Review: Chimpanzee Culture Wars

Nicolas Langlitz, Chimpanzee Culture Wars: Rethinking Human Nature Alongside Japanese, European, and American Cultural Primatologists. Princeton: University Press, 2020; 352pp; Paperback: £22.00. ISBN: 9780691204284

Alfred Freeborn, Humboldt University

The founding figures of science studies told us that we have never been modern (Latour, 1993), that we have never really been cultural agents independent from the natural world but have moved in a web of nature-culture hybrids. Nor indeed have we ever been human (Haraway, 2008), but exist on a continuum with our animal kin. How then are we to understand the exceptional destruction of biodiversity and climatic change that humans alone seem to be causing? This is one of the central questions Nicolas Langlitz poses in his journey alongside people who study chimps in order to understand why it ended up that we are interested in them. Chimpanzee Culture Wars asks what is at stake in understanding the limits of the “anthropo” in the Anthropocene and uses the disciplinary matrices of primatology, anthropology, psychology and science studies to explore this question.

So far, the book has only been reviewed by primatologists, one of whom is a central protagonist in the book: these reviews look at the book as a commentary on primatology (Nakamura, 2020; McGrew, 2021). This review, in contrast, will show the reviewer looking at Langlitz looking at primatologists looking at chimps. I met Langlitz at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton while he was completing this book. We had met because of a shared interest in the work of German sociologist Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998). I was on a research trip to the States and he had kindly invited me to lunch at the Institute. Langlitz originally studied medicine in Berlin before shape-shifting into a medical anthropologist in California, writing a book about neuroscientists studying psychedelics (Langlitz, 2012) and becoming associate professor of anthropology at the New School for Social Research in New York. After lunch he suggested we walk a woodland path through the empty waterlogged grounds of the Institute. 

As we walked, he told me that Bruno Latour had developed actor-network theory after studying baboons with the primatologist Shirley Strum in the late 1970s. Langlitz explained that while Latour’s designs for a ‘primatology of science’ understood human culture not as the result of a cognitive difference to apes but a quantitative proliferation of technical objects, which the apes did not have, subsequent primatology had left Latour behind. In the 1980s primatologists increasingly observed apes using objects. The question of what set human cultures apart from ape cultures remained fiercely debated and paralleled in many ways the debates over pseudoscience in the science wars. All this controversy had resulted in an impasse whereby communication between people interested in human cultures and those interested in primate cultures broke down. While Langlitz’s colleagues in cultural anthropology had followed Donna Haraway’s Primate Visions (Haraway, 1989) in dismissing the epistemic goals of primatology as a morally dubious political project of ranking humans and chimps, he could not help but sympathize with the desire of many primatologists to demoralize the study of apes and their behaviours. In this sense, Langlitz understood the debates over how to study chimp culture as a site from which to reflect on his own epistemic culture. I was surprised by this unfamiliar perspective on the intellectual origins of science studies and struggled to focus on our conversation while navigating the wet path on which my shoes quickly became sodden and caked in mud. 

As part of his virtuoso ‘experiment in reflexivity’, Langlitz walks with ease across disciplinary boundaries and alongside many different observers. The book operates across three levels: it is primarily ethnographic in that it follows Langlitz’s fieldwork from the mid-2010s with cultural primatologists and comparative psychologists across West Africa, Japan and Germany. At a second level, its analysis involves a comparative epistemology of laboratory work and field work including a comparison of national research traditions. Finally, as a historical work, its chronological arc begins with the origins of cultural primatology in 1950s Japan, through to the so-called North-American chimpanzee culture wars that began in the 1970s and up to the transformations in methods and professional politics that mark contemporary primatology. After two opening historical chapters, the book moves across the different sites where Langlitz was able to observe scientists observing chimps: the shrinking forests of Guinea and the Ivory Coast, a psychological laboratory attached to the zoo in Leipzig and the large chimp enclosures of a primate research institute in Inuyama, Japan. While the author’s determination to keep ideas in situ may overwhelm the reader lacking any prior knowledge of primatology – I strongly recommend watching one of the many documentaries about chimp intelligence before reading – it is nonetheless a book for historians of the human sciences.

Langlitz anchors his wide-ranging observations to the eighteenth-century project of philosophical anthropology, showing both how the last representatives of this European tradition (such as Jürgen Habermas and the Frankfurt School) have celebrated the idea of a strong distinction between humans and chimps, as well as how contemporary disciplinary differentiation continues to frustrate unifying visions of a science of primates. Langlitz’s own contribution to this project is to position the ability to observe observers, to conduct what Niklas Luhmann called ‘second-order observations’, as the distinguishing ability of humans against their primate cousins. In an entirely refreshing manner, the book relocates tired debates of positivism versus the humanities in what will be to many readers an entirely foreign landscape. To accompany Langlitz on such a journey is demanding, but it comes with its own rewards. I remember leaving Princeton on the Megabus back to New York relieved not to have lost my footing and with much to think about. 

To summarize my observations: there is no single consensus over the limits of chimp culture as an object of scientific study nor over what has made homo sapiens such a successful primate. The point of Chimpanzee Culture Wars, as the title suggests, is that culture as a concept must be understood as a term of conflict, born out of asymmetric comparisons, by which certain things are compared and certain things excluded from comparison. The essence of Langlitz’s (anti-)polemical argument is that the scientific study of culture, chimp or human, in the field or in the laboratory, need not be conducted in moral terms and that the reluctance of cultural anthropologists and science studies scholars to engage with the question of human distinctiveness blocks our ability to understand our current period of natural history (e.g. the Anthropocene). In a final epilogue, Langlitz suggests that we should by all means be more human about nature, preserving biodiversity and slowing climate change, but that we should also try to be more chimp about culture: sometimes, in between energetic bouts of working to control our environment, all we can do is move with the powerful forces around us. 

Bio: Alfred Freeborn (@Alfred_Freeborn) is a doctoral candidate in the History of Science at Humboldt University, Berlin. His research focuses on the history of biological psychiatry in postwar Britain, North America and Germany, with a special focus on the changing field of schizophrenia research – and he has published on the history of the Mind and Brain Sciences in HHS. He will join the Practices of Validation in Biomedical Sciences Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in July (link: https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/research/departments/max-planck-research-group-biomedical-sciences) 

References 

Haraway, Donna. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. Routledge, 1989.

Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 

Langlitz, Nicolas. Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research since the Decade of the Brain. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2012. 

Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. trans Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993.

McGrew, William C. “Chimpanzee Culture Wars: Rethinking Human Nature alongside Japanese, European, and American Cultural Primatologists, by Nicolas Langlitz.” Primates 62, no. 2 (March 1, 2021): 443–44.

History of the Human Sciences Early Career Prize – winners!

Congratulations to the joint winners of this year’s Early Career Prize, Liana Glew (Penn State) for the essay ‘Documenting insanity: Paperwork and patient narratives in psychiatric history’ and Simon Torracinta (Yale) for the essay ‘Maps of desire: Edward Tolman’s Drive Theory of Wants’. Congratulations also to Erik Baker (Harvard) who received a commendation for the essay ‘The ultimate think tank: The rise of the Santa Fe Institute Libertarian’.

All three scholars will be invited to submit their pieces for publication in the journal and will be interviewed about their work for the website soon.

Thank you to everyone who submitted essays for consideration for the prize – the editors were very impressed by the high quality of submissions and inspired by the new research early career scholars are currently conducting.

Review: ‘Aṣfūriyyeh: A History of Madness, Modernity, and War in the Middle East

Chris Sandal-Wilson, University of East Anglia

Joelle M. Abi-Rached, ʿAṣfūriyyeh: A History of Madness, Modernity, and War in the Middle East (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2020)

In 1982, after more than eight decades of operation, the Lebanon Hospital for Mental and Nervous Disorders officially closed its doors. Seven years into the Lebanese civil war, as hospital employees – who had braved bullets and shells to continue providing counselling to the increasingly anxious population outside the hospital’s walls during the war – desperately sought to overturn the decision to close and to secure the salaries they were owed, the archives of the hospital were abandoned. It was through the initiative of Hilda Nassar, director (until 2013) of the Saab Medical Library at the American University of Beirut, and the work of the archivist Linda Sadaka that the archive of this remarkable institution was saved, as Joelle Abi-Rached tells us at the start of the equally remarkable history that she has woven out of both this and an impressive number of other archives.

ʿAsfuriyyeh: A History of Madness, Modernity, and War in the Middle East traces the rise and fall of an institution which started out life as the Lebanon Hospital for the Insane in the twilight years of the nineteenth century, became the Lebanon Hospital for Mental Diseases in 1915, the Lebanon Hospital for Mental and Nervous Disorders in 1950, and was in throes of a further transformation, this time into the Lebanon Psychiatric Institute in 1976, when war intervened. The hospital’s many names might be taken as indexing how the history of psychiatry unfolded in Lebanon across these decades, as the institution developed from a home for forsaken, impoverished, often chronic cases into the central node in a network of outpatient clinics which aimed to bring mental hygiene to the masses.

But the hospital could never shake off another name, derived from its original location to the east of Beirut on the foothills of Mount Lebanon: ʿAsfuriyyeh, the place of the birds. The name came – like Bedlam in the British context – to serve as a pejorative stand-in for asylums and madness in general, cropping up in novels, plays, and love songs, in spite of the institution’s relentless efforts to stress its scientific credentials and its relocation to a new site in the 1970s. It is a term which has regional currency, too, in a testimony to the hospital’s long history of treating patients and training medical students and psychiatric nurses from Syria, Palestine, Jordan, and beyond. Abi-Rached’s sympathy for this misremembered institution is clear. As well as rescuing ʿAsfuriyyeh from the myths and rumours which have grown to surround it, her concern is to remember the hospital at a time when its original site is at risk of being ‘developed’, like so much of historic Beirut, into amnesiac high-rises.

Weaving together a prodigious range of sources, including Arabic-language scientific and medical journals, missionary accounts, diplomatic correspondence, and hospital reports, Abi-Rached’s aim goes beyond simply narrating an institutional history. Instead, she treats the history of ʿAsfuriyyeh as a ‘sampling device’, or as ‘metonymy and metaphor’,[1] to reveal broader themes. Some of these will be of particular interest to historians of Lebanon and the wider region, but many of them have global resonances. In Abi-Rached’s capable hands, the story of ‘Asfurriyeh helps us think through the often complex relationships between the mind sciences and modernity; medicine, missionaries, and empires; war, conflict, and mental disorder; as well as a host of other crucial themes, including sectarianism, gentrification, memory, and ruination. ʿAsfuriyyeh’s six chapters proceed largely chronologically, with a pause near the middle of the book for a more synoptic exploration of the diagnosis and treatment of patients.

The opening chapter, ‘Oriental Madness and Civilization’, explores understandings of madness in the decades before ʿAsfuriyyeh was established, mobilising two distinct literatures to do so. The first half of the chapter draws on the writings of European and American travellers, missionaries, and medical doctors, who were concerned above all with the abusive treatment of ‘lunatics’ in the region, and the pathological nature of even the ‘normal’ local mind. The second half traces how the sciences of the mind were introduced and elaborated in the pages of Arabic-language scientific and medical periodicals like al-Muqtataf (‘The Digest’), which emphasised a naturalistic account of mental illness. Abi-Rached underlines the strikingly dissonant interests of these literatures and their authors: rather than accepting European accounts of the inherently pathological nature of the so-called ‘Oriental mind’, local intellectuals tied the question of insanity and the deterioration of care for the mentally ill to their wider programme for reforming the late Ottoman state and its people.

The second chapter, ‘The Struggle for Influence and the Birth of Psychiatry’, draws on diplomatic archives as well as the records of ʿAsfuriyyeh itself to reconstruct the history of the founding and early development of the hospital. Although founded by a Swiss Quaker missionary, Theophilus Waldmeier, Abi-Rached argues that the hospital needs to be understood not as a unilateral attempt at proselytization, but rather within the context of a complex struggle for power and influence in the region which involved local as much as international actors. Good relations with the Ottomans were key to the survival of the hospital, with its British medical director and matron permitted to remain on site during the First World War, when they were technically enemy subjects. Although avowedly non-sectarian and cosmopolitan in outlook, the hospital was perceived as ‘Protestant’ and ‘Anglo-Saxon’, both of which fuelled French suspicion of the institution once they replaced the Ottomans after the war, though their policies – covering hospital fees through the introduction of the assistance publique, for instance– indirectly benefited ‘Asfurriyeh.

