Tag: psychology

Review: Outrageous Reason

Peter Barham, Outrageous Reason: Madness and Race in Britain and Empire, 1780-2020  (Monmouth: PCCS Books, 2023), 248pp, £21.50, softcover.

by Michael Romyn

In July 1981, Winston Rose, a 27-year-old father of two was choked to death by police officers in a neighbour’s back garden in Leyton, east London. Concerned for her husband during a period of poor mental health, Rose’s wife, Thora, had sought the advice of the social services, setting in motion a series of destructive actions by a range of state agents, including his GP, psychiatrists, and finally the police: 11 officers in total, some carrying riot shields, were sent to apprehend a visibly fearful Rose for psychiatric detention. Like the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis almost 40 years later, Rose’s fate was abetted by the spectre of violence his blackness supposedly portended. Rose, to be sure, stood little chance of being treated by the authorities with the care his situation necessitated. Rather, he was seen and dealt with as someone whose humanity was obscured by the myth and presumption of black dangerousness.

As Peter Barham shows, Rose’s life and death are a window onto the enduring entanglements of race-making and madness under the hegemony of white reason: mapped onto racialised bodies in broad swathes, madness and the dysfunction, deviancy, and dangerousness it signifies has made up a key dimension of the constitutive outside against which white liberal ‘rationality’ constructs and defends itself. This is a story Barham traces from the hold of the transatlantic slave ship to the hold of the police in contemporary Britain, demonstrating the way in which ideas about race and madness continue to flow along channels created by and for empire. The concept of the ‘hold’ certainly appears frequently across Outrageous Reason’s 14 chapters. For Barham, it can mean the deadly grasp applied by police officers and hospital wardens to black people like Rose and George Floyd, as well as Sean Rigg, Jimmy Mubenga, and numerous others, but also a ‘physical, ideological or, sometimes, figurative space, one of traumatic memory, in which persons, or the traces of persons such as records, are sheltered or stored, or, more commonly, held captive.’ (5).

Here, Barham’s objective is to retrieve a number of these subaltern persons or their traces through case studies and vignettes, some of which utilise personal narratives and other testimonial sources that place us squarely in the historical terrain. For example, we are plunged into the miserable depths of Kingston Lunatic Asylum in post emancipation Jamaica via the observations of Henrietta Dawson. Admitted to the asylum in the late 1850s, Dawson, who, like every patient at Kingston, was a woman of colour, was subjected to and witness of all manner of arbitrary violence, humiliation, and routinised punishment at the hands of staff, including the sometimes lethal practice of ‘tanking’, whereby patients were dunked and held underwater. Drawing on works by an array of scholars of slavery and postcolonialism, Barham argues that the conditions Dawson described were not a localised aberration in the hinterlands of British Empire, but that the asylum was an ‘engine room of colonial modernity’ (61); while cloaked in principles of benevolent governance, the Kingston asylum ‘scandal’ exposed the constitutive violence and racist differentiation at the heart of the imperial project. With the case of Orville Blackwood, who died in appalling circumstances at Broadmoor high-security psychiatric hospital in August 1991, Barham illustrates the disturbing continuities between Dawson’s experience and the treatment of black patients in contemporary spaces of ‘care’. As is made so clear in the book’s final chapters, the systematic negation of the colonial subject – to the status of ‘savages’, ‘beasts’, ‘barbarians’ and so on – continues to seep into and pollute our institutional cultures in both quotidian and cataclysmic ways.

The question of what care has looked like for the poor and racialised is posed at the outset of the book through the episode of the Zong slave ship massacre of 1781, where more than 130 captive Africans were thrown overboard by the crew in a chilling piece of financial calculus. While likely a simple error of re-painting, Barham argues that the earlier renaming of the ship, from the Dutch Zorg, meaning ‘care’, to Zong, augured the horrific events on the vessel to come. But he also sees it as a symbol of the way in which care has been routinely ‘abjected’ or ‘transformed into something else’ (57) when it comes to those deemed ‘mad’ or ‘damaged’ by the arbiters of white reason. The case of Alice Rebecca Triggs, a white domestic servant who spent the last four decades of her life in a mental institution after receiving a diagnosis of ‘moral imbecility’ in 1919, makes a wider point about how such delimitations of care and understanding not only imperilled black lives, but also the lives of the ‘lower or inferior orders’ in Britain who posed ‘a threat to the vitality and stability, and hence to the future, of the white race’ (102).              

