Category: Book Reviews

R. Kugelmann, Constructing Pain: Historical, Psychological and Critical Perspectives, London: Routledge, 2017, £34.099 pbk, 158pp, ISBN: 9781138841222

by Lottie Wittingham

In this thorough review, Robert Kugelmann charts how ideas around the polymorphous concept of pain have come about via the influence of academic personalities, and their experiences in the spheres of psychology and medicine. Drawing on the theories of figures such as Benjamin Ward Richardson[ref]Richardson, B.W., 1897, Vita Medica: Chapters of medical life and work, New York: Longman, Green & Sons[/ref], Henry Rutgers Marshall [ref]Marshall, H.M., 1889, ‘The classification of pleasure and pain,’ Mind, 14, 511-536[/ref] and well-known philosophers such as Descartes and Bentham, part 1 of the book describes the dualistic concept of pain and the perceived distinction between ‘real’ and imagined pain. Beginning with the development of anaesthesia and the influence of this on the anatomical image of the body as opposed to the ‘felt’ body, the introductory chapter describes the heralding of the abolition of pain, and the consequence of this on people’s opinions on pain and its utility or otherwise. Is pain a useful signal to signify a physical ailment within the body? If so, where does chronic pain fit into this model? It is posited that the pointlessness of chronic pain perhaps accentuates how much it hurts. The ‘medical gaze’ describes pain as an indicator of bodily dysfunction and this challenges the legitimacy of chronic pain which has no ostensible ‘function’.

The theory of pain as a direct sensation felt by specific pain nerves is contrasted with the theory of pain and pleasure as direct antitheses to one another. The view of pain as a ‘deficit of energy’ is dissected and dismissed as inconsistent with physiology. Similarly, pain as the opposite of pleasure is not a convincing hypothesis, as not all pain is displeasing, and disagreeableness is not equivalent to the experience of pain. This section of the book is somewhat hard to follow, but the systematic dissection of historical concepts of pain is a useful way to challenge our contemporary conceptions of pain and its treatment. This was an insightful read for someone working in a medical field, as it made me question the way I perceive pain and how this may be different to the way in which my patients perceive it. However I wouldn’t suggest that the book on the whole was particularly accessible for clinicians, as it is written in sometimes quite technical language, often from psychological research, and hence is not particularly applicable to routine clinical practice. Indeed, it is a shame that the book is not more accessible to those who are not academics in the field, as a broader concept of historical views of pain (such as that of Joanna Bourke[ref]Bourke, J., 2014, The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers, Oxford: OUP[/ref]) could be a useful tool for those involved in the care of patients with chronic pain conditions. Nonetheless, as an academic text for historians and scholars of the human sciences, the text is thorough and comprehensive and it is likely to be much more appropriate for this audience.

Three challenges to the so-called ‘Cartesian dualism’ theory of pain, which distinguishes ‘real’ organic pain and ‘imaginary’ nonorganic pain, are elucidated in Chapter 3. The most persuasive and widely accepted of these is the gate control theory, in which the organic and psychological aspects of pain experience are integrated in the felt sensation of pain. This theory is consistent with the physiological findings of specific nociceptive neurons (i.e. nerves specifically for sensing pain) and also explains the observation that a felt response to a painful stimulus varies according to the situation and to psychological variables. Behavioural and psychosomatic approaches to pain are also put forward as potential challenges to dualism, although these are less convincing and, in fact, the gate control theory is the one currently taught in medical school and so is perhaps more pervasive at least in the medical sphere.

The second part of the book claims to ‘temporarily suspend belief in the anatomical image of the body’ by taking a phenomenological approach, i.e. an attempt to derive general principles and conclusions from the subjective experiences of individuals. While this is interesting as an insight into personal experiences of pain, I was left unconvinced of it as a method to verify the broader claims. Narratives are naturally a good resource to learn about subjective experiences. From an analytical and scientific perspective, the book could benefit from reference to a wider sample of narratives, including those from literature and throughout history: the limited number of samples quoted here is perhaps of restricted value, in the sense of drawing reliable conclusions. That said, the experiences which are quoted and dissected are a valuable addition to the scholarly research which forms the bulk of the book, making these observations personal and pertinent, and adding texture and depth to the discussion. The scope of the book is incredibly wide-ranging and the inclusion of personal narratives puts the whole spectrum of theories mentioned into context.

The second part of the book touches on a wide variety of topics including, but not limited to: chronic pain; pain management programmes; moral pain; and pain as attunement, as a threshold, as punishment or as a sign. Enlightening comments are made about the political and economic elements of the pain experience which are not immediately obvious to an outsider. However, I found the writing sometime nebulous and complex, which was frustrating as it detracted from the insightful points being made. In the final chapter, Kugelmann discusses moral pain, and draws upon a wealth of research to make astute parallels and distinctions between physical pain and moral pain in the form of guilt, melancholia, existential distress and a kind of weltschmerz. Reference is made to ‘feelings that the patient interpreted as the moral pain of guilt’, recalling the unfounded guilt often felt in clinical depression. This chapter may benefit from further reference and comparison to psychiatry, both historical and current – which may also function to make the findings and discussion more applicable to clinical practice.

The parts of the book which fascinated me most were the attempts to extract what our concepts of pain are, and the discussion of how our experience of them may say something about human nature. Pain itself is an incredibly slippery concept to attempt to define, and the account of our attempts to do so throughout history is revealing. The book considerably deepens understanding of the concept of pain and all its vagaries.

Lottie Whittingham is a final year medical student at Imperial College London with a degree in Neuroscience and Mental Health. She is an aspiring medical historian and her research is primarily in the history of psychiatry and gender. She blogs at https://medicalmuseumblog.wordpress.com/

Ilonka Venier Alexander: The life and times of Franz Alexander. From Budapest to California. London: Karnac, £22.99 pbk, 2015, xxxii + 154 pp. ISBN:  9781782202509

by Csaba Pléh

Written by the granddaughter of the famous Hungarian-born and educated psychoanalyst (Franz) Ferenc Alexander, Ilonka Venier Alexander’s book is a peculiar work on the life and work of her grandfather in several regards. The peculiarity of the book is shown in two ways. Regarding its central figure, Franz Alexander, the reader sees a constant shifting of perspective between the personal/familiar and the professional perspective, the latter mainly dealing with the history of American psychoanalysis. On the other hand, sometimes we have to deal not with Franz Alexander, but with the grandchild, the vicissitudes of the divorce of her parents, and the central role of the grandfather.

This is not necessarily intended to be a criticism. The book is an excellent resource and a fascinating read. But the constant shifts of perspective make for a hard time for the reader. As a history of a professional psychoanalyst, the monograph is certainly timely. Alexander has been unduly forgotten. The editor of Karnac’s ‘History of Psychoanalysis’ series, Brett Klahr, points out in the preface that Franz Alexander is an important figure in the history of psychoanalysis; Alexander’s proposal for short therapy was a provocative intervention. Even more provocative was his glittering life in California. The author argues that Franz Alexander’s copious honoraria – which allowed for this luxurious standard of life – made many of his colleagues jealous. At the same time, the fact that Alexander continued his practice for over a decade in Hollywood had an important role in psychoanalysis becoming part of American everyday life, thought and pop culture.

The first third of the book is a family chronicle. It presents the Alexander clan with family trees, family photos, and gossip. Franz Alexander’s Father, Bernat (Bernhard) Alexander (1850–1927) – whom the writer spells as Bernard – was a very influential philosopher in turn of the century Budapest. He launched an important series of translations of modern philosophy, from Kant and Leibniz, to Schopenhauer and Hartmann; he was was a central literary and theater critic, and led an intellectual salon.[ref]Gábor, É. (1986). Alexander Bernát. Budapest: Akadémiai In Hungarian[/ref] The book provides a rich and detailed account of life in the New York Palace, a new art nouveau building full of rich bourgeois homes, which was the home of the Alexander family, and at the same time a center for coffeehouse life and journalism. The book also provides a detailed picture of all the in-laws, including the mathematical genius Alfréd ‘Buba’ Rényi (1921-1970), who had a large role in modern probability and information theory.[ref]Rényi, A. (1970).  Probability Theory. New York: American Elsevier[/ref] The presentation is personal and it is full of moving moments. There was a similar account from the same family written by Franz Alexander when he was approximately the same age as the present author is now.[ref]Alexander, F. (1960). The Western mind in transition: An eyewitness story. New York: Random House[/ref] This latter account was rather more interesting when discussing social details, and regarding the birth of psychoanalysis as well.  In the book of Ilonka Venier Alexander, there is too much assumed intimacy, and the reader sometimes has a hard time deciphering whether the author is speaking about the philosopher, Bernat, or his son, Franz. It is nonetheless a rich resource for future historians of ideas and family network researchers.

The section dealing with the history of psychoanalysis has two especially interesting moments. The first is the detailed account of the life of Franz Alexander as a military soldier. The second relates to Ilonka Venier Alexander, the author of the present book. For her, the reconstruction of the assimilated Jewish way of life of the Alexander family in Budapest was a striking novelty. This status had its own ghosts, even in America. Ilonka Venier Alexander, the granddaughter, was initially ignorant of her Jewish background, and she gradually realized this only during family gatherings. The book is full of wondering about this past that is repressed in the interpretation of the author.  However, from the perspective of turn of century Budapest, these moments show the importance of assimilation and secularization at the time, and later, the role of the Franz Alexander’s Italian artist wife in his life. Indeed, Ilonka Venier Alexander herself notes the complexities of these factors: ‘in marrying an Italian Catholic woman of noble heritage, Alexander had certainly “married up” and thus, unwittingly, began his own metamorphosis into something other than an Eastern European Jew. Her aristocratic ancestry, as well as his denial of his Jewish heritage, no doubt allowed them to ultimately move about Chicago’s high society with ease’ (p. 28).

The book has around one hundred pages on the psychoanalytic career of Franz Alexander. The account of the Berlin training years of Franz Alexander is well documented. The saga of the Chicago decades is fascinating. The reader learns not merely about the external history of the work of Alexander, his successes in criminal psychology[ref]Alexander, F. and Staub, H. (1956). The Criminal, the Judge and the Public. Glencoe, IL: Free Press[ref] and psychosomatic medicine,[ref]Alexander, F.G. (1950). Psychosomatic medicine. New York: Norton[/ref] but we also learn about his professional tensions, and debates over short therapy, as well as over the issue of psychoanalysis becoming part of residential training of psychiatrists. In his granddaughter’s account we learn much about an all-round scholar and clinician, who, as his book on the history of psychiatry also showed, was not an either/or thinker regarding relations between body, brain, and the mind.[ref]Alexander,F. G. and Selesnick, S. T. (1966): The history of psychiatry. New York: Harper[/ref] We also learn about a caring European-style pater familias. We learn with the eyes of the respectful granddaughter about a family style that always combined love and commitment with decisiveness. Franz Alexander did not hesitate to intervene into the life of his child and of the youngster navigating through the troubled water of divorced parents.

Overall, the book has two special points of interest: it is a good source for the reconstruction of the role of Franz Alexander in psychoanalysis. At the same time it is a rich starting point for those who are interested in the details of the family socialization  of talented Central European Jews in early and mid 20^th Century.

Csaba Pléh is a cognitive psychologist with a strong interest in the history of psychology. Recently he has been a visiting professor at the Dept of Cognitive Science, Central European University, Budapest. Many of his papers are accessible at his website: plehcsaba.eu 

 

Heike Bauer (ed.), Sexology and Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters Across the Modern World. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2015, $34.95 pbk, 284 pages, ISBN: 978-1-43991-249-2

by Ivan Crozier, with responses from Heike Bauer

Editor’s note: we are very happy to here present Ivan Crozier’s review of ‘Sexology and Translation.’ The review is followed by a response from  the editor of that volume, Heike Bauer; then a response to the response; and then a response to the response to the response. We are grateful to both scholars for this lively and interesting exchange, which foregrounds crucial issues about historiography and field-making, which are central to work on sexology, but that span the human sciences much more widely too.

Sexology was a trans-European, transatlantic discipline, with important sexological works appearing in Italian, French, English and especially German before Havelock Ellis’s synthesis of the field in his Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897-1928). As suggested by their footnotes, most of the main players read each other’s languages. They also read widely outside of the field, and rearticulated non-sexological views of sex from other fields, such as history, literature, law and anthropology. Understanding how they read and used the works of other sexologists and those of other sexperts who were not in the same field is a significant way to map out the intellectual history of one of the most important disciplines that framed many attitudes towards sexuality in the twentieth century. How authors in other fields interpreted and disseminated these sexological discourses is a useful way of assessing the impact that sexologists had.  These are not the same problem, but they both require an understanding of how knowledge is generated within a field.

