Book review: Interiors: A history of psychology in South Africa

Journal of History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 39(2), 183–184 Spring 2003 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10:1002/jhbs.10071 䉷 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. B O O K R E V I E W S Jacob D. Lindy and Robert Jay Lifton. Beyond Invisible Walls: The Psychological Legacy of Soviet Trauma. New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2001, 251 pp. $34.95 (cloth). ISBN 1-58391-318-1. The phone rang. Dr. Katona explained to her long-time colleague, Nora Csiszer, that there has been a letter from “colleagues in America, inviting us to write about our experiences as psychotherapists in Hungary, and asking that we travel to America for a working meeting” (p. 36). Csiszer hesitated, “So they wanted us to tell our story. But, I wondered, can they hear it?” (p. 36). The working meetings brought together two American clinicians (the editors of this book), and several Eastern European and Soviet psychiatrists and psychotherapists. The editors’ aim was to uncover traumas endured by Eastern Europeans and former Soviet citizens, and to make sense of them in terms of “posttraumatic stress disorder” (PTSD) and psychoanalysis. The Eastern Europeans were asked to provide clinical cases that dealt with trauma in Eastern Europe. The working meetings provided a forum for discussing and reconstructing the meaning of the cases in terms of PTSD and psychoanalysis (p. 10). In the subsequent book, Eastern European authors introduce each chapter with case studies from Hungary, the German Democratic Republic, Romania, Russia, Croatia, and Armenia, respectively. The editors introduce and summarize most chapters and provide the theoretical framework of the book. A “Glossary of Eastern Europeans Terms” is provided. Regretfully, the glossary and the book as a whole are replete with misspellings (e.g. “Wermacht” [p. 235], “Bundesant,” “rereinte Deutscheland” [p. 62]) of foreign terms, giving the unfortunate impression that the book has hastily been put together. The editors went through a commendable effort to locate Eastern European practitioners and recover their voices. This psychohistorical approach is an exemplary attempt to do “history from below” by linking individual biographies to political culture. The various contributions deal with such diverse aspects as the links between childrearing practices, pathology, and the political system, and the effect of dislocation, war, and torture on individual patients. Some of the chapters (especially the chapter on Romania) can be harrowing reading, attesting to the grossest of human rights abuses. The editors have set themselves an enormous task in providing a psychohistory of such a huge geographical and culturally diverse area. They are at times well aware of the cultural and political differences across Eastern Europe, but at other times fall into easy generalizations. For example, Lindy argues that in the Soviet era “political repression became folded in with war, genocide, famine, natural and man-made disasters, . . . disease” (p. 15) and even “cannibalism” (p. 17). People were being “brainwashed” (p. 20) and the Soviet system, a “paranoid” (p. 203) “single ecological system of terror” (p. 23), is indeed an “evil” (p. 216) empire. To substantiate all these claims in terms of when, where and how these events took place and how many people were effected, is indeed an impossible task for any sized book, but to cite the only evidence for cannibalism as a little girl telling her Armenian mother during the 1915 famine that “when I die you can eat my flesh . . . ” (p. 177) is not enough to substantiate such harrowing claims. The authors argue that these conditions marked the psychological landscape of Eastern Europe. Based on the case histories the editors argue that the patients, their therapists, and 183 184 BOOK REVIEWS indeed the people of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in general suffered from a variety of psychological ills. Some of these maladjustments include developing a false, inauthentic, dependent, and guilt-ridden self. Such “defensive and adaptive mechanisms” constitute the “invisible wall” (p. 2) between East and West and currently affects the ability of Eastern Europeans to integrate into a “freer” (p. 199) and “bright” (p. 27) Western-style democracy. Moreover, they suggest that psychiatrists and psychotherapists have collaborated with government authorities, reinforcing state ideology and thus participated in the psychiatric labeling of dissidents. This characterization stands at times in a somewhat uneasy relation to the stories as told by the Eastern Europeans. They attest that life behind the Iron Curtain was also marked by stability and routine and they often shared in the dream of building a “good” society. They describe the complex relationship that existed between the individual, the state, and socialist ideals. People resisted, recreated, modified, and accommodated to state-backed programs, and improvised a set of informal practices which remained largely outside the formal command structure. They were attuned to the often contradictory requirements of private, public, and political life and behaved accordingly. The editors lament this and proclaim that they thus lacked an authentic, continuous self, which reveals itself irrespective of social context. This stance is consistent with the modernist assumptions about selfhood which pervade this book. A different perspective might treat the Eastern Europeans’ effort to navigate their intricate, complex, and contradictory social world as a prelude of the postmodern condition. This story can be read as not only a psychohistory of Eastern Europe, but also as about the politics of knowledge. The history and sociology of the human sciences suggests that human nature is constantly being reconceptualized. Psychological concepts are not independent from the social and political conditions which give them currency and legitimacy. Whether it is “stress,” “hysteria,” “attention deficit disorder,” “borderline personality disorder,” or “posttraumatic stress disorder” — these terms serve as a means by which individuals can be made visible, understandable, and treatable. Once these categories are in place, people tend to see what they expect to see. For the authors to have made visible and made sense of the psychological underpinnings of a century of atrocities and to tell the victims’ stories brings “recognition to substantial groups of people who had been ignored” (Thompson, 1998, p. 27). So, I wonder with Csiszer, whom “the Americans” called on to hear her story. “Can they hear it?” Their exposition certainly bears witness to how the self could became entangled with fascist and communist polities and it documents how psychological concepts can be used to make sense of a range of historical experiences. But part of what we hear is also the echo of the current preoccupations of Western psychological theory reverberating across the “invisible wall”. REFERENCE Thompson, P. (1998). The voice of the past: Oral history. In R. Perks and A. Thomson (Eds.), The oral history reader (pp. 21– 28). New York: Routledge. Reviewed by CHRISTINE LEUENBERGER, Research Associate, Department of Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853. BOOK REVIEWS 185 Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 39(2), 185 Spring 2003 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.10072 䉷 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Mark R. Rosenzweig, Wayne H. Holtzman, Michel Sabourin, and David Belanger. History of the International Union of Psychological Science (IUPsyS). Hove, East Sussex: Psychology Press, 2000. 290 pp. $52.00 (cloth). ISBN 1-84169-197-6. This book serves to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the IUPsyS, formed in 1951 in Stockholm at the 14th International Congress of Psychology. The history of the Union of course goes back to 1889, to the first International Congress of Psychology, organized during the Universal Exhibition in Paris. The IUPsyS is the main international body of psychology, in which 66 countries are represented by their national organizations. The authors used as primary data for the project the published proceedings of every International Congress, the minutes of its assemblies, and of the meetings of the various executive committees. As a result, it is rich in detail that would otherwise be very difficult to trace in the archives of the Union. In the appendices, for example, lists of the membership of the International Congress of Psychology Committees from 1889 to 1951 appear, as well as its office bearers since 1951, together with a copy of the “Statutes and Rules of Procedure of the IUPsyS”. Indeed, there is so much detail in here that the book may almost act like a primary source itself for future researchers. (One casual observation struck me: between 1889 and 2000, only 2 of its 27 International Congresses were held in the United States — despite the U.S.’s dominance of psychology around the world). The book thus is both a history and a commemorative description of events. As a descriptive narrative of what happened between 1889 and 2000, it works well. Also, because it is a commemoration, it contains respectful references like “very successful in fulfilling their mission,” “sustained focus on its priorities,” “played a constructive role,” “genuine global expansion,” and so on. As history, however, it fares less well, mainly because there is virtually no historical analysis presented. That may or may not be an unfair expectation of a book like this, but even if one does not expect some analytical effort, the way the material is presented does not make for easy reading. It is so rigorously chronological, and so relentlessly descriptive, that it is nearly impossible to read it like one would normally read a book. I suspect readers might use it either to confirm or look up dates, persons, and events, or to dip into now and again to look for nuggets of interest. At the very least, I would have liked the authors to be a little less celebratory about “a genuine global expansion of international psychology” (p. 195), as the International Congresses held in Asia (1972), Latin America (1984), and Australia (1988) signified the export of psychology to the non-Western world. The enthusiasm for being truly global and promoting the growth of psychology internationally can be juxtaposed with the post-War and Cold War social and intellectual context within which this took place. It was in exactly this context that strong political support existed for establishing international scientific organizations. Indeed, in chapter 2 the authors allude to the renewed scientific communication between the former foes after World War II, and the establishment of new international unions, linked to UNESCO. This is just one of the instances where I thought the authors missed an opportunity to reflect more on what all of these developments mean in a slightly wider context. Reviewed by JOHANN LOUW, Professor of Psychology, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, 7701 South Africa. 186 BOOK REVIEWS Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 39(2), 186–187 Spring 2003 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.10073 䉷 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Arnold I. Davidson. The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. 254 pp. $39.95. ISBN 0-674-00459-0. In this selection of essays, Arnold I. Davidson articulates his approach of historical epistemology in accounting for the history of sexuality. The book is dedicated, in part, to “the memory of Michel Foucault” (p. iv). Indeed, Foucault’s perspective serves as the guiding intellectual spirit for Davidson’s project. This is not to say that Davidson fully accepts Foucault, but he draws on what he considers to be the central tenets of Foucault’s thinking. He also coherently borrows from other historians of science, most notably Ian Hacking and Carlo Ginzburg. In summarizing his approach, the author argues that our cultural understanding of what constitutes “sexuality” is connected with the emergence of the science of sexuality in the nineteenth century. In other words, our conceptions of ourselves as sexual beings developed as a result of a new style of scientific reasoning. In several of the essays, Davidson traces psychiatry’s emergence in the late nineteenth century as an independent medical specialty. Underlying this transition was the move away from linking all diseases to an anatomical etiology. A new class of functional diseases was identified, which included the sexual perversions and hysteria. Focusing on the perversions, especially homosexuality, Davidson argues that a new species of diseased individuals was created. Moreover, since all individuals had the potential to become perverts, a new conception of the sexual self emerged. In an especially well-documented essay, the author demonstrates how Freud was central to this rupture in scientific thinking. In the first set of four essays, Davidson elucidates his thesis of the profound influence that historicized scientific thinking had on our modern concept of sexuality. As he indicates, these essays deal with his philosophical perspective and were written somewhat earlier in his career (between 1987 and 1991). His second set of essays is concerned with historiography and includes the most significant selection in the book (“The Epistemology of Distorted Evidence”), which was first published in 