Category: Book Reviews

Review: Outrageous Reason

Peter Barham, Outrageous Reason: Madness and Race in Britain and Empire, 1780-2020  (Monmouth: PCCS Books, 2023), 248pp, £21.50, softcover.

by Michael Romyn

In July 1981, Winston Rose, a 27-year-old father of two was choked to death by police officers in a neighbour’s back garden in Leyton, east London. Concerned for her husband during a period of poor mental health, Rose’s wife, Thora, had sought the advice of the social services, setting in motion a series of destructive actions by a range of state agents, including his GP, psychiatrists, and finally the police: 11 officers in total, some carrying riot shields, were sent to apprehend a visibly fearful Rose for psychiatric detention. Like the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis almost 40 years later, Rose’s fate was abetted by the spectre of violence his blackness supposedly portended. Rose, to be sure, stood little chance of being treated by the authorities with the care his situation necessitated. Rather, he was seen and dealt with as someone whose humanity was obscured by the myth and presumption of black dangerousness.

As Peter Barham shows, Rose’s life and death are a window onto the enduring entanglements of race-making and madness under the hegemony of white reason: mapped onto racialised bodies in broad swathes, madness and the dysfunction, deviancy, and dangerousness it signifies has made up a key dimension of the constitutive outside against which white liberal ‘rationality’ constructs and defends itself. This is a story Barham traces from the hold of the transatlantic slave ship to the hold of the police in contemporary Britain, demonstrating the way in which ideas about race and madness continue to flow along channels created by and for empire. The concept of the ‘hold’ certainly appears frequently across Outrageous Reason’s 14 chapters. For Barham, it can mean the deadly grasp applied by police officers and hospital wardens to black people like Rose and George Floyd, as well as Sean Rigg, Jimmy Mubenga, and numerous others, but also a ‘physical, ideological or, sometimes, figurative space, one of traumatic memory, in which persons, or the traces of persons such as records, are sheltered or stored, or, more commonly, held captive.’ (5).

Here, Barham’s objective is to retrieve a number of these subaltern persons or their traces through case studies and vignettes, some of which utilise personal narratives and other testimonial sources that place us squarely in the historical terrain. For example, we are plunged into the miserable depths of Kingston Lunatic Asylum in post emancipation Jamaica via the observations of Henrietta Dawson. Admitted to the asylum in the late 1850s, Dawson, who, like every patient at Kingston, was a woman of colour, was subjected to and witness of all manner of arbitrary violence, humiliation, and routinised punishment at the hands of staff, including the sometimes lethal practice of ‘tanking’, whereby patients were dunked and held underwater. Drawing on works by an array of scholars of slavery and postcolonialism, Barham argues that the conditions Dawson described were not a localised aberration in the hinterlands of British Empire, but that the asylum was an ‘engine room of colonial modernity’ (61); while cloaked in principles of benevolent governance, the Kingston asylum ‘scandal’ exposed the constitutive violence and racist differentiation at the heart of the imperial project. With the case of Orville Blackwood, who died in appalling circumstances at Broadmoor high-security psychiatric hospital in August 1991, Barham illustrates the disturbing continuities between Dawson’s experience and the treatment of black patients in contemporary spaces of ‘care’. As is made so clear in the book’s final chapters, the systematic negation of the colonial subject – to the status of ‘savages’, ‘beasts’, ‘barbarians’ and so on – continues to seep into and pollute our institutional cultures in both quotidian and cataclysmic ways.

The question of what care has looked like for the poor and racialised is posed at the outset of the book through the episode of the Zong slave ship massacre of 1781, where more than 130 captive Africans were thrown overboard by the crew in a chilling piece of financial calculus. While likely a simple error of re-painting, Barham argues that the earlier renaming of the ship, from the Dutch Zorg, meaning ‘care’, to Zong, augured the horrific events on the vessel to come. But he also sees it as a symbol of the way in which care has been routinely ‘abjected’ or ‘transformed into something else’ (57) when it comes to those deemed ‘mad’ or ‘damaged’ by the arbiters of white reason. The case of Alice Rebecca Triggs, a white domestic servant who spent the last four decades of her life in a mental institution after receiving a diagnosis of ‘moral imbecility’ in 1919, makes a wider point about how such delimitations of care and understanding not only imperilled black lives, but also the lives of the ‘lower or inferior orders’ in Britain who posed ‘a threat to the vitality and stability, and hence to the future, of the white race’ (102).              

There is another aspect of care to consider here: early on in the book Barham writes that he is ‘trying to feel my way, challenging and exploring diverse forms of “knowing” and drawing as much as I can on the exercise of…“negative capability”’ (6). Certainly, he treads the complex and multiple intertwining pasts of race, class, and madness and their troubling resonances in the present with considerable care and empathy, and in a way that forces us to think about and contend with our own cultural assumptions. In doing so, Outrageous Reason marks an important step in what Barham describes as a ‘gathering discourse, or convergence of voices’ (213) that enjoins a revaluation of conceptions of pathology and dysfunction, as well as the hegemony of whiteness that upholds them.

