History of The Human Sciences

Rebecca Reich. State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature and Dissent After Stalin; DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2018; 280 pages; hardback £45.00; ISBN: 0875807755

By Hannah Proctor

Rebecca Reich’s State of Madness focuses on discourses surrounding punitive psychiatry in the Soviet Union in the years between Stalin’s death in 1953 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Much of the existing literature on the pathologisation of dissent, stories of which began to emerge and spread via samizdat in the 1960s, has an institutional emphasis, whereas Reich focuses on relationships between literature and psychiatry. In the context of a state system of psychiatry that understood dissent as a form of insanity and attributed ‘political resistance to a distinctive state of mind’ (p. 62), resistance was imagined by those resisting as a sane response to a mad system. Dissidents–a broad term that does not necessarily imply engagement in political activism–worked to ‘validate a norm of inakomyslie, or “thinking differently”’ by challenging the state’s authority to diagnose insanity (p. 217). Reich demonstrates that literature was a key site for contesting psychiatric diagnoses, becoming a ‘source of diagnostic authority’ in its own right (p. 6). State of Madness is always working with and through contested dichotomies; there is neither dissent nor madness without a norm. Sanity then becomes a question of who is responsible for defining and assigning the diagnostic categories.

State of Madness examines literature from a range of genres produced during the period after Stalin’s death that challenged the theoretical frameworks and practices of psychiatry. In the case studies considered by Reich the boundaries between the aesthetic and the psychiatric  – along with those between sanity and insanity – are often blurred. Reich does far more than merely analyse aesthetic representations of psychiatry, however. Not only does she discuss how psychiatrists themselves deployed aesthetic conventions in their clinical documents, but her analysis of the interplay between literature and psychiatry is grounded in an understanding of life in the Soviet Union as thoroughly aestheticised: ‘the state went about constructing socialism by applying its creative principles to reality itself’ (p. 50). The question of identifying distinctions between art and life was an urgent one for some of the figures she discusses precisely because it was so hard to discern.

In her introduction, Reich traces the ‘deceptive similarities’ between Soviet dissident narratives and the works of Michel Foucault, noting that although his discussions of the normative impulses of psychiatry echoed Soviet concerns, his analyses pertained to liberal societies and thus cannot fully account for the authoritarianism of the Soviet Union. (Though it could be noted that this does not mean dissent has not been pathologised in the kinds of societies Foucault was analysing, as Jonathan Metzl’s The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease demonstrates with regard to Ionia State Hospital in Michigan in the 1960s.) In addition to identifying such theoretical convergences and divergences, Reich later situates Soviet abuses of psychiatry in relation to contemporaneous Western critiques of psychiatry, often bracketed together under the baggy and contested term ‘antipsychiatry’. News of the pathologisation of Soviet dissidents emerged in the West at the very moment these ideas were at their most popular, and chimed with the notion that psychiatric institutions and nosologies were inherently oppressive. More interestingly, Reich also discusses how the repudiation of antipsychiatry in mainstream Soviet psychiatry journals ironically led to those ideas circulating in the Soviet Union. She discusses examples of people who acquainted themselves with this material and found that it spoke to the Soviet experience: ‘trickling down through sanctioned and unsanctioned channels, Western antipsychiatric ideas informed the critical vocabulary through which Soviet dissidents exposed abuse’ (p. 65).

Reich begins by discussing the literary discourses Soviet psychiatrists themselves engaged with, underlining that the psychiatric norms dissidents were reacting against were expressed in terms that were congruent with Soviet literary conventions. She thus establishes from the very beginning that the lines of influence between psychiatry and aesthetics flowed in both directions. By applying a formal literary analysis to clinical documents, Reich convincingly demonstrates that the discipline of psychiatry was structured according to an ‘established aesthetic framework’ borrowing from the ‘literary doctrine of Socialist Realism’ (p. 27, p. 29). Psychiatrists framed their diagnostic practices as a kind of artistic endeavour and pathologised aesthetic modes that deviated from the standards of Socialist Realism.