1994. I refer to the chronological and organizational sequence of the essays because it is not until the second half of the book, which includes Davidson’s more recent thinking, that I believe readers can fully appreciate the significance of his work. In this essay on distorted evidence, inspired by the writing of Ginzburg, Davidson acknowledges a weakness with his earlier position on scientific thinking as the impetus for the creation of sexual perversions, such as homosexuality. As he states: It might well be that beginning with the creation of the homosexual by psychiatry, homosexual culture only gradually evolved a life of its own. . . . But it might also be the case that . . . we have failed to read the evidence correctly; we have neglected to exploit the gaps, miscommunications, and resistances, and so we have failed to see the existence, from the beginning of a partially autonomous reality from below. (p. 157) He goes on to cogently point out that examples from one dominant culture, as in the case of medicine, can lead to the neglect of less powerful cultures from below. To counter this deficiency, he presents historiographical guidelines directed at searching for and utilizing multiple sources of conflicting evidence and diverse contexts. Included in this discussion is BOOK REVIEWS 187 a treatment of the relationship between the historian and the historical reality he or she seeks to present. The historiography section of the book also contains two significant pieces on Foucault. One involves a comparison of Foucault with the tradition of Anglo-American conceptual analysis, while the other contrasts Foucault’s system of archeology with the French tradition of historical epistemology. Although the chronological sequencing of essays presents some problems in readability, it serves as a revealing example of Davidson’s growth as a thinker. All in all, this is a provocative set of essays that contributes specifically to the philosophy and history of sexuality, and more generally to epistemology and historiography. Reviewed by HENRY L. MINTON, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario N9B 3P4. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 39(2), 187–188 Spring 2003 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.10074 䉷 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Ben Shephard. A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists, 1914 – 1994. London: Jonathan Cape, 2000. 487 pp. $20.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-224-06033-3; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. xxiii, 485 pp. $27.95. ISBN 0-674-00592-9. Soldiers suffering from nervous breakdowns became a familiar appearance in the wars of the twentieth century. Described as suffering from shell shock, battle fatigue, or war neurosis, these soldiers displayed symptoms ranging from paralysis, mutism, blindness, uncontrollable stuttering, and trembling to jumpiness at unexpected noise, repetitive nightmares, and anxiety attacks. Other soldiers appeared to hold up well under the strains of battle, only to experience depression, irritability, and anxiety disorders years after peace had been reestablished. Physicians and soldiers have repeatedly emphasized the psychological costs of warfare while armies in a number of countries requested the help of psychiatrists to contain these costs. In his comprehensive overview of the involvement of psychiatrists with the military, Ben Shephard examines the responses of psychiatrists to mental breakdown in the army, the ideas of military officials with regard to mental breakdown in soldiers and the presence of psychiatrists in the army, and changes in public opinion about war neuroses. Shephard commences with the medical and public response to shell shock during World War I in the British Army and concludes with more current debates around the nature of post-traumatic stress disorder, the diagnosis which was formulated after the American involvement in Vietnam. Psychiatric perspectives on war neuroses were marked by debates and inner tensions, which are extensively covered in Shephard’s account. Psychiatrists either emphasized the necessity of screening out recruits who would most likely break down in combat or the importance of developing treatment methods for soldiers succumbing to war neuroses. Psychiatrists treating soldiers were led by the dual motivation of treating and aiding traumatized soldiers and of conserving manpower by returning them to combat as soon as was expedient. They debated whether the traumatic neuroses of war originated from combat experiences or were previously existing neuroses that only had been brought to the surface. They attempted 188 BOOK REVIEWS to distinguish undeserving malingerers from the soldiers who they thought were no longer able to face combat and should be relieved from duty. They proposed a variety of treatment methods ranging from stern discipline and punitive treatment to cathartic treatment in which a soldier was encouraged to relive and verbalize his combat experience. More puzzling were the symptoms of war neuroses in soldiers who had never faced battle; some of them had not even left the country before breaking down. Such observations made it impossible to settle the debates on the nature of war neuroses for once and for all. Psychiatrists and government officials were particularly concerned about the consequences of providing compensation in the form of pensions to those soldiers who left the war with lasting emotional scars. Unfortunately, the acknowledgment of the existence and severity of war neuroses by providing such compensation has often had the effect of transforming it into a chronic condition. At the end of his study, Shephard presents the rather sobering conclusion that, as far as the suffering of soldiers is concerned, it has not made a great difference what type of treatment (if any) has been provided and whether the traumatizing effects of participating in battle were generally acknowledged or not. During the last two decades, the nature of trauma has been discussed by psychiatrists, psychologists, historians, and the public in general. Shephard does not embrace one of the extremes in this debate; he refuses to portray soldiers suffering from war neuroses as unwilling and passive victims but emphasizes their unconscious agency in using their medical symptoms as a way of justifying their removal from the battlefield. Shephard’s book is encyclopedic in scope, rich in detail, and provides an overview of psychiatric ideas as they have been developed by psychiatrists in the United Kingdom, the United States, and, to a lesser extent, in Germany. In his exceedingly well-written account, he details the perspectives of Army psychiatrists, soldiers, the military command, and the general public. A War of Nerves promises to become the standard work of the history of military psychiatry for a long time to come. Reviewed by HANS POLS, Lecturer, Unit for History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 39(2), 188–190 Spring 2003 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.10075 䉷 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Allan V. Horwitz. Creating Mental Illness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. 289 pp. $32.50 (cloth). ISBN 0-226-35381-8. Allan Horwitz, professor of sociology at Rutgers University and member of the Institute for Health and Health Care Policy there, has given us the most sophisticated effort to date to present the “social constructionist” analysis of psychiatric illness in terms that clinicians and students of neuroscience will find convincing. Social constructionism, in its extreme form, has a long and unconvincing history of attempts to persuade us that there is no such thing as psychiatric illness and that so-called mental “diseases” represent societal labeling of the rebellious or marginal. Worse, the version emphasizing “professionalization” believes that the whole psychiatric-disease scam is simply an act of self-aggrandizement on the part of the mental-health establishment. Horwitz retains what is useful in that take — the recognition that cultural modeling does BOOK REVIEWS 189 influence the presentation of illness — while at the same time carving out a role for underlying brain dysfunction (he doesn’t use the term “disease”) and acknowledging the existence of psychiatric genetics. In his analysis we dance from “mental diseases,” to “mental disorders,” to “mental illnesses,” each representing a different combination of personal distress, brain biology, and cultural modeling. And what Horwitz does superbly — better than any other investigator who has taken on the sociology of psychiatry — is to show what social forces and scientific arguments are lined up on behalf of each of these blendings. He starts out by tracing the expansion of psychiatric diagnoses from the handful of asylum diseases in the days of Emil Kraepelin — around 1900 — to the riot of “disorders” found in the later DSM series: DSM-III in 1980 and beyond. Psychonalysis, in the first half of the twentieth century, has a lot to answer for, he says, in expanding the scope of illness to include the “neuroses,” with such concepts as the “normal neurotic.” But in the later DSM editions we see a real turning of the page. Horwitz quite correctly believes DSM-III and beyond to be much off target. The basic problem, he argues, is DSM’s desire to see psychiatric complaints as specific diseases rather than as continuous psychological qualities. “Most valid forms of mental illness manifest themselves through broad, changeable, and continuous symptoms, not discrete disease entities” (p. 113). Thus we have in DSM-IV a document that lists almost 400 psychiatric diseases, whereas Philippe Pinel, one of the early-nineteenth-century founders of psychiatry, thought there were only four. Who benefits from this riot of largely artifactual diagnoses? The National Institute of Mental Health, for example, has received a new lease on life by plunging into psychiatric epidemiology, discovering hitherto rare kinds of symptoms to be widespread indeed. “The logic of symptom-based diagnoses in community studies considers [many] persons mentally disordered, regardless of the fact that their symptoms do not stem from internal dysfunctions” (p. 92). This plays perfectly into the niche-marketing strategies of the drug companies and the need of the patient-support groups for empire building. One of the most delicious parts of Horwitz’s whole analysis is the section on sexual dysfunction, for which, he says, the real remedy is to change partners rather than go on meds. “There is no valid reason to consider nearly half of women and one-third of men as suffering from the disorder of sexual dysfunction” (pp. 92 – 93). Just as explosive as the Viagra sales curve has been that of such SSRI-style antidepressants as Paxil for a brand of shyness known as “social phobia.” All these diagnoses are celebrated in the media, proferred to patients by physicians, and generally offer models of illness behavior to those with inchoate and disorganized dysphoria. Like Christ throwing the money changers out of the Temple, Horwitz scourges the disease designers of DSM, the patient-support groups hooked on drug company money, and the government bureaucrats struggling for a place in the money hail from Congress. All have been complicit in the rage of nondiseases that constitute the lot of Main Street psychiatry today. Are there problems with this analysis? I am a bit uneasy with Horwitz’s water-tight walls between “real” diseases such as schizophrenia and manic-depressive illness, and daily unhappiness that gets encoded as depression. In family studies, patients with reactive depression often have just as much genetic loading as those with the supposedly more serious disorders. A number of symptoms that Horwitz relativizes on the grounds that they are culturally or historically not universal may nonetheless have a neurobiology of their own. Agreed: the presentation of much depression doubtless owes a great deal to cultural modeling. But let’s not get carried away. The book relies heavily not to say entirely upon the work of other scholars, rather than 190 BOOK REVIEWS digging in the archives of such institutions as the American Psychiatric Association or in the insider newsletters of the pharmaceutical industry, where he would have found much additional material to boost his case. But that would have meant a different kind of book. The present one makes for engaging reading and constitutes a major building block in the efforts that scholars such as David Healy (1997) have begun, to make a powerful weapon of the social-construction case by integrating it with biology. REFERENCE Healy, D. (1997). The antidepressant era. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Reviewed by EDWARD SHORTER, Professor of the History of Medicine and Professor of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 39(2), 190–191 Spring 2003 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.10076 䉷 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Ron Robin. The Making of the Cold War Enemy: Culture and Politics in the MilitaryIntellectual Complex. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001. 