*

Michael Romyn’s first book, London’s Aylesbury Estate: An Oral History of the ‘Concrete Jungle’, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020.

Review: Cult of Creativity

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

Gavin Miller (University of Glasgow)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: Disalienation

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

Janina Klement (University College London)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: Emily Hauptmann, Foundations and American Political Science

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

John Hsien-hsiang Feng, Wuhan University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael N. Healey, Johns Hopkins University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: Emily Martin’s Experiments of the Mind

Review of Emily Martin, Experiments of the mind: From the cognitive psychology lab to the world of Facebook and Twitter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021)

Maarten Derksen (Theory & History of Psychology, University of Groningen)

Experiments of the mind is the result of a ten year-long project studying experimental psychology ethnographically, as a participant-observer in four laboratories. Emily Martin sat in on lab meetings, interviewed researchers, participated in experiments, and even tried her hand at running them. It has resulted in a book that contains many insightful observations.

Martin went into this study with an admirably open mind. Whereas her anthropology colleagues’ thought experimental psychology is a boring topic, she realized that the project of experimental psychology — to produce objective knowledge stripped of the subjectivity that both researchers and experimental subjects bring to the process — is fascinating, whether or not you think it is a worthwhile thing to strive for. Her open-mindedness allowed Martin to make the familiar strange: to alert the reader to aspects of experimental psychological practice that seem unremarkable or do not get noted at all.

To her surprise, studying the individual mind is an intensely social activity. The culture of experimental psychology is one of collaboration, mutual support, and frequent informal gatherings (much more so than in anthropology, she notes). In fact, Martin seems to have found especially social and collaborative labs. Not only are the psychologists who she studied without exception presented as very nice people (as becomes clear from the ‘dramatis personae’ that the book opens with), there is also an almost complete absence of conflict and competition. The labs are friendly, wholesome places, and there seems to be no scarcity. The post docs do not worry about finding another position after their current contract ends. There are no complaints about reviewer two, and the researchers do not struggle to get their work published or to get funding for the next project. This remarkable state of affairs would have merited more reflection, because such aspects of academic life are part and parcel of the production of knowledge.

The social nature of experimental psychology, Martin emphasizes, does not only lie in the relations between researchers. The experiments that are conducted are themselves thoroughly social events. Good experimenters care for their subjects’ well-being, if only because a subject who is bored or in pain does not produce good data. Moreover, experimenters socialize their subjects to become part of their world by training and instructing them so that they can play a role as good subjects. Experiments start by giving the subject instructions, usually followed by a brief practice round. Paradoxically, producing objective knowledge requires a carefully prepared subject. Martin also notices the importance of the virtually omnipresent pieces of furniture in psychological laboratories: a table and a chair for physically stabilising the subject. In this respect they serve the same function as the fixation point that controls the gaze of the subject, and which is an equally common device in experimental psychology. Ironically, Martin herself was a terrible subject, plagued by performance anxiety and constantly second-guessing the intentions of the experimenter. Time and again experimenters had to reassure her that her poor performance was not a problem, and if her data were too unusual they would simply be discarded.

Despite the researchers’ best efforts at disciplining their participants, and despite the devices (EEG, fMRI, eye-trackers) they have at their disposal to measure responses, producing data is not a smooth, automatic process. In a wonderful chapter titled ‘Gazing technologically’ Martin describes the human interventions, the judgment, the social relations it requires to keep the machinery running and bridge the gaps that inevitably fall between the experiment as intended and its actual realisation. She closes this chapter by saying that psychologists’ training and methods ignore these gaps between ideal and practice, but that does not do justice to the work she has just described so well: these gaps are a constant concern for researchers. This is one of several places where her analysis seems a bit off the mark to me. Another example concerns the training of participants. This, Martin writes, is an example of ‘problems and methods passing one another by’, as Wittgenstein famously remarked about psychology. The methods, in Martin’s view, circle around the problem, the cognitive experiences of the subjects, picking out statistically significant findings. But it seems more to the point to say that a particular version of the problem is being enacted by the method. Problem and method do not pass each other by as ships in the night. On the contrary, training and stabilising the subjects is part of creating a particular coupling of problem and method. In the process, the conscious experiences of the subjects disappear from view, only becoming visible if they destabilize this particular enactment of the research topic.

