Three pieces reflecting on the life, work and legacy of the late Bob Young by his former students Roger Smith, Roger Cooter and Kurt Jacobsen
Roger Smith
The historian of the evolutionary and psychological sciences, psychotherapist, philosopher of science, academic and scourge of academics, publisher and TV producer of radical science, libertarian socialist and family man, Bob Young, died, aged 83, early on 5th July. In later years he had a number of medical complications; an added infection proved too much. A large man with a large, often dominating presence, exceptional vitality of intellect and personality made him a large influence in many people’s lives. He was combative in manner and often embraced controversial personal and institutional roles, giving life to the slogan ‘the personal is political’. Underlying the colourful surface, which he and those with him always made the focus of attention, there was a deep moral and philosophical commitment to the value of the individual person. He thought life came with certain values. His search for ways to live these values, first in academic intellectual terms, then through a radical Marxian interpretation of science and then in psychotherapeutic practice and teaching, added layer to layer of complex understanding. He created an exceptionally rich, if at times difficult, life – for himself, and for those around him.
Bob was born into a Presbyterian family in Highland Park, a rich suburb of Dallas, in Texas, though his family was not rich. He retained a love of aspects of that culture – steaks, the novels of Larry McMurtry, popular music and the rhetoric of the preacher. He was a scholarship boy at Yale University before beginning training at the University of Rochester Medical School. He discovered the intellectual theme that was to run through all his life: the gap between the medical conception of the body and the mental world of purposes and values. With boundless intellectual energy and ambition, he looked to psychoanalysis to bridge this gap, and then, plainly seeing that it did not, he turned to the history of science of the nineteenth century to understand why. He married a fellow American and had a son, David. He moved to the UK and to King’s College, Cambridge University (1960) to write a thesis under Oliver Zangwill, a psychologist liberal enough in this regard to take him on. He wanted to understand, and ultimately to transcend, belief in dualism of mind and body, of subject and object, of culture and nature and of values and the material world. His thesis, translating this search into the concrete historical terms of approaches to mind via brain, became his first book, Mind, Brain, and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century (1970; reissued 1990), which continues to be cited as path-breaking. His argument led to close examination of the intellectual development in the nineteenth century, the theory of evolution, which, more than any other, drew the understanding of the mind and the person into nature. Young’s readings of Darwin, the theory of natural selection and the Victorian debates of which they were part pioneered the study of Darwinian thought in context. It is hard now to recall the degree to which the sciences, and such revered geniuses of science as Darwin, were then treated apart from the wider culture as the creators of ‘purely’ objective knowledge. Young’s studies of ‘the common context’ of Darwinian and Malthusian ideas (1969) and of Darwin’s metaphor of ‘natural selection’ (1971) transformed scholarship and lie at the base of a huge amount of work undertaken by other scholars. Bob also wrote (1966) a famously devastating critique of the state of the history of psychology, a critique that other scholars then sought to address, moving out from Bob’s Anglo-American perspective.
Bob Young’s innovative brilliance was recognized and he became a Lecturer in History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge and a Fellow (subsequently Graduate Tutor) of King’s College. These were years of radical political protest and ambition for major social change. At the end of the sixties, Bob’s already liberated life-style and commitments became radical, personally and politically, fuelled by intense reading of Marxian literature and an understanding of the role academic institutions, including science itself, had in mediating ideology in the wider world. He linked his own work on the Darwin debates with twentieth-century science, especially in a notoriously massive paper in a book of essays (which he edited with Mikulas Teich) honouring Joseph Needham (Changing Perspectives in the History of Science, 1973). He organized an influential seminar at King’s, including scholars then transforming the history of science like Charles Webster and Piyo Rattansi, and the young star, Roy Porter, on the contextual understanding of science. He was an inspiring teacher, seen to be where the action was, and he attracted a range of students and colleagues, including Porter and Ruth Leys, who went on to occupy positions in the history of science and medicine, some sharing his political commitments, others moving away from them.
