to a fairly working-class family in England but ended up attending Oxford, where he studied philosophy and economics as an undergraduate. He came to the attention of John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter early in his career and spent time at the University of Chicago and at Harvard. He also became deeply involved in the Society of Friends and Pacifist activism. Boulding spent most of his career in the US — he would say in interviews that because of his working-class background he felt more comfortable in the US, rather than in British academia. His wife, Elise, is also an interesting figure. She was a peace activist who earned a PhD in sociology and worked closely with Margaret Mead in the sixties and seventies.

Boulding wrote The Organizational Revolution in 1953 (with support from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Council of Churches). In this book, he considered a wide variety of organizations, from labour unions to churches, and analysed them using concepts like homeostasis, feedback, hierarchical order. This work brought him to the attention of the Ford Foundation. In the early 1950s he began corresponding with Bertalanffy, who’d recently published an article in Science where he talked about his general system theory. After Boulding was recruited to the Center, he wrote a last-minute recommendation for Bertalanffy to the board, where he says – to paraphrase – that ‘other biologists think Bertalanffy is something as a crackpot but as a fellow crank I have strong fellow feeling with him’. Incredibly this recommendation letter got Bertalanffy invited to the Center and that’s the start of their official collaboration. Throughout their time at the Center, they worked together closely with a few other fellows to put on various workshops, lectures, and seminar series on general system theory, trying to recruit people from across the disciplines, to think in their particular way about how to bridge the gaps across the disciplines.

HHS: How did social scientists at the Center define ‘problems of organization’ and why was this such a conceptually complicated and controversial topic?

LO: The phrase ‘problems of organization’ is both my own analytic term and something my actors used in their writing. When I was working in the archive, I was reading through a folder where they had the statements that each fellow had written out of their proposed activities. I read through dozens and dozens of descriptions of how they’re going to reorganize their own discipline, or how they’re going to unify across the disciplines. This led me to write in my own archive notes a little paragraph about how it seems that problems of organization are the through line between all the different projects that the fellows were bringing. There was a blend of both hubris and anxiety where they both believed they could come to understand the nature of organization, and that it was crucial for our society to do so, and to enact those principles in the world.

I saw a consistent desire to understand organization as almost a philosophical, teleological concept. But at the same time, there was a slippage many of these writers made between organization as an abstract concept and concrete organizations (like businesses, institutions, centres for advanced study, etc). I think the key for the Ford Foundation was to move between these two levels, to find ways to think about organization in general that allowed them to scale between different kinds of organizations, so they could pursue their

poorly defined goal of human welfare in the world.

HHS: What was the General Systems Yearbook?

LO: The General Systems Yearbook was one of the main interventions that the Society for General Systems research made. They framed it as a communication tool. Early members of the Society for General Systems Research all agreed that they needed a way to help promote interdisciplinary, to help overcome the strict specialization within the sciences, to overcome the barriers of jargon and specific words. But they weren’t quite sure how to do that. There was a feeling that there were already too many interdisciplinary conferences. Many of the early members had been to the Macy conferences, and were a little unsure as to whether that had been a helpful experience. There were also too many new journals to keep up with. The goal for the General Systems Yearbook was not to solicit new articles, but to collect articles from across the discipline that were relevant to general systems theory. They imagined the Yearbook as a tool for interdisciplinary communication that would allow interested scientists to keep up on the literature without having to read dozens of journals across multiple fields. It’s been published yearly in one form or another since 1956.

HHS: You emphasise the ‘disunity’ of systems thinking in the case study you focus on – what is significant about that argument / how does it depart from the existing scholarship on systems thinking in this period and how does it relate to questions of interdisciplinarity?

LO: This is one of the themes that I’m interested in pursuing in the dissertation overall. My project’s working title is ‘The Sciences of Unity’, which is trying to invert the unity of science to understand the multiple ways human and physical scientists studied unity in the 20th century. Systems theory is a unifying program that shows up in a lot of really diverse contexts in the 20th century, including engineering, biology, literary theory, and anthropology. Although many people called themselves systems theorists and referenced the same founding figures, I saw real differences in the basic goals that different systems theorists had, the different metaphysical assumptions they had, and the different institutional and political purposes that they ended up serving.

My goal in this paper about the Center was to get really specific about this particular approach to systems theory and the unique models of organizations they were using. I think this is especially important for thinking about systems theory because it claims to transcend individual models. I think the task for historians of systems theory is to resist that totalizing impulse and to look for the particularities and the provincial aspects of the moments when people come together to say they’re doing systems theory.

Why was there this demand for systems theory in this idiosyncratic, weird environment of the Center? Why was it there that systems theory became popular? How were different people and institutions using systems theory for different goals? My hope in the broader project is to ask what gets left out when we generalize away from the specific.

HHS: Reading your article I wondered if there was something tricky to navigate methodologically when you’re writing something that’s a bit ‘meta’, in the sense that it’s a research project on research projects. How do you think about that?

LO: It’s something I’ve definitely thought about because I am studying scientists and academics who are doing really similar work to what I do. There are ways that the history of systems theory interacts with the history of the history of science. In the early 1970s, Bertalanffy actually became very interested in the work of Thomas Kuhn. He was on a panel at the American Historical Association with Kuhn and Christopher Lasch talking about cultures as systems, and he saw “paradigm shift” as a systems concept. There’s certainly a genealogy of the history of science that comes from systems theory. I don’t totally have a solution for the fact that I’m sort of studying my own discipline. My hope is that by doing this we can understand the conditions of knowledge production better. I do think this is a broader challenge, that in the history of science where we end up studying our own field in a lot of ways.

HHS: Finally, I wonder if you could briefly discuss what you’re currently working on and what your next project might be?

LO: My main focus is trying to finish the dissertation. The chapter that this paper is on based sits right in the middle of the dissertation, temporally. I’m moving in two different directions through time right now. On one hand, I’m both moving back in time to look at interwar Viennese philosophy of science and then the early days of cybernetics. On the other hand, I’m moving forward to look at how systems theory was taken up at the Menninger Clinic and in humanistic psychology.

Beyond the dissertation, what I would hope to do is to have some space to expand on some of the themes and questions that have emerged for me while I do this work that I don’t think will fit in the project. Specifically that’s been the really persistent recurrence of religious and spiritual language in these popular science, fictional and philosophical writings about science in the post-war era. There was a lot of collaboration between systems theorists and theologians. That is surprising to me, considering how we often think about the boundaries between science and religion. Thinking about popular science and science fiction as a way to understand the history of science has also been something I’ve been pursuing in my teaching at Yale. That’s the general direction I might move in; but we’ll see!

Interview conducted by Hannah Proctor. The discussion was edited for length and clarity.

Early Career Prize, 2023-24

History of the Human Sciences – the international journal of peer-reviewed research, which provides the leading forum for work in the social sciences, humanities, human psychology and biology that reflexively examines its own historical origins and interdisciplinary influences – is delighted to announce details of its annual prize for early career scholars. The intention of the annual award is to recognise a researcher whose work best represents the journal’s aim to critically examine traditional assumptions and preoccupations about human beings, their societies and their histories in light of developments that cut across disciplinary boundaries. In the pursuit of these goals, History of the Human Sciences publishes traditional humanistic studies as well work in the social sciences, including the fields of sociology, psychology, political science, the history and philosophy of science, anthropology, classical studies, and literary theory. Scholars working in any of these fields are encouraged to apply.

Guidelines for the Award

Scholars who wish to be considered for the award are asked to submit an up-to-date two-page CV (including a statement that confirms eligibility for the award) and an essay that is a maximum of 12,000 words long (including notes and references). The essay should be unpublished and not under consideration elsewhere, based on original research, written in English, and follow History of the Human Science’s style guide. Scholars are advised to read the journal’s description of its aims and scope, as well as its submission guidelines.

Entries will be judged by a panel drawn from the journal’s editorial team and board. They will identify the essay that best fits the journal’s aims and scope.

Eligibility

Scholars of any nationality who have either not yet been awarded a PhD or are no more than five years from its award are welcome to apply. The judging panel will use the definition of “active years”, with time away from academia for parental leave, health problems, or other relevant reasons being disregarded in the calculation. They will also be sensitive to the disruption that the Covid 19 pandemic has had on career progression and will take such factors into account in their decision making. Candidates are encouraged to include details relating to any of these issues in their supporting documents.

Scholars who have submitted an essay for consideration in previous years are welcome to do so again. However, new manuscripts must not be substantially the same as any they have submitted in the past.

Prize

The winning scholar will be awarded £250 and have their essay published in History of the Human Sciences (subject to the essay passing through the journal’s peer review process). The intention is to award the prize to a single entrant but the judging panel may choose to recognise more than one essay in the event of a particularly strong field.

