Category: Author Interviews

In the July issue of History of the Human Sciences, Marcia Holmes, a post-doctoral researcher with the Hidden Persuaders project at Birkbeck, University of London, used the 1965 film adaption of Len Deighton’s The Ipcress File to demonstrate the close relationship between Cold War fantasies of mind control and the postwar understanding of the media. In her analysis, our familiar understanding of brainwashing as an irresistible form of domination is disrupted and she instead demonstrates how the spy drama which pits a hero against the mechanical forces of scientific control provided a new template through which audiences could re-conceive their relationship to modern media.  Against the idea of the passive and pliant observer, Holmes promotes the idea of the ‘cybernetic spectator’, who plays an active role in controlling the flow of information in order to reorganise their own personality and consciousness.  In this analysis, brainwashing moves beyond being a simple disciplinary mechanism to become a potential technology of the self.  Viewed from this perspective, brainwashing is less a legacy of Cold War struggles than a part of psychedelic revolution in which consciousness became a subject for personal exploration and transformation.  Part of the joy of Holmes account is that it connects the history of cold war human sciences to the flowering of the counterculture in the 1960s: a relationship that is only just beginning to receive the attention it deserves. Marcia Holmes is here in conversation with Rhodri Hayward, Reader in History at Queen Mary, University of London, and one of the Editors of HHS. The full paper is available open access here: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0952695117703295 

Rhodri Hayward (RH): Thanks for speaking to us, Marcia. What first drew you to Deighton’s novel and the Ipcress File film?

Marcia Holmes (MH): I admit that I had never seen The Ipcress File (dir. Sidney Furie, 1965), or read Len Deighton’s 1962 novel, until I began researching films that depict brainwashing. Perhaps this is because I’m an American and only recently transplanted to the UK. The film is well-loved by British film critics and has a strong following in Britain, but I find that many of my American colleagues have not heard of The Ipcress File. This is a shame, because it is a very enjoyable film! And for historians of science, I think The Ipcress File offers much to discuss on the intersection between Cold War politics, science, and popular culture.

This original trailer for The Ipcress File (Furie, 1965) includes some images from the film’s brainwashing sequence. A re-mastered version of the film was released on DVD by Network in 2006 (Video source: YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QesO-BRvUAM).

When I first watched The Ipcress File, I was intrigued by how familiar I found the film’s treatment of brainwashing – its use of flashing lights and beating sounds to create a highly cinematic rendition of mind manipulation – and yet how different this imagery was to earlier, 1950s accounts of brainwashing. In the 1950s, reports (and even fictional stories) of brainwashing endeavoured to describe the real methods of indoctrination and interrogation used by communist cadres. Essentially, these methods involved ‘softening up’ a prisoner through starvation, sleep deprivation, and solitary confinement within a featureless cell. Once the prisoner was debilitated physically and psychologically, he would be subjected to a tedious process of indoctrination or interrogation that he would be unable to resist. In the 1950s there was also speculation about whether communists used drugs or hypnosis to weaken a prisoner’s resistance; but the tenor of this speculation was to determine what methods were actually being used, not to spin fictions for the sake of entertainment.

Meanwhile, The Ipcress File knowingly offers us fantastical science fiction in how it imagines the final stage of brainwashing: not as indoctrination or interrogation per se, but as carefully calibrated visual and auditory stimulation that can reprogramme a victim’s memories, even the brain itself. The centerpiece of the film’s brainwashing process is not the featureless prison cell, but rather the ‘programming box’, a person-sized cube that completely surrounds a victim with sounds and images. This fanciful reimagining of brainwashing seems to follow in the footsteps of The Manchurian Candidate, John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film that many historians consider iconic in how it depicts Cold War cultural anxieties. However, I think The Manchurian Candidate differs significantly from The Ipcress File in that Frankenheimer’s film never actually shows techniques or processes of brainwashing, only its after-the-fact effects on a victim’s consciousness.

For me, The Ipcress File film raises the question of how and when the imagery of flashing lights and rhythmic sounds became a trope of brainwashing. I read Len Deighton’s novel to see if the idea for the programming box had come from Deighton. I was surprised to find that Deighton’s description of brainwashing was much more in keeping with 1950s accounts. In particular, he was inspired by William Sargant’s theory of brainwashing as a form of combat neurosis. Indeed, the ‘IPCRESS’ acronym that Deighton invents refers to the softening up process as Sargant might describe it: Induction of Psycho-neuroses by Conditioned Reflex under strESS. As I investigated further, I found that it was The Ipcress File filmmakers who sought out new ways of depicting brainwashing, and that they were guided by what would be spectacular for 1960s cinema goers as well as by emerging scientific theories about the programmability of minds and brains.

RH: You locate the film within a long history of cinema’s fascination with suggestion and hypnosis – what is different about this film?

MH: In a way, The Ipcress File’s depiction of brainwashing as the manipulation of the senses, consciousness, and attention harks back to earlier films about hypnosis, such as Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922) and the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (dir. Robert Wiene, 1920). Film scholars like Raymond Bellour have theorized how these earlier films not only depicted hypnosis but also explored cinema’s own hypnotic effects on audiences. Their directors endeavoured to capture and control viewers’ attention, and heighten the sense of peril, through innovative use of close-up shots, spotlighting, and surreal scenery.

But The Ipcress File differs from these early films in how it explicitly references the power of cinema on the mind. Audiences can see quite clearly that the IPCRESS process is achieved with the help of film projectors that cast moving, colored lights onto the screen-like walls of the programming box. Audiences also see these projected images, and hear the eerie IPCRESS noise, as the film’s protagonist experiences them: as a diegetic film that plays on their own cinema screen before them.

This kind of overt reference to film’s psychological effects appears in several brainwashing films. For instance, The Manchurian Candidate is partly a meditation on the influence of television on American politics; and A Clockwork Orange (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1970) portrays a very effective form of aversion therapy that utilizes film. The Ipcress File is unique, however, in how it emphasizes the structural aspects of film: how light projected through images appearing at a certain frequency can create the illusion of movement, and other effects on consciousness. This is significant because, as I explain in my paper, The Ipcress File was made in a period when many artists, and indeed some scientists, were interested in how the structural elements of film affect spectators’ brains and mental experience. The challenge for historians posed by The Ipcress File, I believe, is to account for the changing cinematic imagery of brainwashing not only with reference to specific filmmakers’ technical innovations and artistic preoccupations, but also with how such innovations and preoccupations may have been in conversation with contemporaneous developments in art, science, and media technologies – as, indeed, historians have done for earlier films about hypnosis.

RH: So could I pick up on that point and ask you to say a bit more about the relationship between particular post-war technologies and new understandings of selfhood that emerge in the 1950s and 60s?

MH: There’s an obvious genealogy that The Ipcress File invokes: popular fears and fantasies of mass media as capable of influencing, even coercing, audiences’ beliefs and behavior. During the Second World War, the Allies were intrigued by film and radio’s power to transmit propaganda, and this fascination continued in the postwar period with the advent of commercial television and televisual advertising. In the late 1950s, there’s a brief but memorable moment when Americans and Britons worried about ‘subliminal advertising’. Even though the possibility of subliminal influence was quickly and notoriously debunked, this didn’t stop moviemakers (of the B- and C-level variety) from creating ‘psycho-rama’ films that purported to embed subliminal messages that would enhance moviegoers’ sensations. Of course, psycho-rama films didn’t succeed in thrilling general audiences, and only a few were produced. But there were other 1950s’ cinematic experiments in manipulating audiences’ sensory experience – such as Cinerama and Circarama – that were relatively more successful and long-lasting. Intriguingly, when The Ipcress File first opened in British and American theaters, critics compared its brainwashing sequence to a demented form of Cinerama or Circarama. Their implication, I believe, is that the film’s depiction of brainwashing was consciously spectacular, and rather gimmicky.

Yet, as I mentioned before, The Ipcress File was made in a period when avant-garde artists and scientists were interested in how the structural elements of film affect spectators’ brains and mental experience. This suggests another lineage that I believe is important to understanding The Ipcress File’s imagery for brainwashing, and why this imagery is historically significant. The Ipcress File premiered in 1965, at roughly the same time that the 1960s counterculture – with its “happenings” and psychedelic art – became recognized by mainstream Americans and Britons. And so, for some art historians, The Ipcress File’s programming box evokes the immersive, multimedia exhibitions of Stan Vanderbeek and USCO, and Tony Conrad’s experimental film The Flicker (1966-67).

