Ben Harris

The Image of Women in Abnormal Psychology: Professionalism versus Psychopathology

A survey of sex stereotyping in photographs was made for major current-edition textbooks of abnormal psychology published in the United States. In photographs of contributors to the field, women were significantly underrepresented, amounting to less than 5% of the contributors pictured. There was no overall difference in the frequency with which men and women were pictured as patients, although women were overrepresented in the fields largest selling textbook. Analysis of this texts editions since 1950 revealed this overrepresentation to be a recent reversal of a previous male stereotype of psychopathology. Possible causes of this reversal are (a) the changing nature of clinical practice and training; (b) changes in the process by which textbooks are produced and published; and (c) factors related to sex differences in the epidemiology of common psychopathologies.

Jewish Quotas in Clinical Psychology?: The Journal of Clinical Psychology and the Scandal of 1945

In 1945 Frederick Thorne, editor of the Journal of Clinical Psychology, proposed to limit the acceptance of Jewish applicants to clinical psychology graduate schools. A public scandal erupted over this proposed limit, which was modeled on Jewish quotas in medical education. Criticized by the mass media and most psychologists, Thornes proposal was repudiated by the Eastern Psychological Association and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. Using private correspondence, oral histories, and published articles, this mostly forgotten episode in the history of clinical psychology is recreated. It is argued that the 1945 campaign against Jewish quotas prepared activists for the 1950s campaign against racial segregation and the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case. Because the participants in 1945 came from all specialties in psychology, it is suggested that this story is of significance to the field as a whole, rather than just to historians of social issues.