There is another aspect of care to consider here: early on in the book Barham writes that he is ‘trying to feel my way, challenging and exploring diverse forms of “knowing” and drawing as much as I can on the exercise of…“negative capability”’ (6). Certainly, he treads the complex and multiple intertwining pasts of race, class, and madness and their troubling resonances in the present with considerable care and empathy, and in a way that forces us to think about and contend with our own cultural assumptions. In doing so, Outrageous Reason marks an important step in what Barham describes as a ‘gathering discourse, or convergence of voices’ (213) that enjoins a revaluation of conceptions of pathology and dysfunction, as well as the hegemony of whiteness that upholds them.

*

Michael Romyn’s first book, London’s Aylesbury Estate: An Oral History of the ‘Concrete Jungle’, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020.

Review: Emily Martin’s Experiments of the Mind

Review of Emily Martin, Experiments of the mind: From the cognitive psychology lab to the world of Facebook and Twitter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021)

Maarten Derksen (Theory & History of Psychology, University of Groningen)

Experiments of the mind is the result of a ten year-long project studying experimental psychology ethnographically, as a participant-observer in four laboratories. Emily Martin sat in on lab meetings, interviewed researchers, participated in experiments, and even tried her hand at running them. It has resulted in a book that contains many insightful observations.

Martin went into this study with an admirably open mind. Whereas her anthropology colleagues’ thought experimental psychology is a boring topic, she realized that the project of experimental psychology — to produce objective knowledge stripped of the subjectivity that both researchers and experimental subjects bring to the process — is fascinating, whether or not you think it is a worthwhile thing to strive for. Her open-mindedness allowed Martin to make the familiar strange: to alert the reader to aspects of experimental psychological practice that seem unremarkable or do not get noted at all.

To her surprise, studying the individual mind is an intensely social activity. The culture of experimental psychology is one of collaboration, mutual support, and frequent informal gatherings (much more so than in anthropology, she notes). In fact, Martin seems to have found especially social and collaborative labs. Not only are the psychologists who she studied without exception presented as very nice people (as becomes clear from the ‘dramatis personae’ that the book opens with), there is also an almost complete absence of conflict and competition. The labs are friendly, wholesome places, and there seems to be no scarcity. The post docs do not worry about finding another position after their current contract ends. There are no complaints about reviewer two, and the researchers do not struggle to get their work published or to get funding for the next project. This remarkable state of affairs would have merited more reflection, because such aspects of academic life are part and parcel of the production of knowledge.

The social nature of experimental psychology, Martin emphasizes, does not only lie in the relations between researchers. The experiments that are conducted are themselves thoroughly social events. Good experimenters care for their subjects’ well-being, if only because a subject who is bored or in pain does not produce good data. Moreover, experimenters socialize their subjects to become part of their world by training and instructing them so that they can play a role as good subjects. Experiments start by giving the subject instructions, usually followed by a brief practice round. Paradoxically, producing objective knowledge requires a carefully prepared subject. Martin also notices the importance of the virtually omnipresent pieces of furniture in psychological laboratories: a table and a chair for physically stabilising the subject. In this respect they serve the same function as the fixation point that controls the gaze of the subject, and which is an equally common device in experimental psychology. Ironically, Martin herself was a terrible subject, plagued by performance anxiety and constantly second-guessing the intentions of the experimenter. Time and again experimenters had to reassure her that her poor performance was not a problem, and if her data were too unusual they would simply be discarded.