277 pp. $39.50 (cloth). ISBN 0-691-01171-0. The Making of the Cold War Enemy is a thought-provoking contribution to the literature on Cold War American science. Whereas most previous work focused on the physical sciences, Ron Robin examines the social sciences; and whereas most works on the social sciences have had a strong disciplinary orientation, Robin places the “behavioral sciences” at the center of attention. Concentrating on defense-supported research at the Rand Corporation and elsewhere, Robin’s book is also important because it examines work ranging from psychological warfare to counter-insurgency studies rather than the better known efforts of the nuclear strategists working on game theory and deterrence policy. This book is most successful in analyzing how an interdisciplinary group of leading scholars (i.e., Bernard Berelson, Alex Inkeles, Morris Janowitz, Harold Lasswell, Daniel Lerner, Edward Shils, Hans Speier, Samuel Stouffer, Paul Lazarsfeld, Wilbur Schramm, Nathan Leites, Stuart Dodd, Herbert Goldhamer, and Charles Wolf, Jr., among others) helped to construct a highly problematic portrait of the Cold War enemy and contributed to questionable, even disastrous, American foreign policies from Korea to Vietnam. In places, Robin says that behavioral scientists produced “ingenious and intellectually stimulating” work (p. 5), but the weight of his analysis shows, rather, how inadequate were their methodological preferences and how impoverished were their theoretical perspectives. The main problem, Robin argues, was that these warrior scholars failed to recognize the sharp conflict between scholarship and policy and had a “fatal attraction” to physics. As a result, behavioral scientists embraced quantitative methodologies, built predictive models, and turned out simplistic analyses that ignored important cultural differences and lacked historical perspective. Whether studying the soldiers, military leaders, political officials, or populations in Korea, Vietnam, or the United States, American behavioral scientists put forth one all-encompassing model, based upon the premise that scientific analysis required the BOOK REVIEWS 191 search for universal generalizations. In particular, they elaborated a universal framework centered on the process of modernization and in which the United States stood as the leading example of a modern nation. Drawing on Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolutions, Robin also tells the story of the rise and fall of the behavioral sciences “paradigm” from the mid-1940s to the mid1960s. Interestingly, though not noted by Robin, Kuhn saw social science as scientifically immature because it lacked a single dominant paradigm. But did the behavioral sciences provide this field of study with a single dominant paradigm, as Robin argues? This is not clear. Scholars within the social science disciplines often disagreed on basic issues such as whether there was one behavioral science or many behavioral sciences, and whether behavioral science represented the one best scientific way or only one among a number of valid orientations within the social sciences. Moreover, the scientific legitimacy of the social or behavioral sciences was widely questioned by outsiders in those years, beginning with skeptical economists and physical scientists at the Rand Corporation whom Robin discusses, as well as numerous political detractors, particularly during the McCarthy era. In explaining the fall of the behavioral sciences, Robin proposes that “internal” scholarly criticism was just as important as “external” factors like changing politics and patronage. Yet, since he focuses mainly on work from World War II through the Vietnam War that was supported by defense dollars, that claim is hard to defend. Robins argues (with good reason) that the paradigm’s demise came in the mid-1960s, at the time of mounting criticism of American foreign policy in Vietnam and the military-intellectual complex. Here, however, it is difficult to separate criticism generated within the paradigm from criticism that had identifiable social or political foundations. The Making of the Cold War Enemy presents an important perspective with far-reaching moral, political, and intellectual implications regarding the post-WWII behavioral science project. Though it doesn’t fully answer all of the important questions it raises, this study makes it clear that we need to pay careful attention to this project as we continue to argue about the causes, contours, and consequences of Cold War science, social science, and American foreign policy. Robin’s book thus deserves our careful consideration. Reviewed by MARK SOLOVEY, Assistant Professor of History of Science, Arizona State University West, Phoenix, AZ 85069. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 39(2), 191–192 Spring 2003 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.10077 䉷 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sven Papcke. Gesellschaft der Eliten. Zur Reproduktion und Problematik sozialer Distanz. Muenster: Westfaelisches Dampfboot, 2001. 409 pp. ISBN 3-89691-496-0. The study of elites starts with Aristotle who used the term oligarchy to designate the rule of the few who exercise power in their own interest. In the same vein, Marx and Engels held that in capitalism the state is the executive committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeois class. In the twentieth century, the study of the masses and the elites has had a prominent place both in social theory and political doctrines. Robert Michels coined the term “iron law of 192 BOOK REVIEWS oligarchy” to refer to the inevitable tendency of political parties and unions to become centralized and bureaucratized. Ever since Vilfredo Pareto’s and Gaetano Mosca’s classical works, an ever increasing number of studies have discussed various economic, political, and cultural segments of elites, as well as their circulations. The customary distinction is made between economic, political, and cultural elites, their intertwining, their rise and fall, and their national variations. Empirical studies of economic elites ranges from the “American robber barons” to C. Wright Mills’ Power Elite. The political elites of totalitarian mass societies — fascism and communism — gained importance after the rise and fall of those societies and their elites. The study of cultural elites increased in importance with the increasingly dominating role of mass media, reaching a world wide audience. The sociological questions to be asked involve such topics as: who elites are and why they exist, democracy and elites, bureaucracies as elites, intellectuals and elites, and elites in underdeveloped countries, just to name a few. Sven Papcke, the eminent German political sociologist at the University of Muenster, offers his investigation of groups at the top and bottom of society and their respective power or powerlessness, and the elite structures concomitant with societal developments since the dissolution of allegedly egalitarian premodern societies. We may recall Mills’ admonition about the problem of middle class sociologists for whom the very top of modern society is often inaccessible, while the very bottom is often hidden. Papcke asks the important question whether we are dealing with a real selection of elites or rather with prominent people who raised themselves to the level of sociopolitical dominance and the demands of the times. He also ask questions about the sense and non-sense of social distance and about the risks that emerge as the result of the gap between elites and the general populace. Each and every modern society is unique in its makeup and the pattern of the changes of elites; modern German society with its turbulent history, revolutions, and world wars is even more so. After 1945, the Nazi political – military elite was tried, many of its members were executed, while a substantial part of the economic and cultural elite survived and returned to prominence in due time. Another theme raised and discussed skillfully by Papcke concerns questions of counter-elites in the political and cultural sphere, their admissions to the top and/or co-optation. This is an extraordinarily impressive book on all accounts, touching on all the major and central issues and themes related to elites and masses. Papcke offers the reader his interpretation in a highly readable and always engaging style, and illustrates his intimate knowledge of particular events as well as of major figures of Western history. The book is a tour de force of scholarly discussion and addresses itself to one of the hottest market areas of the field, to students of political sociology, political science, and the history of ideas. This is a book to which the educated general public will eventually come because, while it is a scholarly work, it is also easy to read and understand, following in the tradition of many great political thinkers; it is also a social document that marks an epoch and thus provides an up-to-date assessment of major social and political issues. Papcke has given the book a symphonic unity that carries the reader along from beginning to end. The study transmits useful information from current German scholarship; thus, a translation of the volume into English would provide great service for English speaking scholars and lay public who are interested in problems of elites in modern societies. Reviewed by ZOLTAN TARR, Professor Emeritus New York City and Budapest. E-mail: Budapestar@aol.com. BOOK REVIEWS 193 Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 39(2), 193–194 Spring 2003 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.10078 䉷 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Othmar Keel. L’Avènement de la Médecine Clinique Moderne en Europe (1750 – 1815). Montreal, PQ: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2001. 542 pp. CAN$59.95. ISBN 2-7606-1822-6. “The current time is one of these great periods of history, towards which future generations will often turn back their eyes, and of which they will eternally ask to account those that can there guide mankind more quickly and more certainly on the roads of improvement. It is given only to few favored geniuses to exercise this great influence: but in the state where are today’s sciences and arts, there is nobody, in a sense, who cannot contribute to their progress” (Cabanis, 1804, p. 436; author’s translation). In his Coup d’Oeil sur les Révolutions et sur la Réforme de la Médecine (1804), French physician and philosopher Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis (1757 – 1808) had the feeling that his time was a theater for determining changes in the practice and teaching of medicine. Although Cabanis was unable to precisely describe what was going on in his own time, he nevertheless was prescient of Keel’s work by intuitively describing his time as a prominent period in the history of modern medicine. Keel’s book is a one-of-a-kind chapter in the history of modern clinical medicine that resolutely challenges received ideas. As Cabanis suggested, Keel turns his eyes to the periods that both preceded and followed the French Revolution and shows the emerging process of hospital medicine with a singular and original perspective, as well as a broader and more comprehensive one. Keel describes two important aspects of the advent of the “new” medicine. First, he shows that the changes that took place in the practice and teaching of medicine appeared long before the second decade of the nineteenth century. Second, Keel underlines the importance of other figures than those of the School of Paris in this emerging process. What he maintains is that an abrupt change took place by the middle of the eighteenth century lasting until the first decades of the nineteenth century, not only in France (Paris), but in other European countries as well. According to Keel’s research, during that period the 23-centuryold medical heritage from Antiquity was replaced by new ideas. Briefly, research, teaching, and practice henceforth had the hospital as a framework for their development. The hospital thus replaced the bedside and became the main arena for the clinical and medical experience. There was an epistemological move from the private to the public sphere. Keel succeeds well in demonstrating the details of this epistemological turning point that characterized the rise of hospital medicine in Europe. He emphasizes, in an elegant and brilliantly written text, the structural, technical and institutional dimensions of this extensive mutational process. He places the School of Paris in its much broader European context and conceives the advent of hospital medicine as a complex set of interactions and exchanges among the different medical schools of the different European countries. Keel shows that European countries not only shared technical advances and theoretical models, but elements of medical policies and the societal prerequisites to these. Therefore, the revolution that took place in medicine between 1750 and 1815 was a theoretical and practical transformation, concerning medical knowledge as well as the day-to-day practice of medicine. Keel’s book should be considered a prelude to a paradigmatic change in the history of modern medicine. REFERENCE Cabanis, P. J. G. (1804). Coup d’oeil sur les révolutions et sur la réforme de la médecine. Paris: Crapart. 194 BOOK REVIEWS Reviewed by YVES TURGEON, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Psychology, Northern Michigan University, 1401 Presque Isle Ave., Marquette, MI 49855. E-mail: yturgeon@nmu.edu. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 39(2), 194–195 Spring 2003 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.10079 䉷 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jacob A. Belzen (Ed.). Psychohistory in Psychology of Religion: Interdisciplinary Studies. International Series in the Psychology of Religion, Vol. 12 (J. A. Belzen & J. M. van der Lans, Eds.). Atlanta: Rodopi, 2001. 