He lived a life in which thought mattered, which intended unity of theory and practice. He had a deep relationship with Sheila Ernst, later a leader of feminist group psychotherapy in London, and there were two daughters, Sarah and Emma. He became head of a new Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine in Cambridge, with Karl Figlio as a close associate. Locked in conflict with conservative interests in History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge and in the Wellcome Trust, a conflict which involved marked contrasts of style, in 1976 he resigned and moved to North London. There, off the Caledonian Road, he lived the rest of his life. He established a long-lasting relationship, with Margot Waddell, subsequently an influential practitioner, teacher and editor at the Tavistock Institute, and there were two children, Anna and Nicholas. He was the motivating centre of a radical science collective, which was responsible for the Radical Science Journal and, later, Science as Culture (now commercially published) and a prominent voice on the political Left, in conflict with more traditional Marxists as well as the despised academic establishment. What is perhaps his key political paper, ‘Science is Social Relations’, which interprets science as part of the labour process, dates from 1977. He helped produce teaching materials for the Open University. His earlier papers appeared in a volume from Cambridge University Press, Darwin’s Metaphor (1985). He trained as a psychotherapist in the Kleinian tradition and, with others, began to publish the much admired journal, Free Associations, and books under the same imprint (Free Association Press, which continues in other hands). He much admired and supported the work of the US feminist scholar, Donna Haraway, and was the first to publish her classic, Primate Visions (1990). Bob’s title, ‘Free Associations’, beautifully illustrates his sense of play, and sense of seriousness, at the task of unifying different areas of life – personal, therapeutic, collective, political. Indeed, much of his work saw the profound content of metaphor; he published his Kleinian study under the title Mental Space (1994). Bob was also the central force in the 1980s TV Channel 4 documentary series, ‘Crucible’, on science in society, which included a memorable film on Newton introduced by Simon Schaffer, later head of History and Philosophy of Science in Cambridge. He also established Process Press (yet another metaphor, and a nod to two philosophers who guided the framework with which he approached the history of science, A. N. Whitehead and E. A. Burtt).
Psychotherapeutic practice, teaching and publishing increasingly occupied Bob’s formidable energies. He looked critically on developments in the history of science after leaving the field professionally, thinking that the central position history of science, and especially Darwin, should occupy in understanding the human political condition had been given up for the pursuit of detail without purpose, except in narrow career terms, and for what he was inclinded to see as the games of ‘French theory’. He was unsympathetic to relativism and retained a longing for a metaphysics that would ground knowledge of the whole person – a longing which, he was well aware, linked him with religious ways of thought. He judged biography, with its capacity to integrate the moral, the social and the personal, to be a key genre of human self-understanding. He himself had deep, warm and highly emotional personal feelings for family and friends; at the same time, he could impose intolerable demands. No one was or could be indifferent.
After the changes in Europe in 1989, he took a central part in introducing psychotherapy training in Bulgaria. Young also accepted a new position as Professor and Chair in the department of Psychotherapeutic Studies at the University of Sheffield Medical School, where he established a swathe of new courses, many online. He continued to give inspiring, accessible lectures calling for unity in ways of thinking about the whole person – moral, political, biological, psychological. He created a new relationship, with Em Farrell, who became a specialist on eating disorders, and there was a loved daughter late in his life, Jessie. In retirement, he was hampered in movement by weight and knee-joint problems. He relished the internet as a medium for spreading and sustaining access to his work and rejoiced in the egalitarian voices it brought into his study. He organized sites around the theme of ‘human nature’, which he took to be the topic that mattered. His study was a fantastic marvel (or horror, depending on who looked) of the heaped paperwork, books, discs, electric cables, loudspeakers, broken chairs, of a life-time as an intellectual. In the last years, he was joined in friendship and given loving support by Susan Tilley. Even Bob mellowed a little, though he retained sharply critical independent views, a sense of irony about his life and life in general and a fierce belief in the intellectual calling for a humane understanding of the human sciences – and of the people these sciences are supposedly about. People love to talk about his impact, and there, indeed, spread over many people and institutions, is this impact. One of his websites (www.psychoanalysis-and-therapy.com/rmyoung/pubs.html) has, at the top left corner, a small moving image of Sisyphus, rolling his stone uphill – over and over again. But something came of it.
