Digital methods can help you . . . If you’re careful, critical, and not historiographically naïve.
This special section on the digital history of psychology includes target articles by Ivan Flis and Nees Jan van Eck and Jeremy Trevelyan Burman, with comments by Melinda Baldwin, Ted Porter, and Chris Green. In his introduction to the section, Burman explains his original motivation in turning to tools borrowed from the digital humanities: helping graduate students to identify dissertation topics more easily, and thereby reduce completion times for the doctorate, while at the same time doing “good history.” Since then, a new field—digital history of psychology—has blossomed. John Burnham, especially, is recognized...
Source: History of Psychology - November 12, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Vittorio Benussi, hypnosuggestive methods, and emotional functional autonomy.
This article reconstructs Vittorio Benussi’s (1878–1927) research on autonomia funzionale emotiva [emotional functional autonomy], carried out in Padua between 1920 and 1927. Its aim is to demonstrate that Benussi believed—against the intellectualist mainstream of the psychology of his time and even against the Brentanian-Meinongian tradition in which he was educated—in the fundamental independence of emotions from the cognitive functions that usually accompany them. To study this autonomy, Benussi used hypnosis as an experimental tool designed to disassemble the phenomena of mental life from their global functiona...
Source: History of Psychology - October 25, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Descartes on emotions, reason, and the adaptive unconscious: The pioneer behind the caricature.
This article shows that these distinguished scholars’ influential books are historically very misleading. Contrary to what they claim, most of Descartes’s many explanations of psychological phenomena are embodied. He was in particular engaged in understanding the relation among emotions, reason, and the brain. According to the models of understanding Descartes put forward in the 1640s, the author argues that Descartes’s Vision would have been an appropriate title for Damasio’s book. Wilson contrasts throughout his book new insights from recent research on the adaptive unconscious with the familiar caricature of Des...
Source: History of Psychology - October 22, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Theoretical psychology at the University of Alberta as social science during the Cold War.
We examine the University of Alberta’s Center for Advanced Study in Theoretical Psychology (1965–1990) in the context of social science conducted during the Cold War. We begin by considering the center with respect to three important properties of social science at this time: an emphasis on interdisciplinarity, a focus on theory, and a preference for quantitative methods. Our analysis suggests that center activities also exhibited these characteristics. They were highly interdisciplinary, they were concerned with the development of psychological theory, and center members were experts in a variety of formal, mathematic...
Source: History of Psychology - September 27, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Australian fantasy revisited.
Australia’s Aborigines possessed a rich cultural heritage dating back more than 55,000 years by the time British colonization began in the late 1700s (Davis, 2009). The British invaders could not comprehend the worldview of the Aborigines, whose hunter-gatherer culture emphasized preservation of the varied environments they occupied across the continent. Native traditions of walking, singing, and, most importantly, dreaming both created and maintained the world’s existence since the first dawn. Aboriginal cosmology differed so drastically from the colonists’ that it posed an insurmountable intellectual challenge. One...
Source: History of Psychology - August 23, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Magic and loss: Hidden sources in the history of human sciences.
This article summarizes the book "The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences" by Jason A. Josephson-Storm (University of Chicago Press, 2017) is a volume that attempts to stimulate discussion on domains considered different: esotericism, spiritism, occultism, idealism, and positivism. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: History of Psychology)
Source: History of Psychology - August 23, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Joint meeting in Brazil: SBHP and EFHEP.
The Brazilian Society for the History of Psychology (SBHP) was founded in 2013 to promote the History of Psychology in the country. The goal of our joint meeting is to discuss how the history of psychology can help foster critical understandings of some basic problems on the definition of psychology, its projects as a science and some issues related to the delimitation of its subject matter and methods. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: History of Psychology)
Source: History of Psychology - August 23, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Society for the history of psychology news.
The Cummings Center for the History of Psychology at The University of Akron in Akron, Ohio, opened a National Museum of Psychology on June 27, 2018. The Museum explores the history of psychology as a profession, a science, and an agent of social change. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: History of Psychology)
Source: History of Psychology - August 23, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Sexuality, therapeutic culture, and family ties in the United States after 1973.