It is obvious to students of sexological texts that translation is a key issue for understanding the field – both the translation of texts between languages and cultures, but particularly the translation of concepts and evidence between fields. This book attends to both types, but with varying degrees of success. Attending to translation is a potentially fruitful way for understanding topics such as how the field of sexology formed, whose work was considered significant, what effects these works had, where concepts were developed, etc. To do so, a theoretical framework is needed that can explain how the field developed in specific contexts; how it related to other fields in the human sciences, the law, literature and the arts; and how it produced specific sexological objects of inquiry and developed sexological concepts that appear similar to but are not identical to other conceptualisations of sex. Translation is a part of the key for understanding this process, but the archaeological insights into the history of sexology that derive from Michel Foucault and the historical epistemologists who have followed him are still necessary if we are to understand how sexology functioned as a field. Not all of the chapters collected in this volume together satisfy this requirement equally.

This book gathers twelve chapters that addressed both the translation between languages/cultures and between fields. On the whole, the problem of language and context translation is done significantly better.  Drawing on contemporary translation studies, many of the chapters explain how sexological works were turned into texts in other languages, attending to the differences in cultural context, and exploring the political issues that framed these translation efforts. An exemplary such chapter was Brian James Baer on Russia, but other fascinating essays addressed the translation of European sexological discourses into Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese. Cultural contexts also changed, with pieces following the influence of sexological texts as far as Peru, Palestine, Egypt and the Far East. And the translation of specific words over a longue durée timescale is seen in Peter Cryle’s scholarly attention to the concept of frigidity from ancient Latin and Greek into nineteenth-century German and French medicine before the psychoanalysts turned away from medical expertise to explain a lack of desire. Liat Kozma‘s chapter on the Middle East also explores the translation of professional texts into practical lay sexual advice, not as a history from below, as those following Roy Porter have emphasized, but as sexual advice by doctors trying to shape the sexual politics of their context by importing some European sexological concepts. In these ways this book adds importantly to our understanding of the spread of sexology outside of the much more commonly studied European texts.

Translation between fields is where many more scholars had more trouble, and it is with this problem that a solid introduction that conceptualised what was at stake when concepts are rearticulated between fields would have helped (the rather busy one-page editorial interjections between the three sections of the book didn’t offer this, either).  “Literary sexology”, a term used by the editor elsewhere to describe how sexological knowledge made its way into literary texts, shows some of the problems with treating the objects (sex) within the different fields as equivalent, and forgets the fact that they are produced differently (relying on different practices, different styles of reasoning, different forms of evidence). Reading the surfaces of texts elides knowledges with very different epistemological values, which is not to say that some fields are more important, only that they produce different things and rely on different networks of power. We see this all of the time in the primary sources when sexologists qualify their uses of non-sexological texts, but many scholars have trouble with these differences.

Rather than arguing that sexology is bigger than the field actually was, so as to include literary and other texts where sex is addressed in that earnest late-nineteenth century way, it is better to understand some manifestations of sexological knowledge as formed by the rearticulation of sexual knowledge into and out of the field of sexology. A text purporting to be factually engaging with sex is not necessarily sexological. Proceeding along these lines depends on the kind of historiographical framework being used, but with decades of historical epistemological engagement with these issues since Michel Foucault, Arnold Davidson and others, there is no excuse to mash texts together looking for, in Foucault’s terms, points of equivalence.’ Different strategic choices are made when a historian accentuates either discontinuity or continuity.

Failure to conceptualise the field was also a problem in Jana Funke and Kate Fisher’s chapter that argued for the inclusion of Edward Carpenter’s contributions within the sexological field, which I have argued against because of the difference in style of reasoning (his is much more literary/historical, and romantic not psychopathological), the differences in evidence used (he did not include case histories, but appeared as one in Ellis’ Sexual Inversion), and the fact that – despite interesting archival evidence that Albert Moll corresponded with him – most sexological texts after his publication did not refer to his work in any significant way (unlike that of Ellis, Moll, Krafft-Ebing, etc.).  He remained an outsider, conceptually, which is not to undervalue his contributions – but rather to see them for what they were: ground-breaking homosexual rights activism rather than sexology. Carpenter does not need to be made into a sexologist to be important. If the field of sexology had been conceptualized more thoroughly, this kind of archival slavery could be avoided.

There is no need to end on a critical note. Katie Sutton’s consistently-strong work shows that a more sophisticated approach to sexological knowledge and its vicissitudes outside the field is possible. She maps effectively how transgendered people interacted with sexological categories, and shows how these interactions were rearticulated in non-sexological fields, such as in novels, films and magazine columns with a transgendered theme from the Weimar Republic. This was the strongest essay in the collection. Overall, this book will not satisfy those with a need for rigorous conceptual analysis as much as those who require specific engagement with translation of sexology into other cultural contexts.

 

Heike Bauer’s response to the review:

Following in the vein of influential scholars such as Gillian Beer, who in the early 1980s pointed out that nineteenth-century science and literature shared a common language, recent research on sexology by Veronika Fuechtner, Anna Katharina Schaffner and Robert Deam Tobin, among others, has shown that the science of sex was a porous field. The main point of Crozier’s critique – that sexology should be located within an idealized, tightly bound domain of science proper, and most definitely not in the literary realm – is both historically inaccurate and critically outdated. Sexology was constituted from the contributions of medical professionals, legal and social scientists, anthropologists, social reformers as well as authors, literary critics and all kinds of cultural commentators who individually and collectively turned their attention to questions of sex. As sexual bodies and behaviours came under scrutiny in the clinic and courtroom, literary and cultural commentators explored the vagaries of desire and the implications of gender norms. Sexual debates as we known them today emerged on the intersections between these different fields rather than just within a distinct, clearly disciplined sexual science. In the collection I therefore use the term ‘sexology’, alongside sexual science, in line with other critics to give a name to the discursive force that gathered momentum around the sustained attention paid to questions of sex in different contexts and countries from around the 1880s to the 1930s. The deliberately loose definition not only captures the historical permeability of the field of sexual research. It also drives a key aim of the collection: to examine the coeval emergence of similar sexual debates in different parts of Europe, Asia, South America and the Middle East.

By policing the boundaries of European sexology, Crozier simply looks for evidence of an assumed one-way traffic of sexological ideas from the West into other parts of the world. He attacks Kate Fisher and Jana Funke’s essay, which argues that the English sexual science around 1900 was ‘a cross-disciplinary field that did not erect exclusionary credentials around its practice’ for including the poet and reformer Edward Carpenter in a discussion of sexual science. At the same time Crozier praises the essays that explore the translations of European sexology into other contexts, including Japan. Yet Michiko Suzuki’s chapter, which examines the reception of Carpenter in Japanese feminist circles, explicitly reads Carpenter’s work as a contribution to sexological and broader sexual debates both in Europe and Japan. For Crozier, then, Carpenter only counts as a sexologist when he can be figured as the harbinger of European knowledge into the East.

Jack Halberstam has pointed out that the problem with disciplinary correctness is that it all too often ‘confirms what is already known according to approved methods of knowing’ (2011: 186). Ivan Crozier’s review of Sexology and Translation shows how methodological rigidity and the guarding of disciplinary boundaries obscures the insights gained from interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research. Insisting on a narrowly defined approach to sexology, his claims support the critically outdated yet perniciously resilient view that modern debates about sexuality originate in Western science from where they were transmitted into a sexually undisciplined Orient. Rather than engaging with the insights and findings presented, the review merely demonstrates how gendered and racialized assumptions about the production of knowledge shape readings of research that pushes against them.

 

Crozier, responding to Bauer:

It appears that many specialists in literary studies have trouble with the idea that discursive fields have boundaries.  Apart from Michel Foucault describing how to approach such fields in his Archaeology of Knowledge, the disciplines of History and Philosophy of Science and Science Studies have developed this well-established concept in historical and sociological terms (especially since Gieryn, 1983), but occasionally when someone studying literature looks at a scientific field, they seem to see a porous mess of texts that anything can seep into and out of like a poorly-squeezed sponge (possibly because literature is a porous field in different ways to the sciences?). By looking at scientific discourses in this way, these cultural approaches remove the discourses from the social contexts in which they were produced. Perhaps they are so over-whelmed by the shared common language which Gillian Beer taught them to see that they do not realise that the concepts, styles of reasoning, uses of data, statuses of the authors, and other social-epistemic factors are not shared between fields? There is, as we have known since Gaston Bachelard, an epistemological rupture, which means that sexology and other disciplines (such as the law) construct sex differently. The original authors of these texts were aware of these different fields, probably because so many of them spent a long time in medical school learning how to look at the world in a particular way; likewise the historians of science who discuss their work. But apparently Heike Bauer has trouble with the idea that we should look at sexological texts as belonging to a specific field if we are to understand their production – not everything can be crammed into this field, and other texts will need to be positioned in their respective discursive fields.  So a line needs to be drawn: those who believe that the human sciences have a status deriving from specific practices; and those who think that there is no demarcation between scientific and non-scientific forms of knowledge… tl;dr: I’m a splitter, she’s a lumper.

Bauer makes a grand statement about sexology being a ‘porous field,’ but what does she mean by this?  Without simply relying on a metaphor that some things (she doesn’t specify in her response, but we might assume she means concepts, words, politics, what else?) somehow seep in and out of the leaky vessel of sexology, it is important for the historian of ideas to understand the social processes by which this happens (no one is denying that it happens; but some of us want to know how). It is through a process of rearticulation, as anyone versed in post-foucaultien historical epistemology knows. And as such, these discourses are not found ‘within an idealized, tightly bound domain of science proper,’ as Bauer incorrectly supposes I think, but rather in a sui generis scientific field that emerged in specific ways, relates to other (scientific and non-scientific) discursive fields through particular socially-acceptable mechanisms, and produces knowledge for this specific field. Sure, these discourses are not bound forever to remain in the field, and occasionally novelists, lawyers and others pick up on these discourses and turn them into something else for their own ends, just as sexologists can draw on these other fields – but without a solid understanding of what is happening in the production of discourses within the human sciences, the work that follows can be pretty flakey.  There is nothing new here – following Michel Foucault, Arnold Davidson, Ian Hacking, and the Edinburgh School in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, I have been saying versions of this for almost 20 years, as Bauer knows from my work that she cites in her book. None of us think that there is a unified field of ‘science proper,’ just different competing fields. Framing the translation between these fields is what could have made Bauer’s book interesting, as some of the chapters show, but which eludes her introduction.

In her response, Bauer relies on Jack Halberstam to suggest that I am enrolling gendered and racialized assumptions because she imagines that I am talking about ‘modern debates about sexuality originat[ing] in Western science’ and oozing out across the world, but I am not.  I am simply saying that discourses produced within fields of the human sciences have specific rules of construction that make them different to literary texts, and to fail to look at these texts in their original social context is to miss a lot of important detail.  To put it another way, there is no literary sexology – there is sexology that rearticulates ideas presented in literary and other non-scientific sources when speaking to other members of the same field, for example when Havelock Ellis writes about Baron von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs when discussing masochism, enrolling it as evidence (rearticulating it to make it sexological). When people outside this field use these sexological ideas, they are no longer doing sexology, which is fine.  To try to make everything a form of sexology just because it speaks about sex is to give the science an inflated status. I think we can do better than this.

Ultimately, I thought Sexology in Translation was an average book whose editor was unable to introduce a historiography properly equipped to deal with the construction of sexological knowledge, which is a shame as it was surely her most pressing task so that she could help her readers understand the translation of objects and concepts between fields.  Some of the better contributions do this (especially Katie Sutton’s), as do other historians of sexology, but many of Bauer’s contributors are happy to wallow around in the common language of sex.  All writing about sex is not sexological, and when it is, it follows a ‘grammar’ specific to that discursive field.  That doesn’t mean that other (literary) writing can’t speak about sex; it just means that these literary sources are not found among the human sciences.

 

Bauer’s response to Crozier, and the final word:

That Crozier wants this collection to be a different book – one that engages specifically with the methodologies and concerns of his own research – is clear, not least because he mistitles it Sexology in Translation. But this book takes a different approach. It examines the coeval emergence of sexology in different parts of the world in terms of a dynamic exchange between distinct discourses and disciplines. Understanding disciplinary porosity in this context is not a denial of the discrete practices, conventions and genealogies that forged a modern sexual science. Instead it focuses on the intersections as well as the differences between discursive fields to gain deeper insights into how modern ideas about sex were formed, disciplined and transmitted, and to what effect.  Such an approach does not dismiss the significance of social context. On the contrary, the essays in the collection show that attention to social context is fundamental to understanding whose existence was on the line in sexological discourse formation.