Robert (Bob) Maxwell Young, hardly remembered by young scholars today, was one of the leading historians of science in the Anglophone world from the late 1960s and early 1980s. He was certainly among the most humanistically committed and creative. His scholarship on man’s place in nature (i.e, ‘nature’s’ constructed place in man’s thinking on man) was wholly innovative. So too was his elaboration of what he came to formulate succinctly in the mid-1970s as ‘Science is Social Relations’ (after having made an intensive study of Marx, the labour process, the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and the notebooks of Antonio Gramsci). Science was not just social, he claimed, it was constructed in/under particular social relations and embodied particular labour relations. It was ideological. At least a half a dozen years before postmodern scholars re-discovered Ludwig Fleck’s 1930s writings on the fallacy of objectivity in science (New Zone Books 1979), Bob made clear that science, technology and medicine—far from being value-neutral— embody values in their theories, artefacts, therapies, procedures and programs. All facts are theory-laden, all theories are value-laden, and all values occur within an ideology or world view, he argued. Fact/value, subject/object, science/society, internal/external (in the study of the history of science), mind/body, and so on were all false dichotomies, the popular belief in which precluded their systematic discussion and critical analysis. Bob opened the space for the latter, especially in relation to the biggies, Darwin, Marx and Freud.
The depth, scope and profundity of his scholarship was without equal, and he had an unrivalled ability to communicate it. His writings, complex, yet cogent and incisive, were always scrupulously researched. They shimmer in their honesty and commitment, as if his enormous brain was at one with his mind and soul or political bottom, as indeed it was. It comes as no surprise to learn that, besides psychology, Bob was deeply interested in religion as an undergraduate at Yale.
His influence was enormous, although I hesitate to use that word here, since a part of what he taught me as a historian was that ‘influence’, like the word ‘fashionable’, only masks what is always in need of explanation. In Cambridge he attracted dozens of bright young scholars, Roy Porter, Roger Smith and John Forrester among them. Donna Haraway, one of his great admirers, was not alone among junior and senior people in the history of modern biology who (she admits) were thoroughly taken with Bob’s insights. The same has been said by dozens of others intellectuals at the coal-face of the study of the brain and nervous system, psychological theories, medicine and the human sciences, the labour process, the history of epistemology, and the contemporary apparatuses of cultural production, on all of which he wrote on. Darwinian scholars, in particular, were/are indebted. Even the apologist for the neo-genetic ‘Darwinian Revolution’ of the 1970s, the philosopher of science Michael Ruse with whom Bob was frequently in heated public debate, admits that Bob’s mind was nevertheless ‘the most exciting’ ever to have turned to the issue.
When I first met him in 1972 he was near the height of his powers. The creative brilliance of his Mind Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral Localization and Its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier (1970, reprinted in1990) had earned him the directorship of the first-ever Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, which was located in the department for the History and Philosophy of Science in Cambridge (HPS). The year before, in 1969, in Past and Present, he published a germinal paper on ‘Malthus and the Evolutionists’ exposing the common context of biological and social theory – a article that foreshadowed much of what was to come. Besides presiding over the weekly seminars in HPS (with Karl Figlio and Ludmilla Jordanova always in attendance), he was in the midst of writing his watershed essay on “The Historiographic and Ideological Contexts of the Nineteenth-Century Debate on Man’s Place in Nature” published in his and M. Teich’s edited volume Changing Perspectives in the History of Science (1973). At the same time he was organizing the defence of Rudi Dutschke, the spokesperson for the German Student movement of the 1960s whom Bob must have met in the mid-1960s. It may have Dutschke who turned Bob on to the work of Gramsci and the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, which were central to Dutschke’s activism. It was Dutschke at least that led him more into neo-Marxist critique and even to the setting up of a short-lived commune in Cheltenham. By the mid-70s Bob had set up the Radical Science Journal (morphed in 1987 to Science as Culture) and was plotting Free Association Books. His energy and commitment were unbounded.
As one of his many PhD students I was always in awe of him. If I came away in tears from some his supervisions, it wasn’t out of resentment of his having effectively torn to sheds what I had submitted to his scrutiny, but, rather, out of grudging acknowledgement of the rightness of his assessment. Throughout the process of my thesis’s completion he never stinted in his encouragement. He didn’t browbeat and, in retrospect, he was remarkable generous with his time. He could, however, be could be acerbic and abrasive, although personally I never experienced this (rather more, his endearing sense of irony). He also liked to massage his own ego, not least through the praises bestowed upon him. He could come across as a brash and over self-confident American, to the annoyance of some (he was born in Dallas, Texas, after all). For all his interest in psychology and work in psychotherapy, he never seemed to be self-aware of this feature of his character. At the book launch of his collection of essays on Darwin — Darwin’s Metaphor (1985) — it was cruelly suggested to him by one his former students (the only one, incidentally, that I ever heard Bob speak ill of) that the peacock on the cover was a perfect self-portrait. Bob was deeply offended. To my mind the ego massaging was forgivable, as we might forgive it with any extraordinary personage. His towering intellect more than permitted it.