The third chapter, ‘The Rise of ʿAsfuriyyeh and the Decline of Missions’, charts the transformation of the institution across the middle decades of the twentieth century, as the missionary zeal which had played a role in its foundation withered away and – contrapuntally – psychiatry’s domain was extended to encompass not just the obvious ‘lunatic’ but the everyday strains of industrial modernity. After the Second World War, a series of neuropsychiatric clinics were founded, as well as a forensic unit for prisoners, to bring mental hygiene to the home, school, factory, and military. If the impressive uptake at these outpatient clinics is any indicator, the wider population welcomed psychiatry’s expansionist ambitions. While in part encouraged by demand, these innovations were driven too by competition with a rival institution, Dayr al-Salib, a convent to the north of Beirut which had been converted in the 1920s by a Lebanese Capuchin priest into an asylum for elderly priests, and subsequently transformed into a psychiatric institution in the 1950s. Abi-Rached also stresses the role played by successive leaders in this period, above all Dr Antranig Manugian, medical director from 1962, whose transformational vision of ʿAsfuriyyeh as a modern psychiatric institute would be torpedoed by the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war.

The fourth chapter, ‘Patriarchal Power and the Gospel of the Modern Care of Insanity’, grapples with the backgrounds, diagnosis, and treatment of patients at ʿAsfuriyyeh right across its lifespan, notably through quantitative analysis of annual reports. This throws up interesting trends: peaks in admissions, for instance, to the hospital during the First and Second World Wars, as well as in the 1950s and 1960s at a time of growing economic prosperity, inequality, and substance use. While Abi-Rached makes some use here of patient case files – mostly from the hospital’s early years – she is reluctant to immerse herself in this archive, on the grounds that ‘the patients’ voices, personal narratives, and singular stories are buried in medical dossiers under the “tyranny” of their diagnosis’.[2] Instead, Abi-Rached largely limits herself to deploying these files to puncture myths surrounding the (in)famous case of Mayy Ziyadah, the influential feminist and poet admitted to the hospital in 1936. No one would deny that medical case files are tricky to work with, methodologically as well as ethically, and it may well be the case that these are amongst the files still in the process of being organised by archivists and so perhaps inaccessible. But they do seem to represent a rich, and here largely untapped, vein for researchers to explore further in future.

The fifth chapter, ‘The Downfall of ʿAsfuriyyeh and the Breakdown of the State’, was to my mind the most compelling and haunting of the book. Zooming in on ʿAsfuriyyeh between the start of the Lebanese civil war in 1975 and the hospital’s closure in 1982, Abi-Rached draws on the correspondence of the hospital’s medical director, Dr Manugian, to paint a deeply felt picture of a hospital which not only found itself in the midst of war, but a target within that war. Staff, students, and patients were kidnapped, injured, sexually assaulted, and killed, and every building hit at least once by shells. It is a harrowing story which Abi-Rached locates within a broader shift in the nature of political violence over the century towards targeting hospitals as a strategy of war – a strategy tragically familiar to us today, whether in Syria, Yemen, Gaza, Afghanistan, or elsewhere.  

The final chapter of the book, ‘The Politics of Health, Charity, and Sectarianism’, takes us past the official closure of ʿAsfuriyyeh in 1982 to develop some of the previous chapter’s reflections on non-sectarianism as the hospital’s deeply held – and ultimately, at a time of sectarian conflict, costly – ideology. Not only is it the case that health services, including mental health services, have been ‘sectarianised’ in Lebanon since 1982, but the very memory of ʿAsfuriyyeh itself is under threat of being sectarianised, with legal consequences: the Supreme Council of the Protestant Community in Syria and Lebanon is seeking to assert its control over this ‘Protestant’ institution in the courts. Abi-Rached vigorously contests this strategic misremembering of an institution whose executive committees, staff, and patients were always drawn from a range of backgrounds.

There is much here to digest for anyone interested in the histories of psychiatry, Lebanon, or the modern Middle East; certainly more than enough to guarantee the book a well-deserved place on undergraduate as well as postgraduate course syllabi, where some of its larger claims are sure to provoke reflection and discussion. At a time when re-institutionalisation is increasingly mooted in the West, Abi-Rached is at pains to emphasise that the closure of ʿAsfuriyyeh cannot be seen as part of any broader movement towards de-institutionalisation, as in Europe and North America. Instead, vast psychiatric hospitals continue to accommodate thousands of patients in Lebanon and the wider region: Dayr al-Salib, which historically rivalled and ultimately outlived ʿAsfuriyyeh, has a bedstrength of 1,100 today, a staggering figure which is nonetheless surpassed by at least two mental hospitals in Egypt and a further institution in Iraq.

Abi-Rached also takes issue with two components of Foucault’s account of the asylum: rather than replacing the leprosarium, Abi-Rached argues the asylum should be seen as emerging in the Middle East as a result of the decline of the bimaristan, charitable healing institutions with their own long history of managing the mentally ill; and rather than any ‘great confinement’, Abi-Rached argues that neither numbers, nor the routes by which patients arrived at ʿAsfuriyyeh, support this picture of the mass incarceration of the insane in Lebanon. While both these narratives have been roundly critiqued on empirical grounds not only in histories of psychiatry beyond Europe, but within it too,[3] one gets the sense that ʿAsfuriyyeh feels obliged to return to them, as the first English-language monograph on the history of psychiatry in the region, for its historiographical moorings.[4]

ʿAsfuriyyeh is a rich, original, deeply researched, and often moving work. Given its many strengths, I wondered whether it needed to be quite so pugnacious in its engagement with the few existing works on ʿAsfuriyyeh, which are criticised for being ‘still stuck in the Foucauldian and postcolonial frameworks’.[5] To give an example, in the otherwise excellent fifth chapter, Abi-Rached takes a tilt at Eugene Rogan for dismissing the hospital’s non-sectarianism as a mere public relations ploy. But Rogan doesn’t quite, at least in my reading, argue this.[6] At other points, a focus on rebutting these interpretations leaves some bigger, and more interesting, questions undisturbed. Responding in the fourth chapter to the claim that the Ottoman authorities embraced ʿAsfuriyyeh because it offered a means to cleanse the streets of lunatics, Abi-Rached marshals statistics to show that a majority of patients at the hospital were almost always private. But the more difficult question this leaves – as Abi-Rached recognises – is the degree to which coercion and dubious motives on the part of families, if not the state, may still have played a role in these admissions. Patient case records might have offered the beginnings of an answer.

In a sense, the book’s pioneering focus on the history of psychiatry in the modern Middle East means that Abi-Rached has to work hard to find bodies of scholarship with which to engage. While the connections she draws are almost always fresh and thought-provoking as a result, the invocation of a spectral figure of ‘Foucauldian and postcolonial frameworks’ at times jars. This does not at all detract from the accomplishment of this book, which not only provides a compelling history in its own right but generously offers future lines of inquiry an essential point of departure. In the opening pages of ʿAsfuriyyeh, Abi-Rached states that her goal is ‘to save this influential institution from oblivion’.[7] This is too modest a description of what she has achieved here, but it does capture a quality which I think characterises this remarkable history: a deep sympathy at its heart for ʿAsfuriyyeh, its reputation, and its people.

[1] Here Abi-Rached is drawing on Charles Rosenberg, ‘What Is An Epidemic? AIDS in Historical Perspective’, Daedalus 118, 2 (1989) and Michel de Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975) respectively.

[2] Abi-Rached, ʿAsfuriyyeh, p.99. Here Abi-Rached is quoting Charles Rosenberg, ‘The Tyranny of Diagnosis: Specific Entities and Individual Experiences’, Milbank Quarterly 80, 2 (2002), pp.237-60.

[3] For example, in this journal, Andrew Scull, ‘Michel Foucault’s history of madness’, History of the Human Sciences 3, 1 (1990), pp.57-67. For colonial psychiatry and the ‘great confinement’, see Megan Vaughan, ‘Idioms of madness: Zomba Lunatic Asylum, Nyasaland, in the colonial period’, Journal of Southern African Studies 9, 2 (1983), pp.218-38.

[4] Happily this situation looks set to change in the near future, with forthcoming monographs by Lamia Moghnieh, Beverly A. Tsacoyianis, and this review’s author. For the history of psychiatry in Israel, see Rakefet Zalashik, Ad Nafesh: Refugees, Immigrants, Newcomers, and the Israeli Psychiatric Establishment (Tel Aviv: Hakibutz Hameukhad, 2008) [Hebrew] and Das Unselige Erbe: Die Geschichte der Psychiatrie in Palästina und Israel (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2012) [German]; for the history of psychiatry in the Ottoman empire, see Fatih Artvinli, Delilik, Siyaset ve Toplum: Toptaşı Bimarhanesi (1873-1927) (Istanbul: Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Yayınevi, 2013) [Turkish]. For earlier histories of madness in the Middle East, see Michael Dols, Majnun: The Madman in Medieval Islamic Society, ed. Diana E. Immisch (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1992), and Sara Scalenghe, Disability in the Ottoman Arab World, 1500-1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), esp. ch. 3. Much more attention has been paid to the career of psychoanalysis in the region: see in particular Omnia El Shakry, The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017).

[5] Abi-Rached, ʿAsfuriyyeh, p.18.

[6] The reference given here is to Eugene Rogan, ‘Madness and Marginality: The Advent of the Psychiatric Asylum in Egypt and Lebanon’, in Eugene Rogan, ed. Outside In: On the Margins of the Modern Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002), p.115. This is what Rogan has to say about ‘public relations’: ‘As a private institution without government support, the Lebanon Hospital dedicated tremendous effort to what would now be termed public relations. On the one hand, the hospital was entirely dependent on networks of private subscribers… On the [other] hand, they sought to preserve good relations with the Ottoman officials of the Mutasarrifiyya (governor general).’

[7] Abi-Rached, ʿAsfuriyyeh, p.xxvii.

Normality – interview with Peter Cryle

The current special issue of the History of the Human Sciences is a collection of essays on Normality, edited by Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens, which responds to their co-written book Normality: A Critical Genealogy, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2017. We discussed the genesis and contents of the special issue with its co-editor Professor Peter Cryle, University of Queensland.

HHS: Before asking you more about the special issue, could you briefly introduce your jointly authored book, Normality: A Critical Genealogy, which was published by Chicago University Press in 2017?

Peter Cryle: Quite often when people are doing research they start off with something that’s a bit of an irritant, something that annoys them and which they wish they could resolve. For me and my friend and colleague Elizabeth Stevens ‘normality’ was a major irritant. We thought the idea was extraordinarily widespread but very poorly analyzed and that it involved all kinds of contradictions.

We had two main options: one was to stop complaining and ignore it, and the other was to try to do the kinds of things that cultural and intellectual historians can do in these circumstances, which is to have a look more closely at this rather messy thematic monster to see if we could nail some things down about it. That’s a way, if you like, for intellectuals to fight back against intellectual messiness. That was our main thought and then we had to go and look for the normal wherever we could find it and make a history out of that.

The two of us worked on it in parallel for about eight years, so we knew at the end we would have a book that would hold together, but we also knew that there were many places that we could have gone to and that there was much more for us to learn about those places. That was the way in which the book led to this special issue. We had a sense that there was much to be done. We had a working seminar in Italy to which we invited most of the people that took part in this special issue. Their thoughts, their contributions and their implicit constructive criticisms of our book provided us with extra material and extra things to think about.

HHS: How do these articles in the Special Issue respond to and expand on the insights of the book?

