Book Reviews: Steven Pinker. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York: Viking

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol.
39(4), 383-386 Fall 2003

Published online in Wiley Interscience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/jhbs.10173
© 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
B O O K R EV I EW S
Steven Pinker. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York: Viking,
2002. 509 pp. $27.95 (hardcover). ISBN 0-670-03151-8.
One of the most remarkable developments in psychology in the last decade has certainly
been the efflorescence of popular evolutionary psychology. From Robert Wright to Matt
Ridley, from David Buss to David Barash, the number of books purporting to show that hu-
mans possess a genetically based, naturally selected, universally shared “nature” has bur-
geoned. Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature is only the
latest addition to a long line that ultimately reaches back to Darwin’s 1871 Descent of Man.
The Blank Slate thus contains nothing new: all of the arguments found here repeat arguments
that Pinker himself and others have made elsewhere. What is new about his book is its pecu-
liarly petulant and cranky tone—it is essentially one long screed against what Pinker deems
the “modern denial of human nature” by a heterogeneous assortment of relativistic doctrines
and traditions, including modernist and postmodernist art and literature, social construction-
ism, science studies, cultural studies, critical theory, and deconstruction. In their relativism,
these areas of study have, according to Pinker, not only denied that there is any such thing as
a universal human nature, they have also denied the possibility that truth, scientific or other-
wise, can be separable from culture, values, and politics. One of Pinker’s aims in arguing for
evolutionary psychology is to argue for a restoration of the distinction between science and
politics, fact and value. “The key,” he tells us, to dispel fears of evolutionary psychology, “is
to distinguish biological facts from human values” (p. 152).
But this is a distinction that Pinker often blurs. A major assertion here is that evolution-
ary psychology does actually support humane values and social and moral progress—much
more so than its enemies have recognized—while the blank slate has historically been put to
pernicious political ends by dictators and social engineers. This difference in the political uses
of the competing theories Pinker offers as a key reason that liberals and feminists should em-
brace evolutionary psychology. But are we then evaluating evolutionary psychology on the
basis of the facts, or on the moral message that supposedly stems from those facts? One can-
not purport to judge two theories on their scientific merit alone, and then turn around and say,
better values flow from this one. Let us not be fooled by Pinker’s claim that he is coolly de-
taching the moral doctrines from the scientific ones. Like all popular evolutionary psychol-
ogy, Pinker’s argument is political, passionate, and thoroughly value laden.
The book falls into three parts. The first describes the doctrine of the blank slate and as-
sociated notions: that humans are basically born good and later corrupted by society (the
“Noble Savage”), and that an immaterial soul separate from our biology is responsible for our
behavior (the “Ghost in the Machine”). Pinker argues that these beliefs are more fallacious
and more dangerous than the idea of an innately designed mind. The second part debunks the
fears that many people have of accepting evolutionary psychology: that it will deprive us of
free will, moral responsibility, and purpose in life, and will condone sexism and racism. And
the third deals with the various “hot button” issues that have become the hallmark of popular
evolutionary psychology, among them gender differences, innate aggression, and the corro-
sive effects of postmodernism.
Because so many of his arguments are so familiar, the criticisms against them can also
be recycled. The critiques brought by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin in the late
383
384 BOOK REVIEWS
1970s and 1980s against sociobiology still seem to me to be entirely applicable to Pinker’s
work. For instance, both Gould and Lewontin pointed out that, given the immense diversity
of human behaviors, it is impossible to decide which traits comprise human nature—which
ones are the supposed adaptations to our ancestral environment—and which are cultural over-
lays. As a result, Gould maintained, our genes must code for a range of possible behaviors
rather than for specific behavioral traits: biological potentiality rather than biological deter-
minism (Gould, 1977). Pinker uses a particularly disingenuous ploy to debunk this argument:
Gould’s biological potentiality is a version of the blank slate because he does not want to
admit that humans have certain behavioral predispositions. Gould is wrong, Pinker concludes,
because of course we do have certain propensities: we, most of us, anyway, enjoy food and
sex, protect our bodies, and cherish our children (p. 211). The examples that Pinker uses to
debunk the blank slate are so obvious that few would deny them, but those, crucially, are not
the examples he is really interested in. There is no chapter here on how humans like food.
Instead he uses these obvious examples as a wedge into his more contentious claims. We may
indeed have a propensity to protect our bodies, but that is a good deal different from saying
that men have a propensity to excel at math, and women at social relationships—claims he
makes in his “hot buttons” section.
What Pinker seems really interested in are these so-called hot buttons. In a chapter called
“Politics,” he claims that democracy is the form of government most in keeping with human
nature: the dynamic of power sharing that it ensures “might go way back in evolutionary his-
tory” (p. 298). The fall of communism is definitive proof that the rival theory of human na-
ture—the blank slate—is wrong. And yet, as Pinker himself acknowledges, modern democ-
racy did not emerge until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a fraction of a blink in
evolutionary time. If democracy is such a perfect reflection of our ancestral nature, why did
it take millions of years to emerge? There is a certain confusion of levels here: Pinker some-
how expects evolution to explain particular historical developments, but even such an evolu-
tionary psychologist as Robert Wright admits that it cannot. In his book The Moral Animal,
Wright writes: “Darwinism does not, of course, explain history as evolution; natural selection
doesn’t work nearly fast enough to drive ongoing change at the level of culture and politics”
(Wright, 1995, p. 99).
Pinker’s next hot button is violence, which apparently includes not only fighting, but also
cannibalism (which Pinker claims was “common in prehistory” [p. 320]) and meat eating.
Aggression is natural; it is the “default setting” (p. 322), especially for men. The mindsets that
one finds associated with violence, such as ethnocentrism or a sense of honor, “evolved to
deal with hostilities in the ancestral past, and we must bring them out into the open if we are
to work around them in the present” (p. 336). The assumption throughout is that the tendency
to aggress is the evolved trait, the natural one, while one must learn “not to aggress” (p. 316).
But if both traits are found throughout the human species, why is aggression, rather than
peacefulness, the innate trait to be explained adaptively?
In the chapter on gender, Pinker argues that the traditional feminist claim that men and
women are identical except for their reproductive organs is both wrong and repressive; actu-
ally the two sexes are thoroughly different in both body and mind, and admitting this will lead
to a more enlightened feminism. Pinker then trots out a list of sex differences that seem in-
spired by the Victorian era and indeed many of which one can find in Darwin: males are eager
for sex, while females are coy (p. 344, p. 346) (pace the primatologists who have shown oth-
erwise); men are aggressive and women are emotional (p. 345); boys are better throwers (p.
345) and get more extreme SAT scores (p. 344); girls play at parenting (p. 345); boys like
things and girls like people (p. 356); males are better at navigating territory (p. 347); boys
BOOK REVIEWS 385
who play with girls’ toys often turn out to be gay (p. 350); and so on. Pinker’s argument is in-
tended to reveal universal gender differences—indeed, he asserts, “in all human cultures, men
and women are seen as having different natures” (p. 346)—an amazing claim, considering
that all of his support for it relies on anecdotes and surveys from late-twentieth-century North
America. Are we to assume that our own norms are true for all time the world over? Most re-
markably, Pinker suggests that men really are better at math than women, which explains why
there are more male than female scientists and engineers—only if men and women were blank
slates, which they are not, would discrimination explain this discrepancy (p. 357). The claim
is an example of Pinker’s slippery logic: until there is no discrimination, how will we know
whether male dominance in the sciences is due to their innate superiority in math or not? In
the meantime, Pinker concludes, evolutionary psychology can be feminist and humane by not
forcing young women to become engineers against their natural inclinations.
There are so many dubious, poorly supported, and downright maddening claims in
Pinker’s book that it is hard to know where to begin in criticizing them. But his last hot but-
ton chapter on “The Arts” was so petulant and extreme that it actually made me wonder
whether this whole book was supposed to be a farce, a satire on evolutionary psychology. Is
Pinker pulling an Alan Sokal/Social Text-style hoax? Is he trying to be a caricature of him-
self? He claims that the arts and humanities have been ruined by postmodernism—that they
have ignored what people really like, which is “calendar landscapes, popular songs, and
Hollywood romances and adventures” (p. 409). Preferences for these art forms are the same
the world over, and their success results not from Western cultural imperialism, but rather
from their appeal to “basic human tastes,” from their engagement of a “universal human aes-
thetic” (p. 409). But postmodernism in the arts and humanities has ignored these human
propensities. Instead of neat narratives and general readability, it has given us “difficult
prose.” Instead of melody, it gives us dissonance, and instead of classical architecture, it gives
us glass towers. These art forms are based on that false theory of psychology, the blank slate,
and its “militant denial” of human nature: “One legacy is ugly, baffling, and insulting art. The
other is pretentious and unintelligible scholarship” (p. 416). Sounding like a mixture of
Rudolph Giuliani, John Ashcroft, and Allan Bloom, Pinker here is basically saying—I don’t
like it, I don’t understand it, therefore it is out of whack with human nature. A more anti-in-
tellectual complaint can scarcely be imagined; Pinker has appointed himself the arbiter of
what constitutes real art, and has apparently done so in all seriousness (though it may be hard
for his readers to take him seriously). He does not seem to realize that this complaint has been
brought against art, music, and literature in every generation: people once complained about
Beethoven; people once fretted over the Impressionists; people once worried about the un-
naturalness of the novel. All of which makes one wonder whether it isn’t petulance that is a
basic part of human nature.
Also curious is what Pinker chooses to attack. He reserves all his bile for elite forms of
art, never popular forms. Is gangsta rap, for example, which he has a fondness for citing, then
in keeping with human nature, and Stravinsky not, or is Pinker simply trying to show that he is
a cool hip guy, a common man, and not an elite academic fuddy duddy? Is there something just
a little ironic about a celebrated author and professor speaking on behalf of the common man?
REFERENCES
Gould, S. J. (1977). Biological potentiality vs. biological determinism. Chapter in Ever since Darwin: Reflections in
natural history. New York: Norton.
Lewontin, R., Rose, S., & Kamin, L. (1984). Not in our genes: Biology, ideology, and human nature. New York:
Pantheon.
386 BOOK REVIEWS
Wright, R. (1995). The moral animal: Why we are the way we are. The new science of evolutionary psychology. New
York: Vintage.
Editor’s Note: Professor Pinker was invited to comment on this review, but declined.
Reviewed by NADINE WEIDMAN, Associate, Department of History of Science, Harvard
University, Cambridge, MA 02138.
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 39(4), 386 Fall 2003
Regina Helena de Freitas Campos, (Ed.) Dicionario Biográfico da Psicologia no Brasil:

Pioneiros. Rio de Janeiro: Imago Editora, 2001, 464 pp. ISBN 85-312-0760-6.
The Biographic Dictionary of Brazilian Psychology: The Pioneers is the fruit of the
labors of the work group on the history of psychology, created in 1996 and associated with
the Brazilian Association of Research and Graduate Studies in Psychology (ANREPP), and
of collaborating individuals. It covers the “pioneers” active prior to the establishment of uni-
versity courses of psychology and the institutionalization of psychology as a profession. The
volume is to be supplemented by a biographic dictionary covering the professional period of
the development of psychology in Brazil.
The volume begins with the lists of individuals who participated in the preparation of the
present dictionary (pp. 7 and 8) and of the persons whose biographies are presented (pp.
13–17), with a total of close to 200 individuals, the lives of whom range from the sixteenth
to the twentieth century. The contributors’ backgrounds included theology as well as such pro-
fessions as medicine, law, and education.
The criteria for inclusion in the dictionary were complex: influential publications, signif-
icant share in the training of young people, development of important institutions, opening new
fields, and production of original thought and research. In the case of persons active in allied
fields, preference was given to individuals who made specific reference to “psychology” or
who referred to terms and concepts relevant to psychology, such as “thinking” or “tests.”
All of the individuals included in the Biographic Dictionary were born prior to 1930, and
the lives and activities were followed up to 1962, when psychology achieved the legal status
of a profession in Brazil. The entries are followed by references to the publications of a given
individual and by “sources of information.”
While the book is focused on native Brazilians, it also contains information relevant to
international psychology. In alphabetical order, the following names will be noted: Helena
Antipoff, born in Russia, trained in Switzerland; E. Claparede, France; F. S. Keller, USA;
Anne K. L. Kemper and W. W. Kemper, Germany; V. Klineberg, international psychologist of
Canadian origin; Adelheid L. Koch, Germany; H. L. Lipman, Germany; Mira y Lopez, Cuba;
A. Ombredane, Belgium; U. Pizzoli, Italy; Haline Radecka and W. Radecki, Poland; A. Rey,
Switzerland; R. J. Rozenstraten, Holland; T. Simon, France; L. Walther, Russia and
Switzerland; P. G. Weil, France.
Reviewed by JOSEF MARIA BROZ̆EK, retired professor in the Department of Psychology,
Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA.
BOOK REVIEWS 387
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 39(4), 387–388 Fall 2003
Published online in Wiley Interscience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002 /jhbs.10138
Lucy Hartley. Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century

Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 242 pp. £40.00 (cloth). ISBN
0-521-79272-X.
A welcome contribution to the growing list of publications on the history of the physical
body as a psychosocial reality and a conveyor of meaning is this monograph by Hartley, a lec-
turer in English at the University of Southampton. As stated in her introduction, she “explores
changing understandings of expression, primarily the expression of emotions, and principally
via the face” (p. 3) from Lavater (1789) to Galton (1892).
Hartley begins by reviewing various efforts to legitimize theories of expression by em-
ploying current philosophy and physiology. Particular emphasis is given to the lesser-known
writers, Parsons and Cross, and then to Hartley and Lavater. Chapter two is devoted to the the-
ory of body expression developed by Bell during the first third of the nineteenth century, with
some contextual discussion given to the ideas of Cuvier and Paley. Hartley demonstrates that
Bell constructed his theories within the framework of natural theology. She notes that Bell’s
anatomical theory, in particular his theory of a respiratory nerve causing innervation of the
musculature for breathing and other expressive movements, coexisted with his theory of emo-
tional expression and his beliefs about how to depict it artistically.
In a third chapter, Hartley discusses the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in-
cluding Rossetti, Millais, and Hunt. According to Hartley, their goal was an “aesthetic revo-
lution” that sought to represent the extraordinary in ordinary daily life. Their mission was to
express the essence of human nature through realistic external appearances and to represent
physical actuality while at the same time conveying the beauty of human characters.
In chapter four, Hartley further explores the influence of theories of expression upon
popular nineteenth-century ideas and practices about physical health and beauty, in particular
those put forth by Spencer, Walker, MacVicar, Bain, and Collins. Not surprisingly, various no-
tions about emotional experience and its expression are woven together with beliefs about
masculinity and femininity, social mores and decorum, body types, and ideal forms.
In her fifth chapter, aptly headed “The naturalization of emotion,” Hartley shows that
Darwin removed the study of body expression from its traditional context, that is, from phys-
iognomical theory and the artistic portrayal of individuals, and reconfigured it into a natural
science regarding the evolution of species. His theory of the evolution of emotional expres-
sions such as blushing, however, was based upon his beliefs about the inheritability of instinct
and about habits rather than upon utilitarian theory and natural selection. Finally, Hartley dis-
cusses the eugenic notions of Galton in order to further demonstrate that theories about the
physical expression of character and emotional states made an important contribution to the
emergence of psychology as a science of mind.
Hartley does not emphasize the way that post-Aristotelian concepts of form and movement
fostered two divergent and incompatible mind-sets. One was the historically older, physiog-
nomical notion that Lavater resuscitated, which held that the human soul consists only of form.
The other was the newer Cartesian dictum that the rational soul has only movement, to which
was added the Lockean body that, psychologically, begins as a tabula rasa as much as the mind.
The phrenology of Gall represents the last physiognomical theory to receive serious considera-
tion within established science and medicine, and the Pre-Raphaelites one of the last major
groups of artists to stress physiognomical expression. Meanwhile, an increasing number of writ-
388 BOOK REVIEWS
ers from various fields argued that meaning occurs only when the animate body moves. This
trend culminated in the new theories of body expression appearing in the second half of the
nineteenth century. Between these polar opposites emerged the mid-eighteenth-century theory
of acquired physiognomy presented by Parsons, who stated that habitual emotional expression
eventually produces permanent physiognomical characteristics. A century later, this new theory
transmuted into Darwin’s theory about how emotional expressions are acquired by various
species. In this book, however, Hartley focuses on the continuity from Lavater to Galton.
Hartley develops the significant point that physiognomical theories exquisitely reflect as
well as motivate many aspects of culture. Historical studies such as hers thereby contribute to our
understanding of human nature and experience within the context of modern Western history.
Reviewed by TORY L. HOFF, Ph.D., C. Psych., Private Practice, Toronto, ON., Canada
Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen. Folies à plusieurs: De l’hystérie à la dépression. Paris: Les