In my paper, I argue that this is a case of correlation, not causation. It just so happens that The Ipcress File’s filmmakers were responding to the same innovations in art, science and media technology that were also inspiring countercultural artists’ explorations of film and other media. For example, in my article I explain how The Ipcress File’s depiction of brainwashing references Grey Walter’s neuropsychological experiments on the effect of stroboscopic light on brainwaves. The film even shows an EEG plotter as part of the Ipcress apparatus, and the film’s villain explains that the programming box works in synchrony with the “rhythm of brainwaves.” As many historians have previously noted, Grey Walter’s scientific experiments also influenced Tony Conrad’s Flicker film, as well as the design of a distinctive artefact of 1960s’ counterculture, Bryon Gysin and Ian Sommerville’s rotating stroboscope, the ‘dreamachine’. While Flicker and the dreamachine apply Walter’s ideas to the liberating exploration of consciousness, The Ipcress File appropriates Walter’s same ideas in a dark vision of mind control.

RH: Yes I guess you’re referring to John Geiger and Nik Sheehan’s work which I’m a fan of.  It seems your work shares their aim of presenting a counter cultural history of the cold war which shows how control technologies could be subverted.

MH: Yes. One of the interesting challenges in researching the Cold War history of ‘brainwashing’ – whether you focus on the scientific research that it inspired, or its evolution as a cultural imaginary – is accounting for how certain technologies, techniques, and concepts can shift in meaning from negative to positive, from coercive to liberatory. There are well known examples, such as how the CIA initially encouraged scientific research on LSD as a potential truth serum, but the drug proved more effective as a means of ‘expanding consciousness’ than of interrogation, and it became emblematic of the 1960s counterculture as well as of brainwashing. A similar story can be told for the flotation tanks that were used in sensory deprivation experiments. In the Hidden Persuaders project, we have been investigating these developments as more than just the creative innovations of a psychedelic counterculture. We probe how these shifts have been informed by changing popular and scientific assumptions about human subjecthood – not only cybernetic models of mind, but psychoanalytic, behavioristic, and neuropsychological models. We consider the evolving cultural and intellectual meanings of brainwashing to be part of a longer history of how concepts of psychological coercion and personal freedom have changed over time.

In my paper, I discuss how the technology of immersive multimedia begins as a mode of entertainment and artistic expression, and then later becomes associated with brainwashing. It’s a rare example of a seemingly positive and liberatory technology becoming rebranded as potentially negative and coercive. There are some excellent histories of the evolution of immersive multimedia technology by scholars like Beatriz Colomina and Oliver Grau. Fred Turner, in his recent book The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties, offers a particularly convincing and helpful genealogy of postwar artists’ experiments with multimedia environments, a phenomenon that he dubs ‘the democratic surround’ because of artists’ utopian, liberal democratic motivations. Turner shows how the counterculture’s seemingly revolutionary installations of psychedelic art – like Vanderbeek’s Moviedrome and the USCO exhibitions – had important precursors in more mainstream exhibitions of the 1950s and early ‘60s, such as Ray and Charles Eames’ multiscreen films, and that these precursors in turn drew on earlier artistic explorations of media’s effect on the mind. He also suggests how cybernetic philosophy was variously interpreted by different artists, encouraging their belief that multi-image, multi-sound-source environments would have a beneficial, psychologically-freeing effect on spectators.

In researching the making of The Ipcress File, I learned that the movie’s producer Harry Saltzman conceived the Ipcress programming box after reading about a multimedia surround in LIFE Magazine, the ‘Knowledge Box’ that was designed by Ken Isaacs. Isaacs was a contemporary of Ray and Charles Eames, both chronologically and in his aims and inspirations. He considered his Knowledge Box as a tool of progressive education, one that took advantage of the human mind’s ability to learn from sheer exposure to information. Meanwhile, Harry Saltzman was not alone in perceiving the Knowledge Box as a potentially coercive technology – some journalists at the time also suggested it could be used for brainwashing – but as a film producer Saltzman was well placed to bring this re-interpretation of multimedia surrounds to general audiences.

RH: Yes!  I guess it’s this tension around the use of coercive technologies as tools for self-mastery or psychedelic liberation that grounds your idea of the cybernetic spectator.  Could you say a little more about that?

MH: The ‘cybernetic spectator’ is my own construct for understanding the relationship between developments in cinema and television, the mind sciences, and cultural fantasies of mind control during the 1960s. It is a model of mind, a way of making sense of human subjectivity, that informed certain developments in these domains and, at times, interconnected them. I’m inspired by the work of Jonathan Crary, who argues that there is a history to our ways of perceiving, and that this history is reflected in artistic media, the human sciences, and cultural anxieties about human subjectivity. My concept of the ‘cybernetic spectator’ comes from trying to envision what Crary’s historiography might look like in the 1960s when cybernetic concepts and philosophy were rewriting many assumptions about how the mind works, not only for scientists but also for artists, media theorists, and sometimes even general audiences.

But, admittedly, cybernetics itself is tricky to define, especially for the 1960s when cybernetics’ forefathers like Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, and Warren McCulloch had long given up on keeping the field definitionally pure. Arguably, a strictly historicist reading of cybernetics’ originary ideas, such as what Peter Galison offers in his seminal article on cybernetics’ ‘enemy ontology,’ doesn’t help us understand the cultural and intellectual efflorescence of cybernetic concepts in the 1960s. So, scholars like Andrew Pickering and N. Katherine Hayles have advocated for a long-historical view of cybernetics as a science of complexity with a deep but lively influence on a wide variety of endeavors – not only engineering and computing, but also the psychological automata of Ross Ashby and Grey Walter, the science fiction of Philip K. Dick, the anthropological theories of Gregory Bateson, and the management philosophy of Stafford Beer. And as I noted before, Fred Turner has reminded us of the influence that cybernetic theory, and cybernetics-inspired commentators such as Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller, had on mid-century avant-garde artists. These scholarly accounts, Pickering’s and Turner’s especially, emphasize how utopian ideals routinely accompanied discussions and appropriations of cybernetic thinking in the 1960s. That is, cybernetic ideas may be value-neutral in and of themselves, or even reflect the values of the military-industrial complex, and yet for many sixties’ thinkers cybernetic philosophy nevertheless signalled a future technotopia where a free flow of information – through various forms of media! –  would liberate individual thought and behaviour. They believed that cybernetic ideas and technologies might even remake society to be more democratic and more enlightened.

Yet, as contemporaneous debates about brainwashing can attest, there were also moments during the 1960s that brought into focus the downsides, even the threat, of the cybernetic interpretation of mind and society. For example, when Marshall McLuhan gave an interview to Playboy Magazine in 1969, he prophesied a future where a worldwide media network would keep the peace within nations by responding to unrest with pacifying messages. McLuhan’s interviewer asked whether this was tantamount to brainwashing. McLuhan acknowledges the possibility, apparently with some consternation, as he argues that such an interpretation misses his point that such a network would respond to the needs and desires of its audience. The Ipcress File is another moment that clarifies the negative potential of the cybernetic spectator interpretation of mind: even though The Ipcress File movie is itself a harmless entertainment, its depiction of the programming box insinuates that the mind is vulnerable to film’s ability to stimulate the senses – that multimedia surrounds can be a technique of brainwashing.

RH: Given that we now, in our iphone addled age, live in a media-saturated environment, do you think this cybernetic model of mind and media still holds good?

MH: That is a challenging question, and a very important one considering that we live in an age of heightened political extremism. Because my own thoughts on this are constantly evolving, I’ll just sketch a couple of points that I’ve been considering lately. It does seem like we still hold many of the concerns, and many of the utopian visions, that surrounded 1960s’ cybernetic interpretations of mind and media. They seem to be especially germane to debates about ‘information bubbles’ and the cloistering effects of internet-based media. I am struck by how we often rely on spatial metaphors – concepts akin to the multimedia surround – to imagine how the internet can envelop a person with messages, with the result of radicalizing her or encouraging her belief in conspiracy theories. The solution to such a predicament is often presented in spatial terms, e.g., to ‘get out’ of one information bubble by exposing oneself to contrary information, or to leave the internet behind altogether and “enter the real world.”

And yet, unlike in the 1960s, we now have a powerful discourse on trauma, one centered around the diagnosis of PTSD, that also shapes how we imagine the effects of media on the mind and the possibilities for mental manipulation. We now understand that certain messages – usually depictions of horrific physical and/or sexual violence – can ‘trigger’ old traumas or create new, traumatic memories. To put it more generally, psychotherapeutic models of the mind, whether they are psychoanalytic, cognitive-behavioral, or otherwise, are also influential for how we imagine the effects of media on the mind, and the possibilities of mental infiltration and coercion. Cybernetic philosophy is arguably not fit for the purpose of distinguishing between psychologically harmful or beneficial messages; it is famously agnostic about the semantic content of information.  So perhaps we have moved on from the ‘cybernetic spectator’ as a prevailing model of mind and media influence, even though cybernetics’ signature technology, the Internet, dominates how we access and interpret media.