PC: The most obvious thing that they do is go to some topical and geographical places that we didn’t go to. Even though the term ‘école normale’ became widespread on the basis of French usage, we made a decision fairly early on not to follow this thread of the normal in education because we thought there were more urgent issues around the key themes we were focusing on. We were therefore very pleased to have Caroline Warman come and do a serious history of the first ever normal school, which came together in revolutionary Paris. That was one completing move, if you like.

Others included the work that Kim Hayek did on 19th century French psychology. It might seem odd that although we spent so much time concentrating on France, we didn’t get around to talking more about what happened to psychology in late 19th century France. We followed psychology to the German speaking countries so we left that out and Kim Hayek wrote a very valuable piece that filled in that gap. Indeed, to say she filled in a gap is a bit misleading because she explored things that we hadn’t explored and she enriched what we’d done. Chiara Beccalossi did work of a complimentary kind for us as well, looking at the Latin Catholic world that stretched from southern Europe to Latin America and that followed a kind of normalizing medicine that we had not looked at.

Those are some of the more obvious ways in which these articles complete, compliment and enrich what we’ve done in our book.

HHS: In your introduction you claim that ‘study of the normal lends itself to interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary analysis’ – could you explain why or in what ways you think that is the case?

PC:  It’s very challenging to work on a history of the normal because of the extraordinary mixture of things that are involved. We knew we were onto something when we found the emergence of the notion of the normal in medical writing in France around 1820, which became very significant from about 1830 onwards. That was one of our key entrees into the whole thing, but we were also aware that in everyday usage in education people talked about normal curves in grading students, for instance. The term ‘normal curve’ was around in some sort of bastardized version of statistical thinking so we went back looking through the history of statistics and, indeed, wrote our own history of statistics in a way, with a focus on how statistical thinking produced the notion of the average.

The notion of the average helped to build one of the key thematic elements of the normal. In addition to that we found that anthropology and anthropometrics became an area in which so much was done to measure normality in people’s bodies. So we looked at the kind of endeavors that went on there, some of them connected with the study of race. Race then became a significant theme in our work. Partly comparable work was also taken up in criminology, especially in Italian criminology, where people claimed to be able to measure the bodies of criminals and identify criminals traits. We found ourselves in a number of different thematic places, each calling for its own kind of disciplinary awareness, although we would claim that there was a coherence.

Later we came to talk about the later 19th century and the history of eugenics, which came out of anthropology and anthrometrology. We then found ourselves confronting the thing which had actually been a trigger for the two of us in many ways, which was the history of sexology and the history of psychoanalysis, where the notion of the normal bulks large. That had initially been our major irritant: the extraordinarily powerful assumptions about normality in those contexts seemed to us to need work done on them in order to lose some of their overweening generality.

HHS: What is the significance of the relationship between the specialist and non-specialist/popular in the history of the term ‘normal’ that you (and/or contributors to the special issue) trace?

PC: Some concepts in the history of science seem to develop in properly and, indeed, in sometimes quite narrowly scientific contexts. Others seem to get out of those more constrained spaces. I think it’s interesting to look at the recent issue of History of the Human Sciences on sexology edited by Katie Sutton and Kirsten Lang. The history of sexology shows how certain terms came into existence in the thinking and the writing of sexologists – terms like homosexuality, autoeroticism and so on –they became great discursive favorites in the writing of sexologists and to some degree psychoanalysts. It seems to me that kind of history –let’s call it popularisation, extension, vulgarization–does not give you a very good model for the history of normality. There is some of that, but one of the things that we found was that in the 1940s and 1950s, especially in the US, the term normal started to be used in ways that had very little to do prima facie with the history we’d been working on. Part of our challenge was to ask, how can we bridge between a history of a scientifically self-conscious notion of the normal, however problematic that might seem to us today, and the kind of breezy assumptions that start to appear around the time of the Second World War, and especially in the US, that the normal is an ideal.

In an earlier period, Francis Galton was one of the people who wrote a lot about the normal and about its significance for the development of eugenics. A word he used as a synonym for normal was mediocre and for him, and indeed for his contemporaries, normal and mediocre were acceptable synonyms. When the normal becomes an ideal around 1950 you can no longer use mediocre as a synonym for it. Something important began to change, so there was a term that had a perfectly dignified scientific existence, albeit a narrow one, that broke out, but as it broke out it changed its significance and meaning. It continued to have some of the significance of the scientific connotations, but it was also given a whole range of new meanings and a capacity to be used for exhortation of people. It became something that people wanted to be. Before that it seems normal was just a place on the scale. There were good things about being normal, but to be normal was to be approximately healthy in physiological terms. It was no ideal, it only became an ideal in that later modern context.

HHS: In tracing the discursive history of a concept how do you go about disentangling it from terms with which it is often conflated including the average, the ideal or the typical?

PC: I don’t know whether we ever did properly disentangle them. What we did was find thematic threads and tried to show the genealogy of each of those. But we had to recognize that, in practice, they didn’t always function separately. That was one of the ironies.

Fenneke Sysling’s paper led me into an area I hadn’t worked on before – phrenology – which struck me as interesting because it occupied a space somewhere between respectable science and something more folksy, related to commercial popular activities of various kinds. What Sysling’s work shows is that something which belonged to one of the most serious areas of 19th century science, which was averages, were used in an impressionistic way in phrenology when people were given evaluations which they paid for. They then got numbers that came out showing particular qualities in relation to averages. One of the things that she found is that it happened very seldom that people would be found to have average measures of a particular quality. If you paid for knowledge then you came away with better numbers.

One of my sisters works in education and she’s done a study into how the notion of the average is used in expensive private schools in Australia. If you pay significant amount of fees it’s part of the implicit contract that your child will not have average results, but that leads to statistical nonsense because if nearly everybody in the school is above average then it leads to a kind of inflation of the average. The average keeps moving up and Fenneke found a similar pattern in 20th century commercial popular medicine. It’s an invitation to us to regard the average as a remarkably fluid notion, despite what mathematicians might want to say about it.

HHS: Your own essay in the issue also discusses phrenology, exploring how it ‘occupied an intermediate position between science and commerce’ – what light can an analysis of commerical activity shed on the history of scientific knowledge-making? 

PC: I think this is a very hard question. The best that I could manage is to say what we find in practice when there are people who are professionals in hat-making who claim generalizable knowledge based on mensuration. At the same time there are others in the field of phrenology – and also a little later, but more strenuously and more assertively in the field of anthropometry – saying we measure people’s heads and measuring people’s heads is an important way of building scientific knowledge. It seemed to me interesting to see that phrenologists, and especially phrenologists in Scotland, were open to the idea that hatters knew things about head sizes that were in a sense, confirmatory of phrenological claims about general patterns in the population.

But in France where the Paris anthropological society was led by a very hard-headed scientist called Paul Broca there was a determined resistance to the idea that commercial hat-makers might be able to produce data of value to craniometric science. There were all these people around the society who thought there was interesting stuff going on in the area of hat-making that could be used as valuable evidence and that shouldn’t be ignored. But the hard-headed scientists were embarrassed because they wanted to keep their craniometry free of what they saw as individualistic measurement. Broca thought that a given hatter could measure people’s heads, but in science these measurements have to be repeatable when they’re done by different people in different laboratories. The measuring had to be done in a particular way to produce scientific knowledge. Scientific anthropologists wanted contributions and wanted support from the general public, but they didn’t value the ways in which those contributions were typically produced. They were actually stuck between their desire to be open and welcoming, on the one hand, and their embarrassment at the fact that these kinds of measures were not in their view scientifically worthy, on the other. They were trying to police the boundaries of science, but were having some difficult moments while doing it.

HHS: You identify sexology and psychoanalysis as ‘fields in which the concept of normality underwent decisive change at the turn of the 20th century’ – in what ways did the concept shift?

PC: When you do serious historical work you find out sometimes that the assumptions with which you began were wrong. We shared a strong assumption, which reflected our broad training in Continental critical theory. We supposed that so much of the thinking that was involved in conceptualising the normal could be thought about in terms of binaries, so if we talked about the normal we would expect to find that the normal and the abnormal were cognate. We assumed that as the notion of the normal arose historically in particular places that the notion of the abnormal would have arisen alongside it. It was quite a remarkable thing for us that this was not how it happened. People talked about the normal in medical contexts but they had no notion of the abnormal. They talked about the anomalous but that did not mean the same thing.

We were able to show that the notion of the abnormal emerges in the late 19th century as a term that has a particular function in psychiatry and in sexology, which is maybe 60 or 70 years after the notion of the normal emerges in medical writing. We thought that was highly significant and worth talking about. Birgit Lang addresses this in her contribution to the special issue. She particularly has something to say about the other point that emerges at that time through psychoanalysis, which is that Freud initiates a rethink of the whole notion of normality in such a way that it can’t be neatly opposed to abnormality. Normality itself is something mobile, something of an artefact. The notion that normality might be stable is one that Freud has no sympathy for and helps to undermine. Her paper asks what it was like for people to experience themselves as psychologically abnormal in their everyday lives. This introduces the contradiction between a broad normal activity and a kind of local normality which brings a richness that we had pointed at but not fully explored.

HHS: In her closing essay Elizabeth Stephens writes ‘the idea of the normal functions not only as a standard but also as a system, one that continues to operate even when its meaning and processes are conceptually opposed or incoherent’ – what does it mean to understand the normal as a system?

PC: When you work together with someone you each make all kinds of contributions but sometimes the other person turns up one day and has a really nifty way of putting something and you realize you owe them a great debt. I’m not saying Elizabeth doesn’t also owe me great debts, but I owe her the great debt of this insight.

There are quite a few colleagues, for example in the area of queer studies, who are convinced that the idea of the normal is riddled with contradictions and that you just have to push in some places to dismantle it or make it crumble. We were also sympathetic to this view but became convinced through our work that yes, it’s full of contradictions, but it actually flourishes on those contradictions because it means it’s able to defend itself in different ways against different kinds of attacks. The hope that it will crumble if you just press on it seems to us to be a forlorn one. We think that it’s much more sagacious to say that the normal is a very resilient notion and its resilience is sustained by the fact that it’s got these contradictory elements in it.

Someone might have noted in an analysis of Donald Trump that his success was based on the management of contradictions in his thinking and not just on some central lack of intelligence or lack of perception. Something much more interesting, complex and tricky is at work. We think that you can talk about the normal in the ways in which it holds the ideal, the typical and the average together. The normal has proven itself, no more so than in the last year, to be a remarkably powerful and resilient notion.

HHS: This leads in nicely to my final question: what is the status of the normal today?

PC: Normal became the keyword of 2020. It was one of the most used words in all kinds of popular contexts. We didn’t predict that and, indeed, we wouldn’t have wanted to because it was the pandemic that made it so. But I think there are some things in our history that suggest how that might have come about. In medical terms, the normal stands over against the pathological. When the pathological is so widespread and so threatening it’s quite obvious that the normal comes to be revalued. Instead of just being some tawdry failure to be impressive, the normal becomes something to be longed for because it takes us out of the space of pathological disorder. In current references the normal is spoken of as something to get back to, to return to. There is an attempt to retrieve a moment in the past.

One of the other great success adjectives in the pandemic is ‘unprecedented’. The notion that we’re living in a time which is unprecedented is, I think, accompanied by nostalgia to get back to a time when we just had some nice sensible precedented things around and we didn’t have the horror of the unprecedented. The novel and the unprecedented, which are things that we attempted to give some history of, then become very directly connected to the pathological. The normal appears to people as the hope for a world without novel viruses and without unprecedented moments. We didn’t write that whole history, but the history we’ve written does give you some things to stand on if you want to think and talk about the present moment.

In the end we realised, you can’t just make the normal into the name of everything hateful and everything that’s to be avoided, scorned or deconstructed. There are things about the normal that are enabling and that are functional and that we can’t and shouldn’t reject. We ended up being thoroughly ambivalent about those things. We didn’t think the things that we began with were mistaken, but we realized how much work the normal could do. We didn’t cease to believe the normal was constructed, inhibiting or trivializing but we saw the richness of it. Initially we thought we would just demolish it but we found stuff that we didn’t know we were going to find. We didn’t just start with some clever theory and demonstrate that is was true, regardless of what evidence we ran into, and I think that’s a good thing.