As the title of the book indicates, Martin has followed psychological theories and techniques from the lab into the world of social media. In the last two chapters Martin tries to show that companies like Meta/Facebook and Twitter.inc rely on psychological paradigms to attract users and keep them clicking on the links to their advertisers. They have turned us all into psychological subjects, unwittingly being manipulated and experimented on, and filling in the same kind of questionnaires as the participants in the lab. Unfortunately, this is not the best part of the book. Some of the links and resemblances that she tries to show between experimental psychology and the practices of Twitter and Facebook are just not there. As she acknowledges herself, Facebook doesn’t care whether you are standing up, lying down, or sitting down, whereas the subject in psychology experiments must be stabilized, immobilized to produce good data. Neither are the users of social media trained like the participants in experiments. The algorithms that platforms like Facebook employ are trained, as Martin notes, but they are not the users of the technology. Finally, it seems questionable whether participants in psychological laboratories ‘willingly’ provide data, as Martin writes. They are usually paid or compensated with course credit after all, unlike the users of social media. These differences are just as interesting as the commonalities between psychological and social media practices that Martin is intent to point out. Ultimately, however, the impression that this book leaves is shaped not by these two chapters, but by Martin’s many fascinating observations about the social production of psychological findings.

Review: Samuël Coghe, Population Politics in the Tropics

Samuël Coghe: Population Politics in the Tropics: Demography, Health and Transimperialism in Colonial Angola (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022) 317 pp. ISBN 978 1 10894 3 307

Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger (Giessen)

In Population Politics in the Tropics, Samuël Coghe studies the population politics of the Portuguese government in colonial Angola from 1890 to 1945, instigated due to its fear of depopulation. In view of the abolition of slavery, the indigenato-system was set up in 1870, which implied a system of forced labor leading to a formerly unknown regional mobility of African people (The transatlantic slave trade was abolished in 1836 but continued along illegal routes until the end of the century. Slavery was officially abolished in 1875). In times of an increasing influx of Portuguese farmers and traders to “modernize” the colony, especially after the Berlin Conference of 1884/85, smallpox and famines increased because of the breakdown of the ecological control of the lands, based on centuries of long-established modes of agriculture. Now, with the construction of the railway and the introduction of different agrarian cultivations for export, the organization of the land gradually changed and the traditional knowledge of ecological landscapes faded away. Consequently, a “racial disease” (p. 31) spread, known as the sleeping illness, to which native Angolans were especially vulnerable, which made the Portuguese even more convinced of their inferiority. However, the high numbers of sicknesses and deaths made intervention necessary to avoid losing the African working force. This background explains the rise of biomedical interventionism in the region, that took the form of a call for medical assistance and led to the development of the discipline of tropical medicine. In 1902, the Escola Medicina Tropical (EMT) was set up in Lisbon, specializing in sleeping sickness, later followed by the initiative of the Asistência Médica aos Indígenas (AMI) in 1926.

These issues, in a nutshell, are what Coghe’s book investigates, not forgetting that the relationship between Portugal and Angola was determined by the strategies of the Third Portuguese Empire, from 1822 to 1975, when, after India (the First Empire) and Brazil (the Second Empire), politics shifted towards concentrating on the trade and exploitation of its African colonies. The author makes an argument against the commonly held opinion that Portuguese colonialism was exceptional and isolated by emphasizing the circulation of international knowledge and actors between countries and empires in both Europe and Africa.

Coghe first discusses the emergence of depopulation anxieties and population politics in Angola around the turn of the nineteenth century. His second chapter considers the multi-faceted practical efforts to check and cure sleeping sickness in Angola until the end of the First World War. Next, he lays out the debates leading to the establishment of the AMI program in the interwar years. In the fourth chapter, he examines the work of doctors as “field demographers” and population experts in tropical Africa. Step by step, he demonstrates that the focus of the attending medical supervisions on sleeping illness shifted toward a focus on children’s health care, with the underlying presumption of a strongly negative image of African motherhood. In the sixth and final chapter, the author goes beyond medical interventions and emphasizes the spatial dimension of European population politics in their colonies in the first half of the twentieth century. Many Angolans migrated to neighbouring countries, either forced to work on the coffee and cacao plantations in São Tomé and Príncipe or in the mines in surrounding countries, among other reasons, and this problem of migration produced conflicting views between the Colonial Ministry in Lisbon and the central government in Luanda.

The archival material Coghe found in different places was of overwhelming abundance and he repeatedly states that although medical assistance is generally considered to be a “tool” of the colonial empire to control the health of its workers, this view should be cautiously modified. For instance, he found that medical doctors often manipulated their reports on the health situation, hiding their dependence on local intermediaries’ expertise to obtain better results with other types of medication and treatment. Practitioners of local belief resisted European methods which seemed to be opposed to their own interests. Coghe makes the effort to read beyond the narratives contained in archival documents and his suggestions about the role of local medical knowledge are quite revealing.