269 pp. $43.00 (paper). ISBN 90-4201205-6. In his introductory essay to this stimulating collection, Antoon Vergote provides a refreshingly broad definition of psychohistory as “the part of historiography that uses psychological concepts and theories for explaining important aspects of past human phenomena and which, in doing so, contributes to the understanding of the facts described” (p. 21). Vergote and editor Jacob Belzen begin by articulating the numerous risks involved in psychohistory: the errors of psychologism and pathologizing; the unavailability of the “subject” of psychobiography for interviews or psychological testing; the danger of using clinical observations to argue causality; the risk of ignoring the context of the social environment. One way to grasp the richness of this collection is to note the great diversity of data sources utilized by these psychohistorians: the sermons of John Henry Newman and JohanChristian Arndt; private journals, diaries, and letters of Newman, Hitler, Stalin, Freud, St. Ignatius, Van Gogh; official memoranda and correspondence regarding the New Mexico Penitentes, the Beaurain apparitions, and Newman’s conflicts with his mentors; the illustrated Philippson Bible; biographies and autobiographical sketches; published works of St. Ignatius, Freud, and Erik Erikson; a variety of German novels in Goethe’s Werther tradition, along with plays and popular songs depicting suicide; Van Gogh’s self-portraits and related paintings; recollections of “disciples”; confidential documents of exorcists and clinical case material related to demonic possession; estate inventories; legal and ecclesiastical codes; court and ecclesiastical chapter records; mission reports; Penitente and Jesuit constitutions; annual reports of the [Dutch Calvinist] Association of Christian Care for the Mentally Ill; and notary, psychiatrist, and medical commission reports concerning the 1932 – 1933 apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Beaurain, Belgium. Jozef Corveleyn provides an excellent example of how the nine contributors to this volume generally realize that the psychohistorian must scrutinize far more than individual motivation. Corveleyn poses a number of larger psychohistorical questions pertaining to the institutional church and the psychological authorities it consulted during its inquiries into the Beaurain apparitions. What psychology was used? What conception of science undergirded that psychology? What were the consequences of the apparitions, and the responses of ecclesiastical and medical authorities, for the child seers? He notes that layers of social-psychological and folk-psychological understanding are required to understand the multiple influences that shaped public reception to the apparitions. BOOK REVIEWS 195 The new face of psychohistory was clear in Donald Capps’ application of Hjalmar Sundén’s role theory to argue that Newman’s sermons and biographical studies constituted religious role-takings, in Jacob Belzen’s illuminating examination of the mentality of the Calvinist pillar in Dutch society, and in William Meissner’s exploration of Van Gogh’s conversion to unbelief. I was also intrigued by the implicit psychologies of perception in the essays by Capps, Corveleyn, and Meissner. I had mixed reactions to the psychoanalytic essays. Ana-Marı́a Rizzuto argues convincingly that Freud’s antiquities collection, reproducing the illustrations in the Philippson Bible, served to retrieve “a needed paternal presence” (p. 110). Richard A. Hutch successfully examines the role of the numinosum in the lives of Stalin and Hitler. Arne Jarrick’s fascinating analysis of suicide — solidly grounded in public documents — ultimately suffers from an outdated theory of shame; and Michael P. Carroll’s application of Robert Paul’s core narrative to the New Mexican Penitentes infuses silliness into an otherwise superb historical overview. Despite the lack of a subject index, and the gender-insensitive language of Jarrick and Corveleyn, this volume is a “must have” for both psychologists of religion and social historians. Reviewed by HENDRIKA VANDE KEMP, Independent Scholar, Annandale, VA. Journal of History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 39(2), 195–196 Spring 2003 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10:1002/jhbs.10094 䉷 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Richard C. Allen. David Hartley on Human Nature. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. 469 pp. $24.95 (paper). ISBN 0-7914-4234-9. David Hartley on Human Nature is the product of an incredible amount of work and is so dense with information that it almost qualifies as a reference work. In fact, the author’s bibliography and chronology of Hartley’s life are extensive enough that the book probably will be used by future Hartley scholars in exactly that way. The book begins with an extended quotation from Joseph Priestley informing the reader that Hartley is not an author who can be read over the course of a few evenings. This also turns out to be good advice for Allen’s readers. Because it is so densely packed and so loosely structured, it is best not to read straight through but to treat this volume as a series of entertaining paragraphs and loosely connected articles. By my second reading, I began to think of this book as a trick-or-treat bag; every time that I reached in I found something different and was usually pleased with the result. Allen covers all the aspects of Hartley’s thought that one would expect — his doctrine of vibrations, his associationist psychology, his neurophysiology, and his speculations on memory, sensation and perception. What makes Allen’s account unusual is that he includes portions of Hartley’s thought that are usually ignored such as his theories of emotional transfer, voluntary action, the origin of language, imagination, ambition, and his classifications of pleasure and contributions to probability theory. More significantly, Allen discusses topics that others pass over not out of simple disinterest but out of feelings of embarrassment or a sense that such topics are inappropriate to a history of science, such as Hartley’s moral 196 BOOK REVIEWS psychology, his naturalistic theology, his vegetarianism, and his thoughts on self-interest and benevolence. Because of its thoroughness and scope, David Hartley on Human Nature will likely become a standard reference among Hartley scholars. Allen’s major theses are persuasive. One leaves this book convinced that Hartley is a thinker to be taken seriously. Allen is also correct in his assertion that Hartley can only be rightly understood if we accept that his theories were simultaneous statements of theology and materialistic science. Hartley was a naturalistic theologian, and if we remove the theology from his thought we invite misinterpretation. Further, Allen’s suggestion that Hartley’s model of the human psyche deserves its place next to those of Freud or Kohlberg has merit. The book’s argument breaks down in its last few concluding pages. Allen wants something more than recognition for Hartley, something much grander than correct interpretation — he wants to revive the naturalistic theology project itself. Hartley’s major work ought to serve, in Allen’s words as “a paradigm for a textbook in psychology — that is, both a textbook in science and textbook in theology” (p. 404). In a number of passages Allen makes it clear that he understands secular psychology in terms of exclusion and censorship; indeed what is wrong with contemporary academic psychology, says Allen, is that it fails to account for the spiritual aspects of life. However, this will not persuade those of us who do not find ‘spiritual’ to be an especially useful or interesting category. Allen has done an exceptional job of convincing the reader that one needs to understand theology to understand Hartley but is considerably less convincing when arguing that psychology needs theology to understand humanity. Although his concluding remarks disappointed me, they did not change my opinion that Allen has produced the best book on Hartley I have read thus far. Reviewed by DAN AALBERS, Ph.D. Candidate in the History and Theory Area, Department of Psychology, York University. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 39(2), 196–197 Spring 2003 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.10095 䉷 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Dean K. Simonton. Great Psychologists and Their Times: Scientific Insights Into Psychology’s History. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2002. 554 pp. $49.95 (cloth). ISBN 1-55798-896-X. What makes a psychologist great? In this ambitious book, Dean Keith Simonton reviews historiometric findings on this question, addressing psychologists, scientists, and historians interested in “the provocative overlap among psychology, science, and history” (p. xi). Extending his 1995 proposal to test metahistorical generalizations published in histories of psychology, Simonton examines individual differences and longitudinal changes in “greatness,” as defined by publication counts, citation counts, and rankings by expert psychologists and relates greatness to an impressive array of personal characteristics (e.g., intelligence, traits, and worldviews), developmental features (e.g., family background and career training), and sociocultural contexts both internal to psychology (e.g., Comtian progress and Kuhnian transformations) and external to it (e.g., cultural values and political conditions). He illustrates these results with many interesting examples of individual great psychologists; unfortunately, BOOK REVIEWS 197 the subject index does not list them by name. Simonton concludes by discussing implications for teaching and research. Reviewing studies that span several centuries and many (largely Western) cultures, Simonton adopts “an inclusive perspective on psychology’s history” (p. 6) by considering psychologists, philosophers, and scientists who have contributed to the field. His own approach to the “scientific history of psychology” is not so inclusive, however; “The researcher transcends history by adopting a scientific perspective that is fundamentally ahistorical.” This “scientific ‘transhistorical’ strategy” (p. 21) involves nomothetic and quantitative studies that seek “universal and abstract laws or regularities” and allow the researcher “to incorporate into a single data analysis all of the variables that are deemed critical in making a psychologist ‘great’;qc (p. 22). Simonton dismisses idiographic historical studies as mere collections of “idiosyncratic facts [that] have no significance beyond the individual to whom they belong” (p. 193), a view that historians and psychologists interested in idiographic approaches will find unacceptable [see, e.g., Danziger (1995) and Furumoto (1995)]. Simonton’s suggestion to avoid unsupported generalizations in history texts is reasonable. However, many of his “covering laws,” resting on arbitrary and decontextualized variable definitions, seem questionable as correctives. For example, he considers psychologists’ tendency to acknowledge more consultants than do physicists a measure of psychologists’ greater scientific uncertainty (an indicator of lower status in Comte’s hierarchy of sciences), rather than simply an example of his previous finding of psychologists’ greater social orientation. Simonton’s “covering laws” often mask considerable transhistorical variation in the meanings and effects of variables. Although he does consider changes in the “gender milieu” in his treatment of gender differences in greatness, his treatment of class and ethnicity (e.g., his general “law” of Jewish preeminence in psychology) is less contextualized. Simonton suggests teaching the history of psychology from the perspective of “the psychology of science” with “covering laws” to understand individual great psychologists either as examples or as exceptions (often a substantial proportion of the sample, as he points out); exceptions in turn illustrate the statistical nature of psychological laws and the effects of missing variables. This approach, which makes laws the central focus, may bring the history of psychology closer to “the science of psychology” (p. 460), as Simonton suggests. Ironically, however, it neglects the methods of the “human science” psychologists his studies find to be the “greatest.” Psychologists and historians who prefer a more inclusive approach and those who wish to pursue an understanding of exceptions to Simonton’s laws may find his book a source of inspiration for detailed studies of psychologists within their historical contexts. REFERENCES Danziger, K. (1995). Neither science nor history? Psychological Inquiry, 6, 115– 117. Furumoto, L. (1995). On textbook history of psychology and scientizing history. Psychological Inquiry, 6, 124– 126. Simonton, D. K. (1995). Behavioral laws in histories of psychology: Psychological science, metascience, and the psychology of science. Psychological Inquiry, 6, 89– 114. Reviewed by NICOLE B. BARENBAUM, Professor of Psychology, University of the South, Sewanee, TN 37383. 198 BOOK REVIEWS Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 39(2), 198–199 Spring 2003 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.10099 䉷 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Colin Heywood. A History of Childhood: Children and Childhood in the West From Medieval to Modern Times. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001. 