Deadlines

Entries should be made by Friday 26th January 2024. The panel aims to make a decision by Friday 10th May 2024. The winning entry will be submitted for peer review automatically. The article, clearly identified as the winner of the History of the Human Sciences Early Career Prize, will then be published in the journal as soon as the production schedule allows. The winning scholar and article will also be promoted by History of the Human Sciences, including on this website, which hosts content separate to the journal.

Previous Winners

2022-23: Freddy Foks (Manchester), “Finding modernity in England’s past: social anthropology and the transformation of social history in Britain, 1959-1977”

2021-22: Harry Parker (Cambridge), “The regional survey movement and popular autoethnography in early 20th century Britain”. Special commendation: Ohad Reiss Sorokin (Princeton), “”‘Intelligence’ before ‘Intelligence Tests’: Alfred Binet’s Experiments on his Daughters (1890-1903)”.

2020-21: Liana Glew (Penn State), “Documenting insanity: Paperwork and patient narratives in psychiatric history”, and Simon Torracinta (Yale), “Maps of desire: Edward Tolman’s Drive Theory of Wants”.

Special commendation: Erik Baker (Harvard), “The ultimate think tank: The rise of the Santa Fe Institute Libertarian”.

2019-20: Danielle Carr (Columbia), “Ghastly Marionettes and the political metaphysics of cognitive liberalism: Anti-behaviourism, language, and The Origins of Totalitarianism”.

Special commendation: Katie Joice (Birkbeck), “Mothering in the Frame: cinematic microanalysis and the pathogenic mother, 1945-67”.

You can read more about these essays in interviews with the authors here.

To Apply

Entrants should e-mail an anonymised copy of their essay, along with an up-to-date CV, to hhs@histhum.com.

Review: Disalienation

Review: Camille Robcis, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021)

Janina Klement (University College London)

In January 1940, the Catalan refugee psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles who had just arrived in France, was recruited to work with the French psychiatrist Paul Balvet. Since 1937, Balvet had been the director of a dilapidated and overcrowded asylum in the village of Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole in Lozère which, situated 1000 metres above sea level in the mountains, counted itself among France’s most impoverished regions. In a giant communal effort that included the local villagers, they prepped the asylum for the war, piled food reserves and planted and harvested produce together with the patients, ultimately saving the asylum population from starvation. Next to its main function as a sanatorium, Saint-Alban became an assembly spot for persecuted intellectuals who began participating in the therapy of the mentally ill, and soon pushed for theorisation of their practice. In 1941, a manifesto with first principles emerged but only eleven years later, in 1952, the term “institutional psychotherapy” first appeared in a journal article.

With Disalienation, Camille Robcis delivers the first history of the French institutional psychotherapy movement for an anglophone readership. The book’s work is to position institutional psychotherapy as a set of ethics of everyday life and experience, and to read it as a political theory (with the ambition of contemporary applicability) of alienation, the unconscious and institutions, more so than to assess its therapeutic merits. Prior to its denomination and introduction to medical literature, institutional psychotherapy was a humanitarian and intuitive act of care during war-time. The bookcover blurb’s claim that Saint-Alban was the only asylum that ‘attempted to resist’ the Vichy regime’s “soft extermination” programme of the mentally ill through supply shortages conceals a dispute among historians (which remains unrectified by the book itself) whether many psychiatrists across France tried the same thing, but ultimately failed to rescue most of their patients. The clinic’s favourable geographical location in the mountains as well as Balvet’s good relationship with the Pétain administration arguably helped Saint-Alban to escape the occupiers and collaborators’ ruthless supervision.

After the war, institutional psychotherapy was carried forward as a practice, subjected to multiple reinventions while transgressing its original geopolitical context. By organising the chapters around four key institutional psychotherapists, Tosquelles, Frantz Fanon, Félix Guattari and Michel Foucault, Robcis achieves to write a biography of a movement, tracing the intersecting yet distinctive practical and intellectual contributions that brought it into being, and that kept it in circulation for the better part of the second half of the twentieth century.

The first chapter knits together the story of how Francesc Tosquelles, a well-read experimental combat psychiatrist, anarchist, and co-founder of the Catalan federalist and anti-Stalinist activist group POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista), became François Tosquelles, inventor of institutional psychotherapy and inspirational figure for the French health reform, that implemented the Catalan inspired concept of “sector psychiatry” nationwide in the 1960s. Institutional psychotherapy is born when after the war, Tosquelles’ équipe tore down the walls surrounding Saint-Alban to create an “asylum-village” allowing for more contacts with the local population. Moreover, the German psychiatrist Hermann Simon’s idea of a “more active treatment in the asylum” inspired the creation of a “healing collective” that actively involved patients in the structuring of everyday life in the hospital to treat the institution more than the individual. According to Jacques Lacan’s doctoral thesis, which first received recognition and practical application in the context of Saint-Alban, psychosis had to be grasped in its ‘phenomenal totality…the entirety of its historical existence’ (p. 38). Thus, as Robcis argues, the idea that the social and the psychic were intimately connected and had to be transformed collectively to escape alienation was the fundamental lesson that Tosquelles and his équipe transmitted to future generations of institutional psychotherapists.

The second chapter uncovers the early steps of Frantz Fanon’s hitherto lesser examined medical career, as Robcis seeks to ‘restate the significance of Fanon in the genealogy of what is generally called “Western radical psychiatry”’ (p. 51). The institutional psychotherapists’ dogma to treat the social and the psychic at the same time resonated with Fanon’s understanding of subjectivity as structural and therefore ‘fundamentally shaped by the social and political context’ (p. 59). The chapter follows him from medical school in Lyon to his brief internship in Saint-Alban, where he was involved with various art and ergo therapies, wrote pieces for the hospital newsletter and advocated together with Tosquelles for a limited use of electroshock therapy, to facilitate personality reconstruction. Yet his subsequent arrival at the Algerian psychiatric clinic of Blida-Joinville was marked by an initial ‘total failure’ (p. 66) to apply Saint-Alban-style social therapy. Arabic staff and patients were equally repulsed by the innovations forced upon them, and only the European patients responded positively to Fanon’s reshuffling of social roles and expectations in the hospital. Fanon retreated for a journey through Algeria which prompted him to reflect on his own complicity with colonial regimes, discovering the necessity to “decolonise” institutional psychotherapy. Upon his return he restructured institutional psychotherapy to the effect that Muslim patients began to enjoy socialising in the hospital space, for example through performances of Muslim singers and professional storytellers, and popular Algerian table games at the hospital’s new “Café maure”.

In this chapter the book is at its most romantic. Robcis masterfully narrates Fanon’s intellectual and personal trajectory beyond cultural and language barriers which he successfully overcame through self-sacrifice and careful introspection. By its finale, he has shaken off the European grip on institutional psychotherapy to arrive at ‘a truly disalienated and disalienating psychiatry’ (p. 68). The absence of patient perspectives in the book is quite noticeable here, as despite Robcis’ initial insistence that her interest is not to write a hagiography (p. 9), her narration tends strongly in this direction throughout the book and is furthermore reflected in her decision to focus on the contributions of four celebrated male practitioners to the movement.

Chapter three is a remarkably condensed and accessible tour de force of French intellectual history surrounding the events of May ’68 and the arrival of institutional psychotherapy in Paris, through figures such as Jean Oury, Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze. Robcis shows how institutional psychotherapy was radicalised at Oury’s “Clinique de la Borde,” on the premise of an “anti-oedipal” politics that sought to disalienate ‘the unconscious, the familial, the social, and the political, all at once’ (p. 78). The chapter’s main contribution to existing historiography is its attentiveness to how Guattari pronounced institutional psychotherapy’s potential to transform and express group desire, pushing the discourse into nonmedical contexts, especially urban planning, left-wing organising and working groups, among others on feminism, health policies, pedagogy and theatre.

The book’s final and arguably strongest chapter circles around Michel Foucault’s role in the development of institutional psychotherapy. Anyone who thought Foucault’s contribution is best explained by starting with his analysis of power is offered a captivating new reading (as well as a picture of him with a full head of hair). Although he never actually practised institutional psychotherapy, Robcis reads Foucault as a ‘fellow traveller’ (p. 110) of the movement. She convincingly argues that the question of psychic causality figured as a centre of attention to Foucault in his student years at the École Normale and the hospital Saint-Anne, and is further developed in his first book Maladie mentale et personnalité (1954). Crucially, for Robcis, Foucault arrived at a similar conclusion to the institutional psychotherapists, proposing that cure requires the relationship between the individual and its milieu to be intact. The chapter also traces how Foucault mediated exchanges between British antipsychiatrists and the French institutional psychotherapists around Guattari, suggesting that Foucault’s engagement with R. D. Laing’s and David Cooper’s work marked a decisive moment of his intellectual development away from the question of the institution and into the realm of the “disciplinary”.