He equally documents that this medical system was not specific to Portuguese colonization; instead it was a trans-colonial phenomenon. Coghe observes intra-imperial differences and addresses their common strategies for exploitation, modernization of the medical service, colonial actors, debates and policies in other parts of the colonial world. Of particular interest are his arguments against so-called Portuguese exceptionalism. He opposes the influential thesis, developed by Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, concerning the unique character of Portuguese colonialism as constituting a big interracial family, living peacefully together. Coghe argues that, in Angola, this ‘harmonious’ family refers to a special situation. In the first place, there were also many unattended white children of degradados parents, of convicted criminals deported from Portugal, often with their families. Until 1932, Angola served as Portugal’s ‘imperial prison’” (p. 193) and the convicts lived in physical and moral misery at the margin of the colonial society, mistreating the local population. Also, Coghe questions that the number of people who were officially identified as mestiços was, in absolute numbers, high compared to other colonies in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in urban areas:

These [high] numbers, however, do not necessarily indicate any special Portuguese propensity of ‘racial mixing’, a long-standing accusation against the Portuguese, and as the Estado Novo would start claiming in the 1950s [….] Gerald Bender has argued that the number and percentage of mestiços in Angola was not exceptional for African colonies when compared to the high number of whites and considering the imbalance in the male-female ratio across the white population. Moreover, definitions of mestiço (and their official number) varied greatly between actors and over time, as they oscillated between somatic, race-biological and cultural criteria, partly depending on political purposes (p. 193).

In his epilogue, Coghe discusses the eventual fear of overpopulation, never a reality in Angola. On the contrary, the country was one of the least heavily populated in sub-Saharan Africa, therefore, in the early 1960s, Portuguese migration reached unprecedented heights, many taking refuge from the rigid dictatorial rule in the metropole. In his closing sentences, Coghe points to the high fertility rates among the local population notwithstanding the long war period after independence from 1975 to 2002, explaining that Angola has one of the highest fertility rates in the world until today.

Coghe’s well-documented study on health in Angola is recommended reading for medical historians, historians of Lusophone Africa, or indeed anyone interested in health strategies in Angola and former African colonies. Furthermore, in my opinion, his observations could also be relevant to those interested in historical novels, in which some characters obviously suffer from sleeping illness, without mentioning it as such, for example, Arnaldo Santos’ A casa velha das margens (The Old House at the Margins, 1999), set in the nineteenth century. Coghe’s cautious interpretation of colonial archives, his detailed understanding of facts and his overall critical tone outlays many controversial issues in health policies in a Portuguese colony in the past, connecting them to the international networks of knowledge at that time.

Review: Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory

Michael Pettit, York University, Toronto

Heather Love, Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021)

In Underdogs, Heather Love offers a densely argued, at times counterintuitive, and yet highly persuasive rereading of how her own field of queer theory relates to its own intellectual past. Love argues queer theory, despite its professed deep historicism, is in denial about its own history, much to its detriment when it comes to making both theoretical and political interventions. She offers Underdogs as something of a remedy to this collective amnesia. In her telling, queer theory as an anti-humanist humanities field is predicated on the notion of rupture: its leading practitioners see it as a field with neither a true academic parent nor a comfortable disciplinary home. Queer theory (and theorists) always stands alone, outside, without friend, kin, or even community. Love identifies this widespread sensibility with the field’s proximate roots in the radical oppositional politics of gay liberation, the women’s health movement, and especially 1980s AIDS activism. In this political crucible, the field disavowed any kinship with earlier social scientific, “empirical,” studies of sexuality (whether of the human animal or other species). Most importantly for Love’s story, queer theory denied its debts to mid-century, observational, qualitative, microanalyses of social interaction. Yet these sociologists of deviance profoundly informed how queer theorists understood both (social) normativity and their own outsider status as intellectuals. Her book seeks to excavate these lost linkages to challenge and enrich contemporary queer theory.

If Underdogs pivots around making uncomfortable kinship between deviance studies and queer theory, Love astutely traces how these two fields operate with very different politics of representation. Contemporary queer theory is predicated on the disruption of all norms and foundations. A profound, skeptical destabilization of all received notions is the field’s primary political intervention. In contrast, mid-century sociologists of deviance sought to uplift alternative forms of social life by making them legible. They related the minortized group to the majority through practices of immersion at the level of data collection and (thick) description as a mode of analysis. However, their sociology continued to traffic in postwar commitments to value neutrality. They staged this not through quantification but by adopting the methodological persona of the cool, hip, outsider observing a foreign scene. A later generation of queer theorists dismissed mid-century sociologies of deviance as hopelessly mired in normative assumptions and compromised by the demands of maintaining neutrality at the expense of explicit political commitment. In short, the sociologists of deviance sought to normalize the subversive, the countercultural, the stigmatized by representing them and their rituals of the world where queer theorists revel in their perennial outsider status as folks who forever operate under the sign of stigma.

