New Histories of Psychology: Politics, Publics, and Power

Radical Psychiatry and Political Activism
 
In the 1970s, a growing number of psychiatrists expressed concern that their field was merely adjusting people to an oppressive society rather than to changing the oppressive society itself. In challenging many of the suppositions and traditions of their discipline, radical psychiatrists urged a shift from biological approaches toward political organizing and community mental health. This challenge was not only at the ideological level, but a shift at the professional and organizational level as well, including separate caucuses (i.e., the Black Caucus and the Women’s Caucus). The role of radical psychiatry meant not only challenging the authority of psychiatry, and the psy sciences more broadly, but also meant including informal expertise and advocacy from current or former mental health consumers/patients. What were some of the insights from radical psychiatry and what were its limits? What can these separate groups of psychiatrists and therapists tell us about psychiatry and counseling today? 
 
 
Readings: 
 

Richert, L. (2014). ‘Therapy Means Political Change, Not Peanut Butter’: American Radical Psychiatry, 1968–1975. Social History of Medicine, 27(1), 104–121. https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkt072

 
(Optional): 
 
Center for the History of Psychology blog: https://centerhistorypsychology.wordpress.com/2020/02/20/young-people-always-at-the-forefront-of-change/
Kunzel, R. (2017). Queer History, Mad History, and the Politics of Health. American Quarterly, 69(2), 315–319. https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2017.0026
 

Deinstitutionalization and Abolitionist Futures 
 
 
Deinstitutionalization, a term often referring to the closing of psychiatric asylums in the late 20th century, remains controversial today. While institutionalism was seen as dehumanizing, the New Asylums thesis has come to describe mass incarceration in prisons as the result of deinstitutionalization without considering the differences between populations of the two. Concerns of reentry (that is, people going  from incarceration to society at large) have extended treatment and surveillance into public life and private homes. These issues are further complicated by the fact that institutionalization has increased in certain parts of the world, while in the US there has been a rise of abolitionism. How might historical narratives about the deinstitutionalization of the mental ill fit with the rise of mass incarceration? What are the implications for understanding institutions as disabling? What are the stakes compared to different forms of psychiatric treatments? Do criticisms of deinstitutionalization risk feeding into reform of current practices? 
 
 
Readings: 
 
Ben-Moshe, Liat. 2017. “Why Prisons Are Not ‘The New Asylums.’” Punishment & Society 19(3):272–89. 
doi: 10.1177/1462474517704852.
 
(Optional): 
 
Abi-Rached, Joelle M. 2021. “Psychiatry in the Middle East: The Rebirth of Lunatic Asylums?” BJPsych International 18(1):5–8. doi: 10.1192/bji.2020.22.

What is “Behavioral” in Behavioral Economics?
Behavioral economics has a particular hold on the twenty-first century (neo)liberal imagination. Following the 2008 financial crisis, the field of mathematical psychology went from the academic margins to the political mainstream as a scientifically respectable way of talking about human irrationality. In this session, we will scrutinize this ascendency, focusing on the popular dichotomy between thinking fast and slow, short- and long-term. Why did heuristics switch from making us smart in the 1950s to error-prone in the 1970s? Is the distinction between behavioral and neuro-economics a semantic or ontology one? Is brainhood a necessary component of dual process theories? Does the popularity of ‘nudges’ among policy-makers represent a behaviorist “counter-revolution” against cognitivism (and democracy)? How is behavioral economics’ critique of human judgment related to wider critiques and venerations of expertise?
 
 
Readings:
Natasha Dow Schüll and Caitlin Zaloom. "The shortsighted brain: Neuroeconomics and the governance of choice in time." Social Studies of Science 41, no. 4 (2011): 515-538.
 
John McMahon, "Training for Neoliberalism," Boston Review (2015). http://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/john-mcmahon-richard-thaler-misbehaving-behavioral-economics

Un(happy) Times
We live in a world awash in emotion. Its experience, measurement, manipulation, and augmentation shape daily life. From feminist engagements with “public feelings” to the emergence of positive psychology as a third force to hot cognition in decision making, the affective realm has recently taken a more prominent place across numerous academic disciplines. How should we make historical sense of this “affective revolution”? Is the pursuit of happiness a political ideal or an existential curse? In this session, we focus on the long past and short history of (un)happiness.
 
 
Readings:
Sara Ahmed, "Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness," Signs 35, no. 3 (2010): 571-594.
 
Content Warning: suicide
Jennifer Senior, “Happiness Won’t Save You,” New York Times, November 24, 2020 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/opinion/happiness-depression-suicide-psychology.html

“I Got a Lot of Problems with You People”: Our Favourite Pet Peeves about the History of Psychology
As the days grow short and people retrieve their unadorned aluminum poles from the closet, our thoughts inevitably turn to the holidays. Please join us for a History of Psychology Festivus! In this light-hearted session, we invite participants to “air their grievances” about the field’s greatest foibles as work together to imagine a brighter future. Libations optional!