Despite this recognition of transnational influences and sympathies, Robcis’ book largely remains faithful to the institutional psychotherapists’ own version of history. This is particularly evident in her portraits of British anti-psychiatry, which are partly based on judgments of the “French side”, which deliberately wanted to distance itself quite clearly from its British counterparts, whose work somewhat anticipated institutional psychotherapy, and was in many ways more similar to theirs than they liked to admit.

While the book makes an important contribution to the intellectual history of a neglected movement, it leaves the question of alienation that its title provokes largely untouched. Sure, we learn that ‘… institutional psychotherapy insisted on the role of institutions in the process of alienation and disalienation of the political, the social, and the subjective’ (p. 73), but a historization or discussion of alienation outside of the protagonists’ framework would have been instructive. The question arises whether alienation, for example from fascism, which marked the birth of institutional psychotherapy as a resistance movement, cannot be thought of as a positive and generally desirable experience.

In many ways, the history of institutional psychotherapy is more convincingly communicated through visual materials than words. Readers in New York City can visit a major exhibition about Francesc Tosquelles that includes hours of film and outsider art produced in French institutional psychotherapeutic milieus at the American Folk Art Museum until 23 October 2023.

Janina Klement is a final year PhD student in history of psychiatry at University College London and an affiliated member at the Birkbeck Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Mental Health.

Interview: Freddy Foks, History of the Human Sciences ECR Prize winner, 2023

Freddy Foks (University of Manchester) was awarded the 2023 History of the Human Sciences Early Career Prize for his essay ‘Finding modernity in England’s past: social anthropology and the transformation of social history in Britain, 1959-1977’. The article is forthcoming in the journal. We asked him some questions about the winning text and his future research.

History of the Human Sciences: First of all, why were a particular group of social historians – your article focuses on four case studies: Keith Thomas, Peter Laslett, E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm ­– in Britain drawn to social anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s?

Freddy Foks: There are two main reasons. The first was about anthropology and its ideas and status and the second was about what the historians wanted to do with those ideas.

Laslett, Thomas and Thompson all wanted to explain that social change change wasn’t just determined by economic change. By the 1960s social anthropologists in Britain had been making arguments like that for decades. Not only that but it was a pretty high-status discipline with a lot of prestige in the academy. Some big names had published big ethnographies by the 1960s: Audrey Richards, Edward Evans-Pritchard, Max Gluckman, Victor Turner etc. Those are names that might even be familiar to some historians today.

So the historians saw a prestigious discipline doing something they wanted to do: they didn’t want to subscribe to an economically determinist account of history (apart from Hobsbawm, who I think we’ll talk about later in the interview). Anthropologists tended to analyse religion, economy, kinship, ritual etc. as part of a whole account of a society. That’s what really appealed to the historians: this focus on the small scale and moving away from political elites.

HHS: Why did Keith Thomas think that engaging with social anthropology might enable historians to break with ‘vulgar Marxism’?

FF: In the early 1960s Keith Thomas was frustrated with colleagues who were mostly looking at very high politics – the lives of politicians, foreign policy, wars, battles etc. Historians who wanted to avoid doing ‘high politics’ in that era tended to reach for Marxism to explain social and economic change even if that method didn’t reflect their politics. The term ‘vulgar Marxism’ has a political slant. It has connotations during the height of the Cold War of a politics associated with the Soviet Union. In terms of ideology this ‘vulgar Marxism’ implies rigid Marxist-Leninism. By implication, Thomas suggested that historians might be uncomfortable simply drawing uncritically on Marxist historiography. And he proposed that anthropology might be a way to avoid high politics and allow historians to write about economics by connecting it to all these other facets of social life, such as religion and kinship. Using social anthropology as a theoretical toolkit rather than Marxism has the advantage, as Thomas saw it, of not placing the historian in the same camp as official Communist Party historians.

HHS: How did Thomas argue that social anthropology might be helpful for making sense of the emergence and subsidence of witchcraft accusations in England? How did his arguments differ from those made by Max Gluckman?

FF: By the time you get to the late 1950s and early 1960s witchcraft had become a classic subject to study in social anthropology. The really key insight that anthropologists had brought to the table was that witchcraft should be understood as neither irrational nor random but as something that’s connected to changes in the social structure, as something that may even have its own particular logic for the people who believe in it, and for those who accuse others of it, and maybe even for the people who are accused of it. That might sound like common sense for social scientists or historians today but that’s because we’re working in the wake of classic works of social anthropology from the 1930s onwards which set out those kinds of arguments.

The anthropologist Max Gluckman made the argument that witchcraft accusations rose in Central Africa as a result of colonialism and capitalist expansion. As people experienced more social dislocation, stress, anxiety, uncertainty about the world they reached for scapegoats. Gluckman then made a comparative point about how he thought the future would pan out. He thought that the decline of witchcraft beliefs in England had occurred once  industrial production had got to a certain scaleand more rational forms of production took hold and so he argued that the same process would probably help dispel witchcraft beliefs in Central Africa.

Thomas posed a problem with Gluckman’s’s reading of English history. It wasn’t during the industrial revolution that witchcraft accusations subsided in England. Witchcraft accusations fell away a century earlier, at the end of the seventeenth century and beginning of the eighteenth. Thomas agreed with Gluckman to the extent that witchcraft accusations arose because of social dislocation and social stress, but at least in England’s case witchcraft accusations subsided in England because social structures stabilised after the introduction of a new set of poor laws and there was much less political stress within the system after the Glorious Revolution. Thomas suggested that the witch craze died down because of the stabilisation of the social structure more generally and not just because wealth increased.

HHS: Who were the American Committee on Comparative Politics (CCP), why did they make overtures to Thomas and what were the results?

FF: The American Committee on Comparative Politics were a group of mostly American political scientists who came together in the 1950s. They were really interested in applying new social science techniques to the contemporary world. They thought that you could chart the current problems that countries might be facing, especially in terms of social breakdown and revolution, by looking back at sequences of history. This became known as modernization theory which posited that countries pass through particular stages, through certain crises, in a particular sequence. If social scientists knew more about how those crises arise and what the sequence of crises would be, then maybe policymakers and political elites could avoid social breakdown that might cause revolution (which in a Cold War context was about avoiding a turn towards the Soviet Union).

The Committee were interested in Keith Thomas because he also seemed to be applying social science to history. So they flew Keith Thomas out to America and he went to a couple of their conferences. He was quite intrigued by the idea of applying social science to history but he became skeptical of modernization theory. This was something he shared with a number of other historians who worked with the Committee – they were all pretty skeptical of the idea that there was a unilinear or teleological modernization happening in history, and that you could squash all of the different societies and nations in the world onto one abstract sequence of progress and breakdown. Thomas did up being influenced by the broader turn towards social science in history, and that’s partly why he looked to anthropology, but he didn’t think that the kind of American modernization theory which the Committee on Comparative Politics was generating was that helpful for describing the European past. It was a too much of a blunt instrument.

HHS: In Peter Laslett’s work how were the politics of early modern historiography tied to Cold War debates about revolution?

FF: This is something that we’ve been circling around in this interview so far, which is how far these quite specialized debates about changes in the countryside or industrial production in seventeenth or eighteenth-century England might relate to the biggest clashes of ideology and geopolitics in the mid-twentieth century.

Peter Laslett, like Keith Thomas, also related English history to the Cold War. For Soviet historians and for many Marxists in Britain, the mid seventeenth century in England gave rise to the first bourgeois revolution in world history. This English Revolution was part of a sequence of revolutions that moved through the French and American to the Russian Revolutions.

If the civil wars in England came about because of a class struggle between a rising bourgeoisie and a feudal monarchical order then the Marxist story seemed right. If that wasn’t the case, then maybe that would pose a broader challenge to the way that Marxists understand the history of revolutions and what causes them. Peter Laslett in The World We Have Lost is very keen to say that England in the mid-seventeenth century was not a class society. He used anthropology to suggest that what you see in England is a society in which elites are relatively closed off from the rest of society but that there isn’t the kind of antagonism that Marxists would want to suggest between elites and the rest of the rest of the social world. Instead he described the elite as a ‘web of kinship’ in the same way that contemporary anthropologists explained other pre-capitalist societies.

HHS: What was distinctive about EP Thompson’s engagements with anthrology and how were they informed by his political convictions?