In many ways talking about sexology in the nineteenth-century is anachronistic. While according to current scholarship the term was first used in English in 1867 in relation to social philosophy, the profession of ‘sexologist’ only took shape in the West in the way in which it is still practiced today when the centres of sexual research shifted from Europe to North America after World War II. Many of the people we today associate with the emergence of European sexology – such as the psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, author of the influential medico-forensic study Psychopathia Sexualis – did not self-identify as ‘sexologists’ even as they staked out a specialism in sexual matters. The work of some male non-scientists such as the literary critic John Addington Symonds was readily accepted as, and widely cited by, the emerging sexological literature. The contributions of women in contrast was often overlooked or dismissed. Edith Ellis, for instance, a feminist reformer who was married to Havelock Ellis, entered sexological literature as a case study (she was in a relationship with another woman) rather than being cited for her radical critique of the institutionalisation of ‘love’. Framing these developments solely in terms of epistemic ruptures, competition between different fields and definitional struggles over what should count as sexology proper not only reduces the complexity of this history. It also fails to consider whose contributions were obscured or excluded in the scientification of sex.

Sara Ahmed has pointed out that citation practices are ‘a way of reproducing the world around certain bodies.’ Crozier’s alignment with an all white male line-up of influential thinkers in the history and philosophy of science illustrates this point. Rather than engaging with the most recent scholarship on the histories of sexuality and sexology, he turns backward. As he says, ‘there is nothing new’ in his critique.

Heike Bauer is a Senior Lecturer in English and Gender Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Ivan Crozier is currently an historian of psychiatry at Sydney University.

 

Sarah Chaney, Psyche on the Skin, Reaktion Books, London, 2017, £20.00, 320pp. ISBN 9781780237503;

Chris Millard, A History of Self-Harm in Britain: a genealogy of cutting and overdosing, Palgrave, London, 2015, £15.99 and available open access. ISBN  9781137547736.

by Ivan Crozier

People have always changed their bodies in permanent ways – whether with tattoos, scars, tongue splits, brands, piercings, genital modifications (from religious circumcision to self-bifurcation), or through cosmetic surgery. These changes give the body a particular meaning that is entirely dependent on the social context. Sometimes, scarification is done to show belonging to a particular ethnic group (a Mossi man from Burkina Faso was traditionally initiated with specific facial scars made with a hot knife), while other scars might be consensually produced as a part of a heavy sadomasochistic scene, and yet others – as these two books show – might be the result of a distressed teenager engaging in a self-harming practice which increasingly became viewed as a ‘cry for help’ within psychiatric discourses, and which necessitated the intervention of mental health professionals. These acts of body modification only take on their meanings within certain social groups. In some cases, self-injury is framed as resulting from a disturbed mind. Psychiatry is the dominant current way of understanding deliberate self-inflicted injuries in the west, but this was not always the framework, and, as these two books show, there is much to suggest that psychiatric power is being resisted in current corporeal practices.

The abhorrence that has framed self-injuring is partly tied up in ideas about pain as a wholly negative experience, with those willing to engage in it consciously believed to be mentally disturbed and requiring psychiatric attention. This is the main reason that sadomasochistic practices come under the scrutiny of psychiatrists. Another important framework for considering self-harm is the social and legal status granted to suicide. Self-harm was developed as a category within psychiatry, firstly believed to be ‘failed suicide,’ and then ‘para-suicide,’ before becoming a different category altogether (Non-Suicidal Self-Injury, as it is in the  of fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5), where it made its first appearance as a self-contained condition in 2013). The links between the legal and medical status of self-harm created the conditions whereby psychiatry could develop a theoretical apparatus for constructing a new category, although other social factors also shaped the way psychiatrists’ thought about self-harm. For example, self harm was increasingly gendered as feminine. This was because it was seen to be the result of domestic distress, where sometimes women hurt themselves to guilt their partners into not leaving them. This gendered conception of self-harm is still seen today, with American psychiatric research showing that adolescent females are the most typical group to cut themselves. What acts of self-injury mean depends very much on how they are understood by the different psychiatric discourses that have attended to them, as well as by the people who commit them.

Sarah Chaney and Chris Millard, in their respective volumes, ally themselves to a view of psychiatric knowledge that derives from historical epistemology. They both use Ian Hacking’s concept of ‘making up people’ to develop the ways that psychiatry produces specific objects of knowledge which are then transported to society through the expansion of psychiatric power – via psychiatric social workers, structures like the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK, and education programmes. The increased prevalence of the self-harmer is in part produced by the sustained and expanding psychiatric attention. By adopting this historical-epistemological standpoint, both books show that self-harm is ‘transient’ in Hacking’s sense; that it is not a stable category, but one which changes over the course of the history of psychiatry: the teenage girls who cut themselves, and discuss what this means to them, on the internet today are not the same as the women in the 1960s who poisoned themselves so their boyfriends wouldn’t leave, even though psychiatry has placed them both in the category of self-harm. How Chaney and Millard develop this analytic framework is not identical, but rather illustrates two different modes of medical historiography: (1) a macro, longue durée approach with an engaging narrative that bears some of the hallmarks of Roy Porter’s influence (Chaney); (2) an extremely detailed micro-history of the development of the concepts of self-harm within the context of British psychiatry, but with close attention to the sites where new psychiatric practices developed (such as the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and the Institute of Psychiatry in London) and which owes much more to the historical Sociology of Scientific Knowledge as applied to medical practices (Millard). Both books problematize psychiatric knowledge, and seek explanations for the shape that it took by looking at the social and conceptual frameworks in which this knowledge was developed, with the resulting works being very different, yet complimentary.

Sarah Chaney’s fantastically illustrated Psyche on the Skin is written for a popular audience and anyone with a personal or professional interest in the subject will be well-rewarded by her book. Chaney uses history to refute the idea that self-inflicted injuries have a universal meaning by showing a variety of episodes where individuals hurt themselves, but were not considered to be episodes of self-harm in a modern psychiatric sense. She discusses practices such as blood-letting, where cutting the self was considered to yield positive results, and castration, which some believed to be beneficial (in particular members of the Skoptsy sect in Russia). Such practices have existed since the ancient world, without any speculation about the individual’s mental health. Chaney’s main focus, and her best research, is on the Victorian period. Using hospital records from Bethlem, as well as a thorough examination of existing medical literature, Chaney shows that self-mutilation was relatively common among the mentally ill in the Victorian period (with 11% of the Bethlem patient population hurting themselves between 1880-1900, employing methods such as burning, biting, plucking, cutting, castration and ocular enucleation). In these instances, self-harming was considered to exemplify the ‘morbid instinct’ that characterised insanity in this period. Self-harm was not a psychiatric object in itself, but was a manifestation of insanity. Self-mutilation, like suicide, was considered an unnatural practice by Victorian psychiatrists (or alienists, as they were typically known in this period) because it was not perceived to benefit the patient. Sexual self-mutilation was addressed as a part of the increased attention to sexuality seen in Victorian and Edwardian medicine.  Practices such as masturbation were seen as self-harming, because of the assumed deleterious effects, and a number of the patients whose records Chaney examined spoke of wishing to be castrated in order to prevent this vice (interestingly, some others wished for castration as a form of gender reassignment).

Other instances of self-harm were associated with hysteria, including the practice of piercing oneself with sewing needles (by 1897 there were enough cases of this practice reported in the medical literature for the women who regularly pierced themselves to be given the name of ‘needle girls’). Particular traits, such as deceit, came to be associated with self-harm, because efforts were made to conceal self-injury and the motivations behind it – and this association apparently remains today. Sometimes the reported self-harm practices were of a sexual nature, such as the insertion of hairpins into the urethra – which, although considered to be a form of self-mutilation by physicians at the time, may have been the result of poorly executed urethral masturbation (urethral sounding).  Chaney’s survey of the literature on self-harm attends to the psychoanalytic writing on the topic, including a long discussion of Karl Menninger’s Man Against Himself (1938) She also discusses the changes in later psychiatric theories of self-harm, from re-writing it as a practice associated with Borderline Personality Disorder and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, to an analysis of Armando Favazza’s Bodies Under Seige (1987). The latter utilised cultural-psychiatric approaches to looking at self-harm relativistically, and suggested that – contrary to much preceding psychiatry – self-harm was often an attempt at self-healing, by taking control of the body in a deliberate way, focusing, and submitting to the pain and then the relaxed feelings that followed such activity. Pain is typically considered negative in the Western imagination, but there are many instances where submitting to pain can bring positive results.

Chaney does not limit her work to psychiatric discourses alone, but provides a welcome analysis of some literary and other artistic depictions of self-harm, giving non-psychiatric voices a legitimate place in her study. Finally, and very importantly, Chaney examines the role played by the popular press and especially the internet in the culture of self-harm – both as a place where information about self-harm could circulate, both from ‘official’ health-care sources, and in patient-led ‘survivor group’ discussions. These non-psychiatric sources are an important part of the ‘making up’ of self-harm. Chaney’s work is both broad and rich and is written in an engaging way that will make this book a valuable resource for anyone trying to understand self-harm practices outside of the narrow confines of psychiatric discourses.

Chris Millard’s A History of Self-Harm in Britain is exhaustive in its genealogical approach to the concepts of self-harm in Britain, and as such is an exemplary case study in the sociological reconstruction of psychiatric knowledge. Most importantly, although he relies heavily on published British medical sources and theses (and it appears that he did not miss a single work), Millard does not fail to examine the practices that allowed for the development of these concepts. He shows how self-harm first emerged as a psychiatric problem by looking at how ‘failed suicide’ attempts (through traumatic injury as well as self-poisoning) in the 1910s and 1920s led to the injured person being taken to voluntary hospitals and workhouse infirmaries, in order to deal with the self-inflicted harm; after the 1930 Mental Treatment Act, which saw mental health becoming more integrated into general medical practices, these ‘failed suicides’ were able to be assessed more readily by psychiatrists. This situation was further stimulated by changes in the law regarding suicide (it was decriminalised in the UK in 1961), which Millard shows led to the integration of therapeutic regimes, joining the somatic approach of casualty departments to acute psychiatric care for the damaged person. The NHS further expanded the remit of psychiatry (especially via psychiatric social workers) into the homes of self-harmers, where a detailed picture began to emerge about the kinds of people who hurt themselves and their motivations for so doing. These practices of observation, which Millard examines in particular detail by assessing the role of the Observation Ward at Edinburgh, led to a psychiatric intervention into what had been a problem within physical medicine (the ‘failed suicide’ became a psychiatric category that could be followed home once their health returned for further investigation). Psychiatric explanations began to be offered to explain why the person had done such violence to themselves. A complex picture emerged whereby self-harm (especially overdosing) was considered to be a cry for help rather than a genuine attempt to end a life. By focusing on the changing practices within psychiatric care, Millard offers a compelling explanation for the development of this new psychiatric category, rather than just following its emergence through the pages of the Journal of Mental Science. Although in Britain the main focus for this argument was on self-poisoning (which makes up the largest number of hospitalizations for self-harm), increasingly under the influence of American psychiatry, it is self-cutting that has come to embody the exemplar of the contemporary self-harmer.

Millard is at his most remarkable in his conclusion, where he expands his argument in brilliant fashion to discuss the movement of self-harm from a communicative indication of internal suffering to an individualised, neurological issue by mapping these changes in psychiatry onto the ideological changes that followed the demise of social ideals to an embrace of neoliberal ideologies. He writes:

‘This political shift broadly coincides and intimately corresponds to the much more individualistic reading of self-damage, based on emotional self-regulation.  Indeed, neo-liberalism’s stress on individual actor’s radical freedom to make choices for their own benefit fits well with a model of self-harm that emphasises the individualistic, private feelings of tension, and the regulation of these through cutting. The coincidence of neo-liberal political ascendency from the early 1980s in the United States and United Kingdom, and the displacement of the social setting from understandings of self-damage are not chance occurrences.’ (205)

Self-harm is one of many examples where psychiatric care has moved to emphasise individuals, who can be put on medication regimes, rather than the more communal view of mental health and community therapy that flourished between the 1950s and 1970s.

