546366 research-article2014
SSS0010.1177/0306312714546366Social Studies of SciencePettit
Review essay
Subject matter: Human behavior, psychological expertise, and therapeutic lives
Social Studies of Science 2015, Vol. 45(1) 146–158 © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0306312714546366 sss.sagepub.com
Michael Pettit
Department of Psychology, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada
Peter Hegarty, Gentlemen’s Disagreement: Alfred Kinsey, Lewis Terman, and the Sexual Politics of Smart Men (Chicago, IL: University Of Chicago Press, 2013), 240 pp., $25.00 (pbk), ISBN 9780226024585. Helen E Longino, Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 256 pp., $25.00 (pbk), ISBN 9780226492889. Chloe Silverman, Understanding Autism: Parents, Doctors, and the History of a Disorder (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 352 pp., $26.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780691159683. Mathew Thomson, Lost Freedom: The Landscape of the Child and the British Post-War Settlement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 312 pp., $99.00, ISBN 9780199677481. Marga Vicedo, The Nature and Nurture of Love: From Imprinting to Attachment in Cold War America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 336 pp., $45.00, ISBN 9780226020556.
Few have greater confidence in psychology’s ability to mold subjectivity than its critics. However, there is a tension in much of the historical and sociological literature on psychology and the psychological society between a commitment to a microphysics of power (Foucault, 1977) and the kinds of sources and voices that get included in such analyses. ‘Subjectification’ (Rose, 1996) is all too often taken for granted, rather than made into a matter of inquiry involving contestation, multiplicity, and rejection. Relationships between scientists and publics are largely understood in terms of a hypodermic needle model of
Corresponding author: Michael Pettit, Department of Psychology, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON M3J 1P3, Canada. Email: [email protected]
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communication (Gitlin, 1978). On this basis, critical psychologist-historians select their favored disorder or construct, offer a largely intellectual history of it, and then assert that everyday experience has been psychologized. Such an approach speaks more to scientists’ visions and pretensions than to the social life of psychological facts (O’Connor and Joffe, 2013). Moreover, this approach bolsters and inflates, rather than critically scrutinizes, the scientist’s authority. We need greater specificity about psychology’s impact, better evidence of the circuits between expert description and self-understanding, and appreciation of the complicated lives of scientific methods and theories. The books under review explore entanglements of psychology, sex, childhood, and development, and in so doing offer rich resources for rethinking much of the received wisdom about the public understanding of psychology, the authority of its experts, and the process of subjectification. The sex/gender distinction has long been recognized as a crucial site of traffic between nature and culture, one weighty with politics and consequences. These dynamics are amplified around children and development, where behavioral sciences and social policy meet, and each tries to anticipate and realize a better future (Adams et al., 2009). As the books here illustrate, psychology does not seek simply to craft accurate depictions of human behavior, but rather to sustain therapeutic regimes directed at intervention and improvement. In other words, the books foreground those sites where psychology’s ambitions to ‘make up people’ (Hacking, 2002) become most explicit. At first glance, Peter Hegarty’s (2013) book seems like a narrow micro-study. After all, it focuses on a brief dispute between two scientists. In 1948, Lewis Terman wrote a scathing and detailed critique of the methodology and findings of Alfred Kinsey’s fielddefining survey of American sexual behavior. However, the book is less a history of these figures than it is a series of essays that draw freely from social theory, cognitive science, and archival research to explore the co-production of sexuality and intelligence as two of the most salient categories of human difference. Hegarty complicates received wisdom that sees Kinsey as the liberator of American sexual attitudes and Terman as the eugenicist intelligence tester. At the same time, Hegarty destabilizes longstanding assumptions within the field of sexology where the scientist’s heterosexuality is often equated with greater impartiality and objectivity. He shows that both men were deeply invested in their subjects’ sexual proclivities and cognitive abilities, and he uses their dispute to open a broad history of sexuality that examines the link between masturbation and precociousness, the historical stability of patterns of sexual behavior, sex as a predictor of class, and the role of religion in repressing sexual urges. At the heart of the book is the figure of the queer genius. Unsurprisingly, Michel Foucault’s theorization of sexuality looms large, often as prevalent as the contributions of either Kinsey or Terman. Hegarty draws on these three theorists of sexuality to contend that we need to tease apart Queteletian (oriented toward the average) and Galtonian (orientated toward the ideal) forms of normalization. He calls on queer theorists to engage with psychology’s messy practices, and not to dismiss the field out of hand as ‘disciplinary power’. Chloe Silverman (2011) also treats the terrain of psychology as complex, documenting how autism, during its relatively brief history, has been made to matter in relation to psychoanalysis, applied behavioral analysis, genetics, neuroscience, and immunology. Silverman highlights this plurality to trouble simplistic stories of medicalization.
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She ably demonstrates both how biomedicine is a contested keyword and how autistic persons have been medicalized in heterogeneous ways at different times. Her key intervention is to illustrate how biomedicine contributes to – and is shaped by – the formation of parents-of-children-with-autism as an identity and experience. Silverman’s work exemplifies the trend toward studying biomedicine in the age of new social movements (Epstein, 1996; Heath et al., 2008; Murphy, 2006). Hers is not an account of the emergent neurodiversity movement, nor an explanation of how autism came to occupy a new cultural niche as geek chic eclipsed mid-century anxieties about the alienation engendered by technological society. Instead, Silverman focuses on deftly disentangling the category of the expert from that of the biomedical professional. Drawing on archival and ethnographic evidence, she charts how caregivers serve not only as patient advocates but also as practitioners of therapy, organizers of novel research, and coordinators in the collection of biological materials. In this way, she rejects the juxtaposition between expertise and dispassion and illustrates how feelings of love structure both representations of and interventions into autism. Scientific pluralism is also at the heart of Helen Longino’s (2013) analysis of behavioral sciences. She focuses on two topics that have generated considerable research and controversy: violence and sexuality. In the first half of the book, she dissects the research questions, methods, and assumptions of five approaches that offer proximate (rather than ultimate) explanations of human behavior: quantitative (or classical) behavioral genetics, molecular behavioral genetics, neurobiology, the social–environmental approaches pursued by psychologists and sociologists, and finally various claimants to integrative approaches. As a social epistemologist, Longino champions this disunity of science, refusing to take sides as she finds each field incomplete and wanting. Interestingly, she classifies various integrative approaches, such as developmental systems theory, as one among many rather than as the solution to a divided arena (cf Fausto-Sterling, 2000). The book demonstrates the philosopher’s skill at teasing out tacit and unjustified assumptions, especially in its account of the continued confusion over what exactly constitutes something as seemingly self-evident as ‘behavior’. Longino convincingly argues that all behavioral sciences are biased toward conceptualizing behavior in individualistic terms, rather than in relational terms that would enable a view of behavior as something networked at a population level. Marga Vicedo (2013) also emphasizes the plurality of the behavioral sciences, but she frames it in terms of different ethical and epistemological consequences. The book is organized around what Vicedo views as a nefarious interdisciplinary alliance between the ethologist Konrad Lorenz and the psychoanalyst John Bowlby, a relationship designed to bolster the credibility of both in the face critics in their respective disciplines. She focuses on this relationship to trace the movement of studies of the affective bond between mother and infant across a wide swath of populations and experimental settings, including orphaned and evacuated human children, gosling imprinting on the maternal figure of the bearded male scientist, and rhesus monkeys clinging to mechanical surrogates. She illustrates how theories of imprinting, instinct, and attachment flourished in the postwar era because the relevant experts continuously worked to shift which field held the expertise to evaluate or debunk these constructs. Vicedo’s book also underscores some of the problematic assumptions about geography that govern the history of