Empêcheurs de penser en rond/Le Seuil, 2002. 400 pp. €25.56/$27.32 (paper). ISBN 2-
84671-027-9.
When two people who are closely associated with each other share the same delusional
ideas, we have a folie à deux. When many closely associated people share the same delusional
ideas and these ideas manifest themselves as hysteria, psychoanalytic neuroses, multiple per-
sonality disorder, dissociative fugue, hypnosis, or depression, we have what the University of
Washington philosopher Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen calls a folie à plusieurs—the madness of
several. This theme runs throughout this wonderful collection of lectures, journal articles, and
book reviews written between 1993 and 2001. Like other constructivist scholars, Borch-
Jacobsen does not deny the reality of what Ian Hacking calls “transient mental illnesses,” but
few, if any, have been as relentless as he has in exploding the mythology that sustains them.
In “The Bernheim Effect,” for example, a brilliant essay based on the work of the French
physician Hippolyte Bernheim (1840–1919) and, especially, the remarkable Belgian psychol-
ogist Joseph Delboeuf (1831–1896), Borch-Jacobsen characterizes hypnosis as a negotiated
game in which the subject tries to guess and fulfill what the hypnotist expects him or her to
do. For Borch-Jacobsen, there is virtually no difference between a hypnotized subject and an
actor playing the part of one. As a Delboeuf enthusiast, I am largely persuaded by Borch-
Jacobsen’s argument; however, it does not adequately explain why so many subjects are ab-
solutely convinced that they are truly hypnotized and not pretending. I wonder whether
Borch-Jacobsen would be willing to concede that many subjects are deluded into believing—
sometimes along with the hypnotist in a folie à deux—they are hypnotized and that this ex-
perience is in itself real and unique.
Another great myth that these essays repeatedly debunk is that of the Freudian uncon-
scious. In abandoning hypnosis, Freud believed he had freed psychoanalysis from the vicissi-
tudes of unintended suggestion between analyst and patient. Borch-Jacobsen disagrees. Freud
never eliminated suggestion from psychoanalytic therapy; he merely rendered it more “subtle
and insidious” (p. 206). In “Neurotica,” for instance, by carefully reconstructing the chronol-
ogy of Freud’s therapeutic sessions and theories, Borch-Jacobsen demonstrates how Freud
BOOK REVIEWS 389
“unwittingly” elicited from his patients the stories that would subsequently confirm his theo-
ries, from the seduction theory to the Oedipus complex.
In “A Black Box Named Sybil,” Borch-Jacobsen chronicles how the world’s most fa-
mous multiple personality emerged from a similar folie à plusieurs between Shirley Mason,
her analyst Cornelia Wilbur, and the writer Flora Rheta Schreiber. Using extensive archival
material and interviews, in collaboration with Peter Swales, Borch-Jacobsen takes us system-
atically through the process by which Mason was groomed into the paradigmatic multiple per-
sonality upon which tens of thousands more would be patterned.
Borch-Jacobsen’s folie à plusieurs is not limited to patients and their therapists—it in-
cludes historians as well. Historians, he writes, “cannot claim to be immune from the looping
effects that affect the psychiatric field in general. Whether it be in ratifying some psychiatric
notion or, on the contrary, in relativizing and contextualizing it, historians, like it or not, in-
tervene in turn in the global etiological equation that defines the psychiatric field at a given
moment” (p. 23). “To write the history of psychiatry,” he continues, “is also, inevitably, to
make it” (p. 24; see also Borch-Jacobsen, 2001, p. 27). To read Borch-Jacobsen, however, one
need not also read French. Eight of the volume’s thirteen essays were previously published in
English journals like History of the Human Sciences, History of Psychiatry, and The London
Review of Books. And although his English is excellent, I still prefer the perspicuous and
sunny prose of this profoundly important and helpful book.
REFERENCES
Borch-Jacobsen, M. (2001). Making psychiatric history: Madness as folie à plusieurs. History of the Human
Sciences, 14, 19–38.
Reviewed by ANDRÉ LEBLANC, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of the History of

Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138.
Published online in wiley Interscience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/jhbs.10140
Julie Marcus. The Indomitable Miss Pink: A Life in Anthropology. Sydney: University of
New South Wales Press, 2001. xiii + 340 pp. $39.95 (paper). ISBN 0-86840-547-7.
In her long life (1884–1975), Olive Pink was nothing if not indomitable. She had to be to pur-
sue her anthropological work among tribal Aboriginal people in central Australia from the 1930s
onwards. This was a time when a single woman so engaged was regarded as a crank or eccentric
by frontier locals, as well as by those metropolitan academics, bureaucrats, magistrates, and mis-
sionaries she encountered and argued with in her lifelong battle to influence government policy.
She wanted to establish some kind of equality, full human rights, and economic independence for
Aborigines, particularly the Arrernte and Warlpiri peoples, but her aspirations constantly con-
fronted the pragmatism, and indeed racism, of the decision makers of Aboriginal policy.
As a political activist and unconventional scholarly researcher, Olive Pink did not publish
a vast amount of her field work, much of which she believed should remain away from public
gaze as it dealt with sacred material. But she left a considerable archive of notes, diaries, and
correspondence which Julie Marcus, an anthropologist herself, has used to very good effect in
390 BOOK REVIEWS
bringing to life a dedicated, passionate, outspoken, and controversial human being whose con-
cerns are still of topical interest today. Olive Pink’s character is also refracted through the many
stories and accounts of this legendary figure told to Marcus by those who knew her.
Before completing university studies in anthropology in the early 1930s, Olive Pink had
studied art, had been a member of the Association for the Protection of Native Races and, at the
age of 42 in 1926, had visited Daisy Bates who was living with Aborigines on the edge of the
Nullarbor Plain. She had also been a founding member of the Anthropological Society of New
South Wales in 1928. Her later experiences of doing field work with Aborigines in central
Australia inclined her to “think black” and in doing so she condemned the assimilation policy
of her day as “extermination,” “land-robbery,” or “hidden apartheid.” Equally unacceptable to
her was the government policy of removing Aboriginal children from their families. And mis-
sionary attempts to Christianize the “natives,” in her view, denigrated Aboriginal sacred beliefs.
In supporting Aboriginal land rights she was associated with the concept of the “secular sanc-
tuary” and, although she maintained that a distinct barrier between black and white societies was
initially essential, she nevertheless accepted that it was up to the peoples themselves to decide
how to engage with the white institutions imposed upon them. Paradoxically, Olive Pink op-
posed citizenship rights for Aborigines, arguing that they were already “fellow citizens.” Legal
citizenship, she believed, would permit a government to conscript Aboriginal men for war.
Marcus’s book is not a simple biography. It is a sympathetic but critical account of a life
from middle-class respectability in Hobart and Sydney to social marginalization in Alice
Springs in which an extraordinary woman became the stuff of legend, a mythical character, still
haunting central Australia today. The author has chosen to focus particularly on the myth of
“Miss Pink,” that “elusive and contradictory figure” who has “hovered over the imagination”
of Alice Springs “for close to 60 years” (p. 24), and to explore the social and political context
in which she was “a restless, delighted, but unquiet traveller” (p. ix). Yet, Marcus observes:
The truth about “Miss Pink” lies hidden not in her mythical persona but within her own
search for truth and the journey she made to central Australia in search of it, a journey
of discovery and sacrifice which is rather more remarkable than her myth. (p. 24)
In taking this path, Marcus has rescued Olive Pink from academic oblivion and has of-
fered us a carefully researched and detailed account of an uncompromising anthropologist
who, in addition to unsettling numerous authority figures during her work, contributed to an
understanding of Aboriginal social life and consequently to the discipline of anthropology. As
she did, she confronted misogyny, ridicule, and malice but carried on indomitably.
Reviewed by MARIE DE LEPERVANCHE, Ph.D., Honorary Research Associate, Department of
Anthropology, University of Sydney NSW, Australia.
S. M. Walters and E. A. Stow. Darwin’s Mentor: John Stevens Henslow, 1796–1861.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 338 pp. $60.00. ISBN 0-52159-146-5.
On 24 May 1861, just eight days after Henslow’s death, Charles Darwin wrote to his
friend Joseph Hooker, also Henslow’s son-in-law. Darwin feared that letters, diaries, and the
BOOK REVIEWS 391
other essential sources did not exist to ensure that an adequate biography could be written
about his old Cambridge teacher. Moreover there were no remarkable events in Henslow’s life
around which the narrative could be built. Walters and Stow preface their biography of
Henslow with a quote from this letter, putting the reader on notice that they intend to prove
Darwin wrong. Ironically, they render Henslow remarkable by emphasizing his impact on
Darwin, and their thorough research has uncovered enough biographical material to flesh out
their picture of their subject. Only one other biography of Henslow exists, Memoir of the
Reverend John Stevens Henslow (1862), by Henslow’s brother-in-law Leonard Jenyns. A
modern biography of Henslow was therefore long overdue and Walters and Stow’s beautifully
illustrated study is a welcome addition to the field.
The biography is divided into three parts. In “Family Background,” the authors discuss
Henslow’s happy childhood in a relatively prosperous household, thanks to his father’s brew-
ery business, and his early education. In “Cambridge,” the authors consider Henslow’s distin-
guished undergraduate career at St. John’s College, his study of geology, and his key role in
the founding of the Cambridge Philosophic Society in 1819. There are also chapters on his
marriage to Harriet Jenyns in 1823, his work as a Cambridge Professor of Mineralogy and
later Professor of Botany, his education of Darwin, his political shift from conservative to
Whig in the early 1830s, his role in the establishment of a New Botanic Gardens at
Cambridge, and his liberal Anglicanism. Finally, in “Hitcham,” the authors explain why
Henslow decided to move to Hitcham, Suffolk, in 1837 to more effectively perform his duties
as Rector, though he returned to Cambridge for one month in the spring to deliver his lectures.
Here, Walters and Stow paint an interesting picture of Henslow as a devoted Anglican minis-
ter responding to the awful social tensions of the 1840s by setting up a new school, helping
the poor to form self-help clubs, and instituting lessons on botany for the village school-chil-
dren. Given the range of Henslow’s activities while at Hitcham, his death in 1861 comes as
no surprise to the reader.
Walters and Stow’s strategy of organizing the biography around Henslow’s relationship
to Darwin has its strengths and weaknesses. On the positive side, it gives the biography co-
herence and supplies the authors with a rationale for Henslow’s historical significance. It was
Henslow who stimulated Darwin’s interest in field geology, who encouraged Darwin to go on
the Beagle voyage, and who recommended Lyell’s work to Darwin at the right time even
though he was not a convinced uniformitarian (pp. 85–96). It was also Henslow who provided
Darwin with a balanced view of religion, and who encouraged Darwin to adopt a geological
position that did not depend on a literal reading of the Bible. Walters and Stow conclude the
book with the pithy statement, “without Henslows there are no Darwins” (p. 260). Although
Henslow was not himself a genius, teachers who release the genius in others are just as im-
portant as their famous students.
But the strategy of highlighting the Henslow-Darwin relationship also makes it difficult
for the reader to evaluate the historical significance of Henslow in his own right. In the open-
ing passage of the book, the authors state that their biography is about “an admirable man
whose qualities have been over-shadowed, even distorted, by the reputation of his most fa-
mous pupil, Charles Darwin” (p. 3). Then why title the book Darwin’s Mentor and why priv-
ilege Henslow’s relationship with Darwin? The relationship never resulted in changes to
Henslow’s views, even after the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859. Henslow de-
fended Darwin against Sedgwick’s attacks, but his reaction to Origin was cautious (pp.
170–103). In any event, his death in 1861 limited his impact on the debate. Should a biogra-
phy of Henslow focus on his relationship to his favorite student when this approach tells us
more about Darwin then it does about Henslow? Wallace scholars have recently been trying
392 BOOK REVIEWS
to free the codiscoverer of natural selection from the immense gravitational pull of Darwin so
that he is no longer a lesser light reflecting a greater glory, no longer “Darwin’s Moon”
(Moore, 1997, p. 292). Walters and Stow may have inadvertently presented scholars interested
in Henslow with the same challenge.
REFERENCES
Moore, J. (1997). Wallace’s Malthusian moment: The common context revisited. In Bernard Lightman (Ed.).
Victorian science in context (pp. 290-311). Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Reviewed by BERNARD LIGHTMAN, Professor of Humanities, York University, Toronto, ON,

Canada M3J 1P3.
E. F. K. Koerner and Aleksander Szwedek (Eds.). Towards a History of Linguistics in