231 pp. $59.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-7456-1731-X. $24.95 (paper). ISBN 0-7456-1732-8. Steven Ozment. Ancestors: The Loving Family in Old Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. 162 pp. $31.50 (cloth). ISBN 0-674-00483-3. $14.95 (paper). ISBN 0-674-00484-1. These books offer concise and accessible syntheses of recent work in the history of Western childhood and the European family. Drawing on the “social constructionist” framework developed by Allison James, Chris Jenks, and Alan Prout, Heywood argues that historians must recapture both the adult attitudes and institutions that affect children’s lives and children’s perspective and agency. He reviews adult ideas about childhood (cultural history) as a background to the examination of children’s experience (social history), first in the family and then in the wider worlds of work and school. In response to Philippe Ariès’s “startling assertion that the medieval world was ignorant of childhood” (p. 11), Heywood proposes, following David Archard, a distinction between a culture’s concept of childhood (the notion that children differ from adults) and varying conceptions of the difference between children and adults. Instead of a “discovery of childhood,” he discerns recurrent debates around the oppositions innocence/depravity, nature/nurture, dependence/independence, and the relation of age to gender. However, in the long run, social transformations resulted in an intensification of interest in children, protracted childhoods and adolescences, and a sharper boundary between childhood and adulthood. Heywood summarizes historians’ findings on the child’s position in the family and with peers, different approaches to child-rearing, and children’s economic role before and after industrialization. He also charts the reduction in both child mortality and fertility, expansion of schooling, advances in child hygiene and welfare, and rising intervention of the state and experts over the past two centuries. Although the striking improvements in Western children’s health are undeniable, Heywood stresses the persistence of inequalities along class, ethnic, and regional lines (to “avoid an air of triumphalism” [p. 145]). A History of Childhood is organized thematically rather than chronologically, focusing “on ways of interpreting the material rather than the details of what happened” (p. 8). Heywood painstakingly assesses arguments advanced by previous historians, but the nonspecialists and students to whom the book is primarily addressed would benefit from a stronger, unified argument backed by detailed discussion of fewer examples, that is, more history and less historiography. Readers of an introductory text such as this one may be perplexed by Heywood’s leaps between centuries, countries, and continents and indeterminate use of “the past” (as in “What was it like to be ill as a child in the past?” [p. 146]). In Ancestors, Ozment reexamines the account of the European family put forward by historians in the 1960s and 1970s in light of the insights of later scholars. He challenges Ariès and his successors, for whom the “premodern” or “preindustrial” family (patriarchal, impersonal, and “sociable”) was replaced by the allegedly superior “modern” family (increasingly egalitarian, sentimental, private, and child-centered). He questions as well gender historians’ condemnation of the early modern period as having confined women in the home and prevented them from pursuing other occupations. Ozment in turn develops two arguments: that BOOK REVIEWS 199 family archives provide the best access to the family of the past and that the “modern” (sentimental) family in fact existed in all historical periods. Historians of childhood and the family face different problems with regard to the availability, reliability, and representativeness of sources. Heywood notes the paucity of records left by children against the relative abundance of official and institutional documents, literary and polemical texts, visual representations, and adult recollections. Family historians, in Ozment’s view, must choose between a quantitative (structural) approach and a qualitative approach based on the analysis of family archives (diaries and correspondence). Ozment persuasively claims that in family archives “the people of the past convey both the story of their lives and what they personally made of them” (p. 106). The argument would be more persuasive if it were not cast as an either/or alternative; different kinds of sources and both quantitative and qualitative approaches are valuable in the investigation of the past. Besides, as Ozment acknowledges, family archives furnish evidence pertaining mostly to literate, urban elites from the fifteenth century onward, evidence that cannot support his claim that the sentimental family existed before and in all social groups. When Ozment writes that “[f]rom ancient Roman marriage practices, to seventeenth-century funeral sermons, to advice literature extending into the twentieth century, historians find abundant features of the ‘modern sentimental family’ existing from antiquity through the Renaissance” (p. 104), one is at a loss to follow his logic. Family archives may be treasure-troves indeed, but here Ozment wants them to do work they cannot do. Heywood and Ozment go to great lengths to defend parents of the past from the charges of indifference, neglect, and abuse leveled by earlier historians, contending that practices such as swaddling and wet-nursing must be understood in their specific context and that regardless of how they appear to twenty-first century readers these practices expressed parents’ care and love. Both authors find the evidence of widespread violence against children, abandonment, and infanticide adduced by other historians inadequate. Ozment asserts that the main goal of child-rearing in the past was to prepare children to “live and work independently” (p. 73); what we perceive as authoritarianism was a manifestation of sincere concern. He reproduces excerpts from letters written between the sixteenth and early twentieth centuries showing that, confronted with “a child who, whether due to weakness, ineptitude, or perversity, stopped before a jumpable hurdle, or succumbed to some self-defeating temptation or folly,” parents “dug in for the duration, dragging their children kicking and screaming into adulthood and useful citizenship rather than abandon them to their own hapless devices” (p. 80 – 1). Although this “parents-know-best” agenda is a far cry from the doubts cast on the infallibility of parental authority by historians during the rebellious 1960s and early 1970s, in both cases the historians’ concerns cannot be separated from contemporary anxieties about childhood and parenting. When, with Heide Wunder, Ozment suggests that the “return of women to the home” in the sixteenth century did not impoverish their lives but gave them an opportunity to apply their creativity to family and children, it is hard not to see this too as an intervention in current controversies on women’s renewed embrace of work outside the home and its purported effects on “the family.” Reviewed by ADRIANA S. BENZAQUÉN, Department of History, Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada B3M 2J6. 200 BOOK REVIEWS Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 39(2), 200–201 Spring 2003 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.10097 䉷 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Adam Kuper. Among the Anthropologists: History and Context in Anthropology. New Brunswick, NJ: The Athlone Press, 1999. X ⫹ 214 pp. ISBN 0-4851-1536-0. Adam Kuper occupies a unique position in the landscape of contemporary anthropology. An accomplished ethnographer in the tradition of British social anthropology, he has, over the last few decades, also become one of that tradition’s premier historians. As a consummate insider, Kuper’s historiographical style is not exactly Rankean. Far from a dispassionate observer who carefully weighs archival evidence to arrive at neutral conclusions, Kuper is an eloquent partisan. A South African who trained and spent most of his professional career in England, he intimately knows the ideas and personalities that shaped British anthropology, and he deploys his historical work in their more or less overtly presentist celebration. Kuper’s book, Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School, published originally in 1973 and now in its third edition (1996), is the archetype for this approach. Written with a wit and candor that brings to life the world of Kuper’s teachers and teachers’ teachers, the text is widely popular among anthropologists. A staple in departmental courses on the history of the discipline, it strikes a balance between historical information and “native folklore,” and it leaves the reader with a strong sense of British anthropology’s intellectual and political powers. More recently, Kuper has stepped up his presentist defense of British social anthropology. Deploying his characteristic historiographical style, he turned his attention to its principal paradigmatic competition — American cultural anthropology. The result, Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account (1999), is a deconstructive history of American anthropology’s central concept — a history that doubles as a scathing critique of the ways the discipline is practiced in the United States. Reproducing a long-standing British critique of American anthropology, Kuper identifies the American preoccupation with culture as the articulation of a German romantic (read potentially reactionary, certainly apolitical) tradition. Kuper traces that tradition through such figures as Talcott Parsons, Clifford Geertz, and Marshall Sahlins to arrive at a wholesale dismissal of the solipsistic postmodern anthropology they ostensibly spawned. Predictably, the remedy has a distinctly British flavor, a fusion of Radcliffe-Brownian concerns for the reality of social structures with a Marxian attention to political economy — an approach pioneered by such figures as the South African/British anthropologist Max Gluckmann. Kuper’s collection Among the Anthropologists: History and Context in Anthropology unites the historiographical celebration of British social anthropology with the critique of the American cultural variant. Comprised of 11 pieces, nearly all of which were originally published in various European venues in the course of the 1990s, it showcases the strengths of Kuper’s passionate partisanship. Pieces on such British anthropological luminaries as Audrey Richards and Ernest Gellner glisten with a sense of the author’s personal familiarity with his subjects (Richards is simply “Audrey”), whereas an essay on the hunter-gatherer debate of the 1960s and 1970s brilliantly reconstructs the institutional and intellectual dynamics of the Cambridge Kuper encountered as a graduate student in the early 1960s. “Culture, Identity and the Project of a Cosmopolitan Anthropology” picks up on Kuper’s critique of American anthropology, making an eloquent case against its move into the humanities. Against a cultural anthropology that takes as “its object the interpretation of cultural texts,” Kuper thus poses a BOOK REVIEWS 201 social anthropology that is a “social science, closely allied to sociology and social history” (p. 56). Kuper has written about the origins of his intellectual commitments in a particularly South African constellation before. However, his essay “South African Anthropology: An Inside Job” — aside from an interview the only previously unpublished piece in the collection — treats the topic succinctly and with great effectiveness. In this manner, it recalls the history of two competing paradigms: the English-based, universalist social anthropology, institutionalized by Radcliffe-Brown as chair of anthropology at Cape Town in the early 1920s and the Afrikaans-based, particularist ethnology (Volkekunde), championed by such figures as W. W. M. Eiselen who deployed German romantic principles and the vision of enduring cultural autonomy to codify and rationalize the Apartheid system. Liberal, Anglophone anthropologists like Kuper always saw their work as part of a struggle against the politics and epistemologies of Volkekunde — a project Kuper has extended beyond the South African context to other anthropological traditions deriving from nineteenth-century German models. Other essays in Among the Anthropologists skirt these more presentist debates. However, those pieces — on Darwin’s influence on anthropology, the relationship between psychology and anthropology, and the function of myths and dreams in Lévi-Strauss and Freud — also tend to be less compelling, not least because in the absence of new (archival) research they tend to confirm existing historiographical positions. However, if Kuper’s book does not significantly change our understanding of anthropology’s past, it still has merit for historians of the behavioral sciences. Those merits have to do with the discipline’s present, where Kuper’s Among the Anthropologists can serve as a fascinating guide to some of anthropology’s more pressing contemporary debates. REFERENCES Kuper, A. (1996). Anthropology and anthropologists: The modern British school (3rd ed.). New York: Routledge. Kuper, A. (1999). Culture: The anthropologists’ account. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Reviewed by MATTI BUNZL, Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, IL. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 39(2), 201–202 Spring 2003 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.10098 䉷 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Angela N. H. Creager, Elizabeth Lunbeck, and Londa Schiebinger (Eds.). Feminism in Twentieth-Century Science, Technology, and Medicine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. 264 pp. $65.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-226-12023-6. $20.00 (paper). ISBN 0-226-12024-4. This text is a welcome contemporary assessment of the role of feminism within the constellation of science, technology, and medical practice. Its greatest contribution is this three-pronged approach within a literature (and a politic) that tends to keep them separate 202 BOOK REVIEWS and distinct. The collection also provides a much-needed American analysis of feminism and technology with very useful overviews combined with specific, “on the floor” examples from engineering, industry, and so forth. The two main weaknesses of the collection are the predominant American focus (important work from abroad is ignored or downplayed) and a shallow working definition of feminism that runs throughout the first two sections (science and technology). Overall, the text is an important contribution to feminist scholarship, women’s studies, and the sociology and history of science and technology. It also revitalizes, and to some extent, updates debates involving gender, science, and technology. The text is divided into the three sections reflected in the title. Both in the clear and useful introduction to the collection (drawn from a 1998 workshop of the Women’s Caucus of the History of Science Society held at Princeton University) and throughout most of the entries, is a treatment of feminism that is both problematic and innovative. The innovation lies in the detailed assessments of the effect feminism has had on the three main areas. This privileging of feminist practice over feminist theorizing, however, reduces feminism and women’s movements along the lines of what Pamela Mack calls “difference feminism” and “equal-rights feminism” (very loosely tied to the first- and second-wave women’s movements). Londa Schiebinger’s “tools of gender analysis,” a sort of practical application of gender issues to professional practice, features in several entries. This analytical framework asks questions such as, “What are scientific priorities?” and “How does representative sampling function to exclude women from studies?” There are references to key texts in the burgeoning literature on gender, science, technology, and medicine (such as those by Donna Haraway and Cynthia Cockburn), and many accomplished scholars including Alison Wylie, Evelyn Fox Keller, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Emily Martin, and Evelynn Hammonds are contributors. However, there is little analytical engagement with the established literature, especially with the many theoretical twists and turns (such as science cultural studies, technoscience, and agential realism that are only picked up in the last section) and how they interact with political movements. In part, this is due to the commitment, especially in the first two sections in the collection, to detailed and varied analyses of feminist practices within the professions. When assessed on this basis, these sections shine. It is only two-thirds of the way through the book, however, in the consideration of feminism in medicine, that a balance between feminist concepts and the detailed practices within the field under criticism is made. Reviewed by ANNETTE BURFOOT, Associate Professor of Sociology, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada K7L 3N6. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 39(2), 202–203 Spring 2003 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.10096 䉷 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. K. N. Cissna and R. Anderson. Moments of Meeting: Buber, Rogers, and the Potential for Public Dialogue. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. xxv ⫹ 323 pp. $71.50 (cloth). ISBN 0-7914-5283-2. $23.95 (paper). ISBN 0-7914-5284-0. This is the second of two volumes that Professors Kenneth Cissna and Rob Anderson BOOK REVIEWS 203 have devoted to the dialogue between the great Jewish philosopher Martin Buber and the great American psychologist Carl R. Rogers — a dialogue that I moderated at the University of Michigan in April 1957. If anything, this second volume is more meaningful and valuable than the first. One of Cissna and Anderson’s main concerns is to demonstrate that Rogers’s understanding of “empathy” is actually close to Buber’s concept of “inclusion” in that it involves relation to others without giving up one’s own ground. Another is to suggest that Rogers’s stress on the emotional congruence of the therapist in relation to the client is comparable to Buber’s concept of “confirmation.” By both emphases they mean to obviate the criticisms that I have made in my comparison of Rogers’s teaching of “self-actualization” and Buber’s teaching of “dialogue” (Friedman, 1992, p. 40). Persuaded by Moments of Meeting, I freely admit that Rogers was and is more dialogical than I thought. I am particularly impressed with Cissna and Anderson’s statement about Rogers: “The wisdom of the dialogical perspective he shared came less from . . . prior philosophical commitments than from the always changing practice in which he saw trust emerge under extraordinarily trying circumstances” (p. 97). While recognizing that Rogers’s use of “empathy” is sometimes close to Buber’s bipolar conception of “inclusion,” I cannot agree with our authors’ conclusion that the difference between Rogers’s use of “empathy” and Buber’s use of “inclusion” is “more semantic than conceptual” (p. 90). Also, when Buber uses the term “over against,” he does not mean the difference and comparison (that characterize the I – It relation), as our authors hold (p. 102 f.) but the face-to-face uniqueness of the I – thou relationship. After counting some 90 times when Buber used the word “cannot” in his dialogue with Rogers, Cissna and Anderson coined the phrase “rhetoric of cannot.” I do not doubt their calculation, but I do differ most emphatically as to the motive that they ascribe to Buber for this rhetoric. “The rhetoric of cannot,” they claim, “far from a rhetoric of invitation, is more likely to be heard as a request to acquiesce to authority” (p. 166); “Buber’s rhetoric of cannot may have discouraged active exploration of ideas, if its central message was that he was already certain of the nature of dialogic reality, and that through this conversation, he was expected to teach the correct conceptual distinctions” (p. 171). In innumerable lectures and seminars that I heard Buber give in the course of a decade, I never heard him use a “rhetoric of cannot” in the service of trying to impose his own expertise as the foremost philosopher of dialogue! What I can say is that Buber got the impression early on that Rogers believed in some sort of full mutuality between therapist and client (and not that “normative limitation of mutuality” that Buber spoke of in the Postscript that he wrote for the second, 1958 edition of I and Thou). Although originally I too felt that Rogers was claiming some sort of full mutuality, later I became convinced that actually all Rogers was claiming was that his clients were aware of the “unconditional positive regard” that he brought to his work with them and that this awareness helped them change in a positive direction. REFERENCE Friedman, M. (1992). Dialogue and the human image: Beyond humanistic psychology. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Reviewed by MAURICE FRIEDMAN, Co-director, Institute of Dialogical Psychotherapy, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, San Diego State University. 204 BOOK REVIEWS Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 39(2), 204 Spring 2003 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.10100 䉷 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Owen Bradley. A Modern Maistre. The Social and Political Thought of Joseph de Maistre. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. 320 pp. $65.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-80321295-X. Owen Bradley aims to clear the French counter-revolutionary, Joseph de Maistre, of two charges: first, that Maistre was an uncritical celebrant of violence for the sake of preserving order, and second, that his traditional commitments to monarchy and papacy make his ideas unsuited to the analysis of contemporary social and political issues. Although the book’s title, A Modern Maistre, suggests Bradley means to refute only the second charge, he devotes much of his attention to the weightier problem of Maistre’s position on violence. The majority of the book’s chapters discuss Maistre’s analysis of punishment, war, power, legitimacy, and sovereignty. Anyone wishing to understand how Maistre fits into late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century social and political thought will be on familiar ground here. However, in the two chapters most central to the argument of the book, those on sacrifice and providence, Bradley focuses on how Maistre analyzed social and political phenomena in explicitly religious terms. How might the conclusions of such analysis still be compelling to those who reject its grounding in traditional religion? Bradley argues that Maistre’s analysis of social and political life can still be compelling indeed, largely because Maistre was so quirky and unconventional a traditionalist. Not only is Maistre modern because he recognized the French Revolution made a return to the old order impossible; more importantly, Bradley argues, Maistre is a modern because of his interest in how social order is maintained by symbol, ritual, and transgressive violence. In these areas, Bradley sees an “uncanny resemblance” between Maistre’s work and that of twentieth-century figures like Girard, Foucault, and Bataille (pp. xi, 30, 58 – 60, 70 – 71, & 79 – 86). Bradley is persuasive in presenting Maistre as a modern, but as he acknowledges, he is hardly alone in doing so — a number of well-known commentators on Maistre (most notably Isaiah Berlin) have said the same (pp. xv – xviii). By contrast, establishing that Maistre neither wholly endorsed nor relished maintaining order by sacrificial violence but rather only theorized this pattern, is by far Bradley’s more formidable challenge. In my view, the greatest difficulties with the case Bradley wishes to make for Maistre here grow out of his undisguised admiration for his subject. Because Bradley is so anxious to show that Maistre deplored excessive violence and did not think just any order worth maintaining, he does not allow his readers to see the full sweep of how Maistre theorizes the place of violence in human life. Instead, Bradley attempts to forestall criticism of Maistre by presenting some of his principal ideas as if they were unquestionable truths. For example, Bradley writes of Maistre’s analysis of sacrifice, “an awareness of man’s destructive nature . . . leads [Maistre] toward an ethic of the minimization of violence” (p. 39). Bradley then focuses his discussion on how Maistre argued for the containment of violence through state-controlled ritual sacrifice, rather than beginning with the more crucial point of how Maistre theorized the place of destructiveness in human nature in the first place. To accept Bradley’s “fundamental thesis” that Maistre ought to be read as “a theorist of political violence” rather than as someone who glorified it (p. 120), however, we need to know more about how Maistre justified his belief in human life’s inevitable “bloodiness” (p. 146) than Bradley is willing to tell us. Reviewed by EMILY HAUPTMANN, Associate Professor of Political Science, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI. BOOK REVIEWS 205 Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 39(2), 205–206 Spring 2003 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.10101 䉷 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. David Edmonds and John Eidinow. Wittgenstein’s Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers. New York: Ecco Press, 2001. 340 pp. $24.