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psychology. The psychological society is often understood as the child of the American Century, and the book is supposedly a study of Cold War America. However, a number of her most prominent historical actors (e.g. Lorenz, Bowlby, and Anna Freud) are decidedly not American. Moreover, the most vocal critics of attachment theory are the psychobiologists associated with the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Thus, Vicedo’s research documents the importance of international sojourns and mistranslations alongside the interdisciplinary ones she foregrounds. Silverman and Vicedo both see the history of child development and its entanglement with psychology as focused on a particular emotion, love. Emotion in general and nostalgia in particular are key themes of Mathew Thomson’s (2013) book. Opening with photographs of children playing in the streets, he offers a social history of the changing nature of childhood autonomy in a number of cultural registers to address the question, ‘Where has the free-roaming child gone?’ His thesis is that as the emotional landscape of the child greatly expanded during the postwar era, the extent of its physical landscape became considerably more restricted. On Thomson’s account, during the postwar era, the welfare state invested its aspirations to form a healthier and more democratic citizensubject in the figure of ‘the child’. In this narrative, psychology is the omnipresent lens for viewing the risks of late modern life – from traffic to television to sex offenders. Thomson illustrates this cultural salience of psychology, while reflexively mining the studies produced by the field to capture understandings of social and technological change. In other words, he is interested both in how the experience of childhood came to be understood in a psychological idiom and in the particular findings of psychologists as eyewitness accounts of the historically changing experience of childhood. The books under consideration offer a number of tools to revitalize and redirect the scholarship interested in tracing the dynamic loops among behavior, scientific knowledge, and subjectivity. Such a renewal involves attentiveness to psychology’s subject matter. This begins with an appreciation of the populations that are made to matter in developing scientific theories. What kinds of species or persons are privileged at different moments in time and how do their particular affordances animate the resulting knowledge? When have the competing imperatives of standardization and inclusion ruled (Logan, 2001)? Alongside this concern with the psychological subject, we need to attend to the historical specificity and materiality of the circuits through which psychology moves (Marres and Lezaun, 2011). This entails changes in the form of mass media (from print culture to radio and television to 21st-century social media), scientists’ attitudes toward the relevance of public opinion and input into their research, and the relationship between psychology and neighboring professions and fields of expertise. Finally, these books signal something of a break with the prevailing synthesis of Foucault and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge that animated the previous generation’s research agenda. There is a tentative turn to resources such as studies of affect, cognitive psychology, and quantified citation analysis to understand the psychological society.
The challenge of recent history Collectively, these books largely reaffirm the received wisdom that World War II (WWII) was the signal event in the history of the behavioral sciences. The dominant narrative has
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revolved around the patronage of the Veteran’s Administration in the dramatic expansion of the ranks of clinical psychologists in the United States and the exportation of this vision during the Cold War (Capshew, 1999; Herman, 1995; Rose, 1990). However, the war figures somewhat differently in these books, which extend Rose’s account of psychology and liberal self-governance. Silverman, Thomson, and Vicedo all argue that the recognition of the psychic costs of wartime deprivation (whether in concentration camps or among young evacuees) led to fears about the pathology of ‘mechanized’ human relations. In response, psychological experts encouraged the development of healthy emotional expression as the key to realizing the democratic promise of the nascent welfare state. The 1943 diagnostic recognition of autism as a disorder of affective contact is emblematic of this moment. In the hands of the controversial psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, autism became a powerful metaphor for social alienation in the immediate postwar period (Silverman, 2011: 61–92). At the time, however, autism and Bettelheim were eclipsed by another psychoanalytic celebrity, John Bowlby. Focusing on the reception of his theory in the United States, Vicedo views Bowlby as exemplifying Cold War culture, a pernicious escalating of maternal anxieties and guilt that led to the containment of women in the home during the Baby Boom. Thomson concedes that Bowlbyism certainly led to the heightening of the private home as the child’s primary developmental landscape, but argues that this constraint was accompanied by greater latitude when it came to emotional expression and free play. These divergent interpretations are in part due to a focus on different national contexts with distinct experiences of social democracy. As salient, however, is that Vicedo’s interest is in motherhood while Thomson is concerned with childhood. In other words, the same psychological theory had different consequences for different psychological subjects, even those who lived contemporaneously and shared the familial bond. These books each contribute to understanding how ours became the age of attachment. Alongside this more conventional periodization, the books, especially Thomson’s, suggest that the 1970s represent a heretofore unnoticed moment of transition. The 1970s are a period when 1960s radical thought entered into the psychological sciences and altered assumptions about development, childhood, and sexuality. The legacy is mixed. As the example of the emergence of the pedophile demonstrates, ‘permissiveness’ allowed for the greater expression of intimate matters and new identities while also opening a space for more explicit condemnation, criticisms, and censure (Thomson, 2013: 153–183). More broadly, historians of psychology have yet to fully grapple with how proponents of anti-racism, feminism, gay liberation, and other emancipatory movements entered into the discipline’s ranks and introduced new theories and research methods. (For a preliminary attempt, see Pickren and Rutherford (2010).) Indeed, the regulatory concepts of ‘human subject’ and ‘informed consent’ date from this period (Stark, 2012). The question becomes whether the behavioral sciences remain the same object, subject to the same forms of critique, as they were in the 1970s. Psychology undoubtedly remains a highly positivistic science in its official pronouncements, and if anything the discipline’s connections to the fields of medicine and health have increased in recent decades. At the same time, in terms of membership, psychology is now more diverse and inclusive than it was prior to 1970, and branches of the discipline are more cognitive and more cultural. How these things fit together in a polyvalent and fragmented field has not
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received much attention from Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars or even psychologist-historians. Indeed, the emergence of the ‘new history of psychology’ was itself emblematic of the historical era. The political sensibilities of attending to psychology’s power dynamics, reclaiming lost voices, and historicizing universalistic claims through qualitative research were forged during the 1970s in debates around sociobiology and the connections between heredity and IQ. The critiques of naturalization and essentialism were not external to psychology, but came to form an element of the discipline. Our histories have not always recognized this. By ending her narrative on the cusp of the 1970s, Vicedo excludes the interventions made by Bowlby’s feminist critics, which include engagements with psychoanalysis that resonate with many of her concerns. In subsequent years, the moral authority of nature has shifted within the behavioral sciences. Silverman demonstrates how naturalization has been a strategy knowingly pursued by patient advocates in the era of genetic citizenship, as opposed to an ideology that scientist-activists have sought to unmask. Caregivers have often embraced behavioral genetics and neuroscience to legitimize conditions and the experience of suffering. In contrast, caregivers have seen psychoanalytic explanations as inadequate and as exemplifying ‘mother blame’. Longino acknowledges (pp. 6–7) but ultimately underplays the uneven moral history of the behavioral sciences’ appeals to nature. In the field of aggression research, genetic explanations are viewed with suspicion because they still carry racialized connotations. In contrast, ‘born that way’ arguments have become the good liberal position when it comes to sexual behavior. This parting of ways, in terms of how policy-minded psychologists conceptualize race and sexuality, began in the 1970s (Pettit, 2011). However, influenced by queer theory, Hegarty is much less sanguine than Longino about psychology’s naturalization of sexuality.