Poland: From the Early Beginnings to the End of the Twentieth Century. Amsterdam
and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2001. 335 pp. $135.00. ISBN
1-58811-177-6.
This volume consists of 10 chapters, each by a Polish scholar, devoted to some aspect of
the history of linguistics in Poland. Most of the chapters are revised versions of articles pub-
lished in the journal Historiographia Linguistica in 1998 and 1999. Part I, “Polish
Linguistics: Origins and Trends,” contains five chapters that deal with the development in
Poland of some particular branch of linguistics: “General Linguistics in the History of the
Language Sciences in Poland: Late 1860s–Late 1960s” (by Zdzislaw / Wa˛sik); “Origin and
Development of Applied Linguistics in Poland” (by Franciszek Grucza); “Lexicography in
Poland: From the Early Beginnings to the Present” (by Tadeusz Piotrowski); “Dialectology in
Poland, 1873–1997” (by Stanislaw / Gogolewski); and “Onomastics in Poland: From 19th
Century Beginnings to the Present” (by Slawomir
/ Gala). Each of the five chapters of Part II,
“Portraits of Major Polish Linguists” presents some aspect of the work of a great Polish lin-
guistic scholar: “Jan Baudouin de Courtenay’s Contribution to General Linguistics” (by
Arleta Adamska-Salaciak);
/ “Mikolaj/ Kruszewsky and 20th-Century Linguistics” (by Fedor
M. Berezin); “Mikolaj/ Rudnicki’s General Linguistic Conceptions” (by Jerzy Bańczerowski);
“Jerzy Kurylowicz
/ as an Indo-Europeanist and Theorist of Language” (by Wojciech
Smoczyński); and “Aspects of Ludwik Zabrocki’s Linguistic World” (by Jerzy Bańczerowski).
The chapters are followed by a five-page summary in Polish, and an author and subject index.
I would have little but praise for this volume, were it not for its unfortunate subtitle.
Professor Wa˛sik cannot be faulted for ending his overview of general linguistics in Poland at
around 1970, and in any event he is explicit about the time frame covered. But by virtue of
the book’s subtitle and the lack of more recent coverage of general linguistics in Poland, one
is invited to conclude that, in the last 30 years, Polish linguists have contributed little of value
to general linguistic theory. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Both cognitive linguis-
tics and generative grammar have a strong presence in Poland, the former probably more than
the latter. One of the most noted contemporary cognitive linguists in the world is Anna
BOOK REVIEWS 393
Wierzbicka, who did her Ph.D. research at the Polish Academy of Sciences and has subse-
quently written over 20 books. Although her faculty position has been in Australia since the
1970s, she has frequently returned to Poland to lecture and is a major force in linguistics in
that country. Her ideas and those of the cognitive linguist Ronald Langacker have adherents
at virtually every linguistics program in Poland. Indeed, in October 2003 Langacker will re-
ceive a “Doctor Honoris Causa” degree at Lodz / University.
Generative grammar has had a presence in Poland since the 1960s, dating from
Kazimierz Polanski’s 1967 study of complex sentences in Upper Sorbian. Two of the world’s
leading generative phonologists are Jerzy Rubach, who divides his time between the Institute
of English Studies at the University of Warsaw and the Department of Linguistics at the
University of Iowa and Edmund Gussmann of Gdansk University. And most importantly, the
late 1990s saw the inauguration of the yearly held Generative Linguistics in Poland confer-
ence, which has featured guest speakers from Western Europe and North America and has at-
tracted participants from around two dozen countries.
I have not the slightest hesitation in recommending this volume to those in search of co-
pious references to source material on the origins and development of the field of linguistics
in Poland. But it is of only slight utility to those interested in the state of linguistics in that
country at the end of the twentieth century.
Reviewed by FREDERICK J. NEWMEYER, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195.
Published online in wiley Interscience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/jhbs.10143
Nicholas Wright Gillham. A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the
Birth of Eugenics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 416 pp. $35.00 (cloth).
ISBN 0-19-514365-5.
Gerald Sweeney. “Fighting for the Good Cause”: Reflections on Francis Galton’s Legacy to
American Hereditarian Psychology. Independence Square, PA: American Philosophical
Society, 2001. 136 pp. $18.00 (paper). ISBN 0-87169-912-5.
Modern advances in genetic research have raised concerns over the social, political, and
ethical implications of genetic engineering. One of the central concerns regarding genetic en-
gineering is the possibility of another eugenics movement. It is timely then that two histori-
cal works have been published recently on Francis Galton, eighteenth-century British poly-
math and Charles Darwin’s cousin, who first coined the term “eugenics.”
There are two previous biographies of Galton: Karl Pearson’s (1914-1930) substantial
four volumes, The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton, and D. W. Forrest’s (1974)
Francis Galton: The Life and Work of a Victorian Genius. Gillham, a geneticist and emeri-
tus professor of biology at Duke University, distinguishes his biography from the previous
two in three ways. First, he places greater emphasis on the Victorian context within which
Galton lived. Second, he explores the relationships between Galton and his three disciples,
Pearson, William Bateson, and Walter F. R. Weldon. Third, Gillham exposes his concerns
about the detrimental effects of eugenics programs, which occurred in several countries
394 BOOK REVIEWS
after Galton’s death, in the prologue and epilogue. He treats Galton’s early years, his years
of travel and exploration, and his later studies of hereditary transmission, pedigrees of ge-
nius, and eugenics.
Galton’s formative years include his early education by his sister Delly, medical training
at King’s College, trips to Europe for medical experience, and his struggles with mathemat-
ics at Cambridge. Gillham provides a thorough account of Galton’s early years, even his pe-
riod of uncertainty and drifting after his father’s death. However, in a biography of this scope,
one wishes for more interpretation of Galton’s early years. For instance, Gillham skims over
Galton’s reasons for abandoning medicine, which appears to be a significant turning point in
his life (Fancher, 1998).
Galton’s excursions into southern Africa are described richly and Gillham does an ex-
cellent job of placing Galton within this early era of African exploration. Portions of this sec-
tion read like an adventure novel. One amusing story is of Galton’s meeting with Jonker
Afrikaner, a Namaquan chieftain, in which Galton bursts into Afrikaner’s hut astride an ox.
Most importantly, Gillham illustrates Galton’s intellectual growth and penchant for quantifi-
cation as Galton joins England’s scientific elite when elected into the Royal Geographical
Society (RGS), developing accurate weather maps and discovering the anticyclone. Gillham
strays somewhat from the narrative in this section by spending two chapters on the RGS and
the David Livingstone controversy instigated by Henry Morton Stanley.
In the final section, Gillham describes meticulously many of Galton’s investigations in-
cluding his research on Darwin’s theory of pangenesis, his method of fingerprinting, com-
posite photography, and his interest in heredity through pedigree analysis, twin studies, and
eugenics. Of particular interest to historians of the behavioral sciences are Gillham’s descrip-
tions of Galton’s studies of mental imagery, the word association test, correlation, and re-
gression. Gillham also attempts to describe the nature of the relationship between Galton and
his disciples. Once more, Gillham breaks from the narrative to concentrate on the numerous
intellectual disagreements over heredity between Pearson and Weldon, the biometricians, and
Bateson, the Mendelian, yet does not tie these to Galton sufficiently.
Overall, Gillham does an admirable job of placing Galton within the Victorian context,
though at times claims Galton “anticipated” modern discoveries in genetics. These instances
are only minor issues of presentism in an otherwise outstanding, thoroughly researched, and
informative biography that will serve as a useful resource for professionals and students about
Galton’s life and work.
Essentially, the subject of Sweeney’s monograph begins where Gillham’s biography
ends, with the growing popularity of eugenics. His work is an original attempt at reinterpret-
ing Galton’s influence on American educational psychologists during the American eugenics
movement between 1903 and 1930. Sweeney’s reinterpretation rests on the assumption that
Galton’s influence on American psychologists, such as Robert Yerkes and Lewis Terman, is
taken for granted and rarely analyzed sufficiently. In six brief chapters, Sweeney searches for
the nature of Galton’s influence by surveying his biographical material, spurious data on em-
inent men, the political context within which Galton developed eugenics, and his antidemoc-
ratic ideals, which paralleled those of the American hereditarian psychologists. Particularly
informative is Sweeney’s excellent analysis of Galton’s original data, stating that his evidence
seemed marked by “purposeful planning . . . and . . . carelessness in execution” (p. 5).
Sweeney posits that Galton provided American psychologists with a “Holy Grail” to pursue.
Sweeney concludes that Galton’s influence had more to do with providing a rationale and po-
litical purpose to pursue eugenics than providing American psychologists with a program-
matic eugenics framework to follow.
BOOK REVIEWS 395
I would recommend “Fighting for the Good Cause” as a good first resource for anyone
interested in the history of eugenics beyond Galton and into the social and political arenas of
American psychology.
REFERENCES
Fancher, R. E. (1998). Biography and psychodynamic theory: Some lessons from the life of Francis Galton. History
of Psychology, 1, 99-115.
Reviewed by MICHAEL J. ROOT, University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH 03824.
W. J. O’Donohue, D. A. Henderson, S. C. Hayes, J. E. Fisher, L. J. Hayes (Eds.). A History

of the Behavioral Therapies: Founders’ Personal Histories. Reno, NV: Context Press,
2001. 357 pp. $49.95 (paper). ISBN 1-878978-40-3.
This edited volume, based on a conference on the History of the Behavioral Therapies
held at the University of Nevada, Reno, in 1999, is an invaluable resource for historians of be-
haviorism, behavior analysis, and behavior therapy. Invited to the conference were some of
the most influential behavioral psychologists of the twentieth century: Sidney Bijou, Ogden
Lindsley, Arnold Lazarus, Albert Bandura, Albert Ellis, Cyril Franks, Leonard Krasner, W.
Stewart Agras, Walter Mischel, Donald Baer, Todd Risley, Montrose Wolf, Gordon Paul,
Gerald Davison, and Leo Reyna. Each gave a paper and was then asked to prepare a chapter
for this volume. Their chapters (save one by Leo Reyna, who was too ill to contribute), along
with an introductory chapter by the editors, a chapter on philosophy of science by Thomas
Nickles, and chapters on Joseph Wolpe, B. F. Skinner, and J. R. Kantor by Roger Poppen, Julie
Vargas, and Paul Mountjoy, respectively, although extremely varied in style and scope, pro-
vide important first-hand accounts of the development of behavioral psychology from senior
participants in the field. As the editors note, the conference and the book allowed them to
“capture a part of the historical record before it was gone forever” (p. v).
The authors were asked to follow a general outline for their chapters: (1) provide an intel-
lectual biography, (2) outline their perceptions of the important developments in the rise of their
field, (3) provide detailed case studies of selected publications, and (4) outline possible object
lessons for the future. Although some authors took this outline to heart, many took it only as a
guide, or omitted topics altogether. For example, attention to biographical detail is fairly scant
in the Kantor, Bandura, and Wolf chapters, but plentiful in the Franks and Lindsley chapters
(among others). The editors comment on this diversity, remarking, “we made the conscious de-
cision to give these leaders of the field the freedom to tell their story in their own way” (p. v).
For the historian using this volume as a historical or biographical resource, this has both advan-
tages and disadvantages. The relatively unedited reflections provide insights into the personali-
ties, styles, perspectives, and convictions of the contributors; however, the information provided
is idiosyncratic, and subject, in some cases, to the inconsistencies of individual recall.
Highlights of the volume include Julie Vargas’s chapter on her father, B. F. Skinner, in
which, in addition to a short and relatively standard biographical account, she pays special at-
396 BOOK REVIEWS
tention to his work on verbal behavior—how his analysis can be applied to traditional talk
therapy—and re-emphasizes the importance of internal events in the radical behaviorist ac-
count of behavior. The chapters by Bijou and Lindsley include fascinating photos of their
early experimental apparatus, including Bijou’s mobile child study laboratory and Lindsley’s
“Apparatus Alley.” Chapters by Lazarus, Franks, and Poppen (on Wolpe) help convey the re-
lationships among researchers and practitioners in South Africa, England, and the United
States, exposing the inaccuracy of bisecting the field simplistically into operant versus clas-
sical conditioning camps. Conspicuously absent is a chapter on Hans Eysenck, whose life and
work are ripe for historical analysis, despite the challenges such an analysis might present.
Part history, part theoretical compendium, and part review of the field, A History of the
Behavioral Therapies: Founders’ Personal Histories may disappoint historians looking for
systematic biographical statements from some of the most important figures in the history of
behavioral psychology. It does, however, elucidate the historical development and interrela-
tionships—both sociological and conceptual—among the field’s many branches. It also gives
readers a sense of the enduring pervasiveness of the behavioral approach, and of the long-
standing debates and controversies unique to the field.
Reviewed by ALEXANDRA RUTHERFORD, Assistant Professor of Psychology, York University,
Toronto, ON, Canada M3J 1P3.
Ann G. Klein. A Forgotten Voice: A Biography of Leta Stetter Hollingworth. Scottsdale, AZ:
Great Potential Press, 2002. 280 pp. $22.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-910707-53-7.
Leta Stetter Hollingworth (1886–1939) is a significant figure in the fields of gifted ed-
ucation and feminist psychology. A prolific writer who was well-known among her contem-
poraries, she, like too many other early twentieth-century women psychologists, was nearly
lost from American psychology’s history. “Rediscovered” in the 1970s, most of what we know
about Hollingworth’s personal and professional life comes from her numerous books and ar-
ticles, and the biography and collections of her poems and public addresses published posthu-
mously by her husband Harry L. Hollingworth, himself a notable psychologist.
Leta Hollingworth’s research and professional contributions lay mainly in three areas:
the psychology of women, clinical psychology, and educational psychology, particularly edu-
cation of the gifted. A Forgotten Voice is the first book-length treatment of her life since her
husband’s biography, originally published in 1943 (Hollingworth, 1990/1943). Klein views
Leta’s life through the lens of research on gifted children and organizes her account chrono-
logically. Klein makes a good attempt at piecing together how the economic difficulties and
emotional abuse Leta Hollingworth experienced in childhood may have shaped her ambitions,
coping strategies, and life course. Chapters concerned with her adult life are focused on her
graduate school and professional years at Teachers College, her involvement in feminist
groups in New York, her move from mental testing and work with children of subnormal in-
telligence into gifted education, and the establishment of Speyer School. Because of the bi-
ography’s focus on gifted education, some aspects of Hollingworth’s extraordinarily varied
BOOK REVIEWS 397
and prolific professional life, such as Hollingworth’s involvement in the professionalization
of clinical psychology, are given only passing treatment. In some instances, background for
Hollingworth’s work is insufficiently developed. Hollingworth’s interest in physical and men-
tal comparison of the sexes, for example, was not only a manifestation of her political femi-
nism, but also her scientific dissatisfaction with the “variability hypothesis,” the then-popu-
lar notion that on any given psychological or physical dimension females, as a sex, varied less
from one another than did males. Klein makes an effort to show how significant personal
events at critical points are linked to professional choices, but is handicapped by having next
to no correspondence or notes that could reveal Hollingworth’s own private voice. A chronol-
ogy of the major events in Hollingworth’s life is provided in an appendix, but in chapters deal-
ing with her adult life, we get much less sense of how events from different facets of her life
may have influenced her activity in others, or how larger changes in the intellectual, political,
and social landscape reverberate in the evolution of her ideas. This is most important in try-
ing to understand how Hollingworth’s “nativist” position with respect to intelligence changed
and resisted change over the course of her career, and stood in contrast to more extreme po-
sitions found among her contemporaries who studied intelligence and mental testing. The bi-
ography highlights the need for further research on Hollingworth to understand how she rec-
onciled belief in the immutability of innate intelligence (rank order) with her insistence that
children at all levels of intellectual ability were underserved by learning environments insen-
sitive to developing their talent to the fullest.
The great impediment faced by any aspiring biographer of Hollingworth’s is that, after
her death, Harry Hollingworth destroyed most of his wife’s personal papers. The weaknesses
in Klein’s book reflect that reality. Klein is able to add important new information to the story
of Leta’s life from unpublished autobiographies of Harry Hollingworth, and from family his-
tories and reminiscences of Nebraska kin. That said, a biographer must also take into account
the sometimes consciously or unconsciously selective memory reflected in these other first-
person accounts, and Klein does not have the multiple sources that would enable her to rely
less literally on single first-person or secondary sources. The inclusion of some previously un-
published photographs of Leta, from infancy through adulthood, are an especially wonderful
addition to the book. A drawback is that a number of quotes are given without reference to
their source and citation of some correspondence is given without noting which archive the
material is taken from. A few editing errors also occur (e.g., Leta’s day of birth is incorrectly
listed at one point). On the whole, A Forgotten Voice is a useful addition to work on Leta
Stetter Hollingworth, adding previously unknown details regarding her childhood and ado-
lescence in Nebraska. The book will certainly help to ensure that Leta Hollingworth will not
again be “lost” and, I hope, encourage further scholarship on this significant figure in twen-
tieth-century American psychology.
REFERENCES
Hollingworth, H. L. (1990). Leta Stetter Hollingworth: A biography. Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing Company.
Originally published in 1943 by the University of Nebraska Press.
Reviewed by STEPHANIE A. SHIELDS, Professor of Psychology and Women’s Studies, The

Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802.
398 BOOK REVIEWS
Rüdiger Safranski. Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography. Trans. by Shelley Frisch. New

York: W. W. Norton, 2002. 409 pp. $29.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-393-05008-4.
Christopher E. Forth. Zarathustra in Paris: The Nietzsche Vogue in France, 1891–1918.

DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001. 238 pp. $42.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-
87580-269-9.
Constructions of “Nietzsche” usually reflect the perspective of his particular biographer