Love’s book consists of a series of close and illuminating readings. This starts with her critical engagement with Eve Sedgwick’s highly influential reinterpretation of Cold War affect theory as a relevant framework for queer scholarship. Given the ubiquity of affect theory in the humanities, Love offers a timely reminder of how profoundly odd the reproachment was and remains. Erving Goffman with his theoretically light but richly conveyed ethnographies looms large over much of the book. He comes to serve as an archetype for the sociology of deviance as a body of knowledge and embodied persona. An intriguing chapter on “Just Watching” shows the surprising affinities between radical constructivist sociology and essentialist ethology when it came to their observational practices by juxtaposing Niko Tinbergen’s turn to human observation through his 1970s interest in autism with Laud Humphreys’ controversial, covert ethnography of male homosexual encounters in public restrooms. Perhaps Love’s most compelling case is her analysis of the Black American science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany’s relationship to queer theory. Delany entered the academic critical theory canon through historian and gender theorist Joan W. Scott’s influential reading of a key passage in his memoir The Motion of Light in Water (1988). In the passage, Delany relates his first visit to the Saint Mark’s Baths in New York City in 1963 when he became aware of the existence of a gay community. Writing at the height of the linguistic turn, Scott’s reading underscores the impossibility of an immediate, universal, transhistorical experience of identity, arguing instead for the mediating, reconstructive power of language as a mode of representation which structures consciousness and even the most inmate of identities. Scott exemplifies queer theory’s demand for disruption and destabilization, the critical humanities’ emphasis on interrogating the very categories of identity rather than populating texts with varied experiences of them. In contrast, Love reads Delany’s considerable writings on the changing sexual and political economy of New York City as a vivid exemplar of mid-century urban ethnography in the sociology of deviance mode. Throughout the book, Love plays with the dialectics of seeing but not being seen, of watching and (not) judging.

Love’s book also raises pertinent and disconcerting questions about why queer theorists and social psychologists have been so drawn to affect as a meta-theory for the past twenty years despite their very different political commitments. Certainly, Sedgwick offered an unfaithful reading of this psychology. However, critics like Ruth Leys have rightly point out how affect theory smuggles in with it deeply problematic notions about biology, universalism, and especially intentionality into critical, humanistic fields. Adding Goffman to the genealogical mix does interesting things to this debate. Despite their innumerable differences, queer theorists, the sociologists of deviance, and contemporary social psychologists all share the conviction that they are the smartest person in the room capable of detecting the cognitive failures of the rubes. It suggests these fields remain overly committed to their own coolness both socially and cognitively. As Love artfully demonstrates, this conviction has been as damaging to the kinds of interventions queer theory ought to make as it has been to social psychology. Adopting Goffman’s cruel coolness as the perennial outsider risks veering into the knowing smugness of the smartest kid in the room who conveniently directs the hermeneutics of suspicious at everyone but themselves. Denying the “evidence of experience” as another foundationalist trick means foreclosing oneself to experience of others. It results in a disposition both unkind and uncharitable.

I found Love’s book a challenging but inspiring read. It raises, if perhaps inevitably does not answer, important questions about how to create good relations between empirical research (both ethnographic and archival) and critical theory. In part, her book challenges a prevalent assumption in the humanities where theory takes precedence over method. Without succumbing to the methodolatry so common in many social science fields, Love’s genealogy problematizes the ways in which Theory is often left unresponsive and ultimately unresponsible to the world. Debunking queer theory’s origin myth that it was born whole cloth out of the AIDS crisis leads Love to challenge necessary alignments of the field’s activism with “paranoid” readings of (medical) authority and anti-foundationalist epistemologies. Underdogs is an insightful book for those seeking to repair the rift between the critical humanities and empirical social science.

Review: Evolution of Desire

Cynthia L. Haven, Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2018)

Michael C. Behrent, Appalachian State University

“How is a philosophy embodied in the man who espouses it? … How does a man’s being—the sum of his knowledge, experience, and will—‘prove’ his knowledge? Can we ever devise a philosophy, even a theory, wholly apart from who we are, and what we must justify?” (144). These are the questions that drive Cynthia L. Haven’s engaging biography of René Girard (1923-2015), the French scholar whose influential studies of mimetic behaviour, violence, and scapegoating proposed a complete reinterpretation of religion and a comprehensive theory of human nature and society. The nexus between thought and life promises to be a particularly fruitful vantage point for assessing Girard’s thought: unlike so many of his generation, particularly in his home discipline of literary studies, Girard’s interest was not in how texts “functioned,” but in what they described. “I’ve always been a realist,” he once asserted. “I have always believed in the outside world and in the possibility of knowledge of it” (127). Drawing, perhaps, on this claim, Haven reconsiders Girard’s thought from the standpoint of its interaction with the “outside world” that shaped it.