The circuitry of publics The 20th-century social and behavioral sciences confront us with two discrepant images. In one, they are governed by a hyper-professional scientism that led them to become ensconced in the ivory tower and detached from worldly concerns. In the other, they are seen as constantly psychologizing, economizing, and sociologizing the lifeworld. I have argued elsewhere that if historians want to parse this contradiction, then they need to be more attentive to the form and content of the archives generated by the human sciences (Pettit, 2013a). One good index of the kind of ‘looping effects’ (Hacking, 1995b) that interest historians is the presence of such dialogues in archival sources. Put simply, what kind of evidence do these sources provide indicating that the sciences at stake have encountered and shaped daily life? The answers may include information about the design of tests and experiments, and the content of responses and letters from the public inquiring about research or seeking advice. Thus far, historians of medicine have been much more attuned to this kind of history from below and its limitations (Jacyna and Casper, 2012). One certainly has to be cautious. Forms of self-censorship may work to exclude such material (Freedman, 1998). Moreover, relationships between psychologists and their publics in the era of print culture and letter writing were different than they are in the world of science blogging, social media, and knowledge mobilization plans. In our own
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era, voices from below have become a commodity (Savage and Burrows, 2007) in a process intertwined with the emergence of modern opinion polling in the 1930s (Igo, 2007). At a time when social-media-generated opinion seems to be eclipsing knowledge in contentious politics, calls to acknowledge non-expert voices have a different political valence than they did during the supposed age of experts at mid-century (Irwin, 2006; Lezaun and Soneryd, 2007). When I was researching my book on deception (Pettit, 2013b), I was struck by the paucity of sources in the papers of those early 20th-century psychologists most active in the public sphere as compared with those of their mid-century counterparts. The lack of sources was due partly to the technology of the office (carbon paper and secretaries) and the geographic mobility of the scholars. Yet, the absence also speaks to how early 20thcentury psychologists understood the public and their relationship to it, as well as the incredulity of jurists, journalists, and others toward the notion of psychologists as experts. In contrast, the most ambitious recent histories of the mid-century social sciences have artfully drawn on an abundance of archival materials to detail new forms of technical expertise, subjectivity, and their interaction (Igo, 2007; Rutherford, 2009; Savage, 2010). Archival silence and presence are in themselves suggestive evidence that can illuminate the social history of expertise. Tellingly, even the philosopher Longino feels that a study of the behavioral sciences requires more than careful conceptual analysis. In Studying Human Behavior, she devotes a chapter, ‘The social life of behavioral science’, to the circulation and reception of scientific theories through various disciplinary communities and media. Using the ISI Science Citation Index and Google Scholar, she and her team examined how key publications from the different disciplinary approaches got cited in what they classified as research, clinical, policy, and hybrid journals. They also looked for stories in leading newsmagazines and book reviews of popular science books reflecting the different approaches. She uncovered greater media coverage of genetic approaches compared to more integrative ones. I have both conceptual and methodological reservations about Longino’s analysis, and ultimately found it more suggestive than satisfying. She writes about science communication primarily in terms of dissemination, filtering, distortion, and ‘downstream users’ (p. 181). In other words, she does not engage with STS’ more dynamic approaches to the public understanding of science and civic epistemology (Hilgartner, 1990; Jasanoff, 2005; Wynne, 1992). She leaves little room for how psychological constructs acquire new meanings as they circulate through heterogeneous communities. Methodologically, citation analysis promises a certain rigor when it comes to assessing scholarly influence. Yet, the criterion used for selecting specific publications to represent the different approaches was unclear. I am not convinced that charting the citation of a single publication per field is the correct level of analysis. If Longino had conceptualized different approaches in terms of institutions and networks instead of relying on single exemplary papers, she would have detected distinct geographies when it comes to research on sexual behavior, for example, one focused around the North American Great Lakes region (especially Southern Ontario) and one focused around London, United Kingdom. I make these criticisms because quantitative citation analysis has much to offer the kind of history that I am advocating. Danziger’s (1990) influential argument about the
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changing relationship between experiments and subjects is grounded in a systematic content analysis of several journals over a number of decades. Capshew’s (1999) analysis of the psychology profession has a strong prosopographical component. We do not have similar studies of the recent past when psychology’s scale has increased dramatically. Furthermore, scientometrics has become too important an aspect of the contemporary management of science for us to neglect it. We must engage with this methodology but bring our own questions to bear on it.
