Category: Book Reviews

Susan Lanzoni. Empathy: A History; New Haven and London: Yale University Press; 408 pages; hardback $30.00; ISBN: 9780300222685

by Sarah Chaney

A couple of years ago, I attended a colloquium on empathy at the University of Oxford. The organisers of this event were rightly concerned by the vague and varied definitions of empathy in medical research and practice and sought to remedy this. While they had found a number of clinical trials that purported to measure empathy, the introductory lecture noted, every single one of these gave a slightly different definition of what it was they were actually measuring! As Susan Lanzoni’s comprehensive history of empathy shows, this conceptual confusion around empathy is not new. Even after an explosion of interest in the term through the 1950s and 1960s, in 1979 the American social psychologist Kenneth B. Clark declared himself dismayed by the lack of “clear definition and a comprehensive theoretical approach” to the subject (p. 248).

As Lanzoni shows in this genealogy, the confusion lies to some extent in the fact that the meaning of the term has “shifted so radically that its original meaning transformed into its opposite” (p. 8). Lanzoni makes this shift clear by outlining a huge range of examples of studies in which empathy does not mean what the modern reader might expect. To take just one example of many, when the psychologist Edward Bullough found in 1908 that his subjects described coloured lights as having a particular temperament or character he called this “empathy” (p. 52). Even in the twenty-first century, many forms of empathy exist: “from emotional resonance and contagion, to cognitive appraisal and perspective taking, and to an empathic concern with another that prompts helpful intervention” (p. 252). While the book takes a chronological approach to the subject, the diversity of different meanings at play in any one period are thus made clear throughout.

Lanzoni records the first use of the term “empathy” simultaneously in English in 1908 by the psychologists James Ward and Edward Titchener, used in both cases as a translation of the German Einfühlung. Jeffrey Aronson has dated this a little earlier, finding the English word empathy in The Philosophical Review of 1895. Quibbles about the exact date aside, however, Lanzoni rightly emphasises the importance of the origins of empathy in the aesthetic Einfühlung (empathy was later translated back into German psychology as “empathie”). Empathy thus emerged from the appreciation of art and was first conceptualised as an ability to project oneself into an artwork or object; early psychological definitions also incorporated this notion of empathy as an extension or projection of the self. By the post-war period, however, empathy increasingly became viewed as a way of understanding others, a notion that was particularly prominent in the field of social work. It was this latter idea of empathy that was popularised after the Second World War.

Of course, the distinction is not so clear or neat in practice. Indeed, Lanzoni cites the German psychologist and philosopher Theodor Lipps as having suggested that Einfühlung was a way to understand the emotions of others as early as 1903, while modern neuroscientific definitions often hark back to aesthetic empathy through the links made to visual images and movement (p. 265). For ease of narrative, however, Lanzoni divides the history of empathy into nine historical stages. She begins with empathy in the arts as a way of “feeling into objects” and closes with mirror neurons as an expression of empathy in the modern neurosciences. On the way, the book takes in the experimental laboratory, art and modern dance, the psychiatric hospital, social work, psychometrics, popular depictions of empathy and the politics of social psychology. While the early chapters, on the introduction of the word, include aesthetic and psychological research across Europe, the second half of the book tends to focus more closely on the United States. This is perhaps the opposite of what one might anticipate, as the post-war era moved towards a supposedly international culture. Further explanation of the reasons for the chosen focus would thus have been helpful to the reader, or the occasional reflection on how the North American field complemented or differed from research elsewhere.

The chapters vary in their presentation: some chart changes over a period in a particular area such as social work, others focus in more detail on a specific person or theory. A good example of the former approach is chapter six, on the post-war measuring of empathy, a comprehensive account of North American efforts to test for empathy in the wake of Rosalind Dymond’s student test at Cornell University in 1948. These tests are highlighted by Lanzoni as they marked a shift in understanding of empathy from a creative enterprise to an “accurate understanding of another’s thoughts” (p. 176). In contrast, chapter 8 on the 1960s relationship between social psychology, race and politics, focuses largely on the social psychologist Kenneth B. Clark. This seems to be a particular interest of Lanzoni’s (she has also written about Clark for the Washington Post) and she sensitively weaves Clark’s concerns about the centrality of capitalist greed in White American society, and prejudice as a social disease, into his psychological research on the topic of empathy. This culminated in the publication of Clark’s Dark Ghetto in 1965, an ethology of Harlem explicitly aiming to “inform, to engender feeling, and to galvanize social action” (p. 240).

At times, the sheer amount of content means that Lanzoni veers into a rather descriptive style. Some chapters are heavy on chronological lists of contributions with less focus on how these fit into a broader picture. Chapter 3, on empathy in art and modern dance, for example, might have been edited down and combined with the previous chapter to indicate the links between experimental psychology and aesthetics in a more directed way. And while the material on Clark is undoubtedly interesting, a greater degree of contextualisation into the contemporary civil rights movement (which is merely nodded at in passing) would have been useful. There are also some significant absences. For instance, while occasional debates around the distinction between empathy, sympathy and compassion briefly surface (such as Edward Titchener’s claim that sympathy referred to fellow feeling, whereas empathy reflected an imagined but unfamiliar feeling [p. 66] ), the reader is left wondering why more attention was not paid to the interplay and conflict between these ideas.

Overall, however, Lanzoni’s book ably charts the complex changes in meaning that empathy has undergone over the last century, and convincingly argues that much of this confusion remains today. This is important, given how often empathy is invoked in a wide range of arenas in the modern world – from politics to education to health and medicine. As Lanzoni recognises, empathy is frequently emphasised as a vital human capacity, something that has the power to shape society for the better. Does it matter that we remain unable to convincingly explain what exactly it is or how it functions? Perhaps not, Lanzoni concludes, so long as we are aware of this complexity. Across all its definitions, empathy is characterised as a “technology of self”. This means that understanding its complex history can serve to increase our ability to make connections.

Sarah Chaney is a Research Fellow at Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions, on the Wellcome Trust funded ‘Living With Feeling’ project. Her current research focuses on the history of compassion in healthcare, from the late nineteenth century to the present day, and includes an exhibition to open at the Royal College of Nursing Library and Heritage Centre in December 2019. Her previous research has been in the history of psychiatry, in particular the topic of self-inflicted injury. Her monograph, Psyche on the Skin: A History of Self-Harmis published in paperback in July 2019 (first published 2017).

Elizabeth Hannon & Tim Lewens (Eds) Why we disagree about human nature. Oxford University Press, 2018. 206 pp. £30 hbk.

By Simon Jarrett

If one day a disturbingly precocious child were to ask what part you had played in the nature/ nurture war, what would you reply? Were you with the massed intellectual ranks who, since the philosopher David Hull’s ground-breaking 1986 classic ‘On Human Nature,’ have denied that there is any such thing as a common nature for all humans? Or did you join Stephen Pinker’s 2003 counter-revolution, when The Blank Slate sought to reclaim the ground for the Enlightenment, and the idea that there is something essentially the same about all humans across time, space and culture?

If you are not quite sure where you stand, or perhaps too sure where you stand, then this pleasingly eclectic collection of ten essays on human nature, and whether we can meaningfully talk about such a thing, will be of great help. Its contributors, who come from psychology, philosophy of science, social and biological anthropology, evolutionary theory, and the study of animal cognition, include human nature advocates, deniers, and sceptics. We could perhaps call the sceptics ‘so-whaters’ – they agree there may be something we can attach the label ‘human nature’ to, but query whether it really matters, or carries any explanatory weight. These people would take our (hopefully apocryphal) infant prodigy aside and say, ‘well there are some conceptual complexities here that make it quite difficult to give you a straightforward answer.’

Human nature remains, alongside consciousness, one of the great explanatory gaps, a question that permeated philosophical enquiry in antiquity, lay at the heart of Enlightenment ‘science of Man’, and now forms a central anxiety of modernity.  The over-arching problem is, in essence, this: are there traits and characteristics that are biological, and not learned or culturally acquired, which we can say form something called the nature of the human, and which not only define humans as a unified entity but also differentiate them from all other species? In which case, what on earth are they? Or: are we essentially constructed by culture, our traits and characteristics formed by experience, language, learning and social relations, and once we strip away these veneers we find no inner essence that unites us a human species, no meaningful shared oneness other than what we have made ourselves? In which case, what on earth do we mean by ‘we’?

As Hannon and Lewens’ title suggests, we all disagree about human nature and – as the final chapter warns us – are probably destined always to do so, not least because of the term’s epistemological slipperiness. However, one thing on which the contributors find consensus is that the essentialist concept of human nature – ‘that to be human is to possess a crucial “human” gene, or a distinctively “human” form of… intelligence, language, technical facility, or whatever’ (pp.2-3) – is dead. The essentialist idea was killed by Charles Darwin, because if species variation occurs across time and space then there can be nothing invariable in their form and structure, and therefore nothing that we can call a fixed, universal and unchanging ‘nature’. If humankind has adapted, evolved and varied over millions of years, and across numerous environments, what common nature can exist amongst all humans, past and present?