So do you think psychoanalysis provides the wellspring for a new morality that cybernetics failed to provide? 

This is an issue that we discuss in the Hidden Persuaders project. I think that psychoanalysis might be able to provide such a wellspring; it has certainly shaped our cultural discourse on trauma to be empathetic, if not moralistic (the work of Robert Jay Lifton with Vietnam veterans comes to mind). But I am not convinced that, in current practice, psychoanalytic theory serves this purpose.

I’d certainly agree with that.  Thank you so much Marcia!

Marcia Holmes is a post-doctoral researcher with the Hidden Persuaders project at Birkbeck, University of London. She is currently researching the American and British militaries’ Cold War-era community of psychological researchers, tracing how political, bureaucratic and intellectual fault lines influenced service psychologists’ assessments of brainwashing.

Rhodri Hayward is Reader in History at Queen Mary , University of London, and one of the Editors of HHS.  His most recent book, The Transformation of the Psyche in British Primary Care, was published by Bloomsbury in 2014. 

We are delighted today to publish a new special issue, ‘Psychology and its Publics,’ edited by Michael Pettit and Jacy L. Young. HHS editor-in-chief, Felicity Callard, spoke to Jacy about the background  to the issue, and how the question of publics, in particular, may push a heterogeneous collection of interdisciplinary voices to the fore within the history of psychology 

Felicity Callard (FC): Jacy, maybe we should start with the genesis of this special issue. Did it start with you explicitly wanting to stage an encounter between research on the history of psychology and research on publics? How has this focus inflected your own research trajectories?

Jacy Young (JY): Both Michael Pettit and I have an abiding interest in the manifold ways in which the human sciences have interacted with the public across history. This special issue emerged in conversations in the wake of my doctoral dissertation, a project that was very much concerned with psychologists’ various engagements with the public, specifically in the context of the history of questionnaire research in American psychology. As we note in our introduction, too often conversations about psychology and the public presume a passive public simply receiving whatever messaging the discipline happens to disseminate. And, the public as an entity is often under-theorized in these discussions. The term is employed but never defined with respect to its parameters and characteristics, its ontology remaining un- or at least under-addressed. The contributions to this special issue speak to these concerns in a variety of ways, expanding the conversation about the public to encompass much more vibrant, active, and multifaceted notions of the public. This is especially so in Kieran O’Doherty’s piece on the construction of deliberative publics. The nature of the public, and the ways in which particular publics are brought into being in interaction with the human sciences continues to be a theme in much of my work, as is the public’s influence on the shape of scientific practice and the kinds of knowledge produced therein. Exploring the nexus of the human sciences and the public implicated in much of this work is a rich and wide-ranging landscape for the historian of the human sciences.

FC: Your special issue dislodges the obdurate assumption that, as you put it, the discipline of psychology took form ‘when a small cluster of philosophers got out of their armchairs, adapted the apparatus of experimental physiology to their needs and secluded themselves in the tightly controlled spaces of the laboratory’. The question remains: why has this vision of psychology’s beginnings had such staying power?

JY: Much of this is a consequence of psychology’s perennial concern with its status as a science. The replication ‘crisis’ that has received so much attention of late is only the most recent evidence of this ongoing fixation with the discipline’s scientific credentials or lack thereof. And this is by no means a new concern. The narrative of psychology as an experimental, laboratory-based science began at the field’s very inception, yet even from these earliest days much of psychology’s work took place outside of laboratory spaces. The laboratory is, and has only ever been, one of many spaces in which the discipline of psychology conducts itself. This is especially so in the United States, the national context of much of my own research. Here psychology was an expansive enterprise from the start, at work in clinics, classrooms, business enterprises, and other decidedly public contexts as it sought to ensure the discipline’s influence within American society. This meant not only a place in the national conversation, but also recognition of its expertise and authority when it came to addressing a host of social concerns. Psychology’s diverse forms of practice and pursuit of disciplinary authority have not left us today, though their exact configurations may have changed. And given psychology’s ever present concerns about its scientific standing the narrative of the field originating in the laboratory – that designate site of scientific undertakings – continues to have traction. This is especially so because the history of psychology has often been written by and for psychologists, just those individuals most concerned with the question of the field’s scientific identity. As a consequence, histories of psychology often speak to psychologists’ concerns and preoccupations, and continue to put forth the narrative of psychology’s history as one rooted in laboratory practice.

That being said, there has been a marked shift in the histories of psychology produced in recent years. Much of the scholarship emerging from younger scholars, in say the last ten to fifteen years, is less concerned with this traditional narrative, often sidestepping it entirely and instead producing more diverse and nuanced accounts of psychology’s history. Where the laboratory story remains, however, is in the history of psychology textbook, which continues to be what most psychologists encounter and take up during their training as the singular narrative of the field’s development.

FC: Your introduction establishes the special issue as a coming together of history of psychology, science and technology studies (including Public Understanding of Science [PUS] and Public Engagement with Science [PES]), and communication studies. I was also struck by how much the articles in the special issue think with, and have things to offer to, feminist, queer and affect studies. Can you say more about what you hope your special issue might do in terms of opening up new disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to the history of psychology?

JY: This coming together is really predicated upon the fact that despite the relevance of Science and Technology Studies (STS) – especially in this instance, the Public Understanding of Science and Public Engagement with Science – and related fields to the history of psychology these areas remain largely separate endeavours. Although there are some scholars in STS who work on the human sciences, often these scholars and their projects exist apart from what is taking place in the history of psychology. Similarly, those in the history of psychology working on projects that interrogate the role of the public, and other considerations that are at the core of STS, often do so without fully or meaningfully engaging with happenings in STS. This disciplinary segregation is unfortunate and one this special issue goes someway to address. As we hope the issue illustrates, there is much that can be gained on both sides when it comes to engaging with the history of psychology in ways that incorporate insights from STS.

Historians of the human sciences are well-positioned to think with and alongside feminist, queer, and affect studies as these are, topically at least, concerns very much within the purview of the human sciences. In history of psychology scholarship thus far, feminist perspectives have had the most readily apparent influence, but there still remains much that can be done here. Queer studies, in particular, continue to be an under-recognized and under-utilized reference point for the historian of psychology. Certainly psychology has had much to say about sexuality over its history, and its practitioners have lived diverse lives, but thinking about these engagements in terms of the frameworks provided by queer studies is a rarity. And here Katherine Hubbard and Peter Hegarty’s contribution queering the history of psychology in the context of the Rorschach test and the graphic novel Watchmen serves an important function. The articles in this special issue that engage with these lines of thought provide concrete illustrations of just what may result from these unions. But this is by no means the sum total of what these spheres offer the historian of psychology. Hopefully the invaluable provocations of these and other fields mean we can look forward to many more projects along these lines in the future.

FC: There is significant heterogeneity in the disciplinary backgrounds and expertise amongst your contributors. Was this intentional and, if so, how so?

JY: In many respects this heterogeneity is a feature of our own professional lives. In my case, I completed my doctorate in the rare history of psychology program situated within a psychology department. Despite its location within psychology, the program was thoroughly interdisciplinary. This meant many fruitful cross-conversations with STS scholars and others, including those working in the History and Philosophy of Science. The result of this is a broad and various network of colleagues, each working on aspects of the human sciences from different disciplinary perspectives. This kind of exposure to novel approaches to the history of psychology and related disciplines has been incredibly intellectually stimulating. Interdisciplinarity is also now second nature as I navigate a bit of a Venn diagram of colleagues spread across scholarly societies that range from the Forum for History of Human Science (a special interest group of the History of Science Society), Cheiron (the International Society for the History of Behavioral and Social Sciences), and the Society for the History of Psychology (Division 26 of the American Psychological Association), among other organizations. Bringing together scholars from diverse fields is both the norm and, to my mind, the ideal. The result is an amalgam of individuals with unique and productive takes on the history of psychology and its relation to the public.

FC: Your introduction makes it very clear why history of psychology needs to take on board the insights of STS and PUS/PES. You might say that STS has, similarly, not always been that attuned to the psy disciplines and the history of psychology. What might your special issue do for STS (and PUS/PES)?

JY: Attending to the history of psychology in the context of STS opens up a number of avenues for scholarship. This is perhaps especially so in the context of PUS/PES. It not only highlights the ways in which the public is an active participant in these conversations but also brings to the fore how the public, especially in the case of psychological knowledge, may be affected in potentially profound ways by such knowledge. Given its subject matter, psychological knowledge carries with it the possibility of altering, and itself being altered by, individuals’ self-understanding, à la Ian Hacking’s notion of looping effects. Thinking about the impact of the knowledge science produces on individuals lives in not only material and practical, but psychological, terms is something that is often only obliquely addressed. This is likewise the case with the role of psychology in helping craft the public and the public sphere that are central to work in PUS/PES. In terms of STS’s theorizing about the public, these psychological dimensions are challenging and productive realms for further work.

