Conceptual and Historical Issues in Psychology Putting the HIP into CHIP How to Interest Students in an Unfamiliar Subject Geoff Bunn Manchester Metropolitan University

Conceptual and Historical Issues in Psychology A required level II undergraduate course 160 students 1 hr lecture each week over 2 semesters 10 credits 1 course work essay (1,500 words) 1 final exam question (from 6) in 1 hour http://www.psychology.heacademy.ac.uk/networks/chip/

Conceptual and Historical Issues in Psychology Interrogative Themes Situated knowledge (investigative traditions in Psychology) The construction of gender

The reception of De Revolutionibus was mixed The reception of De Revolutionibus was mixed. The heliocentric hypothesis was rejected out of hand by virtually all, but the book was the most sophisticated astronomical treatise since the Almagest, and for this it was widely admired. Its mathematical constructions were easily transferred into geocentric ones, and many astronomers used them. In 1551 Erasmus Reinhold, no believer in the mobility of the Earth, published a new set of tables, the Prutenic Tables, based on Copernicus's parameters. These tables came to be preferred for their accuracy. Further, De revolutionibus became the central work in a network of astronomers, who dissected it in great detail. Not until a generation after its appearance, however, can we begin point to a community of practicing astronomers who accepted heliocentric cosmology. Perhaps the most remarkable early follower of Copernicus was Thomas Digges (c. 1545-c.1595), who in A Perfit Description of the Coelestiall Orbes (1576) translated a large part of Book I of De Revolutionibus into English and illustrated it with a diagram in which the Copernican arrangement of the planets is imbedded in an infinite universe of stars 4

The reception of De Revolutionibus was mixed The reception of De Revolutionibus was mixed. The heliocentric hypothesis was rejected out of hand by virtually all, but the book was the most sophisticated astronomical treatise since the Almagest, and for this it was widely admired. Its mathematical constructions were easily transferred into geocentric ones, and many astronomers used them. In 1551 Erasmus Reinhold, no believer in the mobility of the Earth, published a new set of tables, the Prutenic Tables, based on Copernicus's parameters. These tables came to be preferred for their accuracy. Further, De revolutionibus became the central work in a network of astronomers, who dissected it in great detail. Not until a generation after its appearance, however, can we begin point to a community of practicing astronomers who accepted heliocentric cosmology. Perhaps the most remarkable early follower of Copernicus was Thomas Digges (c. 1545-c.1595), who in A Perfit Description of the Coelestiall Orbes (1576) translated a large part of Book I of De Revolutionibus into English and illustrated it with a diagram in which the Copernican arrangement of the planets is imbedded in an infinite universe of stars 5

Three Investigative Paradigms in Psychology Francis Galton: Psychometric Sigmund Freud: Psychodynamic Wilhelm Wundt: Psychophysics

Using Tools: Psychometrics Does it work? Is it useful?

Telling Stories: Psychodynamic What does it mean? Does it help me to understand my experience?

Puzzle Solving: Psychophysics Does it exist? Is it real?

Psychology has many different historical foundations.

“The human being is not the eternal basis of human history and human culture but a historical and cultural artifact.” (Nikolas Rose, 1996) Social interconnections The fork.

Portrait of Sir Thomas Lucy and His Family by Cornelius Johnson (copy of c.1625)

Portrait of Sir Thomas Lucy and His Family (copy of c Portrait of Sir Thomas Lucy and His Family (copy of c.1625) Cornelius Johnson

Diurnal and seasonal time. Pre-industrial time   Markers are natural work rhythms Lambing time; milking time: ie task orientation; the length of the day varies with the tasks at hand. Ie irregular work rhythms Cock crowed Light is by candle-light, therefore expensive and not particularly luminous ‘a rice-cooking’ – (Madagascar; half an hour) ‘a pissing while’: 1450 a clock is ‘the devil’s mill’ (Algeria) fishermen have to ‘attend the tides’ a man may make many contributions to the village life e.g. at harvest time. Pattern lurched between intense labour and idleness (when a man is in charge of his own work – e.g students).

‘The industrial revolution demanded a greater synchronisation of labour.’ (E.P. Thompson, 1967)

“This was not merely an idea, but a revelation “This was not merely an idea, but a revelation. At the sight of that skull, I seemed to see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal—an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals.” – Lombroso (1874) Clouston argued that scientific criminal anthropology therefore ‘must deal with the idle, the vagrant, the pauper, the prostitute, the drunkard, the imbecile, the epileptic, and the insane, as well as the criminal.’ This complex array could be reduced to two simple classes:   The considerations to which I have directed attention seem to point to two great sources of criminality. First, the not fully evolved man who might do his work well enough in a primitive society, but who cannot accommodate himself to the conditions of a highly organised and largely artificial modern society. Secondly, the non-developed man, whose development has been pathologically arrested towards the end of the period of adolescence, just before the inhibitory and moral faculties had attained normal strength, there being in him often a slight intellectual impairment also.[1] [1] Clouston, p.225.