Reading the Archive after #metoo
In the fall of 2017 sexual harassment came to the forefront of public conversation. Accounts of harassment and its consequences soon proliferated under the banner of the #metoo movement, first organized by Tarana Burke more than a decade earlier. While ‘sexual harassment’ as a distinct term only emerged in the 1970s, unwanted sexual attention has long had a presence in, and impact on, people’s lives. As historians of the human sciences operating in the post-#metoo era, how might we read the archive for traces of sexual harassment in the lives of our historical actors? What challenges and opportunities present themselves by attending to sexual harassment’s presence in the archive? How can we productively engage with sexual harassment as both an experience and exercise of power? What kinds of sources lend themselves to revealing these kinds of stories? How might an awareness of sexual harassment and its dynamics inform understandings of who our historical actors are and the knowledge they produced? In this session we will explore these questions and consider how sexual harassment may inform histories beyond those explicitly centred around gender.

Reading:
Young, J. L., & Hegarty, P. (2019). Reasonable men: Sexual harassment and norms of conduct in social psychology. Feminism & Psychology, 29(4), 453–474.
Kim, S., & Rutherford, A. (2015). From seduction to sexism: Feminists challenge the ethics of therapist–client sexual relations in 1970s America. History of Psychology, 18(3), 283–296.

How Our Biases Became Implicit
Implicit bias is one of psychology’s most (in)famous contributions to the popular lexicon. The concept's entry into the North American public sphere is sustained by the availability of the Implicit Association Test and the rise of the implicit bias training industry in organizations. Theories of implicit bias suggest that ongoing discrimination, like racism and sexism, are sustained not be conscious, explicit beliefs but by implicit, unconscious, automatic biases we all hold.

Yet the very prevalence of implicit bias has fuelled a backlash. Some vocal critics of the IAT challenge its methodology (eg. how the algorithms derive cutoff scores) and predictive validity, concerned that the associations it measures don’t correlate to real-world behaviour. These criticisms, ostensibly about psychometrics, embed political concerns about the overreach of implicit bias and a broader opposition to diversity and inclusion policies. The conservative backlash against implicit bias just reached its peak with the latest US executive order, which essentially forbids government contractors from conducting implicit bias training.

For more left-leaning radical critics, the problem with implicit bias is that it doesn’t go far enough. Their worry is that implicit bias neither names nor addresses the structural and systemic factors that produced and sustain racism or sexism or other inequalities. This session will explore questions about the intertwined scientific and social dimensions of implicit bias. What are the implications for understanding racism and sexism in terms of individual implicit bias? What are the stakes when psychological concepts travel in the world?  Do criticisms of implicit bias risk feeding into this conservative backlash? How can historical and critical approaches to psychology navigate the scientific and political stakes of implicit bias?

Readings
Jeffrey Yen, Kevin Durrheim and Romin Tafarodi, “I’m happy to own my implicit biases’: Public encounters with the Implicit Association Test,” British Journal of Social Psychology (2018)
Olivia Goldhill, “The World is Relying on a Flawed Psychological Test to Fight Racism,” Quartz (Dec) 2017)

Troubling the Commemoration of Psychology’s Past
What is the relationship between commemoration and critical history? Historians of psychology often find themselves in role of keeping the memory of the past alive in the discipline. Such an imperative often exists in tension with a scholarly, critical perspectives. We live in a moment of renewed concern about the ways in which universities and other institutions mark and celebrate their past. Many honored figures not only held abhorrent views on gender, race, sexuality, and ability but acted to promote and enshrine them. From the recent denamings of the Galton Lecture Theatre at University College, London and Thorndike Hall at Columbia University’s Teachers College to the European Association of Social Psychology’s decision to rename its Tajfel Award, these issues touch directly on the history of psychology. Are these merely symbolic gestures which keep existing structures in place? How do certain memories of the disciplines past get materialized into the space we inhabit? What would a critical practice of commemoration look like? In this session, we will explore these issues and think about how to incorporate the current controversies over commemoration on one’s own campus into the pedagogy of the history of psychology class.

Reading:
Alderman, D. H., & Reuben, R.-R. (2020). The classroom as “toponymic workspace”: Towards a critical pedagogy of campus place renaming. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 44(1), 124–141. https://doi.org/10.1080/03098265.2019.1695108
How to Research Your Own Institute (U.S. edition)

Tuck, E. (2009). Suspending damage: A letter to communities. Harvard Educational Review, 79(3), 409-428.
Mascarenhas, M. (2018). White space and dark matter: Prying open the black box of STS. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 43(2), 151-170.