 Interview conducted by Hannah Proctor.

Psychiatry’s Neoliberal Philosopher – Review: Thomas Szasz

Review: C. V. Haldipur, James L. Knoll IV, and Eric v. d. Luft (eds.), Thomas Szasz: An Appraisal of His Legacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. xv and 298 pp. ISBN: 9780198813491

Alexander Dunst, Paderborn University, Germany

70 years after the publication of The Myth of Mental Illness, the book’s enduring impact can seem puzzling. Built on a series of outrageous simplifications and argumentative slips, Szasz’s polemic generalized its denial of mental illness from an understanding of hysteria as “malingering“, never engaged with the intricacies of long-term care it sought to deny to patients, and upbraided the sick for cheating the healthy. Nevertheless, Szasz emerged as the pre-eminent critic of psychiatry in the United States. He at once relished this status and vehemently distanced himself from the left-wing practitioners and theorists, from Franco Basaglia to Michel Foucault, that he was often lumped with. Szasz’s distinction was to be the only conservative so-called anti-psychiatrist, and his writings were feted by right-wing intellectuals and the counterculture alike. For patients and radical psychiatrists, The Myth of Mental Illness promised to remove the stigma of disease and seemed to offer freedom from paternalistic institutions. Despite its numerous shortcomings, then, Szasz’s work proved useful to a wide range of readers and inspired an institutional practice of mental health that combined self-help, state neglect, and psychopharmacology under the aegis of personal autonomy.

Unfortunately, Thomas Szasz: An Appraisal of His Legacy fails to answer, or even seriously ask, how his flawed ideas could have such enormous consequences. The editors and authors are psychiatrists and analytic philosophers and have surprisingly little to say about the real-world contexts of their subject’s writing, either at the height of his career or in our present moment. Neither does the volume contain contributions by former patients, a particularly disappointing oversight because the social movements that formed against institutional psychiatry were an important locus of Szasz’s reception in the United States and abroad. Instead, the chapters largely focus on his philosophical influences, extend Szasz’s reflections on psychoanalysis, suicide, and schizophrenia, or apply his writings to legal and theoretical issues in contemporary psychiatry.

A historical appraisal of Szasz’s legacy must therefore move along the edges of the volume’s dominant concerns. Many of its contributors note the significant impact The Myth of Mental Illness had on their professional development and testify to their lasting friendship with its author, lending the publication the air of a posthumous Festschrift. Even the contributors that disagree most strongly with Szasz assert his importance to critical debates within a field dominated by biomedical assumptions. Such personal testimonies reveal Szasz’s continued appeal to a small minority of philosophically minded psychiatrists. Coming from a generation of researchers that underwent graduate training in the 1960s or soon thereafter, these comments also emphasize the historical situatedness of Szasz’s critique. Writing with real rhetorical verve, Szasz attacked institutional psychiatry where and when it was weakest, exploiting the uncertain etiology of major mental illnesses as the psychodynamic consensus of the postwar years unraveled.

Throughout his writings, Szasz built on the central opposition between physical and mental illness. Adopting Rudolf Virchow’s definition of disease as cellular pathology, Szasz denied that psychological suffering could constitute an illness, or that it involved any suffering to begin with. If all illness was physical in this purposefully narrow sense, then mental illness was merely a metaphor or myth—a rhetorical ploy “to force others to provide for one’s needs“ (Szasz 171). This notion of myth was inspired by Gilbert Ryle, who saw the mind as a philosophical category mistake. Yet, it seems to have been Szasz, rather than any of his conservative forebears, who reinforced this argument with a psychiatric voluntarism that was breathtaking in its lack of empathy: So-called mental illness was merely an abdication of personal autonomy and society owed little to those who shirked responsibility in this manner. There was one decisive exception for Szasz—involuntary treatment. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he founded two organizations that fought forced hospitalizations in court. The results, coming as large psychiatric hospitals closed, were decidedly mixed. Although some wards were rife with abuse and the quality of treatment varied considerably, Szasz and his followers saw no need to extend care to those freed from hospitalization. The only person worthy of attention became the freely contracting participant in a capitalist marketplace, the individual who paid for therapy out of their own pocket.

Several contributions to the volume point to the fallacies of this philosophy—Szasz’s misreadings of Virchow, Thomas Hobbes and Ryle, and his naive positivism that at once idealized medical science and denied any role for public health. In a memorable passage, the psychiatrist Allen Frances recounts that Szasz refused to treat severely ill patients during his residency in Chicago. When ordered to do so, he moved to Syracuse where he exclusively saw outpatients for the rest of his career. The man who routinely dismissed mental suffering, who railed against the laziness and stupidity of people with severe psychological problems, never actually worked with them.

Given these accounts, it’s difficult to agree with the praise accorded Szasz throughout the book, from describing his unmatched analytical rigor to lionizing him as the greatest defender of patient rights since Philippe Pinel. In part, these adulations stem from shared commitments, such as rejecting “statist medicine” (60). This opposition to public healthcare is widely shared in the United States, where it extends to a medical establishment that benefits from the inflated costs charged by private hospitals and resident doctors, pharmaceutical and insurance companies. Although Szasz was often dismissed out of hand by mainstream practitioners, his program shares more with the psychiatric status quo than may be apparent. As early as 1961, Szasz advocated a mental health policy that married conservatism with libertarianism and anti-communism, the main pillars of the Republican party that emerged under Ronald Reagan. Reagan had already implemented drastic cuts for psychiatric care during his time as governor of California, and state budgets have only shrunk further since. On the one hand, these measures have instituted a modern version of laissez-fare capitalism, with intensive psychotherapy for wealthy individuals and cheaply produced but highly profitable medication for the masses. On the other hand, a punitive regime has built on the moral condemnation that Szasz personified, pushing the desperate and needy into poverty and homelessness. For thousands, prison terms have replaced the mental hospitals that campaigners decried as incarceration. Szasz himself might have found punishment more palatable than treatment. For their part, patients and mental health workers proved pawns in a cynical, yet effective, game of cutting costs while crying freedom.

References

Szasz, T. S. (1971) The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct. New York: Harper & Row.

Review: Psychologies in Revolution

Hannah Proctor, Psychologies in Revolution. Alexander Luria’s ‘Romantic Science’ and Soviet Social History. Palgrave, 2020; 259 pages, Hardcover £59.99, eBook £47.99; Hardcover ISBN 978-3-030-35027-7, eBook ISBN 978-3-030-35028-4

by Lizaveta Zeldzina

Psychologies in Revolution is dedicated to the work of Soviet psychologist and neurologist Alexander Luria: an early enthusiast of psychoanalysis in Russia, and ‘the father’ of Soviet neuropsychology, Luria was known internationally as a prolific writer and experimenter. He was an inspiration to a new generation of scientists in the Soviet Union in the mid-twentieth century, and managed to stay in touch with intellectual currents in the wider world. Together with Lev Vygotsky, Luria has become a figure of intense interest for many scholars of Soviet science, and especially for so-called ‘revisionists’. Unlike existing studies, however, Psychologies in Revolution examines Luria in his social and historical circumstances, ‘contending that analysing Luria’s research in isolation from the historical circumstances it emerged from and influenced would be like analysing someone’s personality by examining their brain on a glass table’ (p. 4). In this text, Proctor provides us with our first detailed history of Luria’s ideas and his work.

Psychologies in Revolution entails the discovery of a previously unknown Luria. The text is structured around his major scientific projects: studies of the criminal, the ‘primitive’ (Uzbek peasants with no formal education), the child, the aphasic (brain-injured Red Army soldiers) and the synaesthete. Eponymous chapters move the reader chronologically from the Revolution of 1917 to the late 1970s, opening out new dimensions for critical inquiry. Proctor shows how Luria, ‘developed a form of scientific writing capable of fully attending to the utterances and experiences of the people he dedicated his career to observing, understanding and treating’ (p. 22). But she makes this claim by considering the inherent constraints on such an approach within Soviet Russia in the early and mid-twentieth century. As Proctor emphasizes, the contribution of her study is not to draw our attention to new primary sources or texts, but to offer a new reading of Luria’s existing texts, already published in English, and thereby rehabilitate Luria as a potentially important figure for contemporary scholarship.

In the Chapter ‘The Criminal’, based on experiments from Luria’s The Nature of the Human Conflicts, Proctor shows how Jungian theory was embedded in the criminology and associative techniques involved in the development of a predecessor of the polygraph machine. The devastation caused by the October Revolution had resulted in a wave of crime, and the details of criminal acts available to Luria often seemed senseless: “a baker accused of killing his wife; a man found in a pile of snow having been hit with a sledgehammer; a factory worker who broke a window at his workplace to steal a ventilator; a man who killed his fiancée and threw her dead body into water tied to a cast-iron wheel” etc. (p. 48). Luria’s ambition was to incorporate psychoanalytic theory into his work as a Soviet psychologist, even though it was to criminals rather than patients that he turned. Proctor notices, though, that Luria’s focus was on whether the people he observed had commited murder, rather than on why they had commited murder. Thus, Luria consequently failed to reflect on the role of the social order in fostering criminal behaviour, being focused instead only on the application of psychological theories, and in experimental proofs of his associative technique. The author also points out that his theoretical views expressed in the paper ‘Psychoanalysis as a System of Monistic Psychology’ in 1924 are in conflict with his later clinical writings.

In Luria’s defence, this lack of social reflection may have derived from his own need to shield himself from the devastating loss and disruption which accompanied the post-Revolutionary years. Besides, between the 1920s, a period of active involvement in the psychoanalytic movement in Russia and the publication of The Nature of Human Conflicts in 1932, significant changes occurred. The experimental psychoanalytic project Detski Dom (or International Solidarity Laboratory) and the State Psychoanalytic Institute in Moscow was shut down in 1925 by decree of Narkom RSFSR. It was a time of growing attacks on psychoanalysis, and Luria resigned from the Russian Psychoanalytic Society in 1927, the year of the exile of Trotsky, a political associate of psychoanalysis. Then, in 1930, Psychoanalytic Society was shut down. These socio-historical circumstances of Luria’s career are downplayed in the book.

To Proctor, Luria’s psychological approach was never primarily psychoanalytic. Luria’s ambition to engage psychoanalysis with Marxism and other psychological theories, such as Gestalt, resulted in an alternative model, which “paradoxically failed to retain the elements of Freud’s theory… praised for being dialectical in the first place (the ongoing tension between the life and death instincts)” (p. 43). The paper she refers to is Luria and Vygotsky’s introduction to the Russian translation of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle published in 1925. My reading of this paper is different. I’d argue that Luria and Vygotsky’s failure is not in their impossibility to retain to the dialectic of life and death drives, as there is no sign in this text that they deny this tension. The resulting ‘third’ in this dialectical tension for them – the belief in the possibility of sublimation of the death drive – is what constitutes their failure for Proctor. She contrasts this theoretical optimism with the apparent regression that has occurred in society as a result of the revolutionary movement. This illuminates further that their theoretical hopes for the ability of psychoanalysis to provide a basis for monistic psychology were dashed more by the growing reality of Stalinism than by their theoretical failure to remain faithful to psychoanalysis.

The chapter ‘The Primitive’ explores Luria’s failure to find his place under the Soviet political regime. Central Asian expeditions of 1931 and 1932, were, as Proctor writes, Luria’s most explicit political endeavour: an attempt to demonstrate the cognitive benefits of collectivisation. The results, however, did not satisfy the State and his work was denounced before he published his findings. While not being able to contribute to the First Five Year Plan, Luria’s findings in this expedition were for Vygotsky of the highest importance and deepened his understanding of the interrelations between language and thought. Proctor’s analysis of the interrelations between ‘primitive’ people and the Soviet idea of collectivisation in Luria’s work elaborates the nuances of the revolutionary movement in its oppressive rather than ‘progressive’ character.

