New Histories of Psychology: Politics, Publics, and Power

Please join us for the final meeting of the New Histories of Psychology working group. We will reflect on the past 2 years of discussion and members will have the opportunity to talk about their future plans.

This week we will examine the history of global mental health. We will focus on 2 recent articles which examine the linkages between Europe and the decolonizing world after World War II. The first examines Frantz Fanon’s relationship to the French tradition of institutional psychotherapy. The second examines the relationship between Eastern European psychiatric experts and the decolonizing world. We will discuss how these articles help us envision alternative geographies for postwar psychology. They also offer new perspectives on the meaning of psychological universalism and its limits.
 
Robcis, Camille. "Frantz Fanon, Institutional Psychotherapy, and the Decolonization of Psychiatry." Journal of the history of ideas 81, no. 2 (2020): 303-325.
Antić, Ana. "Transcultural Psychiatry: Cultural Difference, Universalism and Social Psychiatry in the Age of Decolonisation." Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 45, no. 3 (2021): 359-384.

Pedagogies of the New Histories of Psychology
Please join us for our monthly meeting on Wednesday, March 23 at 1pm Eastern time. This month we will pivot slightly and have an informal conversation about teaching the history of psychology, psychiatry, madness - however you frame your courses!
Some ideas to mull over:
- diversifying the history of psych class
- thinking locally, nationally, and globally in the history of psych...and how to fit all that in?
- teaching to psych majors v. teaching to history majors
- bringing the patient in
- incorporating media - what are your favorite teaching films?
- your best assignments...and the awesome-seeming assignments that didn't quite work
Maybe you want to bring your teaching conundrums or share your favorite readings. Or just come think through the big questions with us: what do we actually want our students to learn when we teach them the history of the psy* sciences, and how do we try to get them there?
There are no assigned readings this month - just show up!

In this month’s meeting, we will discuss the American Psychological Association’s 2021 apology to People of Color for its “role in promoting, perpetuating, and failing to challenge racism, racial discrimination, and human hierarchy in U.S.” We will focus on the historical research, publicly shared as a timeline, used to support the claims made in the apology.
What kind of history of psychology does the apology construct? How does it relate to other public apologies made by public institutions and the state for past wrongs? Which persons, events, and interventions get highlighted? Which get occluded? What does the apology and the timeline tell us about the role of historical knowledge (and memory) within the discipline of psychology?
 
https://www.apa.org/about/policy/racism-apology
https://www.apa.org/about/apa/addressing-racism/historical-chronology

Pop Psychology
 
It’s easy to roll our eyes at pop psych, especially when ideas from psychology are translated into into feel good, neoliberal, self-help books. But this meeting we dig deeper into the uses of pop psych. When is it political and when is it apolitical? Why is it more eagerly consumer by women, and can it ever be feminist? And how do we navigate the relationship and boundaries between “real” psychology and pop psychology, both today and in the past? When is psychology appropriated by culture, and when is culture appropriated by psychology? What does the self-help bestseller tell us about its surrounding culture?
 
 
Readings:
 
Susanne Schmidt, ‘The Anti-Feminist Reconstruction of the Midlife Crisis: Popular Psychology, Journalism and Social Science in 1970s USA’ Gender & History, Vol.30 No.1 March 2018, pp. 153–176.
 
Eleanor Cummins, "The Self-Help That No One Needs Right Now,” The Atlantic October 18, 2021  https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/10/trauma-books-wont-save-you/620421

History of Substance Use Disorder Treatment
 
As overdose rates have risen in the last few years, there has been more attention to treating substance use disorder. The history of such treatments, from the “narcotic farm” in Lexington, Kentucky of the 1950s to present pharmaceutical and CBT-informed treatments, reveal the intertwined phenomena of the professionalization of the psy sciences, race, and the criminal legal system. However, alongside these more carceral and medicalized forms of addiction treatment, there have been various community-based interventions, including the Lincoln Detox clinic, which provided acupuncture treatments for people who used heroin. In this discussion, we will elaborate on questions such as what has been the role of psychology in the war on drugs? How has mindfulness been conceived as treatment within carceral spaces? How can we, as historians of psychology, investigate community-based approaches to substance use treatments? 
 