“In hysteria, every thought, every symptom was linked to sex…The hysteric’s tale...was a narrative of seduction.” (Lunbeck, 1994) Lectures on Tuesdays followed by receptions at 217 Boulevard Saint-Germain, his private mansion, attended by society elite, artists, architects, police chiefs, Cardinals.   Rediscovered hysteria, ie. distinguished it from everything else. Charcot wanted to solve the puzzle of hysteri, for it to bear an idea. Unable to vivisect; but to seek the site of the cerebral lesion, after clinical observation to delineate symptoms. Charcot’s vocation as a painter, according to Freud ‘a “visuel,” a man who sees’. The clinical gaze, glance. Photography as the ideal of the clinical eye. Casts taken of clinical cases, to be moulded in wax and housed in the Anatomo-Pathological Museum.

4. Explaining the Symptoms Soldiers came down with symptoms appropriate to those that 'broken machines' might exhibit: tics, mutism, obsessions, the shakes etc. Officers came down with symptoms associated with the burdens of leadership such as mutism, nightmares, anxiety attacks, stuttering. The English public schools, those engines of masculine values, extolled the virtues of the 'stiff-upper lip' where no emotion should be shown. Officers were diagnosed with neurasthenia, that form of hysteria that upper class males had been diagnosed with in the previous century. Because the Army initially regarded Shell shock as cowardice/malingering (faking) the first treatments were not sympathetic. They were punitive. Showalter (1985) argues that the emotional breakdown of shell shock echoed that of middle class women a generation earlier who had been diagnosed with hysteria. Shell shock was thus a ‘disguised male protest’ against the masculine ideal that the war had shattered. Men were frightened and scared - but they were not allowed to show their emotions. The stresses thus came out in other 'psychosomatic' ways. ‘These are men whose minds the Dead have ravished. Memory fingers in their hair of murders,’ - Wilfred Owen

Conceptual and Historical Issues in Psychology Interrogative Themes Psychological categories and human kinds Power and subjectivity Pop psychology and psychological expertise

What’s the difference between a broken heart and a broken bone?

http://www.steve.gb.com/science/oxidative_phosphorylation.html

Conceptual and Historical Issues in Psychology

Do Psychological Objects Have Historical Continuity? The Passion is the theological term used for the suffering – physical, spiritual, and mental – of Jesus in the hours prior to and including his trial and execution by crucifixion. The Crucifixion is an event central to Christian beliefs. The etymological origins of the word lie in the Christian Latin passus, (stemming from pati, patior- to suffer) No books: “The Emotions of the Soul” “The Psychology of the Passions” The Psychology of Emotion The Passions of the Soul

“There is no physiology of the mind any more than there is psychology of the nervous system.” – John Hughlings Jackson

Natural Objects (Indifferent Kinds) & Psychological Objects (Interactive Kinds) Natural objects: rocks, atoms, electrons, chemicals, cells, stars, genes, electricity, weather, hormones, viruses, bones, trees, dinosaurs, gravity. Psychological objects: depression, love, melancholy, intelligence, schizophrenia, self-esteem, autism, attitudes, motivation, emotion, dyslexia, cognition, behaviour, nostalgia, mind, soul, ADHD, shell shock, sexuality, race, personality, development, introversion, feeblemindedness, hysteria, temperament.

Psychological Objects & Human Kinds Psychological objects: depression, love, melancholy, intelligence, self-esteem, attitudes, motivation, emotion, dyslexia, cognition, behaviour, nostalgia, mind, soul, sexuality, race, personality, development, temperament. Human kinds: schizophrenic, autistic child, child with ADHD, gifted child, introvert, genius, shell shocked soldier, paedophile, multiple personality, hysterical woman, father, feebleminded child, vulnerable adult, hero, rough sleeper, alcoholic, criminal man, single mum.

Emotional labour Popular psychology “Race” Power & Expertise Psychological Categories “Race” Looping suggests a return to the original place. I’d rather suggest that once changed, the discourse does not return to the same place. Rather the discourse moves on, such that definitions have to be changed once they have been let loose in the world. It is not as though there is looping, as there is a spiralling effect – and not just of human kinds, but of all human categories; and the process involves regulation and governance. Psychology, in other words, is involved in a perpetual process of negotiation with Society which finds utility in its categories depending on the regulatory functions it requires. It is not so much a linear ‘mangle’ of practice, as it is a ‘corkscrew’. There’s always feedback from the governors. What, after all, is a governor, if not a regulatory mechanism? Does this imply that all psychological research is about boundary work, in so far as it is all about deciding what’s appropriately psychological and what’s not? Psychology does not produce immutable mobiles, it produces mutable mobiles. Centripetal forces Centrifugal forces Power & Expertise 28

Dr. Arnold Gesell (C) studying baby at Yale's child psychology lab. Location:New Haven, CT, USDate taken:1947Photographer:Herbert Gehr ‘Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.’ - Simone de Beauvoir (1949)

Conceptual and Historical Issues in Psychology An optional level III undergraduate course 60 students 1 hr lecture each week over 2 semesters 20 credits Essay and a reflective journal of readings