Sometimes the detail in both books could have been significantly lessened.  To pick two examples, Chaney’s discussion of Freud’s Wolfman, and Millard’s 6 page exegesis of Samuel Waldenberg’s MPhil thesis on wrist-cutting, could have both have been much shorter without losing any significance to the respective books; this is probably an artefact of the two books having been converted out of PhDs. Furthermore given the foucaultien framework that was developed by Ian Hacking and which has influenced these two authors, it was a little surprising that more was not said about resistance. Sarah Chaney does end her book by looking at the ways that some self-harmers have responded to their condition, by taking back their lives from the medical practices in which they were framed as self-harming, through the production of literary, artistic and even historical works. On the other hand, Millard’s book gives little sense that any of the sufferers were anything other than passive actors in a complex medical system – which sits a little uncomfortably with his critique of neo-liberalism, which may even encourage such radical self-determination. It would have been very interesting to think even more broadly about the ways that self-harmers actively resist these medical discourses – as can be seen, for example, on the kinds of internet discussion forums on self-harm (as examined by Helena Mattingley’s 2009 Edinburgh University MSc thesis on self-harm). The making up of people is – as Hacking realised – not simply a top-down process. Individuals sometimes respond directly to these psychiatric regimes, and have otherwise developed their own strategies to cope with their struggles.  Often, taking control of their own body –by cutting it, or via some of the many other bodily practices that are increasingly prevalent, such as tattooing, sadomasochism, or other extreme bodily practices – is often seen to give a sense of asserted autonomy in a world where people increasingly are regulated. Placing the self-harmers in relation to these other bodily practices would help break them out of the psychiatric framework in which they have been confined.  The body can be a site for resistance, as well as a frame for the deployment of power.

I strongly recommend these two books for anyone interested in the topic of self-harm. They show two faces of the history of psychiatry as it is currently emerging from the University of London, and should be widely read.

Ivan Crozier is an Associate Professor and ARC Future Fellow in the History Department, of The University of Sydney, Australia

 

Han F. Vermeulen, Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015, $75.00. xxiii + 718 pages, ISBN: 978-0-8032-5542-5

by

Hilary Howes

The central argument of Han F. Vermeulen’s Before Boas, which checks in at an impressive – indeed, somewhat daunting – 718 pages, is presented with admirable conciseness at the very beginning of the first chapter.  Both ethnography, ‘conceived as a program for describing peoples and nations in Russian Asia and carried out by German-speaking explorers and historians’, and ethnology, developed by ‘historians in European academic centers dealing with a comprehensive and critical study of peoples’, ‘originated in the work of eighteenth-century German or German-speaking scholars associated with the Russian Academy of Sciences, the University of Göttingen, and the Imperial Library in Vienna’ (pp.1-2).  The formation of these studies, Vermeulen adds, ‘took place in three stages: (1) as Völker-Beschreibung or ethnography in the work of the German historian and Siberia explorer Gerhard Friedrich Müller during the first half of the eighteenth century, (2) as Völkerkunde and ethnologia in the work of the German or German-speaking historians August Ludwig Schlözer, Johann Christoph Gatterer, and Adam František Kollár during the second half of the eighteenth century, and (3) as ethnography or ethnology by scholars in other centers of learning in Europe and the United States during the final decades of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century’ (pp.1-2).  Building particularly on existing research by Hans Fischer and Justin Stagl into the importance of Göttingen as a locus of early ethnographic work, Vermeulen pushes the earliest uses of the German terms Völkerkunde, Ethnographie, ethnographisch, and Ethnograph back by several years, and the concept, as Völker-Beschreibung (description of peoples), by several decades.  In the process, he also raises several significant overarching points, including the interconnectedness of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century science in Western Europe and in Russia; the need to distinguish between ‘colonial anthropology’ and ‘anthropology developed in colonial contexts’; and the emergence of the ethnological sciences as part of global history (dealing with peoples and nations, defined primarily by their languages), rather than as part of anthropology (dealing with human varieties or ‘races’, defined primarily by their physical features).

Before Boas is divided into eight substantial chapters.  Chapter One, ‘History and Theory of Anthropology and Ethnology: Introduction’, and Chapter Eight, ‘Epilogue: Reception of the German Ethnographic Tradition’, usefully contextualise the real ‘meat’ of this study, namely Vermeulen’s exhaustive examination of little-known primary sources.  I particularly enjoyed Chapter Two, ‘Theory and Practice: G.W. Leibniz and the Advancement of Science in Russia’; Chapter Three, ‘Enlightenment and Pietism: D.G. Messerschmidt and the Early Exploration of Siberia’; and Chapter Four, ‘Ethnography and Empire: G.F. Müller and the Description of Siberian Peoples’.  As their titles suggest, these three interlinked chapters examine, respectively, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s (1646-1716) development of a strict methodology in what would now be called comparative or historical linguistics; the itinerary, methods, and results of Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt (1685-1735), ‘the first scientifically trained explorer of Siberia’ and the first to ‘systematically conduct ethnographic research’ there (115); and the inauguration of ‘ethnography as a descriptive study of peoples’ by the historian Gerhard Friedrich Müller (1705-1783).  In all three cases, Vermeulen points out, the general neglect by historians of these individuals’ contributions to the development of ethnography can largely be attributed to the ‘lack of published works’ (p.131).  An accurate assessment of Müller’s ethnographic work, for example, has only become possible with the very recent publication (in 2003, 2009, and 2010) of German and Russian editions of two of his manuscripts.

In addition to examining the published and unpublished writings of these three individuals – their correspondence, memoirs, reports, manuscripts, and maps – Vermeulen pays careful attention to their education and training, employment, contacts, and scholarly networks.  This approach emphatically underscores the remarkable mobility of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century savants, as well as the resulting interconnectedness of Western European and Russian science.  Vermeulen’s in-depth discussions of particular individuals and specific expeditions add valuable detail and nuance to existing scholarly work on Tsar Peter the Great’s ‘Petrine reforms’; the lower-level interactions he traces help flesh out contacts between figures at the top of the food chain.  For example, the establishment of an academy of sciences in Russia, which resulted in a significant influx of foreign scholars, is not described simply as a result of Leibniz’s meetings and correspondence with Tsar Peter the Great; rather, Vermeulen presents it as a multi-player process facilitated in large part by the Scottish head of the Apothecary Chancellery in Moscow, Robert Areskine (Erskine), and the Tsar’s main science adviser, Yakov Vilimovich Brius (Jacob Daniel Bruce).

In contrast to Chapters Two, Three, and Four, which blend seamlessly into one another, Chapter Five, ‘Anthropology and the Orient: C. Niebuhr and the Danish-German Arabia Expedition’, seemed to me to sit rather awkwardly within the structure of the book as a whole. Vermeulen introduces it by explaining that its ‘apparent lack of a colonial context … will give us occasion to further comment on the relation between ethnography and empire’, and that its ‘contributions to ethnological discourse were much less pronounced than Müller’s Siberian venture’, this being ‘a contrast that requires elucidation’ (p.218).  Perhaps it does, but 48 pages of elucidation struck me as excessive, particularly since Vermeulen’s main conclusion is essentially negative: the ‘new, “ethnic” principle’ introduced by German-speaking scholars in the Russian Empire, their ‘classification of “peoples” according to their languages’, was ‘not found in Niebuhr’s work’ (p.266).  As for Vermeulen’s insistence on the distinction ‘between “colonial anthropology” and “anthropology developed in colonial contexts”’ (p.28), I felt that this point, although undeniably important, was adequately made in Chapter Four.

Chapter Six, ‘From the Field to the Study: A.L. Schlözer and the Invention of Ethnology’, picks up where Chapter Four left off.  Having traced the concept of ethnography, in the form Völker-Beschreibung, to Müller’s research in Siberia (1740), Vermeulen concedes that the historian August Ludwig Schlözer (1735-1809) was ‘probably the man who invented the term Völkerkunde’ (270).  More importantly, Schlözer ‘was the first to initiate an “ethnographic method” into the study of history”; he employed the concepts Völkerkunde, Ethnographie, ethnographisch, and Ethnograph ‘in strategic passages that were central to his argument’, and ‘held a key position in the international network of scholars first applying the ethnos terms to designate a study of peoples’ (pp.270-271).  While I share James Urry’s (2016: 1) concern that the search for ‘points of origin for ideas and concepts … too often resembles that for the Holy Grail’, I could not help but be impressed by Vermeulen’s meticulously compiled table tracing the history of ‘Ethnological discourse in Asia, Europe, and the United States, 1710-1815’, from Leibniz’s historia etymologica in 1711-12 to B.G. Niebuhr’s Völker- und Länderkunde in 1815 (354-355).  A further valuable aspect of Chapter Six is the attention Vermeulen pays to the proliferation, in the final decades of the eighteenth century, of journals with Völkerkunde in their titles.  These were, in a sense, the first ethnological journals, but the phenomenon has largely been neglected by modern scholars.

Chapter Seven, ‘Anthropology in the German Enlightenment: Plural Approaches to Human Diversity’, offers an overview of anthropological studies in the German Enlightenment.  From a survey of major publications with the word ‘anthropology’ (or its French, German, Italian, and Latin equivalents) in their titles, Vermeulen concludes that anthropology was in fact a ‘polyvalent’ term, used not only for physical and biological approaches but for medical, theological, and philosophical ones (p.393).  He adds that anthropology ‘up until the eighteenth century … was very different from ethnology’; while the former ‘focused on human beings as individuals or as members of the human species’, the latter ‘dealt with particular kinds of human groupings, that is, peoples and nations’ (p.393).  This chapter, unlike the previous ones, is a summary rather than an in-depth study, and doubtless some historians of racial thought will feel that certain aspects or individuals should have been dealt with in more detail.  However, Vermeulen’s focus is on anthropology as an alternative approach to human diversity, and his main point – that ‘anthropology and ethnology developed in separate domains of learning’, and that ‘the distinction between civil (political) history and natural history remained very much alive in the eighteenth century’ (pp.392-393), despite various attempts to relate them – is an important one.

It is scarcely possible, in a book of this scope, to avoid a few minor errors and omissions.  For instance, Vermeulen states that the remains of the ‘main ship, commanded by [Jean-François de Galaup de] La Pérouse’ during his 1785-88 expedition to the Pacific, ‘have never been retrieved’ (p.343).  In fact the wreck of the Boussole was located by Reece Discombe at Vanikoro, Solomon Islands, in the 1960s, while the final resting place of its companion ship, the Astrolabe, has been known since at least the 1950s (Coleman, 1987; Tryon, 2008).  Investigations conducted in 1986 and 1990 by the Maritime Archaeological Section of the Queensland Museum recovered substantial amounts of material from both wrecks (Stanbury and Green, 2004).  Nor is Vermeulen correct to describe it as ‘a mystery why Blumenbach labelled [his] fifth [human] variety “Malayan”’ (p.373); as Bronwen Douglas has pointed out, in the third (1795) edition of his De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa, Blumenbach explicitly justified his use of the name ‘Malay’ ‘on the linguistic grounds that this “variety of men” mostly spoke Malay’ (Douglas, 2008: 107).

These, of course, are mere quibbles.  I was rather more startled to find, in so thoroughly researched a monograph as Vermeulen’s, a passing reference to Gavin Menzies’ widely critiqued (if not debunked) 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (see Goodman, 2006; Henige, 2008; Melleuish et al., 2009; Rivers, 2004).  Any of the numerous credible studies outlined by Finlay (2004) could more effectively have been used to support Vermeulen’s essentially uncontroversial claim that ‘the Chinese sea voyages of Zheng He’, like ‘the Russian conquest of Siberia during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, have ‘rarely been included in the canon of Western exploration’ (p.87).

Vermeulen’s close reading and careful analysis of little-known primary sources far outweigh these few flaws.  Before Boas is a substantial piece of scholarly work on a topic of ongoing interest.  It valuably complements the existing bodies of work dealing, on the one hand, with German-language contributions to the development of physical anthropology, and, on the other, with the history of British and American ethnology.  Historians of science, scholars of Enlightenment thought, and those interested in the peoples of Siberia are the obvious target audience, but I believe Before Boas also has much to offer to anthropologists, ethnologists, geographers, and historians, each of whom will learn a great deal about the history of their own discipline.

Hilary Howes is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at The Australian National University, working on Professor Matthew Spriggs’ Laureate Fellowship project ‘The Collective Biography of Archaeology in the Pacific: A Hidden History’ (CBAP).  Her current research, which addresses the German-speaking tradition within Pacific archaeology and ethnology, builds on her PhD dissertation, published in 2013 as The Race Question in Oceania: A.B. Meyer and Otto Finsch between metropolitan theory and field experience, 1865-1914.  Following various stints as a research assistant, tutor, co-lecturer, guest lecturer, and associate course co-ordinator, she was employed most recently as Executive Assistant to the Ambassador at the Australian Embassy in Berlin, where her responsibilities included facilitating the repatriation of Australian Indigenous ancestral remains from German collecting institutions.

 

References

Coleman, R. (1987) ‘Missing: Explorer’s Disappearance Creates a 200-year-old Puzzle’, Australian Geographic 8: 86-99.