That he is hardly remembered today and that his death in July of this year has solicited so little notice from his peers in the history of science is partly attributable to his having more-or-less left the field in the 1980s in order to pursue his interest in Klienian psychotherapy, for which he re-trained in the 1980s qualifying as a practitioner. He continued, however, to contribute to the history of science – a stunning example being his chapter on ‘Marxism and the History of Science’ in the Routledge Companion to the History of Science (1990). According to those who know much more than I about the last decades of his life, his contributions to the understanding of psychoanalytic concepts, and of philosophical and sociological ideas as they bear upon thinking about human nature, were as formidable as his earlier work. ‘I would think he is without equal,’ remarks one; ‘he combines a depth and scope of knowledge with an extraordinary facility for producing lucid and telling synopses of bodies of work, and a unique alertness to the connections and contrasts between different positions, both within psychoanalysis and between psychoanalytic ideas and their correlates in the wider culture.’
Undoubtedly, too, his neglect is the result of the challenge of his politically radical stance on science and society; he was a ‘Marxist’ thorn in the side as much to pious sociologists and historians of science as to populist apologists for science and technology, such as the Nobel prize winning biologist Peter Medawar (another well-earned victim of Bob’s wrath along with Dawkins and Gould). But his neglect, if that is what it is, may have as much to do with the fact that his ideas (albeit shorn of Marxian hue) actually became fairly normative in the history and epistemology of science. They were watered down to the academic blandness of the importance of ‘social context’ or ‘science in culture’– the leaving aside of what he had to say on the ideological nature of concepts and categories in science. At the same time, his formulation of science as mediating and mystifying the social relations of capitalism became as it were almost surplus to requirement as science became ever-more nakedly capitalistic and blatant in its political and economic service and as its knowledge production became more obviously commercial and corporate conducted on privatized university campuses and science parks.
But Bob’s neglect among his peers in the history of science has rather more to do, I think, with the fact that he was never a disciplinarian in the field. He transcended it. He was never just or only an academic. From an early age his commitment was to one thing, the question of what it is to be human, or rather, what is ‘human nature’. Thus was his entire career unified. His turn to Klienianism was not a deviation from this path, but a continuation, for no enterprise was so likewise worried over the split between subject and object. As the postmodern intellectual world of mediated ideology (would-be apolitical but in fact deeply neoliberalism) moved increasingly to the disparagement of humans and the celebration of the equality of things and animals (Latour), towards fragmentation, to the reduction of everything to social context, to the negation of essences, Bob struggled to salvage the essence of what it is to be human – not to a naïve belief in the goodness of man, but rather, to the belief that there was such a thing as human nature and that it was worth rescuing from the reductionisms of biology — behavioural economics, bio-psychology, neuroscience, etc. People are more than mere species, Bob believed, and through education/critical thinking they could learn to struggle against the hegemony of a disastrously riven scientistic culture. In the midst of this, our present anthropological crisis, it is view that is more than ever is in need of urgent revival. From this perspective, Bob Young was more than an academic tearaway; he was fighter for human qua human salvation. I suspect that his true moment is only just becoming.
Roger Cooter
Robert (Bob) Maxwell Young, hardly remembered by young scholars today, was one of the leading historians of science in the Anglophone world from the late 1960s and early 1980s. He was certainly among the most humanistically committed and creative. His scholarship on man’s place in nature (i.e, ‘nature’s’ constructed place in man’s thinking on man) was wholly innovative. So too was his elaboration of what he came to formulate succinctly in the mid-1970s as ‘Science is Social Relations’ (after having made an intensive study of Marx, the labour process, the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and the notebooks of Antonio Gramsci). Science was not just social, he claimed, it was constructed in/under particular social relations and embodied particular labour relations. It was ideological. At least a half a dozen years before postmodern scholars re-discovered Ludwig Fleck’s 1930s writings on the fallacy of objectivity in science (New Zone Books 1979), Bob made clear that science, technology and medicine—far from being value-neutral— embody values in their theories, artefacts, therapies, procedures and programs. All facts are theory-laden, all theories are value-laden, and all values occur within an ideology or world view, he argued. Fact/value, subject/object, science/society, internal/external (in the study of the history of science), mind/body, and so on were all false dichotomies, the popular belief in which precluded their systematic discussion and critical analysis. Bob opened the space for the latter, especially in relation to the biggies, Darwin, Marx and Freud.