The death of essentialism, however, does not mean the death of the idea of a human nature. Four essays that defend the idea begin the collection, starting with a defence by Edouard Machery of his much-assailed (including in this book) ‘nomological notion’. By this Machery means identifying typicality in human beings, traits that are common to most humans, but which do not have to be universal, and do not even have to hold evolutionary significance. He includes only traits that are demonstrably biologically evolved, and excludes cultural processes, on the grounds that just because most people learn something, this does not become an essential trait of humanness. His theory falls far short of, and explicitly rejects, essentialism, but nevertheless argues that traits of groups of typical human beings, and of individual typical humans in particular life stages, constitute something we can call human nature: it is the properties that humans tend to possess as a result of evolution.

Grant Ramsey, in his contribution, calls Machery’s theory a ‘trait-bin’ account, which essentially assembles a series of typical traits and places them together into a single bin marked ‘human nature’ while assigning all other traits, cultural, environmental or whatever, to entirely separate bins. Ramsey proposes instead a ‘trait cluster’ account which, rather than assembling a collection of natural traits, captures the complex ways in which traits are related to each other, and the patterns created over life histories by their interactions. The sum of these patterns, seen as potential developmental trajectories at various stages of life, give us human nature. As Ramsey puts it: ‘trait cluster accounts hold that human nature lies not in which traits individual humans happen to have, but in the ways the traits are exhibited over human life histories’ (p.56). This is more encompassing than Machery’s account, which excludes atypical traits, but maintains that there is a nature to be derived from an exploration of all traits and their interactions.

Karola Stotz and Paul Griffiths offer a ‘developmental systems account’ which echoes Ramsey’s but argues for the adoption of the human developmental environment into an account of human nature. They use the idea of ‘niche construction’ – whereby organisms singly and collectively modify their own niches to transform natural selection pressures – to argue that there is a uniquely human developmental niche. This is the environment created for human infants comprising parental interaction, schooling and artefacts such as tool use and language. In this sense nature is culture, and humans create the selection pressures that act on future generations. Human nature is human development, environment is as important as any biological or genomic essence.

The final advocate of a specific human nature is Cecilia Heyes, who echoes Machery in believing that there are certain traits that comprise human nature, but builds into this a theory of what she calls ‘evolutionary causal essentialism’, a key element of which is ‘natural pedagogy’. This sees the teaching of human infants not as an exclusively cultural phenomenon, but as a heritable system whereby nature makes human infants receptive to teaching signals.

The reply of the sceptics to the notion of a ‘human nature’ begins with John Dupré’s ‘process perspective’, which argues that a human cannot be considered as a thing or substance (and therefore something which has a nature) but is rather a process. Humans comprise a life cycle, and are associated with different properties or traits at its different stages. In their very early stages, for example, and often in their latest stages, humans lack language. We cannot, therefore, associate humans with a fixed set of properties; they are instead a plastic process responding to changing environments, and sometimes changing those environments themselves. We could, if we like, call this process itself ‘human nature’ but such a ‘descriptive venture’ would carry little conceptual weight.

Kim Stereny’s ‘Sceptical reflections on human nature’ argues, in similar vein, that even if there is some set of traits shared by most humans – what he calls a ‘cognitive suite’ – describing these as human nature is ‘bland and uninformative’ and lacks any explanatory power. Such a descriptive account of human nature is little more than a ‘field-guide’ to our species – in which case, Serelny asks, do we need it?

Kevin Laland and Gillian Brown recommend that the concept of human nature simply be abandoned. It is, they argue, socially constructed in a number of ways. Evolutionary history is not easily separated into biological and cultural evolutionary processes, since each is dynamic and interacts with the other. Like Stotz and Griffiths they recognise the uniqueness and importance of the developmental niche in the human process, but see it as product of inseparable internal and constructive processes which cannot be incorporated into a theory of an evolved nature. More important is to build an understanding of the human condition over developmental and evolutionary timescales, in all its diversity and multiple processes.

Peter Richerson’s survey of major theorists from Darwin to Pinker rejects any form of strong human nature claim. The later theorists, he notes, all have a strong commitment to the ‘Modern Synthesis’ – a term popularised by Julian Huxley in 1942 – which, in very simple terms, seeks to combine evolution and heredity. For Richerson, the Modern Synthesis account of human nature, with its rejection of the fundamental role of cultural evolutionary processes against overwhelming evidence, has reached the end of the line.

Christina Toren weighs in with an anthropological broadside against the notion that some traits are products of nature rather than culture. Based on her own ethnographic studies, she calls for the rejection of notions of both nature and culture, and calls instead for a focus on ontogeny – the development of the human organism over its life cycle, and within its environments and social relations. Toren’s model focuses on the microhistorical processes that build each individual: ‘mind is a function of the whole person that is constituted over time in intersubjective relations with others in the environing world.’ No ‘nature’ can capture such complexity.

The collection ends with Maria Kronfelder’s elegant interrogation of the term ‘nature’, and the power relations lurking within its appropriation by intellectuals seeking to lay out a domain of study they can claim as their own. This welcome historicization of the subject begins in Greek antiquity and journeys through the Enlightenment, to the advent of heredity (which, Kronfelder notes, shifted from the adjective ‘hereditary’ to a nominal noun defining itself as a scientific field), and finally to Machery’s nomological account, where the book began. In each case the word ‘nature’ is used to denote a field-defining phenomenon in need of explanation – explanations which those using the term saw themselves as having the authority and capacity to produce. It was also used in contradistinction: to the supranatural, to nurture, to culture, and to other enemies which the ‘nature’ power claim could dismiss as irrelevant. Nature, in these claims, was ‘always what could be taken for granted… solid, authoritative’ and carrying some form of objective reality (p.202).

It falls to Kronfelder to explain why ‘we’ disagree, and will probably always disagree, about human nature. Firstly, when talking about our own nature, we fall into what she calls ‘essentialist traps’ involving normalcy and normativity, that we do not apply when more carefully describing other species. Secondly, we have traditionally tried to identify ‘what it means to be human’, which has led us to apply to human nature a description of what characterises our in-group, consequently dehumanising out-groups by placing them outside human signifiers. In this context, different human groups will always disagree about what it means to be human, and thus about human nature. Finally, we load the term ‘human nature’ with too many contradictory and incompatible meanings. Do we want it to be a description of a bundle of properties, a set of explanatory factors, or a boundary-determining classification? It can never be all three, but precisely which epistemological duty it is being asked to perform at any one time in any one context is often obfuscated. We will never agree, because we are arguing from parallel starting points that are invisible to one another.

At the heart of the human nature debate lies, since the collapse of the essentialist view, not only the issue of whether there is such a thing, but also whether such a thing is worth thinking about. If the account of human nature spreads so widely, becoming the set of genetic, epigenetic and environmental traits that we can observe in humans, then does it just become a conceptual mush, consisting of everything that humans ever do or experience? If purely descriptive, then does it lack any explanatory power, thereby rendering it conceptually worthless?  Or is there something about our nature that binds us, and is worth knowing? This is a defining issue for those who practice or study the human sciences, which after all is the study of humans from diverse perspectives. The collection is a hugely helpful trek across much of the best of the current scholarship, and an elegant framing of the key debates, for which the editors should be congratulated.

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Simon Jarrett is a visiting lecturer and honorary research fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. His monograph on the history of ‘idiocy’ will be published in 2020. With Jan Walmsley, he is co-editor of Intellectual disability in the twentieth century: transnational perspectives on people policy and practice. (Policy Press 2019). His current research is on theories of consciousness in relation to the deficient mind.

Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm. The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017; xiv + 411 pp. $96.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-226-40322-9; $32.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-226-40336-6.

by Andreas Sommer

If recent surveys of belief in magic are accurate, there is a good chance that you either hold some variant of these beliefs yourself, or that you may be puzzled by some otherwise secular-minded colleague, friend, or family member who does. Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm might not be a believer in spirits himself, but reveals toward the end of this remarkable book a significant factor in his choice of becoming a religious scholar: his grandmother Felicitas Goodman, the noted anthropologist who caused quite a stir when she openly confessed her commitments to shamanism. An expert of East Asian religions, Josephson-Storm’s previous cross-cultural studies have certainly prepared him well to tackle vexing questions regarding the Western occult. But it is perhaps especially owing to a deep respect for his heretical ancestor that The Myth of Disenchantment is marked by a refreshingly even-handed approach which neither mocks nor advocates unorthodox beliefs. Instead, Josephson-Storm makes a bold and sincere effort to come to grips with hidden continuities of magic in often surprising places, and the persistence of Western normative assertions of the disenchantment of the world as the flip-side of that puzzle.

