Elizabeth Lunbeck

Science without Laws. Model Systems, Cases, Exemplary Narratives

Physicists regularly invoke universal laws, such as those of motion and electromagnetism, to explain events. Biological and medical scientists have no such laws. How then do they acquire a reliable body of knowledge about biological organisms and human disease? One way is by repeatedly returning to, manipulating, observing, interpreting, and reinterpreting certain subjects—such as flies, mice, worms, or microbes—or, as they are known in biology, “model systems.” Across the natural and social sciences, other disciplinary fields have developed canonical examples that have played a role comparable to that of biology’s model systems, serving not only as points of reference and illustrations of general principles or values but also as sites of continued investigation and reinterpretation. The essays in this collection assess the scope and function of model objects in domains as diverse as biology, geology, and history, attending to differences between fields as well as to epistemological commonalities. Contributors examine the role of the fruit fly Drosophila and nematode worms in biology, troops of baboons in primatology, box and digital simulations of the movement of the earth’s crust in geology, and meteorological models in climatology. They analyze the intensive study of the prisoner’s dilemma in game theory, ritual in anthropology, the individual case in psychoanalytic research, and Athenian democracy in political theory. The contributors illuminate the processes through which particular organisms, cases, materials, or narratives become foundational to their fields, and they examine how these foundational exemplars—from the fruit fly to Freud’s Dora—shape the knowledge produced within their disciplines. Contributors Rachel A. Ankeny Angela N. H. Creager Amy Dahan Dalmedico John Forrester Clifford Geertz Carlo Ginzburg E. Jane Albert Hubbard Elizabeth Lunbeck Mary S. Morgan Josiah Ober Naomi Oreskes Susan Sperling Marcel Weber M. Norton Wise

Feminism in twentieth-century science, technology, and medicine

What useful changes has feminism brought to science? Feminists have enjoyed success in their efforts to open many fields to women as participants. But the effects of feminism have not been restricted to altering employment and professional opportunities for women. The essays in this volume explore how feminist theory has had a direct impact on research in the biological and social sciences, in medicine, and in technology, often providing the impetus for fundamentally changing the theoretical underpinnings and practices of such research. In archaeology, evidence of womens hunting activities suggested by spears found in womens graves is no longer dismissed; computer scientists have used feminist epistemologies for rethinking the human-interface problems of our growing reliance on computers. Attention to womens movements often tends to reinforce a presumption that feminism changes institutions through critique-from-without. This volume reveals the potent but not always visible transformations feminism has brought to science, technology, and medicine from within. Contributors: Ruth Schwartz CowanLinda Marie FediganScott GilbertEvelynn M. HammondsEvelyn Fox KellerPamela E. MackMichael S. MahoneyEmily MartinRuth OldenzielNelly OudshoornCarroll PursellKaren RaderAlison Wylie

American Psychiatrists and the Modern Man, 1900 to 1920

This article examines two competing popular and professional constructions of masculinity in the first two decades of the century. One was the masculinity of youth, separatist and oppositional vis-à-vis women; the other was the respectable masculinity of bread-winning and married life. Drawing on psychiatric case records (from the Boston Psychopathic Hospital) as well as a range of published sources, this article argues that professionals advocated both constructions of masculinity and that men lived by both in their everyday lives. Particular attention is given to the role of sexuality in the consolidation of male identities; to “failures,” designated psychopaths; to battles over alcohol, with psychiatrists unwilling to align themselves too closely with women and prohibitionist aims; and to World War I and male hysteria.

Narcissism: Social Critique in Me-Decade America

It is a commonplace of social criticism that America has become, over the past half-century or so, a nation of narcissists. Greedy, selfish, and self-absorbed, we narcissists are thriving, the critics tell us, in the culture of abundance that is modern, late-capitalist America. The disciplined, patriarchal Victorianism under which our stalwart forebears were raised has purportedly given way to a culture that makes no demands, while at the same time promising to satisfy our every desire. Self-indulgence has displaced self-control; plenitude reigns where privation was once the norm. The harsh Freudian super-ego, forged in Oedipal conflict with the powerful paterfamilias, has yielded to a permissive and undemanding simulacrum of the same.

The Narcissistic Homosexual: Genealogy of a Myth

Among the many character traits associated with narcissism, perhaps none has proven more central and enduring than self-love. The Narcissus of classical mythology has long served in the Western tradition as an object lesson in the dangers of excessive love of self, and it is thus not surprising that the psychological use of “narcissism” from the start connoted an all-enveloping, pathological vanity and taste for self-admiration alongside what quickly would become its more technical referents. The sexologist Havelock Ellis, who is usually credited with having coined “narcissism” in 1898, used the term in reference both to a sexual perversion and to a state of absorbing contemplation and admiration of self.1 Freud, in perhaps the first recorded analytic discussion of narcissism, in 1909, explained to his Viennese colleagues that the narcissism on display in “being enamoured of oneself”—and, he added, parenthetically, “of one’s own genitals”—was normal, a necessary and “indispensable stage of development.”2 And his fellow analyst Otto Rank published a paper in 1911 in which narcissism was treated as first and foremost love of self.3