Douglas, B. (2008) ‘“Novus Orbis Australis”: Oceania in the Science of Race, 1750-1850’, in B. Douglas and C. Ballard (eds) Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race 1750-1940. Canberra, ACT: ANU E Press, pp. 99-155.

Goodman, D.S.G. (2006) ‘Mao and the Da Vinci Code: Conspiracy, Narrative and History’, The Pacific Review 19(3): 359-384.

Finlay, R. (2004) ‘How Not to (Re)Write World History: Gavin Menzies and the Chinese Discovery of  America’, Journal of World History 15(2): 229-242.

Henige, D. (2008) ‘The Alchemy of Turning Fiction into Truth’, Journal of Scholarly Publishing 39(4): 354-372.

Melleuish, G., Sheiko, K. and Brown, S. (2009) ‘Pseudo History/Weird History: Nationalism and the Internet’, History Compass 7(6): 1484-1495.

Rivers, P.J. (2004) 1421 Voyages: Fact and Fantasy. Ipoh: Perak Academy.

Stanbury, M. and Green, J. (eds) (2004) Lapérouse and the Loss of the Astrolabe and the Boussole (1788): Reports of the 1986 and 1990 Investigations of the Two Shipwrecks of the French              Explorer at Vanikoro, Solomon Islands. Fremantle, W.A.: Australasian Institute for Maritime   Archaeology.

Tryon, D. (2008) ‘Vale Reece Discombe (1919-2007)’, Pambu: Pacific Manuscripts Bureau Newsletter 24: 10-11.

Urry, J. (2016) ‘Book Review: Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment’, TAJA: The Australian Journal of Anthropology 0 (Early View): 1-2, accessed 2     December 2016, accessible @: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/taja.12217/full

 

 

Marianne Sommer, History Within: The Science, Culture, and Politics of Bones, Organisms, and Molecules, London and Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2016, 544 pages, cloth $50.00 ISBN 9780226347325.

by Chris Renwick

UNESCO – the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation – is probably best known to the public for the “world heritage site” status it has awarded to buildings, structures, and places including the Acropolis, the Galapagos Islands, and the Taj Mahal since it was founded in 1945. Given this role as a guardian of the globe’s heritage, it might surprise some people that UNESCO’s first director – and the man who insisted it include science as well as education and culture in its remit – was Julian Huxley (1887-1975). Grandson of “Darwin’s Bulldog”, Thomas Henry Huxley, Julian was a distinguished biologist in his own right and a public intellectual who had written numerous best-sellers, including Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942), been Secretary of the Zoological Society of London, and even won an Oscar for his documentary film, The Private Life of Gannets (1934). Julian Huxley’s connection with UNESCO made perfect sense. A campaigner for what he called “evolutionary” or “scientific” humanism, he believed there was no good reason to exclude the stuff of which we are made from our concept of heritage.

Huxley’s vision is one of the three overlapping evolutionary programmes – the others belonging to the American paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857-1935) and the Italian geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza (b. 1922) – that Marianne Sommer has weaved into the compelling History Within. Charting almost 100 years across 15 deeply researched and packed chapters, Sommer tells a story about the efforts to come to terms with the biological, social, and cultural meaning of evolution during the twentieth century. Focusing on an evolving understanding of heritage, through which thinkers fused biology, society, and culture whilst avoiding reductionism, History Within documents a complex intergenerational project to provide us with a scientifically-informed account of what it is to be human. In so doing, Sommer takes us from the early twentieth-century world of what historians have called “mainline” eugenics, in which categories like race had essentialist properties, to the triumph of diversity, in both politics and biology, 70 years later.

Central to Sommer’s argument about those developments is the idea that they were both made possible by and a direct consequence of networks that included not only scientific and political ideas but also technology and modes of communication. Whilst Huxley went so far as resigning his university chair to devote more time to communicating his ideas to a wider public, Osborn worked as both a professor of biology at Columbia University and a curator at the American Museum of Natural History. Cavalli-Sforza, a former student of the British population geneticist R. A. Fisher, integrated his work at Stanford with the latest advances in computing, helping to lay foundations for both the Human Genome Diversity Project and the National Geographic-funded Genographic Project. Immersing ourselves in each of these thinkers’ worlds takes us from an effort to illustrate and encourage people to engage with human evolution through dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History to electronic maps showing the migration of genes across the globe. At each stage, new research techniques made it possible to look deeper into ourselves and increased the amount of information that accounts of human history could include. But they also furnished people like Osborn, Huxley and Cavalli-Sforza with new ways of thinking about humans and opened up new possibilities for people to engage with them.

As Sommer shows, these developments, which have created businesses that will decode genomes for a fee and the idea that heritage can be identified with our genetic makeup, have always existed within a complex and precarious set of political and cultural relationships. Indeed, History Within is most thought-provoking and insightful when it comes to the twentieth-century struggle to fashion a biology that worked productively with left and liberal politics. When allied with his science, Osborn’s somewhat unforgiving eugenics generated a story about humanity that was hierarchical and excluded races and groups. Huxley, however, saw eugenics as having more to do with equality of opportunity – an idea that provided the foundation for his later and more famous work on the UN Statements on Race, which declared race a social, not biological, category. Yet in a post-war world where Huxley’s once-progressive beliefs about eugenics suddenly sounded old-fashioned, Cavalli-Sforza transformed apparently empty biological categories into positive political statements. Genetic geography, with arrows and maps showing the global movement of people, told us about that a common humanity that stretched deep into the past and could be discovered within us.

As Sommer argues, though, problems have persisted, even with this apparent resolution to the challenge set by mid-twentieth-century biosocial progressives. One is the tendency to treat some communities as living fossils – reminders of some geographic and cultural staging post on the way to our own current state. Given that the science involves choices about which groups to sample, stories about genetic and cultural development map historical change in complex and politically fraught ways; for example, by making some people and places part of others’ pasts. At the same time, however, the constant pursuit of diversity in the biosocial sphere threatens to overload us with information, making it difficult to support a story about human heritage that is as coherent as it was when Cavalli-Sforza first started work – a scenario that will be familiar to anyone engaged with the politics of “big data”. Indeed, there is another order of questions that History Within alludes to, namely what all these developments in understanding our past might mean for our future. In the decades after the Second World War, when he was forced to drop eugenics as a frontline concern, Huxley wrote about something he called “transhumanism” – how our knowledge of biological and psychological science might be used to overcome our physical limitations. Diversity was an important part of this project because Huxley had come to believe that, given it was essential for evolutionary progress, society’s role was to compensate for its costs, such as disability. This was a very different answer, of course, to the one offered by earlier mainline eugenicists, who believed in the purity of races. In this respect, progressive social and political ideals have been integral to biology and our understanding of the human during the past 70 years. But with private companies becoming significant actors in the development and communication of these ideas, there are profoundly important questions about the ownership of human heritage, not to mention inequalities in participating in it and accessing any of its future benefits. Sommer offers us a profoundly important historical frame for thinking about this problem, not to mention the others that will emerge in future.

Chris Renwick is senior lecturer in modern history at the University of York and an editor of History of the Human Sciences. He works on the relationship between biology, social science, and politics, and is the author of British Sociology’s Lost Biological Roots: A History of Futures Past (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

 

L’Âge d’homme preceded by L’Afrique fantôme, by Michel Leiris. Paris: Gallimard, 2014. Edited by Denis Hollier, in collaboration with Francis Marmande and Catherine Maubon, Series: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, n°600. 1456 pages, 38 ill., ISBN: 9782070114559.

by Emmanuel Delille

A new edition of L’Âge d’homme (available in English as Manhood)[ref]Leiris, M. (1992) Manhood: A Journey from Childhood into the Fierce Order of Virility, translated by Richard Howard. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.[/ref] by Michel Leiris (1901-1990), overseen by Denis Hollier, was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade at the end of 2014. It constitutes the second volume of Leiris’ selected works, the first volume being La Règle du jeu[ref] Leiris, M. (2003) La Règle du jeu, ed. Denis Hollier, in collaboration with Nathalie Barberger, Jean Jamin, Catherine Maubon, Pierre Vilar, and Louis Yvert. Paris: Gallimard.[/ref]. The edition presents selected autobiographical texts in addition to L’Âge d’homme, including L’Afrique fantôme. (The latter is often translated into English as Ghostly Africa, but will be soon published for the first time as Phantom Africa in a new translation by Brent Hayes Edwards).[ref]Available in English in February 2017: Leiris, M. (2016) Phantom Africa, trans. Brent Hayes Edwards. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.[/ref] L’Afrique fantôme is an essay that is simultaneously controversial and foundational for French ethnology. Hollier’s editorial decision highlights Leiris’ contribution to the genre that we call autofiction, wherein autobiographical materials are rewritten using the techniques of fiction writing – in contrast to the raw journals kept by Leiris between 1922 and 1989. Hollier has proposed the general title L’âge d’homme fantôme[ref]Hollier, D. (2014a) ‘Préface’, in Michel Leiris, L’Âge d’homme précédé de L’Afrique fantôme, ed. Denis Hollier in collaboration with Francis Marmande and Catherine Maubon. Paris: Gallimard, XI.[/ref] to identify this corpus; following Edwards’ new translation of Phantom Africa, an English version of this title could be Phantom Manhood [ref]I am very grateful to Professor Brent Hayes Edwards (Columbia University), who answered my questions about his new translation and suggested Phantom Manhood as a general title in English.[/ref]

The volume is imposing; for this reason, my analysis focuses solely on L’Âge d’homme, the best-known of Leiris’ books among the general public (L’Afrique fantôme is the object of another review article, in the Japanese academic journal Zinbun).[ref]Delille, E. (2017) ‘Michel Leiris, L’Âge d’homme, précédé de L’Afrique fantôme. Édition de Denis Hollier, avec la collaboration de Francis Marmande et Catherine Maubon, (Paris, Gallimard, Collection: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, n°600, 2014, 1456 pages, ill.)’, Zinbun: Memoirs of the Research Institute for Humanistic Studies, Kyoto University, 47: in press. [/ref] From my perspective, it is not, for all that, his masterpiece; however, this narrative has benefited from its long availability as a mass-market paperback, unlike L’Afrique fantôme. Of Leiris’ books, it is also the one closest to the genre of confessional literature: it reveals the author’s sexual obsessions, the pathological shame he felt, and how he turned to the psychoanalytic interpretation of myths to narrate his experience.

Hollier soberly recounts the book’s context: after a period of anguish and impotence, Leiris began psychoanalysis in 1929 with Adrien Borel (1886-1966), one of the first French psychoanalysts, on the advice of his friend Georges Bataille (1897-1962). He then joined the Dakar-Djibouti Ethnographic Mission (1931-1933) and published a long travel narrative, L’Afrique fantôme (1934). L’Âge d’homme soon followed (1935), although it only really began to take shape after a second series of psychoanalytic treatments (1933-34).

While Leiris was at the very beginning of his scientific career in the 1930s, it is obvious that he drew on two disciplinary genres in order to breathe new life into confessional writing: psychoanalytic and ethnographic narratives. Indeed, as in L’Afrique fantôme, Leiris began with the principle that writing in the subjective mode increases the value of the testimony contained in the book and brings it closer to the truth. Eight chapters tell the story of his childhood and adolescence until the age of reason: marriage, the publication of his first works, and the beginning of a scientific career. Parental figures, his brothers and sister, and his first romantic relationships haunt the narrative, even though the figure of the beloved brother is not as well developed as in The Rules of the Game (La Règle du jeu). Nevertheless, the text is not structured as a family drama in the strict sense; instead, the plot is organized around a painting by Cranach that represents two biblical figures: Judith and Lucretia (Cranach, 16^th century). Leiris saw in this diptych a kind of crystallization of his obsessions: two women who personify the two faces, desired and terrifying, of his fantasy. At one and the same time, woman is the object of man’s imperious desire (rape of Lucretia) and triumphant against her rapist (Judith decapitating Holofernes). The influence of psychoanalysis allowed him to identify his fascination with Cranach’s diptych with the concept of the castration complex, which Leiris believed explained his anxieties: “By psychoanalysis, I hoped to free myself from this chimerical fear of punishment, a chimera reinforced by the absurd power of Christian morality – which one must never flatter oneself that one has altogether escaped.”[ref]Leiris, M. (1992) Manhood: A Journey from Childhood into the Fierce Order of Virility, translated by Richard Howard. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 138. See also: Leiris, M. (2014) L’Âge d’homme précédé de L’Afrique fantôme, ed. Denis Hollier in collaboration with Francis Marmande and Catherine Maubon. Paris: Gallimard, 889-890.[/ref] In Freudian psychoanalysis, the castration complex designates the anxiety that results from the Oedipus complex, which is to say the love children have for their mother, as it is checked by paternal power. This infantile fear represents a certain renunciation of the maternal object, but also an irreversible loss: it thus constitutes an existential anguish, which makes it susceptible to displacement onto substitute objects.