FF: The two historians we’ve been talking about so far thought that social anthropology was useful because it helped to explain societies that were very different from their own. For Keith Thomas, anthropology provided a series of analogies to make sense of witchcraft beliefs in the past. Peter Lalett’s thinking about kinship drew on analogies between English history and societies that anthropologists were studying where there were struggles between kinship lineages and within the elite over political power.

E. P. Thompson wanted to use anthropology to understand the past and also to help us understand later political developments and he came up with the idea of the moral economy to do this. This is the idea that there’s a form of economic and social life which is informed by common-sense ideas of justice, to which market rationality and profit-seeking and capitalism, especially at moments of social stress, seems to be in total opposition.

That’s something that Thompsons saw playing in English history and also something he saw in anthropological literature describing many different societies.

Thompson proposed that the moral economy was something that could be drawn on as an inspiration for contemporary politics. The moral economy didn’t just describe a world that had been lost. For Thompson the moral economy could provide some lessons and inspiration and it reflected a series of struggles going on around the world in the mid twentieth century that he thought historians should be interested in.

HHS: You claim that in Thompson’s article ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’ (1971), he ‘used anthropological exemplars in exactly the way he chided other historians for doing’ – what were his criticisms of other historians and how did he fall into the same trap?

FF: In a review Thompson published a year after his moral economy article he’s really keen to suggest that history is really about particular contexts and that each society has to be treated on its own terms. He was very into empiricism generally and he was pretty skeptical of social theory more broadly. In 1972 he warned about making grand comparisons between different societies. But in his famous 1971 article on the moral economy he does seem to do exactly what he criticised others for doing, which is to make big comparisons and connections between very geographically dispersed societies at different periods of time. He says that the moral economy really is something that’s global, not just national and that you can see examples of it all around the world. One of those examples is England. Thompson certainly didn’t just apply abstract models to the past in the way the Committee on Comparative Politics did but he did definitely have a kind of implicitly comparativist mindset. He did – more than has been understood before by people writing about him – use social science comparatively, but the social science that he’s using is anthropology and ethnography. It’s not abstract in the sense that contemporary modernization theory or development economics were abstract, his social-scientific sensibility was ethnographically sensitive and particularist but it nevertheless drew him to make comparisons across different societies and different contexts to explain the English past.

HHS: What did Eric Hobsbawm see as the potential dangers associated with historians borrowing methods from the social sciences?

FF: Hobsbawm, unlike Thompson, was very excited by the new histories of growth and economic development appearing in the 1950s. He was worried, though, about historians drawing from anthropology and sociology because, in his view, anthropologists and sociologists hadn’t thought enough about change over time. So while he thought that anthropology and sociology might be useful, they hadn’t been describing social change or creating models to explain how it happens. Hobsbawm was invested in the interdisciplinary discussions going on at the time between historians and other social scientists. But because he was a Marxist and an economic determinist he thought that the kind of social science that historians should be interested in should be a social science of change, conflict and development.

HHS: How did Hobsbawm’s accounts of ‘social banditry’ differ from the kinds of argument made by Thompson and how did this reflect their respective political outlooks?

FF: When I was talking about Thompson I explained that there’s a way of reading his work that suggests that protests against modern forms of economic rationality rely on this common sense moral disgust at profit-making, especially in times of social hardship.

The kind of protests he’s interested in are very similar to what Eric Hobsbawm had called social banditry just over a decade earlier. These bandits weren’t necessarily organised or part of a bigger political project. They might be local protestors who based their resistance on folk ideas of justice. For Thompson that would have looked like evidence for a sense of moral economy, but for Hobsbawm these bandits looked irrational, pre-modern and not very helpful for our understanding of what drove social change. For Hobsbawm only committed Communist Party discipline of a broadly Leninist kind was going to bring about socialism and then communism. This reflects, at least in part, Hobsbawm and Thompson’s different politics.

After 1956 with the Soviet invasion of Hungary and Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’, Thompson left the Communist Party of Great Britain but Hobsbawm stayed on even though he had a very fraught relationship with the Party. What Hobsbawm calls social bandits may have been protesting against capitalism, but they did so on a moral basis and without being part of a vanguard party and without an economic understanding of the world, which he would see as necessary for the creation of socialism. Hobsbawm’s book on bandits came out of lectures given at Max Gluckman’s anthropology seminar at the University of Manchester and there are many similarities between his account and the work of the Manchester School of Gluckman and Victor Turner.

HHS: What distinct understandings of the relationship between the modern and the ‘primitive’ did these historians rely on?

FF: Social anthropologists in the mid-twentieth century were very sceptical of evolutionary social science, where the concept of the so-called primitive represented an earlier stage of human history and then history had progressed from that point forward. There’s a bit of an irony in the story I tell in the article because in many ways the historians began to reformulate the old Victorian story about evolutionary progress by drawing on the works of the anti-evolutionist social anthropologists.

Thomas, Laslett and Hobsbawm all reinstantiated a kind of historical teleology of modernity in which they used ethnographic examples from the twentieth century to read back into Europe’s pre-modern past. So, in a way, there’s a kind of irony here that the social anthropologists were trying to relativize amongst different societies around the world in order to challenge the notion of a ladder of history with English society at the top, while many of the historians recreated a version of that story by using anthropological examples to measure a distance from an ethnographically-informed past to the present. The one historian who really stands out in comparison to that idea is Thompson, who had a different idea of development and change in history. He never wrote a big manifesto laying it all out in a fully worked through theoretical way but amongst these four historians who I write about he’s the one who seems to be most relativist and the one who wants to maintain an anthropological sensibility by saying modernity hasn’t simply left behind the premodern past. Maybe  the premodern even provides resources – political, imaginative and moral resources – for ways to protest against and resist what he saw as the worst features of his present.

Finally, I wonder if you could briefly discuss what you’re currently working on and introduce your monograph Participant Observers: Anthropology, Colonial Development, and the Reinvention of Society in Britain (University of California Press)?

FF: The book came out a couple of months ago. It’s a history of social anthropology in the twentieth century that looks at the discipline’s development over time and its effects on Britain’s intellectual culture. The book ends with a few brief comments about these historians that I discuss in the article, but it doesn’t go into nearly as much detail. Writing this article was a chance to draw on research I had done for a chapter of my PhD thesis which I then had to mostly cut from the book. So it’s been really great to get the opportunity to get this research out there and I hope it’ll be interesting for readers of HHS.

I’m now working on a totally different project millions of miles away from the stuff we’ve been talking about here. I’m working on a new book about emigration from the UK between the mid nineteenth century and the mid twentieth century. I’m  looking at how emigration from the UK transformed the British state and affected citizenship law. It explores ideas about race and empire, economic policy and social policy so it’s totally different to the history of anthropology. I’ve left intellectual history behind to some extent and I’m moving on to social, economic and political history over a bigger timespan than my first book. But I’m still interested in the relationship between social science and historical writing. I guess I’m now trying to do some social science history rather than write about other people doing it.  

This interview was conducted by Hannah Proctor. It has been edited for clarity and length.

Review: Emily Hauptmann, Foundations and American Political Science

Review: Emily Hauptmann, Foundations and American Political Science: The Transformation of a Discipline, 1945-1970 (Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas, 2022)

John Hsien-hsiang Feng, Wuhan University

Money talks. Fundraising campaigns have substantial influence on American public life. Likewise, financial sponsorships have considerable impacts on American political science. Funding matters. Disciplinary development is beyond political scientists’ genealogies and debates. As archival sources become available, one might wonder how funding bodies shaped the discipline in the past. Emily Hauptmann explores such an inquiry in her latest monograph: Foundations and American Political Science: The Transformation of a Discipline, 1945-1970.

Hauptmann emphasises “an important material dimension” in the history of American political science (p. 9). She looks at the timespan between 1945 and 1970, namely the heyday of behaviouralism: “[T]he mid-twentieth-century programs of the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller philanthropies influenced academic political science in powerful, lasting ways,” argues Hauptmann (p. 169). Behaviouralism prevailed in the discipline in the 1950s and 1960s. It wasn’t until David Easton’s 1969 call for a post-behavioural revolution that American political science shifted toward more diversified paradigms. Behaviouralism was intellectually rooted in the work of Charles Merriam during the interwar period. He was the leader of the Chicago School and helped to create the Social Science Research Council. The Chicago School and the SSRC were both vital to the rise of behaviouralism. Giving credit to Merriam, scholars are inclined to take the post-WW2 supremacy of behaviouralism for granted. Rather, Hauptmann skips Merriam’s interwar period and pays attention to the financial circumstances that contributed to the superiority of behaviouralism in the US.