According to Reich, diagnostic categories furnished psychiatrists with ‘predictive templates for narrating’ the lives of dissidents (p. 43). The psychiatrist drew out the ‘essence’ of a patient’s life story through a spoken discussion and effectively muffled the patient’s own account in the process, which Reich frames, drawing on the work of Soviet literary scholar Bakhtin, as a shift from dialogue to monologue (p. 44). A further stage of mediation then occurred when the ‘essence’ extracted verbally was converted into writing in the form of a clinical report in which the subjective interpretations of the psychiatrist, along with the aestheticising qualities of diagnosis, tended to be obscured by the neutral tone of medical objectivity. Yet Reich argues that in spite of their authors’ impartial intentions, forensic reports nonetheless amplified the always partial voices of Soviet psychiatrists, whom Reich argues narrated their patients’ conditions in a manner that conformed to the teleology of the Socialist Realist ‘master plot’, situating syndromes and processes of recovery in a progressive narrative.

Psychiatrists also turned their diagnostic gaze on the artistic and literary outputs of their dissident patients. In line with state-sanctioned understandings of art, figurative work was associated with sanity and aesthetic harmony was associated with mental healing. Normative aesthetic judgments and literary categories were transferred from artworks to individual psyches which, Reich argues, betrayed a failure to understand the sophisticated artistic movements of the period – such as Moscow Conceptualism or Sots-Arts – that relied heavily on irony, kitsch and parody, and self-consciously critiqued Socialist Realist tropes.

But literature was – conversely – a site for contesting psychiatry’s art of diagnosis, which Reich moves on to discuss in the book’s second chapter and in three subsequent case studies. The ambiguities of psychiatric discourse and diagnostic categories facilitated their punitive use, but writers also played with these ambiguities for their own ends: ‘their psychiatric narratives reveal a shared perception that psychiatric abuse had resulted both from the ambiguity psychiatric discourse itself and from the state’s conflation of inakomyslie, or ‘thinking differently’, with insanity’ (p. 60). The monologism Reich identifies as characteristic of Soviet psychiatry in the first chapter is replaced in the second by the dialogue introduced by dissidents ‘that embraced singularity, irony, and open-endedness’ (p. 93). If psychiatrists had absorbed the conventions of Soviet Socialist Realism as part of their pathologisation of dissidents in these counter examples, by contrast, ‘literary discourse assimilates psychiatric discourse to depathologize inakonmyslie and to pathologize both society and the state’ (p. 96).

The book’s first ‘case’ focuses on Joseph Brodsky with an argument animated by his reversal of Marx’s dictum ‘existence conditions consciousness’. Here dialogism becomes literalised through a discussion of his narrative poem ‘Gorbunov and Gorchakov’, set in a psychiatric hospital, which takes the form of a discussion between two characters embodying different concepts. Brodsky is not deemed to have been hospitalised for punitive reasons and, unlike the dissidents discussed in the previous chapter, was not a political activist. But the significance of his diagnosis and institutionalisation for Reich is ‘the sense it appears to have given the poet that the primary purpose of the psychiatric profession was to enforce a linguistic regime of existence’ (p. 108).

Andrei Siniavskii (along with his pseudonymous alter ego Abram Terts) is the second of Reich’s three case studies. In 1965 he was arrested and found imputable by psychiatrists who examined his literary output for evidence of pathology, thus enacting the very melding of life and art that his previous works critiqued. Siniavskii developed an understanding of the aesthetic process at odds with that espoused by the state, which propounded a vision of creativity in line with Lenin’s ‘reflection theory’ [teoriia otrazheniia]. This extended the dictum of Marx, that Brodsky drew upon, by claiming that consciousness and existence – or humanity and nature – existed in a mutually transformative relationship with one another; people were shaped by their circumstances but could also intervene in the world to transform it. This, Reich explains, had a counterpart in psychiatry in the form of reflex theory [reflekornaia teoriia]. According to Reich, mirrors and other reflective surfaces litter Terts’s works, figuring as surfaces that distort the reality they claim to show: ‘It was by concealing rather than revealing reality’s essence… that the state had driven society mad.’ (p. 184). His works imagined art, alternatively, as the site where it might be possible to promote a deeper awareness of reality by highlighting its strangeness and artifice, departing from Lenin and drawing instead on Viktor Shklovskii’s notion of ‘defamiliarization’ [ostranenie] as an ‘antidote to creative madness’ (p. 153). For Siniavskii/Terts, who developed a form of Fantastic Realism as a counterpart to the officially sanctioned conventions of Socialist Realism, the antidote to reflection in art was not achieved through a greater fidelity to reality but, paradoxically, through estrangement from it.