FC: You and your contributors challenge the usual temporal and spatial frameworks used to understand psychology’s histories and geographies. Where might this challenge take us in future research on the history of the human sciences?

JY: In the past several years there has been growing interest in tackling the history of recent social sciences (e.g., a recently founded Society for the History of Recent Social Science), a trend that is evident in some of the contributions to the special issue. Taking the history of psychology forward to the events of more recent years can at times be an intimidating and fraught process, especially when dealing with histories that involve living subjects with their own, sometimes very definite, narratives of what transpired. But moving history forward to the recent past is also an exciting endeavour that is opening up new lines of research, including work on evermore timely topics. Alexandra Rutherford’s piece on rape surveys is a prime example of just this kind of work.

Taking a long view of the history of psychology also means not only looking forward to more recent times, but further back in time before that long feted move of psychology into the laboratory. Thus, Edward Jones-Imhotep’s account of the French Revolution’s public psychology, sentimentalism, and its influence on the rationalized process of execution via guillotine. In fact, the laboratory and that era it is most often associated with – the nineteenth century – are themselves largely if not entirely absent from the special issue. This is clear evidence of the many non-laboratory spheres in which psychology operates, many of them not only public but popular, as in Hubbard and Hegarty’s examination of the Watchmen graphic novel and Luke Stark’s work on Albert Ellis’s rational therapy and its embeddedness in popular media forms of the day.

As the contributions to this special issue reinforce, psychology and psychological facts operate in domains that extend far beyond the long revered space of the laboratory. Psychology’s presence in such spaces, and its attendant relation to the public, continues to this day. Consideration of the intertwined histories of psychology and the public has much to tell us about how we understand both ourselves and the public we are positioned within.

Jacy L. Young is a psychologist and historian whose work explores the methods and practices of the human sciences. She recently completed a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Surrey.

Felicity Callard is Editor-in-Chief of History of the Human Sciences. From September 2017, she is director of the Institute for Social Research at Birkbeck, University of London.

We were delighted in our current tissue, to publish Till Düppe‘s new article, “The generation of the GDR: Economists at the Humboldt University of Berlin caught between loyalty and relevance.” The article is an account of a particular generation of economists at Humboldt – socialized in Nazi Germany, growing up through during the Second World War and the Stalinist period, becoming committed to a state career in the GDR, but whose careers then ended very suddenly, in the ‘ultimate reform’ of 1989. The article draws on Karl Mannheim’s theory of generations to present a very particular historicization of the GDR, one that limns the tension between ‘the ideological and productive functions of knowledge in socialism, that is, between loyalty and relevance.’ Angus Nicholls, one of the editors of HHS, spoke to Till about the GDR economists.

Angus Nicholls (AN): Till, can you tell us a little bit about your own academic career, and how and why you came to be interested in economists in the German Democratic Republic (GDR)?

Till Düppe (TD): I’m trained in continental philosophy and in economics which led me into the history and philosophy of economics. In my previous work, I was interested in how economics became mathematical, and how that development was related to the U.S. during the Cold War. In this paper I am working on the same period, but on a very different group of people, GDR economists, who I met during my post-doc in Berlin. But they are in fact not so different from the American mathematical economists: both operate within rather closed discourses, such that there is little understanding of how they see themselves. This is how I felt when I was at the faculty in Berlin (at Humboldt) from which the GDR generation had been excluded after German reunification, even though they still feel attached to ‘their’ institution. I try to create more understanding, Verstehen, just as I did when I was working on mathematical economists in the US.

AN: In your paper you mention Karl Mannheim’s theory of generations and its importance for the sociology of knowledge. Can you tell us about what you mean by ‘the generation of the GDR’ and why this generation is important for understanding GDR history? 

TD: In a narrow sense, by ‘the generation of the GDR’ I mean the generation that passed their entire professional career, roughly from age 20 to 60, in that state (which existed between 1949 and 1990). The article is thus about the life-paths of those born in the early 1930s. Mannheim was interested in generations because they share similar memories, a similar understanding of current events, and also similar hopes and fears regarding the future – all of which shapes a specific mode of thought. It’s the historical equivalent of a ‘class.’ The style of thinking of the economists at Humboldt University at times of the GDR (most of them were born in the early 1930s) was indeed quite distinct from what preceded and followed, such that they stick out historically. When I speak of the generation of the GDR, I also think of this epistemological aspect that a generational experience ‘generated,’ ‘brought about’ the belief in the project of the GDR. The life-path of this generation ultimately helps us to understand how the GDR was stabilized, was maintained, and then fell apart.

AN: What are the advantages and disadvantages of using generations as a conceptual tool to analyse the history of the human sciences? What does this category make visible from an historical point of view?

TD: Well, the disadvantage is of course that the notion of a generation is really a cultural fiction. It was indeed challenging when writing the article to refer to individual experiences, while focusing on an entire generation, and this trying to avoid making claims about individuals. But what I like about this notion is that it is somehow in between the individual and the social structure. You know, an event like a war imposes itself on an individual, just like social structures, but it is still lived experience. But whatever the advantages or disadvantages, the notion suggested itself to me because the Humboldt economists saw themselves as a collective group through their shared memories, and their shared understanding of their historical task. It was they themselves who did not wish to be singled out as individuals and who acted as a generation.

AN: What distinguished the role played by academic economists in the GDR? How was their role in society different to those in other academic fields?

TD: Economists are interesting, compared to other disciplines and professions, because they had to represent the leading beliefs of the state – i.e. Marxism-Leninism – but they also had to solve practical problems of running the state, in this case educating financial administrators. They lived through a tension that was characteristic of the entire GDR project: a tension between loyalty to the state and a commitment to be practically relevant to the state. That’s what they had to negotiate at different stages of their careers.

AN: To what extent did GDR economists of this generation have freedom to pursue their own research interests, independently of questions of state ideology and Marxism-Leninism? Was, for example, party membership a precondition for an academic career in this field?

TD: Party membership was not a formal but an informal requirement. In fact, a vanishing minority of professors were not party members – which is different to the preceding professors’ generation, and also different to middle-rank university positions. As for independent research, this was hardly encouraged: the economists hardly had the time because their main task, in contrast to economists at the Academy of Sciences, was teaching; most research was commissioned, subject to the planned economy, and controlled by so-called ‘practice partners,’ in this case the ministry of finance and the State Bank, among others. Additionally, international contacts, though existent, were complicated, not least due to language barriers. All of this made research, compared to today, a minor aspect of these professor’s lives. Research was generally confined in specialized fields that could more easily draw from research on an international level, such as demography or also some parts of sociology.

AN: That’s interesting. Is the research produced by this generation of GDR economists now only of historical value, or are some of the scholars discussed in your paper still taken seriously by academics in the field of economics? Who were the standout scholars of this generation?

TD: Most Humboldt economists were specialized in public finance, which was more a matter of administration than understanding the complex system of an economy. The bureaucratic character of the GDR made the kind of knowledge they produced comparable to what educators in administration do today, i.e. explaining institutional rules of conduct rather than offering law-like ‘theories’ on the economy. In that sense, the idea of truly inquisitive economic research is limited to a ‘capitalist’ economy. So this paper is not written in order to assess the quality of their scientific contributions, but to show what role economic knowledge plays in a socialist context. Even posing the question of quality of research would be a category mistake, and in fact this is exactly what happened after 1990. One could have renamed the faculty into administrative sciences and just begun another faculty in economics, as we understand it. Indeed, one of the professors did exactly that: he founded a school for local administrators. In political economy, I should mention one scholar, Dieter Klein, who indeed stood out. He was a reformist intellectual  close to the party. What he wrote would count today as a mixture of political theory and economic sociology, which is interesting in its own right. But also he as one of the most progressive economists somewhat talked past the political activists when it came to the first protests in the late 1980s.

AN: How did these academic economists view the fall of the Berlin wall and how did this impact on their careers? What role did they play in the reform of the GDR, which led to the ‘ultimate reform’ of the wall coming down?

TD: When the wall came down hardly anyone in this generation thought of the end of the GDR. The society was moved by a strong desire for actual democratic reform and, after all, one could hardly see the wall as a symbol of democratic values (though the planned economy could be so interpreted, as I show in the paper). The fall of the wall was a moment of pride for them, because it happened peacefully and they all remembered the violence at comparable occasions such as in 1953. They themselves played no role in this movement, which came largely from the youth. The misunderstanding was that for the ‘GDR generation’ it was all about finally getting over Stalinism. But that was simply not what the younger generation had in mind. Sadly, the younger generation had great difficulties finding a professional place in the new state. The GDR generation instead retired, and hardly changed their mind about the nature of the GDR.