The social lives of participants Longino is not the only author concerned with the social life of the behavioral sciences. One of the most striking features about the books at hand is how they draw our attention to the formation of parents (rather than children or patients) as psychological subjects. Silverman does a tremendous job of using personal papers to excavate the affective labor that transformed caregivers like Amy Lettick into autism experts. Yet her son Benjamin, who inspired her efforts, is largely absent from Silverman’s narrative. I was left wondering how a historian might reread Amy Lettick’s papers to render him more visible and agential. Conversely, actual mothers have a shadowy presence in Vicedo’s history of attachment theory. Hinted at through occasional use of media and citations of contemporaneous sociological research on family life, they are ever-present, but their voices are largely absent. Especially when read against Silverman’s book, it becomes clear that how mothers facilitated, adopted, or questioned attachment theory based on their own experiences is largely outside the bounds of this intellectual history. The exception is Vicedo’s (2013: 160–162) chapter on Harry Harlow’s wire mother experiments. There, she relates the ambivalent reception of the monkey experiments among the women who wrote to Harlow to that by the press. It is precisely her attention to these women and the ultimate fate of the rhesus monkeys that allows Vicedo to go beyond Donna Haraway’s (1989: 231–243) account of Harlow. Hegarty’s contributes a number of valuable tools to our analysis of subjectification when he addresses the often intimate relationship between scientists and their subjects. Terman used the intelligence test to identify a cohort of gifted children, initiating one of psychology’s earliest longitudinal studies. Hegarty argues that becoming a child genius was not simply a matter of coming from a place of racial privilege. Instead, Terman’s identification of these children is better understood as a Maussian gift, fraught with reciprocal obligations. The gifted would validate Terman’s science by making good on their early promise of becoming the nation’s leaders and improving its racial stock. Nonnormative sexuality compromised their eugenic mission, and as a result, Terman had a complicated relationship with a number of the gifted who came to express queer sexual behavior. In some ways, he saw them as betraying his emotional investment in their futures. Yet, he could not disavow their promise: when the gifted musician Henry Cowell was imprisoned for his homosexual behavior, Terman wrote on his behalf to mitigate the sentence. When it comes to Kinsey, Hegarty rejects Foucault’s identification of the sexological interview with Catholic confession, since the former did not offer personal redemption. Like Igo (2007), he is fascinated by the intense commitment of Kinsey’s subjects
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to contributing their private experiences to sets of anonymous sexual statistics. Hegarty contends that because of his strictly behavioral approach to sexuality, Kinsey was ill equipped to understand why granting an interview led his fellow scientists and other respondents to have greater trust in the project. Instead of the confession, Hegarty sees participation in Kinsey’s survey as analogous to the initiation rituals at the core of midcentury cognitive dissonance experiments. Just as priming situations led experimental subjects to have greater interest in subsequent boring tasks, the experience of becoming anonymized and counted seems to have engendered greater feelings of trusting intimacy.
Rethinking reflexivity Psychology has occupied a fairly marginal place within the history of science and STS. In part, this is due to ways in which STS scholars often replicate the hierarchy of the sciences when they value the importance of their own scholarly interventions. In part, it stems from self-identifying as social scientists trying to understand the materialization and maintenance of natural order. In such a schema, it is unclear whether psychology is best understood as the object of analysis, a methodological tool, or an alternative to more reductionist accounts. This ambiguity has its advantages. It has nurtured a community of scholars both inside and outside of the discipline of psychology dedicated to historicizing its assumptions, methods, and impact on the public (Bayer, 2004). At its most ambitious, this literature has sought to establish a historical psychology (Smith, 1988; Staeuble, 1991) or ontology (Hacking, 2002) of the self. Foucault was a major inspiration for this project, but it gained a foothold in the field in the wake of the 1970s crisis in psychology (Faye, 2012). Much of this literature has been deeply informed by STS (e.g. Danziger, 1990; Hacking, 1995a; Rose, 1990), but has largely retained its own distinctive character and development. At the heart of this project is a particular form of reflexivity (Morawski, 2005): a thoroughgoing exploration of the epistemological slipperiness endemic to psychology between knower and known, observation and intervention, measurement and improvement. While many STS scholars contend that these dynamics govern all science, because psychology deals with self-aware beings capable of generating meaning about their condition, it furnishes unique material for investigating ‘the full circuit of the historical kinetics linking theory, culture, and consciousness’ (Morawski, 2001). This is research dedicated to examining the loops extending from human behavior, scientific descriptions of it, and how subjects alter their behavior and self-understanding once they are made aware of such descriptions. If such concerns animated the emergent field in the 1980s and 1990s, has this program lived up to its laudatory goals? What kinds of methods and evidence are necessary for a historical psychology? This historical sensibility was deeply intertwined with the rise of various interpretivist, qualitative, and critical approaches that sought to demonstrate the poverty of certain ‘scientistic’ pretensions and to provide methodological alternatives (Ross, 2014). In retrospect, this endeavor seems like a partial victory at best. We have entered an era of détente where the critics have secured some (marginal) institutional niches and largely speak to one another rather than pose a serious challenge to the core of the
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discipline (Blackman et al., 2008). Its fate in an era when the impulse toward critique has waned (Foster, 2012; Latour, 2004) is unclear. Moreover, the recent enthusiasm for the ‘neuro’ and for big data in the humanities poses a serious challenge to this hard fought autonomy. Hegarty’s turn to cognitive dissonance experiments as an interpretive framework is indicative of a greater readiness among historians of the human sciences to incorporate affect theory and cognitive psychology as tools. Silverman is the most enthusiastic, making ‘love’ the primary analytic framing her project. This is in stark contrast with an earlier generation of scholars who subsumed the critical history of psychology into a heady combination of Foucauldian analysis and the sociology of knowledge. Part of the how the new history identified itself was through the disavowal of the findings of empirical psychology as a theoretical framework (Pettit and Davidson, 2014). Presently, this turn to cognitive psychology and affect theory is tentative, but it suggests a new interest in understanding the relationship between experts and subjects in psychological rather than strictly sociological terms (Cromby, 2004). Both the deficit and agential versions of the public understanding of science have built into them assumptions about human cognition. However, STS scholars have largely avoided making this element of the loop into something amenable to investigation. I suspect the uneasiness between psychology as object of analysis and psychology as possible source of analytic tools will remain unresolved for historians of the human sciences. In some ways, these scholars are best equipped to translate such insights into historical research, but they also remain the most committed to questioning psychology’s universalizing truth claims. What I am proposing is an analysis of psychological expertise and subjectivity that takes its cues as much from Stuart Hall’s (1981) approach to culture as it has from Foucault’s analysis of the microphysics of power. Such a sensibility would be more attentive to polyvalent responses from subjects and to the materiality of the circuits through which psychology travels. Similar to Hall’s account of popular culture, from this perspective, subjectivity is neither something authentic and interior that psychology documents nor is it something imposed from outside. The latter is all too often the impression left by Foucauldian studies, despite the admonitions to the contrary, because they exclude actual subjects from the analysis and often have an ahistorical understanding of the circuits that bring together scientists and populations. The result, I think, will be very different narratives that would augment existing ones about the role of psychology in the management of individuality as an aspect of liberal governmentality. The social life of psychological science is simultaneously a set of stories about the subject’s augmentation, exploitation, cooptation, appropriation, defiance, incredulity, and boredom. Acknowledgements For helpful feedback on this essay, I wish to thank Nicole Nelson, Laura Stark, and Darya Serykh.
Funding Financial support came from a standard research grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
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Author biography Michael Pettit is an associate professor of Psychology and Science and Technology Studies at York University. He studies the history of psychology’s research methods and ethics, the relationship between scientists and subject populations, the interface between psychology and public policy, and the circulation of psychology in the public sphere.