or critic, thus making the field of Nietzsche interpretation one of the most important and con-
tentious arenas in which fundamental intellectual, political, and psychological issues are sym-
bolically fought out. Followers of aesthetic and political movements of all stripes, including
socialists, conservatives, fascists, anarchists, syndicalists, feminists, libertarians, and, in re-
cent American appropriations, even liberal democrats could draw inspiration from and find
corroboration in various aspects of Nietzsche’s thought. Although the German scholar
Rüdiger Safranski relegates the question of Nietzsche’s reception to a brief epilogue, his
splendid new intellectual biography is nonetheless very helpful in showing why Nietzsche’s
thought has been subject to so many different constructions over time. Drawing copiously on
Nietzsche’s letters, journals, and notes, as well as on his published works, Safranski consci-
entiously and persuasively traces the development of Nietzsche’s “highly personal philoso-
phy” (p. 298) from his lonely and pious childhood, through stages of Wagnerian obsession and
subsequent painful apostasy, to the maturation of his thought in his “enlightened” middle pe-
riod and its culmination in the ferociously provocative works of the last years before mental
derangement put an abrupt end to his productive life. Safranski is particularly successful in
grounding the evolution of Nietzsche’s thought both in his personal experiences and in the
mentality of the Bismarckian German Empire by which he was influenced and against which
he was reacting. The Nietzsche that emerges from Safranski’s plausible and sympathetic, but
not uncritical account is an intrepid pioneer of the process of thinking, determined “to mold
himself into a great individual” (p. 298) and to follow the “will to truth” wherever it would
lead him. In the felicitous words of Shelley Frisch, whose creative translation eschews a lit-
eral rendering of difficult phrases and passages in favor of conveying their meaning and
sense, Nietzsche “fancied himself a new Columbus of the mind, exploring territory as yet un-
charted by human cognition” (p. 15). “Kant had asked,” Safranski concludes, “whether we
ought to leave the terra firma of reason and venture out into the open sea of the unknown.
Kant had advocated remaining here. Nietzsche, however, ventured out” (p. 350).
Although he does not explicitly deal with the debate between “gentle” and “tough”
Nietzscheans—the debate on Nietzsche’s relationship to fascism—Safranski does very effec-
tively show the tension in Nietzsche’s thought that allowed his various interpreters to con-
struct apparently mutually exclusive versions of the same philosophy. Whatever else may be
said about the social and political ramifications of Nietzsche’s doctrine of the Übermensch
(fittingly left untranslated in the book), Nietzsche did try (in the end unsuccessfully) to em-
body what Safranski considers a major trait of the Übermensch: the habit of self-questioning
and self-overcoming that leads to higher levels of awareness. Safranski rightly stresses the im-
portance of Nietzsche’s break with Wagnerian Romanticism, citing a little-noted entry in
Nietzsche’s journal in 1877: “I wish to declare explicitly to the readers of my earlier works
that I have relinquished the metaphysical and artistic views that essentially dominated those
BOOK REVIEWS 399
works: they are agreeable, but untenable” (p. 135). In the soberly rational works of his mid-
dle period, beginning with Human, All Too Human (on which Cosima Wagner commented in
her diary, “Evil has triumphed here”) and culminating in the buoyant The Gay Science in
which the doctrine of the eternal recurrence is first set forth, Nietzsche turned away from the
comforting illusions of Wagnerian myth and transformed himself through the healing power
of self-reflection and self-knowledge. It is in this period that Nietzsche advocated what
Safranski calls a “bicameral system of culture,” one chamber providing the passionate fuel of
metaphysics, art, religion, and myth, the second chamber furnishing the cooling agent of
pragmatic, demystifying science to prevent the system from overheating. If Nietzsche had
continued to adhere to such a system, Safranski writes, “he might well have spared himself
some of the mad visions of grand politics and the will to power” (p. 200).
Although Safranski understands that by “will to power” Nietzsche meant primarily power
over self—“a principle of free self-configuration and self-enhancement”—he regrets that by
eventually offering this reductionist formula as an explanation of the world as a whole,
Nietzsche was “indulging in some mythologizing of his own” (p. 292), providing the kind of
monocausal, metaphysical principle that he continued to decry in received religion and
Wagnerian myth. Departing from the perspectivist position he had so eloquently defended in his
middle years, Nietzsche “wanted his theory to be a unified whole that would explain and clar-
ify everything” (p. 290). Notwithstanding his own earlier critique of science as itself a form of
myth, in propounding his doctrines of will to power and eternal recurrence, Nietzsche himself
fell under the spell of the positivist temper of his time and its faith in “scientific” natural or bi-
ological determinism. While Safranski recognizes that Nietzsche wanted to preserve human cre-
ativity when he attributed to the Übermensch the ability to “accept and even embrace the notion
of an existence entirely determined by the laws of nature without breaking down,” he is critical
of Nietzsche’s failure to maintain his earlier attitude of skepticism toward “the quest to elucidate
the world from one specific point” (p. 292). The “wrenching tension” in Nietzsche’s thought be-
tween two different visions of the world, “one of the great cosmic game and the other of power
as ‘causa prima’ ” (p. 293) helps to account for the very different ways in which Nietzsche has
been received. The Nietzsche who liberated himself from his “first nature”—who forced him-
self to be life-affirming because of his own submissive tendencies and propensity for pity—is
far more congenial to Safranski than the Nietzsche who allowed himself to be carried away by
the “second nature” he had created for himself. In his final years “the character that Nietzsche
had fashioned out of himself claimed the stage, and everything else yielded to the sensation of
this imaginative self-production” (p. 306). Safranski asks readers to approach Nietzsche’s works
with the same kind of ironic reserve that Nietzsche himself recommended, in a letter to an ad-
mirer in July 1888, as the most “intelligent attitude toward me” (p. 298).
Christopher Forth’s book on the reception of Nietzsche in France before the First World
War is a testament to the seemingly inexhaustible versatility of Nietzschean thought and to the
important role that competing interpretations of Nietzsche have played in the intellectual history
of the last century. What distinguishes Forth’s history of Nietzsche reception in France from ear-
lier, more comprehensive reception studies by Douglas Smith (1996) and (in French) Geneviève
Bianquis (1929), Louis Pinto (1995), and Jacques Le Rider (1999) is its sociological approach.
Struck by the “remarkable uniformity of perceptions corresponding to shared situations of writ-
ers with common positions and stakes in the intellectual world” (p. 6), Forth argues that view-
ing the divisions of French intellectual life through the lens of Nietzsche “provides a unique per-
spective on a social world whose conflicts helped shape cultural developments for much of the
twentieth century” (p. 7). Noting “a homology between a marginal social status in the intellec-
tual world and a propensity to embrace Nietzsche” (p. 168), Forth concludes that Nietzschean
400 BOOK REVIEWS
philosophy “functioned as a radical means of entry into the field for many unrecognized writ-
ers” (p. 24). Although Nietzsche’s paean to Wagner, Wagner in Bayreuth, was the first of his
works to be translated into French, it was the anti-Wagnerian Nietzsche of Le Cas Wagner
(French translation 1892) who first attracted wide notice and was deployed by the youthful lit-
erary avant-garde to attack the “decadence” of the declining Symbolist movement in the 1890s.
For antiestablishment youth the celebration of Nietzsche “was tantamount to a validation of their
own social identity as heroic yet misunderstood creators” (p. 31). What is perhaps most sur-
prising about the early Nietzsche vogue in France was his appropriation to affirm an aesthetic
of social engagement. “Until 1898 leftist and centrist devotees of Nietzsche were the rule rather
than the exception” (p. 32), with Dreyfusards vastly outnumbering anti-Dreyfusards among
Nietzsche’s early admirers. This would change in the years to come as the Right now increas-
ingly invoked Nietzsche in support of a rigid social hierarchy. Nonetheless his most fervent ad-
vocates remained on the left, including most notably Jean Jaurès and André Gide, while the roy-
alist Charles Maurras (notwithstanding the allure of Nietzsche for some members of the Action
Française) condemned the German philosopher as too individualistic.
Although one source of Nietzsche’s popularity was his defense of the superiority of
French culture, the growth of nationalism in the decade before the First World War adversely
affected his reputation in France. A new generation of conservative, Catholic, nationalist
youth now turned against the cultural icons of their elders, including Nietzsche. These young
nationalists now turned for inspiration to French culture heroes, such as Stendhal, whom one
of them called the “Nietzsche of our race” (p. 152). After 1910, as war clouds gathered, every
form of Nietzscheanism came under fire in France. But even after the onset of the Great War,
in the course of which Nietzsche came to be reviled as an “apostle of violence,” even so com-
mitted a nationalist as Maurice Barrès could recognize Nietzsche as a cultural ally of the
French, recalling that in the Franco-Prussian War “when the Louvre was bombed, Nietzsche
wept.” This observation, as Forth acidly notes, “might have put the destruction of the Rheims
cathedral [in World War One] in perspective” (p. 179).
The pre-war Nietzsche vogue in France marked only the first wave of Nietzsche’s reception
in France. The war had rudely interrupted an international project to build a Nietzsche memorial
outside Weimar, the cornerstone of which was to have been laid on the seventieth anniversary of
Nietzsche’s birth on 15 October 1914. The French sculptor Aristide Maillot had agreed to con-
struct the planned statue of Apollo, but because of the war the project never got off the ground.
A second period of French fascination with Nietzsche was again interrupted by war in 1939. And
now the third and arguably most important wave, the poststructuralist appropriation of Nietzsche,
seems also to have run its course. Whatever form the next phase of Nietzsche interpretation in
France may take, it seems safe to predict, if Forth’s lucidly written history is any guide, that he
will be embraced “as a means of radical distinction in the face of an intellectual orthodoxy” (p.
182). Forth would certainly agree with Safranski’s conclusion that all those “who regard thinking
as a central concern of life will keep coming back to Nietzsche” (p. 349).
REFERENCES
Bianquis, G. (1929). Nietzsche en France: L’influence de Nietzsche sur la pensée francaise. Paris: Alcan.
Le Rider, J. (1999). Nietzsche en France: De la fin du xixe siècle au temps présent. Paris: PUF.
Pinto, L. (1995). Les neveux de Zarathoustra: La réception de Nietzsche en France. Paris: Seuil
Smith, D. (1996). Transvaluations: Nietzshe in France, 1872–1972. New York: Oxford.
Reviewed by RODERICK STACKELBERG, Professor of History, Gonzaga University, Spokane,

WA 99258.
BOOK REVIEWS 401
Jonathan Andrews and Andrew Scull. Undertaker of the Mind: John Monro and Mad-
Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2001. xxii + 364 pp. $35.00 ISBN 0-520-23151-1.
Undertaker of the Mind investigates the life and times of Dr. John Monro, arguably the
most famous “mad-doctor”—a medical man specializing in the treatment of insanity—in
Georgian England. Monro did indeed have a fascinating life, being both the visiting physician
to the (in)famous Bethlehem Hospital, and also a renowned medical practitioner catering to
the London elite of the latter eighteenth century. In these capacities, his practice intersected
with many of the great political events of the time, including the attempted assassination of
George III by Margaret Nicholson and, ultimately, the madness of the King himself. Andrews
and Scull thus use Monro’s life to explore the “macrocosmic view of the place of madness in
eighteenth-century society and culture” (p. xii).
By the eighteenth century, Bethlehem Hospital was largely a nonprofit, charitable insti-
tution that had strong ties to the political elite in London. It also had a reputation as a tourist
attraction, as well as acting as a convenient metaphor for the ills of Georgian political life.
With the establishment in 1751 of a rival London voluntary institution, St. Luke’s, there
emerged a war of words over the nature of lunacy treatment, a battle that had not-too-subtle
political and religious overtones. Monro and Bethlehem were portrayed as being Anglican,
Tory, and reactionary; Battie and St. Luke’s were associated with dissent, Whig politics, and
reform. Andrews and Scull provide important correctives to this false dichotomy, suggesting
that both institutions adopted some of the new therapeutic approaches to the treatment of the
mad (such as the gradual reduction in the use of mechanical restraints) that were being em-
braced in Britain and France at that time.
The book’s central chapters explore the world of the eighteenth-century “trade in lu-
nacy,” and, in particular, the treatment of the “moneyed classes.” Here, the authors provide an
excellent update on the pioneering work of William Parry-Jones, published nearly three
decades ago. The rising merchant classes, as well as the aristocracy, began to use their wealth
to purchase domiciliary or institutional care for their insane relatives, and increasingly turned
to medical “experts” for advice and assistance. Monro creamed off the top of this new trade,
counting the elite of London and notable landed gentry among his clientele. Chapter four, for
example, summarizes the treatment by Monro (and others) of George Walpole, the third Earl
of Orford (and nephew of the British Prime Minister). Although Monro’s advice and assis-
tance was central to Walpole’s treatment, his services, and that of other mad doctors, remained
controversial. Medical men who engaged in this practice found themselves publicly ques-
tioned (and, at times, lampooned) for their involvement in what was considered by many to
be a morally dubious, financially motivated, and scientifically suspect enterprise.
The debate over the nature of madness and its appropriate treatment are highlighted in
the final chapter of the book, which analyzes two famous forensic cases: that of Earl Ferrers
(Lord Shirley), who murdered one of his senior servants in 1760; and that of Margaret
Nicholson, the woman who tried to assassinate George III with a butter knife in 1786. Monro
was invited to provide expert testimony in both cases, ushering in an important chapter in the
history of medical involvement in criminal cases, and promoting the evolution of the insanity
plea. Ferrers unsuccessfully invoked the defense of insanity for his actions (and was subse-
quently executed); “Mad Meg” was adjudged unfit to stand trial, and was sent to Bethlehem
402 BOOK REVIEWS
for the rest of her life. The immense popularity of the cases at the time bears witness to the
fascination accorded to madness and its impact on the Georgian political elite.
This book is a delightfully well-written and informative contribution to the history of psy-
chiatry. Its most novel addition to the literature lies in forging yet new ground in critical med-
ical biography and showing the benefits of incorporating elements of the new methodological
innovations being forged in an area best described as the new cultural history of medicine. The
authors do well to blend Scull’s recent success in biographical portraits, and his acerbic wit,
with Andrews’s eye for detail and encyclopedic knowledge of Bethlehem Hospital. The authors
made great use of the representations of madness in contemporaneous prints to reinforce ar-
guments or simply to add illustrative commentary. There is no simple thesis to the book—the
authors take pains to demonstrate the complexity of responses to insanity in later Georgian
England and the multiplicity of meanings attached to its representation.
Tensions in the book, however, emanate predictably from its title and inception. The au-
thors took two excellent studies of the life of Monro and Battie and decided to expand their
research to a full-length book, adding sections on the mad-doctoring trade, the treatment of
Lord Orford, the attempted assassination of “Mad Meg,” and the trial of Lord Ferrers. Yes,
they are connected to the life of Monro by being contemporaneous and because, for a very
brief time, Monro was involved in all three cases; however, there remains an uneasy cohabi-
tation in the book between the chapters on Monro and his trade, the history of Bethlehem, and
the (somewhat) tangential discussions of famous Georgian insanity trials.
In terms of their analysis of the mad-doctoring trade, Andrews and Scull succeed in
grounding their investigation of madness within the social and cultural context of Georgian
England. Their depictions of Monro and Battie are superb, easily the most nuanced and sub-
stantial portraits of eighteenth-century mad doctoring to date in the secondary literature. By
way of criticism, this reviewer felt the over-reliance on these two towering figures tends to
downplay the role of parishes and other provincial philanthropic institutions (York and
Manchester Asylums, for example) in the evolving mixed economy of care. Though one can
agree that Monro (and for that matter, his London rival, Battie) exemplified the potential of
the mad-doctoring trade, they seem to hold fascination because they were so very atypical.
Still, these are matters of interpretive debate, and should not be taken as any more than criti-
cal reflection on what is a book of the highest scholarship.
Reviewed by DAVID WRIGHT, Hannah Chair in the History of Medicine at McMaster
University, Hamilton, ON, Canada.
G. C. Bunn, A. D. Lovie, and G. D. Richards (Eds.) Psychology in Britain: Historical

Essays and Personal Reflections. Leicester, UK: British Psychological Society, 2001.
514 pp. £26.95. ISBN 1-85433-332-1.
When E. G. Boring initiated the American version of the history of modern psychology
in the late 1920s, he provided a set of compass points and a whipping horse for several gen-
erations of ambitious scholars. Across the Atlantic, historians of psychology have suffered
BOOK REVIEWS 403
from or enjoyed (depending on your standpoint) a relative absence of the grander narratives
that characterize some of the American literature. Strictly speaking, Psychology in Britain
does not aim to change this.
This volume is, as the subtitle suggests, a collection of original essays and personal
memoirs. It does well to fill in many gaps in the patchy record of British psychology, and will
provide interpretive impetus to boot. However, no overarching theme links this collection to-
gether. One has no choice but to evaluate it in terms of its individual elements. Still, it boasts
contributions from some of the finest historians on the British scene, and some of its most
important practitioners. Smoothly introduced by Bunn, it includes essays on the emergence of
a nineteenth-century discipline just beginning to call itself psychology and its struggle to de-
marcate itself from philosophy. To this end, there are worthy pieces on Edward Cox, George
Croom Robertson, and James Sully, as well as the establishment of the British Psychological
Society (BPS).
Most of these historians take the opportunity to probe the scientific, institutional, and
professional frames mediating the emergence of particular ideas, techniques, and careers.
Broader issues relating to the interface between psychology and its client markets (currently
a hot topic in the American literature) are reflected in analyses of social-problem research,
military work, and the popular circulation of psychological ideas. Several contributions also
stretch to provide comparative signposts to the particular and peculiar qualities of British psy-
chology—notably Baistow’s excellent account of the repackaging of behavioral techniques for
mass consumption, Dersken’s analysis of Eysenck’s clinical boundary work, and Wilson’s
piece on animal psychology. Only a handful (e.g., Smith on Sherrington, Collins on memory,
Hayward on mechanical models of mind) furnish much in the way of closely analyzed, nu-
anced intellectual history—relating as it might to contemporary research concerns. This may
limit the readership of psychologists.
What level of topic coverage should we expect? Although this volume covers a fair ex-
panse, there are some significant omissions. Post-1970s developments get short shrift, espe-
cially the elaboration of professional services and standards, government patronage, and pub-
lic accountability. Likewise, the opportunity to explore the impact of the cognitive turn and
recent cross-disciplinary ventures goes begging.
The personal reflections section is also an eclectic mix of tales, the type of which has
typically been published in stand-alone volumes. As is often the case, most are too short and
too lacking in detail to function effectively as primary source material. Nevertheless, some
key figures—including Michael Argyle, Michael Rutter, Margaret Boden, Richard Gregory,
Alan Baddeley, and Fay Fransella—contextualize aspects of their careers and personally color
in some of the blanks mentioned above.
Psychology in Britain has the appearance of being produced on a budget; it is less ex-
citing to look at than one might hope for and contains no photos or illustrations. The impres-
sion is that it is pitched at those in the know—experienced historians of the human sciences
rather than newcomers and budding psychology students. I found most pieces to be high qual-
ity, and more than useful in several cases. Published in conjunction with London’s Science
Museum, this book was commissioned by the BPS to mark the centenary of the Society but
is thankfully free of celebratory overtones. Hopefully, we won’t have to wait another 100 years
for similar volumes.
Reviewed by RODERICK D. BUCHANAN, Heymans Institute for Psychological Research,
University of Groningen, The Netherlands.
404 BOOK REVIEWS
Serge Nicolas. Histoire de la Psychologie française: Naissance d ’une Nouvelle Science.

