Reviews for Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research

The average rating for Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-10-03 00:00:00 Michael Bahr A masterwork. As a historical and sociological study of early psychology, it is peerless, and may well be an exemplar for the study of science in general. The arguments' framework is the development of the role of the experimental subject in psychology, which Danziger argues came to determine the development of the discipline within decades of its inception. This is hardly as restrictive a topic as it might seem, and it touches a huge array of the historical forces that shaped today's psychology, including its use of statistics, its links to education and state control, its vying for scientific legitimacy and private funding, and its deep and multinational ties to eugenics and race science. Danziger has discovered a fault line in psychology that extends across the entire discipline, evident from its formative years. As a result, from a specific position, the sprawling edifice can be collapsed with a single cohesive line of argument. The first 7 or so chapters are a ruthless dissection that strips psychology of any legitimacy with a superb command of sources and data. They roughly cover 1879 (Wundt's opening of the first psychology lab) to the beginning of the second world war, when Danziger convincingly argues that psychology had crystallised many of the trends evident today. As psychology developed out of physiology and philosophy, a struggle to differentiate and legitimate itself as a scientific and reputable field began. The dual tendencies exhibited by Wundt's introspectionism, a limited but empirical science and a more loose and qualitative phenomenology, was rapidly reduced in order to gain a foothold in the contemporary academic environment. The European culture of an aristocratic elite, trained in philosophy, initially created a version of psychology where an elite circle of academics investigated one another's psychology, blurring the line between experimenter and subject. However, as psychology spread to America, the bourgeois democratic culture supplanted the old style. More laypersons were admitted to become subjects of psychology, but only a few could be endowed with the social power to understand and report these subjects' experiences. This merged with pioneering British eugenicists' statistical techniques for identifying stable patterns across the new mass samples, a trend that accelerated as psychologists adapted themselves to the needs of capitalism and the state. By the end of the era studied here, psychologists had developed sophisticated statistical instruments to identify good officers for the military, good salesmen for businesses, and predictive educational assessments for classrooms, but little that could be called insight into the problems identified by Wundt in the 50 years previous. This earlier and somewhat despondent, deconstructive section is then complemented by later excellent discussion on the alternative possibilities for psychology, including the Gestalt and Lewinian school, a Weimar Germany collective of mostly jewish and women psychologists. Their radical ideas about levelling the ground between experimenter and subject suggests the silhouette of a psychology still to come, inspiring a minority of psychologists in the late 20th century such as James Gibson and Urie Bronfenbrenner. As they were destroyed by the Nazis, most orthodox psychologists were being recruited into the fascist German state as it rearmed, to help identify candidates for officer training, a brutal demonstration of the concrete reality behind psychology's idealised self-image. Danziger's analysis often strains at the borders. While it is very coherent and well-structured, the author pulls his analysis back from larger structures or modern parallels. Hence, Danziger is reluctant to name capitalism as the motivator for applied psychology (primarily using the term "industry" or "market" instead), or the less substantial references to eugenics and race science that have left just as indelible a mark on psychology. Given the author's history investigating the effects of apartheid in South Africa, this is likely a deliberate reduction of scope for the sake of clarity (certainly another book could be written on that topic), though I personally feel that given his vociferous reaction to scientific malpractice, the racist and ableist assumptions behind many of psychology's developments should have had more discussion. This light criticism is the most I can muster, and given the book ends with a call to align a new psychology to groups interested in knowledge not for social control, but their own emancipation, I do not think it is a damning one. The author's writing deserves note. His points are clear and repeated with emphasis, technical language minimised and sentences short and snappy. I would recommend it to be read by anyone, psychologist or not: its narrow field of study belies an issue of interest to many, and it is well-written enough to make itself available to that wide audience. However, it particularly deserves reading from psychologists, though the book demonstrates very well that the field is effective and aggressive at policing its integrity. This is a shame as the book is particularly relevant in 2018. Danziger demonstrates how important theoretical problems were avoided by replacing them with narrow technical problems, and as a result the subject is now uniquely fragile and dependent on an empirical basis. For instance, well conducted but theoretically ridiculous papers, such as Bem's (2011) study of ESP, were published in a top journal (JSPS) primarily because the editors could find no principled reason for rejecting it- after all, it met the same empirical standards their other publications had. More recently, many relied-upon studies in psychology have been found to be irreproducible, due to their weak designs and questionable research practises. These again are motivated to meet purely empirical standards that are emphasised in psychology at the cost of theoretical substance. It is a powerful reminder of how long psychology has been almost entirely conducted for the sake of ideological cover and social control, and the science it could be has been endlessly smothered in the crib.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-09-26 00:00:00 Jennifer Nichols Another comprehensive (and dense) piece of scholarship by Dr Danziger, a psychologist-turned-historian of the field. Here he traces the development of American research method from its German roots in 19th century to mid 20th century, presenting us an analysis of the development with reference to the social and historical context. While the author has explained why the development took that direction (the academic struggle of founding psychology as a respectable discipline), the general tone is critical and an alternative title could be "the cost we paid to establish psychology as a science in the 20th century". The concluding chapter is particularly harsh but a reader may still feel the relevance of such critique today Overall, it's an rewarding read to understand a crucial aspect of the discipline. I am not giving more stars as there seems to be a peculiar lack of details for the American side of the story (while many are given for the German one) and the first half may not be as strong as the second half. The last three chapters (with topics on the obsession of quantification, the implications of the practical origin of personality psychology, the sociology and philosophy of knowledge) are probably more important than the rest.