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SSS0010.1177/0306312714546366Social Studies of SciencePettit
Review essay
Subject matter: Human behavior, psychological expertise, and therapeutic lives
Social Studies of Science 2015, Vol. 45(1) 146–158 © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0306312714546366 sss.sagepub.com
Michael Pettit
Department of Psychology, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada
Peter Hegarty, Gentlemen’s Disagreement: Alfred Kinsey, Lewis Terman, and the Sexual Politics of Smart Men (Chicago, IL: University Of Chicago Press, 2013), 240 pp., $25.00 (pbk), ISBN 9780226024585. Helen E Longino, Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 256 pp., $25.00 (pbk), ISBN 9780226492889. Chloe Silverman, Understanding Autism: Parents, Doctors, and the History of a Disorder (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 352 pp., $26.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780691159683. Mathew Thomson, Lost Freedom: The Landscape of the Child and the British Post-War Settlement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 312 pp., $99.00, ISBN 9780199677481. Marga Vicedo, The Nature and Nurture of Love: From Imprinting to Attachment in Cold War America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 336 pp., $45.00, ISBN 9780226020556.
Few have greater confidence in psychology’s ability to mold subjectivity than its critics. However, there is a tension in much of the historical and sociological literature on psychology and the psychological society between a commitment to a microphysics of power (Foucault, 1977) and the kinds of sources and voices that get included in such analyses. ‘Subjectification’ (Rose, 1996) is all too often taken for granted, rather than made into a matter of inquiry involving contestation, multiplicity, and rejection. Relationships between scientists and publics are largely understood in terms of a hypodermic needle model of
Corresponding author: Michael Pettit, Department of Psychology, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON M3J 1P3, Canada. Email: [email protected]
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communication (Gitlin, 1978). On this basis, critical psychologist-historians select their favored disorder or construct, offer a largely intellectual history of it, and then assert that everyday experience has been psychologized. Such an approach speaks more to scientists’ visions and pretensions than to the social life of psychological facts (O’Connor and Joffe, 2013). Moreover, this approach bolsters and inflates, rather than critically scrutinizes, the scientist’s authority. We need greater specificity about psychology’s impact, better evidence of the circuits between expert description and self-understanding, and appreciation of the complicated lives of scientific methods and theories. The books under review explore entanglements of psychology, sex, childhood, and development, and in so doing offer rich resources for rethinking much of the received wisdom about the public understanding of psychology, the authority of its experts, and the process of subjectification. The sex/gender distinction has long been recognized as a crucial site of traffic between nature and culture, one weighty with politics and consequences. These dynamics are amplified around children and development, where behavioral sciences and social policy meet, and each tries to anticipate and realize a better future (Adams et al., 2009). As the books here illustrate, psychology does not seek simply to craft accurate depictions of human behavior, but rather to sustain therapeutic regimes directed at intervention and improvement. In other words, the books foreground those sites where psychology’s ambitions to ‘make up people’ (Hacking, 2002) become most explicit. At first glance, Peter Hegarty’s (2013) book seems like a narrow micro-study. After all, it focuses on a brief dispute between two scientists. In 1948, Lewis Terman wrote a scathing and detailed critique of the methodology and findings of Alfred Kinsey’s fielddefining survey of American sexual behavior. However, the book is less a history of these figures than it is a series of essays that draw freely from social theory, cognitive science, and archival research to explore the co-production of sexuality and intelligence as two of the most salient categories of human difference. Hegarty complicates received wisdom that sees Kinsey as the liberator of American sexual attitudes and Terman as the eugenicist intelligence tester. At the same time, Hegarty destabilizes longstanding assumptions within the field of sexology where the scientist’s heterosexuality is often equated with greater impartiality and objectivity. He shows that both men were deeply invested in their subjects’ sexual proclivities and cognitive abilities, and he uses their dispute to open a broad history of sexuality that examines the link between masturbation and precociousness, the historical stability of patterns of sexual behavior, sex as a predictor of class, and the role of religion in repressing sexual urges. At the heart of the book is the figure of the queer genius. Unsurprisingly, Michel Foucault’s theorization of sexuality looms large, often as prevalent as the contributions of either Kinsey or Terman. Hegarty draws on these three theorists of sexuality to contend that we need to tease apart Queteletian (oriented toward the average) and Galtonian (orientated toward the ideal) forms of normalization. He calls on queer theorists to engage with psychology’s messy practices, and not to dismiss the field out of hand as ‘disciplinary power’. Chloe Silverman (2011) also treats the terrain of psychology as complex, documenting how autism, during its relatively brief history, has been made to matter in relation to psychoanalysis, applied behavioral analysis, genetics, neuroscience, and immunology. Silverman highlights this plurality to trouble simplistic stories of medicalization.
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She ably demonstrates both how biomedicine is a contested keyword and how autistic persons have been medicalized in heterogeneous ways at different times. Her key intervention is to illustrate how biomedicine contributes to – and is shaped by – the formation of parents-of-children-with-autism as an identity and experience. Silverman’s work exemplifies the trend toward studying biomedicine in the age of new social movements (Epstein, 1996; Heath et al., 2008; Murphy, 2006). Hers is not an account of the emergent neurodiversity movement, nor an explanation of how autism came to occupy a new cultural niche as geek chic eclipsed mid-century anxieties about the alienation engendered by technological society. Instead, Silverman focuses on deftly disentangling the category of the expert from that of the biomedical professional. Drawing on archival and ethnographic evidence, she charts how caregivers serve not only as patient advocates but also as practitioners of therapy, organizers of novel research, and coordinators in the collection of biological materials. In this way, she rejects the juxtaposition between expertise and dispassion and illustrates how feelings of love structure both representations of and interventions into autism. Scientific pluralism is also at the heart of Helen Longino’s (2013) analysis of behavioral sciences. She focuses on two topics that have generated considerable research and controversy: violence and sexuality. In the first half of the book, she dissects the research questions, methods, and assumptions of five approaches that offer proximate (rather than ultimate) explanations of human behavior: quantitative (or classical) behavioral genetics, molecular behavioral genetics, neurobiology, the social–environmental approaches pursued by psychologists and sociologists, and finally various claimants to integrative approaches. As a social epistemologist, Longino champions this disunity of science, refusing to take sides as she finds each field incomplete and wanting. Interestingly, she classifies various integrative approaches, such as developmental systems theory, as one among many rather than as the solution to a divided arena (cf Fausto-Sterling, 2000). The book demonstrates the philosopher’s skill at teasing out tacit and unjustified assumptions, especially in its account of the continued confusion over what exactly constitutes something as seemingly self-evident as ‘behavior’. Longino convincingly argues that all behavioral sciences are biased toward conceptualizing behavior in individualistic terms, rather than in relational terms that would enable a view of behavior as something networked at a population level. Marga Vicedo (2013) also emphasizes the plurality of the behavioral sciences, but she frames it in terms of different ethical and epistemological consequences. The book is organized around what Vicedo views as a nefarious interdisciplinary alliance between the ethologist Konrad Lorenz and the psychoanalyst John Bowlby, a relationship designed to bolster the credibility of both in the face critics in their respective disciplines. She focuses on this relationship to trace the movement of studies of the affective bond between mother and infant across a wide swath of populations and experimental settings, including orphaned and evacuated human children, gosling imprinting on the maternal figure of the bearded male scientist, and rhesus monkeys clinging to mechanical surrogates. She illustrates how theories of imprinting, instinct, and attachment flourished in the postwar era because the relevant experts continuously worked to shift which field held the expertise to evaluate or debunk these constructs. Vicedo’s book also underscores some of the problematic assumptions about geography that govern the history of