AN: On that note, how was economics treated as a subject by the German authorities following reunification, and how did this affect the eventual fates of economics institutes of the former GDR and the professors within them?

TD: Universities in Germany are run by provinces, so each province treated their economists differently. The Berlin Senate, which governed Humboldt, distinguished between different disciplines: philosophy, history, law, and also economics had to be closed down and then relaunched. These disciplines were thus put under general suspicion while others passed without much change (though mathematicians, for example, were known to be even more party-loyal). The reform to economics was radical. Hardly any of the GDR staff were kept on, which was unseen in the history of the faculty, even compared to 1933 and 1945. I still sense an awkward feeling at the economics faculty at Humboldt when it is reminded of the GDR past, as if things went too far. The judgement of low scientific quality, which was misplaced anyway, made the reform appear as an act of force. But anyhow, this did not really concern the generation that I describe in this paper, since they mostly went into retirement.

AN: Is this paper part of a larger project? How does it fit into your broader research programme?

TD: Yes, it’s part of a series of historical studies on economic knowledge in socialism that I started some years ago. I am still working on the secret service archives of the GDR, exploring how the line between expertise and ideology was drawn in this context. I am also organizing a conference on this topic in 2018 with scholars from all sorts of fields. So stay tuned.

Till Düppe is Professor of Economic Sciences at the Université du Québec à Montréal. He is the author of The Making of the Economy: A Phenomenology of Economic Science (Lexington) and, with Roy Weintraub, Finding Equilibrium: Arrow, Debreu, McKenzie, and the Problem of Scientific Credit (Princeton).

Angus Nicholls is Reader in German and Comparative Literature at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author Myth and the Human Sciences: Hans Blumenberg’s Theory of Myth (Routledge) and Goethe’s Concept of the Daemonic: After the Ancients (Camden House)

We were delighted in April 2017 to publish a special issue of History of the Humans Sciences, ‘Psychotherapy in Historical Perspective,’ edited by Sarah Marks, currently based at Birkbeck, University of London, as part of the Wellcome Trust-funded Hidden Persuaders project. HHS Web editor, Des Fitzgerald, spoke to Sarah about the special issue – and about how we might (re-)think the history of the psychotherapeutic complex today. 

Des Fitzgerald (DF): Sarah, thanks for taking the time for this interview. Why a history of psychotherapy, now, in 2017?

Sarah Marks (SM): The history of psychotherapy does seem to be having something of a moment right now. There’s recently been the Other Psychotherapies conference at Glasgow, the Transcultural Histories of Psychotherapy conferences at UCL, special issues of this journal, and forthcoming issues of History of Psychology and The European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling. So I’m happy to say that this seems to representative of a blossoming field.

The seed for this issue came about a few years back, though. As a graduate student I was very surprised at how fractional the literature seemed to be by comparison with work on, say, psychiatric diagnostics and the ‘Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorder,’ psychopharmaceuticals, or asylums and institutions. I thought there must be others out there working on it, and there were. It’s probably particularly relevant that I came to it initially from trying to figure out how Cognitive Behaviour Therapy become such a significant force in the UK. I don’t especially privilege ‘histories of the present’ as an approach, but I think psychotherapies as interventions – and psychotherapeutic knowledge in broader terms – do have something of an unexamined presence in contemporary society and policy, in various forms. I note that there is currently a growing critique, or even backlash against this in Britain, including from therapists themselves.  So taking a historical approach now makes good sense – it reminds us that these are by no means timeless, value-free techniques, about which there is a clear consensus. And it also helps us to excavate their intellectual foundations, which aren’t always that transparent.

But beyond the ethical or political motivations for historicizing psychotherapy, there’s a fascinating variety of stories to be unearthed. Even just in this special issue, there are vastly different models of mind, debates about cultural or moral decline, questions of identity or normality and pathology, ideas about cure or the nature of human relationships, resistance movements, and the political spectrum across left and right, to name but a few. And that’s just from looking at predominantly West European and North American examples.

DF: For many I think, a Venn diagram showing intersections between the history of psychotherapy and the history of psychoanalysis will more or less form a circle. But I get a strong sense that this special issue wants to prise these two apart somewhat. Is that right? And why, if so?

SM: Yes, you’re right about that. I’m not of the opinion that the history of psychoanalysis has reached its end point, as some have begun to argue. I’m working myself on its legacies in the Soviet sphere during the Cold War at the moment. There still is much to be done there. But it really has overshadowed other approaches in the literature quite drastically.

This could be because psychoanalysis has been very a productive interpretive strategy in the arts and humanities: we’re all familiar with it, and it has been very successful at captivating audiences outside of its clinical setting. It would be hard to say that about, say, behaviourism, or Gestalt. So it’s understandable that we have more histories of it. But its popularity in these spheres, and as an actual clinical movement in the 20^th century, has led to a sort of Whiggish dominance of this one particularly successful approach. This has been at the expense of lots of other therapeutics or frameworks, which also had a real impact in their time, but that have now – for multiple, usually contingent reasons – been forgotten. A number of the contributions to the special issue uncover such stories: from late Victorian psychotherapeutics, to some quite peculiar Viennese competitors to Freud, or ways of understanding art therapy and psychosis.

The striking thing, though, is that from the mid-century up to the present, psychoanalysis has had some extremely militant challengers to the throne, which have, in some cases, exceeded it in terms of institutional power. Behavioural and cognitive approaches are the obvious candidates here, especially in the way they have mobilized trials and ‘evidence base’ for their cause. But there are others: Rogerian counselling has been ubiquitous at particular moments, and, increasingly, Mindfulness-based approaches. And there is an excellent emerging literature coming through that is beginning to address some of these gaps: the work of Rachael Rosner on Aaron Beck, and Matthew Drage’s forthcoming PhD on the history of Mindfulness in particular. But the fact that the ‘non-psychoanalytic circle in the Venn diagram’, as you elegantly put it, has had very little historical interrogation thus far, has quite significant implications given the status they’ve acquired.

I would be curious to think more about the nature of the overlap of the two circles. Is there a degree to which we can say that most modern psychotherapies are indebted to psychoanalysis in some sense, in terms of how we have come to structure an interpersonal therapeutic relationship? How have some of the norms of analytic training, or its ethical framework, been kept up by other approaches, which have otherwise emphatically broken away from psychoanalysis? And how have other traditions been formed in explicit opposition to, or in dialogue with Freudian thought? Perhaps we should actually draw out your suggested Venn diagram on a blackboard and see where it leads…

DF: There is of course a well-known view – coming especially from scholars in the wake of Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault –that the history of ‘psy’ science tends towards recurrence: that to (as Nikolas Rose puts it) work ‘within the true’, as a psychotherapeutic practitioner, is also to work with a history of the truthfulness of one’s own practices, and vice versa. Do you agree with this view? And where does it leave the historian?

SM: There is something to it. I mention in the introduction to the special issue the question of therapeutic traditions, and Laurence Spurling’s comment that the texts of the founders can come to play an almost Talmudic role in particular professional communities, which can at times lead to a sort of conservatism, or I suppose a ‘recurrence’, to use your quotation. There certainly are dogmatic ‘believers’ out there in the therapy world, for whom the history of the profession is mainly useful for the purposes of legitimising their ways of seeing, which are wholeheartedly assumed to be true. But that’s not a universal stereotype at all.

Working at Birkbeck, I’m currently surrounded by clinicians, many of them psychoanalytic (see this short video, for example). I do observe with curiosity the way they sometimes read or teach historical texts as sources for contemporary practical inspiration. But, at the same time, they also step outside and approach these ‘truths’ as culturally or historically situated, and examine them from a position of critical distance. This isn’t exclusive to the academy either: from interviewing full-time therapists in cognitive traditions, too, I’ve often seen this reflexive tension at play. But, from the historian’s perspective, the problem here is that we’re talking about practitioners in the way they behave and present themselves outside of the consulting room. What actually goes on when they work as clinicians is still mostly a black box to me – and that’s the case for those I am able to talk to, as well as those historical actors that I can only trace via their textual or archival paper trail. This has huge implications for what it means to write about the history of psychotherapy: mostly we’re just reconstructing the edges, without ever actually getting at the therapeutic interaction itself.

So I’m not sure I can fully agree with Rose, that we can say they are ‘working within the true’. One could infer from the evidence that this is probably what is going on, sure. But I often wonder whether it could be the norm that there are slippages around such ‘truths’ in practice, (perhaps especially in a health service where policy dictates that clinicians deliver a particular brand of therapy, which they themselves might be critical of). Therapists might integrate different approaches that contain conflicting truth claims, or they could respond to a situation in a manner which might be guided by more banal or common-sense assumptions, or personal values, that have nothing at all to do with their professed psychological worldview. Or they might tailor a ‘therapeutic alliance’ around the belief system of the client, and work in such a way that necessitates the suspension of their own truths. There could be ways to research this question, to test the theory out a bit better. But as it stands, the historian, as usual, can only tell a partial story.