Haven’s book is not a conventional biography, objectively recounting its subject’s life history. It is, rather, a whimsical exploration of Girardian thought, a play in which René Girard is the leading but by no means solitary actor, and in which the biographical narrative is interwoven with more chronologically disparate episodes. Haven, moreover, incorporates herself into the story, using her relationship with Girard, as well as his family and friends, to explore his character and trace the multiple ramifications of his thought. Though undoubtedly biographical, the precise subject of her book is difficult to pin down. It is not, strictly speaking, an intellectual biography, rigorously focused on the conception and development of Girard’s most distinctive ideas. At moments, it becomes a study of academic self-fashioning, examining Girard’s successive appointments, academic politics, and professional jockeying before his ultimate consecration as a superstar. Frequently, Haven’s style can only be described as hagiographic—not simply because it is laudatory, but because she presents Girard as a visionary whose wisdom and insight are instrumental to grasping humanity’s current condition. Though Girard’s life is the book’s core, it bristles with digressions—an excursus on the medieval papacy (when discussing Girard’s native Avignon), a slapstick account of Jacques Lacan’s disastrous trip to Baltimore (at a conference organized by Girard), and meditations on 9/11 as a world-historical confirmation of Girard’s intuitions about violence and sacrifice.

Beneath these intriguing quirks lurks a comprehensive and quite definitive narrative of Girard’s life and career. He was born in 1923 in Avignon, France, where his father worked as a curator at the Palais des Papes, the edifice that attests to the city’s brief stature as a seat of medieval Christendom. During the German Occupation, Girard moved to Paris, where, following in his father’s footsteps, he studied at the École des Chartes, the national school for archivists. After the war, he played a role in launching the Festival d’Avignon, which has since become of one France’s most cherished annual cultural events. The turning point in Girard’s youth was his decision to seize an opportunity to teach at Indiana University in 1947. While enjoying the United States’ postwar prosperity—a far cry from his depleted and dilapidated homeland—Girard taught French and trudged his way through a history dissertation (devoted to American attitudes towards France during World War II). Not until he was fired for failing to publish were the rigours of the American academic system impressed upon him. Girard learned his lesson: after a brief stint at Duke, he was hired by Johns Hopkins, where he published a suite of literary papers, before completing, in 1959, his landmark study of mimetic behavior in literature, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. This essay not only secured his academic reputation, it also coincided with a spiritual watershed in the young professor’s life: as he was completing the manuscript, Girard underwent a conversion experience, leading him to become—for the first time—a practicing Roman Catholic, while also leaving him brimming with thoughts that he would flesh out in his theoretical writings.

In 1966, Girard leveraged his growing reputation to host a symposium at Hopkins, entitled “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,” which provided an American showcase for cutting-edge French thinkers associated with structuralism—though in retrospect, the event is often seen as the first flowering of post-structuralism or post-modernism. Girard, who viewed these currents as a “plague” (124), was, as Haven aptly notes, “both a child of this new era and an orphan within it” (122). Not long after his subsequent move to the State University of New York at Buffalo, Girard published his definitive statement, Violence and the Sacred (1972).In this work, he argued that scapegoating was the mechanism through which humans successfully purge themselves of their tendency towards destructive violence (rooted in mimetic rivalry), and that sacrifice was the institution through which the initial scapegoating was both revived and managed. The book’s success led to ever-more prestigious academic recognition (Hopkins redux, Stanford, the Académie Française), a series of books teasing out the (notably theological) implications of Girard’s core thesis, and the establishment of Girardian studies as a self-standing subfield (of which the series in which Haven’s book was published—“Studies in Violence, Mimesis, and Culture”—is one example). In 2015, at the age of 91, Girard died at his home near Stanford.

Haven offers a panoramic view of Girard’s impressive career and his bold and influential ideas. But, knowing more about his life, are we expected to understand these ideas any differently? Haven implicitly acknowledges the appropriateness of this question, as can be seen in her quest to find a biographical basis for Girard’s signature concepts, particularly scapegoating and victimization. Was Girard’s thinking provoked by the tondues de ‘44­—the French women accused of “horizontal collaboration” with German men, whose heads were shaved by Resistance forces before they were paraded and publicly derided by throngs celebrating France’s liberation? Was he influenced, rather, by his encounter with racism during his brief stint in North Carolina? In this vein, Haven briefly entertains the claim, advanced by a close friend of Girard’s, that Girard may have witnessed a lynching—even if, ultimately, she rejects it. Or was Girard’s theory ultimately purely intellectual, a merger of his intuitions about mimetic rivalry in literature with his extensive readings in the field of anthropology? Haven dangles each of these options before her reader as possible explanations, without ever committing to a particular experiential matrix as the primary font of his thought—or even committing unreservedly to the claim that such a matrix exists.

This reluctance to clinch the relevant contexts of Girard’s theory accounts, in part, for Haven’s unwillingness to take a stand on what the ultimate significance of Girard’s oeuvre really is. She convinces us that he matters. But Girard’s thought is so consequential, she implies, that it is not necessary to pinpoint its import. For example, all the modern instantiations she cites of Girard’s theory—the Jim Crow South, South Africa under Apartheid, and 9/11, to name a few—are presented in ways that effectively depoliticize them. For Girard’s readers, this is hardly surprising. His theory emphasized the fundamental commonality between the many forms of “sacrificial crises” (that is, the eruptions of violence that can only be ended by scapegoating). Though fundamental, victimization and sacrifice attest, for Girard, to the eternal return of the same in human affairs.