Regarding the latter issue, the book can be considered a historical test of the actual adherence to basic naturalistic proscriptions in the humanities and human sciences. After all, as Josephson-Storm reminds us, Max Weber’s famous verdict of disenchantment is often misunderstood as motivated by a normative agenda itself. The introduction to the book formulates a fruitful principal method and rationale: to “investigate the least likely people – the very theorists of modernity as disenchantment – and show how they worked out various insights inside an occult context, in a social world overflowing with spirits and magic, and how the weirdness of that world generated so much normativity” (p. 6). While the focus of the book is on what Josephson-Storm calls the human sciences (a term which is perhaps somewhat problematically equated with the German Geisteswissenschaften, ibid.), the significance of older popular histories assuming the inherent opposition between magic and the natural sciences is also acknowledged. Among the refuting instances enlisted by the author are the familiar occult preoccupations of figureheads of the scientific revolution such as Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton, as well as more original observations on mediumistic experiments by icons of modern ‘naturalistic’ science like Marie Curie and Pierre Curie.

Chapter 1, “Enchanted (Post) Modernity”, sets the stage by taking stock of sociological findings which document the current prevalence of occult beliefs in secular Western societies. The upshot again upsets popular assumptions and categories, including the habit of using occult beliefs as a shorthand for religion, and the view that ‘occultism’ always springs from the same politically reactionary sources which have brought about what some have diagnosed as a ‘post-truth’ society: traditional Christianity continues to decline while belief in magic is on the rise, and political affiliation appears to be as poor a predictor of occultist sympathies as education. An historiographically crucial point is that suppressions of magic do not self-evidently express anti-spiritual motifs. On the contrary, once we check the concrete means by which magic has been concealed in plain sight, it turns out that more often than not it has cancelled itself out through its own competing modes. Puritan prohibitions of magic, for instance, were not due to scepticism but naked fears of devils. (Or to use a recent example, think of pro-Trump evangelists responding with protective prayers to public appeals by self-identifying witches to bring down the President through sorcery.)

The remaining nine chapters sketch continuities of magic in major thinkers since the sixteenth century, and bear out these insights and arguments by reconstructing previously understudied currents in the formation of modern Western intellectual traditions. Drawing on personal correspondence and overlooked passages in often canonical writings of architects of ‘naturalistic’ modernity, Josephson-Storm re-enchants parts of critical theory and Freudian psychoanalysis in due course. He convincingly argues that to understand the origins of modern disciplines ranging from religious studies and sociology to linguistics and anthropology, we need to acknowledge that foundational scholars such as Max Müller, Ferdinand de Saussure, Edward B. Tylor, James Frazer and Max Weber systematically grappled with revivals of magical traditions and large-scale occult movements such as spiritualism and Indian Theosophy. This they did not as prophets of ‘scientific materialism’, but often on the basis of sustained reflection on the kinship of magic with science, and a genuine reverence for mystical and pantheistic traditions.

Josephson-Storm’s ingenious method – to search for magic in the most unlikely places – is also brought to fruition in his reconstruction of parapsychological studies by members of the Vienna Circle of logical positivism. In apparent contradiction with standard portrayals of Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap and Hans Hahn as undertakers of metaphysics in science, they in fact shared a sustained curiosity in medium-istic and poltergeist-related phenomena. By no means the first to reveal this perplexing side of the Vienna Circle’s history, Josephson-Storm provides the most comprehensive account currently available in English.

Regarding the links between occultism and politics, Josephson-Storm in no way downplays the occult entanglements of Nazism. By recovering the significance of magic and mysticism in a wide range of left-leaning and Jewish thinkers, however, he puts another hefty nail in the coffin of outdated but still fashionable notions of ‘occultism’ as a necessary condition of fascism. Not least, by reminding us of the racist origins of anthropological theories which explained widespread interest in spiritualism and other ‘vulgar’ forms of magic as morbid relapses into ‘savage’ evolutionary stages, the author confronts us with some previously obscured unsavoury aspects of the suppression of magic.

In the face of the vast materials covered, some problems of detail might be inevitable. While I was glad to see the philosopher Carl du Prel being rescued from oblivion, I would disagree with Josephson-Storm’s assumption that The Philosophy of Mysticism, or indeed any of his works, were actually concerned with mysticism in the commonly accepted meaning of the term. Du Prel was not really interested in the unio mystica as a defining feature of mystical experience, and his rather loose deployment of Mystik as a synonym for spiritualism, occultism, and what would later be known as parapsychology, provoked criticisms even from some of his supporters. Du Prel’s explicit goal was to enlist supposed transcendental functions of the mind such as telepathy and clairvoyance for his model of the self, which was supposed to guarantee personal survival as a precondition for spiritualism. The statement that “philosophers and theologians like Karl Joel and Otto Pfleiderer followed du Prel in discussing the union of mysticism and philosophical thought” (p. 191) therefore needs to be qualified, as neither Joel nor Pfleiderer were known to have maintained sympathies for investigations of occult phenomena, let alone for spiritualism. A closer look at oppositions to spiritualism could have introduced an additional layer of analysis and a more vivid illustration of the important argument that the apparent decline of magic was often a result of the suppression of its ‘vulgar’ forms by protagonists adhering to ‘higher’ notions such as mysticism proper.

A related issue that Josephson-Storm touches upon but which also may have deserved further discussion is the conceptual and pragmatic ambivalence of modern continuities of Renaissance natural magic like telepathy. After all, while spiritualist authors like du Prel marshalled telepathy as supposed evidence for the mind’s dual citizenship in a co-existing physical and spirit world, materialist and positivist psychical researchers like Charles Richet, Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, and Julian Ochorowicz rejected spiritualism on the basis of the view that its phenomena could be explained by telepathy, clairvoyance and telekinesis of the living. Moreover, they doubted that these psychic phenomena had inherently spiritual implications at all.

Josephson-Storm is to be commended for his reconstruction of Sigmund Freud’s growing belief in telepathy, and for trying to make sense of his reading of du Prel. Yet while it is technically correct to state that, in embracing telepathy, du Prel and Freud “shared more than the classical narrative would admit” (p. 181), their juxtaposition again misses an opportunity to illustrate that telepathy was not always interpreted as an inherently spiritual let alone ‘magical’ phenomenon. Josephson-Storm concedes that “it seems unlikely Freud ever came to believe in spirits” (p. 203), but I would also highly doubt that Freud seriously considered non-physicalist interpretations of telepathy that imbued it with spiritual meaning. Similar reservations apply to remarks about the assumed openness to belief in spirits by members of the Vienna Circle (p. 258, but see the qualification on p. 268), whose interpretation of the weird phenomena some of them came to believe in were, I think, dictated by sentiments akin to Theodor Adorno’s notion of spiritualism as the supposed ‘metaphysics of the dunces’. Moreover, while William James is occasionally mentioned, a short discussion of James’s experiments with various mediums throughout his career could have further illustrated the point that even psychical researchers sympathetic to spiritualism struggled to interpret its reported phenomena as evidence of the ‘spirit hypothesis’.

And here I have to admit I found the omission of psychology before Freud and Jung unfortunate. James is cited as a scholar of religion, but he was also the instigator of the American psychological profession, who also happened to be a psychical researcher. Together with another ‘professionalizer’ of psychology, Théodore Flournoy in Switzerland, James was heavily indebted to the inventor of the term telepathy, Frederic W. H. Myers. The latter doesn’t appear in the book at all, while Flournoy is mentioned in passing only in regard to Ferdinand de Saussure’s involvement in Flournoy’s psychological studies of mediumistic trance productions. Moreover, the dismissal of both spiritualism and psychical research by Wilhelm Wundt as the ‘father’ of professionalized psychology in Germany could have nicely illustrated a psychological ‘standard mode’ in the war against magic discussed in Josephson-Storm’s treatment of Tylor and Frazer: like other border-guards of professionalized psychology, Wundt relied on these anthropological frameworks to discredit uncritical spiritualism along with serious attempts to test and interpret its alleged phenomena. Moreover, Wundt’s anti-occultist polemics, in light of his assertions that his own psychological project was indebted to a quasi-mystical experience as well as the writings of mystics like Jakob Böhme, is another important example that would have served to support a main thesis of the book.

An appreciation of the significance of the occult during psychology’s professionalization might also have prevented the problematic statement that “for all the polemical attacks against superstition and magic, disenchanting efforts were only sporadically enforced within the disciplines” (p. 16). The ‘psychology of paranormal belief’, which I would describe as an industry with the sole intent of policing metaphysical deviance, is a direct outgrowth of polemical strategies by psychologists like Wundt and Joseph Jastrow. Historical contexts and debunkers’ own metaphysical commitments may have changed drastically, but orthodox psychology’s axiomatic dismissals of belief in magic and spirits still serve to shield the profession’s public image from ongoing associations with the occult in marginalized disciplines such as parapsychology.