Yet one of the most interesting aspects of this new edition is precisely that it draws attention to the biblical personage with whom Leiris identifies: Holofernes. Indeed, in his foreword, Hollier justly stresses the disappearance of Judith and Lucretia in the conclusion of L’Âge d’homme; they are replaced by masculine figures, suggestive of homosexuality, that are designed to be more harmonious with the psychoanalytic theme of castration.[ref]Hollier, D. (2014b) ‘Notice: David et Goliath ou la castration’, in Michel Leiris, L’Âge d’homme précédé de L’Afrique fantôme, ed. Denis Hollier in collaboration with Francis Marmande and Catherine Maubon. Paris: Gallimard, 1227.[/ref] He also reproduces some of Leiris’ corrected proofs, one of which is soberly entitled Psychanalyse (Psychoanalysis, December 1930).[ref]Leiris, M. (2014) L’Âge d’homme précédé de L’Afrique fantôme, ed. Denis Hollier in collaboration with Francis Marmande and Catherine Maubon. Paris: Gallimard, 31.[/ref] which Leiris had originally intended to insert before a dream narrative.

From a historical point of view, we know that the interpretation of symbols played an important role in the beginnings of psychoanalysis, particularly in the first half of the 20^th century. This practice first appeared as a technique for interpreting dreams, with the goal of filling out the material obtained in the patient’s free associations while recounting a dream. For the therapist, it helped both to overcome mental blocks and to explain Oedipal fantasies to the patient. But psychoanalysts soon extended this practice to interpreting symbols in myths, religions, and literary texts; Freud himself based his analysis of infantile sexuality on Greek mythology and published an essay on the biblical figure of Moses.

Hollier also presents a previously unpublished letter written by Leiris to his wife, dated May 30^th, 1932. It explains that Borel’s virtue lay in his having understood that Leiris wanted to play the role of a mythological character: he would stage himself in the form of a new Holofernes[ref]Hollier, D. (2014b) ‘Notice : David et Goliath ou la castration’, in Michel Leiris, L’Âge d’homme précédé de L’Afrique fantôme, ed. Denis Hollier in collaboration with Francis Marmande and Catherine Maubon. Paris: Gallimard, 1229.[/ref], in an autobiographical narrative where confession would have a cathartic function. Finally, Hollier observes that castration is also an explicit theme of two texts, contemporary with Leiris’ writings, that were published in 1930 in the journal Documents; this journal was edited by Bataille and lists Borel as one of its contributors.

These materials make a convincing argument that Leiris identified himself with a mythological character. It is unfortunate, however, that the editors chose not to present more context about the appropriation of psychoanalysis by writers of this generation, and that they even forgot to list Borel in their index. This oversight is all the more curious because the very interesting appendices of this new edition contain a Note remise au docteur Borel (Note delivered to Doctor Borel, 1929)[ref]Leiris, M. (2014) L’Âge d’homme précédé de L’Afrique fantôme, ed. Denis Hollier in collaboration with Francis Marmande and Catherine Maubon. Paris: Gallimard, 912.[/ref], followed by Projets de mémoires (Ideas for Memoirs, 1930)[ref]Ibid., 913-915.[/ref], extracted from Leiris’ journal and contemporaneous with his psychoanalysis – a corpus of texts which should have been compared with those written by other former surrealists who undertook psychoanalysis with Borel.

And yet evidence indicating that these texts represent collective practices is not lacking, and editors might have remembered that in the Bible, Judith’s victims include not only Holofernes, but his army as well! Because in addition to Leiris and Bataille, we must also take into account Jacques Baron, Raymond Queneau, Colette Peignot (pseudonym: Laure), and Boris Souvarine, all of whom were in therapy with Borel. Moreover, Borel was not only a confidant of but also an intermediary between the members of this group, as their correspondence demonstrates. For example, in 1934, Baron revealed to Leiris that he too had taken the initiative of asking for help: “I’m not joking, but I’m heading to Privas to visit Doctor Borel! Tell no one about this idiocy, but I’m dreaming: I have all of hell in my head.”[ref]The original French text: “Je ne rigole pas, mais je pars pour Privas rendre visite au Docteur Adrien Borel. Ne souffle mot à personne d’une telle idiotie mais je rêve: j’ai tout l’enfer dans la tête.” Leiris, M. & Baron, J. (2013) Correspondance 1925-1973. Nantes: Joseph K., 149. The English translation here, by Marie Satya McDonough, is literal, because Baron’s expressions are not clear in French. We know that he suffered from depression after the War, but we must be wary of retrospective diagnoses. See also: Delille, E. (2016) ‘Michel Leiris & Jacques Baron, Correspondance. Édition établie, annotée et préfacée par Patrice Allain & Gabriel Parnet (Nantes, éditions Joseph K., 2013, 192 pages)’, Zinbun: Memoirs of the Research Institute for Humanistic Studies, Kyoto University, 46: 213-215.[/ref] That same year, Leiris wrote to Bataille: “If you see Borel after receiving this letter, give him my regards and tell him that I am trying hard to be good.”[ref]Bataille, G. & Leiris, M. (2008) Correspondence, trans. Liz Heron. Chicago: University of Chicago Press/Seagull Books, 105.[/ref] Similarly, in 1943 he wrote him about the posthumous publication of a text by Peignot: “Did you receive the Histoire d’une petite fille? All the copies planned have now been distributed, except Borel’s (but I expect to go and see him within a very few days).”[ref]Ibid., 160.[/ref] We thereby see how in the 1930s, psychoanalysis was a collective practice, much like automatic writing, introduced in The Magnetic Fields (Les Champs magnétiques) in 1920.[ref]Available in English as The Magnetic Fields: Breton A. & Soupault P. (1985) The Magnetic Fields, translated and introduced by David Gascoyne. London: Atlas Press.[/ref]

This intellectual social scene, enthusiastic about psychoanalysis, also had an impact on academic psychology. For example, after the suicide of the eccentric writer Raymond Roussel (1877-1933), Leiris was tasked with editing How I Wrote Certain of My Books[ref]Roussel, R. (2005) How I Wrote Certain of My Books, edited by Trevor Winkfield and introduced by John Ashbery. Boston: Exact Change.[/ref] (Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres, 1935), a posthumous autobiographical essay. The project led him to contact the psychologist Pierre Janet, a professor at the Collège de France and Roussel’s psychotherapist, in order to reconstruct his illustrious patient’s last days. Bataille would repeat the gesture in consulting Borel with regard to the posthumous edition of Peignot – and that is not all: in 1937, Leiris would join Bataille in founding a Société de Psychologie Collective, with Borel and Janet! This Society’s goal was to study the psychological factors in social facts. While it may be argued that this information is well-known, unfortunately the existing historiography on the crossed histories of psychoanalysis, psychology, and early 20^th century avant-gardes reveals that the collaborations between the literary world and academic psychology are relatively unknown. I am thinking in particular of Alexandra Bacopoulos-Viau’s research,[ref]Bacopoulos-Viau, A. (2012) ‘Automatism, Surrealism and the Making of French Psychopathology: The Case of Pierre Janet’, History of Psychiatry 23(3): 259-276.[/ref] which is well documented but too focused on Breton, and where Leiris is literally forgotten. Beyond Borel and Janet, Leiris would consult other psychotherapists after the war, including Julián de Ajuriaguerra (1911-1993), who would later become, like Janet, professor at the Collège de France. To sum up, it would have been interesting to establish the similarities and the differences between L’Âge d’homme and the accounts, diaries, and fictions that Leiris’ contemporaries left on the practice of psychoanalysis.

Emmanuel Delille is a historian of medicine and health, currently Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. He is an Associate Researcher at the Centre d’Archives en Philosophie, Histoire et Édition des Sciences (CAPHÉS, École Normale Supérieure, Paris) and at the Centre Marc Bloch (CMB, Humboldt University, Berlin). One of his major interests is the history of psychiatry: intellectual networks and comparative history between France, Germany, and North America – particularly Canada. Other research projects include the history of the French psychiatric hospital Bonneval (Eure-et-Loir) and the history of the French scholarly society “L’Évolution Psychiatrique” (created in 1924). His work in intellectual history focuses on epistolary material, above all, letters between scientists involved in scholarly networks.

James E. Strick, Wilhelm Reich, Biologist. (London: Harvard University Press, 2015). 467pp. ISBN 9780674736092. (hardcover), £31.95

by Matei Iagher 

In his biography of Wilhelm Reich (1983), Myron Sharaf began the section on Reich’s scientific work with a warning that he did not have the requisite competence to judge this scientific work, and that the existing literature on this aspect of Reich’s work was too unreliable to be used  in making a critical assessment. This caveat could be read as a challenge for historians of science, but as the Reich archives only became available in 2007, the task of providing a competent, historical account of Reich’s biological work also had to wait. The wait has not been in vain, as with James Strick’s Wilhelm Reich, Biologist we now have a balanced and thoroughly researched account of Reich’s experimental work in the 1930s, which is likely to become the standard for any future historical investigation of Reich’s work.

Outside of a small circle of researchers and aficionados, Wilhelm Reich’s name does not immediately evoke associations with laboratory biological research. Rather, he is much more well-known as a psychotherapist, a psychoanalyst and Freudian dissenter, and above all, as a forefather of  the 1960s sexual revolution and as an intellectual source for later American and European counterculture. Much of the popular image of Reich is, even today, glazed over with an unsavory patina—an echo of the sensationalist reporting that tarnished his reputation in the 1950s, when the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) also made him the target of a witch hunt (Reich’s books were burnt, and he was eventually imprisoned for contempt of court). Part of the aim of Strick’s book is to destroy this popular, pseudo-scientific aura that hangs around Reich, by showing that some of his most controversial theories were rooted in serious, cutting edge research.

Methodologically, the book draws on an extensive engagement with the Reich archive (his laboratory notebooks, correspondence, research and personal images), which is used to reconstruct Reich’s working methods, theoretical commitments and the process whereby he obtained his results. In addition, this is very much a book about debates in early twentieth century biology (and Reich’s place within them) as well as a book about changing paradigms in the life-sciences. The word ‘paradigm’ is not accidental, as Strick mentions Kuhn, and particularly his notion of ‘revolutionary science,’ more than once, as a way of describing Reich’s biological work. As he writes in the introduction: ‘Scientists, then, whose names we associate with revolutions—Copernicus, Newton, Lavoisier, Darwin, Pasteur, Semmelweiss—all, by definition, faced staunch, often irrational resistance to their ideas, not least from the established scientific authorities of their day. I argue that Reich’s work on biogenesis in the bion experiments, and certainly the visceral reactions it provoked, need to be understood in this light’ (p.8). This is pretty illustrious company, to say the least, but it reflects Strick’s sense that Reich drew the short straw of history and that he deserves a posthumous rehabilitation.

Wilhelm Reich, Biologist thus sets out to perform this rehabilitation, by examining Reich’s theoretical and experimental work in biology, undertaken in Oslo between 1934-1939. The book’s seven chapters chart Reich’s discovery of the ‘bions’ (microscopic particles that Reich saw as intermediary between inanimate matter and life) and outline the process by which Reich tried (and ultimately failed) to get his research validated by the wider academic community. As Strick’s focus is on Reich’s work as a biological researcher, the book contains only scattered remarks about Reich’s work as a psychotherapist and a psychologist in the 1930s. It is regrettable that Strick did not explore the connection with psychology in more depth, both in the case of Reich himself, as well as by comparing Reich’s forays into biology with those of other contemporary psychologists (such as Freud and Jung, for example, who both based their psychological systems on biological theories). Sulloway’s Freud, Biologist of the Mind (1979) or Shamdasani’s Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology (2003) might have helped to further contextualise the question of why an early twentieth century psychologist would look toward biology as a way of vindicating and expanding upon his psychological theories. At the same time, I can find no argument (other than the book’s already substantial length) for why the narrative does not continue beyond 1939, and into Reich’s American years.