“I am convinced that history has meaning,” Girard once remarked, “and that its meaning is terrifying” (128). Yet while Girard was no doubt interested in history, he was far less concerned with historical change—that is, with the ways in which social structures, political systems, and ideologies might alter and transform unchanging anthropological truths (the one exception being Christianity, which he saw as an escape hatch from the implacable dynamic of human violence). The primitive horde, the Dionysian sparagmos, the sans-culottes crowd, and the Southern lynch mob were so many variations on a common transhistorical theme. This view was reinforced by Girard’s insistence that the choice of a scapegoat could only be arbitrary: it is because every human is to blame for the species’ penchant for violence that no one human can be deemed more guilty than the rest. Yet few interpretations of the French Revolution, American race relations, or 9/11 claim that the victims of these events were randomly chosen. This reductive tendency in Girard’s thought is carried over into his biographer’s analysis: in reflecting on his theory’s relationship with the world, there is little that could not be construed as instances of scapegoating or related phenomena.

More attention to the distinctiveness of Girard’s thought, rather than its capaciousness, would be welcome in Haven’s account—especially since, in her expansive research, she has found material that more narrowly delimits Girard’s uniqueness as a thinker. In an interview, the philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy gives her three reasons why Girard’s work is often ostracized by certain intellectual circles: 1) Girard believed in God; 2) he believed in the human sciences; and 3) 1) and 2) are the same (179). Perhaps this is where Girard’s true significance lies—in his attempt to wrest a world-historical justification for Christianity from the violent fate to which human nature (as he sees it) seems condemned, as much in primitive times as at present.

While Haven’s efforts to explain Girard’s thought may be more suggestive than satisfying, the portrait she paints of Girard is nonetheless a convincing one. She offers a rich and evocative account of his life, situates his work in historical context, delineates his intellectual persona through extensive conversations with friends and colleagues and, along the way, suggests that Girard represents, if not an exemplary life, at least an exemplary mind—one that, by so breezily sweeping aside so many modern assumptions, sheds a paradoxical light on the modern world.

Review: The Maternalists

Shaul Bar-Haim, The Maternalists: Psychoanalysis, Motherhood and the British Welfare State (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) ISBN 9780812253153

Katie Joice

During the last two years, we have had ample opportunity to reflect on the capacity of the state to care for its population: to warn us of imminent harm, to nurse us back to health when danger strikes, and to show compassion when the worst happens. As Shaul Bar-Haim skilfully outlines in his introduction to The Maternalists, for several generations,ever since Margaret Thatcher began to shift responsibility for the care of the vulnerable and dependent back onto the family, ‘the nanny state’ has become an epithet of right-wing scorn. Those who mourn the unravelling of the post-war settlement may be hoping that the collective suffering of the pandemic has exposed the need for a more interventionist, ‘motherly’ politics, one which fully compensates for human frailty. Bar-Haim’s study of maternally-minded psychoanalysts, and their influence on post-war social policy, is therefore a timely one, in which questions of theoretical inheritance open onto a series of urgent debates about our own historical moment.

Bar-Haim’s story begins in Budapest during the 1920s, where Sandor Ferenczi, one of Freud’s protegées, advocated a radically new style of analysis. Ferenczi was the yin to Freud’s yang, or as Jung, another of Freud’s rebellious students, might have put it, the anima to his animus. Whereas Freud practiced with cool, paternalist detachment, Ferenczi fostered affection, mutuality, and intuition in his clinical relationships. He encouraged patients to revisit the traumatic experiences of earliest childhood, and famously cradled them in his arms, claiming that there was ‘progression in regression’. By shifting the analytic focus away from the Oedipus conflict and phallocentrism towards the sensuous bond between mother and infant, Ferenczi opened up new terrain for analysts of an egalitarian, emancipatory bent. Infancy was characterised here both by vulnerability to trauma and an original psychic freedom, a halcyon period before the oppressive norms of civilised society achieved their grip. Ferenczi surrounded himself with a group of gifted young intellectuals, including Michael Balint and Geza Roheim, the founder of psychoanalytic anthropology, and later had a profound influence on the Scottish analyst Ian Suttie, who also objected to the Freudian ‘taboo on tenderness’.

The relationship between mothering and the human sciences in the twentieth century – in which Mother features as Origin Story and Causal Principle – is hugely complex, extending from the idealisation of matriarchal religion in Robert Graves’ The White Goddess to the development of a laboratory-based attachment theory. By Bar-Haim’s own admission, this book teases out one micro-history from an intricate tapestry, arguing that a set of Ferenczian legacies within inter-war psychoanalysis anticipated the specifically maternal disposition of the British welfare state.