The chapter ‘the Child’ illuminates the period of Luria’s experimental work with children and his published work with Vygotsky. Conducted between 1923 and 1936, a time of relative freedom of thought and the institutionalisation of psychoanalysis in Russia, as well as progress in pedology, these observations and experiments focused on the the future citizens of the Soviet state, and therefore with understanding the processes of child development. Proctor covers an extraordinary range of material, providing not only a clear picture of Luria and Vygotsky’s position on the role of language, play and historical context for mental development, but also vividly imagining the atmosphere in which Soviet children were raised, the toys they played with, the tales they read, and just how many of them survived without parents. We also learn how the Soviet state gradually abandoned its ‘kids’, as successive decrees constricted Luria’s and Vygotsky’s scientific activity.

By the late 1930s, a period when psychology as a discipline disappeared in Soviet Russia, and calling Freud by his name was equated with high treason, Luria lost both of his foundations – psychology and psychoanalysis, and also lost his dear colleague Vygotsky. He found shelter in medicine, and the patriotic appeal of World War II left him no choice but to discover a new object of research – the brain. However, some of Luria’s work on the brain kept its distance from dry neurological language and instead, as Proctor notes of his late case histories, ‘Luria composed the text in a self-consciously literary style.’ I would argue that this was possible due to the relative freedom of after-Stalin years, which allowed for more open expression of Luria’s long-standing beliefs.

The chapter ‘the Aphasic’ focuses on a rather unusual story of a brain-injured patient, Zasetsky. It shows how far Luria the neurologist was from studying the inanimate tissues of the brain, and how close he was instead to questions about the animate vicissitudes of the individual. It is no wonder, as Proctor writes, that Oliver Sacks in the introduction to The Man with a Shattered World, claims Luria’s work was ‘always and centrally concerned with identity’ and suffused with ‘warmth, feeling and moral beauty’. ” (p. 169) I would suggest that an optimistic belief in the ability of ‘monistic psychology’ to hold to the ‘dialectic of the whole organism’ was still alive for Luria, and resulted in his approach to brain injuries. At that time Luria was also in favour of the idea of functional systems. According to this theory, restoration of lost functions was possible through compensation and reorganisation of nervous connections. Luria’s texts Traumatic Aphasia and Restoration of Function after Brain Injury illustrate this approach and demonstrate successful results of restorations of functions after brain damage, including the restoration of a sense of self. Luria’s approach to aphasia departs from the localisation of damages and, I would argue, his understanding and classification of aphasia are based on the same principles as proposed by Freud in 1891. Luria’s later texts could be read fruitfully alongside Freud’s texts, despite Proctor’s suggestion that their theoretical grounds had moved apart. This fact is also noted in the article of Solms (2000), to whom Proctor refers in a previous chapter, but who is left unmentioned in this one.

The chapter ‘the Synaesthete’ continues to draw on the ‘brain’ period of Luria’s career and his synaesthetic patient Solomon Shereshevsky, going back and forth in time describing his friendship with Eisenstein and his engagement with Freud’s texts and the lost tradition of ‘romantic science’. In these case histories, Luria eventually succeeds as an exemplary scholar within the tradition of his own social-historical approach, as he is not concerned with describing symptoms in isolation from a person’s whole personality, but to ‘allow for the preservation of ‘the manifold richness of the subject’. In my view, the case histories discussed in these two chapters are an illustration of the historical continuity of theoretical views of Luria.

Psychologies in Revolution is indeed so much more than just a study of Luria’s heritage or a socio-historical analysis of the period in which he lived. Proctor’s main proposal is that Luria’s ‘romantic’ science offers a model for approaching human nature and can therefore contribute to the current rupture between the ‘brain’ and the ‘subject’, and the departure of the neurosciences from the social sciences. It is a pertinent study offering Luria’s ‘romantic science’ to scholars in the neurosciences and medical sciences searching to approach their subjects in a more humane way. However, the complexity of the Soviet years remain to be explored further, and it is still necessary to investigate archival resources and personal connections of Luria beyond those who are already well known, and to translate more of his theoretical heritage into English. It would also be interesting to bring his neuropsychological studies back into discussion within the psychoanalytic field. There is still much scope for incorporating Luria’s ideas into a contemporary theory of mind.

Lizaveta Zeldzina is a psychologist and a PhD candidate at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research is dedicated to the vicissitudes of psychoanalysis in Soviet Russia 1930-1980. It explores Soviet studies of the unconscious in psychology and physiology, and theoretical engagement with the psychoanalysis of Alexander Luria, Bluma Zeigarnik, Pyotr Anokhin, Filipp Bassin and Dmitry Uznadze in the socio-historical context of their times.

Review: Physics and Psychics

Richard Noakes, Physics and Psychics: The Occult and the Sciences in Modern Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019; 403pp; Paperback £24,99; ISBN: 978-1-107-18854-9

Luis Fernando Bernardi Junqueira

What is ‘science’ – and, as a corollary, ‘non-science’? What does it mean for something to be called ‘scientific’? And is ‘science’ an objective, singular entity, or is it conditioned by culture? These questions have provoked some of the most fascinating scholarly debates over the past two centuries, precisely the period during which ‘science’ (however defined) gradually became the standard of truth in most societies across the globe. These concerns – sometimes called ‘the demarcation problem’ – far exceed the immediate purview of philosophers and historians of science, having lasting consequences in fields such as education, medicine and public policy. Philosophers like Karl R. Popper, Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend have shown that to define ‘science’ is far more complicated than we might initially assume.[1] Over the past few years, their (often contrasting) views have inspired a wave of ground-breaking historical works on the ‘fringe sciences,’ those disciplines and subjects – such as mesmerism, spiritualism, psychical research and parapsychology– rejected by ‘mainstream’ scientists for not conforming with their own ideological agenda.

Physics and Psychics belongs to this revisionist tradition of scholarship in the history of science and technology. Richard Noakes has for years looked at the cooperation and contention between the physical sciences – fields like chemistry, physics and astronomy – and the occult in fin-de-siècle Britain. Physics and Psychics not only reunites his latest works on telegraphy, ether and psychics but also goes beyond, calling into question the popular, hasty definitions of ‘science’ and ‘non-science’ (or ‘pseudoscience’). It centres on the lives and activities of eminent British physical scientists who split their time between physical experiments and psychical investigation. Noakes calls these individuals ‘physical-psychical scientists’, an etic category that highlights their primary background as practitioners of the physical sciences while distinguishing them from the broader community of spiritualists, conjurers and psychical researchers also interested in the study of psychical phenomena. ‘Psychic’ (also called ‘psychical’, ‘supernormal’ or ‘paranormal’) refers to a wide range of phenomena not contemplated by mainstream science and often labelled as ‘supernatural’, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis, levitation and spirit materialisation. To physical-psychical scientists like Oliver Lodge, William Crookes and William F. Barrett, however, there was nothing ‘supernatural’ in all this. Indeed, they endeavoured precisely to demonstrate, by empirical means, that psychical phenomena belonged to the realm of nature and, therefore, constituted legitimate objects of scientific inquiry.

The heyday of physical-psychical research coincided with the formative period of modern scientific disciplines, when the boundaries of such fields as physics and chemistry were relatively fluid and constantly challenged in light of new discoveries, methods and theories. Physical-psychical scientists argued that a systematic study of psychical phenomena could not only expand the purview of the physical sciences beyond the recognised spheres of matter and energy but, ultimately, revolutionise our understanding of the universe, of life and death. Who were the British physical scientists interested in psychical investigation? What drove their enthusiasm for the subject? How did they negotiate their position as physical scientists and psychical researchers? To what extent did their achievements in physics profit from their studies in psychics, and vice-versa? These are some of the main concerns running through Physics and Psychics.

Noakes draws on  a remarkable wealth of primary sources, ranging from diaries and personal letters to specialised journals, wide-circulation newspapers, illustrations and books. The methodological sophistication of Physics and Psychics also deserves praise. In contrast to studies that tend to label such subjects as psychical research, spiritualism and Theosophy as ‘superstition’ or ‘pseudoscience’, Noakes favours ‘alternative sciences’ as a framework through which to accommodate disciplines or subjects not contemplated in fin-de-siècle scientific orthodoxy. As a medical historian working on psychical research and the occult in early twentieth-century China, I find the category of ‘alternative sciences’ particularly valuable. It helps historians of China appreciate the emergence of ‘Spiritual Science’ (xinling kexue 心靈科學) – the Nippo-Chinese offspring of the Anglo-American psychical research – in the 1910s not as a backlash reaction to science and modernity but rather as an alternative to scientific materialism, ontological dualism and the worldview that everything in the universe is mere matter and motion. Indeed, my reading of Physics and Psychics is concerned primarily with the transnational history of fin-de-siècle psychical research, particularly its development in East Asia.

The book is divided into six chapters. It begins in the first half of the nineteenth century, the formative period of the physical sciences. Chapter 1 explores how mesmerism, Karl von Reichenbach’s theory of od and the emergence of Modern Spiritualism in the mid-nineteenth century inspired British physical scientists to appreciate the scientific study of psychical and occult phenomena as extensions of the nascent discipline of physics. They celebrated Mesmer’s discovery of a new physical force – animal magnetism – as having the potential to revolutionise people’s understanding of the human body, reconcile science and religion, and eventually clarify the underlying causes of such ‘inexplicable’ and ‘remarkable’ phenomena like mind-reading, thought-transference and spirit materialisation. The potential to investigate psychical phenomena through scientific means led a group of eminent British scientists and intellectuals to establish the Society of Psychical Research (SPR) in London in 1882. Centred on the SPR, chapter 2 teases out the identities and networks of physical-psychical scientists. Dissatisfied with the limitations of Christian orthodoxy and scientific materialism, this group included not only official members of the SPR but a broader community of high-ranking scientists whose interest in psychics often predated the Society’s foundation, and whose sustained commitment to psychical investigation went beyond the Society’s umbrella.

The next three chapters look at the physical-psychical scientists’ view that psychical phenomena belonged to the natural (=material) realm and, therefore, deserved scientific investigation. Chapter 3 examines how those scientists envisaged the relevance of the physical sciences – their theories, methods and experiments – to clarify the mechanisms of the psychical world. The physical sciences offered not only a scientific framework through which to investigate psychical phenomena but also furnished a set of tools for physical-psychical scientists to draw analogies between the visible and invisible realms of existence. Their latest achievements in electricity, telegraphy and ether, for example, suggested that psychical phenomena were not as impossible or ‘supernatural’ as some might have once assumed, and that physical experiments could enhance our understanding of the same. Indeed, Fukurai Tomokichi’s 福来友吉 (1869–1952) invention of thoughtography – the ability to imprint mental images onto photographic plates – in the mid-1900s,[2] and the myriad of early twentieth-century Japanese and Chinese articles and books explaining the reality of telepathy and clairvoyance in terms of electricity, ether and wireless telegraphy indicate that the analogies proposed by British physical-psychical scientists enjoyed an impressive transnational audience.

Following, Noakes turns to the laboratory as a shared space for physical and psychical investigation. While the use of scientific instruments yielded some positive evidence for the reality of certain psychical effects – like table-rapping and telekinesis – experimental work also posed new challenges. The unavailability of reliable mediums or difficulty to see, control and replicate paranormal phenomena in the laboratory led many practitioners of the physical sciences to doubt the feasibility of psychical research. Despite this, psychical experimentation inspired creative uses of the physical sciences to an extent far greater than historians have so far recognised. Not everyone agreed that physical scientists were the most suited to study psychical matters, though. Chapter 5 examines the debates between spiritualists, psychologists, psychical researchers, conjurers and physicists regarding who could claim authority in psychical investigation. Unsurprisingly, the most outspoken defenders of the physical expertise were the same familiar individuals who were engaged in shaping the boundaries of the physical sciences in Britain’s public sphere. Physical theories, methods and experimental work, they declared, ranked as the most appropriate to decipher the puzzles underlying the cause and reality of psychical effects.