The book’s first chapter (pp.16-63) examines the intellectual context of Reich’s experimental work, surveying the relevant debates in the turn of the century research in the life sciences (mechanism/vitalism, the concept of a specific life-energy, holism, dialectical materialism) and also surveys Reich’s personal journey from Viennese psychoanalyst to origin of life researcher. Chapter 2 (pp. 64-98) then proceeds to outline the process whereby Reich discovered the bions. As Strick explains, Reich was early on struck by an analogy between the amoeba’s extending of a pseudopod and the erection of the penis (p.61, 75). In a rather androcentric way, Reich argued that human sexuality in general was ‘functionally equivalent’ to the protist’s reaching out ‘toward the world’ with its pseudopod. Sexual arousal was rooted in the autonomic nervous system, which Reich claimed was a protozoan structure still present in the metazoan organism. Strick then traces the way in which Reich’s work on human sexuality precipitated his turn towards laboratory science.

After moving to Oslo in 1934, Reich began to study the bioelectric potential of the human skin. The conclusion of this study was that ‘the sexual process, then, is the biological-productive energy process per se’ (73). As Strick shows, it was this idea that, around 1936, led Reich to study the electrical charges of microorganisms like the amoeba. The discovery of the ‘bions’ followed from there: Reich was instructed to soak moss in water for ten to fourteen days in order to obtain a fresh culture of amoebas. Unsure of, or unconvinced by the explanation that amoebas came from spores present everywhere in nature, Reich proceeded to observe the process under the microscope. He concluded that before protozoa were formed, a series of vesicular shapes (i.e. bions) could be clearly seen detaching from the moss and then assuming some of the signs of life, such as motility and inner pulsation. The bions could be further cultivated through successive generations, using various preparations. Over time, through variations in the ingredients, Reich was able to produce bions with different properties.

In chapter 3 (pp. 99-145), Strick charts Reich’s dialogue and collaboration with Roger du Teil, a French philosopher who took an early interest in the bion work, and who offered to perform control experiments and to lobby on behalf of Reich’s theories among his French colleagues. This chapter allows Strick to go into more depth about the criticisms that were leveled against the bions, such as the fact that Reich was merely looking at bacteria picked up through air contamination, or that the lifelike movement he was observing was merely Brownian movement. As Strick convincingly argues, both of these critiques fell wide of the mark. Reich took particular care to sterilize his preparations, over and above what normal sterilization procedures at the time would have required. In one such instance, he burned soot to incandescence, before sticking it into his culture media (p.133). Such temperature would have been enough to kill off any common bacteria. Curiously however, Reich’s bions formed faster when the preparations where boiled than when they were not. Regarding the issue of the lifelike movements of the bions, Strick notes that Reich was using a state of the art microscope not usually available to most laboratories at the time and that the failure of other researchers to identify these movement was also due to a lack of requisite high-end apparatus (p.102, 127).

In chapter 4 (pp. 146-185), Strick halts the narrative in order to discuss Reich’s theoretical commitments and methodology. As Strick argues, Reich considered his dialectical-materialist method (later rebranded as ‘energetic functionalism’) as essential to understanding his work on bions. The chapter is an interesting case study of what constituted the scientific-method for Reich (as opposed to other contemporary dialectical materialists such as Alexander Oparin or J.D. Bernal) and serves as a prelude to chapter 5, which discusses Reich’s work on cancer. As Strick shows, Reich had theorised (on the basis of his own materialist ontology) that cancer was an endogenous disease, brought about by bions formed from disintegrating organic material, well before he ever looked at cancer tissue under the microscope. In chapter 5 (pp.186-217), Strick traces the development of Reich’s ideas about cancer and the experiments (some of them frustrated by his falling out with one of the main cancer specialists in Oslo) he devised to test them.

While Reich’s ontology was no doubt productive in setting him on the track of an original cancer theory, the public articulation of that ontology may have well have set him up for the response that followed from his Norwegian colleagues. As shown in chapter 6 (pp. 218-269), Reich was the target of a bitter press campaign meant to discredit his work, and, as some hoped, to get him to leave the country. As Strick shows, in ‘the small town of Oslo,’ the academic establishment did not take kindly to a dialectical materialist who was also a Jew, with no formal training in biology, and who evinced a radical stance toward sexuality and unorthodox ideas about the origin of life and cancer. As Strick also demonstrates, Reich’s Norwegian detractors had a vested interest in attacking Reich and his work: they were competing for the same funding from the Rockefeller foundation, the only major funding body around in the Depression era (p.227). The book’s seventh chapter (pp.270-310) seeks to bring the story full circle, by returning to the issue of the specific life-energy first broached in the first chapter. This final chapter thus charts Reich’s discovery of the radiating ‘SAPA bions’ and his eventual conclusion that the energy emitted by these bions was the specific life-energy or, as he began to call it in 1939, ‘orgone.’

In the Epilogue, Strick asks himself: ‘Is this story of purely historical interest?’ (311). The answer, one is led to believe, is clearly ‘no.’ Much like Hasok Chang, who has put forward the idea of a history and philosophy of science that functions as ‘complementary science,’ Strick is interested in the way in which historical knowledge might be useful in uncovering and helping to reinstate forms of scientific knowledge that have been obscured or deliberately left out in the development of scientific disciplines (Chang, 2004).  At the same time, to ask what relevance Reich’s work might have today is a question that follows from the attempt to take Reich’s work seriously—something which, as Strick reminds us, few historians and scientists have done before. And to take it seriously means to consider the proposition that Reich was indeed looking at something real, that his bions were not merely the imaginary constructs of a deluded dilettante. Strick’s work makes the reasoned case that Reich was indeed on to something. What that something might be is not for the historian to decide. Nevertheless, Strick seems to write for more than just a historical audience, and biologically minded readers might want to pick up on some of the suggestions that are scattered throughout the book. Even so, as Strick shows, Reich’s work diverged so radically from everything that happened in biology in the decades since the discovery of the bions that it may prove as difficult to give it a fair hearing today as it was in the 1930s.

 

Matei Iagher obtained his PhD in the History of Medicine from UCL in 2016, with a thesis about the history of the psychology of religion. He is now working on turning his dissertation into a monograph.

 

References

Chang, H. (2004) Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Shamdasani, S. (2003) Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sharaf, M. (1983) Fury on Earth: A Biography of Wilhelm Reich. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Sulloway, F.J. (1979) Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend. London: Burnett Books.

 

Jan De Vos and Ed Pluth (Eds.), Neuroscience and Critique: Exploring the Limits of the Neurological Turn

New York and London, Routledge, 2016, 236 pages, hardback £95.00, paperback £31.99, ISBN: 978-1138887350

What is it about neuroscience? Ever since a group of disparate life sciences – partly propelled by ‘the decade of the brain’ in the 1990s[ref]Rees, D and Rose, S. (2004) The New Brain Sciences: Perils and Prospects, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press[/ref] – congealed into what we today call ‘neuroscience,’ scholars from the humanities and social sciences have been committed, sometimes intensely committed, to a more-or-less sharp critique of this science, and the unspooling of its socio-political effects[ref]Edwards, R., Gillies, V., and Horsley, N. (2015) ‘Early Intervention and Evidence based Policy and Practice: Framing and Taming. Social Policy and Society 15(1): 1-10[/ref][ref]Martin, E. (2000) ‘Mind-Body Problems’, American Ethnologist 27(3): 569-590[/ref][ref]Bennett, MR and Hacker, PMS (2003) Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, London: Wiley[/ref]. Indeed, in recent years, neuroscience has not only been the object of critical scrutiny, but has become something of a whet-stone on which critique sharpens itself – a sort of funhouse mirror for critical social scientists to figure out what it is, exactly, they stand for. What explains this cultural role of neuroscience in the academy? Is it a fear that, in its powerfully reductive hold over human subjectivity (so it seems, anyway), neuroscience will ultimately stake a claim to all social, cultural, and human insight – an ‘expectation,’ as Jan De Vos and Ed Puth put it in their introduction to Neuroscience and Critique, ‘that the neurosciences will explain it all?’ (p.2).

Neuroscience and Critique appears in an established genre – but it has significant virtues of its own. Central among these is the sheer breadth of its scholarship: this is a properly interdisciplinary collection, featuring not only philosophers with interests in critical theory and/or psychoanalysis, but also a geographer, an anthropologist and STS scholar, a neuroscientist, and a psychologist, among others. What holds this disparate collection of interests together is a commitment to not only some kind of critical engagement with neuroscience – but also a shared attention to what, precisely, critique can do, even to what critique might be, as it gets more widely entangled in neuro-sciences and neuro-cultures. At the heart of the book, then, is a deeply committed reflexive attention to what it is we do when we think critically about neuroscience. The conjunction ‘and’ in the book’s title is crucial: at stake here are not only the ‘conditions of possibility’ for neuroscience, but also for critique itself (p.4). As I will discuss below, I think there is an uneven distribution of sophistication in the consideration of these two poles; nonetheless, readers looking for careful work on the stakes of critique today, especially as it approaches the natural sciences, will find much to think with in this volume.

The book is in three sections. The first, ‘Which Critique?’, perhaps the most overtly philosophical of the three, is also where we get the most explicit examination of the conditions of critique itself. It asks, as Jan De Vos puts it in his own contribution: ‘what are the limits of a deconstruction of neuroscience?’ (p.24). In De Vos’s account, one cannot simply do ideology-critique of neuroscience today, given the claim that neuroscience itself now makes on critical thought (‘targeting our false consciousness, laying bare the illusions involved in love, altruism, rationality…’ [p.23]). As De Vos shows, however, neuroscientific empirics remain haunted by psychological and humanistic concepts – they are inhabited, he argues, by a folk-psychological human subject, coterminous with the birth of the modern sciences, and which might itself yet be the object of critical scholarship (p.25, 39). A more overt defence of critique is offered by Nima Bassiri – who, against the fashion of the times is unconvinced that critique has to be associated with ‘negativity, undue skepticism [and] excessive suspicion’ (p.41). Bassiri proposes instead a different kind of critical question, one not mounted on this suspicious imperative, viz. (I paraphrase): what is it about contemporary selfhood that legitimizes brain science as its singular technology? This is a good question, and Bassiri approaches it through an historical epistemology of forensics – uncovering a need, especially in the nineteenth century, and amid concerns over disorders of simulation and malingering, to decide whether we are or are not our selves, in the grip of such experiences (p.55).

The second section (I am only here selectively surveying some essays from each), ‘Some Critiques’ is the most empirical part of the volume, and this, not coincidentally, is where it is strongest. Geographer Jessica Pykett, for example, analyses ‘the political significance of the influence of psychological and neuroscientific approaches in economic theory’ (p.82) – situating her account in the work of ‘discerning the precise models of the human subject selected by policy makers’ (p.88). That labour of discernment leaves Pykett well placed to propose, against the turn to ‘non-representational’ theories in geography, that ‘the widely presaged undoing of the human subject within human geography may… be premature’ (p.96). In the volume’s most compelling chapter, Cynthia Kraus, of the interdisciplinary ‘Neurogenderings’ research network, argues against self-consciously ‘critical’ programmes that are too often wrapped up in attempts to assuage conflict. Kraus argues, instead, for ‘dissensus,’ or the ‘study of social conflicts inherent to processes of knowledge and world making’ (p.104). As she points out: ‘people come to speak the language of the brain, not only because it has a prominent truth-discourse… they do it to come to terms with conflicting life situations’ (p.105). And it is not only by focusing on, but indeed exacerbating such conflict, says Kraus, that scholars interpellated by neuroculture might pose ‘the conditions under which interdisciplinarity… could be valued as a theoretical and practical solution’ (p.112).

The final section, ‘Critical Praxes,’ consists of papers by three scholars working within the neurosciences in relatively heterodox ways. I found these interesting in themselves, but (at least in the case of the latter two) struggled to relate them to the broader themes of the book. In this section is an argument for ‘embodied simulation’ from the neuroscientist, Vittorio Gallese (famous for his role in the discovery of mirror neurons) –  a proposal, in brief, that what is at stake in intersubjectivity is not only a kind of mind-reading, but actually the incorporation of others’ mental states (p.193). And there is a related discussion of empathy from the neuropsychoanalyst, Mark Solms – for whom empathy is not only a perception of others’ states, but a mode in which a subject ‘projects itself…into the object’ (p.205). For Solms, this projecting-into is always an affective move: whatever the desires of scientific psychology, ‘feelings come first’ in the work of encountering and (ultimately) tolerating the world (p.218).

There is some variability across the chapters, but I found much to stimulate and provoke in this volume. And if there is, for my taste, sometimes too much of the rhetoric of continental philosophy and critical theory here, still Neuroscience and Critique made me think hard (harder than I am used to) about the potent range of practices that we might arrange under the sign of ‘critique,’ as well as the very different inheritances and stakes of those practices. Those – like me – accustomed to being casually dismissive of the critical impulse, especially as it relates to neuroscience, have much to gain from these essays, even where there is disagreement.  Nonetheless, in the spirit of the book itself, and as a contribution to the important conversation that I think it wishes to provoke (and it should), let me here make two critical interventions of my own. They centre on the two poles of the book’s title: ‘neuroscience’ and ‘critique.’