DF: One of the things that especially strikes me about the special issue – you gesture at this in the introduction – is that the patient or service-user is much more present, as an experiencing subject, than we are perhaps used to in histories of psychology and psychotherapy. How should we think about his shift in the literature (if indeed it marks a shift)?

SM: I’d say the recipient of therapy as an experiencing subject isn’t by any means as present as it should be. Patrick Kirkham’s article in the special issue really does place the service-user (or in his particular example of autistic self advocates and their objections towards Applied Behaviour Analysis, the service-resister) at the centre. And it’s interesting to note that Patrick came at this topic not from an interest in the history of therapeutics, but somewhat tangentially, from conducting his dissertation research on neurodiversity and the autism rights movement.

Despite the fact that the service-user-as-subject is the very point of most therapies, they are usually only implicit subjects in historical writing on psychotherapy. I’m as guilty of reiterating this in my own writing as anyone else, I admit. It’s something that really struck me when I was writing the introduction, looking over what literature existed. It is incredibly problematic, that we have this looming blank space with regard to the experience of the recipient of the treatment, who is often only seen refracted through the gaze of the therapist.

It’s obviously not difficult to account for this imbalance: there are many more archives and published primary sources from practitioners than there are from patients. It’s a classic problem in the history of medicine, but I think historians of other medical fields – even psychiatry – have been doing a better job of addressing it. So I think it’s a shift in the literature that definitely should happen, and which I will look to follow through in my own work. There are some good sources of inspiration in neighbouring fields in terms of more contemporary, ethnographically orientated research. Ilina Singh’s work on children’s understandings of their ADHD diagnosis springs immediately to mind, or Juliet Foster’s monograph, Journeys Through Mental Illness.

On the other hand, there certainly is a theorized, or perhaps imagined, service-user that has cropped up in the work of sociologists, philosophers and historians. I’m thinking here of Nikolas Rose again and his autonomous, liberal ‘self’ who governs themself through psychological technologies. Equally, Ian Hacking’s patient who becomes therapeutically labelled with, and then reinterprets themselves through, a ‘human kind’ such as multiple personality disorder. Or Sonu Shamdasani’s individual who might opt in or out of an ‘optional ontology’ offered to them by psychotherapy, or who may well present to a therapist having already defined themselves in such terms in the first place.

All of these seem to capture something about the psychotherapeutic subject, and intuitively I’d say they are productive concepts to think with. But the interesting question would be to see whether, or how, they hold true in actual service-user experience, and how subjects do – or indeed do not – act in these terms. What might be the nuances of the individual case, or the particular variant of psychotherapy? How might these differ across time period or culture, or down to the level of the particular kind of institution, clinic, or private practice? Or even by the mode of delivery of self-help intervention, which can be many and varied these days? I’d love to see more work on these questions.

DF: The special issue is composed of many (I mean this term, as I guess you do, in its most positive sense) emerging authors in the field – was this a deliberate decision as an editor? And why, if so?

To be honest, it’s because a high proportion of the people doing good work on this topic are at an early career stage, and they were the ones who came my way, by various means. So it feels as though the history of psychotherapy itself is something of an emergent field, even though there have been some really key publications from senior scholars in previous years, as I mention in the introduction. It wasn’t necessarily a deliberate editorial choice from the outset. But there is something to what you have noticed, as this isn’t the only edited volume I’ve been involved with which specifically foregrounds early career researchers. There probably is an implicit ethic there, in terms of wanting to open up space for newer authors, because there is a lot of inspiring new work out there. I have often thought this at recent conferences, that it bodes well for the future of the field.

In other editorial work I’ve done, I’ve also sought to encourage authors from non-anglophone academic backgrounds to publish. I think we can be incredibly North American and West European focused in our field. This doesn’t by any means reflect the quality of research that is being done by scholars elsewhere – it’s just that the latter doesn’t always make it into English-language publications.

DF: You yourself are (if I may use a deeply problematic term) an ‘early career’ scholar working in the history of mental health. I’m wondering, if it doesn’t make you groan too much –what advice would have for others entering the field (I’m think e.g. of those who have recently entered graduate study)?

SM: It’s interesting that you’re so apologetic about the use of ‘early career’. A number of colleagues, probably myself included, have found it quite a helpful designation: it can create a sort of solidarity amongst the precariously employed, and it at least implies that you might be en route to having a career! I’ve been part of a writing group within my department, made up of early career historians, which has been enormously galvanising, both creatively and in terms of pooling advice and information, and mutual support. So I’d advise those entering the field to get organised with those around you, within your own institutions and across the field more broadly. There’s a lot on offer already to help enable this, for postgraduates especially: conferences organised by the British Society for the History of Science, the Society for the Social History of Medicine, the Institute of Historical Research’s ‘History Lab’ etc.

I think another key thing is to start becoming an active member of the research community earlier rather than later. Don’t be shy about submitting work to journals (such as History of the Human Sciences!) once you have a good argument to make, and a strong research base to support it. Peer review can be gruelling, but it does help you shape your work for the better, and responding to that kind of critique is good preparation for the viva, not to mention job interviews. Put in for conferences, or organise your own conference if there’s a theme or question that you think really needs to be talked about more. That’s how this special issue originally came about, from putting out a call for conference papers during my PhD at University College London.

I’m often heartened by how supportive academics in this particular field can be towards fledgling researchers actually, in terms of advice and encouragement, from across different institutions. So I’d say it’s a very good community to be part of.

Psychotherapy in Historical Perspective is available now at the HHS website.

Sarah Marks is a postdoctoral researcher at Birkbeck, University of London working on the history of the psy-disciplines during the Cold War and after, with the Wellcome Trust funded Hidden Persuaders project . She is co-editor (with Mat Savelli) of Psychiatry in Communist Europe. 

Des Fitzgerald is social media and web editor of History of the Human Sciences, and a lecture in sociology at Cardiff University.

For the latest in our series of author interviews, we spoke to Beatriz Pichel, Wellcome Trust Fellow in Medical Humanities, at the Photographic History Research Centre, De Montfort University. Dr Pichel works between the history of photography, the history of emotions, and the medical humanities; she is currently working on the relationship between psychological theories of the emotions and photography at then turn of the nineteenth century. Her new paper, ‘From Facial Expressions to Bodily Gestures: Passions, Photography and Movement in French 19th-Century Sciences‘ is available, open access, in the current issue of History of the Human Sciences. Dr Pichel spoke to HHS Web Editor, Des Fitzgerald. 

Des Fitzgerald: The fundamental claim of your paper, as I read it, and if you’ll forgive a radical simplification, is that the history of the emotions is also the history of photographic technology. Why was it that attention to the emotions, particularly, became so associated with photographic technology? Or should we understand what’s going on here as only one story within a broader history of visual technology in the history of psychology?

Beatriz Pichel: In the second half of the nineteenth century, psychologists and physiologists started to measure emotions in terms of bodily changes (breath, blood pressure, pulse, etc.). But some of them nonetheless still used photographs to see the external changes in the body. This is interesting because, at this time, the imaging of emotion is the only use of photography that I have found in the group of psychologists that I’m looking at. So yes, I would suggest that there is a special connection between photography and emotions in the history of psychology – although, of course, the uses of photography in psychology cannot be reduced to this. But there is a further question, which relates to what we understand by the ‘history of emotions’ more broadly. In my article, I refer to the history of emotions as a discipline, and I claim that part of this history should be written so as to take into account photographic history. I focus on one example: the history of how psychology has understood emotional expressions.

DF: Though your paper is very focused  on photographic technology, I also read it as a broader call for perhaps more attention to material cultures of experiment within the history of the emotions. Is this fair? Have these debates advanced as far as you would like?

BP: Yes, that is a fair reading. There are, of course, fantastic works that examine the practices and the material settings of the laboratory where emotions were ‘created’ – I’m thinking of Otniel Dror’s work (1999, 2011) for instance. This attention is fortunately common in both the history of medicine and the history of emotions nowadays. Perhaps my main claim here would be to turn to material and visual aspects of experiments at the same time. This is something that has been done in relation to the graphic method (an instrument which transcribed movement into linear traces on paper) but not so much in relation to photography. What I argue here is that we should consider images as objects embedded into material practices and cultures. This is actually the question that I would like to see not only in specialized debates in photography, but also in broader historical studies.

DF: We are used to accounts of photography eliciting emotion, and as having affective weight in that sense  – but one of the central claims of your paper (as I understand it) is that photographic technology is also constitutive of how we understand emotions in the first place. Can you expand on this claim a bit: how hard an argument are you making here, and where would you locate it within  studies of affect more generally?