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psychology. The psychological society is often understood as the child of the American Century, and the book is supposedly a study of Cold War America. However, a number of her most prominent historical actors (e.g. Lorenz, Bowlby, and Anna Freud) are decidedly not American. Moreover, the most vocal critics of attachment theory are the psychobiologists associated with the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Thus, Vicedo’s research documents the importance of international sojourns and mistranslations alongside the interdisciplinary ones she foregrounds. Silverman and Vicedo both see the history of child development and its entanglement with psychology as focused on a particular emotion, love. Emotion in general and nostalgia in particular are key themes of Mathew Thomson’s (2013) book. Opening with photographs of children playing in the streets, he offers a social history of the changing nature of childhood autonomy in a number of cultural registers to address the question, ‘Where has the free-roaming child gone?’ His thesis is that as the emotional landscape of the child greatly expanded during the postwar era, the extent of its physical landscape became considerably more restricted. On Thomson’s account, during the postwar era, the welfare state invested its aspirations to form a healthier and more democratic citizensubject in the figure of ‘the child’. In this narrative, psychology is the omnipresent lens for viewing the risks of late modern life – from traffic to television to sex offenders. Thomson illustrates this cultural salience of psychology, while reflexively mining the studies produced by the field to capture understandings of social and technological change. In other words, he is interested both in how the experience of childhood came to be understood in a psychological idiom and in the particular findings of psychologists as eyewitness accounts of the historically changing experience of childhood. The books under consideration offer a number of tools to revitalize and redirect the scholarship interested in tracing the dynamic loops among behavior, scientific knowledge, and subjectivity. Such a renewal involves attentiveness to psychology’s subject matter. This begins with an appreciation of the populations that are made to matter in developing scientific theories. What kinds of species or persons are privileged at different moments in time and how do their particular affordances animate the resulting knowledge? When have the competing imperatives of standardization and inclusion ruled (Logan, 2001)? Alongside this concern with the psychological subject, we need to attend to the historical specificity and materiality of the circuits through which psychology moves (Marres and Lezaun, 2011). This entails changes in the form of mass media (from print culture to radio and television to 21st-century social media), scientists’ attitudes toward the relevance of public opinion and input into their research, and the relationship between psychology and neighboring professions and fields of expertise. Finally, these books signal something of a break with the prevailing synthesis of Foucault and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge that animated the previous generation’s research agenda. There is a tentative turn to resources such as studies of affect, cognitive psychology, and quantified citation analysis to understand the psychological society.
The challenge of recent history Collectively, these books largely reaffirm the received wisdom that World War II (WWII) was the signal event in the history of the behavioral sciences. The dominant narrative has
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revolved around the patronage of the Veteran’s Administration in the dramatic expansion of the ranks of clinical psychologists in the United States and the exportation of this vision during the Cold War (Capshew, 1999; Herman, 1995; Rose, 1990). However, the war figures somewhat differently in these books, which extend Rose’s account of psychology and liberal self-governance. Silverman, Thomson, and Vicedo all argue that the recognition of the psychic costs of wartime deprivation (whether in concentration camps or among young evacuees) led to fears about the pathology of ‘mechanized’ human relations. In response, psychological experts encouraged the development of healthy emotional expression as the key to realizing the democratic promise of the nascent welfare state. The 1943 diagnostic recognition of autism as a disorder of affective contact is emblematic of this moment. In the hands of the controversial psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, autism became a powerful metaphor for social alienation in the immediate postwar period (Silverman, 2011: 61–92). At the time, however, autism and Bettelheim were eclipsed by another psychoanalytic celebrity, John Bowlby. Focusing on the reception of his theory in the United States, Vicedo views Bowlby as exemplifying Cold War culture, a pernicious escalating of maternal anxieties and guilt that led to the containment of women in the home during the Baby Boom. Thomson concedes that Bowlbyism certainly led to the heightening of the private home as the child’s primary developmental landscape, but argues that this constraint was accompanied by greater latitude when it came to emotional expression and free play. These divergent interpretations are in part due to a focus on different national contexts with distinct experiences of social democracy. As salient, however, is that Vicedo’s interest is in motherhood while Thomson is concerned with childhood. In other words, the same psychological theory had different consequences for different psychological subjects, even those who lived contemporaneously and shared the familial bond. These books each contribute to understanding how ours became the age of attachment. Alongside this more conventional periodization, the books, especially Thomson’s, suggest that the 1970s represent a heretofore unnoticed moment of transition. The 1970s are a period when 1960s radical thought entered into the psychological sciences and altered assumptions about development, childhood, and sexuality. The legacy is mixed. As the example of the emergence of the pedophile demonstrates, ‘permissiveness’ allowed for the greater expression of intimate matters and new identities while also opening a space for more explicit condemnation, criticisms, and censure (Thomson, 2013: 153–183). More broadly, historians of psychology have yet to fully grapple with how proponents of anti-racism, feminism, gay liberation, and other emancipatory movements entered into the discipline’s ranks and introduced new theories and research methods. (For a preliminary attempt, see Pickren and Rutherford (2010).) Indeed, the regulatory concepts of ‘human subject’ and ‘informed consent’ date from this period (Stark, 2012). The question becomes whether the behavioral sciences remain the same object, subject to the same forms of critique, as they were in the 1970s. Psychology undoubtedly remains a highly positivistic science in its official pronouncements, and if anything the discipline’s connections to the fields of medicine and health have increased in recent decades. At the same time, in terms of membership, psychology is now more diverse and inclusive than it was prior to 1970, and branches of the discipline are more cognitive and more cultural. How these things fit together in a polyvalent and fragmented field has not
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received much attention from Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars or even psychologist-historians. Indeed, the emergence of the ‘new history of psychology’ was itself emblematic of the historical era. The political sensibilities of attending to psychology’s power dynamics, reclaiming lost voices, and historicizing universalistic claims through qualitative research were forged during the 1970s in debates around sociobiology and the connections between heredity and IQ. The critiques of naturalization and essentialism were not external to psychology, but came to form an element of the discipline. Our histories have not always recognized this. By ending her narrative on the cusp of the 1970s, Vicedo excludes the interventions made by Bowlby’s feminist critics, which include engagements with psychoanalysis that resonate with many of her concerns. In subsequent years, the moral authority of nature has shifted within the behavioral sciences. Silverman demonstrates how naturalization has been a strategy knowingly pursued by patient advocates in the era of genetic citizenship, as opposed to an ideology that scientist-activists have sought to unmask. Caregivers have often embraced behavioral genetics and neuroscience to legitimize conditions and the experience of suffering. In contrast, caregivers have seen psychoanalytic explanations as inadequate and as exemplifying ‘mother blame’. Longino acknowledges (pp. 6–7) but ultimately underplays the uneven moral history of the behavioral sciences’ appeals to nature. In the field of aggression research, genetic explanations are viewed with suspicion because they still carry racialized connotations. In contrast, ‘born that way’ arguments have become the good liberal position when it comes to sexual behavior. This parting of ways, in terms of how policy-minded psychologists conceptualize race and sexuality, began in the 1970s (Pettit, 2011). However, influenced by queer theory, Hegarty is much less sanguine than Longino about psychology’s naturalization of sexuality.