The National Science Foundation allocated little budget to political science before the 1970s. According to Hauptmann, the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller foundations filled the lacuna and provided large amounts of subsidies to political scientists for their behavioural research: “From 1950 until 1957, Ford invested $24 million to develop what it called ‘the behavioural sciences’… From 1959 to 1964, Ford funds for political science exceeded Carnegie and Rockefeller’s by 20 to 1.” (p. 50) Ford also financed universities. One of the receivers was the University of California, Berkeley. The university management used Ford’s grants to set up an interdisciplinary centre for behavioural research, bringing different social science faculties together. Meanwhile, the political science faculty was incentivised to offer new courses, in parallel with traditional political theories, studying interest groups, political parties, and the like. Ford’s monetary aids attracted political scientists to participate in interdisciplinary behavioural research and modify the conventional curriculum vis-à-vis behaviouralism. Hauptmann accordingly draws the conclusion that although the priorities were psychology and sociology, “the influence of the Ford Foundation’s program on political science was nevertheless profound” (p. 55).

The other two foundations were by no means trivial. The Rockefeller Foundation funded V. O. Key’s project using statistical data to analyse the voters in the South in the late 1940s. When Key chaired the SSRC Committee on Political Behaviour, when his ties with Rockefeller officers were enhanced, Rockefeller “gradually moved toward supporting behavioural political science” (pp. 83-86). The Carnegie Cooperation sponsored Angus Campbell and his colleagues’ project analysing the 1952 presidential election: “Carnegie officers made clear that their support would not extend past the 1952 election” (p. 45).  They favoured Key’s SSRC committee. Rockefeller stepped in and supported Campbell’s team to conduct surveys in 1956 and 1960. Campbell’s team project later became an integral part of the American National Election Studies. The ANES was established under the SSRC’s and NSF’s long-term auspices. In this regard, the ANES was an accumulative outcome of various funding organs. Carnegie was a proportionally smaller contributor. Intriguingly, Hauptmann attributes to Carnegie and remarks that “Carnegie’s ‘investment’ in the 1952 election study therefore yielded not only The American Voter but also the ANES.” (p 45)

Throughout her book, Hauptmann endeavours to demonstrate that behaviouralism thrived in American political science because Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller patronised behavioural research with enthusiasm between 1945 and 1970. The NSF and other federal agencies continued this trend. The foundations made behavioural research fiscally feasible and transformed the discipline in the US. Changes were brought to professional practices and curricula on campuses. American political scientists’ self-identity was reconstructed accordingly. A classic definition of politics is “who gets what, when, how”. In terms of American political science, other historians shed light on who published what and when. They contextualise scholars’ contesting academic discourses in the greater political or philosophical backgrounds. In contrast, Hauptmann discusses how the discourses were produced and reveals the financial resources behind them. In addition to genealogies and debates, scholars competed for grants and the funding bodies competed for influence. Hauptmann’s portrayal of American political science is not only material but also pragmatic.

Intriguingly, Hauptmann is reluctant to distinguish the types of funding bodies and explore the significances underlying them. Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller are private whereas the NSF is governmental. The latter marks state intervention. As American political scientists are governmentally patronised, what are the state-society or power-knowledge relations in the discipline? In terms of transnational exchanges, private funding bodies are more flexible. As American political scientists are sponsored by the foundations to collaborate with those from the Global North and South, what does it mean to the discipline vis-à-vis globalization? Hauptmann limits her discussion to the domestic development of American political science. Furthermore, the timespan between 1945 and 1970 focuses on the Cold War. What is the longer term history of American political science, private and governmental patronages, and the global ideological confrontation? The above-mentioned questions are left unanswered in the book. To be sure, Hauptmann’s book is insightful and reminds us that money talks in American political science. However, her partial portrayal leaves other avenues to explore.

Interview: Archiving the COVID-19 pandemic

Archiving the COVID-19 pandemic in Mass Observation and Middletown, Special Section, interview with co-editor Nick Clarke (University of Southampton).

History of the Human Sciences: Clive Barnett with whom your collaborated on this Special Section sadly passed away before it was published. I wonder if you might want to begin by paying tribute to Clive and reflecting on your experience of working together?

Nick Clarke: In the summer of 2020, Clive and I started working on a project about popular responses to COVID-19, funded by the British Academy. A part of that project was a seminar series that we ran with the Mass Observation Archive. The Special Section emerged out of that seminar series. I was working with Clive on finalising the first draft of these articles when he died suddenly in December 2021. Clive and I had actually been working together for years, since I arrived in Bristol as a PhD student in 2000. I subsequently went on to work as a researcher for Clive as a postdoc. I considered him a close friend and his sudden death was devastating, of course for his family, but also for many friends of his in academia, myself included. No doubt Clive would have had lots of brilliant ideas for how to develop the Special Section.

Perhaps the best thing I can do for the purposes of this interview, instead of talking about Clive all day, which I could do, is to refer readers to a set of things that have been written about Clive in the last year or so. There was a blog post that I wrote soon after his death, about his generosity as a supervisor, a reader, a thinker and collaborator. This was posted on ‘Covid Responsibility’, a blog that we were both writing together specifically about popular responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Clive was an editor at the journal Progress in Human Geography at the time he died and there’s an a nice obituary there that people can read too.

HHS: Thank you so much. What were you hoping to achieve with this Special Section?

NC: Clive and I won the British Academy grant to study popular responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically by using Mass Observation’s COVID-19 collections. As I said, a part of that project was to organize a seminar series with the Mass Observation Archive where we got people from many different disciplines to talk to us about those collections and related collections of biographical writing about everyday life during the pandemic, including the Everyday Life in Middletown Project’s COVID-19 collections.

In the seminars, contributors were speaking about a particular way of knowing the pandemic through the human sciences, and especially through diaries and related forms like mass photography. Our seminar series was also archiving initial responses to these collections.  All of these initial analyses, it became clear to us, were informed by and shaped by the history of the human sciences, and especially the distinctive histories and human sciences of Mass Observation and Middletown. By the end of the seminar series we came around to the idea of submitting a Special Section to History of the Human Sciences that would focus on the pandemic and we thought it made sense to structure it around the past, the present and future.

The past, in the sense that archiving practices during the pandemic were informed and shaped by the histories of Mass Observation and Middletown. The present, in the sense that, among other things, what the articles in the Special Section seek to do is know the pandemic through the human sciences in the present. And the future, in the sense that one function of the Special Section, we hope, is to archive these initial engagements between researchers and archives, which could then inform researchers in the future.

HHS: What role did scholars from the human sciences contribute to ‘ways of knowing’ in the COVID-19 pandemic?

NC: In the introductory article we write about different ways of knowing pandemics. Of course, the most prominent way of knowing the COVID-19 pandemic – at least in the UK but I suspect all around the world – was through the health sciences: epidemiology, virology, and so on. But in the UK and probably elsewhere, the human sciences were also included in official ways of knowing the pandemic. So, for example, psychologists, behavioural scientists, anthropologists and historians were included in SAGE, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, or at least in expert groups on the periphery of SAGE. There were some very interesting debates among psychologists. There was an argument between what some people have called ‘the frailty tradition’ of psychology – that positions people as mentally frail, easily susceptible to pandemic fatigue, and so on – and a tradition that identifies as ‘the social identity tradition’, which argues that people can be expected to comply with the rules and guidance around non-pharmaceutical interventions so long as certain certain kinds of advice and information are provided to them and certain support is given.

We focus on one particular way of knowing pandemics through the human sciences in the Special Section:  diaries, other biographical writing, and related forms like mass photography. We do this not least because the COVID-19 pandemic seemed to be a diarological moment. Many diaries and similar forms were kept, produced, collected, published during the pandemic by many different actors.

HHS: Could you briefly introduce Mass Observation and the Middletown studies?

NC: I’ll try my best but they’re very complex organizations and projects with very complex histories!

Let’s start with Mass Observation, which in its original form existed from 1937 to the late 1940s. It was an independent research organization influenced by anthropology and surrealism, and primarily focused on revealing the everyday lives of ordinary people in the UK. It did that by using volunteers, so-called ‘mass observers’, who were meant to observe their own lives and the lives of people around them and then submit those observations to Mass Observation who would publish them.

In the introductory article to the Special Section we also write about the contemporary iteration of Mass Observation, which is made up of the Mass Observation Archive, established in 1975, attached to University of Sussex in Brighton. That archive contains the papers of the original project, but it’s also become a set of active research projects. Out of the archive is run the Mass Observation Project, which is sort of a panel study. Mass Observation maintains a panel of 500 or 600 volunteer writers based across the UK who, every three or four months, are sent a ‘directive’ consisting of a suggestion of topics to write about. These ‘directive responses’ are sent back in and added to the archive. There is also the 12th May project, which asks people across the UK to keep a day-diary every 12th May and send that in to the archive.