BP: My strong claim in the article is that photographs – especially the ones produced in scientific studies – have participated in our understanding of what constitutes an emotional expression. First of all, because these studies used photography as a method of research. Photographs not only documented their theories but also provided essential information. Secondly, and most important for me, these photographs carried with them particular notions about emotional expressions: their location on the face, and their identification with the instant captured on the plate. It is the latter notion what is more relevant here. Charles Darwin, Duchenne de Boulogne and others described the process of producing an emotional expression, but they didn’t show this process: photographs displayed just one instant that summarized that process. This instant is not conceptualized as such in their books, but was nonetheless materialized in the photographs. These photographs were later appropriated by others such as the psychologist Georges Dumas and the physiologist Charles-Émile François-Franck, who also followed their photographic methods. By doing this, Dumas and François-Franck were implicitly assuming the principle of the instant: that the smile was that frozen moment that they were seeing in the photographs. This is especially important if we take into account that photography, as I discuss in the article, was able to introduce movement as an element in the analysis. However, this was a marginal practice, and most psychologists continued Duchenne’s and Darwin’s model (the focus on the face, and the use of instantaneous photography). The fact that we all assume that instantaneous photos of a smile are the only way to represent a smile tells us a lot about how pervasive the notion of the instant has been.

I think that the approach I develop here, based on research in the history of emotions, photographic history and the history of medicine, complements the work carried out in affect theory. My impression – as a non-specialist in the field-, is that affect theory is more helpful in the analysis of how photographs as visual objects can provoke emotions, or how we become attached to certain images. But it is difficult to apply it to epistemological questions such as why we understand emotions and emotional expressions in particular ways. Emotions are experienced but also categorised and understood, and therefore I think it is a good thing to have several theoretical approaches to examine each of these aspects.

DF: One of the really interesting stories, in this paper, is the story of the transition from an idea, first, that emotion is constituted by the fleeting expression in the face, versus, second, the idea that emotion is more of a bodily gesture, or a series of movements.  Your interest, in the article, is in how this becomes a story about the move from the photograph to the chronophotograph. But I also wondered what else was going on here – conceptually, empirical, even culturally? And how can we disentangle technological from cultural and conceptual developments I our interpretation of this scene – if at all?  

BP: I don’t think we can really disentangle the scientific and technological from other cultural developments and concerns, and that’s precisely the interesting point. The idea of the presence of the body in movement is something that permeates the French cultural scene at the end of the nineteenth century. As is widely known, hysterical patients became ‘muses’ or even role models for actresses such as Sarah Bernhardt. But there is also, as you said, something going on that is deeper than that. This is the moment when film was invented, but also when Loie Fuller started performing. Fuller is deemed one of the pioneers of modern dance. Her most famous dance, the Serpentine, was all about occupying the space with the movement of her body and clothing, using all sorts of technological props and theatrical lighting. She was an artist as well as an amateur scientist who was a close friend of Marie Curie and did research on lighting design. It’s a fascinating period to examine links between emerging technologies and emerging movements of the body.

DF: Was there any dialogue between the scientists who interest you, and more (for want of a better word) ‘creative’ or ‘fringe’ figures also exploring photography in this period?  For example, its maybe an obvious and/or stupid comparison, but to me the images by Albert Londe, in particular, are strikingly  redolent of the work of someone like Muybridge. It’s a crude dichotomy, but I guess my question is about two kinds of modernity that seem to getting mediated by photographic technologies in this period – scientific and artistic. What kind of dialogue is taking place across these twinned developments – if any?

BP: Definitely, there is a continuous dialogue between the sciences and arts, often mediated by photography. My Wellcome Trust funded project precisely tries to identify these links, particularly with theatre. Besides tracing shared ideas in the expression of emotions, we can also trace individuals who populated both worlds. Albert Londe is a very good example. He was a photographer, exactly like Muybridge. He had with no particular knowledge of medicine, but working at the Salpêtrière he learnt a great deal about nervous and physiological reactions. He later applied this knowledge, for instance, to his work photographing actors and his research on artificial lighting and the use of magnesium flash. He also presented his discoveries to the Société Française de la Photographie, so other photographers could learn from him. On the other hand, Charcot and Richer asked Londe to photograph artworks to demonstrate the history of hysteria, and psychologists like Alfred Binet wrote theatrical pieces. One of the things I like the most about this period are the blurred lines we find among disciplines, as well as between ‘science’ and ‘art’.

DF: Is there anything in this history that can help us to understand the visual technologies that seem to structure the science of emotion in the twenty-first century? I am thinking especially of the relationship between studies of emotion and the neurosciences in our own period.   

I would say that there is still the same desire to see emotions, locating them in particular places: the face, the body, the brain. It seems that we need images to fix emotions, turning them into a controllable thing –which I presume is exactly the opposite of what we experience! What is common in both periods, furthermore, is that the final image, the one reproduced in books and articles, is taken as the ‘data’ that we have to analyse. This means that the particular technological choices made in the production of that image usually stay out of question. These choices are never neutral, and they determine the kind of results we can get. I think we need to develop more critical approaches that take into account image-making processes, technologies and practices.

‘From Facial Expressions to Bodily Gestures: Passions, Photography and Movement in French 19th-Century Sciences’,  by Beatriz Pichel, is available open access in the February 2016 issue of History of the Human Sciences: http://hhs.sagepub.com/content/29/1/27.abstract

Nicolas Langlitz is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research in New York City. His work lies at the intersection of anthropology and the history of science, where he has been especially engaged with the epistemic cultures of the neurobiological and psychopharmcological sciences. His most recent monograph, ‘Neuropsychedilia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research Since the Decade of The Brain’ is available from the University of California Press. At the beginning of March, Des Fitzgerald, HHS Web Editor, caught up with Nicolas about his recent article in History of the Human Sciences, ‘On a not so chance encounter of neurophilosophy and science studies in a sleep laboratory.’

Des Fitzgerald: We’ve had a lot of reflection lately on how disciplines like anthropology and sociology intersect the natural sciences (and especially life sciences); one of the things I found especially valuable about your article was its attention to a very different set of interdisciplinary relations – those between social scientists and philosophers. Why do you think there has been relatively little attention to these interactions? And where do you see their future?

Nicolas Langlitz: That’s true. Social studies of science, including anthropology and sociology, have not paid much attention to philosophy. I think there are political reasons for why the humanities and the social sciences attracted less interest. In his article “What Happened in the Sixties?“, Jon Agar located the birth of science studies in the long 1960s and the countercultural upheaval against technocratic government. Philosophically, one of the goals of science studies was to show that there was no clear demarcation of science from society, that scientists were human beings like you and me, and that their claims to objectivity were unfounded. Expert knowledge was put in its place and subordinated to a democratic process. When science studies were established as a field in the 1980s, we were certainly not ruled by philosopher kings and nobody felt the need to show how Derrida and Rorty had fabricated their truth claims ­– not least because these philosophers didn’t make any. But technoscientists did assert their expertise and transformed our world in powerful ways. So we started the Science Wars.

“On a Not So Chance Encounter” has a non-identical twin titled “Vatted Dreams,” in which I point to a second reason for the neglect of philosophers. They are really hard to study. Life scientists meet in a laboratory where they conduct experiments or they go to the field where they observe things. If they trust you, you can hang out with them and watch what they are doing. By contrast, philosophers sit at their desks in the library, their office, or – in the worst case – at home. You can’t install an observation post in their study. And, even if you did, watching them think and write wouldn’t provide much insight anyway. This is primarily a problem for the ethnography, not the history of the human sciences, I think. I was lucky in that my interest in the exchange between neurophilosophers and neuroscientists took me to a sleep lab in Finland. So I departed from a classical and more manageable laboratory ethnography setting not so different from the work I had done on neuropsychopharmacologists studying psychedelic drugs. Nevertheless the neurophilosophy project never flourished ethnographically. It mostly facilitated conceptual reorientations on my part that I document in the two articles mentioned and a third one that will soon be coming out in Common Knowledge.

DF: One of the things you seem to be negotiating in the article is your stance as an ethnographer, on the one hand, and your role as a collaborator in an interdisciplinary team, on the other: as you say in the article, your interest is not only in differences, but in common ground. What has it been like to inhabit the sleep laboratory both as ethnographer and collaborator? And where do you locate yourself in the sometimes vexed debates about anthropological inhabitations of the life sciences?

NL: As an ethnographer I felt relatively comfortable in this project because the group of philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists I worked with had only been brought together by the Volkswagen Foundation’s European Platform for Life Sciences, Mind Sciences, and Humanities. So I was a member from the start and not the awkward newcomer trying to find his place at the margins of a community, which is the usual role of the ethnographer. I got along very well with the other members of the group, especially Jennifer Windt and Valdas Noreika.