Such quibbles aside, in my view The Myth of Disenchantment still stands head and shoulders above recent historical monographs on the modern Western occult. With its focus on continuities of magic in unexpected places, and demonstrations of how enchantment has often undermined itself through competing modes, a major distinguishing feature of the study is a complete lack of timidity, delving as it does straight into the heart of fiercely contested issues. Drawing on an impressive wealth of primary sources in various languages, Josephson-Storm shows a sure instinct for hidden treasures, and recovers significant associations of canonical figures with important, but now obscure, actors and ideas. Not all of his insights are fully unpacked, but the overall level of rigour and balance displayed by Josephson-Storm is so rare that I just might try my luck at sorcery, if that’s what it takes to make him continue this line of research.

Andreas Sommer is an independent scholar working on the history of the sciences and their cross-links with magic. His Wellcome Trust-funded doctoral thesis (UCL, 2013) reconstructed the formation of modern psychology in response to psychical research in Europe and the US, and won a Young Scholar Award from the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. He held research posts at Cambridge University and has published various journal articles and chapters in edited books. He is currently working on a monograph expanding his earlier findings while running Forbidden Histories, a website distilling academic work in the history of science and magic to a broad, educated audience.

Steve Fuller. Post-Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game; New York: Anthem Press; 218 pages; paperback $39.95; ISBN: 978-1-78308-694-8

by Steve Baxi

A consistent problem in the journalistic discourse on post-truth is the confusion between the recent phenomenon of post-truth and some historically justifiable, apolitical, entirely objective Truth – the latter having been, on some level, eclipsed by the former. Indeed, this is precisely how the Oxford English Dictionary understands post-truth, and thus the focus in mainstream media outlets and contemporary studies of truth have focused on the contentions between Truth and post-truth. However, this understanding misses the relationships of power and conditions of possibility for knowledge with respect to truth – power relations and conditions we can claim to value in research fields that place the pursuit of truth over the recent, overblown idea of Truth.

In the face of academic experts, Brexit, and social media, Steve Fuller argues that post-truth is “a deep feature of at least Western intellectual life, bringing together issues of politics, science and judgement in ways which established authorities have traditionally wished to be separate” (2018, 6). Fuller’s Post-Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game attempts to provide a set of case studies of post-truth in academia, as well as in contemporary political movements, to establish the historical character of post-truth, or what he calls a post-truth history of post-truth.

The book is divided into seven chapters, each examining Fuller’s own previously developed concepts and social epistemological stances on expertise, philosophy, sociology, and science and technology studies. Fuller especially draws on Vilfredo Pareto’s distinction between “lions” and “foxes” to help set up the tensions in his case studies. Where the lions play by the rules of the game, the foxes attempt to change the rules, but do so such that the lions believe themselves to be following the very same rules they have always followed. Fuller’s approach here is loosely genealogical, perhaps even Foucauldian, as he attempts to, at least initially, present us with a history of the present.

While Fuller coins various concepts, the most important appears to be modal power which he defines as “control over what can be true or false, which is reflected in institutions about what is possible, impossible, necessary and contingent” (2018, 188). Modal power mirrors the historical discourse on systems of exclusion, the most powerful of which is the will to know, here reconfigured to be part of the military-industrial will to know (more on this below). This form of power is intended not only to explain how the moves of the “lions” and “foxes” become possible, but also how the academic fields they inhabit are growing, changing, accepting or now rejecting certain paradigms of truth.

While commentary on post-truth’s relationship to Brexit and the 2016 US presidential election has largely understood post-truth as a rejection of the facts, Fuller provides a more complex account. He asks: if these events are the outcome of a certain discourse of rules, where were these rules crafted? How might we even think of Plato, in one of Fuller’s most provocative statements, as the original post-truth philosopher? And how does this change our view of the present? Fuller especially analyses Brexit via his long-standing anti-expertise approach to social epistemology. This allows him to read Brexit as a phenomenon incited by parliamentary elites distinct from the ethical values and strategies identified in wider public opinion. Fuller concludes from this a resurgence of a “general will” in democracy. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s general will represents a sense of shared identity: to challenge me is not merely to challenge my opinion, but the very identity I share in, and the traditions I identify with. In the case of Brexit, this is how people come to rally around nationhood. In the case of academia, it is seen in the hard-lined alignment with unchanging paradigms of thought, where the act of placing a footnote is a way of counting yourself amongst a group with a political identity. Fuller asks where this growing predilection for academic politics came from. He thus dovetails into a genealogy of academic philosophy

Academics, Fuller argues, while claiming to be in pursuit of truth, or what Michel Foucault (borrowing from Nietzsche) would call savoir, have in fact, since Plato, been entrenched in what is only now referred to as Post-Truth.[ref] Foucault, Michel. “Appendix: The Discourse on Language.” The Archaeology of Knowledge, 220. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage Books, 2010. 215-237.[/ref] This claim is tried into Fuller’s concept of modal power, which is an account of how, collectively, any discourse becomes a discourse in the first place; post-truth is then an argument about the boundaries of discourse. Academic fields such as sociology are important because they are acutely aware of what counts as possible in terms of boundary-pushing. Where sociology had historically embraced the post-truth condition, with its analysis of how subjectivity evolves within a particular historical condition, its contemporary pursuit of a style of knowledge-making modelled on the rigid sciences fails to adequately challenge post-truth.

If post-truth and truth are separated by who decides to change the rules of the game or who follows them, sociology ought to be at some advantage. And yet sociology – and academia more widely – seems unable to confront these issues. To explain this, Fuller coins the term “military-industrial will to knowledge,” which exemplifies the pursuit of knowledge as “effective” or useful. Fuller diagnoses academia as frequently degenerating into conversations about the merits of certain principles without first identifying itself as part of the institutions of modal power.  Here, we see how goal-oriented publications, writing, or knowledge-development relates to whether one follows the rules, or changes them: i.e. whether one is a “fox” or a “lion.” A military-industrial will to know empowers certain paradigms of thought, and thus the lions are those safeguarding an unyielding sense of academic identity; the foxes are those who would challenge these norms, but the “publish or die” state of academic positions make such self-aware shifts near impossible.

Even living outside these academic norms will not necessarily solve the problem. Fuller develops the concept of ‘protscience’ to describe how individuals come to be accustomed to understandings of science. Even deviations from institutional norms still produce their own kinds of norms which are often just as dangerous and which play into the post-truth condition. Protscience most directly threads Fuller’s discussion of Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn into his more immediate interest in academia. By pulling in the philosophy of science, we begin to see how philosophy and science are not so distinct. If we take post-truth to be about how the rules change, science as the understanding of rules, and politics as their possibility via modal power, then these three “vocations” ultimately coincide with one another. Here, Fuller delivers on the fundamental premise of this text: that post-truth represents a collapse of traditional academic spheres into each other. To do philosophy is to do science; to do science is to do politics; to do politics is to do philosophy.

In general, Post-Truth is an insightful, thorough text which examines issues of truth with more nuance and clarity than most other recent works in the field. The book succeeds most overtly in its ability to present a case for why post-truth studies need be done. To understand the contemporary world, the promises of past theories, and where things go wrong in political controversy, we have to understand how post-truth in its contemporary condition unites all fields of inquiry. In this way, Fuller seems to owe much to John Dewey’s and Arthur Danto’s arguments that a solution to one problem implies a solution to all problems.[ref] Danto, Arthur C. Nietzsche as Philosopher, 24. New York: Columbia University Press, 1965 [/ref]

However, what Post-Truth lacks is a convincing case for its own need to present concepts and coinages that might go without a label. Despite a deep reading of the text, and research on Fuller’s past work, I am still unclear on why modal power is somehow different, necessary or even more precise a quantifier of power. In general, the post-Foucauldian world of academia, and certainly the audience that Fuller wishes to speak to, will be keenly aware of what we mean when we discuss the conditions for the possibility of certain concepts. Power on its own dictates an all-inclusive concept that unities the various fields that Fuller discusses, in a way that seems not to gain much by adding ‘modal’ to it.

Similarly, Fuller frequently draws on his own body of work, which wrestles with these themes of anti-institutionalism, elitism, and gate keeping.[ref]This is evident most clearly in Fuller, Steve. Social Epistemology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. And Fuller, Steve. The Intellectual. Cambridge, UK: Icon, 2005.[/ref] But he does so without providing us any reason to see him as one of us, outside the world of academics as we wage a war of foxes and lions on the ground. Military Industrial Will to Knowledge has quite a ring to it, as does modal power, but these concepts sometimes sound more like the academic stiffness Fuller claims to detest, and less like the tools with which we might interrogate the various values of our post-truth society.