Paris: In Press Editions, 2002. 350 pp. €23.00. ISBN 2-912404-72-X.
This publication marks the first history of French psychology as a new and autonomous
science. It has been preceded by Nicolas’s earlier journal articles and by other contributions
which the author acknowledges (e.g., Carroy & Plas, 1996; Brooks, 1998). This history is
only a precursor, in condensed form, of a more comprehensive study to appear in four further
volumes.
The book covers French psychology’s “prehistory” during the first half of the nineteenth
century in Part 1. Part 2, on the second half of the century, relates the struggle for the formal
acceptance of scientific psychology within the Université. In France, this included teaching
in secondary schools or Lycées as well as the Facultés themselves. In this regard, Nicolas con-
siders the work of Théodule Ribot (1839–1916), Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893), and
Alfred Binet (1857–1911) and his collaborators. Part 3 describes Pierre Janet (1859–1947),
Edouard Toulouse (1865–1947), and the work of Henri Piéron and Henri Wallon. Part 4 is
headed “The Professionalization of French Psychology,” and describes the development of in-
stitutional structures, the emergence of subdisciplines in psychology, and finally, a
“panorama” of present-day training of psychologists and their professional code. In describ-
ing the expansion of psychology in the twentieth century and its wide range of associated top-
ics, the author has taken a short cut. There is little detail on recent development in French psy-
chology, but in its place he has included a very long list of publications in the “Que sais je?”
series, dating from the year 1942 to 2001. Presumably this list serves as an index of topics.
One of the outstanding features of this history is its emphasis on the practice of psy-
chology: to this end the author has inserted 37 tables throughout the narrative, covering, for
example, titles of courses taught by professors, syllabuses, titles of theses, presidents of psy-
chological societies, and long lists of publications so that the reader sees what was happening
on the ground in psychological practice. Nicolas also shows the role of journals; in particu-
lar, he discusses the importance of La Revue Philosophique, founded by Ribot in 1876, and
L’Année Psychologique founded by Binet in 1895—the first publication devoted entirely to
psychology and its important reports of experimental work.
The author also describes foreign influences on French psychology—in particular
Spencerian evolutionary theory, as introduced by Ribot—and later Freud’s work as it influ-
enced psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, Nicolas also wishes to show what is distinctive about
French psychology without denying shortcomings and tardiness in some areas of its develop-
ment. In this respect, he cites the work of Pierre Janet’s synthesis of philosophical and med-
ical psychology.
A comparison with the first national history of British psychology (Hearnshaw, 1964)
shows two similarities. Both place the beginning of psychology as an independent science in
the nineteenth century. This represents what Richards (1996) identifies as a “newer” approach
to the history of psychology as opposed to the “classic approach.” Hearnshaw also included in-
stitutional history in his account, a feature prominent in Nicolas’s work. But the innovative as-
pect of this French work is the amount of information that the author presents in tabular form.
Nicolas’s target readership—historians and teachers of psychology, psychologists, psy-
chiatrists, and workers in the fields of education and health—may account for its more in-
strumental approach. For the time being, however, it has filled an important gap, and histori-
BOOK REVIEWS 405
ans of psychology will welcome the future volumes and hope for a more thorough study of
late twentieth century French psychology.
REFERENCES
Brooks, J. (1998). The eclectic legacy. Newark, DE: The University of Delaware Press.
Carroy, J., & Plas, R. (1996). The origins of French experimental psychology: Experiment and experimentalism.
History of the Human Sciences, 9, 73-84.
Hearnshaw, L. (1964). A short history of British psychology, 1840-1940. London: Methuen.
Richards, G. (1996). Putting psychology in its place. London: Routledge.
Reviewed by DIANA P. FABER, Honorary Research Fellow, Psychology Department, University

of Liverpool, United Kingdom.
Julia V. Douthwaite. The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster: Dangerous
Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment. Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 2002. 314 pp. $55.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-226-16055-6. $19.00 (paper). ISBN 0-226-
16056-4.
In this book, Julia V. Douthwaite examines scientific attempts to “perfect mankind” dur-
ing the Enlightenment in France and Britain and juxtaposes these experiments—some per-
formed, others imagined—with literary texts which were inspired by them and often directly
responded to them. Because the fictions explored the darker implications of scientific efforts
to understand and improve human nature by experimentally manipulating the development of
children, they shed light, Douthwaite claims, on the “sinister potential” (p. 146) of the
Enlightenment discourse on perfectibility. Douthwaite discerns a shift in literary reactions to
scientific developments: whereas in the early eighteenth century, science’s ambition to reveal
the truth about human nature was viewed with confidence and optimism, by the 1790s (after
the excesses of the Terror), French and English literary works expressed apprehension instead.
The first chapter shows how three “wild children”—Peter of Hanover, Marie-Angélique
Leblanc, and Victor of Aveyron—aroused considerable interest and a flurry of writing be-
cause they were expected to elucidate Enlightenment debates on the definition of the human
and the malleability of human beings. As in her earlier prize-winning article (1994–1995),
here Douthwaite stresses the gendered responses to the wild children. The “savage girl” puz-
zled her contemporaries despite her remarkable transformation. Less threatening, Victor ben-
efited from Itard’s innovative experimental methods, which relied on a new understanding of
mental pathology and an “unwillingness to make value judgments” (p. 64). Chapter 2 reviews
the thought experiments formulated by sensationist philosophers and scientists. Buffon,
Condillac, and Bonnet had recourse to the figure of a fully formed man or an animated statue
to develop a scientific and experimental approach to the mind, but Douthwaite dismisses their
attempts to turn fiction into fact as “a startling sleight of hand” (p. 77). Although Scottish
philosophers such as Hume and Ferguson distanced themselves from French sensationism,
Douthwaite observes in them a similar adherence to a “loosely defined” (p. 84) experimen-
406 BOOK REVIEWS
talism, dubious treatment of evidence, and concern with the articulation of more dependable
experimental methods. The sensationist model of the mind and learning had contradictory po-
litical ramifications, leading to rationalized justifications for the exclusion of women and the
poor, or to ambitious proposals for social and educational reform.
Chapter 3 looks at the “darker side” of, and “internal paradoxes, contradictions, and in-
felicities” (p. 93) contained in Rousseau’s influential Emile and the educational fictions of
other eighteenth-century authors, with the aim of uncovering the inhumane means they de-
ployed and advocated. Douthwaite is troubled by the authoritarian undertones of these texts’
pedagogies and their promotion of cruel and dubious experiments on animals as a “useful pas-
time” (p. 122). She is even more troubled by the “real-life experiments” she describes in chap-
ter 4, in which zealous parents or interested guardians (her examples are Richard Lovell
Edgeworth, Thomas Day, and Manon Roland) purported to apply Rousseauian methods to
“perfect” their charges, with results ranging from disappointing to outright disastrous. The ed-
ucational treatise-novels of Mme de Genlis and the Edgeworths outlined “a more feasible, re-
sponsible, even ‘scientific’ ” (p. 135) appropriation of Rousseau’s ideas, but the controlling
tendencies Douthwaite notices in them lead her to conclude that all these texts, by limiting
freedom in the name of perfectibility, “set a dangerous precedent for childrearing” (p. 159).
The last chapter traces the uses of perfectibility during the revolutionary years, in par-
ticular in the political and cultural discourse on “regenerated man,” and ends with a discus-
sion of dystopian literary texts of the 1790s. The fictions of Maria Edgeworth and Eliza
Fenwick probed the dangerous undercurrent of Enlightenment obsession with perfecting
human nature from a gendered perspective, while the works of Sade and Révéroni Saint-Cyr
negated the notion of perfectibility by means of a ruthless exploitation of and experimenta-
tion on human subjects for private pleasures. These texts, Douthwaite suggests, lay the ground
for Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which the monster both embodies and smashes the scientific
dream of perfected man.
By bringing together scientific and literary texts, the author effectively demonstrates the
extent to which during the Enlightenment human science resorted to fiction in its pursuit of
“facts” while literature represented scientific themes and the anxieties to which they gave rise.
Some readers may not fully share Douthwaite’s bleak assessment of Enlightenment per-
fectibility. After all, what would an education that would not seek to improve and meddle with
the child look like? Others may find the idea of a general shift in literature’s attitude to science
(from optimism to apprehension) and a parallel yet opposite shift in the history of wild chil-
dren (from apprehension to optimism) not entirely convincing. The research is extensive and
the readings insightful, but not all the inferences are warranted, nor all facts accurate. Just one
example: Douthwaite echoes Candland’s (1993) misleading assertion that Arbuthnot’s work on
Peter of Hanover “amounted to an observation, not an experiment” (p. 60), yet since Arbuthnot
left no record of his methods, we have no way of knowing what they amounted to. But because
it provokes important and intriguing questions, this lively book deserves a wide readership.
REFERENCES
Candland, D. K. (1993). Feral children and clever animals: Reflections on human nature. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Douthwaite, J. (1994–1995). Rewriting the savage: The extraordinary fictions of the “wild girl of Champagne.”
Eighteenth-Century Studies, 28(2), 163–192.
Reviewed by ADRIANA S. BENZAQUÉN, Assistant Professor of History, Mount Saint Vincent

University, Halifax, NS, Canada, B3M 2J6.
BOOK REVIEWS 407
David Halperin. How to Do the History of Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 2002. 208 pp. $30.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-226-31447-2.
With a flood of recent scholarship on the history of (homo)sexualities appearing from

the humanities and social sciences, can a new book in the area deliver on the promise con-
tained in the title, “How to do the history of homosexuality”? This book raises high expecta-
tions, and it succeeds in carefully sorting through many debates and cross-disciplinary mis-
understandings in order to arrive at a strong thesis on how best to conceptualize modern
homosexuality and its antecedents. Despite taking on many of the minutiae of sometimes
highly specialized areas of evidence and scholarly dispute, there is not one lifeless word in the
writing of this book. On every page is a strong sense of the parrying between sometimes
closely aligned positions, an intense and vigorous engagement with disparate philosophical
and interpretive sources, and a compelling argumentation that makes sense of the various fits,
starts, and long trajectories of research on sexual history.
There are four extended essays collected in this volume, each of which has appeared in
print in an earlier version before, and are now tied together with a reflective, semi-autobio-
graphical introduction. Perhaps the key essay is the one that bears the title of the volume as a
whole, where Halperin proposes an analysis “readily acknowledging the existence of trans-
historical continuities, reintegrating them into the frame of analysis, and reinterpreting their
significance within a genealogical understanding of the emergence of (homo)sexuality itself ”
(p. 106). This essay navigates through the debates around social construction and essential-
ism, works upon and through Foucault and queer theory, and seeks to arrive at a rebalancing
between the idiographic preferences of cultural studies and the nomothetic interests of social
science. The queer theory wave of the 1990s tended toward cutting off contemporary lesbian,
gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) people from any commonalities with pre-twentieth-
century peoples or nonwestern societies, it invested a great deal in de(con)structing contem-
porary identities, and it promoted the notion of historical and cultural discontinuities. Now it
is fascinating to see a willingness to recognize “transhistorical continuities” and, as Stephen
Murray argues, the few major recurrent patterns of same-sex relationship that emerge from
both historical and anthropological evidence, and reconcile them with the theoretical gains of
discourse analyses.
Halperin’s proposal to rebalance these views is persuasively argued and is destined (or at
least ought to be destined!) to have a major effect on the study of sexualities. He contends that
scholars should attend to four major discursive traditions in male same-sex relations: “(1) ef-
feminacy, (2) paederasty or ‘active’ sodomy, (3) friendship or male love, and (4) passivity or
inversion” (p. 109). Each recurs sometimes episodically, sometimes as major or minor tradi-
tions in a wide range of societies, and each merits documentation and interpretation without
being too quickly subsumed under the label of homosexuality. And he notes that while “ho-
mosexuality” represents a new historical configuration, out of which LGBT identities have
arisen, its influence as a cultural category is perhaps as much as an overlay or umbrella con-
ception than as a genuinely homogenizing or universalizing category. This proposal of course
applies to male relationships; in another essay in the book, Halperin challenges lesbian histo-
riography with a similar task, offering a strong critique of pitfalls in contemporary scholar-
ship, but without taking the next step toward a parallel delineation of discursive traditions in
female same-sex relations. (Martha Vicinus’s nineteenth-century social scripts of the passing
408 BOOK REVIEWS
woman, the mannish woman, the libertine, and the romantic friend may be the place to start
in pursuing this agenda.)
Overall, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of sexualities.
REFERENCES
Murray, S.O. (2000). Homosexualities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Reviewed by BARRY D. ADAM, University Professor of Sociology, University of Windsor,

Windsor, ON, Canada.
Ian A. M. Nicholson. Inventing Personality: Gordon Allport and the Science of Selfhood.
Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2003. 301 pp. $39.95 (cloth).
ISBN 1-55798-929-X.
Gordon Allport is a paradoxical figure in the history of American psychology, variously

described as both “father and critic” of the Five-Factor Model of personality traits (John &
Robins, 1993), as advocating yet mistrusting studies of individual lives (Cohler, 1993), as
modernist and mystic. In an exceptional book that combines biography with intellectual and
cultural history, Ian Nicholson examines the tensions that pervaded Allport’s work and gave
rise to these paradoxical images. Focusing on the years between Allport’s birth in 1897 and
his presidency of the American Psychological Association in 1939, Nicholson draws upon a
careful reading of archival materials, family papers, and primary and secondary sources from
a wide range of disciplines. He suggests that Allport pursued two contradictory goals in pro-
moting the psychology of “personality.” Measuring personality with tests of “traits,” he
sought to define it as a devaluated natural object of scientific control. At the same time, he
attempted to preserve personality as a unique spiritual essence that could be captured only in-
completely by scientific methods.
The tension between these goals, Nicholson argues, was not Allport’s alone. Instead, it
characterized the field of psychology, which in turn reflected shifts in popular conceptions of
the self during the early decades of the twentieth century. At the disciplinary level,
Nicholson’s portrait of Allport suggests an embodiment of David Bakan’s “mystery-mastery
complex” in psychology, “the simultaneous pursuit” of conflicting objectives—to keep per-
sonality from being understood, but also to master (predict and control) human behavior
(Bakan, 1965, p. 186). Nicholson suggests that Allport’s appeal to American psychologists
during the interwar period lay in his commitment to both goals and in his ability to bridge di-
visions between psychologists who disagreed as to whether psychology should be a natural or
a human science, a pure or an applied science.
Rather than focus primarily on these intradisciplinary tensions or on a chronicle of
Allport’s theoretical contributions, Nicholson relates the discourse of personality to broader
cultural trends. This innovative approach is one of the major strengths of his book. Far from
being a neutral scientific term, he suggests, “personality” carried multiple meanings during a
BOOK REVIEWS 409
period of rapid modernization in the United States. As Americans turned from religious to
secular sources of authority, they substituted the self-expressive concept of “personality” for
the older, morally tinged concept of “character.” Like many Americans, however, Allport was
reluctant to abandon the older concept of self, and he used the modern language of “person-
ality” to preserve moral values associated with character, backing them up with scientific au-
thority. Drawing on the work of historian T. J. Jackson Lears (1981), Nicholson illuminates
Allport’s antimodernist tendencies, emphasizing his “psychological religiousness” and the
moral concerns underlying his work in a field that was ostensibly scientific and value neutral.
Another strength of the book is Nicholson’s challenge to the criticism that scientific bi-
ography reveals nothing more than trivial details of an individual life. Quoting from Allport’s
journal and from personal correspondence, he provides a rich and complex view of Allport
without losing sight of the broader contexts that framed his experience. Readers familiar with
images of Allport as staid and diplomatic will find delightful revelations of a youthful Allport
dancing and drinking “hootch,” poking fun at E. B. Titchener, or mimicking an absent-minded
Charles Spearman. Here, too, are poignant glimpses of Allport’s family life, based on
Nicholson’s interviews with Allport’s son Robert. These biographical details, however, are
carefully chosen to illustrate broader social and cultural themes—changing moral standards,
conflicting definitions of psychology, and shifting concepts of gender during the interwar pe-
riod. Nicholson’s close examination of Allport’s life shows that he was far from a solitary in-
ventor of personality psychology. At the same time, it calls into question generalizations re-
garding the exclusive modernism of the discipline.
Situating Allport’s promotion of “personality” within the cultural landscape, Nicholson
provides rich insights into the use of psychological language to address spiritual and cultural
uncertainties. Although his purpose is not to examine in detail Allport’s research or his teach-
ing, I would have liked to see more applications of Nicholson’s insights to these areas.
Allport’s advocacy of idiographic methods, for example, might be used to illustrate his fasci-
nation with “pure” individuality. Also, Allport’s private expressions of distaste for his public
pose as a scientist might be considered alongside his own efforts (largely “behind the scenes”
and often unsuccessful) to promote case studies and other “unscientific” methods, and his stu-
dents’ research using these methods. To me, they suggest that Allport’s difficulties in pub-
lishing such studies resulted more from institutional pressures than from his own ambiva-
lence. Clearly, this compelling and thought-provoking study suggests many possibilities for
further research. Nicholson’s examination of the ethical and spiritual tensions informing
Allport’s work adds a new dimension to the history of personality psychology and raises in-
triguing questions regarding the “cultural work” of other psychological concepts.
REFERENCES
Bakan, D. (1965). The mystery-mastery complex in contemporary psychology. American Psychologist, 20, 186-191.
Cohler, B. J. (1993). Describing lives: Gordon Allport and the “science” of personality. In K. H. Craik, R. Hogan, &
R. N. Wolfe (Eds.), Fifty years of personality psychology (pp. 131-146). New York: Plenum.
John, O. P., & Robins, R. W. (1993). Gordon Allport: Father and critic of the Five-Factor Model. In K. H. Craik, R.
Hogan, & R. N. Wolfe (Eds.), Fifty years of personality psychology (pp. 215-236). New York: Plenum.
Lears, T. J. Jackson. (1981). No place of grace: Antimodernism and the transformation of American culture. New
York: Pantheon Books.
Reviewed by NICOLE B. BARENBAUM, Professor of Psychology, University of the South,