The circuitry of publics The 20th-century social and behavioral sciences confront us with two discrepant images. In one, they are governed by a hyper-professional scientism that led them to become ensconced in the ivory tower and detached from worldly concerns. In the other, they are seen as constantly psychologizing, economizing, and sociologizing the lifeworld. I have argued elsewhere that if historians want to parse this contradiction, then they need to be more attentive to the form and content of the archives generated by the human sciences (Pettit, 2013a). One good index of the kind of ‘looping effects’ (Hacking, 1995b) that interest historians is the presence of such dialogues in archival sources. Put simply, what kind of evidence do these sources provide indicating that the sciences at stake have encountered and shaped daily life? The answers may include information about the design of tests and experiments, and the content of responses and letters from the public inquiring about research or seeking advice. Thus far, historians of medicine have been much more attuned to this kind of history from below and its limitations (Jacyna and Casper, 2012). One certainly has to be cautious. Forms of self-censorship may work to exclude such material (Freedman, 1998). Moreover, relationships between psychologists and their publics in the era of print culture and letter writing were different than they are in the world of science blogging, social media, and knowledge mobilization plans. In our own
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era, voices from below have become a commodity (Savage and Burrows, 2007) in a process intertwined with the emergence of modern opinion polling in the 1930s (Igo, 2007). At a time when social-media-generated opinion seems to be eclipsing knowledge in contentious politics, calls to acknowledge non-expert voices have a different political valence than they did during the supposed age of experts at mid-century (Irwin, 2006; Lezaun and Soneryd, 2007). When I was researching my book on deception (Pettit, 2013b), I was struck by the paucity of sources in the papers of those early 20th-century psychologists most active in the public sphere as compared with those of their mid-century counterparts. The lack of sources was due partly to the technology of the office (carbon paper and secretaries) and the geographic mobility of the scholars. Yet, the absence also speaks to how early 20thcentury psychologists understood the public and their relationship to it, as well as the incredulity of jurists, journalists, and others toward the notion of psychologists as experts. In contrast, the most ambitious recent histories of the mid-century social sciences have artfully drawn on an abundance of archival materials to detail new forms of technical expertise, subjectivity, and their interaction (Igo, 2007; Rutherford, 2009; Savage, 2010). Archival silence and presence are in themselves suggestive evidence that can illuminate the social history of expertise. Tellingly, even the philosopher Longino feels that a study of the behavioral sciences requires more than careful conceptual analysis. In Studying Human Behavior, she devotes a chapter, ‘The social life of behavioral science’, to the circulation and reception of scientific theories through various disciplinary communities and media. Using the ISI Science Citation Index and Google Scholar, she and her team examined how key publications from the different disciplinary approaches got cited in what they classified as research, clinical, policy, and hybrid journals. They also looked for stories in leading newsmagazines and book reviews of popular science books reflecting the different approaches. She uncovered greater media coverage of genetic approaches compared to more integrative ones. I have both conceptual and methodological reservations about Longino’s analysis, and ultimately found it more suggestive than satisfying. She writes about science communication primarily in terms of dissemination, filtering, distortion, and ‘downstream users’ (p. 181). In other words, she does not engage with STS’ more dynamic approaches to the public understanding of science and civic epistemology (Hilgartner, 1990; Jasanoff, 2005; Wynne, 1992). She leaves little room for how psychological constructs acquire new meanings as they circulate through heterogeneous communities. Methodologically, citation analysis promises a certain rigor when it comes to assessing scholarly influence. Yet, the criterion used for selecting specific publications to represent the different approaches was unclear. I am not convinced that charting the citation of a single publication per field is the correct level of analysis. If Longino had conceptualized different approaches in terms of institutions and networks instead of relying on single exemplary papers, she would have detected distinct geographies when it comes to research on sexual behavior, for example, one focused around the North American Great Lakes region (especially Southern Ontario) and one focused around London, United Kingdom. I make these criticisms because quantitative citation analysis has much to offer the kind of history that I am advocating. Danziger’s (1990) influential argument about the
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changing relationship between experiments and subjects is grounded in a systematic content analysis of several journals over a number of decades. Capshew’s (1999) analysis of the psychology profession has a strong prosopographical component. We do not have similar studies of the recent past when psychology’s scale has increased dramatically. Furthermore, scientometrics has become too important an aspect of the contemporary management of science for us to neglect it. We must engage with this methodology but bring our own questions to bear on it.