The final chapter is probably the most insightful to scholars working on the popularisation of psychical research beyond the United Kingdom. Noakes turns from the debates taking place in laboratories and scientific journals to the engagement of physical-psychical scientists in the dissemination of psychical research – its methods, achievements and social uses – through mass media and popular scientific literature. Focused on Oliver Lodge, Noakes shows how wide-circulation newspapers, popular books and lecture halls became important venues where physical-psychical scientists could expose ideas deemed inappropriate in secularised scientific settings, such as the reconciliation of science and religion, the survival of the soul after death, and the physical effects happening in spiritualist seances.

Persuaded by Noakes’s argument that Lodge stood as a prominent figure in early British radio broadcasting often called upon to illuminate the latest discoveries in physics to a broader audience, I looked for some visual evidence to satisfy my curiosity about what had made Lodge’s public appearances so special – the ‘thing’ written records cannot fully capture. Searching on YouTube, I was thrilled by a short video titled ‘Sir Oliver Lodge Renders Science Intelligible’, originally aired on British Movietone on 31 December 1930.[3]

Praising Lodge as ‘one of the greatest scientists of modern times’ who ‘needs no introduction to British audiences’, the film presents a charismatic old man in his early 80s playing with a device wherein a highly magnetic piece of cobalt steel seems to be levitating or ‘floating in empty space in vacuum.’ To demonstrate magnetic attraction and repulsion, Lodge then brings two pieces of steel up to each other. ‘As we can see’, Lodge explains, the piece ‘runs away’, they ‘don’t like each other; they chase each other’. But when he reverses them, then ‘they like each other very much.’ Using everyday experiments and lively language, Lodge illustrates what Noakes explored thoroughly in this book: how insights in physics – here, in magnetism – can help illuminate the causes and reality of psychical phenomena, if not life and death as a whole. If we understand ‘all the actors in the relation between ether and matter, or let’s say, between space and matter, we might begin to understand something more of what life and mind really are.’ After the proper appraisal of scientific evidence, Lodge concludes, ‘if the result is that personalities continue to exist then they must have a physical vehicle for that existence,’ a substance or entity ‘which fills space and which is a far more important thing than any form of matter’, which becomes ‘a trivial thing in comparison.’ That revolutionary thing refers to Lodge’s cherished ‘ether’.[4]

By the 1920s, some of Lodge’s most best-selling books in physics and psychics – including The Substance of Faith Allied with Science,[5] Survival of Man[6] and Raymond or Life and Death[7] – had already been rendered into Japanese alongside hundreds of newspaper articles and interviews on science and religion, ether and psychical research. An important channel for Chinese elites fascinated by hypnosis, telepathy and clairvoyance, Japan played a key role in the dissemination of Western psychical research in China. Publications about the latest achievements of British scientists like Lodge, Barrett and Crookes featured prominently in the Chinese popular press during the first half of the twentieth century. These typically comprised book excerpts and newspaper articles translated from English into Japanese, and then from Japanese into Chinese. These publications were decisive in the formation of Spiritual Science therein. For instance, in a review of the Claude’s Book – prefaced by Lodge – a Chinese writer praises the British scientist as ‘the physicist of the afterlife’, whose ‘established reputation had encouraged us to take the subject of psychical phenomena seriously’.[8]

Despite Noakes’ flowing prose, Physics and Psychics is dense reading. But while focused on the British context, the book is a must-read to anyone working on the transnational history of spiritualism and psychical research. Noakes makes an important contribution to a recent body of work, which calls for spiritualism and psychical research to become legitimate subjects in the history of science, medicine and religion. It sheds much-needed light on the question of how religion and the occult have helped shape the boundaries of modern science, a concern with global implications.   

Luis Fernando Bernardi Junqueira (林友樂) is a PhD student in the Department of History at UCL. Funded by the Wellcome Trust, his research project investigates the transnational history of spiritualism and psychical research in early twentieth-century China. It looks at the formation of ‘Spiritual Science’ (xinling kexue 心靈科學), its impact on healthcare and religious experience. His areas of interest include modern Chinese history, medical history, esotericism, and science and technology studies, and he has published in Portuguese, Chinese and English. 

[1] Popper, Karl R. The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Basic Books, 1959); Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); Feyerabend, Paul. Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (London: Verso, 1975).

[2] Tomokichi, Fukurai. Clairvoyance & Thoughtography (London: Rider & Company, 1931).

[3] British Movietone, “Sir Oliver Lodge Renders Science Intelligible and Mr Sanger – Sound,” YouTube Video, 4:29, 21 July 2015, https://youtu.be/A4uOdx_dQBs.

[4] On Lodge and ether, see Noakes, Richard, “Making Space for the Soul: Oliver Lodge, Maxwellian Psychics and the Etherial Body,” in Jaume Navarro, ed, Ether and Modernity: The Recalcitrance of an Agonising Object in the Early Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 88–106; Noakes, Richard, “Glorifying Mechanism: Oliver Lodge and the Problems of Ether, Mind, and Matter,” in James Mussell and Graeme Gooday, eds, A Pioneer of Connection: Recovering the Life and Work of Oliver Lodge (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), 135–152.

[5] Kagaku yori mitaru shinkō no honshitsu 科学より観たる信仰の本質, trans. Ōno Yoshimaro 大野芳麿 (Tokyo: Rakuyōdō, 1921).

[6] Shigo no seizon 死後の生存, trans. Takahashi Gorō 高橋五郎 (Tokyo: Genkōsha, 1917); Shinrei seikatsu 心霊生活, trans. Fujī Hakūn 藤井白雲 (Tokyo: Dai Nihon bunmei kyōkai kankōsho, 1917).

[7] Reimondo meikai tsūshin レイモンド 冥界通信, trans. Takahashi Gorō (Tokyo: Uchū reizō kenkyū kyōkai, 1918); Takai ni aru aiji yori no shōsoku 他界にある愛児よりの消息, trans. Nojiri Hōei 野尻抱影 (Tokyo: Shinkōsha, 1922).

[8] “Weilai shenghuo zhi xinjieshi 未來生活之新解釋” (New Explanations on the Afterlife), Dongfang zazhi 17, no. 6 (1920): 53–54.

Histories of sexology today – interview with Katie Sutton

‘Histories of sexology today: Reimagining the boundaries of scientia sexualis’ is the current issue of History of the Human Sciences, guest edited by Kirsten Leng and Katie Sutton. Special issue co-editor Katie Sutton spoke to the journal’s web editor Hannah Proctor about how the essays in the issue contribute to extending our understandings of histories of sexology.

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HHS: First of all, could you say a little about the genesis of the Special Issue? What did you, as editors, hope to achieve with this collection of essays?

KS: Kirsten Leng and I have both been working in various areas of the history of sexology for some time and with this special issue we really wanted to push some of the boundaries of the field.

Michel Foucault influentially turned his attention to the history of sexual science in the History of Sexuality and since then there’s been a tendency to prioritize certain kinds of analytical questions within the field – for example, how has our understanding of homosexuality developed over time? Or, how have scientists gone about diagnosing “deviants”? This has been a history with a decidedly Western, male, white and European focus. The history of sexology has also often been limited to the “medical” and “scientific”. We were interested in opening up the historiography in more interdisciplinary directions, including by problematizing the disciplinary boundaries of the field from its very early days onwards. We were also interested in how we could use this issue to explore more of the transnational connections that have influentially shaped this field across time, as well as pushing further at questions around gender and intersectionality that historians have been turning their attention to in recent years.

In these respects, this issue connects in interesting ways to a debate that was published a couple of years ago in this journal between Heike Bauer and Ivan Crozier, a back and forth about the disciplinary limits of sexology that asked, among other things, how we might use concepts like translation to push those a bit further.

In your introduction you discuss the historiography of sexology, which, as you point out is still relatively young – how do you see the essays in this collection as intervening in or extending this historiography?

Firstly, in a geographic sense. The essays extend a historiography that has often focused on Western European and specific national contexts. For example, they shed light on how Eastern European sexologies and sexologists crossed the iron curtain during the Cold War era, or the prominence of North American thinkers at various key moments.

Secondly, they extend it by looking backwards and forwards in time. We’ve got essays such as Benjamin Kahan’s, which looks right back to the mid 19th century in the US, but we also have pieces that look forward through to the post World War II era. These expand the parameters of a historigoraphy that has tended to focus on the early 20th century.

But as well as pushing at conventional limitations of space and time, we were interested, as I’ve already noted, in approaching questions of disciplinarity in more open ways. For example, one essay engages explicitly with animal studies, and shows how scientists turned to the natural world to make new kinds of arguments about human sexual and gender diversity. As Ina Linge shows in this essay, animal research has always been part of the sexological project, but it has been a decidedly neglected aspect of historical scholarship. Other essays in this issue explore the porous boundaries between sexology and various traditions of psychotherapy (both Western Freudian traditions and Eastern European traditions of Pavlovian psychotherapy), as well as with fields more at the edges of scientific tradition, such as phrenology and transcendentalism.

How do you see scholarship on the history of sexology as contributing to explorations of ‘the relationship between sexual knowledge and sexual politics’?

Ina Linge’s piece is a good example of this. It shows not only how research into intersex moths and butterflies in early 20th century Germany was used to make arguments about the naturalness of sex and gender variation, but also how the scientists very consciously applied their experimental findings to quite politicized arguments around decriminalizing homosexuality, particularly during the Weimar Republic.

Another good example is Kate Davison’s essay, which opens up questions around the understudied context of sexual politics in the Cold War. Sexologists in socialist countries were examining homosexuality just as their colleagues on the other side of the iron curtain were. Yet the history of gay “conversion” therapies in Czechoslovakia points to more progressive paths than were taken elsewhere. Researchers there argued for legal reforms around homosexality, but their ideas were taken in much less politically progressive directions when they were drawn on, selectively, by scientists in the West. 

These essays also contribute to thinking about sexual politics and sexual science in relation to race. Scholars such as Heike Bauer and Laurie Marhoefer have shown that racializing frameworks have always been a critical, if often invisible, part of how sexual scientific knowledge was produced and conceptualized. Such ideas have continued to shape our thinking, though often in quite implicit ways, such as by feeding the colour blindness of much contemporary LGBTQ politics. Even someone quite progressive like Magnus Hirschfeld, who is often lauded as a left-wing pioneer of gay rights, was very much tied up in imperialist and rationalizing frameworks, from which we haven’t quite extricated ourselves, even in the present. Benjamin Kahan’s piece is an example of work that furthers this project by pushing at the racial dimensions of some of the earliest sexological thought, and showing how this was tied up with discussions in other fields such as phrenology that were thoroughly infused with underlying racializing and racist thought.

Finally, recent work has started to pay more attention to rethinking the place of pleasure and desire in the history of the sexual sciences. What are the political implications of bringing pleasure and ideas of the erotic back into the equation? Sarah Bull’s piece on the complex relationships between sex researchers and erotic and explicit print cultures does this particularly well, but this is a question that has often been sidelined.

As you underline in the introduction, one of the strengths of the issue is its emphasis on transnational conversations between sexologists –what was significant about these kinds of exchanges?

We’ve tended to do research that has been quite constrained by national boundaries, or sometimes by the linguistic boundaries of the German speaking world or the English speaking world. We’ve also often tended to assume that there was a distinctly German origin of modern sexual science. But if we pay a bit more attention to the conversations that were always going on, such as between North American and European researchers in the mid 19th century, we can develop a more nuanced account of sexology as a field that has always looked beyond national boundaries, even from its earliest beginnings.

The trade in erotic books and the non-scientific circulations of medical and scientific writing on sex discussed by Bull is a good example here. Erotic book trade dealers in North America saw a strong market in trading in European sexual scientific works in the 1930s and 1940s, and publishing new editions of works by sexologists like Havelock Ellis. These kinds of circulations brought ideas that had been originally formulated in a distinctly medical-scientific space to a much wider mid-century US audience of lay readers.

Ina Linge’s essay explores how research into ‘intersex butterflies’ influenced sexologists at the Institute of Sexology in Germany. What are the implications of the case she makes for ‘paying attention to non-human actors in the history of sexology’?