Steve Baxi is a Graduate Student and Teaching Assistant in the Ethics and Applied Philosophy Department at the University of the North Carolina at Charlotte. He works across philosophical traditions, with a particular interest in Nietzsche and Foucault. He is currently writing on the politics of truth, and social media ethics.

by Hannah Proctor

Oisín Wall, The British Anti-psychiatrists: From Institutional Psychotherapy to the Counter-Culture, 1960-1971 (London: Routledge, 2018)

The Spring 1972 issue of the short-lived self-published journal Red Rat: The Journal of Abnormal Psychologists includes a review by Ruth Davies of Ken Loach’s film Family Life alongside the Yugoslavian director Dušan Makavejev’s W.R., Mysteries of the Organism.[ref]Ruth Davies, ‘Film Review: W.R. + Family Life’, Red Rat: The Journal of Abnormal Psychologists, 4, Spring 1972, pp. 28-29, p. 28. Issues of Red Rat are held in the archives at MayDay Rooms, London.[/ref] According to the reviewer both films were then showing simultaneously at the Academy Cinema on Oxford Street in London and in ‘both cases, the theme of the film is the work of a radical psychologist whose ideas have helped lay the foundations of alternative psychology; in the case of Family Life, the work of RD Laing, and in Mysteries of the Organism, Wilhelm Reich.’ Davies outlines the different approaches to psychology presented in the films: ‘Family Life is an account of the genesis of schizophrenia firmly in the Laing tradition,’ following a young woman whose diagnosis with schizophrenia is presented as deriving from her family situation, while W.R., Mysteries of the Organism combines documentary footage shot in America (interviewing people at Wilhelm Reich’s infamous Organon laboratory and following various artists around New York) with a heavily stylised narrative about sexual revolutionaries in Belgrade encountering a dashing Soviet figure skater who embodies Communism in its repressive and sexually repressed form. Though Davies is primarily concerned with the content of these two films, I was struck by how their wildly contrasting formal qualities–Loach’s drab naturalism (people wearing beige clothes drinking beige cups of tea in beige institutional rooms) versus Makavejev’s audacious experimentalism (people tearing off lurid clothes knocking down the walls of their bohemian rooms)–resembles a contrast at the heart of Oisín Wall’s new book, The British Anti-psychiatrists: From Institutional Psychotherapy to the Counter-Culture, 1960-1971. Wall demonstrates that British anti-psychiatry in the period immediately preceding the release of these films in Britain in 1971 was connected to the staid ‘square’ world of professional medicine, as well as being hugely influential within the ‘hip’ counter-culture, involving ‘collusions and collaborations between the long-haired kaftan wearing radicals who inhabit the 1960s of the contemporary popular imagination and people who, at another time, would have been the epitome of bourgeoisie [sic] stability’ (p. 2). As such, Wall’s narrative shuttles between beige institutional spaces and anarchic psychedelic communes, sees middle-aged doctors living alongside young hippies, and describes unlikely convergences of medical, spiritual, philosophical, and political discourses.

One of the most persuasive arguments Wall advances in The British Anti-Psychiatrists, and the book’s main intervention, is an insistence on the importance of acknowledging continuities and connections between the theories, practices and communities of the mainstream ‘psy’ disciplines and those of anti-psychiatry. As Wall explains, RD Laing arrived in London from Glasgow in 1956 with the intention of training as a psychoanalyst. Laing and Aaron Esterton’s work with people diagnosed with schizophrenia that forms the basis of Sanity, Madness and the Family (1964) was undertaken while Laing was involved with the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. Laing began his analysis with Charles Rycroft, supervised by DW Winnicott and Marion Milner (prominent figures in the ‘Independent Group’ of British psychoanalysts), who were both subsequently listed in the training programme of the Philadelphia Association. Wall observes in a footnote that Winnicott invited Laing to deliver a paper at the British Psychoanalytic Association in 1966, of which Winnicott was then the president, and ‘practically begged’ Laing to join as a member (p. 181). Wall claims that even at the height of their counter-cultural notoriety when they were most vocal in their critiques of the medical establishment and of professional hierarchies, the British anti-psychiatrists continued to invoke their psychiatric credentials to gain legitimacy in certain contexts: ‘the anti-psychiatrists were not averse to using the authority of their professional status to prove a point or advance a position’ (p. 91).

A contextual chapter also places the radical therapeutic communities associated with anti-psychiatry in historical perspective, discussing their antecedents in mainstream psychiatry. Wall describes the therapeutic communities established at Northfields and Mill Hill during the Second World War and demonstrates that many principles that would go on to be central to anti-psychiatry–including an emphasis on the therapeutic benefits of group dynamics that challenged the centrality of the doctor-patient relationship–were commonplace in psychiatry by the 1950s (Wall mentions the example of a 1953 World Health Organisation report on The Community Mental Hospital, for instance). He also makes clear not only that critiques of traditional asylums were already being voiced by the time anti-psychiatry emerged but that mental hospital reform was well underway: ‘the Anti-Psychiatric movement’s antipathy to the hospital was well rooted in established psychiatric practrices and discourses’ (p. 50). Though Wall does still assert that it would be ‘naïve to suggest’ that anti-psychiatry’s ‘widespread cultural influence’ was completely unrelated to the eventual ‘deinstitutionalisation of the British asylums in the 1980s and 1990s’ (p. 8).

Although Wall challenges the novelty of the two most well-known British anti-psychiartic spaces, Villa 21 and Kingsley Hall, he nonetheless concludes that both ‘went farther’ than the therapeutic communities that preceded them ‘in the informality of staff-patient relationships, the democratic arrangement of the community and the de-stigmatization of mental illness’ (p. 78). Wall’s account of David Cooper’s experiments at Villa 21, a community established at Shenley Hospital in the early 1960s, is particularly illuminating, including perspectives from interviews conducted with two former patients, one of whom was much more cynical in his reflections than the other, indicating that the bombastic theoretical pronouncements made by British anti-psychiatrists in their best-selling published work often played out ambiguously in practice: ‘I don’t think anyone really understood why we were there or what we were trying to achieve, or what it was meant to achieve by us being there’ (p. 66).

Kingsley Hall in East London was the most infamous anti-psychiatric space, renowned for its raucous LSD-fuelled parties as much as for its innovative therapeutic methods. Wall emphasises the American psychiatrist Joe Berke’s role in providing links with the kinds of counter-cultural figures conventionally associated with the building, but he points out that visits from celebrities, artists, and hip international radical psychiatrists like Franco Basaglia and Félix Guattari were combined with those from ‘the world of ‘square’ psychiatry’ (p. 74). He also discusses tensions that emerged within the community that would have lasting implications for anti-psychiatry, particularly between Laing and Esterton; the former more anarchic and experimental, the latter more interested in retaining some conventional medical techniques and boundaries. Laing allegedly carried a Lenin book under his arm, while Esterton read Stalin.

Wall not only discusses anti-psychiatry’s psychiatric roots but also traces the ways it eventually grew entangled with the counter-culture, through a consideration of anti-psychiatrists’ links with Alexander Trocchi’s Project Sigma, their organisation of the Dialectics of Liberation Congress at the Roundhouse in London in 1967, and their involvement in establishing the Anti-University. As in other sections of the book, he highlights the forms of power still at play in these ostensibly non-hierarchical and informal networks of interpersonal relationships. Wall is at pains to show that there’s something counter-intuitive about the place these bourgeois medical professionals came to occupy among trendy young radicals, but also demonstrates how their ideas in this period of counter-cultural engagement broadened out from a critique of the psychiatric hospital to one of society at large, emphasising the numerous oppressive institutions of which society was comprised: ‘anti-psychiatry prescribed an apparently liberatory programme that demanded social, and not only psychiatric, change. This change, they argued, should be based on a fundamental reorganization of the interpersonal relations that bind society together’ (p. 79). 

Overall, The British Anti-Psychiatrists is more interested in concrete contexts than abstract concepts, in practices more than theories (or at least in how theory was practically instantiated), and the book is more interesting for that focus. The closing chapters venture into more theoretical territory, however, containing discussions of Laing’s and Cooper’s key concepts and published works. Wall briefly outlines the influence of Sartrean existentialism on Laing and Cooper; the notion that ‘madness’ can be understood as resulting from discrepancies between a person’s individual existential reality and the social reality they inhabit.[ref]Despite Wall’s introductory statements bewailing the absence of women from the British anti-psychiatry movement (p. 16), he nonetheless seems not to have reflected on the implications of using male pronouns to refer to all people in some of these later sections.[/ref] He is clear to distinguish anti-psychiatric theory from caricatures of it, asserting that certain ideas commonly associated with Laing and Cooper, particularly a romantic characterisation of madness as a form of ‘break through’, were articulated by them only rarely. He also usefully contextualises their discussions of psychic ‘liberation’ in relation to contemporaneous discourses (Third World Liberation, on the one hand, and legacies of the Second World War, on the other). The book’s final chapter on theories of the family satisfyingly loops back from the counter-culture to reiterate the book’s core argument that the anti-psychiatrists’ ‘cultural revolutionary rhetoric emerged directly out of mainstream psychiatric discourse’ (p. 143).