The depth, scope and profundity of his scholarship was without equal, and he had an unrivalled ability to communicate it. His writings, complex, yet cogent and incisive, were always scrupulously researched. They shimmer in their honesty and commitment, as if his enormous brain was at one with his mind and soul or political bottom, as indeed it was. It comes as no surprise to learn that, besides psychology, Bob was deeply interested in religion as an undergraduate at Yale.
His influence was enormous, although I hesitate to use that word here, since a part of what he taught me as a historian was that ‘influence’, like the word ‘fashionable’, only masks what is always in need of explanation. In Cambridge he attracted dozens of bright young scholars, Roy Porter, Roger Smith and John Forrester among them. Donna Haraway, one of his great admirers, was not alone among junior and senior people in the history of modern biology who (she admits) were thoroughly taken with Bob’s insights. The same has been said by dozens of others intellectuals at the coal-face of the study of the brain and nervous system, psychological theories, medicine and the human sciences, the labour process, the history of epistemology, and the contemporary apparatuses of cultural production, on all of which he wrote on. Darwinian scholars, in particular, were/are indebted. Even the apologist for the neo-genetic ‘Darwinian Revolution’ of the 1970s, the philosopher of science Michael Ruse with whom Bob was frequently in heated public debate, admits that Bob’s mind was nevertheless ‘the most exciting’ ever to have turned to the issue.
When I first met him in 1972 he was near the height of his powers. The creative brilliance of his Mind Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral Localization and Its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier (1970, reprinted in1990) had earned him the directorship of the first-ever Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, which was located in the department for the History and Philosophy of Science in Cambridge (HPS). The year before, in 1969, in Past and Present, he published a germinal paper on ‘Malthus and the Evolutionists’ exposing the common context of biological and social theory – a article that foreshadowed much of what was to come. Besides presiding over the weekly seminars in HPS (with Karl Figlio and Ludmilla Jordanova always in attendance), he was in the midst of writing his watershed essay on “The Historiographic and Ideological Contexts of the Nineteenth-Century Debate on Man’s Place in Nature” published in his and M. Teich’s edited volume Changing Perspectives in the History of Science (1973). At the same time he was organizing the defence of Rudi Dutschke, the spokesperson for the German Student movement of the 1960s whom Bob must have met in the mid-1960s. It may have Dutschke who turned Bob on to the work of Gramsci and the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, which were central to Dutschke’s activism. It was Dutschke at least that led him more into neo-Marxist critique and even to the setting up of a short-lived commune in Cheltenham. By the mid-70s Bob had set up the Radical Science Journal (morphed in 1987 to Science as Culture) and was plotting Free Association Books. His energy and commitment were unbounded.
As one of his many PhD students I was always in awe of him. If I came away in tears from some his supervisions, it wasn’t out of resentment of his having effectively torn to sheds what I had submitted to his scrutiny, but, rather, out of grudging acknowledgement of the rightness of his assessment. Throughout the process of my thesis’s completion he never stinted in his encouragement. He didn’t browbeat and, in retrospect, he was remarkable generous with his time. He could, however, be could be acerbic and abrasive, although personally I never experienced this (rather more, his endearing sense of irony). He also liked to massage his own ego, not least through the praises bestowed upon him. He could come across as a brash and over self-confident American, to the annoyance of some (he was born in Dallas, Texas, after all). For all his interest in psychology and work in psychotherapy, he never seemed to be self-aware of this feature of his character. At the book launch of his collection of essays on Darwin — Darwin’s Metaphor (1985) — it was cruelly suggested to him by one his former students (the only one, incidentally, that I ever heard Bob speak ill of) that the peacock on the cover was a perfect self-portrait. Bob was deeply offended. To my mind the ego massaging was forgivable, as we might forgive it with any extraordinary personage. His towering intellect more than permitted it.