Despite the researchers’ best efforts at disciplining their participants, and despite the devices (EEG, fMRI, eye-trackers) they have at their disposal to measure responses, producing data is not a smooth, automatic process. In a wonderful chapter titled ‘Gazing technologically’ Martin describes the human interventions, the judgment, the social relations it requires to keep the machinery running and bridge the gaps that inevitably fall between the experiment as intended and its actual realisation. She closes this chapter by saying that psychologists’ training and methods ignore these gaps between ideal and practice, but that does not do justice to the work she has just described so well: these gaps are a constant concern for researchers. This is one of several places where her analysis seems a bit off the mark to me. Another example concerns the training of participants. This, Martin writes, is an example of ‘problems and methods passing one another by’, as Wittgenstein famously remarked about psychology. The methods, in Martin’s view, circle around the problem, the cognitive experiences of the subjects, picking out statistically significant findings. But it seems more to the point to say that a particular version of the problem is being enacted by the method. Problem and method do not pass each other by as ships in the night. On the contrary, training and stabilising the subjects is part of creating a particular coupling of problem and method. In the process, the conscious experiences of the subjects disappear from view, only becoming visible if they destabilize this particular enactment of the research topic.

As the title of the book indicates, Martin has followed psychological theories and techniques from the lab into the world of social media. In the last two chapters Martin tries to show that companies like Meta/Facebook and Twitter.inc rely on psychological paradigms to attract users and keep them clicking on the links to their advertisers. They have turned us all into psychological subjects, unwittingly being manipulated and experimented on, and filling in the same kind of questionnaires as the participants in the lab. Unfortunately, this is not the best part of the book. Some of the links and resemblances that she tries to show between experimental psychology and the practices of Twitter and Facebook are just not there. As she acknowledges herself, Facebook doesn’t care whether you are standing up, lying down, or sitting down, whereas the subject in psychology experiments must be stabilized, immobilized to produce good data. Neither are the users of social media trained like the participants in experiments. The algorithms that platforms like Facebook employ are trained, as Martin notes, but they are not the users of the technology. Finally, it seems questionable whether participants in psychological laboratories ‘willingly’ provide data, as Martin writes. They are usually paid or compensated with course credit after all, unlike the users of social media. These differences are just as interesting as the commonalities between psychological and social media practices that Martin is intent to point out. Ultimately, however, the impression that this book leaves is shaped not by these two chapters, but by Martin’s many fascinating observations about the social production of psychological findings.

Interview: Ohad Reiss Sorokin on Alfred Binet, ‘intelligence’ and failed experiments

Ohad Reiss Sorokin, is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia who recently completed a PhD at Princeton University. He received a commendation in this year’s History of the Human Sciences Early Career Essay Prize for his essay ‘Intelligence’ before ‘Intelligence Tests’: Alfred Binet’s Experiments on his Daughters (1890-1903)’. We spoke to him about his interest in Binet and other research.

History of the Human Sciences: First of all, I wonder if you could briefly introduce your broad research interests, including your PhD project “‘I [Suffer] Unfortunately from Intellectual Hunger’: The Geistkreis, Desire for Knowledge, and the Transformation of Intellectual Life in the Twentieth Century”?

Ohad Reiss Sorokin: I wrote this essay a few years ago before I started working on my dissertation. The only thing that ties them together is that the dissertation is also a history of the human sciences but from a very different perspective. My dissertation deals with the ‘Geistkreis’, which was an intellectual circle that was active in Vienna between and 1921 and 1938. It was a meeting place of young philosophers, economists, lawyers, sociologists, psychologists, and art historians. What I argue in the dissertation is that they created this Geistkreis, in order to combat the reigning intellectual environment of Vienna at the time, which is known to be the “mandarin” culture. They tried to create a more open discussion culture that does the human sciences in a way that is not subjugated to the natural sciences, on the other hand, and is not completely metaphysical and out of touch with the empirical evidence, on the other.

HHS: Now to move on to your essay, ‘Intelligence’ before ‘Intelligence Tests’: Alfred Binet’s Experiments on his Daughters (1890-1903)’: who was Alfred Binet, for what is he most famous and how does your article on his work depart from the existing scholarship?