Reich’s concluding ‘case’ focuses on Venedikt Erofeev, a writer whose chaotic and often inebriated life paralleled the social deviance of his literary heroes, who also bore his name. Here the smudged line between life and art and Erofeev’s self-conscious attempts to play with this blurriness, returns in the guise of a tussle between madness and its simulation. The theatrical feigning of mental illness as a means of avoiding imprisonment was a practice Soviet psychiatrists were aware of, and Reich situates Erofeev’s work in this context arguing that it ‘captures the risks of simulating madness in an irrational world of ever more meaningless diagnostic categories’ (p. 188).

Alcohol was Erofeev’s primary material in his performative experiments which danced along the border between sanity and insanity, a pair of categories that had a counterpart in the relationship between simulation and dissimulation: at what point does the performance become a reality? Or does simulating madness as it is defined by a ‘mad’ state paradoxically stave off real madness? Erofeev eventually lost control of his own experiment and sought out treatment as the alcohol induced hallucinations and delirium that had characterised his writing became a part of his lived experience. The staged pathologisation soon became inseparable from life.

As in other chapters of State of Madness, in Erofeev’s work distinctions are constantly breaking down: between sanity and insanity, simulation and dissimulation, the theatrical and the real, the asylum and society, and, ultimately, between literature and real life. The mask of madness gradually became indistinguishable from the face beneath. Yet if, as Reich argues, Erofeev’s play Walpurgis Night exposes ‘the fact that it is society that has lost its mind’ (p. 203), the question remains whether sanity can ever really exist or even be defined within a crazy world: ‘how were they to calibrate their health in a society where, as they so frequently portrayed it, madness was the psychological norm?’ (p. 15) Ultimately for Erofeev, ‘the only certainty is the theatricality with which both categories [sanity and insanity] manifest themselves’ (p. 205). Reich describes dissidents stuck in a ‘discursive trap’ and the examples she considers describe these traps from within or sometimes construct new ones but they struggle to find ways of escaping altogether (p. 61). It’s enough to drive anyone mad.

If dissent is the norm then what happens when society changes? I would have been intrigued to read an epilogue considering what became of these discourses after the Soviet Union – and its attendant master plots and meta-narratives – collapsed. Of the three writers Reich discusses in most detail, Brodky and Siniavskii both lived past 1991. Brodsky left the Soviet Union in 1972 but the implication is that this geographical displacement did not lead to a sudden sanity and he instead experienced ‘the maddening freedom of exile’ (p. 20). The Soviet ‘state of madness’ may have had particular contours but this suggests that there may be no such thing as a ‘state of sanity’. The dissident writers Reich discusses ‘assumed the role of psychiatrists to an authoritarian state that had lost its mind’ (p. 19), but the lingering anxiety remains that identifying this madness could provide neither an individual nor societal cure. Reich’s book attests that literature nonetheless remained a privileged site for contending with the impasse. As Brodsky wrote in ‘A Part of Speech’ (1975-76):

It may be the heel that’s slipping on ice, or it may be the earth

that’s turning beneath the heel. (p. 137)

Hannah Proctor is Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare at the University of Strathclyde.

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

by Sarah Chaney

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Simon Jarrett

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by Andreas Sommer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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