That he is hardly remembered today and that his death in July of this year has solicited so little notice from his peers in the history of science is partly attributable to his having more-or-less left the field in the 1980s in order to pursue his interest in Klienian psychotherapy, for which he re-trained in the 1980s qualifying as a practitioner. He continued, however, to contribute to the history of science – a stunning example being his chapter on ‘Marxism and the History of Science’ in the Routledge Companion to the History of Science (1990). According to those who know much more than I about the last decades of his life, his contributions to the understanding of psychoanalytic concepts, and of philosophical and sociological ideas as they bear upon thinking about human nature, were as formidable as his earlier work. ‘I would think he is without equal,’ remarks one; ‘he combines a depth and scope of knowledge with an extraordinary facility for producing lucid and telling synopses of bodies of work, and a unique alertness to the connections and contrasts between different positions, both within psychoanalysis and between psychoanalytic ideas and their correlates in the wider culture.’
Undoubtedly, too, his neglect is the result of the challenge of his politically radical stance on science and society; he was a ‘Marxist’ thorn in the side as much to pious sociologists and historians of science as to populist apologists for science and technology, such as the Nobel prize winning biologist Peter Medawar (another well-earned victim of Bob’s wrath along with Dawkins and Gould). But his neglect, if that is what it is, may have as much to do with the fact that his ideas (albeit shorn of Marxian hue) actually became fairly normative in the history and epistemology of science. They were watered down to the academic blandness of the importance of ‘social context’ or ‘science in culture’– the leaving aside of what he had to say on the ideological nature of concepts and categories in science. At the same time, his formulation of science as mediating and mystifying the social relations of capitalism became as it were almost surplus to requirement as science became ever-more nakedly capitalistic and blatant in its political and economic service and as its knowledge production became more obviously commercial and corporate conducted on privatized university campuses and science parks.
But Bob’s neglect among his peers in the history of science has rather more to do, I think, with the fact that he was never a disciplinarian in the field. He transcended it. He was never just or only an academic. From an early age his commitment was to one thing, the question of what it is to be human, or rather, what is ‘human nature’. Thus was his entire career unified. His turn to Klienianism was not a deviation from this path, but a continuation, for no enterprise was so likewise worried over the split between subject and object. As the postmodern intellectual world of mediated ideology (would-be apolitical but in fact deeply neoliberalism) moved increasingly to the disparagement of humans and the celebration of the equality of things and animals (Latour), towards fragmentation, to the reduction of everything to social context, to the negation of essences, Bob struggled to salvage the essence of what it is to be human – not to a naïve belief in the goodness of man, but rather, to the belief that there was such a thing as human nature and that it was worth rescuing from the reductionisms of biology — behavioural economics, bio-psychology, neuroscience, etc. People are more than mere species, Bob believed, and through education/critical thinking they could learn to struggle against the hegemony of a disastrously riven scientistic culture. In the midst of this, our present anthropological crisis, it is view that is more than ever is in need of urgent revival. From this perspective, Bob Young was more than an academic tearaway; he was fighter for human qua human salvation. I suspect that his true moment is only just becoming.
Kurt Jacobsen
Robert Maxwell Young, 83, who died 5 July 2019 in a London hospital, was an rambunctious transatlantic intellectual who made key contributions to social studies of science, especially Darwin studies, and to the even trickier realm of psychoanalysis, which he treated in a critical yet always appreciative way. He was a scholar, publisher, journal founder, editor, psychoanalytical psychotherapist, documentary maker, activist, and a radical entrepreneur – though. for lack of an acquistive attitude, a lousy businessman, Bob played a role in founding this journal as well as Radical Science Journal (now Science as Culture) Kleinian Studies, and Free Associations, which I coedited with him over the last few years.
Bob down to his last days was an incorrigible free spirit, equally concerned with scholarly rigor and social relevance. Nothing was alien to him, except cruelty and hypocrisy, and nothing was above scrutiny. He was just plain fun in any conversation if one could keep up with his vast range of references, and, if not, one suddenly found oneself either in an engaging impromptu tutorial or else gestured toward a bookshelf containing a vein of knowledge he urged you to begin to master. Bob was instinctively heretical in every endeavor. I remember most of all his unflagging enthusiasm for the ‘life of the mind’ and his heartfelt moral concerns in this world of too, too solid flesh. Naturally, he rubbed a good few savants the wrong way, and. he also paid the cost, willingly. “We must imagine Sisyphus happy,” was his motto.
