History of The Human Sciences

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.

Louise Sundararajan, Understanding Emotion in Chinese Culture: Thinking Through Psychology. 

Springer International Publishing, 2015, 201 pages, Hardcover £90.00/-Book £72.99, ISBN: 978-3-319-18220-9/978-3-319-18221-6

by Gerald C. Cupchik

Louise Sundararajan’s book offers a comparison between Western and Chinese culture based in part on differing modes of cognition that underlie lived experiences. Her approach is more nuanced than the usual East and West comparison. First, she is careful to focus on Chinese culture instead of making sweeping generalizations about the East. Second, while using the term “West,” she focuses on contemporary Western psychology. Since scientific psychology does not necessarily represent the full scope of knowledge about Western emotions, this book pertains primarily to western psychological conceptualizations of emotions, not Western emotional experiences per se. Sundararajan presents as a scholar with a foot in each of two worlds. On the one hand, she introduces many valuable concepts from Chinese culture and, in particular, the contrast by Confucian and Daoist approaches to life and meaning. On the other hand, she is well versed and established in the mainstream literature from Western psychology with a bit of philosophy thrown in.

Sundararajan summarizes the challenge of understanding Chinese emotions as follows: ‘This suggests that a central problem for understanding Chinese emotions is the gap between mainstream western scientific terminology and indigenous Chinese psychology.’  At the heart of her book is the bridging of dynamics of emotional processes in Chinese culture with concepts and findings in the Western empirical tradition. Implicitly juxtaposed against mechanistic thinking in Western psychology is the Chinese approach that focuses on dynamic processes.  Sundararajan explains this difference in terms of that between non-relational and relational cognition. Relational cognition, which applies to Chinese culture, focuses on holistic mind-to-mind transactions based on shared meanings. Western culture embodies more linear non-relational cognition emphasizing mind-to-world transactions and mastery over the environment. Whereas the former is marked by Communal Sharing, the latter is reflected in Market Pricing. Understood in terms of a “dual processing model,” the Chinese mode of thought is automatic, intuitive, and holistic (System 1), whereas the Western approach is effortful and reflective (System 2). Summing up these differences in mindsets, she claims that the Western and Chinese cultures are ‘upside-down universes of each other.’

Obviously, establishing broad categories and binary oppositions such as the ‘West’ and the ‘East’, involves many levels of abstraction. To some, this distinction is suspect and ultimately misleading. One of the most stringent critics of this approach is Edward Said[ref]Said, E.W. (1978). Orientalism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.[/ref]  who considers it a legacy of Orientalism, the persistent East and West comparison.

“Throughout the exchange between Europeans and their ‘others’ that began systematically half a millennium ago, the one idea that has scarcely varied is that there is an ‘us’ and a ‘them,’ each quite settled, clear, unassailably self-evident.”  (Said, 1993, p. xxv)[ref]Said, E. W.  (1993). Culture and Imperialism.  New York:  Alfred A. Knopf.[/ref]

Continuing this line of criticism, Sundararajan uses the East and West comparison in a subversive manner. First, instead of using the West-East comparison in an ‘us versus them’ fashion, she suggests that the two conceptualizations of emotion are complementary– somewhat like yin and yang with each taking turns being the under-current of the other. Second, she turns cultural reductionism on its head.  Instead of reducing all cultural phenomena to collectivism versus individualism, she uses the cross cultural findings on cognitive styles as an explanatory framework to foreground the rich cultural phenomena of Chinese emotions, with special focus on the nuanced differences in conceptualization of emotion between China and modern Western psychology.

To elaborate on this central theme, Sundararajan devotes one chapter each to the three foundational ways of thinking in Chinese history — harmony, Confucianism and Daoism.  Chinese discourse on emotion is founded on the notion of harmony which is ‘understood as moderation’ based on self-regulation. There is a dynamic quality associated with the search for complementary relations between seeming opposites (the yin and yang dialectic). This effort after optimal harmony leads to emotional refinement as exemplified in this description of Confucius as ‘mild, and yet dignified; majestic, and yet not fierce; respectful, and yet easy.’ Framed in terms of Western psychology, this effort after harmony is characterized in terms of ‘concurrent goal pursuit’ so as to be inclusive and make the best possible choices.

The Confucian approach to social development emphasized strong social ties and inner/private consciousness in a ‘rites-based’ society. This contrasts with a Western emphasis on ‘big gods,’ laws, and public spaces. The Chinese communal approach emphasizes the quality of relationships and concern for the other. The goal was to humanize power so that respect was ‘earned through sharing and helping.’ Accordingly, ‘the ideal model of the social order is the family’ and the cultivation of an inner sense of self that is sincere and cultivated through the arts, in particular music and poetry. Thus, emotional engagement is fundamental to ritual performances as in mourning where deep sorrow is considered more important than attention to minute details of observances. The outcome of this approach is filial piety combining intimate benevolence with respect for authority.

The ideals of Daoism are exemplified in the attributes of hermits who abandon the existing social order in favour of the solitude preferred by wanderers. Giving up the comforts of society and social status enabled inward hermits to achieve a state of transcendence and a deeper appreciation of harmony with nature. This was embodied in a spiritualized approach to social relations which emphasized equality in contrast to the hierarchy embodied in a Confucian emphasis on elder and younger, father and son, and so forth. The Daoist approach to independence and transcendence focussed on uniqueness rather than on egocentrism and competition with the attendant deleterious effects on health. The acceptance of an eremetic life style flourished when Chinese civilization was at its zenith during the Tang and Song dynasties rather than during its decline under the Mongol rulers.

