Greg Eghigian

Introduction: The Self as Project: Politics and the Human Sciences in the Twentieth Century

On May 8, 1945, Germany formally surrendered to Allied forces, ending the Second World War in Europe. Soon after Soviet, American, British, and French troops occupied German territory, something unique in the annals of military history took place. Scores of researchers and practitioners from clinical medicine, law, psychiatry, and the social sciences descended upon Germany at the invitation of occupying authorities. They were charged with two main tasks: help determine who was responsible for the murderous actions committed in the name of National Socialism, and contribute to the reconstruction of a democratic Germany. To these ends, legal scholars, forensic pathologists, physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychometrists were recruited to assist military tribunals in western occupation zones in analyzing evidence and interrogating defendants and witnesses in criminal cases against Nazi officials, administrators, scientists, and doctors. At the same time, social scientists were brought in to revamp the German educational system and to track public opinion using a relatively new tool, the mass survey.

Deinstitutionalizing the history of contemporary psychiatry

While contemporary mental health services have been marked by the burgeoning of outpatient and preventive care, the historiography of psychiatry remains largely tied to the study of custodial and palliative treatment. The work in which contemporary psychiatry has been involved cannot be adequately understood as a singular, autonomous enterprise based in a residential facility. It has become a technoscience that operates in numerous settings and alongside multiple sciences, technologies and decision-makers. This paper explores what it might mean to ‘deinstitutionalize’ the history of contemporary psychiatry by examining the case of social therapy for sex offenders in West Germany.

A Drifting Concept for an Unruly Menace: A History of Psychopathy in Germany.

The term “psychopath” has enjoyed wide currency both in popular culture and among specialists in forensic psychiatry. Historians, however, have generally neglected the subject. This essay examines the history of psychopathy in the country that first coined the term, developed the concept, and debated its treatment: Germany. While the notion can be traced to nineteenth-century psychiatric ideas about abnormal, yet not completely pathological, character traits, the figure of the psychopath emerged out of distinctly twentieth-century preoccupations and institutions. The vagueness and plasticity of the diagnosis of psychopathy proved to be one of the keys to its success, as it was embraced and employed by clinicians, researchers, and the mass media, despite attempts by some to curb its use. Within the span of a few decades, the image of the psychopath became one of a perpetual troublemaker, an individual who could not be managed within any institutional setting. By midcentury, psychopaths were no longer seen as simply nosological curiosities; rather, they were spatial problems, individuals whose defiance of institutional routine and attempts at social redemption stood in for an attributed mental status. The history of psychopathy therefore reveals how public dangers and risks can be shaped and defined by institutional limitations.

Making UFOs make sense: Ufology, science, and the history of their mutual mistrust.

Reports of unidentified flying objects and alien encounters have sparked amateur research (ufology), government investigations, and popular interest in the subject. Historically, however, scientists have generally greeted the topic with skepticism, most often dismissing ufology as pseudoscience and believers in unidentified flying objects and aliens as irrational or abnormal. Believers, in turn, have expressed doubts about the accuracy of academic science. This study examines the historical sources of the mutual mistrust between ufologists and scientists. It demonstrates that any science doubt surrounding unidentified flying objects and aliens was not primarily due to the ignorance of ufologists about science, but rather a product of the respective research practices of and relations between ufology, the sciences, and government investigative bodies.

The Corrigible and the Incorrigible: Science, Medicine, and the Convict in Twentieth-Century Germany

Prisons are never far from the headlines at the present time in the UK. As I write, a new Prisons and Courts Bill is being hailed as ‘a historical shift in thinking about the purpose of prisons’, on the grounds that it sets out rehabilitation as a specific, statutory goal. (1) Critics may speculate about the value and achievability of such a goal; historians, drawn by the siren call of claims to momentous historical change, are perhaps more likely to question its novelty.

‘A transatlantic buzz’: flying saucers, extraterrestrials and America in postwar Germany

The years 1946–1960 saw a wave of reports of flying saucer sightings on both sides of the Atlantic. To date, however, few scholars have examined how the phenomenon moved across states and regions, what responses it garnered and what impact it had on contemporary thought and values. This article examines how the mainstream press and public intellectuals in postwar West and East Germany reported on and discussed flying saucer reports. The evidence shows that both cold war geopolitics and the occult were used to explain sightings, but that suspected American influences and anti-American sentiments figured heavily in how most reports were interpreted. Flying saucers thus functioned as cyphers for considering alien influences in postwar society.