If you knew the beefy, bearded and suspendered Bob in his last decades, as I did, you encountered an effervescent blend of Falstaff, the Ghost of Christmas Past (Alistair Sims movie version), and the latter day Orson Welles – with all of their sparkling virtues and not a few of their faults. Entering his inner chamber in Islington was to stumble into a jovial wizard’s lair. All he lacked in that dazzling tumble of books and memorabilia was a magic wand. I am told, though, that in younger days he was a flintier chap, as I suppose befits a fellow who was up against extremely flinty orthodoxies. I glimpsed that peremptory side of him once or twice, but you have to bear in mind the daunting debunking tasks he set for himself and the formidable authorities he took on.
Bob hailed from a modest family home nestled on the edge of a ridiculously wealthy community in Dallas Texas. His rowdy associates included future oil heirs, who he found wanting in every respect except cash flow. Texas – a mythic brawling Texas of bold ideas and brave actions – pervaded everything he did from loftiest endeavors to personal habits. He is the only fellow I knew in London who drank Dr Pepper, which I later discovered was Dallas’ prized soft drink. Bob, after dallying like a good local boy with visions of a valiant military career, somehow slipped away on a swimming scholarship to Yale in the mid-1950s where, unlike the parched privileged legacy kids like George W. Bush (a bit later), he fell head over heels in love with scholarship, philosophy above all. While at Yale Bob spent a Summer as a care worker at an Arizona ‘snake pit’ sanitarium, which left an indelible mark.
After Yale Bob attended the University of Rochester Medical School to become a psychiatrist but in his second year he snagged an irresistible research fellowship to Cambridge, which he told me gave him an intoxicating freedom to explore whatever medical subject he chose. He soon decided to remain in Cambridge to finish a PhD with a remarkable dissertation that swiftly became in 1970 the Oxford University Press book “Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century.” The correspondence theory of localized brain area to specific behavior that he demolished there is evident again today in a related form in stubborn genetic determinist enterprises.
Bob was invited to stay on as a Cambridge don and soon became the first head of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine there too. He followed up Mind Brian and Adaptation with ground-breaking Darwin essays that he eventually collected and published in 1985 as Darwin’s Metaphor, A former editor of this Journal was with Bob then so I won’t tarry with a description other than to mention how squarely he situated Darwin in the Victorian socioeconomic context. All the time, however, the questing iconoclastic spirit of the late 60s and 70s worked its way into a highly receptive Bob’s life, as did an intense interest in Marxism, which colleagues found utterly unwelcome. Bob, under some duress, left Cambridge in 1976 to roam at will outside the increasing strictures of the academy. Bob told me he really thought that the liberatory leftward social thrust of the era would continue apace. He did not reckon with the relentless counterrevolutionary neoliberal project signaled by the arrival of Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the US, and slowly steamrollering everything in its path ever since.
Still, Bob had a great long run. He started Free Associations Books (turning out several hundred titles) and, after losing control of it, Process Press too, ran the aforementioned journals, formed the Radical Science Collective, produced and narrated a splendid British TV series on science issue in society, trained as a Kleinian psychotherapist, headed the celebrated Psychoanalysis and the Public Sphere conferences from 1987 to 1998, resumed academic life at Sheffield University, published Mental Space and several more fine books, and influenced a long stream of colleagues, assocites and readers.
“I continue to believe”, Bob wrote in 1996, “that in the beginning was the value– not the word, nor the fact – and that all institutions, theories and practices are embodied politics.” Those were fighting words when he started out and in some quarters they remain so. In revising his collection of Darwin essays in the 1980s he provocatively stated that he had cause to thumb again through the Bible (as literature, not doctrinaire guide), which perhaps seemed even worse to many academics than taking Marx seriously, and argued that it provided “a coherent frame of reference for the issues he addresses – origins, human frailty, temptation, the birth of knowledge, sin, pain, evil suffering, and the beginning of the sort of social order to which I wish to relate scientific knowledge- living and doing our best on the east of Eden.” Hard to bridle at that. Bob did his best and it was more than good enough.
