Rhodri Hayward

The tortoise and the love-machine: Grey Walter and the politics of electroencephalography.

The life of the pioneer electroencephalographer, William Grey Walter, initially appears to be a paradigmatic example of the process of network building and delegation identified by Michel Callon and Bruno Latour. In his professional career, Walter continually repositioned himself, moving from an unhappy beginning as an expert in the apparently unless and suspect technology of the EEG, to become a self-styled crucial mediator in subjects as diverse as medical diagnosis, forensic detection, marriage counseling, and international diplomacy. This position was achieved moreover through the construction and co-option of human and mechanical accomplices - laboratory assistants, electrical tortoises, and mechanical analyzers - which sustained his research and propagated his arguments. However in contrast to Callon and Latours atomistic account of scientific power and agency, this paper will extend their analysis to explore the impact of network building and delegation on domestic life, human desire, and personal identity. Walters engagement with the complexities of love and the human brain demonstrates how the transformative power of scientific rhetoric extends simultaneously into both the organization of the world and the subjectivity of the individual.

Enduring emotions: James L. Halliday and the invention of the psychosocial.

Emotions maintain an ambivalent position in the economy of science. In contemporary debates they are variously seen as hardwired biological responses, cultural artifacts, or uneasy mixtures of the two. At the same time, there is a tension between the approaches to emotion developed in modern psychotherapies and in the history of science. While historians see the successful ascription of affective states to individuals and populations as a social and technical achievement, the psychodynamic practitioner treats these enduring associations as pathological accidents that need to be overcome. This short essay uses the career of the Glaswegian public health investigator James L. Halliday to examine how debates over the ontological status of the emotions and their durability allow them to travel between individual identity and political economy, making possible new kinds of psychological intervention.

Demonology, Neurology, and Medicine in Edwardian Britain

The idea of a conflict between demonology and psychiatry has been a foundational myth in the history of medicine. Nineteenth-century alienists such as J.-M. Charcot and Henry Maudsley developed critiques of supernatural phenomena in an attempt to pathologize religious experience. Modern historians have reanalyzed these critiques, representing them as strategies in medical professionalization. These accounts all maintain an oddly bifurcated approach to the perceived conflict, treating demonology as a passive and unchanging set of practices, while medicine is depicted as an active and aggressive agent. An examination of early twentieth-century demonological literature reveals a very different story. Fundamentalists and Pentecostalists engaged with the problems of conversion and possession, developing sophisticated models of the normal and the pathological in spiritual experience. Their writings drew upon medical and psychiatric sources ranging widely from Pastorian germ theory to Jacksonian neurology. This article explores the points of contact between the medical and demonological communities in order to demonstrate the contested nature of biomedical innovation.

The invention of the psychosocial: An introduction

Although the compound adjective ‘psychosocial’ was first used by academic psychologists in the 1890s, it was only in the interwar period that psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers began to develop detailed models of the psychosocial domain. These models marked a significant departure from earlier ideas of the relationship between society and human nature. Whereas Freudians and Darwinians had described an antagonistic relationship between biological instincts and social forces, interwar authors insisted that individual personality was made possible through collective organization. This argument was advanced by dissenting psychoanalysts such as Ian Suttie and Karen Horney; biologists including Julian Huxley and Hans Selye; philosophers (e.g. Olaf Stapledon), anthropologists (e.g. Margaret Mead) and physicians (e.g John Ryle and James Halliday). This introduction and the essays that follow sketch out the emergence of the psycho-social by examining the methods, tools and concepts through which it was articulated. New statistical technologies and physiological theories allowed individual pathology to be read as an index of broader social problems and placed medical expertise at the centre of new political programmes. In these arguments the intangible structure of social relationships was made visible and provided a template for the development of healthy and effective forms of social organization. By examining the range of techniques deployed in the construction of the psychosocial (from surveys of civilian neurosis, techniques of family observation through to animal models of psychotic breakdown) a critical genealogy of the biopolitical basis of modern society is developed.

Busman’s stomach and the embodiment of modernity

Abstract This paper examines the relationship between the gastric illness, ‘busman’s stomach’ and the Coronation bus strike of May 1937 in which 27,000 London busworkers walked out for better working conditions and a seven-and-half-hour day. It explores the way in which new patterns of somatisation, gastroenterological techniques, psychological theories and competing understandings of time worked together to create new political institutions and new forms of political action in inter-war Britain.

The Pursuit of Serenity: Psychological Knowledge and the Making of the British Welfare State

Over recent decades, historians, sociologists and policymakers have begun to pursue the psyche in earnest. From histories of fear and empathy to policy initiatives in education and social welfare, the psyche appears as an elusive but authoritative entity that will provide the grounds of an effective politics and reveal the inner meaning of historical experience. Much has been made of the novelty of these developments. The rise of the so-called happiness agenda is presented by its apostles as a new kind of political dispensation.1 Similarly historians who have embraced psychoanalytic and neuropsychological insights in their writings believe that this has allowed them to escape the cultural theorists’ dead-end obsession with discourse and representation.2 Yet despite the promise and energy associated with these new approaches, the pursuit of the psyche has been marked by a certain ambivalence. Although researchers might celebrate their engagement with psychological life, this engagement is often perceived as demonstrating the limitations of their disciplines. Despite the broadly accepted idea that role and identity is socially constructed, some small aspect of selfhood remains beyond the scope of sociological or economic explanation. Thus in the writings of some contemporary historians on subjectivity, the real essence of the self is located outside history in, for instance, a different temporal order of evolutionary adaptation, a neurobiological affect program or the romantic sublime of the deep unconscious, which is said to resist the claims of social determinism and narrative representation.3

The war inside: psychoanalysis, total war and the making of the democratic self in post-war Britain

illustrated by the case studies. They do usefully trace commonalities in the legal treatment and reportage of ‘disorganised’ crime over a longer period and across varied criminal activities, though, and Shore’s mastery of her extensive archival material here is impressive—if at times the sheer proliferation of examples makes chapters these a little dense to read. On the whole, this is an interesting and important new work in the history of crime that successfully challenges the intellectual and chronological parameters of existing work.

From Clever Hans to Michael Balint: Emotion, Influence and the Unconscious in British Medical Practice

The story of Clever Hans, the mathematical wonder horse, is now relegated to undergraduate textbooks on psychology and ethology. Yet for a few years, at the beginning of the twentieth century, people all over the world thought he was a truly remarkable beast. Owned and trained by Russian aristocrat, Wilhelm von Osten, he had been coached for ten years in elementary mathematics using a collection of skittles, carrots and an abacus. After two years of intense tuition, Hans had mastered basic numeracy, tapping out the correct answers to arithmetical problems with his hooves. A few years later he had graduated to more complex algebraic feats and his reputation as mathematical prodigy soon brought him to the attention of the Berlin Board of Education. Inspired by the pedagogical possibilities raised by Hans’s tuition, the board established a twelve men investigative commission led by the Berlin psychologist, Carl Stumpf.1