This article examines family therapy’s gradual recognition of gay and lesbian families as emblematic of the historically changing relationship among psychotherapy, sexuality, and family during the 1970s to 1990s. Although early family therapists of the 1950s and 1960s were largely unconcerned with treating homosexuality as a psychiatric problem, they also generally did not recognize same-sex relationships as a possible configuration of family life because their models presumed a heterosexual nuclear family. By the 1980s and 1990s, many family therapists came to see sexuality as a dimension of family life that might shape...
Source: History of Psychology - August 23, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Psychology and psychoanalysis in Argentina: Politics, French thought, and the university connection, 1955–1976.
The hegemonic place acquired by psychoanalysis in the Argentinean psychotherapeutic field is recognized by friend and foe alike. Nevertheless, the historical process leading to this situation is less well known. In this article, I focus on 2 periods crucial to understanding the unusual scope of Freudian ideas and practices in that country. The first one (1955–1966) corresponds to the professionalization of psychology and was marked by projects such as those of Bleger and Pichon-Rivière. Their ideas involved an alliance between psychology and psychoanalysis within a larger synthesis whose philosophical framework was Fren...
Source: History of Psychology - August 23, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Psychedelics and psychotherapy in Canada: Humphry Osmond and Aldous Huxley.
The decade of the 1950s is well known among historians of psychiatry for the unprecedented shift toward psychopharmacological solutions to mental health problems. More psychiatric medications were introduced than ever before or since (Healy, 2002). While psychiatric researchers later credited these drugs, in part, for controlling psychotic, depressive, and anxious symptoms—and subsequently for emptying decaying psychiatric institutions throughout the Western world—psychiatrists also produced a number of other theories that relied on a more delicate and nuanced blending of psychotherapy and psychopharmacology. Canadian-...
Source: History of Psychology - August 23, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
In the shadow of the double: Psychiatry and spiritism in Cuba.
This article traces the history of Cuba’s first and only Spiritist mental clinic, founded in the 1940s in the central province of Camagüey and shut down by the revolutionary government in the 1960s. It analyzes the history of the clinic with respect to the virtual absence of institutional psychiatric care outside of Havana in these decades, but also in the context of a more enduring problematic: the persistent preference shown by Cubans for religiously grounded forms of mental healing. Namely, “In the Shadow of the Double” explores the broader geography of mental care within which Spiritists defined the uniqueness o...
Source: History of Psychology - August 23, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Combining psychiatry and spiritism: Therapies employed in a Brazilian sanatorium (1934–1948).
The purpose of this article is to present an historical account of an intersection that occurred in Brazil between popular healing treatments and conventional psychiatric practices during the first half of the 20th century. To illustrate our argument, we analyzed data retrieved from the medical records of patients admitted to the Spiritist Sanatorium of Uberaba, Brazil, between 1934 and 1948. Although the Uberaba Spiritist movement founded the institution, it was directed by a physician educated in the biomedical tradition at the Rio de Janeiro School of Medicine. Based on the theory of the circulation and appropriation of...
Source: History of Psychology - August 23, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Warren Felt Evans: 19th-century mystic, wounded healer, and seminal theorist-practitioner of mind cure.
The Methodist-Episcopalian minister-turned-physician and philosopher of healing Warren Felt Evans (1817–1889) was one of the earliest practitioners of mental healing, also known as “mind cure.” Originating in New England in the second half of the 19th century, mind cure spread through the country in the 1880s. Drawing from Evans’s unpublished journals, I recount his struggles with chronic ill health and his turn to the Quietist mystics and Swedenborg, and then to the mesmerist-turned-mental-healer P. P. Quimby to procure both healing for his ills and philosophical sanctification for his soul. The transformational r...
Source: History of Psychology - August 23, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
History and the topsy-turvy world of psychotherapy.
This special issue talks about the history of psychotherapy. It was inspired by the events of a 3-day conference, “From Moral Treatments to Psychotherapeutics: Histories of Psychotherapy From the York Retreat to the Present Day". The conference was small and the ideas were exciting. It was clear that enthusiasm was high for exploring possibilities in something called “the history of psychotherapy”. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: History of Psychology)
Source: History of Psychology - August 23, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