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-06-621244-8. Lively and well-researched (except for a few details), this semipopular book centers on a face-to-face clash between Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein over whether or not there are philosophical problems. The authors argue that the clash was emblematic of wider conflicts in their intellectual backgrounds. Wittgenstein had two philosophies: in the first he solved all philosophical problems; in the second he held that philosophy was a kind of linguistic confusion, or even a kind of sickness, that invited therapy. Popper, by contrast, consistently held that philosophical problems were inescapable general issues that arose out of science. Thus viewed, both of Wittgenstein’s philosophies were grave mistakes. Invited to speak in Cambridge in 1946, Popper expected Wittgenstein to be present so he courted confrontation by choosing as his topic, “Are there philosophical problems?” The authors sketch vividly the biographical and intellectual backgrounds of the two Viennese philosophers before they were transplanted to Britain. Wittgenstein was the scion of a wealthy family; Popper was that of a successful lawyer. Wittgenstein was restless, intense, and rather mystical. Popper was focused, also intense, and devoted to science. Each belonged to an originally Jewish family that had converted to Catholicism and Protestantism, respectively, the Wittgensteins in the first half of the nineteenth century, the Poppers sometime before World War I. Wittgenstein was old enough to serve in the Austrian army during that war; Popper was too young but old enough to be marked by the upheavals of its aftermath, including his family’s impoverishment. Young Wittgenstein came to England before World War I and soon moved to Cambridge to study with Bertrand Russell. He was eventually made a professor there. Popper fled Austria in the 1930s to escape the Nazis, alighting first in New Zealand and then moving to the London School of Economics in 1946. An enigmatic and charismatic figure, Wittgenstein was surrounded by devoted followers, some of whom attended the meeting being discussed. While in New Zealand Popper had written a widely discussed book, The Open Society and Its Enemies, but he had at the time no philosophical following to speak of, and certainly no supporters with him on his visit to Cambridge. Wittgenstein chaired the meeting and was the lead interlocutor. All accounts agree that Popper tried to show examples of philosophical problems and that Wittgenstein dismissed each one. In draughty England, the room was heated by an open fire that Wittgenstein from time to time tended with a poker. He likely gestured with it when speaking. He left the meeting before it was formally closed. Either before then or just after, Popper, challenged to give an example of an ethical rule, offered: “not to threaten visiting speakers with pokers.” This was clearly a joke, but whether Wittgenstein appreciated such jokes is to be doubted. By 1946 Wittgenstein had already become a “hidden king of thought,” that is, a philosopher who published almost nothing but whose reputation as profound and brilliant was the talk among young philosophers. Soon after his death in 1951 his executors began translating and publishing volume after volume of his writings. He became easily the most influential and discussed of professional philosophers in the English-speaking world. Despite this, he was not much read by the general intellectual public, which had difficulty summing up his contribution. Popper, by contrast, lived a long life and published a great deal under his own 206 BOOK REVIEWS hand. He translated his early work, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, and was much discussed by philosophers of science, scientists, and the general intellectual public. He lectured and taught all over the world. Above all he stood for a clear set of challenging ideas in knowledge and in politics. He was without enigma or charisma in his writing and person. He eventually had followers, but nearly all registered some degree of dissent from his ideas, which was hardly surprising, given his teaching about the value of criticism. What actually happened in the meeting is reconstructed in great detail. It takes on a Rashomon-like quality as the various witnesses disagree. Fascinating though it is, the authors’ detective work is to Wittgenstein’s Poker what Hitchcock called a ‘McGuffin’ in a film: a useful plot device but not the point of what is going on. According to Edmonds and Eidinow, the point of what was going on was indeed whether there were genuine philosophical problems. Wittgenstein and his followers had shown some to be pseudoproblems and some to be artifacts of language. However, the authors aver, Popper’s view that there remain genuine philosophical problems out of science, metaphysics, and ethics is now more or less uncontested. Philosophy as mere therapy has not gained the day. Wittgenstein’s followers quarrel among themselves about the great man’s legacy. This book is remarkable in trying to say what the score is. Not since Ernest Gellner’s Words and Things of 1959 have these matters been so successfully broached for the general intellectual public. Reviewed by IAN JARVIE, Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy, York University, Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canada. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 39(2), 206–207 Spring 2003 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.10102 䉷 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Mark S. Micale and Paul Lerner (Eds.). Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870 – 1930. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 334 pp. $60.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-521-58365-9. The eleven contributors to this volume comprise a new generation of trauma scholars. In their opening historiographic essay, editors Marc S. Micale and Paul Lerner point out that while most historical accounts of trauma have used history to illuminate our present understanding of the concept, this volume has taken the further step of using the historical study of trauma to illuminate history. The concept of trauma is thus ably used to explore railway travel, accident insurance, the welfare state, gender identity, class politics, World War I, the American Legion, and American and European society between 1870 and 1930. The caliber of the research is uniformly high, and in some cases exceptionally so. The volume’s first contribution by Ralph Harrington recreates the nineteenth-century world of English railway travel with the skill of a gifted novelist. As if not to be outdone, Eric Caplan describes America’s early experience with trains, litigation, and trauma in an erudite and swift moving account. There is also a characteristically masterful historiographic essay by Micale on Jean-Martin Charcot and a sensitive analysis by Bruna Bianchi on the psychiatric experiences of Italian soldiers during World War I. The articles collected in this volume were first presented at a conference on the history of trauma and medicine in March 1996. A lot has changed since then, however, thanks BOOK REVIEWS 207 especially to the work of Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen (1996, 1997, & 2000). In resurrecting the ideas of the great Belgian psychologist Joseph Delboeuf (1831 – 1896), Borch-Jacobsen has, in my opinion, succeeded in showing that trauma — along with hypnosis, upon which the concept of trauma is based — does not exist. By the word “trauma” I do not mean the distress that follows an emotionally disturbing event, but the idea of unconscious psychic trauma without which trauma studies would have no raison d’être. Micale seems to be implicitly aware of this possibility because he tends to minimize the debt trauma owes to hypnosis in his flagship essay. For example, although he recognizes the importance of Charcot’s work for Pierre Janet’s and Freud’s conceptualizations of trauma, he nonetheless criticizes Charcot for “his use of the hypnotic parallel to account for the mental processes of traumatic-symptom-formation [which] led to more confusion than enlightenment” (p. 133). However, had it not been for such hypnotic parallels, as Freud himself acknowledged, there would have been no concept of psychic trauma to be confused about. Micale also states that “trauma was central to Pierre Janet’s ideas about psychological dissociation” (p. 135) when exactly the reverse was true — it was Janet’s ideas about hypnosis that led him to trauma (LeBlanc, 2001). These small but significant oversights reveal how well Micale senses what is at stake; as he well writes, “In the grand movement of the age from somatogenic to ideogenic models of the mind, the role of the study of trauma was key” (p. 136). However, if Borch-Jacobsen and Delboeuf are right, then the grand historical question becomes the following: why has it taken us over a hundred years to rediscover the fundamental truth about hypnosis and trauma? In line with the general orientation of this important volume, I think the answer to that question will teach us a lot about the twentieth century and ourselves. REFERENCES Borch-Jacobsen, M. (1996). Remembering Anna O. A century of mystification. New York: Routledge. Borch-Jacobsen, M. (1997). L’effet Bernheim (fragments d’une théorie de l’artefact généralisé). Corpus, 32, 147– 173. Borch-Jacobsen, M. (2000). How to predict the past: From trauma to repression. History of Psychiatry, 11, 15– 35. LeBlanc, A. (2001). The origins of the concept of dissociation: Paul Janet, his nephew Pierre, and the problem of post-hypnotic suggestion. History of Science, 39, 57– 69. Reviewed by ANDRÉ LEBLANC, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 39(2), 207–208 Spring 2003 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.10103 䉷 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn. Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. 267 pp. $25.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-393-04873-X. In Race Experts, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn provocatively argues that the goals and ideals of the Civil Rights movement were derailed by the therapeutic sensibility that came to dominate American society since the 1960s. According to Lasch-Quinn, “Finding one’s identity 208 BOOK REVIEWS became more important than the political project of attaining equality or building community” (p. 64). For this shift in priorities, she blames an “army of race experts” (p. xii) — teachers, social workers, and psychiatrists — who created new professional roles as interracial etiquette advisers, co-counselors, and diversity trainers. She claims that they distracted activists and the public from the moral universalism of the early Civil Rights crusade with “half-baked, contradictory, quasi-scientific pseudo-truths” (pp. xiv – xv) that reinforced a new race-consciousness and racial double standard of behavior reminiscent of the era of Jim Crow. Although scholars and contemporaries have extensively documented the intricacies of interracial relations under slavery and segregation, Lasch-Quinn points out that little attention has been given to how such etiquette has changed in the generation since integration. Through insightful analysis of a broad array of cultural evidence including scholarly works, confessional literature by black authors, popular films, etiquette manuals, diversity training videos, counseling guidelines, and children’s books, Lasch-Quinn convincingly shows how a preoccupation with identity, emotional catharsis, and personal growth became entangled in our everyday understandings and practices of race. Rather than resolve old tensions, Lasch-Quinn claims that therapeutic methods, which were aimed at liberating whites from their “alleged racism” (p. xv) and blacks from their “assumed bondage of low self-esteem,” (p. xv) created new misunderstandings and breathed fresh life into racial stereotypes. In particular, she identifies the “harangue-flagellation ritual” (p. xv) as emerging in the mid-1960s and governing interracial interactions with its dissemination in encounter groups and later diversity training programs in workplaces, schools, and elsewhere. This ritual called for expressive assertiveness on the part of blacks, usually in the form of rage, and restrained submission on the part of whites, usually through the admission of guilt of their racism. She contends that race experts who continue to popularize this ritual ignore the real revolution of the Civil Rights movement in achieving significant improvements in race relations and instead perpetuate a vision of society in which virulent racism continues to divide the world into white oppressors and black victims. She asserts that the culture of therapy encourages hypersensitivity to all imagined slights and traps us in a cycle of recovery with no end in sight. What is worse, these therapeutic methods hamper our ability to assess which problems we have overcome and which remain to be tackled, preventing further progress toward true democracy and racial equality. Lasch-Quinn provides a valuable service by bringing together two vital, but too often separate discussions — on therapeutic culture and race — and by exploring the effect of one on the other. Her tone is combative, and she does not give much consideration to the real psychological and emotional effects of racism or to genuine attempts to grapple with such problems. By relying on critics (such as herself) who find the therapeutic methods of the human potential movement to be meaningless, she sidesteps the reality of thousands of ordinary Americans who have indeed derived profound personal meaning from such experiences. This does not undermine her critique of the debilitating effect of the therapeutic sensibility on the quest for racial equality, but it does open up other questions for further exploration and understanding of the nature of this widespread phenomenon. Race Experts is sure to provoke discussion over the ways in which we see and deal with race and the pervasive question of identity and is thus essential reading for all. Reviewed by LAURA KIM LEE, Ph.D., Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME 04011. BOOK REVIEWS 209 Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 39(2), 209–210 Spring 2003 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.10105 䉷 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Daniel P. Todes. Pavlov’s Physiology Factory: Experiment, Interpretation, Laboratory Enterprise. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. 512 pp. $58.