Sewanee, TN 37383.
410 BOOK REVIEWS
Allan Megill. Karl Marx: The Burden of Reason (Why Marx Rejected Politics and the
Market). Boston: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002. 400 pp. $85.00 (cloth). ISBN
0-7425-1165-0. $27.95 (paper). ISBN 0-7425-1166-9.
Situating Marx among nineteenth-century thinkers (e.g., Hegel, Fichte, Comte) who be-
lieved a knowable, unified rationality existed in the world (p. 3), Allan Megill contends that
Marx’s theory of history is premised on a “unitarist,” embedded rationalism that he began to
develop between 1837 and 1841. Hegel, Aristotle, and Spinoza were key to Marx’s philosoph-
ical premises but they also led to the “basic defect of Marxian theory in general [which] lies
in its all-too-global application of an all-too-restrictive conception of rationality” (p. 179). This
meticulously developed thesis is far-reaching but it succeeds through a “trick of definition,”
and Megill could have taken this challenging monograph in more rewarding directions.
Combating conservative, post-Hegelian philosophy in 1840–1841, Marx gained insight
into the active, subjective side of the dialectic through the Aristotle of Hegel’s History of
Philosophy—the true locus of Hegel’s historical dialectic. The image of philosophers debat-
ing in the Lyceum to achieve progressively closer approximations to truth presented the
progress of reason as necessary and, through contradiction, unfolding. Hegel further histori-
cized and universalized Aristotle’s dialectic—Mind (Geist), transcending the contradictions
discovered in its historical development as scientific intellect (Verstand), which is progres-
sively revealed as a more ramified manifestation of reality’s systematic whole, which, as such,
is the embedded Reason (Vernunft), or Absolute Rationality, of history.
Complementing Hegel’s “massive” impact, Spinoza’s materialist naturalism helped sub-
stantiate the idea of a world “that requires nothing outside itself for its self-production” (p. 5).
Feuerbach’s “Preliminary Theses on the Reform of Philosophy,” and experiences with the
Rheinische Zeitung influenced the shift towards a materialist analysis, but Spinoza was cru-
cial to Marx’s conception of an unfolding, embedded rationality to human history, which be-
came manifest through material human activity. The history of material production parallels,
and helps Marx supersede, Hegel’s history of philosophy. Marx’s historical materialist view
of history “has its initial impulse in the confrontation between humans’ needs and nature’s
paltriness,” and it progresses through “the self-correcting mechanism that is scientific testing”
(p. 206). In future socialist society people will take control of their lives through “the knowl-
edge they have of the laws of production and of society” (p. 229).
Detailed discussions of politics and the market follow directly from chapter one. Megill (p.
101) argues that due to “the tightness of his rationality-criteria,” Marx, “from the beginning . . .
really had no conceptual space for politics.” Instead, the communist revolution “would establish
a non-political state within which the course of action to be pursued would be determined sci-
entifically and not through a process of political deliberation and debate” (p. 118). Scientific
knowledge of the embedded reason of nature and society would, logically, eliminate the need for
negotiated compromise. Similarly, as an irrational means of allocating scarce resources, the
market would be replaced by a perfect, scientifically coordinated system of allocation.
Megill’s critique of Marx hinges on chapter one, but it contains a definitional ruse. Marx
is presented as a “hyper-enlightenment” (p. 179) thinker, committed solely to the unity of
knowledge and an underlying rationality to the world that would be revealed historically. If
one accepts this Enlightenment worldview, then history will determine the truth, or falsity, of
the Weltanschaung. If one rejects it, then everything premised on it falls apart. Few still be-
BOOK REVIEWS 411
lieve in the ultimate rationality of reality, so Marx’s positions on politics and the market, as
logical outcomes of an embedded rationality, seem hopelessly misguided. But was Marx
locked into an Enlightenment worldview? Did he reject political debate or the market? Or are
there places in his work where Marx broke out of the Enlightenment mindset or established
premises that would lead elsewhere? Are these aspects of his work more fruitful to explore
than the burden of Enlightenment Reason?
Had Megill extended Marx’s formative period into 1845, he might have written a differ-
ent book. Feuerbach’s “Preliminary Theses” proposed analyzing concepts or beliefs by locat-
ing their root in experience to expose “an estrangement and subservience not previously vis-
ible” (p. 19). In 1844, as Megill documents, Marx argued that the primary estrangement of
bourgeois society was, first and foremost, from the act of production—the fundamental, cre-
ative basis of social history—which is simultaneously head and hand; the conceiving and
building of things; the creation of ideas and social relationships; the building of base and su-
perstructure. As a humanly creative process, the act of production supersedes the thrust of
Marx’s Enlightenment-inspired, embedded rationality and is the departure point for an under-
standing of history in which people create their lives and optimize their potential through his-
torically situated debate over needs and wants. Karl Korsch and other Western Marxists em-
phasized this dimension of Marx’s work against Orthodox and Scientific Marxism and it is
here one should look for Marx’s continued relevance today. No one can deny the
Enlightenment dimension of Marx’s thought, or that his transcendence of Hegel was incom-
plete. There are certainly different passages that demonstrate Marx’s hyper-enlightenment,
embedded rationalism. But Marx wrote until 1883; his transcendence of Hegel extended past
1841. Marx’s critique of political economy fashioned—if not the transcendence of the burden
of Reason and Hegel—significant tensions that undermine the embedded rationalism thesis.
These aspects of Marx’s oeuvre might be less provocative but they are also more fruitful keys
to the potential of Marx’s legacy.
Reviewed by ROB BEAMISH, Associate Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology and
School of Physical and Health Education, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada K7L 3N6.
The author comments:

I am grateful to Professor Beamish for the effort he has expended in reading at least part
of Karl Marx: The Burden of Reason. It seems strange, however, that Professor Beamish
thinks that Karl Marx: The Burden of Reason does not deal with the Marx of 1845, given that
the last of its four substantial chapters analyzes so-called “historical materialism” in some de-
tail. And clearly Professor Beamish was not interested in any “meticulous” reading of the sec-
ond and third chapters, which ask a historical question: How and why did Marx come to the
conclusion that politics and the market (private property, exchange, money) would ultimately
be relegated to the dustbin of history? These chapters show a crux in Marx’s project, not a
critic’s “definitional ruse.”
Karl Marx: The Burden of Reason is first of all a historical study. Professor Beamish
would have preferred a study emphasizing “more fruitful keys to the potential of Marx’s
legacy” than the aspect of Marx that the book focuses on, namely, the rationality-criteria of
universality, necessity, and predictivity. Tellingly, Professor Beamish cannot quite bring him-
self to deny that what the book finds in Marx is really there. The primary task of the historian
is not to strengthen “legacies”; it is to tell truth about the past even when we do not like it.
Karl Marx: The Burden of Reason is an attempt to clarify certain assumptions that shaped
Marx’s theoretical project. It is then up to us to make our own way in the present.
412 BOOK REVIEWS
There are historical scholars today who hold that the essential task of history-writing is
to serve the good cause in the present (it being manifest to right-thinking persons which
cause, exactly, the good cause is). Such a view is a corruption of the historian’s task. People
in related fields should avoid offering unwitting support to the view that it is perfectly legiti-
mate to bend our representations of the past in the interests of better serving the cause (any
cause) in the present. If a political or social theorist wishes to deploy insights from Marx in
his or her attempt to make sense of the social order, this is legitimate. What is not legitimate
is the often-made claim—probably born more of insecurity than of arrogance—that what one
is doing in such a case is offering an account of what Marx’s theoretical project really was.
ALLAN MEGILL, University of Virginia.
Martin Fichman. Evolutionary Theory and Victorian Culture. New York: Humanity Books,
2002. 256 pp. $21.00 (paper). ISBN 1-59102-003-4.
Many historians of science have dedicated their efforts to the study of evolutionary the-
ory and its diverse cultural implications, focusing mostly on Darwin’s role. Martin Fichman
attempts to provide a more balanced view of how the co-discoverers of the principle of natu-
ral selection, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, arrived at their theories, and the
major differences in their conceptions of human evolution. The bulk of Fichman’s book de-
picts the many debates on the political, religious, racial, and ethical aspects of evolutionary
theories. Accordingly, extensive parts of his essay deal with the socio-political context of
nineteenth century Great Britain, including gender issues and reactions to evolutionary the-
ory in popular culture (through literature and satirical periodicals). Fichman stresses the im-
portance of the process of “professionalization” of science, “crucial” in his eyes, to under-
standing the controversies, then and now, that accompany the discussions of evolution. He
also analyzes, in an interesting fashion, the two-way relationship between evolutionism and
imperialism, insisting upon the importance of Darwin’s and Wallace’s expeditions to exotic
parts of the world for the formation of their theories, and the successive political attempts to
justify colonialism and racism in the name of evolution. The reader is offered, thus, a very
vivid image of Victorian society around the time of publication of The Origin of Species
(1859), conveyed in an engaging narrative style.
In a brief survey of “social Darwinism(s),” Fichman further ascertains the role of spe-
cialization and professionalization as eminent factors in establishing the “neutrality” of sci-
ence and its place as an authority in questions political and ethical. He quickly alludes to
Herbert Spencer’s philosophical system, Francis Galton’s eugenics, Ernst Haeckel’s monism,
Peter Kropotkin’s theory of “mutual aid,” and Thomas Henry Huxley’s agnosticism. Although
it is impossible to fully develop in a short chapter the innumerable doctrines designated with
the appellation “social Darwinism,” one wonders why the author chose to include Germany
and Russia in his account and did not mention French interpretations of evolutionary theory,
and the role they played in the formation of modern sociology and political ideologies such
as “solidarisme.”
BOOK REVIEWS 413
Stretching the boundaries of Victorian culture, Fichman devotes nearly two chapters to
reactions to evolutionism in the United States. He offers a rather harrowing depiction of the
activities of the American Institution for Creation Research and the diverse legal cases on the
teaching of evolutionary theory in schools throughout the country (including the legendary
Scopes trial of 1925). This detailed summary gives the reader an acute sense of the relevance
of Victorian debates to our times. However, Fichman’s emphasis on transatlantic evolutionism
(almost a quarter of the book), renders the title of his essay somewhat problematic, unless
“Victorian Culture” is understood in the broad meaning of “Anglo-Saxon Culture.”
In the rest of the book, Fichman studies carefully the divergence between Darwin and
Wallace on the “meaning of evolution,” and, more specifically, the latter’s development of a
spiritualistic position in favor of “evolutionary theism.” He expands the subject to incorporate
the topic of evolutionary ethics and discuss various approaches, notably Huxley’s “ethical
twist.” Fichman, naturally, evokes Spencer’s moral theory, but the eminent Victorian philoso-
pher is awarded much less attention in the book than the trinity of Darwin-Wallace-Huxley.
Although it may be argued that Spencer’s contribution to the theory of natural selection was
only secondary, when the focal point is human evolution, he deserves to be analyzed in greater
detail (especially if reactions to evolutionism in the United States are being discussed).
These reservations aside, Fichman’s essay provides a very good introduction to the study
of evolutionism in its various formulations and the importance of political and cultural as-
pects attached to it.
Reviewed by NAOMI BECK, Université de Paris-1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne)/The University of
Chicago.
Published online in Wiley Interscience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002 /jhbs.10158
Andreas Mayer. Mikroskopie der Psyche. Die Anfänge der Psychoanalyse im Hypnose-Labor.
Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002. 283 pp. €28.00 (paper). ISBN 3-89244-616-4.
Lydia Marinelli and Andreas Mayer. Träume nach Freud. Die “Traumdeutung” und die
Geschichte der psychoanalytischen Bewegung. Wien: Turia + Kant, 2002. 217 pp.
€22.00 (paper). ISBN 3-85132-321-1.
“Hysterical women can be viewed as the laboratory frogs of experimental psychology”

(p. 62), declared Charles Féré, working as Jean-Martin Charcot’s assistant at the Salpêtrière,
and thus signifying in a single sentence the complex cultural context in which the unconscious
emerged as a scientific object. And yet, this was just one strand in the rich genealogy of psy-
choanalysis, as Andreas Mayer has now demonstrated. Hippolyte Bernheim and his thera-
peutic setting at Nancy formed an early version of psychosomatic medicine, and physicians
like Oskar Vogt combined aspects from both practices for their own versions of psychother-
apy. Knowing most of these actors and their practices, Sigmund Freud developed psycho-
analysis and its setting very much in consequence of the broad scientific debate on the ex-
perimentalization of the unconscious and in an interaction with the constraints resulting from
his specific position in Vienna.
414 BOOK REVIEWS
The main steps of this history are apparently so well known that they supposedly leave lit-
tle room for a new analysis, apart from various forms of taking sides with, for example, neglected
actors such as the (female) patients or with renegades of the Freudians. It counts among Mayer’s
major achievements to have presented us with a genealogy of psychoanalysis that undercuts the
fruitless stalemates of the “Freud wars.” Instead, he provides us with a disturbingly new reading
of the well known path toward psychoanalysis. His “microscopy of the psyche” replaces the ha-
giographic genealogy of psychoanalysis as codified already by Freud himself and his biographer
Ernest Jones with its Foucauldian double. Where others either localized a great divide between a
prehistory of blind attempts with magnetic healing, hysterical performances, and hypnosis on the
one side and the heroic act of the self analysis on the other, or denounced the hagiographic ac-
count on the basis of their specific presuppositions, Mayer describes a rich field of scientific in-
vestigations into the supposed territory of the unconscious; research practices guided by well-es-
tablished scientific strategies and formed in complex processes of negotiation.
Mayer follows the symmetry principle of social studies of science (the book derived from
his dissertation in sociology) and he thus demonstrates that this is not a moral imperative but a
question of epistemological scrutiny. Although he also presents various hitherto neglected figures
such as Joseph Delbœuf, the richness of his account unfolds, above all, as a fresh and carefully
carved look at the well-known experiments with hypnosis from Charcot to Freud. He analyzes
them as a series of heterogeneous practices, each one forged and formed by local contingencies
and specific epistemological constraints. Mayer writes his analysis as a detailed and sometimes
minute geography of spaces and settings, in which clinical facts are being produced, put on stage,
recorded, and stored. With this ethnomethodological distance from the actors’ view upon their de-
bates, he convincingly shows how experimentation with hypnosis developed into a complex to-
pography of only partially stable research strategies into the unconscious. Furthermore, the un-
conscious appears as something formed by the very history of this series of locally and
temporarily stabilized practices. In this view, Freud’s “virtualization of technology” (p. 221), his
shift from experimental strategies according to the laboratory model of science to discursive
means for mediating the unconscious as scientific object, is no longer the heroic breakthrough of
an unashamedly self-critical mind, but results from the constraints he encountered in transfering
practices he had studied in France to his local and hostile setting in Vienna.
The strength of Mayer’s account of the emergence of psychoanalysis in the hypnosis lab-
oratory lies in its focus on scientific practices, bypassing the furious debates on psychoana-
lytical theory. He shows how close a sociology of scientific practices can come to a historical
epistemology of psychoanalysis, although his book may have benefited further from high-
lighting the differences rather than obfuscating them.
That his methodology was the result of a carefully weighed decision is proved in the sec-
ond book, co-edited by Mayer with Lydia Marinelli from the Freud Museum in Vienna, in
which both analyze the development of psychoanalytic theory. Marinelli and Mayer recon-
struct the history of its document of origin, Freud’s Traumdeutung. Very much in contrast to
its codified appearance in the Gesammelte Schriften or the Standard Edition, Freud’s first
major book changed dramatically in the course of its eight editions between 1899 and 1930.
The two authors describe the additions and alterations of Freud’s text in the context of the de-
veloping psychoanalytic movement as the product of various competing strategies to foster
psychoanalysis’s scientific standing. The curiosity that the Traumdeutung is still cited as the
double volume II/III of the Gesammelte Schriften forms part of this complex history, along
with the elimination of contributions from former collaborators such as Otto Rank, or the
plain fact that a critical edition of this book is still lacking. What others may have collected
in form of a scandalmongering story of psychoanalysis’s unsoundness, these authors analyze
BOOK REVIEWS 415
as part and parcel of the interactions within the group of actors, including friends and foes,
reading patients, criticizing colleagues, cooperating translators, etc.
The authors complement their essay—which is a thoroughly revised version of their contri-
bution to the collected centenary volume on the Traumdeutung (Marinelli & Mayer, 2000)—with
an extended list of sources on the history of the Traumdeutung, mainly from the Library of
Congress: an early parody on the Traumdeutung by Sigmund’s younger brother Alexander Freud,
seven letters by the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler to Freud, three letters form the correspon-
dence between Freud and Alphonse Maeder, and Otto Rank’s addenda to the fourth edition 1914;
each of which is carefully introduced and annotated, forming together one-third of the book.
REFERENCE
Marinelli, L., & Mayer, A. (Eds.) (2000). Die Lesbarkeit der Träume: Zur Geschichte von Freuds “Traumdeutung.”
Frankfurt am Main: Fischer.
Reviewed by CORNELIUS BORCK, Research Group “Writing Life,” Bauhaus University