Readings:
Kerrison, E. M. (2017). An historical review of racial bias in prison-based substance abuse treatment design. Journal of Offender Rehabilitation, 56(8), 567–592.
 
Shaw, D. (2016). 50 Years since the Panthers formed, Capitalism + Drugs still = Genocide. Liberation School. 
https://liberationschool.org/50-years-since-the-panthers-formed-capitali...
 
 
 

History of Psychedelic Research
 
Over 1,000 articles on the scientific and medical applications of psychedelics were published in the 1950s and 60s. However, by the early 1970s, changes in how medications were regulated and the conservative backlash against hippie culture essentially ended research into psychedelics. Over the past 15 years that has changed. Scientists at prominent universities like Johns Hopkins, Columbia and University College London are now investigating how drugs like MDMA and psilocybin can be used to treat conditions such as PTSD, depression and addiction. This week we explore the history of why psychedelics were banned and the burgeoning field of contemporary psychedelic research. How did (and does) the usage of psychedelics outside of a controlled scientific setting affect the course of psychedelic research? How does research into psychedelics blend religious and scientific beliefs? Can psychedelics possibly deliver on their current promise to be a cure-all for many treatment-resistant psychiatric ailments like PTSD and addiction?
 
Readings:
Novak, Steven J. 1997. “LSD before Leary: Sidney Cohen’s Critique of 1950s Psychedelic Drug Research.” Isis 88(1):87–110.
 
Pollan, Michael. 2015. "The Trip Treatment." The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/trip-treatment

TBA

Aversion Therapy
Few terms are as controversial in the history of psychology as “behavior modification.” At once at the heart of almost every psychological intervention, the term evokes images of involuntary control, manipulation, and even torture. This is especially true of “aversion therapy” targeting sexuality. In this session, we will examine the history of this controversy. What was the historical geography of this approach? How did the promote and critique of behavior modification intersect with wider political concerns? What is the historical relationship among behavior modification regimes for homosexuality, gender nonconformity, pedophilia? How did the political controversies of the 1960s and 1970s shape subsequent psychotherapeutic orientations like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and eclecticism/integration? Our core reading examines the considerable gap between the initial studies of aversion therapy for homosexuality conducted in Czechoslovakia and their subsequent interpretation among behavior therapists across the British Commonwealth. Follow up readings examine the historical memory of aversion therapy among patients and professionals as well as a recent online exhibit dedicated to LGBTQ+ psychology.
 
Readings
Davison, Kate. "Cold War Pavlov: Homosexual aversion therapy in the 1960s." History of the Human Sciences 34, no. 1 (2021): 89-119.
Smith, Glenn, Annie Bartlett, and Michael King. "Treatments of homosexuality in Britain since the 1950s—an oral history: the experience of patients." BMJ 328, no. 7437 (2004): 427.
King, Michael, Glenn Smith, and Annie Bartlett. "Treatments of homosexuality in Britain since the 1950s—an oral history: the experience of professionals." BMJ 328, no. 7437 (2004): 429.
 
Radiolab interview with Gerald Davison
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/unerased-davidson-gay-cure
A Clockwork Lavender (online exhibit from Cummings Center for the History of Psychology)
https://www.uakron.edu/chp/education/a-clockwork-lavender
 

Unpacking Communities of Care in the History of Psychology
 
In our final session of the academic year, we will try unpacking the contested meaning of “community care” in the history of psychology, the social sciences, and politics. What is meant to empower the community? What constitutes a community “after kinship”? Who does the work of care in our austere times?  
 
Readings:
Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. Care work: Dreaming disability justice. Vancouver: arsenal pulp press, 2018, chapter 1.
Cooper, Melinda. "Neoliberalism’s Family Values: Welfare, Human Capital, and Kinship" in Mirowski, Philip, Dieter Plehwe, and Quinn Slobodian, eds. Nine Lives of Neoliberalism. Verso Books, 2020, 95-119.

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.