I found myself occasionally infuriated by the vagueness of some of the ideas presented in the book, particularly Cooper’s and Laing’s insistence on the ‘necessity of mediating between the micro-social and the macro-political’ (p. 103), but having read their speeches from the Dialectics of Liberation Congress, I’m aware that this says more about my frustrations with Laing’s and Cooper’s ideas than it does about Wall’s glosses of them, though his impeccably even-handed tone is a little unrelenting for my tastes. Reading the book I found myself longing for smatterings of archness, humour, poeticism or polemic.

Again, these objections to the style of The British Anti-Psychiatrists are not really faults it would be fair to level at Wall individually or at this book in particular, but stem from more general frustrations about the limitations implicitly imposed by established conventions of genre and discipline (which are in turn connected to the demands and expectations of academic institutions and publishers), constraints I also feel acutely aware of when I write. Yet these frustrations seem worth thinking through when the historical material being presented is politically radical, formerly inventive or critical of existing structures. I might find some of Laing’s and Cooper’s arguments less persuasive than Wall seems to, but the sweeping analyses, rhetorical bombast and literary flourishes that characterise their publications couldn’t be further from the polite timidity of tone so pervasive in current academic history writing. Unlike in the main body of the text, The British Anti-Psychiatrist’s preface–in which Wall situates his project in dialogue with political struggles today, relates it to his own political commitments and talks about first encountering Laing’s enigmatic literary work Knots (1970) as a teenager–does significantly deviate from the unofficially mandated scholarly mode, giving a glimpse of themes and concerns which guided the book’s composition but remain latent or muffled in its final form. If, as Wall claims, ‘the issues that drove the radicalism of the 1960s are still very much alive and kicking’ (p. x) and concern for these issues partially motivated him to write the book in first place, would it not be possible to write this history in such a way that made the contemporary urgency of those issues manifest?

Aside from these slightly churlish or at least tangential reservations about form and style, I would also love to have read more about the two communities that succeeded Kingsley Hall: the Archway Community and Sid’s Place, the former of which is the subject of Peter Robinson’s extraordinarily intimate 1972 documentary Asylum. Wall only mentions these spaces briefly, which makes it difficult to make full sense of his claim that they represented a ‘significant shift’ in their move away from ‘politics and counter-cultural fervour’ (p. 76). I wondered if there might not be ways to think about those experiments laterally, in relation to the flourishing of squatting and communal living experiments in London at that time, which could frame them as differently rather than simply less political. Luke Fowler’s Turner Prize nominated 2011 film All Divided Selves, though focused on Laing, gestures towards such connections through its inclusion of footage relating to squats, activist-run Day Centres and the radical group COPE (Community Organisation for Psychiatric Emergencies[ref]For a brief discussion of COPE (which underwent several name changes) see, Nick Crossley, Contesting Psychiatry: Social Movements in Mental Health (London: Routledge, 2006) pp. 172-173. [/ref]). This lingering question links to a reservation I had with Wall’s conclusion that by the early 1970s (when Laing went off to meditate in Ceylon and Cooper sought out militancy in Argentina) anti-psychiatric ideas had lost their significance (p. 177). Although in his introduction he claims that anti-psychiatry ‘paved the way for the birth of the Service User’s Movement’ (p. 8), I would make a stronger case than this book does that the trenchant critiques of mainstream psychiatric diagnoses and treatments articulated by people active in the Women’s Liberation Movement and Gay Liberation Movement and the proliferation of self-organised non-professional therapy groups, not to mention the emergence of the psychiatric survivors movement and radical groups of psychiatrists critical of the medical establishment (like those involved with the journal Red Rat), indicate the influence and extension of anti-psychiatric ideas well into the 1970s. While I think Wall is right to insist on the specificities of the British anti-psychiatrists’ approach, contra much of the existing scholarship on anti-psychiatry which often places them alongside contemporaneous American, French, German or Italian figures and movements (p. 21), there is also something about the extent of the British anti-psychiatrists’ fame and the wide and diffuse percolation of their ideas that undermines this approach, as Wall notes: ‘it is impossible to quantify the influence’ (p. 8).

One of Peter Sedgwick’s main intentions in his anti-anti-psychiatry diatribe Psycho Politics (1982) was to distinguish Laing’s actual theories and practices from caricatured versions of them in popular circulation (his ire was often not primarily directed at Laing himself but at those on the left who mistook Laing for a Marxist), but I would contend that caricatured, over-simplified, wishfully politicised or deliberately partial readings of Laing’s work also form part of the history and legacy of anti-psychiatry in Britain.[ref]I wrote about Peter Sedgwick’s work on Laing at length here: https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/lost-minds. [/ref] Sedgwick may not have approved either way, but Laing’s work inspired activists regardless of Laing’s own political evasiveness and increasing spiritualism. The fact that some people may have misread Laing or chosen to discard aspects of his work does little to undermine the things they were inspired to do as a result. The unquantifiable influence of anti-psychiatry that Wall identifies also had a historical reality, which, though its elusiveness by definition poses difficulties for the historian, it nonetheless seems worth attempting to capture.

The archival material of TV interviews and documentaries in Luke Fowler’s All Divided Selves is interspersed with 16mm footage shot by the filmmaker – a glimpse of blue sky streaked with clouds, long grass in sunlight brushing against a wire fence, sheep grazing placidly in a bracken-filled field, murky landscapes seemingly shot at dusk. The connection of these images to the film’s content is oblique, but their presence participates in conjuring an atmosphere that seems appropriate to the psychic states anti-psychiatry explored, just as in W.R., Mysteries of the Organism the orangey kaleidoscopic opening shots of sexual abandon helped convey the Reichian pronouncements that accompany them through a voiceover. Historians are not artists and Laing’s Sonnets (1979) serve as a reminder that venturing beyond one’s discipline to embrace formal experimentation might not always be a particularly good idea, but perhaps historians of radicalism interested in producing radical modes of history writing appropriate to their subjects can still learn something from other genres or media when thinking about how to present radical pasts in ways that might challenge or inspire people in the oppressive present.

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Hannah Proctor is a postdoctoral fellow affiliated with the ICI Berlin. She’s in the process of finishing her first monograph Psychologies in Revolution: Alexander Luria, Soviet Subjectivities and Cultural History and is embarking on a second book project on the psychic aftermaths of left-wing political movements. She is a member of the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy.

by Anaïs Van Ertvelde

Claire L. Shaw. Deaf in the USSR: Marginality, Community and Soviet Identity, 1917-1991; Ithaca: Cornell University Press; 310 pages; hardback $49.95; ISBN: 1501713663

In a picture taken during the 1933 May Day Parade in Moscow, we witness a procession of young athletes with firm bodies walking towards the Red Square. Dressed in a uniform of sporty blouses and practical shorts, the athletes are on their way to the Lenin Mausoleum, where they can salute the USSR’s top leaders. It’s a display seen a hundred times over – one that historians in training study in a first year course, or the general public has seen in any given documentary on life in the USSR. It would be a wholly unremarkable picture, if it were not for one detail. The first column of male and female athletes carries a banner which reads ‘glukhonemye’ or ‘deaf-mutes’. ‘With their cheerful appearance, the deaf-mutes testified to their readiness to fight alongside the working class of the USSR for the general line of the party and its leader, comrade Stalin’ the then magazine for deaf-mutes Zhizn glukhonemykh wrote about the event. Deaf people seemed intent on participating in Soviet life. They dedicated themselves to overcoming the obstacles to their inclusion into the Soviet project in general and the industrial workforce in particular. For it was the Soviet project, many leading figures in the burgeoning deaf community felt, that gave them the opportunities to emancipate themselves. No longer were they the dependent, disabled people they had been under the tsarist regime – now they could become valuable members of the working class.

However much the deaf athletes, or the editors of Zhizn glukhonemykh, subscribed to a narrative of radical inclusion, or framed perfecting the deaf masses as a Soviet aim pur sang, they were also confronted with exclusion. In everyday life not everyone was equally capable of realizing the utopian rhetoric of overcoming deafness. The deaf people on the May Day Parade picture marched alongside their hearing comrades but also distinguished themselves by carrying a banner proclaiming their deaf-muteness. This was illustrative of the separate institutions that helped deaf soviet citizens develop a distinguished communal identity, but also at times kept them at a substantial distance from the hearing world.