Weimar, Germany.
Uta Gerhardt. Talcott Parsons: An Intellectual Biography. Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2002. 311 pp. £47.50 (cloth). ISBN 0-52181-022-1.
“Who now reads Gouldner?” Nothing seems more attractive, when writing on Talcott
Parsons, than to paraphrase once again the famous first sentence of The Structure of Social
Action (Parsons, 1937). It becomes even more tempting because Talcott Parsons: An
Intellectual Biography, written by the well-known German sociologist Uta Gerhardt, starts
precisely from the first sentence of the first Parsonian masterpiece—a quote from Crane
Brinton that asked originally, as any sociologist knows, “Who now reads Spencer?”—to re-
construct Parsons’s intellectual and political flight. Gerhardt’s book, to be sure, is no mere re-
construction of Parsons’s oeuvre, nor a chronicle of his life. Deeply immersing herself in the
Talcott Parsons Papers kept at the Harvard University Archives, Gerhardt has crafted a larger-
than-life image of Parsons as a champion of democratic thought, intensely involved in the
domestic and international political issues of his day, and ready to give his time and knowl-
edge to help promote freedom and equality literally “all over the world.”
Each of the book’s four chapters deals with a major phase of Parsons’s professional life:
the political meaning of The Structure; the years between 1938 and 1945, which saw Parsons
deeply involved in understanding National Socialism as a complex (cultural and structural) so-
cietal phenomenon; the postwar effort and the political roots of The Social System (Parsons,
1951); and the 1960s, characterized by the upsurge of the Civil Rights Movement and, from a
theoretical point of view, by Parsons’s repudiation of structural functionalism in favor of a more
sophisticated theory based on systemic interchange and generalized media of communication.
Using a panoply of published and unpublished documents—including correspondence, re-
search grant proposals, meeting minutes, memorandums, and conference drafts—Gerhardt
shows convincingly how Parsons’s political ideas and aspirations were all one with his more
416 BOOK REVIEWS
theoretically oriented research, and how the latter would frequently change its direction to deal
with substantial problems raised by the development of democracy. Among the highlights of
the book are the paragraphs on Spencerism and social Darwinism in the first chapter, which
remind us of what sociological theory used to be both in Europe and America less than one
century ago; the discussion on the rising importance of the “professional complex”; the many
unknown stories from the war and postwar days; and the analyses of Watergate and the events
of 1968, which show Parsons’s continuing effort to understand his time.
Having presented the book’s strong points, we can now go back to our first (and not so
enigmatic) sentence. What does Alvin Gouldner have to do with Uta Gerhardt? The answer
could be “almost everything,” for Gerhardt’s Parsons is declaredly intended to be the exact op-
posite of the abstract theorist cloistered in Harvard’s ivory tower depicted by Gouldner in his
seminal work, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (1970). Not only is Gerhardt’s Parsons
a progressive intellectual, deeply embedded in his time, but his thought is always straightfor-
ward, “healthy,” no-nonsense; his political stance in favor of American democracy is always
without doubts, but nonetheless fair and thoughtful (as in the episode in which Parsons op-
poses the further development of nuclear weapons); his sense of responsibility always well-
tuned with his own theoretical Weberian roots. The book may well have been titled Talcott
Parsons: An American Hero—the only spot on this immaculate record being Charles Wright
Mills’s exclusion as a speaker from the Sixth World Congress of Sociology in 1962 (p. 191).
Maybe the reader can decide for herself if such a fight against Gouldner’s allegations is,
today, a timely effort or not; this would not be too important if the book had only a historical
intent. In fact, in addition to this rather uncritical stance towards Parsons as an individual, the
book suffers from another evident, more theoretical flaw. Gerhardt always seems to accept
Parsons’s sociological analyses at face value. For example, she demonstrates quite convinc-
ingly how, in The Structure and beyond, Parsons juxtaposes American democracy as an inte-
grated society with German totalitarianism as an anomic, that is, Hobbesian, type of society
(pp. 45-48 and pp. 276-277). This seems highly questionable from a theoretical point of view,
for Parsons’s thesis against utilitarianism, the thesis for which The Structure has become a
worldwide theoretical classic, excludes that anything like a purely anomic, Hobbesian soci-
ety could exist. The Hobbesian problem of order is discarded in the third chapter as the best
account of what a purely utilitarian world would look like but, precisely because it is the best
account, it is also the most unbearable from a sociological-theoretical point of view. In
Gerhardt’s book, we do not find any discussion of this (at least apparent) contradiction be-
tween the voluntaristic framework and Parsons’s substantive inquiry. Nor do we find a dis-
cussion of the many and well-known critiques of Parsons’s analogy between money, power,
influence, and value commitment. In the end, the reader does not understand if Parsons made
any (sociological, as well as political) errors throughout his intellectual career.
Her intensely sympathetic stance towards Parsons’s work probably explains why Gerhardt
herself tends to conflate the empirical and the theoretical level of sociological analysis even
where Parsons does not. When Gerhardt, for example, writes that Parsons “used the term of so-
cietal community for the Greek polis despite the fact that categories of members such as slaves
and women were excluded from the unity that constituted equality” (p. 258), she squanders, on
the one hand, the analytical power of a general-theoretical concept (“societal community”)
which in itself has nothing to do with democracy and modernization. On the other hand, she
refuses to offer any reflective sociological interpretation of Parsons’s concepts. All in all,
Gerhardt seems entrapped in the short circuit between the “formal” and “substantial” dimen-
sions of Parsons’s voluntarism, which Jeffrey C. Alexander explained so well 25 years ago (see,
for another example, p. 279 ff.). Maybe a careful interpretive work on Parsons’s “missing
BOOK REVIEWS 417
book”—the large unpublished manuscript on The American Societal Community, which sur-
faces from time to time in critical literature—would have shown the subtleties of late Parsonian
theory, paradoxically permitting Gerhardt to distance herself from her too-narrow focus on
“Parsons as a democratic theorist.” Without this, I think, a fine and unprecedented effort in his-
torical reconstruction has remained a dubious accomplishment in sociological reasoning.
REFERENCES
Gouldner, A. W. (1970). The coming crisis of Western sociology. New York: Basic Books.
Parsons, T. (1937). The structure of social action. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Parsons, T. (1951). The social system. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Reviewed by MATTEO BORTOLINI, Researcher in Sociology of Cultural and Communicative

Processes, University of Padua, Italy.
Timothy W. Kneeland and Carol A.B. Warren. Pushbutton Psychiatry: A History of

Electroshock in America. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002. 162 pp. $62.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-
275-96815-4.
This is the first book devoted to electroshock or electroconvulsive treatment (EST or

ECT) that does not seek to explain how the procedure “works.” Kneeland, a historian, and
Warren, a sociologist, do not try to determine whether ECT, “the treatment that brings together
the head and brain of the patient with the electrical machine” (p. 43), has survived the century
because it “rebalances neurotransmitters” or because it “disables the brain,” because it induces
an epileptic seizure, or because it courses electricity through the brain. These and many other
views are, of course, faithfully represented in the words of their best-known and lesser-known
proponents. Rather, Kneeland and Warren ask, “What does ECT mean?” and artfully weave in-
dividual, professional, and cultural meanings and burdens into a history of electrotherapeutics,
psychiatry, and gender roles. This is undoubtedly the first social history of ECT.
The slimness of the volume belies the scope, depth, and accuracy of the coverage and the
reliance on an enormously varied repertoire of primary and secondary sources (but no footnotes
or endnotes). The authors chose to explore the relationship between electricity and psychiatry
against the background of ancient and modern electrotherapeutics. The introduction situates the
story of EST both in the golden age of American electrical inventions (1870s to the 1900s), and
in ancient debates over the nature of the body, health, and illness. The establishment of the mod-
ern economic marketplace is seen as the milieu for the development of electrical machinery, the
assembly line, and electrotherapeutics. European and American fascination with the machine
culminated in the 1930s invention of “pushbutton psychiatry” in the EST device.
Chapter 1 illustrates the interplay of science with entertainment during the late seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, and the association of electrical medicine with gimmickry
and quackery. Electrical inventions and applications, “like revolutionary politics, [went] back
and forth across the Atlantic” (p. xi). Chapter 2 explores the American fascination with elec-
tricity during the great age of the asylum. Both public and private psychiatry and electrother-
418 BOOK REVIEWS
apy became highly specialized during the nineteenth century, but the arrival of psychoanaly-
sis ushered the decline of electrical treatment—until the birth of EST in April 1938.
Chapters 3 to 5 explore the birth, death, and rebirth of electroshock over the next six
decades. The astounding initial acceptance of ECT quickly overshadowed earlier treat-
ments—but not practices—of institutional psychiatry: despite ECT’s novelty, its use quickly
focused on distress and disorder among women. In the 1960s and 1970s, there rose a still-fa-
mous backlash against ECT. This occurred in the context of the patients’ rights movement,
professional rivalries, and the rebellion against authority. Earlier lone complaints of patients
grew into a hostile chorus as individuals treated against their will spoke and wrote against
ECT, joined by anti-ECT psychiatrists. However, legislative efforts to ban or regulate ECT
failed during the 1970s and 1980s, as ECT’s restoration was beginning.
In the 1990s, against the background of political and economic movements in medicine
(insurance, then managed care), ECT returned triumphantly as an appropriate treatment for a
wide range of diagnoses. “New and improved” ECT became promoted as a first resort and
even a preventive treatment. As celebrity patients praised the treatment, a National Institute
of Mental Health conference in 1985, and various psychiatric task forces, consecrated ECT
for the next generation of practitioners. However, “although the ancient patriarchal hierar-
chies of electrical medicine were not displaced, something was new: elderly bodies, as well
as women’s bodies, became the subject of ECT treatment” (p. xii). An intriguing epilogue
closes the story at the start of the twenty-first century, when ECT is unchallenged within psy-
chiatry and where elaborate pro- or anti-ECT web sites proliferate. The authors remind read-
ers that now, as long ago, other electric and magnetic treatments have appeared on the fringes
and are moving into the mainstream.
Kneeland and Warren’s masterful study shows not only how ECT—like many other so-
matic treatments in medicine and psychiatry—has moved through cycles of invention, accep-
tance, rejection, and re-acceptance, but also how culture shapes and intertwines our bodies,
minds, and machines.
Reviewed by DAVID COHEN, Professor of Social Work, Florida International University,
Miami, FL 33199.
Thomas Nickles (Ed.). Thomas Kuhn. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 298
pp. £45.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-521-79206-1. £16.95 (paper). ISBN 0-521-79648-2.
Attention to detail is evident from the disconcertingly intimate photograph on the cover
to the well-chosen selected reference list of this edited volume. This meaty yet diverse col-
lection reflects Kuhn’s most influential work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in
being provocative, rather piecemeal in sources of insight, and difficult to categorize. The vol-
ume is a real treat for those with a particular interest in Kuhn’s work and impact, but it is dif-
ficult to say whether it is true to its promise of being accessible to someone new to Kuhn.
The first three background essays (by, respectively, Friedman, Gutting, and Worrall) and
the last essay of the volume (by Longino) focus in on specific aspects of Kuhn’s influences
BOOK REVIEWS 419
and influence. Friedman provides well-written, detailed analysis of the intellectual lineage of
Kuhn and the Logical Empiricists, disentangling how they differ from one another, and how
they do not. Gutting clarifies the notions of scientific progress, rationality, and realism by ex-
amining how Kuhn relates to, and lagged behind, some key thinkers in French philosophy of
science (though Kuhn had only “glancing contact” and “no serious understanding” [p. 45] of
them). Worrall’s essay is a romp behind the scenes of the famous debate between Popper and
Kuhn, with Duhem and Lakatos featured as prominent players, and it manages to nicely ar-
ticulate the primary conceptual stakes in the debate. Longino reviews the unintended conse-
quences Kuhn had on feminist ideology, how several important feminists used Kuhn with lim-
ited success, but how drawing from him a pluralistic “contextual empiricism” may be fruitful
to the feminist agenda.
The other essays are less about influences and more about ideas. Rouse and Barnes each,
with very different orientations (Rouse “revisionist” and Barnes “sociological”), explore Kuhn’s
emphasis on science as a practice. The other four essays (by Nickles; Nersessian; Barker, Chen,
& Anderson; and Grandy) examine overlaps in Kuhn’s work and cognitive science. From this
reader’s (discipline-biased) perspective, these, especially the first three, are the most stimulating
of the volume. They extend Kuhn in the direction of how the mind works. Do we learn, and do
concepts change, based on knowledge of rules, exemplars, cases, models, anecdotes, and/or
frames, and on processes of pattern recognition and/or ostension? The relevance these questions
and their answers may have for real world applications such as work in artificial intelligence and
development of educational curricula is tantalizing. And the authors do a good job of referring
their extensions back to Kuhn to redress identifiable problems in his treatise (notably in recon-
ceptualizing incommensurability). Although there is some common coverage in the four cogni-
tive science essays, each does offer unique and intriguing contributions.
Nickles writes that “Scientific activity is ‘multipass’. . . in the sense that various practi-
tioners keep cycling back to refine a seemingly important result, again and again, each time
investing it with greater theoretical or experimental richness” (p. 154). His quote happens to
capture the spirit of this collection. Together these essays cycle back over a selection of
Kuhn’s most prominent ambiguities—e.g., distinguishing between normal and revolutionary
science and defining precisely how concepts in science change—and are successful in in-
vesting those points with greater richness, and on occasion significantly greater clarity.
Furthermore, the collection recapitulates Kuhn in diversity of method, with some essays em-
ploying biographical details about Kuhn, some using scientific case studies, and some re-
viewing and augmenting philosophical arguments, in order to make their points. Serious stu-
dents and regulars of philosophy of science, history of science, psychology, and cultural and
social studies, will find much in this volume to rouse revolutions in thought.
Reviewed by ERIN DRIVER-LINN, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Psychology, Harvard
University, Cambridge, MA 02138.
Deborah Hayden. Pox: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis. New York: Basic
Books, 2003. xx + 379 pp. $27.50 (cloth). ISBN 0-465-02881-0.
420 BOOK REVIEWS
The history of syphilis offers a fascinating if frustrating challenge for historians.