Ina Linge’s essay, which we touched on earlier, makes a strong case for paying more attention to non-human actors in the history of sexual science. Many of us may know that Kinsey, for example, made a name for himself studying insects before he turned his attention to his students at Indiana University and human sexual behaviors, but in general, animals have been sorely lacking from the historiography of sexology, and that’s not really justified. When you look at the earliest sexological journals, animal research, along with ethnological comparisons, were frequently used as reference points. What was naturally occurring in animals could be used to argue for what was also naturally occurring in humans, and for what by extension could be considered “normal” or legally justifiable. Similarly, my co-editor Kirsten Leng has shown that German feminists in this era were busy drawing on nature comparisons to justify their political demands as in line with what nature intended.

Linge points out that pop culture today is really fascinated with stories about queer animals, such as penguins showing same-sex desires. Those comparisons tend to be used to argue for the naturalness of sex and gender variation in humans as well, and what Linge does that is new is to situate these comparative moves in that early 20th century moment. She draws on what Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal have referred to as the ‘moral authority of nature’ to show how some scientists were starting to advocate for more progressive sexual politics. Jewish German geneticist Richard Goldschmidt knew very well when he was publishing his research on intersex moths that this might be drawn on to make political points about humans as well, especially when it came to defending homosexuality. These kinds of analogy were intensely politicized in Germany at that time because of the criminalization of gay sex under Paragraph 175. At the same time, Linge’s essay shows how these ‘natural is normal’ arguments could be put to more sinister use, such as by those arguing against interracial sexual contact or in favor of sterilizing homosexual men.

figure
A series of intersexual females of Lymantria dispar, R. Goldschmidt, The Mechanism and Physiology of Sex Determination (1923)

Sarah Bull’s contribution, which explores the relationship between sexual science and erotic print culture, raises questions about respectability and the sources of scientific knowledge – what light does this shed on what she describes as the ‘porous’ boundaries of sexology as a discipline?

Sarah Bull’s piece really problematizes those border areas between sexual science, on the one hand (with practitioners working to establish a respectable scientific field of inquiry not weighed down by older notions of religion, morality and taboo), and on the other hand, ways of looking and talking about sex that were more aligned with traditions of erotica and pornography. From the late 19th century British sexologists in particular were constantly vulnerable to censorship, prosecutions and to their works being labeled obscene, although censorship was also an important factor shaping the development of sexual science elsewhere.

Bull shows that sexual scientists were both loudly disavowing any connection to these seemingly dubious realms of smut and porn, but, at the same time, they were absolutely dependent on those “grey” areas of the publishing world for their evidence. They were also dependent on them for disseminating new kinds of knowledge about sex, including across national boundaries, as I mentioned earlier. She points out that the borders between these fields were always porous, but they were also always policed, with appeals to “science” often used to justify protecting work from the censors.

She points to some interesting examples of that porosity over time, especially as erotic literature traders began republishing older sexological works and circulating across their original national origins in ways that targeted less specialist audiences. By the 1970s sexologists were themselves publishing in erotic magazines like Playboy. There is still a lot that we don’t know about these interplays between the “erotic” and the “scientific” in the history of sexology.

You highlight the importance of ‘balancing sexology’s global dimensions with its regional specificities’. Both your essay and Benjamin Kahan’s contributions examine sexology in the US at different historical moments – what was distinctive about the trajectory of sexological research in North America? 

This is a really interesting question and I like how you bring those two pieces together, because they do speak to different ends of the history of sexology in North America, which has often played second fiddle to its European counterparts.

Kahan’s piece, which we touched on earlier, shows how mid-19th century American researchers such as Elizabeth Osgood were highly influential in coining key terms in sexual science, as early as several decades before terms like ‘Sexualwissenschaft’ were introduced in Germany. My own work as a cultural historian of Germany, meanwhile, has tended to follow the narrative around the German “invention” of modern sexuality—an explanation that sees the German speaking world as crucial in coming up with many of the identity categories, such as “homosexual” or “trans” identities, that have stayed with us in into the present. But Kahan’s work shows that if we pay more attention to North American actors, and to what was going on in science-adjacent fields like phrenology and transcendentalism, then we can develop much more nuanced and transnational narratives of the sexual sciences.

My piece hones in on Kinsey’s research in the late 1940s and 1950s. I do see sexology as shifting its global centre of gravity in this period, from the German speaking world following the rise of the Nazis across the Atlantic to North America. Many Jewish medical practitioners, analysts, and scientists emigrated from Europe to North America, and they shifted these conversations in very distinct ways. By the mid twentieth century North America had become the international centre of both sexology and psychoanalysis, but we also need to examine the distinctly national interests that shaped these disciplines in that context, such as the fundamental shifts in US psychoanalysis compared to early Freudian thinking due to the prominence of a certain brand of Protestant Christianity.

Finally, would it be possible to reflect on how work into the historiography of sexology engages with the ‘normal’ and the ‘natural’ as historical categories?

I would say that work on the historiography of sexology has played a key role in encouraging researchers working across all sorts of fields, not just the history of sexuality, to engage more critically with ideas of the ‘normal’ and the ‘natural’ – to ask how these categories have changed over time and to recognise that they’ve always been historically contingent. There are some really interesting connections between the essays in this special issue and those in another issue coming out soon in the History of the Human Sciences on the history of normality (edited by Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens). Their work and work by scholars such as Laura Doan shows that the “normal” has always been a contested and contingent idea, and one that only really came to carry the meanings it does now in the mid 20th century. Some of this critical attention on the “normal” is now also shifting to the “natural”, with scholars pushing at how the natural and the normal are sometimes seen as interchangeable categories, but also how and where they can, or must, be teased apart.

Thinking in, with, across, and beyond cases with John Forrester – interview with special issue co-editor Chris Millard

A new double special issue of History of the Human Sciences edited by Felicity Callard and Chris Millard has just been released. Chris Millard spoke to Hannah Proctor about how the special issue came about and how the contributions responded to, extended and celebrated the work of John Forrester.

HP: The special issue celebrates the work of the late John Forrester and specifically his essay ‘If p, then what? Thinking in cases’, published in History of the Human Sciences in 1996. The introduction to the special issue contends that the essay transformed understandings of what a case was – could you explain what was so significant about the essay?

CM: I think the essay managed to bring into focus the case, which is a particular part of the armory of the human sciences, a way of talking about a particular life or even a particular instance that has significance. Forrester ranges across disciplines looking at cases, looking at case law and, of course, looking at the psychoanalytic case that was extremely close to all of his work. And it gave people a way into a whole host of questions about how cases do the work that they do.

I don’t necessarily think that Forrester, answered the questions he posed. I don’t think that the essay was intended to answer questions. It was intended to to provoke. I still find the essay challenging and incredibly rich – new things come up whenever I reread it. The real power of it is that it doesn’t pretend to settle any questions, but it makes you aware of questions you were only half aware of before.

HP: Do you also think the essay is significant in terms of how it chimes with the overarching concerns of the journal?

CM: Yes, as I said I think it was about one particular weapon in the armory of the human sciences and so absolutely it resonates with the concerns of the journal. You can’t think of the human sciences without thinking about the relationship of cases to broader ways of understanding human beings, understanding human nature, understanding humanity. I think it’s quite rare that you get such a fundamental part of that way of understanding humans that’s so fundamentally brought to light in one essay and that spawns so many lines of thought that shoot off in different directions. Actually part of the problem with putting this special issue together was that it almost became unmanageable in its fertility, in the way that it provoked so many different people to run off with it in different directions. There’s just so much richness that it became almost bewildering at times, but in a good way.

HP: How did this special issue come about?

I was the reviews editor at the time and the essay collection Thinking in Cases landed on my desk. I didn’t know John Forrester personally but knew that he had died recently and I thought there were so many people that I knew working in and around the human sciences and around the history of psychiatry and psychosis who were working in ways that connected with this book so I thought let’s have a review symposium responding to it. And because the original essay was first published in History of the Human Sciences I thought that would be really apt. It’s all just snowballed from there. We ended up asking for contributions, I think of 3000 words, and people came back to us asking if they could write more. It was really driven by people who wanted to contribute and who had so much to say. It powered itself foremost. Scholars gave their time so freely, gave so much of their time and effort to producing these pieces and that’s what made it difficult, but also really wonderful to work with.

HP: I was struck re-reading Forrester’s essay that he emphasises in his discussion of psychoanalytic cases that the disclosures in any case are always matched by silences. Perhaps in some sense no case can ever really ‘succeed’ and failure is a theme that unites several of the contributions to the special issue – what is revealed when cases fail? Can failure take different forms? Can failures be generative?

CM: Yeah, I think when things fail or break down it’s almost more interesting than when they succeed, because success doesn’t lead you to question your premises but failure often does. Failure is a really emphatic event that lays bare the machinery of how the case is supposed to work. I think Erik Linstrum’s piece especially is about failure and it helps understand things like power. Sometimes in a Foucaultian idea of power, it ends up being so all encompassing that you wonder how things ever change at all. And yet when they fail you don’t have to look very hard for grounds for resistance or grounds for agency, which are the things that normally recede in that crude Foucaultian telling.

So, yes, failure is significant, but the impossibility of success is also significant, and I think they’re usefully kept distinct. I think what Matt ffytche’s article on the ‘impossible case’ of Luisa Passerini shows is that success isn’t always possible. But that impossibility is more interesting than thinking of it necessarily as a failure in conventional terms.

HP: Yeah, it’s such a good example of a new genre that emerges because the existing genres are not really adequate to the material.

CM: Yeah and ffytche’s article is a wonderful analytical survey of this these kinds of writing and the ways that when you push at the boundaries of autobiography or self-case making or autoethnography, or examine the way human beings narrate about themselves, it’s such a rich vein that spans disciplines. You know, you tend to think ‘oh this is about psychoanalysis and it’s probably about anthropology’ but there are so many other ways of human beings writing themselves and narrating themselves that show how even your most secure sense of who you are just collapses under the slightest bit of interrogation.

HP: The pieces in the special issue are striking in terms of their disciplinary range (which is also reflected in Forrester’s essay) – does this say something about the relative hetereogeneity of ‘case thinking’?

CM: The real gift in that paper and in all the essays in the book, was the ability to show that in any place where human beings are being talked about or are talking about themselves you can you can start to break them down to see how they work.

I don’t think we consciously decided this was going to be an interdisciplinary project. I don’t actually particularly like the word, which I think has become diseased by funding calls, going back 30 years, where you’re prizing interdisciplinary just because. But it’s a real credit to the flexibility and the richness of that essay that when we sent the call out and people responded, that we had no idea that people were working with and around cases or on Forrester in those ways. I think that’s one of the real bonuses of doing an open call but also having channels of circulation through a mailing list that can reach out to places and get cross posted in ways that that wouldn’t have been possible 25 years ago.

Mary Morgan’s paper, for example, is a really challenging and a really fantastic riffing off Forrester’s title in a way that I just found almost virtuosic and she wasn’t somebody who we would necessarily have had in mind to approach as our original call was aimed at early career researchers, but she responded. It was that enthusiasm where people, even though they weren’t necessarily being spoken to, wanted to come on board. They wanted to contribute. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that really before. People really love this essay, even if they have problems with it, they really want to talk about it.

HP: Many of the contributors reflect on the case history as a genre – both in terms of what that opens up but also in terms of its limitations – Maria Böhmer discusses the capacity of the case to ‘travel’, while Michael Flexer emphasises the linearity of case thinking and points to historical instances that ‘thinking in cases’ acted as a constraint – how do these interventions extend or challenge Forrester’s work on cases?

CM: I think the way that cases travel is really quite basic to their utility, in that they are a nice sort of parcelling up of either an exemplar or as an illustration of a particular principle. What Maria Böhmer’s essay does is it puts really useful empirical flesh on those bones. People wouldn’t be necessarily surprised that a case travels and circulates in networks, but when you have to dig down and find the examples, those examples can push back on how you thought the case travels: across from medicine to the more journalistic. The sensational ways in which the particular case of the man who crucified himself that she discusses were talked about. Getting into those empirical examples can be really useful.