It is precisely these kinds of tensions between the deaf identity project and the Soviet identity project, between inclusion and exclusion, sameness and difference, which lies at the heart of Claire Shaw’s Deaf in the USSR: Marginality, Community and Soviet Identity. Shaw writes a history of deafness in the USSR from the February Revolution of 1917, to the collapse of the USSR in 1991, while situating deafness in the broader programme of Soviet selfhood. She examines the different Soviet conceptions of deafness throughout the period as influenced by factors ranging from self-advocacy, science, defectology, schooling and technology; to institutionalization, ideology and professionalization. To this end, Shaw draws on deaf journalism, films and literature produced by deaf and hearing people alike, as well as personal memoires. The main body of her source material hails from the institutional archive of VOG, an acronym that covered the different names that the Russian Society of the Deaf bore throughout the period under scrutiny. According to Shaw, VOG offers a lens through which we can gain an understanding of what it meant to be deaf that is both broad and in-depth. The society was involved with activities concerning housing, education, sign language, literacy, labour placement, cultural work, and social services, and was, as Shaw notes early on, a locus for ‘both Soviet governance and grassroots activism and community building.’ By the end of the 19070s it was estimated that more than 98% of Russian deaf people were members of VOG, although the core of its operations were directed from Moscow and to a lesser extent St. Petersburg. Inevitably, and with some exceptions, much of Shaw’s focus is on these cities.

The first chapter traces the foundation of VOG in 1926 after a period of reconceptualising deafness in reaction to the tsarist period and in exchange with the new Soviet ideas. Deaf people drew upon models developed by  women and ethnic minorities to turn their differences into a path towards Sovietness while simultaneously insisting that ‘the affairs of the deaf-mutes are their own.’ Chapter two brings us to the 1930s when VOG becomes an organization of mass politics and deaf people try to write themselves into the Stalinist transformative narrative. At the same time, fears about those deaf people who could not live up to the ideal spread within the deaf organization. Chapter three examines the break in deaf history that was the Great Patriotic War. Disabled war veterans raised the overall status of people with disabilities and the postwar state infrastructure was rebuilt with an emphasis on welfare. Both trends rendered VOG a stronger and more centrally controlled organization. They also raised the existing tensions in the deaf community between striving for autonomy and being ‘passive’ recipients of expertise and care services. Chapter four zooms in on the Golden Age of deafness during the 1950s and 1960s in which deaf cultural institutions and educational efforts flourished. Deaf people came close to a functional hybrid deaf/Soviet identity that was also advertised to the world at large. Chapter five takes a detour to follow up on a nationwide debate about deaf criminality and lingering fears concerning deafness, femaleness, marginality, and otherness., while chapter six tracks the downfall of the deaf cultural community in the Brzehnev era: deaf models of selfhood gave way to curative and technological visions. Finally, an epilogue outlines with broad strokes the evolutions deafness underwent after the collapse of Soviet Union.

Deaf in the USSR is often at its most compelling when it grapples with the category of deafness itself. Many of our conceptions of what disability and deafness actually are have roots in 20^th century disability and Deaf activism, and scholarship from the UK and the US. These conceptions bear specific political and historical connotations that are not self-evidently transferable to the context of Soviet Russia. Proponents of global disability studies have been rewriting this Anglo-American conceptual framework of disability to suit local contexts for quite some time now, but what place the former ‘Soviet world’ is to be assigned within global disability studies is still quite unclear. Few authors have tried their hand at the endeavour (See, for instance, the work of Michael Rembis & Natalia Pamuła [in Polish]).

Shaw employs her national case study to elaborate on specific Soviet understandings of deafness. A social interpretation of deafness, for example, was prevalent in the USSR decades before disability activists in the UK and the US formulated the social model of disability. Moreover, Shaw does so without falling into the trap of completely disconnecting the history of the USSR from international developments. After all, the social model of disability, as developed in the UK in the 1970s, was inspired by Marxism, while early Soviet conceptions of deafness in turn were influenced by 19^th century conceptions of deafness hailing from German and French deaf education.

‘Could a defective body ever embody the Soviet ideal?’ is the question that returns throughout Deaf in the USSR. It is used by Shaw as a window onto the moulding of the Soviet self and, more importantly, onto the limitations of this moulding. While Shaw sporadically touches upon the subject of how deafness was related to other defective bodies, the topic is never fully addressed. Shaw emphasizes how work and employment were essential to overcoming deafness and approaching the Soviet ideal. In this regard deafness distinguishes itself from other disabilities, as it does not make access to physical labour quite as difficult. A limited discussion of the relation between ‘Soviet’ deafness and other forms of ‘Soviet’ disability would not have been uncalled for, especially as Shaw seems to take issue with the dire picture of disability in the USSR painted by researchers such as Michael Rasell and Elena Iarskaia-Smirnova.

Shaw is clearly interested in how studying deafness in the USSR can shed light on more than the history of deafness itself. At several points throughout the book she demonstrates that deafness can be useful for reevaluating broader historiographical debates. In the case of the 1933 May Day Parade photograph, she asserts that such forms of deaf inclusion shed a new light on this period. The 1930s have often been depicted as a decade in which earlier, more plural socialist visions of equality and emancipation where completely buried by the dictatorial regime of Stalin. Shaw’s broader reflections could have been worked through in more depth, but they show an important willingness to leave behind the type of disability history that follows an ‘add disability and stir’ recipe. It is in these attempts that the reader sometimes catches a glimpse of the full potential of disability as a as category of historical analysis: valuable both in its own right, and in its ability to pinpoint questions about a society at large.

Anaïs Van Ertvelde is a PhD student at the Leiden University Institute for History on the ERC funded project Rethinking Disability: The Global Impact of the International Year of Disabled Persons (1981) in Historical Perspective. Her current research focuses on how government experts, disability movements and people with disabilities themselves conceive of, and deal with, disability in the wake of the UN international year. She uses a cross-‘iron curtain’ perspective that involves three local case studies and their global entanglements: Belgium, Poland, and Canada.

Emily J.M. Knox (ed.). Trigger Warnings: History, Theory, Context; London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017; 298 pages; hardback £54.95; ISBN 978-1-4422-7371-9 .

by Sarah Chaney

In August 2016, the University of Chicago sent a letter to new students that received a great deal of academic and media interest. In the letter John “Jay” Ellison, Dean of Students, stated that the university was committed to “intellectual freedom”, indicating that other concepts referred to – “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” among them – were antithetical to this notion. The connection between these concepts, as well as the letter itself, was much debated at the time, and the issues raised appear to be the starting point for many of the essays in this book. Are students’ minds really being coddled, or are there valuable things to be learnt from the use of trigger warnings and the debate surrounding them?

Trigger Warnings: History, Theory, Context does not take a clear-cut and dogmatic approach to the topic (as some others have done, most prominently those who object outright to the idea of trigger warnings like Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt). Most authors in this volume adopt a carefully critical view of trigger warnings that also seeks to understand and explore their implications and uses. The book focuses on higher education in North America; the location is only to be expected, perhaps, as this is where the bulk of debate has taken place. A few essays do look beyond higher education to the broader context from which trigger warnings emerged, including a rather Whiggish history of trigger warnings based on retrospective diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (chapter 1) and a more incisive look at the use of trigger warnings in the treatment of eating disorders since the 1970s (chapter 3).

The volume claims to be interdisciplinary, although contributions largely stem from those working in the arts, humanities and social sciences. This is understandable: these fields have probably been the most affected by calls for trigger warnings, as well as being concerned with the practice of critical thinking and debate (which, according to their detractors, trigger warnings stifle). The inclusion of a number of authors with a background in library and information studies raises an interesting angle for historians about the way collections are labelled and configured. As Emily Knox indicates in the introduction, the American Library Association has long been opposed to the rating of texts, a practice which holds political connotations and has tended to be fairly arbitrary, usually based on the attitudes of a small group of people. Despite voicing this opposition, however, Knox goes on to raise the central tenet that runs throughout this book: while trigger warnings can and may be used as a form of censorship, teachers and lecturers also have an obligation to consider the welfare of their students.

These two potentially conflicting ideas are reflected in the division of the book into two parts. Starting with the context and theory around trigger warnings, the second half moves on to specific case studies, designed to try and offer some practical guidance for teachers. While Kari Storla does this excellently in her piece on handling traumatic topics in classroom discussion, other case studies are less satisfying and the first half of the book is ultimately of more interest to the historian, grappling as it does with the controversies raised by trigger warnings and placing them in wider context. Are warnings important for welfare, or damaging to students’ critical thinking? Do they protect or censor? Do they fulfil a genuine need for students or do universities use them to avoid confronting systemic issues around student welfare? Most authors do not resolve these questions – indeed, few come down squarely on one side or the other. This in itself reflects the complexity of the debate. It is, of course, possible in each case cited above for both things to be true, even in the same example.