The other archive and research project covered by the Special Section is the Everyday Life in Middletown project. The original Middletown study of Muncie, Indiana was completed by Robert and Helen Lynd in the 1920s. It actually influenced the foundation of Mass Observation in the 1930s. One of the first projects of the original Mass Observation was the ‘Worktown’ study of Bolton, which took its title from Middletown. The original Middletown study was a community study of Muncie, Indiana, which sought to study life in general in a small American city and to trace how life was changing in the 1920s in the context of industrialization.

Since then there have been numerous Middletown studies and the Everyday Life in Middletown project is one of the latest or most recent of those. It was established in 2016 and also runs a panel of volunteer writers.

HHS: What are distinctive about Mass Observation and Middletown as human sciences?

This is a question we try to address in the introductory article to the Special Section. The original Mass Observation had a number of characteristics that mark it out as a distinctive human science. For the purposes of this interview I’ll focus on a particular framing we use, which I think previous writing about Mass Observation has never quite fully developed. This framing is the idea of the original Mass Observation as a science ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’. ‘Of the people’: this basically meant to focus on the everyday lives of ordinary people. ‘By the people’: this was achieved in the way Mass Observation attempted to use ordinary people to collect observations about everyday life. These were the mass observers who were recruited to do a kind of citizen science, if you like. Thirdly, ‘for the people’: in that Mass Observation sought to publish these observations as widely as possible, including back to the mass observers who had been making these observations in the first place.

If we think about the contemporary Mass Observation, there are a whole series of characteristics that distinguish it as a particular human science, but it still continues to focus on the everyday lives of ordinary people and continues to mobilize people as mass observers or writers. Perhaps what it does less than the original Mass Observation is publish that writing widely. It’s still ‘of the people’ and ‘by the people’, but perhaps there’s a bit less emphasis on it being ‘for the people’.

The original Middletown study was distinctive as a human science, informed by functionalist cultural anthropology. The Lynds focused on the majority population in Muncie. They produced an account that excluded minorities. The Everyday Life in Middletown project, which is influenced by that original study, is also its own study with its own distinctive human science. It also focuses on the everyday lives of ordinary people in Middletown, but

brings to the foreground the idea that Middletown is a particular place. It is not typical America, but one particular community; a community now characterized by industrial decline, class conflict and provincialism.

The Everyday Life in Middletown Project is influenced by Mass Observation, both the original and contemporary versions, and makes an effort to publish all of the writing that it collects back to those people doing the writing, and it does that digitally. They call it the ‘digital commons’. It is very much trying to practice that democratic science ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’.

HHS: How does Rebecca Coleman and Dawn Lyon’s article ‘Rupture, repetition, and

new rhythms for pandemic times: Mass Observation, everyday life, and COVID-19’ use “rhythm as an object and tool of inquiry to make sense of spatio-temporal change”? How did they gather data on people’s experiences of time during the pandemic?

NC: The authors ran a directive on COVID-19 and time through Mass Observation in August 2020. They partnered with the archivists to send out a directive to the panel of volunteer writers, asking a series of open questions about experiences of time during the pandemic. The authors were interested in the centrality of rhythm to experiences of everyday life and in how the pandemic was potentially disrupting the rhythms of everyday life. The writing they got back suggested to them that the pandemic seemed to be rupturing rhythms of everyday life. Many regular activities had been stopped. Many of the panelists were experiencing time during lockdown as monotonous, as lacking in rhythm, so they were finding ways to make new rhythms by, for example, attuning to nature. One of the most interesting things coming through from this article was the way that Dawn and Rebecca found the responses to their directive contained less life-writing than is usually the case in directive responses for Mass Observation, which suggested it was difficult for people to do life-writing during the pandemic. What people seemed to be doing instead in responses to this directive was grappling with a live present, grappling with the unfolding of the pandemic. The writing takes the form of fragments, small stories. I’ve come to think of the Special Section as partly an archiving of those fragments and small stories and initial analyses of those forms.

HHS: In the article you co-wrote with Clive Barnett, ‘Seeing like an epidemiologist? Mobilising people against COVID-19’ you discuss how ordinary people were encouraged to ‘see like an epidemiologist’ – how was this ‘process of translation’ carried out and to what extent was the attempted mobilisation achieved?

NC: This article started from an observation, which was that during the pandemic one means of governing the pandemic in the UK was that citizens were being encouraged it to see ‘like an epidemiologist’: to think in terms of populations and groups; rates, trends, and distributions; the capacity of public services; and complex systems of causation. By saying ‘Stay home, protect the NHS, save lives’, the government was asking people to think in terms of a complex system of causation. All this was being communicated in terms of statistics, charts, maps etc. at press conferences, for example. Citizens were encouraged to develop a kind of scientific literacy to process all of these resources and then to act accordingly.

Clive and I thought that one of the things we might be able to use Mass Observation’s COVID-19 collections to do would be to see how citizens responded to this attempt to govern the pandemic. It might be that the citizens would become kind of an ‘epidemiological public’ with ‘epidemiological imaginations’, that they would come to see like an epidemiologist. But it’s also possible that citizens would develop their own kind of ‘lay epidemiology’ in response to these attempts to govern behavior during the pandemic.

We read as much as we could of these collections and identified a lay epidemiology

that involved confident use of epidemiological terms and concepts by ordinary people: rates, curves, spikes, that kind of thing. But we also found a much more skeptical and reluctant engagement with the subject positions being offered by epidemiology during the pandemic – ideas of vulnerable groups, at-risk groups and so on. I think our conclusion is that mobilization of people as epidemiologists, or translation of the idea of seeing like an epidemiologist, was partial in the way that it worked out during those first eight months of the pandemic.

HHS: Annebella Pollen’s article in the Special Section ‘‘There is nothing less spectacular than a pestilence’: Picturing the pandemic in Mass Observation’s Covid-19 Collections’, looks at visual observation in MO’s COVID-19 collections that take various forms (from photos to drawings to memes) – what does she argue is revealed through the visual culture of COVID-19?

NC: Annebella was interested in how the pandemic was visualized or pictured, so she focused on a particular sample of directive responses and day-diaries in Mass Observation’s COVID-19 collections, responses that included photography, drawing, painting, but also writing about the pandemic’s image cultures and writing that included visual descriptions.

One thing that seemed to be revealed by these materials is a wider pandemic visual culture

in which these materials submitted to Mass Observation was situated. This wider visual culture seems to be comprised of stylized renderings of the spiked spherical virus, photographic documentation of the first stage of the pandemic (empty cities, for example), and also depictions of the main actors of the pandemic, for example, masked healthcare workers. Another thing that’s revealed by these materials is the important role of Mass Observation in that pandemic visual culture. She notes that many of the public photography projects that were set up during the pandemic to collect images and publish them cited the original Mass Observation as an inspiration and justification. Submissions to Mass Observation that the article analyzes were both influenced by a wider pandemic visual culture, but also played an active role in the production of that culture.

The other thing it’s just worth highlighting about this paper is that, similar to the Lyon and Coleman, she notes how a lot of the submissions she was reading contained a kind of live processing of the pandemic and people’s experiences of the pandemic and the questions that the pandemic was posing to people. That’s very similar to Rebecca and Dawn’s observation that what they were reading was a sort of grappling with the live present of an unfolding pandemic.

HHS: Like the Coleman and Lyon article, Patrick Collier and James J. Connolly’s ‘Time shifts: Place, belonging, and future orientation in pandemic everyday life’ looks at experiences of the pandemic from a temporal perspective via materials gathered by the Everyday Life in Middletown project. According to the authors, how were disruptions associated with the pandemic reflected in autobiographical writing?

Collier and Connolly use diaries and directive responses submitted to the Everyday Life in Middletown project to consider how the pandemic distorted experiences of time and place and potentially caused problems for the construction of autobiographical selves in doing so.

During the pandemic people in Muncie seemed to experience the present as confusing because everyday rhythms were disrupted. They didn’t really write much about the future. They seemed to feel disconnected from the future, unable to plan for the future, which is different from what the project would usually receive in terms of autobiographical writing. People writing during the pandemic didn’t write so much about the lifetime; didn’t provide in their writing a sense of continuous life and belonging, which was different to the usual writing that the project would get in response to directives. Ultimately, what Patrick and James suggest is that the pandemic seemed to generate new forms of writing, reflective of new experiences and new forms of relating.

HHS: Finally, a more general question: what were the challenges associated with archiving the pandemic specifically or with analysing archives of the very recent past more generally?