Michael Flexer’s paper, which I’ll admit I found difficult, rattled around in my head for weeks after reading it because he’s trying to strip the case back to its bare bones. He’s asking, what is it that makes something emerge as something that might be made into a case in the first place? So it’s not taking the case as the starting point but is asking, how do we even know how the raw material emerges to get made into a case? What he does really clearly is show how even before you think you have a case you’re getting locked into a particular direction of travel, where a lot of other assumptions can very easily plug you in and push you forwards. He discusses the example of the AIDS pandemic, where all those prejudices around particular communities of men were just laid bare, especially because people could not understand where their case reasoning was pushing them.

HP: Erik Linstrum’s contribution discusses colonial cases and the challenge the kinds of individual traumas they documented posed to colonial rulers. Linstrum discusses how the kinds of testimonies contained in cases conflicted with the ideologies of the colonial rulers, suggesting that the case might be a disruptive genre that can exceed or confound attempts to generalise. Does this analysis point to ways case histories be treated as historical documents?

CM: Often when people talk of power in the human sciences, they’re talking about thoughts and ways of thinking and expertise and advice. All of that is real and effective, of course, but we’re not often talking about machine guns and police forces that keep people in place. I think part of what what Erik Linstrum’s paper does is it looks at the – I don’t want to call it soft power because I mean something quite different – but it look at the intellectual power relations that are involved in making people into cases and subjecting them to expertise.

And that just doesn’t work in an environment that is strafed by a very different kind of power and a very different kind of resistance. When you put different kinds of power and different kinds of attempts to enforce governance together – so here there’s the governance of the psychoanalytic overarching framework that puts people into a particular relationship with power but there’s also the militarised imperial power – and those just don’t fit. That really shows us, I think, something quite important about how power works, but also how it doesn’t. I think that what’s really in illuminating there is that failure of the case to do anything but sort of say, ‘Well, here’s some ‘natives’ and they have very strong murderous impulses towards their leaders. Oh, well, hang on a minute. No, we can’t say that.’ The colonial elite simply can’t use the case they’ve produced because it documents something that is impossible for them to acknowledge.  

This essay, like many in the Special Issue, I’ve read and proofed and been very close to and every time I re-read it I notice different things and find my head is spinning with connections. I don’t know if that’s solely a testement to Forrester’s work but it’s amazing that it’s generated such generorous and constructive responses. They bring his insights to their work. You don’t have to pull Forrester out of shape to have him talk to your work because it’s so open.

HP: Matt ffytche approaches the question of genre from a slightly different perspective, by focusing on an example of what he calls an ‘exploding’ or ‘impossible’ case – Luisa Passeri’s Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968. Here the individual case history is destabilised by the forces of history, which seems to demand a different kind of narrative.  In Autobiography of a Generation, ffytche oberves, ‘the personal and the social… act as metonyms for each other’, but I wondered if that was also true of all cases in some sense?

CM: I’m fascinated by how people use ‘the social’ and the things that they think inhabit it and the power that it has and also doesn’t have. It’s sort of like a case in the way that it’s this incredibly amorphous thing that explains everything and therefore explains nothing.

I love Passerini’s book partly because it’s such a traumatic and chaotic mess that I think, well, if you can turn a chaotic mess into something brilliant then I’ve got some hope for some of my life. It’s so – I don’t want to say honest because honest makes it seem weirdly confessional – but it lays bare its own wiring in a way that I think is really powerful. And I think it makes it difficult because you’re never quite sure that you’ve got it. It never closes, it never satisfies, it never gives you that neat finish. And that’s life.

Being able to put that into a book – when every sinew of you when you’re writing a book is trying to close it and finish it and get it into this disciplined form – for a book to manage not to do that really impresses me.

I’m going to go back to the original thrust of the question about the comparison with the social. Whenever you write a human or a group of humans you’re always in the middle of personal agency and social/structural agency. There are so many frames of reference that are always already there, pulling out of focus. Going in and being able to think about the person and the social and history, about the way history impacts individuals without collapsing the social when you go down to the individual and without erasing the individual when you go to the structural but existing in neither and both of these spaces at the same time, I think that’s what she what she’s trying to do. She does have to flip between her psychoanalysis and her interviews and a broad sense of the history and it is chaotic but it’s not chaotic because she is a bad writer. It’s chaotic because the project she is trying to do can never actually succeed (to go back to the point we were discussing before).

It really illuminates the case by sort of showing it up, by showing how it is both inadequate and also kind of super adequate in that there’s too much in it. It’s like that classic Joan Scott thing about gender being an empty and overflowing category. I think of cases as telling us nothing and everything. They tell us nothing at all and far too much because of the way that they can connect to everything. They can explain everything and they can be explained by everything in a way that makes you really have to make some pretty serious choices analytically before you even start. You’ll never exhaust the case.

I think one of the things that used to annoy me when I was an undergraduate and postgraduate student when I looked at psychoanalytic practitioners who I was researching is that everything is so overdetermined. It used to really annoy me that there are 5678910 reasons for why one thing happened and then more and then more and more. That irritated me for whatever reason, but then you begin to see how everything makes some kind of sense because of the power of that that reading strategy, the strategy of reading everything through it and I ended up not hating it quite so much, but just being being really interested in what that does for your analytical possibilities.

HP: Did revisiting Forrester’s essay and reading these responses to it change or nuance how you think about cases?

CM: I think it has to have done. I mean, one of the things I think we haven’t touched on is how long this project has been in the works. Initially I think we sent out a call at the very beginning of 2018 so it’s been a long time. So yeah my thinking has absolutely changed.

I first read the essay, I think in the first year of my PhD ,and then again during my postdoc, and then again teaching. Every single time new things leap out to me and that isn’t always the case with even very good articles.

Having this group of people writing in their own different directions has really shown is the impossibility of case thinking even though it’s a very useful and usable concept. I still think it’s an impossible concept because case thinking is far too broad. It’s almost as if it’s so broad that it should collapse on itself and become useless but somehow it isn’t and so somehow it doen’t. I’m trying to write a book at the moment about how personal experiences of the things you’re studying might impact or be made clear or be made explicit in writing histories and how personal experiences are always already there and your case, the case of yourself, that’s always there in every history. And I think I’d go as far as to say, at least if this were on Twitter, I would say all history writing is displaced autobiography. I’m not ready to defend that actually but I still believe it and I think that ‘Thinking in Cases’ has really helped me show up what’s important in history writing and writing in general about humans in a way that I never would have imagined when I first downloaded it. This is a difficult essay. It’s really interesting but my god I don’t really get it and here I am still not really getting it 10 years later. Some essays are difficult because they’re difficult and some essays are difficult because they’re brilliant and I think Forrester’s essay is the latter.

I love Julie Walsh’s re-doing of Forrester’s essay ‘Inventing Gender Identity: the Case of Agnes’. I’ve read and reread it. I would never have thought that something as chaotic [as a case] could be as generous and as meaningfully generous that it could generate that reading of how gender identity is a process. There’s an awful lot of heat and not a lot of light around that issue at the moment. Julie Walsh’s essays cuts through that so beautifully and, again, in a way that reading Forrester’s original essay you’d think, where the hell’s that come from? I love how open and generous complexity and nuance can be, how the impossibility and the unfinishedness of cases can be bewildering and chaotic but it can be generous and open and compassionate.

Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene

Jürgen Renn, The Evolution of Knowledge: Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene. Princeton:  University Press, 2020; 584pp; Hardcover £30; ISBN: 9780691171982.

By Alfred Freeborn

The year 2012 marked the 50th anniversary of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a book which profoundly shaped the historical study of science. The then director of Department II of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin, Lorraine Daston, reflected that one unintended result of the book’s influence was that ‘most historians of science no longer believe that any kind of structure could possibly do justice to their subject matter.’[i] Daston proposed that the path to a new intellectual structure, sight of which had been lost among the growing plethora of detailed micro-histories, lay in the turn from a cultural history of science to a historical theory of knowledge.[ii] Down the corridor from Daston’s office the director of Department I has been busy charting just such a path. Jürgen Renn’s The Evolution of Knowledge: Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene is a guidebook for a new historical theory of knowledge. It is not so much a contribution to the growing literature on how society might tackle global climate change, but uses this context to give urgency to the daunting task of synthesizing a common theoretical structure for a discipline that has lost its way.

As the title of the book suggests, the structure of knowledge is not revolutionary but evolutionary. Renn takes his theoretical model from the biological theory of evolution and its explanatory concepts from the cognitive sciences. An evolutionary theory of knowledge seeks to do for the human sciences what Darwin’s theory of evolution did for the biological sciences by conceptually linking the morphology of the organism with its environmental conditions. It hopes to conceptually link experimental studies of individual cognitive development with the historical study of socially shared knowledge. The binding thread is, like in Darwinian evolution, the survival of the species, with knowledge understood as a value that emerged within the ecology of human life but which now threatens to fatally disrupt that ecology. What matters for the history of science reframed within the global evolution of knowledge is not the emergence of a progresive form of rationality, but the long-term accumulation of ‘earth-changing knowledge’. There is no single structure to scientific development in Renn’s world. Scientific achievements stabilize within complex architectures of knowledge governed by historically specific knowledge economies, but importantly, they do so in a shared cognitive world.

The book is divided into five parts. The first two lay out the methodological and historiographical tools for Renn’s vision of the history of knowledge. In parts three and four, we see how these tools can be put to work in telling longue durée histories of knowledge across its intellectual, material and social evolution. In the final part, the author turns towards the present ecological crisis. The case studies that form the bulk of the book mainly cover episodes from the history of mechanics, the focus of Renn’s department, which he embeds within a global history of the natural sciences. Towards the end of the book, Renn describes the need for a future transdisciplinary venture which he calls ‘geoanthropology’. This research domain would synthesize insights from the evolutionary history of knowledge with large-scale data gathering and modelling of contemporary human-earth systems. For Renn, the ‘anthropocene’ offers a mantle for a renewed ‘unity of science’ movement and the framework within which the natural sciences and the human sciences can be more closely integrated. Among the few concrete proposals for the future, Renn restyles an argument first put forward by Vannevar Bush in the 1940s that the internet can be harnessed to support an interactive and public worldwide web of knowledge. This wikipedia-on-steroids will aid the decompartmentalization of scientific knowledge and its reorganization for facing new challenges.

Renn presents his theoretical framework as an alternative to Kuhn’s Structure. Unlike Kuhn’s book-length essay, however, Evolution has the stature of a textbook, with its own illustrations, text-boxes for important theoretical digressions and a glossary of concepts seventeen-pages long. The book is a densely complex web of cross-referenced ideas and case studies bookended by detailed discussion on the meaning of the anthropocene, staggering in its breadth of scholarship. But one doubts whether Evolution will enjoy the persuasive celebrity that Structure has exerted over the luminaries of our current knowledge economy. In 2015 Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, selected Kuhn’s Structure as his book of the year, recommending it to his followers on the largest social media platform in the world. In doing so, he joined a long list of notable American figures who have praised the book, including Al Gore and Bill Clinton. Renn dispels the ideas of dramatic paradigm shifts and scientific revolutions which helped make Kuhn’s book appear as a lightning rod for intellectual change. But perhaps what our present needs more than revolutions is intellectual common ground. For that reason alone, this book should be required reading for all who consider themselves students of the history of knowledge.

[i] Daston, Lorraine. “History of Science without Structure”, in Robert J. Richards and Lorraine Daston, Kuhn’s “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” at Fifty: Reflections on a Science Classic (University of Chicago Press, 2016), 117.

[ii] See chapter above and also Lorraine Daston, “The History of Science and the History of Knowledge,” KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge 1, no. 1 (March 1, 2017): 131–54

Alfred Freeborn (@Alfred_Freeborn) is a doctoral candidate in the History of Science at Humboldt University, Berlin. His research focuses on the history of biological psychiatry in postwar Britain, North America and Germany, with a special focus on the changing field of schizophrenia research – and he has published on the history of the Mind and Brain Sciences in HHS. He is a member of the junior research group “Learning from Alzheimer’s disease: A History of Biomedical Models of Mental Illness” (2015–2020)