ORS: Binet is a very very famous figure in the history of the French psychology and in experimental psychology. He is most famous for the Binet-Simon test, which became the blueprint for the modern IQ test. That would be his main contribution. But that’s just one aspect of his work. He wrote so much, his bibliography is huge and he worked on many aspects of psychology. He did work with geniuses and people who could make complex calculations in their head to see how they thought. He was also a playwright. My work focuses on the 1903 book [L’Étude expérimentale de l’intelligence [“Experimental Study of Intelligence”], which was not exactly ignored but I argue that there was something very significant there that people have missed.

HHS: From what scientific contexts did the concept of ‘intelligence’ first emerge as a scientific object?

ORS: That is not an easy question to answer because we have a concept of intelligence from at least the Renaissance or even earlier. I focus on a very, very specific concept of intelligence that we talk about now, when we talk about intelligence, which has to be with intelligent tests, it has to do with the ranking of people according to their potential for intellectual achievement. This concept was created in an intellectual context in which empirical psychology became a lot more important in the late mid to late nineteenth century. It was a context in which such a concept was needed in order to sort students in a much more democratized education system.

HHS: And how did Binet understand ‘intelligence’?

ORS: The concept of intelligence I just described, that Binet developed in his 1903 book, has to do with personality, it’s called the personality type psychology of intelligence, which is like types of functions, holistic intellectual affinity/taste capabilities that can be described but cannot be ranked on a hierarchical scale. This is the kind of work that Binet does with his daughters in the 1903 book. He later developed a scale and its goal was to differentiate between what in English is called the ‘feeble minded’ and students who could actually succeed. Later on when he thinks about what was done with his intelligence test, especially in the United States, he never meant to create a number that you can sort people according to, but a scale to be used only in a specific context. It’s plausible that he never meant to do it, but he did nonetheless give the tools that allowed other people to do it.

HHS: What was the significance of Binet’s experiments on his daughters and, specifically, of the failed experiment you discuss?

ORS: The book is is quite interesting. There are definitely other books like that but it’s definitely not something you would see today in any of the natural sciences of psychology. It’s a big collection of experiments described from beginning to end, with all the details included, that he conducted with his daughters for many years. And, at least the way he presents it, he didn’t have a specific goal in mind, other than to study the intelligence of his daughters – whatever this means – and he tries many things. What I emphasize is that a failed experiment can teach us sometimes more than a successful one, especially if the experimenter reflects on the failure, then he can explain to us what he was looking for, he can explain what he didn’t get with the results. Then we can better understand the epistemic object or the thing that he was after that he did not discover. This is, to my mind, the key to understanding the most successful experiments which we just hear were successful.

HHS: What were the implications of Binet conducting experiments outside a laboratory setting – including his discussions of ‘outside noise’ and ‘distractions’ – for his understanding of intelligence?

ORS: I think the interesting thing is that he does not reflect so much about that, if I remember correctly. At the time he was working and was eventually the head of the experimental psychological laboratory in the Sorbonne so he had access to all the machines and instruments that were required but he does not reflect much about the effect of taking those instruments outside of the laboratory. He does, however, get very much annoyed by the fact that he doesn’t have adequate conditions in his home. So I would say as an answer to the question is that he has two subjects that can sees roughly every day, for many, many years which is something that it’s really difficult to duplicate in a laboratory setting. He has all the instruments and he exposed all the norms of laboratory science by remarking on the infringements of the norm that happens because he was working outside the laboratory. If it was just in a laboratory we wouldn’t know, for example, that sound isolation is important to measure intelligence because it’s not obvious, it hasn’t come from the concept that you need to isolate the subject. So in this book he makes these norms explicit and that’s what I found interesting about it

HHS: Why did Binet part ways with British associationism?