The Maternalists’ central chapters explore the rehabilitation of the ‘primitive’ psyche and ‘primitive’ mothering, in the work of educationalist Susan Issacs, Roheim, and Suttie. Issacs challenged Piaget’s theory of developmentalism, in which the child’s psyche was equated with that of the ‘savage’. A follower of Melanie Klein, and a member of the anti-colonial movement in inter-war Bloomsbury, she proposed a synchronic model of mind, arguing that at all ages, and within all races, magical and animistic ideas exist alongside rational thought. Roheim’s work is placed in dialogue with that of Bronislaw Malinowski, who had ‘disproved’ the universalism of the Oedipus conflict in his study of the matrilineal society of the Trobiander Islands. Roheim undertook fieldwork in the Aboriginal communities of central Australia with the intention of refuting Malinowski’s claim, but changed course when he observed the psychological benefits of matriarchal culture. Aboriginal life, he concluded, was characterised by ‘indulgent mothering’, the development of a weak super-ego, and pacifism; a corrective to the ‘sadistic’ mothering of modern Europe. Similar arguments were advanced by Suttie in The Origins of Love and Hate (1935), which posited the existence of an archaic pagan community, in which the mother-child bond formed the basis of sociability. In Suttie’s account, monotheism, modernity, and the fixation with ‘progress’ were begot by the envious and destructive patriarch, embodied in Freud himself. The autocratic and bellicose paternalist state is never invoked in The Maternalists, although elisions are sometimes made between the maternal and the parental polity. It is worth noting that the psychology of the fascist patriarch was being excavated in works such as Theodor Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality well into the 1950s, and that reactionary forms of maternalism, including pro-natalist policies, were in turn associated with authoritarian governments. A post-war suspicion of toxic masculinity, as well as the exaltation of mother-love, perhaps explains the peripheral role of fathers in the case-studies of D.W.Winnicott, the theme of the book’s penultimate chapter.

The book’s argument hinges on its final section, a discussion of Michael Balint’s psychological training with British GPs in the second half of the 1950s. In this illuminating but little-known piece of post-war history, Ferenczian theory was translated into social practice. A significant number of family doctors (including many prominent figures in the Royal Society of General Practitioners) joined Balint groups in this period to deepen their understanding of the doctor-patient relationship. Balint believed that what many patients seek when they visit the GP is regression to a state of infant-like dependency. Anyone who has had the experience of their symptoms mysteriously disappearing after a visit to the local surgery will understand something of this notion, and of the concept of doctor ‘as drug.’ There is also something refreshingly queer about Bar-Haim’s description of middle-class, middle-aged, GPs shape-shifting into loving mothers. In radical contrast to the pressured, consumer-focused approach of twenty-first century medicine, Balint disputed the idea of a medically objective diagnosis, suggesting that both the description and treatment of illness should be an unhurried, inter-subjective process. This is akin to a phenomenological, rather than instrumentalist, account of disease, which blurs the boundaries between physical and psychological medicine. Bar-Haim goes on to suggest that as a section of male GPs began to display maternal capacities in the consulting room, real mothers took on greater responsibility for liaising with the state’s agents, including not only doctors, but social workers, psychiatrists, and teachers. In these various ways, the act of mothering became integrated into the smooth functioning of social democracy.

This brings us to the lived experience of mothers, which the author is careful to distinguish from the theoretical constructions of his book’s protagonists. One of his literary touchstones is historian Carolyn Steedman’s memoir of post-war childhood, Landscape for a Good Woman, in which she makes the striking claim: “I loved the state because it loved me.” For Steedman, the state compensated – with milk, orange juice, library books and free education – for what her mother could not provide. As well as underlining the huge redistribution of wealth and ensuing social mobility that took place in this period, we are reminded that a state with maternal capacities frees flesh-and-blood mothers to be imperfect, or even inadequate, which is precisely what makes welfarism a moral issue for the Right.

We return then to the broader issues raised by the book’s enfolding of inter-war psychoanalytic theory with post-war state interventions. Histories of maternalism inevitably leave political, sociological and philosophical questions in their train. Most obviously, where do we stand with regard to this aspect of our past, in an era when so many forms of ‘care’ have been shredded and privatised? What role, if any, remains for psychoanalysis, now marginalised within NHS practice? The example of Balint groups is compelling, but histories of the role played by analysts in the construction of the welfare state obscure the contribution of radical British socialists to Atlee’s sweeping post-war reforms. This latter tradition advanced an ethic of mutual care using theoretical sources quite alien to psychoanalysis. How should the state compensate for the reproductive labour of women, for the dependence engendered by dependants? Is there a future world in which mothering, and early childhood, could be a period of psychic liberation, a counterpoint to the constraints of industrial time? And finally, is the ‘maternal’ – and the forms of sustenance it offers – bound up with the messy biological and psychological experiences of womanhood, or is it a transferable, rational good?