However, I really failed as a collaborator. Originally, I saw my job as conducting what Niklas Luhmann and Paul Rabinow called second-order observations: observations of how other observers were observing the world. Ideally, this perspective allows you to identify the other observers’ blind spots, the contingency of their observations. But it’s no basis for collaboration. The philosophers were trying to develop a theory of dreaming based on the empirical findings of the sleep researchers – so philosophers and neuroscientists were looking at the same thing, dreams, while I was looking at something else, namely them. At one point, we had a series of, on my part, rather agonizing Skype conferences about an article we wanted to write together on dreaming as a model of consciousness. I had written a piece on using another altered state of consciousness, namely the inebriation with hallucinogenic drugs, as a model of psychosis. So I actually had things to say about this kind of modeling and yet I did not know how to contribute. Eventually Jenny and Valdas went ahead without me and I really couldn’t blame them (see Windt & Noreika 2011).

It eventually dawned on me that collaboration required that I would open up to first-order observations, that we had to look at the same thing. I had already been making this move in the context of psychedelic research. But there it was much easier. The effects of psychedelics depend on set and setting – they are shaped by the social and cultural milieu. It’s not difficult to insert yourself into this research as an ethnographer. In a publication in this very journal, I had argued for a rapprochement of psychopharmacology and the human sciences. But dreaming is a very different state of mind. The neural thresholds for sensory input and motor output are significantly elevated. Dreamers are cut off from their environments. The setting of the sleep laboratory doesn’t affect dream content a whole lot. It took me years to realize what a beautiful provocation this was. In anthropology and science studies, we implicitly or explicitly subscribe to externalist philosophies of mind, emphasizing how human experience is a product of the subject’s relations with the outer world, and we always criticize brain researchers and neurophilosophers for reducing mind to brain. It turns out that the neuroscience of dreaming provides some of the strongest support for internalist philosophies of mind. This led me to rethink the biases I had inherited from my own field of scholarship. That’s what I lay out in “Vatted Dreams.”

For me, doing ethnographic fieldwork is about learning to think differently. So I have no interest in mobilizing anthropological critiques against my interlocutors. There are enough people who regularly, although not very successfully, remind neuroscientists that they have left out the social and the cultural. I focus on mining other fields for things that we anthropologists ignore or habitually dismiss. My plea for positivism at the end of “On a Not So Chance Encounter” is another example of that.

 DF: One of the many fascinating historical stories threaded through your article is the failure – if I can put it like this – of science studies to be the mode in which the conceptual would get sutured to the empirical within a naturalized epistemology (a role, indeed, for which it was a serious candidate). There’s an interesting counterfactual history at stake here: what happened? And how do you think things might have played out differently for what today calls itself STS?

I actually do think that the social studies of science are based on a naturalist epistemology. My plea to make neurophilosophy more materialist urges philosophers like the Churchlands to expand their naturalist approach from the mind to the sciences, which they continue to regard in a rather idealistic fashion. They slept through the social, practical, and material turns in the history of science. Of course, that also protected them against the constructionist excesses that came with these turns.

If you want me to make up a counterfactual history of the two fields, I would imagine a much earlier encounter of science studies and neurophilosophy in a neuroscience lab. Maybe between Latour and Churchland at the Salk Institute where they both conducted research in the late 1970s and 1980s, respectively. It might have made both fields more attentive to the fact that some natural phenomena are more affected by humans than others, and that this should be more of an empirical than metaphysical question.

DF: Your paper is one sense a genealogy of neurophilosophy – and (if I read you correctly) one of your claims is that neurophilosophy has been (or at least has become) a more orthodox intellectual space than some have seen it, or than it might otherwise have been. Is this the case? And what would your dream for a more heterodox neurophilosophy look like?

NL: Since my intellectual life doesn’t depend as much on how dynamic or sclerotic neurophilosophy is these days, I’m personally a lot more concerned about the orthodoxy of my own field. That’s what I’m primarily writing against.

But I do think that neurophilosophy could profit from catching up with a history of science that, in the past 30 years, has shifted its attention from scientific ideas to material practices. The Churchlands’ prediction that psychological understandings of the human mind will either become reducible to neuroscientific conceptions or be eliminated went far beyond the philosophy of mind. It drew from positivist and postpositivist philosophies of science, which also gave rise to science studies, historical epistemology, etc. What philosophy of mind would we arrive at if it took into consideration these later developments in how we think about science?

Regarding the orthodoxies of science studies, we should revert the theory-ladenness of observation and the constructedness of all phenomena from articles of faith to objects of empirical inquiry. We might also be able to learn something from the seemingly old fashioned histories of scientific ideas that the Churchlands continue to favor. That would be in line with John Tresch’s recent plea for reintegrating a materialist history of science with intellectual history.

DF: You end by saying that science studies scholars, among others, should perhaps not peremptorily dismiss a positivist attitude to objects like the dreaming brain? Can you expand on this – are you calling for a more nuanced ethnographic attention to positivism, or actually for something like a more positivistic STS? What is the content of your ‘materialist dream,’ as you put it?

NL: The ontological turn in anthropology and science studies has relegitimated metaphysical speculation. In principle, that seems fine to me. We need metaphysical frameworks for empirical research and materialism is one such framework. But these frameworks can and should be continuous with what we know about the world. In the case of dreaming, this knowledge is quite limited. Like the neurophilosophers, I’m confident that we will ultimately arrive at a materialist account. That’s my materialist dream, but at present it’s speculative. Positivism rejects all metaphysical speculation, which also sets it up in opposition to metaphysical materialism. It was not my intention to commit myself to materialism or positivism in general. It’s a situational epistemology in the face of a particular phenomenon. And in the current situation we don’t have enough experimental knowledge to simply dismiss Norman Malcolm’s dream positivism. So it’s not a plea for a more positivistic STS. If there is anything programmatic about it, then it would be to pay more attention to the peculiarities of phenomena instead of plastering everything with one and the same theory.

 DF: One of the things that has captured my own attention about neuroscience is how, when you get close up, it is sometimes strikingly unnaturalistic, at least in the stereotyped sense of that term. This is one sense banal (all intellectual practices are weird, close up) – but it does seem to call for more nuance in how anthropologists and sociologists have understood the neurosciences. And indeed one of the lessons I take from your article is that both the neurophilosophers and the anthropologists have potentially failed to grasp the subtleties that structure the material culture of neuroscience. What are your thoughts on this?

NL: There is so much to be said about this, but it all depends on what you mean by naturalism. A prominent definition in anthropology, for example, is Philippe Descola’s. For him, naturalists assume continuity between humans and other animals on the physical level while postulating radical discontinuity on the mental or spiritual level. Descartes is the prototype of this kind of naturalism. Of course, that’s not what most neuroscientists and neurophilosophers mean by the term. They are Descartes bashers like everybody else these days. And yet some of their practices – most prominently animal experiments – are informed by this dualist conception of naturalism: it wouldn’t make epistemological sense to develop an animal model of a neuropsychiatric disorder, if you didn’t believe in physical continuity, but ethically it’s only permissible to experiment on these animals because their minds are regarded to be qualitatively very different from our own. I examined this closely in my book Neuropsychedelia. I also noticed that the psychopharmacologists I worked with only talked about themselves in neurochemical terms when they were joking. As soon as things got serious they reverted to vocabularies informed by the psy disciplines.  Ian Hacking might well be right and Cartesianism continues to run strong. Maybe that even tells us something about universal forms of human cognition, as Descola suggests, but I don’t think he provides enough evidence for that.

There are probably other reasons for why the Churchlands are materialists in their philosophy of mind and idealists in their philosophy of science. In Science in Action, Latour argued that, in scientific discourse, statements qualify other statements either in a positive or negative modality. In the positive modality, a statement leads away from the first statement’s production to its consequences. By contrast, negative modality statements direct the reader’s attention to the conditions under which the first statement was produced. It’s not taken as a fact on which we can build but is opened up to further scrutiny. By and large, historical and ethnographic laboratory studies have adopted this critical perspective revealing the social and material practices generating scientific truth claims. Neurophilosophers prefer to draw philosophical conclusions from neuroscientific facts – they operate in the positive modality. That might explain why they are not so keen on the kind of epistemological naturalism that characterizes science studies. We can dismiss this as being uncritical, but we should also note that our own obsession with the negative modality is a very serious obstacle to any meaningful collaboration with neuroscientists and empirically oriented philosophers of mind. Although science studies originated in the long 1960s, we might have a brighter future if we stopped conceiving of ourselves as an epistemic counterculture.

‘On a not so chance encounter of neurophilosophy and science studies in a sleep laboratory,’ by Nicolas Langlitz, is available in the October 2015 issue of History of the Human Sciences: http://hhs.sagepub.com/content/28/4/3.abstract