ORS: British associationism was, at the time, one of the leading theoretical frameworks for understanding the mechanics of the mind. Binet, who was an autodidact, read all the major works by John Stuart Mill and others, and at first took after them. During the time he was working with his daughters he discovered a number of phenomena that he could not square with the assoociationists’ passive understanding of consciousness, most important among them is, of course, “attention”, i.e., our mind’s capability to willfully focus on certain inputs and ignore others. This break with the British tradition helped him to articulate the need for a theory of the active mind. Intelligence is one way to think about it.

HHS: What role did time measurement devices play in Binet’s research?

ORS: I use the analysis done by Jimena Canales in the book Tenth of a Second. Canales argues that measuring things to the 10th of a second became such a crucial element of science in general in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It became like a symbol for science in a way. What I argue in the article is that at the beginning of that book it seemed like Binet measured things just out of duty. He’s a scientist so he needs to have a number somewhere. We know that in modern psychology that the mind is tied with time, it happens in time not in space so therefore it follows to measure time. There are tools for that and there’s a concept for that. But you can find time marks for tests that have nothing to do with time. He doesn’t comment on the time, he doesn’t explain why it is important that some took longer or shorter amounts of time.

But then, at some point, he changes, and I argue cautiously that the change is not necessarily a conscious one. At some point he asked the girls to write sentences. He defined the sentence according to their quality, quality in terms of whether it was a descriptive sentence, a poetic sentence or an imaginative sentence and so forth. He measured how much time it took for them to produce each kind of sentence. But then it is a bit like comparing apples and oranges. He compares the different times it took to each girl to perform different tasks. He has time as a way to compare the performance, but he does it in a way that makes no sense, because he himself defines the tasks as diffrernt. He doesn’t explain why he does it but in the paper I argue that this is the blueprint for the notion that we have today that doing something faster is an indication for greater intelligence. I mean to cook an egg is faster than to write paper. It says nothing about the persons cooking eggs or writing papers. That’s basically the argument.

HHS: How is the difference between the two concepts of intelligence Binet outlined in 1903 and 1905 conventionally characterised and how do you understand the relationship between them? Why do you claim that the concept of intelligence outlined in his 1903 book should be seen as a ‘major ontological leap’?

ORS: These are two separate questions, I think. The first one is easier to answer because usually scholars treat the 1905 publication as introducing Binet’s concept of intelligence because in this iteration of the concept intelligence becomes measurable and hierarchical. Those two components are “missing,” or better, not yet in existence, in 1903.

For the most part scholars either treat the1903 concept as a deficient concept on his way to create the, “fully developed” 1905 concept. Or they ignore it altogether because they don’t think about it as a work about intelligence, but as a work about “personality types”. I don’t remember seeing a good account that explained why he called it intelligence nevertheless in 1903.

I was trying to draw attention to the fact that there are some similarities between the two concepts. It’s difficult, I don’t think it’s impossible, but it’s difficult to find in other major works on intelligence from the time period. It is the idea that intelligence is subjective, in the sense that we measure or look at the intelligence of each person separately. It is not about a philosophical or general concept of intelligence. It’s immaterial – not about the size of the brain or the density of the brain or anything like that – and yet it’s empirically observable.

It’s not something that you learn from a conceptual analysis of any sort. Instead you need to take people to the lab or make an empirical examination or make them take a test. The combination of those characteristics is already there in 1903.

I wouldn’t be the first to argue that Binet has a very eclectic method. This constellation of characteristics is the result of his eclectic method and it’s an ontological leap in the sense that it creates in the world an object that did not exist before. The idea that we each have a specific thing that was like an organ but immaterial and yet is observable with particular methods.

HHS: I began by asking you about your PhD project and wondered if in conclusion you could say something about where you hope your research might lead in the future.

ORS: I’ve been working on the dissertation about the ‘Geistkreis’ for four years now and with time I realized that what I found so attractive about this circle is that they are almost an embodiment of the idea of desire for knowledge. I’m interested in how knowledge and desire survive together in the realm of professional humanities, in the twentieth and early twenty-first century. I’m about to start a postdoc position in the Institute for Advanced Studies of Culture at the University of Virginia and I hope to follow this thread.

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.

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.