NC: Lots of challenges! One of the challenges was that the pandemic disrupted everyone’s lives, including the lives of researchers and archivists. This is one of the reasons why these projects became so important during the early stages of the pandemic. They were long-standing research projects, organizations and archives. They were already set up. They had an existing infrastructure that allowed for the collection of diaries and other forms of biographical writing during the very early stages of the pandemic, when perhaps setting up something new would have been difficult. There were some ethical challenges to setting up new research projects during the beginning of the pandemic, asking people for their time and asking people to write about a very difficult situation. Mass Observation and the Everyday Life in Middletown project already had panels of volunteer writers and a trusting relationship with those people so it seemed possible to do ethical research and ethical archiving through those organizations.

Now, I’ve talked about those two projects as an opportunity at the beginning of the pandemic, but they are also a constraint. Both of these projects have their own characteristic human sciences; they attract certain participants and certain forms of participation and so they produce a particular account of the pandemic and we have to keep that in mind. I think that’s  why it’s so important to situate these projects in the history of the human sciences.

Interview conducted by Hannah Proctor. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Review: Matthew Smith, The First Resort: The History of Social Psychiatry in the United States

Matthew Smith, The First Resort: The History of Social Psychiatry in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023)

Michael N. Healey, Johns Hopkins University

For many decades, the history of U.S. psychiatry was likened to a pendulum, one which repeatedly swung between a biological framework and a psychodynamic one. As Jonathan Sadowsky has argued, however, grand narratives such as these obscure more nuanced aspects of the discipline’s past (Sadowsky, 2006). There were many continuities between psychoanalysis and psychopharmacology, for example, as Jonathan Metzl demonstrates in his analysis of medical journals, popular magazines, and related sources (Metzl, 2003). Similarly, some Freudians were surprisingly receptive to somatic methods, as Sadowsky’s own research on electroconvulsive therapy has shown (Sadowsky, 2017). Works like these have broadened the historiography of psychiatry in generative ways, providing us with a richer understanding of this specialty’s development.

In his latest book, The First Resort, Matthew Smith makes a similar intervention. He does so, however, not by examining another convergence of biological and psychodynamic approaches, but by contrasting them to another paradigm entirely: social psychiatry. While the term itself has existed for well over a century, and has been used in a variety of contexts, The First Resort largely focuses on a cohort of U.S. psychiatrists that practiced after World War II, and the diverse group of allied professionals with which they collaborated. Indeed, to Smith (and many of his actors), it was this interdisciplinarity – in mental healthcare, yes, but primarily in research – that characterized social psychiatry during these “magic years” (as the title of an unpublished manuscript by APA president Daniel Blain cited by Smith characterized the era). Accordingly, the book revolves around his analysis of four classic studies: Robert Faris and H. Warren Dunham’s research on schizophrenia in Chicago, Illinois; August Hollingshead and Frederick Redlich’s research on class and mental health in New Haven, Connecticut; and the Midtown Manhattan and Stirling County projects, both conducted under the auspices of Cornell University. These case studies are bookended by an overview of the field’s social and intellectual origins – and the political trends that led to its decline. By chronicling the rise and fall of social psychiatry, Smith reminds us that this pivotal period in the mid-twentieth century was not merely the heyday of Freudianism. It was also the zenith of a more environmentalist perspective, one which shaped the contours of U.S. psychiatry for decades to come.

In a more granular sense, however, Smith has also deepened our understanding of several historical figures, in ways that open numerous avenues for further research. Take, for example, the Cornell psychoanalyst Thomas Rennie, who Gerald Grob once portrayed as just one of biological psychiatry’s many detractors (Grob, 1991). In Smith’s account, he is cast instead as a leading social psychiatrist, whose research in Midtown demonstrated how both somatic and sociocultural factors contributed to mental illness. By focusing less on the internecine disputes between these ideologies, and more on the projects that united them, historians of psychiatry might discover similar instances of exchange, and find that individual practitioners were less partisan than Grob’s narrative suggests. Historians of the human sciences, too, will benefit from Smith’s analysis. His chapter on Stirling County, in particular, highlights the early careers of Dorothea and Alexander Leighton, two physician-ethnographers that have previously appeared in histories of anthropology. By examining these and other connections between psychiatry and the social sciences, Smith provides a model for other scholars that seek to merge – or perhaps transcend – the historical literature on both.

In contrast, Smith is less interested in promoting further epidemiological research. Throughout the book, in fact, he criticizes psychiatrists and social scientists – both then and since – for quibbling over the minutia of their methods and results, instead of using them to inform policy. Their inaction has been especially harmful, he argues, when it comes to matters of income inequality. While discussing the findings of each study, Smith repeatedly emphasizes those on economic disparities (though related factors, like social disintegration, are also considered). These data, according to him, are enough to establish poverty as a determinant of mental health – and justify programs aimed at its alleviation. Smith concludes, then, by advocating for universal basic income (or UBI), a policy that was proposed by some social psychiatrists, but has become far more popular during the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, while it makes several important scholarly contributions, The First Resort is also an applied history, one which offers much to contemporary policy-makers and activists.

That said, it would be a mistake to dismiss Smith’s book as an exercise in presentism. On the contrary, he should be commended for his measured scrutiny, of both the studies themselves and the individuals that conducted them. Smith is particularly attentive to the prejudices of these researchers, for example, and repeatedly demonstrates how classism and ethnic discrimination shaped the collection and communication of data. Such biases, he suggests, help to explain social psychiatry’s political inertness, as its practitioners (by and large) were unwilling to advocate for welfare programs that would address the various inequities they had uncovered. Their elitism undermined clinical services too, as Smith explains in brief sections on community mental health centres. The First Resort, then, is not an unapologetic endorsement of social psychiatry, or an attempt to inspire its renaissance. Both here and elsewhere, in fact, Smith insists that patients are best served by a combination of biological, psychodynamic, and environmentalist approaches. His argument, rather, serves as a warning to the growing number of like-minded clinicians and scientists, who might otherwise replicate the shortcomings of their predecessors.

Indeed, if I have one criticism of Smith’s book, it is that crucial episodes of this cautionary tale are overshadowed by his own emphasis on research. Consider, for instance, his discussion of the community mental health movement, which I alluded to above. Smith’s account of the conflicts that arose between social psychiatrists, their staffs, and the populations they served should be required reading for anybody pursuing a career in public mental health. Similarly, his overview of the sociopolitical factors that undermined these preventative programs is invaluable to those advocating for similar interventions today. And yet, those skimming The First Resort, or reviewing its table of contents, might miss them entirely, as they are spread across chapters devoted to landmark projects in psychiatric epidemiology. This is not to say that these sections are out of place; on the contrary, they do much to demonstrate the broader relevance of this niche field. But the basic structure of The First Resort – four case studies of social psychiatric research that build toward an argument for UBI – does distract from these other moments and messages. Perhaps it is unfair to expect an author to accomplish more than they set out to. It is odd, though, that Smith (much like the researchers he criticizes) devotes most of his attention to the academic side of community mental health, instead of its many clinical and political manifestations.

These, of course, may be explored in subsequent histories. In any case, however, The First Resort will continue to resonate with both academic historians and mental health professionals – even if its policy prescriptions become dated. The evolution of psychiatric theory and practice may not be as pendulous as previously thought. As Smith reminds us, however, the profession will always be situated within a broader political context, one which is constantly oscillating between the left and the right. Just as social psychiatry’s larger ambitions were quelled by the neoliberal turn, UBI and related policies may soon encounter increased resistance, as rising inflation leads to yet another era of austerity. If and when they do, Smith’s book will be there to remind us of those fleeting moments, both in the mid-twentieth century and more recently, when the radical seemed reasonable. Because it was – and still is.

Interview: Nadine Weidman on the Hoffman Report

We spoke to Nadine Weidman (Harvard University) about the Special Section she edited on ‘The Hoffman Report in historical context’, published in the December 2022 issue of History of the Human Sciences.

History of the Human Sciences: Could you briefly introduce the 2015 Hoffman Report and explain its historical background?

Nadine Weidman: In the wake of 9/11 the Bush administration began what it called the Global War on Terror. As part of that war his administration introduced ‘enhanced interrogations’ of political detainees, who were held as prisoners of the war on terror in places like the military prison at Guantanamo Bay. The administration had a great hunger for information about the possible location of future terrorist attacks and so they detained people who they didn’t charge with any specific crime and who were often held in extremely inhumane conditions in these military prisons. Many observers and international organizations said that these enhanced interrogation techniques were actually tantamount to torture. They would involve things like waterboarding, sleep deprivation, stress positions – all kinds of really inhumane techniques.