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-8018-6690-1. The medical philanthropy of the Romanovs, the Crimean War, and a rabid dog named Pluto each contributed to Pavlov’s abrupt rise as Head of Physiology in Russia’s Imperial Institute of Medicine. By 1904, Ivan Pavlov had been nominated for the Nobel Prize four times, but each time the committee hesitated because it wasn’t sure the work was Pavlov’s. Todes’s excellent scientific biography uses a factory model of science to explain why. Pavlov managed knowledge production in a “physiology factory.” His Praktikanty, physicians who received special incentives to spend time doing scientific research, were a vital feature of the factory. They flocked to Russian laboratories, and the result was a huge labor force that Pavlov used as his “borrowed senses.” However, they also allowed the Nobel committee to question whether the research was really Pavlov’s. Going well beyond description implied by the term “factory,” Todes contrasts Pavlov’s scientific vision with the managerial vision by which Pavlov, the manager, maintained tight intellectual control over the knowledge the factory produced. Todes’s outstanding scholarship succeeds admirably in presenting the conflicts that plagued Pavlov, the person, a scientific idealist with an irascible temper, and his factory amid the social and philosophical debates that surrounded the institute. Pavlov’s scientific vision was “Bernardian” and passionately experimental; it integrated the contrasting influences of Claude Bernard and Karl Ludwig with the work of Pavlov’s methodological hero, physiologist Rudolf Heidenhahn. The “Bernardian” Pavlov rejected metaphysical materialism (and any ontological speculation) in favor of methodological precision carefully tuned to a “biological” level of analysis. Committed to determinism, he nonetheless avoided the reduction of living phenomena to physics. Although they “obey” the laws of physics and chemistry, organisms are too complex to be explained by them. Explanation required levels of analysis, like organ and organism, that captured the purposeful activity of the whole. Pavlov himself used the factory as his scientific metaphor, depicting the digestive system as a chemical factory in which coordinated action worked to achieve the goal of digestion. Pavlov’s assessment of this purposeful coordination required both the controlled disruption of experimental analysis and reintegration of the whole. This produced tensions between analysis and synthesis and between mechanism and purpose. The former led to Pavlov’s preference for chronic experiments in which an animal was surgically modified in a chronic procedure that permitted recovery and “normal” physiological function. The latter reveal the prominent, if sometimes vague, use of psychological concepts in turn of the century physiology. Todes argues elegantly that the notions of “normalcy” and psyche permitted a wide interpretive range that loosened Pavlov’s tight experimentalism and mediated the tension between his desire for precise quantitative measures and the purposefulness and variability of life. Dogs’ psyches were often used as causal factors to explain data on gastric secretions; critical experiments with Pavlov’s favorite data dog, Druzhok, for example, were interpreted in terms of appetite, personality, taste, mood, and “broad self-esteem” (p. 144). However, at other times personality or mood was used to discard findings that contradicted the protostatistical construction of stereotypical “characteristic secretory curves” (p. 161). There is a great deal here beyond Pavlov the physiologist and discoverer of the condi- 210 BOOK REVIEWS tional reflex. One also learns about the attempts to modernize Russian culture with positivistic science, about the technological tensions of nineteenth-century physiology, about the origins of “big science” and its commercial application, and about the tight reciprocal connections between experimental physiology and scientific psychology as lawful regularity in the psychic causes of digestion involving judgment and volition (“the mind of the glands”) gave way, through Wundtian concepts, to the less mental and more automatic conditional reflex. Todes’s excellent work takes its place among the histories of experimentation that place empirical analysis and precision within the context of social relations, politics, institutions, and personalities, in this case, dog as well as human. Reviewed by CHERYL A. LOGAN, Professor of Psychology and Biology, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC 27402. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 39(2), 210–211 Spring 2003 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.10104 䉷 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Juliet Mitchell. Madmen and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria. New York: Basic Books, 2000. xiii ⫹ 381 pp. $30.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-465-04613-4. $18.00 (paper). ISBN 0-46504614-2. Historically, psychoanalysis and hysteria are inseparable. Yet, in our era hysteria seems to have disappeared; indeed, it has been expunged from the diagnostic classification system. In this broad-ranging book, Juliet Mitchell, a practicing psychoanalyst and a respected feminist theorist, endeavors to revitalize the concept of hysteria. In her view, hysteria is a “universal phenomenon, a possible response to particular human conditions that can arise at any time or anywhere” (p. 3). Mimesis is at the heart of hysteria. Hysteria has assumed diverse forms in different times and places — the “wandering womb” of classical Greece, possession states and ecstatic trances, the conversion symptoms that played a part in the birth of psychoanalysis, and the battle neuroses of World War I. If hysteria now has vanished, Mitchell insists on asking, “Where has it gone?” She argues that hysteria has fractured into its constituent parts. The diverse phenomena that once came under its umbrella — multiple personality, borderline personality disorder, eating disorders, and trauma syndromes — are now erroneously regarded as distinct disorders. Mitchell attributes the disappearance of hysteria to a cultural and professional repudiation of it. Because of the stigma placed on hysteria, it is most often ascribed to members of denigrated social groups. In the Western world, women and girls have been the customary recipients of the diagnosis. Madmen and Medusas not only explores the manifestations of hysteria; it also offers a fresh reading of its origin and psychodynamics. Psychoanalysis has focused attention on the vertical axis of the family. In classical theories, the Oedipal father played a pivotal role in the child’s psychic development; in the developmental accounts of object relations theorists, the mother – child dyad is pivotal. In either case, the sibling – sibling axis is largely ignored. However, sibling relations evoke powerful and complex feelings and fantasies. Among them — and key to Mitchell’s account of the development of hysteria — are feelings of displacement and the threat of parental abandonment. BOOK REVIEWS 211 Mitchell explores the dynamics of sibling relationships by re-analyzing several classic case studies. She inserts information about analysands’ siblings (e.g., births, deaths, illnesses, and miscarriages of brothers and sisters) and infers the consequences for the young child’s psychic life and family dynamics. For example, Mitchell rereads the “Fragment of a Case of Hysteria in a Male,” inserting into the account information about the birth and death of Freud’s baby brother Julius. She reinterprets Dora’s analysis by foregrounding Dora’s competitive stance toward her brother Otto. She also offers several amalgamations of case material drawn from her own practice. The case accounts that Mitchell offers are sketchy, however. There is no verbatim record of the interchanges between patient and analyst in the classic cases, and she opts not to provide such material for her own cases. Often even a chronology of the therapeutic work is not provided. This makes it close to impossible for readers to evaluate Mitchell’s interpretations or to formulate their own alternatives. Madmen and Medusas will be most appreciated by readers already immersed in psychoanalytic thought and sympathetic to its style of argument and theorization. Such readers will appreciate Mitchell’s meticulous and perceptive discussion of the differences among British, Continental, and North American variants of psychoanalytic thought. As one might expect, her exploration of the diverse schools of British psychoanalytic thought are especially nuanced and illuminating. Her spirited critique of Frederick Crewes’s notorious attacks on psychoanalysis and its relation to recovered/repressed memory is worthwhile reading for anyone interested in contemporary psychological theory. Madmen and Medusas is a broad-ranging book. It is composed of a series of loosely connected essays that circle around hysteria and its various manifestations. Mitchell shines a spotlight on a number of episodes in the lives of Freud and other revered figures that usually are tactfully left in shadows. This is a rich, intriguing, and provocative text. Reviewed by JEANNE MARECEK, Professor of Psychology, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA 19081. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 39(2), 211–212 Spring 2003 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jhbs.10106 䉷 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Henry L. Minton. Departing From Deviance: A History of Homosexual Rights and Emancipatory Science in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. 360 pp. $65.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-226-53043-4. $20.00 (paper). ISBN 0-226-53044-2. Henry L. Minton, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Windsor, has written an exciting account of the scientific study of homosexuality in the twentieth century and the ways that homosexuals have become not merely “passive victims of scientific and medical inquiry, but also active agents in utilizing scientific research as a vehicle for homosexual rights” (Minton, 2002, pp. ix – x). Minton shows how homosexual men and women worked to shape, conduct, assist, and inspire researchers in understanding homosexual life in America. Beginning with a fine summary and overview of the study of homosexuality to about 1935, the author goes on in subsequent chapters to deal with the major works on sex research dealing with homosexuality including George Henry’s Sex Variants, Alfred Kinsey’s reports on American sexuality, and Evelyn Hooker’s studies on the mental health of homo- 212 BOOK REVIEWS sexual men during the 1950s. In each case Minton carefully examines the preconceptions of the work under review and details the picture of homosexuality offered in the work. The most obvious comparison for Minton’s work is with Jennifer Terry’s An American Obsession (1999). Minton and Terry both define the manifold ways that scientific study shapes the understanding of homosexuality for both social control and emancipation. A detailed comparison would be impossible here, but a compressed summary would be that Terry’s work stresses the former tendency, whereas Minton’s stresses the latter. Consequently, Minton always considers the work of well-known researchers in connection with homosexual men and women who offered otherwise unavailable insights into homosexual life. Jan Gay provided George Henry with a wide range of data and contacts among lesbians. Alfred Gross worked with George Henry on several projects, including making possible his study of male prostitution. In fact, the relationship between Gross and Henry became symbiotic in many ways, with Gross authoring reports over Henry’s name and using the psychiatrist’s reputation to make possible limited social services for homosexuals in postwar New York City. Two chapters focus on Thomas Painter and his relationship to the work of Alfred Kinsey and the Kinsey institute. Although Painter’s work never gained recognition beyond Kinsey and his inner circle, his ethnographic work, and the detailed account he kept of his own life, serve today as valuable and rare insights into gay male culture prior to the 1970s. Finally, Minton follows the work of homosexual activists who prodded the scientific establishment from the 1950s onward to recognize the legitimacy of homosexual individuals and communities. Minton demonstrates that despite the limits to true collaboration between scientists and homosexuals, homosexual men and women have often welcomed scientific study as a means of creating greater understanding in the general community and as an opportunity to advance the goals of tolerance and, ultimately, homosexual rights. Two issues, neither of which can detract from the value of Minton’s work, nevertheless require some attention. Other than the discussion of Jan Gay, Minton has little to say about lesbian researchers or research about lesbianism. This reflects the overwhelming preference of scientific study for male homosexuality. Minton might have discussed this discrepancy and provided some insight into the ways that the gay-male focus may have shaped emancipatory science. Minton might also have developed the distinction between sexual liberalism and homosexual identity. Although the issue makes appearances in these pages, Minton could profitably have discussed the impact of these views on scientific research. REFERENCE Terry, J. (1999). An American obsession. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Reviewed by JOHN C. SPURLOCK, Professor of History, Seton Hill University, Greensburg, PA 15601. Copyright of Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences is the property of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.