The second part of the book is dedicated to exploring complementary ‘contours of the emotional landscape’ in Chinese culture. An example of dynamic harmony is embodied in deep feelings (qing) surrounding ‘heart-aching love’ (xin-teng) which can be both bitter and sweet at the same time. In Western language, this emotion combines the perception of vulnerability with empathy and anxiety over the well-being of another. These feelings are situated in a ‘gut-feeling approach to morality’ that is central to Chinese culture. This analysis of intimacy is predicated on ‘we–ness,’ bonding that is based on shared mind-to-mind intention and modelled after the parent-child relationship rather than the mating pair. Metaphysically, the Chinese notion of affect implies a sympathetic universe which is sustained by an affective bond among all things from humans to stones and rocks in nature. Emotion in this context works by means of a ‘resonating feedback loop’ not unlike that of a tuning fork. The importance of emotional resonance/attunement is brought home through examples of paradoxical communications of affect such as an expressed emotion of seeming anger that masks the underling feeling of relief and gratitude.

Of particular importance in a Chinese context is the presence of spontaneity, authenticity, and creativity in an emotion. Wisdom of the ancients helps to explicate these different facets of emotion. As in the case of traditional poetry, the ideal state of emotion freely embodies a simple message that is deeply felt. Thus, an authentic expression of emotion is sensitive to the meaning of a situation and is free from the interference of intentions to control it by a deliberate mind. This account of spontaneity in the Chinese expression of emotion is at odds with a Western academic emphasis on appraisal and purposive action. But it does fit with a mystical approach such ‘that the unleavened bread of mystical experience has no use for the yeast of discursive thought.’

The author reminds us of the duality in Chinese culture, between the hierarchical nature of social relations from a Confucian perspective (e.g., between parent and child) and the horizontal emphasis on egalitarian relations in Daoist thought (e.g., between person and nature). In a hierarchical context, we find the complex intimacy between parent and child who may be “spoiled rotten,” given vulnerability and immaturity. This transforms into caring gestures toward parents as youth gives way to indebted gratitude in adulthood. Thus, the good feelings attendant to gratification of impulses leave a glow of self-worth that changes to filial piety and caring gestures. As my young guide on a tour of Nanjing expressed it to me: ‘I am nothing without my family.’

Refinement in Chinese culture is embodied in the concept of savoring which applies both in everyday life and in an aesthetic context. This concept is unique in that it encompasses both positive and negative episodes. Temporality plays an important role encompassing both immediate and retrospective experiences in subtle nuances. Thus, from a Chinese perspective, savoring includes mindful awareness of sensory experiences that are integrated in an ideal mental world best expressed in poetry. The greatest challenge to a Western mind is appreciating the insight into emotions that comes from experiencing emptiness which may also apply to negative experiences in one’s life. Savoring without blinding expectations (thus emptiness) enables the person to appreciate the gist of things and also fosters novel connections. This new understanding is enhanced by reflective self-consciousness that formalizes relationships and sets the stage for “enlightenment.”

When placed in a broad multicultural and historical context, the Chinese approach to emotion differs substantially and substantively from that favoured in the West. While the West has long been concerned with the ways that emotion can distort ‘reality,’ the Chinese notion of qing holds that emotion ‘discloses something that is true about the person and the world’ by grounding the person in reality. This sensitizes the person to the undisclosed or implicit impact that the world has upon us. While Western theory focuses on differences (‘symmetry breakdown’) that foster action and control, the Chinese privilege symmetry as evidenced by a heightened appreciation of harmony and resonance with others and nature as a whole.

My reading experience heightened an understanding of the ways that the principle of complementarity is actively embodied in Chinese philosophy and social relations. The Confucian emphasis on hierarchy, and its effects on maintaining social harmony through parent-child relations, is complemented by a Daoist appreciation of how silence and intimacy helps us savour subtle qualities of nature and our social world.

Sundararajan makes a valiant attempt to build a bridge between traditional Chinese concepts and thinking through ideas in contemporary psychology. In part, this effort is successful because it shows how Western ideas and findings can resonate with Chinese culture. But it also indirectly reveals the burdens of Western mechanistic ideas that are worlds apart from the holistic attitude underlying Chinese thought. This awakens a savouring mind to the need for Western culture to be more reflective about its own purposive and ‘Enlightened’ biases or,  as the subtitle of the book suggests, ‘thinking through psychology.’

I hope that Europeans/North Americans appreciate Sundararajan’s in-depth representation of their work. But I personally feel that her account of Chinese emotion does not need Western psychology at all since, from my perspective, Western research seems to have lost ecological validity. Thus, the value of this book is not just that it introduces us to principles underlying the empathic, moral, and aesthetic values of Chinese culture. It shows us the limitations of our own Western concepts and empirical methods that may lead us away from a resonant understanding of the social world. In Chinese landscape paintings, we project ourselves into the empty spaces and resonate (from Hsieh Ho’s Six Principles) with the implied meanings; in other words, projection and empathy. Thus, by adopting a Daoist worldview, we enter into phenomena and overcome the alienating effects of experimental conditions and method as a whole. We essentially adopt the Verstehen orientation at the heart of a German Romantic perspective that is both empathic and intuitive rather than the British Enlightenment emphasis on distant and logical sympathy. Incorporating a sense for “emptiness” and “resonance” can help us think through the biases of Western psychology and enhance the insightful outcomes of our empirical projects.

Gerald C. Cupchik  is Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. His book The aesthetics of emotion: up the down staircase of the mind-body is out now from Cambridge University Press.