Take Stephanie Houston Grey’s chapter on the history of warnings around eating disorders. This is one of the most thought-provoking and well-written articles in the book. Grey explores the public health response to eating disorders in the late 1970s, which she argues was one of the first instances in which widespread efforts were made to restrict speech on the grounds of preventing contagion. This “moral panic” resulted in crackdowns on eating-disordered individuals, most prominently online, which stripped basic civil rights from people but was nonetheless unsuccessful in reducing the prevalence of eating disorders. Grey’s thoughtful examination of one specific example that began nearly thirty years before trigger warnings became widespread online is an interesting opportunity for reflection on the emergence of triggers. In the case of eating disorders, labelling images and words as triggering might have begun from concerns about people’s welfare, but ultimately became repressive and silencing of people with eating disorders. Providing “critical thinking tools and skill sets”, Grey suggests, might instead assist people to engage in more productive conversations around eating disorders.

Although the context of public concern about contagion is very different from the modern emphasis on managing individual trauma, there are certain lines of similarity with other pieces in the book. Indeed, an emphasis on critical thinking tools to aid welfare is one of the most practical suggestions that emerges from the volume as a whole. As Storla notes, one of the biggest myths around the use of trigger warnings is the assumption that a blanket warning alone can somehow prevent students from experiencing trauma. Storla’s “trauma-informed pedagogy” instead provides a nuanced framework which incorporates student participation at every turn. Her classes develop their own guidelines, debate the use of warnings at the start of the course and consider the difference between discomfort and trauma. This provides a lesson to students in considering multiple viewpoints (in particular those of the rest of the class). Similarly, in their chapter Kristina Ruiz-Mesa, Julie Matos and Gregory Langner suggest that encouraging students to consider the differing backgrounds of their audiences can be a valuable lesson in public speaking. In both cases, trigger warnings become part of the educational content rather than being in opposition to it.

Trigger warnings can, then, be about opening up conversation as well as closing it down. Several authors, including Jane Gavin-Herbert and Bonnie Washick, suggest that student demands for trigger warnings may not even necessarily be about individual experiences of trauma but based in wider concerns about structural violence and inequality. Taking seriously and discussing these concerns may have more impact than a simplistic warning. Indeed, Storla argues that one of her techniques – the use of “safe words” by which students can bring an end to class discussion without having to give a personal reason for doing so – has never been used by a student in her classroom. However, its existence as part of a set of communal guidelines, she feels, means students are safe and supported and thus able to engage more fully in debates. Paradoxically, having the opportunity to censor discussion might actually promote it.

As a general guide, most of the authors in this volume agree that trigger warnings are an ethical and legal practice that can and should be put in place as part of increasing access to higher education. The people most likely to request trigger warnings are minority groups, who are also at greatest risk of experiencing trauma. The problem, however, comes when these issues are individualised, as neoliberal interpretations of trigger warnings have tended to do. Bonnie Washick’s sympathetic critique of the equal access argument for trigger warnings raises the way in which warnings have led to the expectation that individuals who might be “triggered” are viewed as responsible for managing their own reactions. While trigger warnings might have begun as a form of activism and social protest, they have since been medicalised (through the framework of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) and individualised. By taking a critical and contextual approach to trigger warnings, both teachers and students can gain from discussing them.

Trigger Warnings: History, Theory and Context is a valuable contribution to the debate around trigger warnings in higher education today, as well as an interesting exploration into some of the nuances around why and how such a concept has emerged. An edited volume particularly suits the topic, allowing for multiple and varied perspectives. No reader will agree with everything they read here, but then that’s precisely the point. If, collectively, the authors in this book achieve any one thing it is to persuade this reader at least that trigger warnings have the potential to generate more insightful debate and critical thought than they risk preventing.

Sarah Chaney is a Research Fellow at Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions, on the Wellcome Trust funded ‘Living With Feeling’ project. Her current research focuses on the history of compassion in healthcare, from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Her previous research has been in the history of psychiatry, in particular the topic of self-inflicted injury. Her first monograph, Psyche on the Skin: A History of Self-Harm was published by Reaktion in February 2017.

Jennifer Wallis, Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum. Doctors, Patients, and Practices, (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); xvi, 276 pages; 9 b/w illustrations; hardback £20.00; ISBN, 978-3-319-56713-6.

by Louise Hide

Skin, muscle, bone, brain, fluid – Jennifer Wallis has given each its own chapter in this exemplary mesh of medical, psychiatric and social history that spans work carried out in the latter decades of the nineteenth century in Yorkshire’s West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum. The body – usually the dead body – is at the centre of the book, playing an active role in the construction of knowledge and the evolution of practices and technologies in the physical space of the pathology lab, as well as in the emerging disciplines of the mental sciences, neurology and pathology. Wallis explores how, in the desperate quest to uncover aetiologies and treatments for mental disorders, there was a growing conviction that ‘the truth of any disease lay deep within the fabric of the body’ (Kindle: 3822). General paralysis of the insane (GPI) is central to the book. A manifestation of tertiary syphilis and a common cause of death in male asylum patients, it was one of the few conditions that produced identifiable lesions in the brain, raising hopes that the post-mortem examination could yield new discoveries around the organic origins of other mental diseases. Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum is, therefore, not only about how the body of the asylum patient was framed by changing socio-medical theories and practices, but about how it was productive of them too.

Whilst reading this lucidly written monograph, it soon becomes clear that West Riding was no asylum back-water. Its superintendent, James Crichton-Browne, was determined to forge a reputation in scientific research and West Riding became the first British asylum to appoint its own pathologist in 1872. Wallis has not only marshalled a vast amount of secondary literature, but made a deep and far-reaching foray into the West Riding archives, analysing some 2,000 case records of patients who died there between 1880 and 1900. Drawing on case books, post-mortem reports, administrative records and photographs, Wallis has created a refreshingly original way of conceptualising the asylum patient. Rather than exploring his – as it usually was in ‘cases’ of general paralysis – role within tangled networks of external social agencies and medical practices, she turns her focus to the inner unchartered terrain of unclaimed corpses. She shows how the autopsy provided different ways of ‘seeing’ as the interior of the body was ‘surfaced’ through a range of new and evolving practices and technologies, such as microscopy and clinical photography.  Processes for preserving human tissue and conducting post-mortem examinations were enhanced, as were methods for observing and testing tissue samples, and for recording findings. None of these practices was without an ethical dimension, such as a patient’s right to privacy and anonymity.

Doctors, perhaps, gleaned most from the living as they examined and observed patients on admission and in the wards; pathologists could venture into the deep tissues of the body, which were out of bounds for as long as a patient remained alive. Yet the two states could not be separated quite so neatly and Wallis turns her attention to the growing tensions between pathologists and asylum doctors as both scrambled to plant their disciplinary stake in the ground, navigating boundaries between the living and the dead body. How, I wondered, were practices mirrored at the London County Council pathology lab, which opened at Claybury in 1893 and also investigated various forms of tertiary syphilis, including GPI and tabes dorsalis, as well as alcoholism and tuberculosis? Wallis does touch on other laboratories, but it would be interesting to know a little more about how they associated with each other.

One of the many strengths of the book is the way in which Wallis makes connections between social and cultural mores and the impact of wider political and medical developments. Germ theory was, of course, highly influential. Wallis touches on the ‘pollution’ metaphor but might have expanded on the trope of the ‘syphilitic’ individual as a vector of moral depravity in the western context – an unexpected swerve of narrative into the belief systems of the Nuer jars slightly. Otherwise, Wallis provides a fascinating investigation of the social framing of the male body with GPI, explaining how atrophied muscle and degenerating organs might be interpreted as an assault on masculinity in a period of high industrialisation. Soft bones could be equated to a loss of virility and femininity; broken bones forced asylums to ask whether they might be due to the actions of brutal attendants, rough methods of restraint, or of physical degeneration in the patient.

Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum provides a meticulously researched and thoroughly readable – for all – social history of an important development in the mental sciences in the nineteenth century, centring it around the evolving practices of post-mortem examinations. I particularly like the way in which Wallis writes herself, her research process and her thinking into the book. Her respectful treatment not only of the asylum patients but of the medical and nursing staff who cared for and treated them is threaded through from beginning to end. One might not expect to be gripped by descriptions of ‘fatty muscles’, ‘boggy brains’ and ‘flabby livers’, but Wallis reveals a fascinating story that is full of originality and tells us as much about nineteenth century medical practice as about the patient himself.

Louise Hide is a Wellcome Trust Fellow in Medical Humanities and based in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research project is titled ‘Cultures of Harm in Residential Institutions for Long-term Adult Care, Britain 1945-1980s’. Her monograph Gender and Class in English Asylums, 1890-1914 was published in 2014.