One thing that was often unclear to me, as I read the book, was what different authors actually intended by ‘neuroscience’– who it was they were actually addressing in the guise of this figure. For example, authors in the volume (albeit not all of them) sometimes invoke ‘neuroscience’ or ‘the neurosciences,’ as if such terms represent a stable or coherent category – leaving aside the contingency, partiality, and specificity of the myriad different practices that are actually affiliated to this image. But if we are going to talk about ‘neuroscience,’ then we need to be clear whether we are talking about, for example, cognitive neuroscience, or molecular neuroscience, or systems neuroscience, or neuroanatomy, or whatever it is. This might seem like a nitpick – but actually such practices, only lately gathered under the umbrella, ‘neuroscience,’ have significantly different inheritances and trajectories. What gets lost, when we fail to recognise these differences, is any sense of the lively debates, contests, and disagreements that actually go on within ‘neuroscience’ itself. In fairness internal critique is discussed in the introduction (p.3). Still, overall, I felt that I got little sense from the book of the sheer range of (often quarrelling) methods, perspectives, epistemologies, and so on, that go on under this polyvalent noun, ‘neuroscience.’ For example, when De Kesel says in his interesting and suggestive contribution that he will ‘show the limits of neurology’s attempt to comprehend freedom’ (p.13), it is not clear to me what is indicated by that noun, ‘neurology.’ Indeed no neurological work is explicitly cited; we have only secondary philosophical texts. Similarly, Reynaert, in his philosophically rich chapter, argues ‘that neuroscience runs the risk of becoming dystopic in a logical sense by committing a category mistake’ (p.62). But relatively little ‘neuroscience’ is discussed in the chapter, beyond the now somewhat hoary example of Benjamin Libet’s experiments on free will, and conversations around it (p.75). Indeed, something that strikes me about the volume, taken in the round (by no means applicable to all chapters), is that, for a book about ‘neuroscience and critique’, there is sometimes quite a bit less actual neuroscience discussed than one might anticipate – even in chapters that claim to speak of either neuroscience or the brain.

Rather than simply picking holes, however, I want to use this feature of the volume to pose a broader question in the sociology of knowledge: what are we are we actually talking about when we talk about neuroscience? What are we (here I mean ‘we’ scholars in the social sciences and humanities, and not only the present authors) concerned about, or critical of, when we are concerned about, or critical of, ‘neuroscience’? Because clearly it is not always the laboratory practice, or the output, of an actually-existing neuroscience. And here is maybe the crux of the issue: the editors and authors would perhaps respond – with justification – by saying that they do not promise in-depth reading of neuroscience literatures; that their interest is in (as per the subtitle) ‘a neurological turn’ – which is to say, a cultural and historical object, and not a laboratory one. What concerns them is the way in which the neurosciences ‘are both situated within culture and in turn influence culture’ – as well as the practices of bordering that then ensue (p.4). Which is all fair enough. But I cannot get over the feeling that, in the absence of a committed and detailed attention to specific and carefully-parsed neuroscientific literatures, we are potentially faced with a paper tiger. Which prompts another question: how are we to think sociologically about critical attentions to ‘neuroscience,’ and to a ‘neurological turn,’ when those intentions are not necessarily or always made manifest via a sustained attention to contemporary neuroscientific experiments, practices, or concepts? Is there not some risk that we are in the presence of a phantom – that the ‘neuroscience’ in question may only be a product of the very critique that presumes to unravel it?

This brings me to my second critical point. It seems to me that the central question of the book is, as De Vos and Pluth put in a perceptive and subtle introduction: ‘what are the conditions for a critique of the neurosciences from the humanities?’ (p.3). As they point out, there can be no reactionary turning-back to the ‘before’ of neuroculture – not least because, as Nikolas Rose (2003) and others have pointed out, we cannot now separate our subjectivity from our consciousness (or indeed our inhabitation) of our cerebrality[ref]Rose, N. (2003) ‘Neurochemical Selves’, Society 41(1): 46-59[/ref]. What is needed, according to De Vos and Pluth, is ‘something other than a simple, humanistic critique of the neurosciences’ – a way of thinking that

engages in questions about the conditions of possibility, impossibility, and the domain, or range, of different sciences and disciplines… how far does the legitimacy of the neurosciences extend? How is the relation of the neurosciences to the humanities to be thought? (p. 4).

I am sympathetic to such an ambition. We see one aspect of it in the chapter by Philipp Haueis and Jan Slaby, which critically analyses the stakes of the Human Brain Project, arguing that that project is entangled in specific computational and economic infrastructures – thereby producing a kind of ‘de-organ-ization’ of the brain, even leading to a kind of ‘world-making,’ that reconfigures the outside vis-à-vis the experimental microworld of brain and computer’ (p.124, 131). We see it similarly in the contribution of Ariane Bazan, which maps a history of interaction between biology and psychology, and diagnoses a new ‘moment’ for psychology, via a neuropsychoanalysis that works to ‘characterize the… knotting-points between the biological and the mental,’ placing physiological and clinical concepts in new orders of relation, and thus subverting old hierarchies (p.181). There is much to admire in such critical analyses. And yet. In The Limits of Critique (2015), the literary theorist, Rita Felski distinguishes between two ways of being suspicious.[ref]Felski, R. (2015) The Limits of Critique, Chicago: University of Chicago Press[/ref] The first, ‘digging down,’ is the now deeply unfashionable practice of digging into the concealed ‘truth’ of the text, to discover what’s really being said (Marx and Freud are obvious icons of this mode [p.61]). The other mode of suspicion, more recent, and perhaps more subtle, works through a strategy of ‘standing back.’ The goal – clearly, Michel Foucault is the guiding light – is now ‘to “denaturalize” the text, to expose its social construction by expounding on the conditions in which it is embedded’ (p.54). I read the critical ambiton of Neuroscience and Critique very much through this latter mode. And yet, as Felski points out, the distinction between the two may be less profound than it seems: for all its analytical coolness, she argues, for all its disdain for simplistic hermeneutics, that second mode, that critical-theory procedure of ‘standing back,’ is ‘just as suspicious and distrustful’ as its truth-digging forebears – surrounding this practice is still a profound commitment to ‘drawing out undetected yet defining forces, to explain what remains invisible or unnoticed by others’ (p.83). For all its subtlety, I wonder if we are not, throughout this volume, still in that old suspicious mode. What Felski demands of us, in any event, is that we take seriously the question of whether we are not, in 2016, still mired in critical accounts of neuroscience, and neuroculture, which, even at their most sophisticated, are still working to dredge up, to make visible, to spatialize, that always-undetected, mysterious, and all-powerful force.

Neuroscience, says Joseph Dumit, in an important afterword to the book, is surprisingly weak today (p.223). Indeed it is precisely its weakness, its epistemological fragility and plasticity, argues Dumit, that makes neuroscience dangerous in the hands of industrial, political, and economic actors, working to instrumentalize research for their pre-determined ends. Dumit asks us to thus read the essays in Neuroscience and Critique as a map of fragility – a helpful guide to tensions and aporias within neuroscience, which the reader may wish not only to note, but to exacerbate (here I am reminded of Kraus’s desire for dissensus). And that reader might so exacerbate not with destructive or paranoid intent, but precisely to ‘help defend [neuroscience’s] right to explore brains against its instrumentalization by industries’ (p.226-228). This is the vital question: what kind of neuroscience do we want to see in the world? At the risk of introducing simplicities of my own: what kind of neuroscience are our scientific collaborators and colleagues working towards, and what tools do we have for working with them, for collaborating with them, even for making shared things with them? How far are ‘we’ willing to travel down that road? The map in this book is certainly a good point for starting those conversations. But it is precisely conversations, interactions, and shared readings, that need to be had. And for this, I think we need to let go of that still-suspicious work of standing back. Even if our primary interest is in cultural objects, we need to engage more closely with actual neuroscientific experiments, in their many actual manifestations in the world. This, it seems to me, is the still unrealised promise of neuroscience and critique.

 

Des Fitzgerald is a lecturer in sociology at Cardiff University. His first book, co-authored with Felicity Callard, Rethinking interdisicplinarity across the social sciences and neurosciences, is available open access from Palgrave Macmillan now.

 

Patrizia Guarnieri, Italian Psychology and Jewish Emigration under Fascism. From Florence to Jerusalem and New York

New York, Palgrave Macmillan US, 2016, 275 pages, Hardcover $100.00; E-Book: $79.99,  ISBN: 978-1-137-30655-5/978-1-137-30656-2

by John Foot

This is a difficult and at the same time a fascinating book. It has many sites of focus and can also be read as a set of collective biographies or individual pathlines through the worlds of psychology, fascism and Jewish identity in Italy and elsewhere. The overall analysis of the book is linked to the study of psychology and psychologists in Italy – and the way this nascent and marginalised discipline developed in that country before, during and after fascism – and in particular in the city of Florence. Thus, Guarnieri tells us a number of important stories of individuals who carried forward this discipline and taught and research within various areas of psychology. Within this world, in Italy, we quickly come across the all powerful role played by Agostino Gemelli in the private Catholic University in Milan. As Guarnieri points out, Gemelli had institutional resources behind him. Gemelli, a friar, turns up time and time again in this book as a king-maker, able to create or destroy careers – and someone who, within Italian psychology, it was very difficult to avoid.

For me, the most fascinating parts of this volume are those linked to the pernicious effects of Italy’s anti-semitic laws of 1938.  These laws led in most cases to the expulsion of all Jews from academic posts in Italian universities.  These people were forced to find another job – not easy in a country which officially discriminated against Jews and where psychology itself was hardly a major discipline. Guarnieri then takes up individual pathways of certain key psychologists. There is the detailed and extraordinary story of Enzo Bonaventura, who emigrated to Palestine in March 1939 and became Professor of Psychology in the Hebrew University.

But perhaps the most shocking part of this book are the stories of what happened to these Jewish psychologists after fascism had fallen during and after World War Two. Unfortunately, as with many other Jews who had been discriminated against or sacked in a variety of sectors, their reintegration and rehabilitation was neither easy nor straightforward. Would these people simply be offered their former jobs back? Some were happy to stay where they were, but others tried to return to Italy. Others appeared lost – nobody seemed to know where they were or what they were doing. Should those who ‘replaced’ these people be themselves sacked or moved on?

In 1947 a national competition was opened up for a Professor of Psychology (in reality this was for three prestigious Chairs).  Bonaventura was an obvious candidate for one of these posts. But Gemelli was to play a key role in deciding who got these jobs, despite his (to put it mildly) co-habitation with fascism. In the end Bonaventura did not even put himself forward. Guarnieri argues that this was thanks to political and personal manoeuvres designed to keep him out and assign these jobs to others. This is also – for Italy – a sad and depressing tale of half-truths and conspiracies, of the re-writing of the past and of continuity with fascism (something which was particularly true within academic institutions).  Bonaventura died in April 1948 during clashes with what Guarnieri calls ‘Arab forces’ in Jerusalem. A street there is still named after him.

More controversially, Guarnieri also points the finger at the role played by Cesare Musatti in this story. Musatti was a legendary public figure in Italy – the first intellectual to bring psychoanalysis to the masses and a frequent presence in the press and on television during his lifetime. He was also, very clearly, a man of the left and someone with – it seems – impeccable anti-fascist credentials. Guarnieri does not pull her punches concerning Musatti – and it is surprising that this ‘case’ has not been taken up in the Italian press in any way. In short, Guarnieri accuses Musatti of having re-invented his own past – both before and after obtaining the coveted chair of psychology in Milan’s Statale University. Worse, Guarnieri argues that Musatti had ‘not made any bones about collaborating with the promoters of racist theories’ under fascism. This is explosive stuff to say the least. It is to be hoped that a debate and further historical research will follow these revelations about Musatti’s role before and after fascism.

This is a book packed to the brim with interesting material for further study and pathways to be followed. It is intensely multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary – touching not just on psychology, but also on social history, trans-national history, cultural studies, Jewish studies, politics and memory. However, the text itself is a major hindrance to an understanding of the arguments made within the book. Much more copy-editing was needed and I can find no reference as to whether this is a translation or was directly written in English. Either way, it needed an extensive re-write to clarify much of what is included here. And this is a great pity, because this book sheds light not just on the history of academic psychology in Italy, but also on a complicated and painful past which has remained hidden for some time. In that sense, it is a brave and important book.

John Foot is professor of modern Italian history at Bristol University. His most recent book, The man who closed the asylums: Franco Basaglia and the revolution in mental health care, is available now from Verso.