Psychologists got involved in assisting in these interrogations. The APA [American Psychological Association] got into it in 2005 by issuing high-level ethical guidelines that permitted psychologists to assist with and engage in these so-called interrogations. In 2005 the APA convened a committee and put out a report called ‘Psychological Ethics and National Security’, which gave ethical sanction to psychologists participating in these interrogations. As you might imagine, this created a huge firestorm of controversy within the profession. For 10 years – from 2005 to 2015 – the APA faced a great deal of criticism including from psychologists within the APA. Many people left the APA in response to this issue. Then towards the end of 2014 a journalist made public an email correspondence between APA authorities and national security officials showing that the APA had drawn up those high-level ethical guidelines in 2005 in collusion with members of the military, in collusion with the Department of Defense [DoD].

In the wake of this revelation, which showed that the APA was working with the military to produce the high-level guidelines sanctioning psychologists’ involvement in torture, the APA decided it was finally time for some self critique. They appointed an independent legal investigator, David Hoffman, to conduct an investigation of what had gone on with that 2005 report. The Hoffman Report came out in the summer of 2015 exploring what had happened and showing that the APA had colluded with the Department of Defense to come up with these guidelines. Since then the Hoffman report has itself become a target of controversy. People who are named in the Hoffman report as part of this collusion effort have been suing the APA. So the APA is under litigation right now about the report and some people have been trying to vilify Hoffman and his efforts. It’s a huge ongoing controversy and, of course, Guantanamo Bay is still open. I understand that there are still possibly psychologists involved there. It’s an ethical problem that the American Psychological Association has got itself into and doesn’t seem like it has any clear way forward.

HHS: What were you hoping to achieve with this Special Section?

NW: When the Hoffman Report came out in 2015 and I saw the explosion in the field that it had created, I thought that it was necessary to provide some historical perspective on it. The Hoffmann Report itself does contain some history but only a small section out of 500 pages is devoted to history and historians didn’t put it together so it’s kind of sketchy and brief. I thought it would be interesting for historians of psychology who have done a tremendous amount of work on the relationship between psychology and the US military over the past century or more to lend some perspective on this. I felt that there was an idea that what happened with the APA and torture was just a matter of a few bad apples. I kept hearing that expression: “Oh, it’s just a few bad apples. It’s not really anything to do with the profession or with the APA.” It was as if it was just these renegade psychologists who were making sure that these torture interrogations were, as they put it, safe, legal, and effective.

But how could they be safe and also effective? The whole point was to garner some kind of information out of these detainees, who might not have had any involvement in anything at all.

I thought that we needed some more explanation for how psychologists could have turned in this way to cooperating with the military. It made a very striking contrast to psychiatrists. The American Psychiatric Association specifically distanced itself from having anything to do with the War on Terror, whereas the psychologists didn’t. I thought that needed some explanation and I thought that looking at the longer history of psychology and the military starting in World War I and throughout the Cold War would really lend a context and a historical explanation that I felt was missing from other commentary on this issue. So I got together these authors who are experts in this field to give us insight into this relationship.

The first two articles by Joy Rohde and Dan Aalbers are past-oriented and discuss the history, while the latter two articles are more future-directed, they think about what the profession can do now that we know that this has happened.

HHS: In her article ‘Beyond torture: Knowledge and power at the nexus of social science and national security’, Joy Rohde demonstrates that far from originating in the War on Terror, psychology has long-standing connections with the national security services.  What is the significance of these historical entanglements and what ‘cautionary lessons’ do they offer for those responding to the Hoffman Report in the present?

NW: She argues that there has been this ‘psychological-national security nexus’ and that it has benefited both partners. I think that’s key – there have been professional benefits and economic benefits on both sides. The APA itself has benefited in certain ways and I think she shows that. That offers a cautionary lesson in itself because if those benefits are flowing in both directions then we need to know that.

HHS: In ‘The Hoffman Report in historical context: A study in denial’, Dan Aalbers claims that the Hoffman Report can be viewed as a ‘study in denial’ or as an example of ‘motivated blindness’ – what does he mean by this?

NW: He’s arguing that during the Cold War the APA looked away from what might have really been going on. There were these Cold War precedents for involvement of social scientists in interrogation and torture techniques. He says that the DoD and the CIA were using social scientists for their expertise and that professional organizations like the APA were refusing to acknowledge it or refusing to look at the real implications of that. They didn’t want to know what was going on, so they never really faced up to it. They never really opened up about it. I think it’s a little bit of a different argument from saying they gave sanction to it, which I think is what we saw in that 2005 report. This is a little bit more nuanced.

HHS: And he discusses how the use of euphemistic terms like ‘enhanced interrogation’ also facilitates this kind of denial…

NW: Yes. I got these articles together when I was the editor of History of Psychology, which is an APA journal. I was putting together this Hoffman Report special section for that journal. I got all these authors together, they wrote their articles, they went through round after round of peer review and then they went through round after round of legal review. The APA lawyers looked at these articles and censored them. We had to change words. My authors had to insert things like, “in my opinion” or “in my view” or, as you say, use some euphemisms. The APA cited their own legal concerns and their own ongoing involvement in litigation. And then, at the very last minute, when the section was about to appear in the journal the APA called me up and said they declined to publish the special section. The whole thing got stopped right at the very end. They refused publication.

That’s when I turned to Sarah Marks at History of the Human Sciences and asked if we could publish it with you instead. The APA said we could publish it in a non-APA journal but this was after their legal counsel had supposedly approved the articles. That really I did it for me as it seemed like they were preventing this history from being known or trying to use this ongoing legal battle over the Hoffman Report to censor their own history and to legislate what academic historians can and cannot say. That disturbed me. I was very glad that HHS could pick it up and it could finally see the light of day.

HHS: What was specific about the ‘weaponization of psychology post-9/11’ (according to the co-authored article by Jean Maria Arrigo, Lawrence P Rockwood, Jack O’Brien, Dutch France, David DeBatto and John Kitiakou)?

NW: The authors (who are both psychologists and military/intelligence professionals) argue that military sector objectives and academic science objectives are very different. They include charts in the article that show that their [respective] aims and methods are just completely different. And yet, they argue, academic organizations like the APA are prime targets for infiltration from military sector objectives. I think they mean that studying what happened with the APA and within psychology can act as a warning for other social science organizations who might be tempted to line up with the military. They show that this is not a good partnership because the goals are so fundamentally incompatible.

HHS: Elissa N. Rodkey, Michael Buttrey and Krista L. Rodkey’s article ‘Beyond following rules: Teaching research ethics in the age of the Hoffman Report’ argues that the findings of the Hoffman Report ‘illustrate how ethics codes are not objective and ahistorical, but always products of a particular time and place’ – what is the significance of this insight for how ethics codes are understood and taught?

NW: This article asks what the revelations in the report mean for the profession, for psychologists. The authors also ask what it means for us as teachers of psychology and of ethics. They ask how we can teach ethics knowing that one of the major professional academic organizations in the US compromised its ethics in this way. The authors see ethics codes as historically situated, products of time and place. They’re not universal or trans historical or trans cultural. They give some historical background of the APA ethics code, which was one of the earliest in the profession. They also trace how it changed over time. They then talk about the outcomes of the Hoffman Report for the APA ethics code and ask what remains to be done to ensure that such military collusion does not recur. In the end they propose a wholly different view of ethics from what we might be accustomed to. They suggest that we take up ‘virtue ethics’ as an alternative to a more cost-benefit analysis which is the way ethics is usually taught and practiced. I think they’re saying that kind of cost-benefit analysis can lead us into situations like the collusion that the Hoffman Report uncovered.

I think the APA would like this whole issue to go away and for us to move past it, to say that it’s in the past so let’s forget it. The whole point of the special section is to show that the historical roots of the connection between psychology and the military are very deep.

The links are very longstanding and they have had and continue to have tremendous significance for the profession. Division 19 of the APA, which is military psychology, is one of the largest and most powerful of the divisions. Those interests are still very potent in this discipline. I don’t think that there’s a place for psychologists – who are supposed to be in the helping professions – in an arena that involves torturing people. I think the whitewashing and euphemisms that the APA has used in describing these connections are problematic.

I don’t think we can understand how the ethics report got issued in 2005 without looking at the longer history. I don’t think we can understand where we should go from now on, how we should act from now on, without understanding how we got to that point. This is a place for historians to make a contribution. That’s what I was hoping to do with this section. Someone at the APA must recognize that there is a threatening issue here, that there’s something really serious going on, or the special section would not have been pulled from the History of Psychology journal.

Interview conducted by Hannah Proctor. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.