The social lives of participants Longino is not the only author concerned with the social life of the behavioral sciences. One of the most striking features about the books at hand is how they draw our attention to the formation of parents (rather than children or patients) as psychological subjects. Silverman does a tremendous job of using personal papers to excavate the affective labor that transformed caregivers like Amy Lettick into autism experts. Yet her son Benjamin, who inspired her efforts, is largely absent from Silverman’s narrative. I was left wondering how a historian might reread Amy Lettick’s papers to render him more visible and agential. Conversely, actual mothers have a shadowy presence in Vicedo’s history of attachment theory. Hinted at through occasional use of media and citations of contemporaneous sociological research on family life, they are ever-present, but their voices are largely absent. Especially when read against Silverman’s book, it becomes clear that how mothers facilitated, adopted, or questioned attachment theory based on their own experiences is largely outside the bounds of this intellectual history. The exception is Vicedo’s (2013: 160–162) chapter on Harry Harlow’s wire mother experiments. There, she relates the ambivalent reception of the monkey experiments among the women who wrote to Harlow to that by the press. It is precisely her attention to these women and the ultimate fate of the rhesus monkeys that allows Vicedo to go beyond Donna Haraway’s (1989: 231–243) account of Harlow. Hegarty’s contributes a number of valuable tools to our analysis of subjectification when he addresses the often intimate relationship between scientists and their subjects. Terman used the intelligence test to identify a cohort of gifted children, initiating one of psychology’s earliest longitudinal studies. Hegarty argues that becoming a child genius was not simply a matter of coming from a place of racial privilege. Instead, Terman’s identification of these children is better understood as a Maussian gift, fraught with reciprocal obligations. The gifted would validate Terman’s science by making good on their early promise of becoming the nation’s leaders and improving its racial stock. Nonnormative sexuality compromised their eugenic mission, and as a result, Terman had a complicated relationship with a number of the gifted who came to express queer sexual behavior. In some ways, he saw them as betraying his emotional investment in their futures. Yet, he could not disavow their promise: when the gifted musician Henry Cowell was imprisoned for his homosexual behavior, Terman wrote on his behalf to mitigate the sentence. When it comes to Kinsey, Hegarty rejects Foucault’s identification of the sexological interview with Catholic confession, since the former did not offer personal redemption. Like Igo (2007), he is fascinated by the intense commitment of Kinsey’s subjects
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to contributing their private experiences to sets of anonymous sexual statistics. Hegarty contends that because of his strictly behavioral approach to sexuality, Kinsey was ill equipped to understand why granting an interview led his fellow scientists and other respondents to have greater trust in the project. Instead of the confession, Hegarty sees participation in Kinsey’s survey as analogous to the initiation rituals at the core of midcentury cognitive dissonance experiments. Just as priming situations led experimental subjects to have greater interest in subsequent boring tasks, the experience of becoming anonymized and counted seems to have engendered greater feelings of trusting intimacy.
Rethinking reflexivity Psychology has occupied a fairly marginal place within the history of science and STS. In part, this is due to ways in which STS scholars often replicate the hierarchy of the sciences when they value the importance of their own scholarly interventions. In part, it stems from self-identifying as social scientists trying to understand the materialization and maintenance of natural order. In such a schema, it is unclear whether psychology is best understood as the object of analysis, a methodological tool, or an alternative to more reductionist accounts. This ambiguity has its advantages. It has nurtured a community of scholars both inside and outside of the discipline of psychology dedicated to historicizing its assumptions, methods, and impact on the public (Bayer, 2004). At its most ambitious, this literature has sought to establish a historical psychology (Smith, 1988; Staeuble, 1991) or ontology (Hacking, 2002) of the self. Foucault was a major inspiration for this project, but it gained a foothold in the field in the wake of the 1970s crisis in psychology (Faye, 2012). Much of this literature has been deeply informed by STS (e.g. Danziger, 1990; Hacking, 1995a; Rose, 1990), but has largely retained its own distinctive character and development. At the heart of this project is a particular form of reflexivity (Morawski, 2005): a thoroughgoing exploration of the epistemological slipperiness endemic to psychology between knower and known, observation and intervention, measurement and improvement. While many STS scholars contend that these dynamics govern all science, because psychology deals with self-aware beings capable of generating meaning about their condition, it furnishes unique material for investigating ‘the full circuit of the historical kinetics linking theory, culture, and consciousness’ (Morawski, 2001). This is research dedicated to examining the loops extending from human behavior, scientific descriptions of it, and how subjects alter their behavior and self-understanding once they are made aware of such descriptions. If such concerns animated the emergent field in the 1980s and 1990s, has this program lived up to its laudatory goals? What kinds of methods and evidence are necessary for a historical psychology? This historical sensibility was deeply intertwined with the rise of various interpretivist, qualitative, and critical approaches that sought to demonstrate the poverty of certain ‘scientistic’ pretensions and to provide methodological alternatives (Ross, 2014). In retrospect, this endeavor seems like a partial victory at best. We have entered an era of détente where the critics have secured some (marginal) institutional niches and largely speak to one another rather than pose a serious challenge to the core of the
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discipline (Blackman et al., 2008). Its fate in an era when the impulse toward critique has waned (Foster, 2012; Latour, 2004) is unclear. Moreover, the recent enthusiasm for the ‘neuro’ and for big data in the humanities poses a serious challenge to this hard fought autonomy. Hegarty’s turn to cognitive dissonance experiments as an interpretive framework is indicative of a greater readiness among historians of the human sciences to incorporate affect theory and cognitive psychology as tools. Silverman is the most enthusiastic, making ‘love’ the primary analytic framing her project. This is in stark contrast with an earlier generation of scholars who subsumed the critical history of psychology into a heady combination of Foucauldian analysis and the sociology of knowledge. Part of the how the new history identified itself was through the disavowal of the findings of empirical psychology as a theoretical framework (Pettit and Davidson, 2014). Presently, this turn to cognitive psychology and affect theory is tentative, but it suggests a new interest in understanding the relationship between experts and subjects in psychological rather than strictly sociological terms (Cromby, 2004). Both the deficit and agential versions of the public understanding of science have built into them assumptions about human cognition. However, STS scholars have largely avoided making this element of the loop into something amenable to investigation. I suspect the uneasiness between psychology as object of analysis and psychology as possible source of analytic tools will remain unresolved for historians of the human sciences. In some ways, these scholars are best equipped to translate such insights into historical research, but they also remain the most committed to questioning psychology’s universalizing truth claims. What I am proposing is an analysis of psychological expertise and subjectivity that takes its cues as much from Stuart Hall’s (1981) approach to culture as it has from Foucault’s analysis of the microphysics of power. Such a sensibility would be more attentive to polyvalent responses from subjects and to the materiality of the circuits through which psychology travels. Similar to Hall’s account of popular culture, from this perspective, subjectivity is neither something authentic and interior that psychology documents nor is it something imposed from outside. The latter is all too often the impression left by Foucauldian studies, despite the admonitions to the contrary, because they exclude actual subjects from the analysis and often have an ahistorical understanding of the circuits that bring together scientists and populations. The result, I think, will be very different narratives that would augment existing ones about the role of psychology in the management of individuality as an aspect of liberal governmentality. The social life of psychological science is simultaneously a set of stories about the subject’s augmentation, exploitation, cooptation, appropriation, defiance, incredulity, and boredom. Acknowledgements For helpful feedback on this essay, I wish to thank Nicole Nelson, Laura Stark, and Darya Serykh.
Funding Financial support came from a standard research grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
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Author biography Michael Pettit is an associate professor of Psychology and Science and Technology Studies at York University. He studies the history of psychology’s research methods and ethics, the relationship between scientists and subject populations, the interface between psychology and public policy, and the circulation of psychology in the public sphere.
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