Everything about this disease is controversial. Its origins are shrouded in mystery; there are
difficult problems posed by protean symptoms and signs; and the accuracy of retrospective
diagnoses is problematic. One thing is clear: syphilis was a serious disease from the sixteenth
through the mid-twentieth century.
What is venereal syphilis? Outwardly, it is a largely sexually transmitted chronic disease
caused by the Treponema pallidum, a spirochete that reproduces rapidly in the early stage. The
characteristic symptom in the primary stage is a chancre that heals within weeks. In the sec-
ond stage, the infection is asymptomatic and generally not contagious. In the tertiary stage,
which develops in perhaps one-third of untreated cases, any organ can be affected. The most
serious forms of tertiary syphilis involve the central nervous and cardiovascular systems.
Neurosyphilis includes locomotor ataxia and a form of insanity (paresis or general paralysis
of the insane). Because the spirochete disseminates in all organs and systems, the clinical
symptoms are protean and hence can be confused with a myriad of other diseases.
Deborah Hayden begins her book with a brief summary of the controversy dealing with
the alleged New World origin of syphilis, although conceding that the evidence in favor is not
definitive. She then provides a description and history of the disease and the manner in which
it was understood at various times. Hayden is not in the social constructionist tradition; she
understands the health consequences of this devastating disease and does not dwell on stigma-
tization. Most of the book is devoted to a discussion of a series of eminent figures who might
have had syphilis and the impact of the disease on their lives. The individuals include Ludwig
van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Charles Baudelaire, Mary Todd and
Abraham Lincoln, Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, Vincent van Gogh, Friedrich
Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, Karen Blixen, James Joyce, and Adolf Hitler. The evidence, she sug-
gests, leads to the conclusion that all of these figures had been infected with the spirochete,
and that the disease had a dramatic impact upon their lives and their work.
Retrospective diagnosis, as Hayden concedes, is a “fragile art” (p. 60). In the nineteenth
century, there was an implicit agreement that the diagnosis of syphilis should be avoided.
Instead, physicians employed such terms as paralytica dementia, paresis, or occasionally
paralysis. Biographers often overlooked the disease; the absence of the diagnosis in the liter-
ary record led many to simply miss its presence. Its shifting symptomatology caused them to
see “only the diseases that syphilis mimics” (p. 64). Yet, concludes Hayden, there is in many
cases “overwhelming circumstantial evidence” as well as a “pinch of intuition” that leads to
a high probability of the presence of the spirochete (p. 66).
In successive chapters, Hayden examines the evidence to support the claim that the in-
dividuals she is studying had syphilis. In some cases, there is evidence of an initial infection;
in other cases, the evidence is more circumstantial. Beethoven’s life is in some ways typical.
A physician (who burned all of his correspondence with the composer) told Alexander Thayer
(who was writing a biography) that he had treated Beethoven for lues with mercury; subse-
quent symptoms seemed to confirm a diagnosis consistent with a syphilitic infection. A post-
mortem examination of his bones decades after his death suggested syphilitic meningovas-
culitis; his cirrhosis was attributed to the same disease. His aberrant behavior in later life also
hints that he might be approaching the paretic stage. Yet in this case, as in others, the evidence
is capable of other interpretations. Mercury, for example, was a nonspecific medication used
to treat a wide variety of conditions. Similarly, individuals were exposed to a variety of in-
fections at this time, many of which had similar symptoms. In pointing this out, I do not mean
to criticize Hayden. Her analyses of her subjects are both incisive and thought provoking even
if alternative explanations are possible. Hayden’s attempts to relate the consequences of
BOOK REVIEWS 421
syphilis to the artistic and literary works of her subjects, on the other hand, are much less per-
suasive, and seem to be more of an afterthought.
Hayden’s greatest contribution is to call attention to the medical significance of
syphilis in the nineteenth century. Since the advent of antibiotic therapy, relatively little at-
tention has been devoted to the disease despite its high prevalence. Historians have tended
to focus on the origins of the disease, efforts to suppress prostitution, and stigmatization of
victims. Even if her interpretations are subject to debate, she has written a book that de-
serves a wide readership.
Reviewed by GERALD N. GROB, Henry E. Sigerist Professor of the History of Medicine
Emeritus, Institute for Health Policy, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901.
William H. Tucker. The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer
Fund. Champaign IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002. 286 pp. $34.95 (cloth). ISBN
0-252-02762-0.
First, a disclosure: William H. Tucker and I have been researching the same subjects al-
though for different purposes. He and I have corresponded about some of the figures in
Funding Scientific Racism and have pointed each other to this archival resource or that. I
make this disclosure not to attempt to take any credit for Tucker’s book, which is very much
his own, but in order to make my interests and my (very minimal) involvement with his proj-
ect known. I am motivated to make this unusual disclosure because the subject of Tucker’s
book, reclusive millionaire Wickliffe Draper, went to such great lengths to hide his interests
and his involvement with the projects he funded throughout much of the twentieth century.
Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve (1995) focused attention on the
Pioneer Fund, a philanthropic agency that did not fund The Bell Curve itself but did fund
many studies that it cited. Critics of The Bell Curve claimed that Pioneer was a racist, or even
a neo-Nazi, organization. Defenders of the Fund, most notably its chief officer, attorney Harry
F. Weyher, claimed that Pioneer only funded pure academic research, that it had no political
agenda and that the liberal, politically correct media were spreading lies about the Fund.
The truth, as Tucker meticulously documents here, is that the Pioneer Fund was a con-
sistent supporter of racist organizations and individuals. Draper’s racial worldview was not
that unusual for the pre-World War II United States: the United States was a white, or more
specifically Nordic, country and it needed to be protected from racial pollution from inferior
stocks. To prevent “breeding downward,” racial segregation should be rigidly observed and
immigration from southern and eastern Europe should be sharply curtailed.
Pioneer’s purported scientific agenda was not, according to Tucker, “to finance studies
that would demonstrate white, northern European genetic superiority but to support projects
that would use this presumptive fact as a point of departure and encourage policies to prevent
the contamination of this superior group by inferior races, especially blacks” (p. 56). As
Tucker documents, Draper never wavered from his prewar racial beliefs and the Pioneer Fund
never wavered from its racial agenda from its founding to today.
422 BOOK REVIEWS
Draper formed Pioneer in 1937, but it remained fairly quiet until the immediate threat of
desegregation in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. Draper was a
generous benefactor of various aspects of the “Massive Resistance” movement the white South
mounted to maintain segregation. Not only did Draper’s largess extend to purportedly scien-
tific documents such as Wesley Critz George’s Biology of the Race Problem or former APA
president Henry E. Garrett’s well-known efforts on behalf of segregation, but also to purely po-
litical organizations such as the Citizen Councils, the notorious Mississippi Sovereignty
Commission, and the Coordinating Committee for Fundamental American Freedoms—an or-
ganization formed to fight the bill that became the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In the years since
the failure to maintain racial segregation, Pioneer has turned to funding any number of ex-
tremist organizations such as American Renaissance, Nordicist Roger Pearson’s Institute for
the Study of Man, and the American Immigration Control Foundation.
This book is painstakingly documented and cannot be dismissed as a “liberal smear” as
defenders of Pioneer are prone to do. Tucker has done a prodigious amount of research and
makes an effective case that the Pioneer Fund finances much more than disinterested scien-
tific research. Like Tucker’s previous book (1994), this belongs on the shelves of anyone in-
terested in the history of the scientific study of race in the twentieth-century United States.
REFERENCES
Herrnstein, R. J., & Murray, C. (1994). The bell curve: Intelligence and class structure in American life. New York:
The Free Press.
Tucker, W. H. (1994). The science and politics of racial research. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
Reviewed by JOHN P. JACKSON JR., Department of Communication, University of Colorado,

Boulder CO 80309-0270.
Curtis M. Hinsley and David R. Wilcox (Eds.). The Lost Itinerary of Frank Hamilton
Cushing. Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 2002. 382 pp. $50.00 (cloth).
ISBN 0-8165-2269-3.
This wonderful exercise in archival and historical detective work is part of an ongoing proj-
ect to piece together a documentary history of the Hemenway Expedition, the first important ar-
chaeological exploration of the Southwest. (The first volume, The Southwest in the American
Imagination: The Writings of Sylvester Baxter, 1881–1889, was published in 1996.) This vol-
ume, which reunites fragments of the journals and later writings of the expedition’s leader, Frank
Hamilton Cushing, from the dusty corners of far-flung archival collections, offers students of
the history of archaeology and anthropology a glimpse at the Southwest, the Zuni Indians, and
the fledgling sciences of human cultures through the eyes of one of the period’s most fascinat-
ing and elusive characters. Cushing had more interesting adventures than most Americans, he
had an extraordinary eye for details other people missed, and he wrote with both flair and in-
sight, but he was plagued by illness, poverty, and other tribulations, and much of his writing re-
mained scattered in lost fragments until the work of these two tireless detectives brought them
BOOK REVIEWS 423
together and arranged them into an unfinished but coherent narrative. The result is an extremely
readable account of Cushing’s travels, work, and associates (Zuni and American) that will, with
the other volumes in this series, greatly advance our understanding of this critical period in the
development of the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology. It was during expeditions like
this one that careful work in the field began to refine and challenge the universalist assumptions
of evolutionary theorists and moved the disciplines in more historically specific directions.
While this book is of importance to students of the history of archaeology and anthro-
pology, it would be a shame if it did not also gain the attention of historians of late-nineteenth-
century American culture. Curtis Hinsley has, with his historical contribution here, placed
Cushing and his work in the context of the complicated and sometimes contradictory intel-
lectual world of Victorian America, continuing work he has published in several collections
of essays and in The Smithsonian and the American Indian: Making a Moral Anthropology in
Victorian America (Hinsley, 1994). In addition to providing readers with the critical tools nec-
essary to make sense of Cushing’s complex relationships with his Zuni friends and inform-
ants, his fellow scientists, and his family, Hinsley offers us insight into the world of a new
kind of philanthropy that was vital, inspiring, and capricious all at once. His study of Mary
Hemenway, the Boston philanthropist who, intrigued by Cushing’s work linking Zuni mythol-
ogy to Zuni prehistory through a brilliant ability to read both into and out of the American
desert landscape, adds an important facet to our understanding of the means and ends of this
new kind of patron and the society in which she lived.
Finally, the editors, Curtis Hinsley and David Wilcox, should be credited for making
available an engaging set of primary documents through which students at all levels can come
to understand the realities of the late-nineteenth-century frontier and the challenges of early
archaeological fieldwork. Carefully chosen photographs help us to see what Cushing saw, in
Massachusetts as well as Arizona, and reproductions of his notes and sketches allow us to
share the experience of archival discovery while taking advantage of the easy availability of
this published work. Cushing writes well, and Hinsley and Wilcox help us to be alert to bi-
ases that were shaped by the circumstances under which these fragments were created. This
book is both a valuable resource and a good story.
REFERENCES
Hinsley, C. M. (1994). The Smithsonian and the American Indian: Making a moral anthropology in Victorian
America. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Hinsley, C. M., & Wilcox, D. R. (Eds.) (1996). The Southwest in the American imagination: The writings of Sylvester
Baxter, 1881-1889. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.
Reviewed by ELIZA MCFEELY, Assistant Professor of History, The College of New Jersey,
Ewing, NJ 08628.
Marina Leitner. Ein gut gehütetes Geheimnis. Die Geschichte der psychoanalytischen
Behandlungs-Technik von den Anfängen in Wien bis zur Gründung der Berliner
Poliklinik im Jahr 1920. Giessen: Psychosozial-Verlag, 2001. 446 pp. €35.50 (paper).
ISBN 3-89806-046-2.
424 BOOK REVIEWS
The discussion about the correct and best psychoanalytical method of treatment is al-
most as old as psychoanalysis itself. The diversification of psychoanalytic movements them-
selves did not contribute to more unity in this issue in the present, as was the case in pre-war
Vienna or Berlin. If one takes a glance at the early history of psychoanalysis, tensions with
regard to treatment already existed between Sigmund Freud and the first generation of his
students. Should one keep quiet about a disputed issue? The Austrian psychologist Marina
Leitner moved this well-kept secret into the center of her scientific research. Even in the
early development of the psychotherapeutic application of psychoanalysis, the question con-
cerning psychoanalytic technique gained in weight with the establishment of the first insti-
tutes, which functioned as training sites, and finally with the adoption of guiding principles
for training.
During the establishment of these guiding principles, which initially gained in status in
Germany and then internationally within the Internationale Psychoanalytische Vereinigung,
the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute became the center of psychoanalytic attention. Vienna
contributed considerably, since over time many Viennese psychoanalysts migrated to Berlin.
One preliminary finding highlighted in her book is the small number of scientific pub-
lications concerning the method of treatment. This seems to stand in contrast to the great
significance placed on methods within the framework of psychoanalytic training. Leitner
puts forth the hypothesis that in the pioneering phase of psychoanalysis each psychoanalyst
was forced to find his or her own method based on trial and error. This is one of the main
reasons that Freud’s publications concerning the methods of treatment left plenty of leeway
and room for interpretation for practicing psychoanalysis. However, André Haynal’s ques-
tioning the very existence of psychoanalytic technique in the preface to this book seems in
some ways overstated.
In order to reveal Freud’s therapeutic methods in her present research, Leitner reviews
Freud’s well-known cases. The viewpoint here is as unsparing as it is balanced: the achieve-
ments of psychoanalysis are covered as well as the failures of early treatment efforts. The au-
thor describes the overall development of psychoanalysis by conducting a chronological
search for positions on the question concerning technique.
The spread and structural organization of psychoanalysis are developed chronologically,
and advances made in the early years are highlighted. According to Leitner, the first and fore-
most motivation for the institutionalization of training, especially for the Berlin founders of
psychoanalysis, can be traced back to their own bad experiences with regard to the substandard
education they received during therapeutic activities. There might well be truth in this question
the author poses in the conclusion. However, the standardization of training is also a necessary
prerequisite of any successful establishment and additionally produces transparency. A greater
consideration of such professional and sociological aspects would have benefited the conclud-
ing thesis. What is surprising, however, is the author’s astonishment with regard to the scant re-
sults of her search for early documents on psychoanalytic technique. And one should question
Haynal’s monocausal stance in the preface, since the sociohistoric conditions supported the au-
thoritarian structures of the distinctive relationships between the master and the student during
the birth of psychoanalysis. Several of these correctly observed characteristics of this profes-
sion-in-the-making undoubtedly can also be found in the establishment phase of other proce-
dures in psychotherapy or in completely different professions.
Regardless of these minor criticisms, there should be no doubt that this research is a sig-
nificant contribution to the history of psychoanalysis. To Leitner’s credit, she has dealt with a
neglected topic and presented a scientific work with clear results comprehensible to both ex-
perts and laypersons.
BOOK REVIEWS 425
Reviewed by THOMAS MUELLER, Charité-Universitaetsmedizin Berlin, Center for the
Humanities and Health Sciences (ZHGB), Institute for the History of Medicine, Benjamin
Franklin Campus, Klingsorstr. 119, 12203 Berlin, Germany.
Philip J. Pauly. Biologists and the Promise of American Life: From Meriwether Lewis to
Alfred Kinsey. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. 313 pp. ISBN 0-691-04977-7.
In the “science wars” of the 1990s, it was often alleged that historians and sociologists
of science, by locating science in culture, attacked it. Because science has been traditionally
viewed as aloof from culture, any picture that challenged this implicitly challenged science.
Moreover, it has been a commonplace that science requires isolation from the cultural forces
that constantly threaten to distort it—politics, religion, fashion, even (in the interpretations of
an earlier era) femininity. If a historian showed that science was not isolated from its cultural
surroundings, it meant that the science had been distorted, and therefore was not objective,
not reliable, and ultimately not true.
Whatever plausibility such views might once have had, they are demolished by historian
Philip J. Pauly in Biologists and the Promise of American Life. In this thoughtful and grace-
fully written book, Pauly shows how American biologists in the first half of the twentieth cen-
tury took on the project of developing the science of biology in the United States as a cultural
project. Fifty years before the term “sociobiology” became a household word (but with a dif-
ferent meaning) in the hands of E. O. Wilson, biologist William Ritter joined forces with his
benefactor E. W. Scripps on a project they called “socio-biology”—a “blueprint for the im-
provement of American life.” Ritter, Scripps, and many of their colleagues believed that biol-
ogy, properly understood, could provide the foundation for a better understanding of human
society, and thereby a better life. They sought to expand American biology both as a profes-
sional activity and as a force responding to and shaping American culture.
Pauly organizes his narrative around a double entendre of the word “culture”—the com-
mon sense, as the social and political world we live in, and the biological sense of cultivated
growth—and shows how biologists promoted biology as a cultural project in both ways. On
the one hand, they wanted to culture biology: to increase its scope and presence in American
universities, to increase the numbers of professional biologists, and to increase its rigor and
focus. But they also wanted to culture American society: to improve the social and political
world through a better understanding of scientific principles. Their aspirations were multiply
cultural, determined by the world in which they lived and by their own determination to im-
prove (culture) that world. They were committed to a thoroughgoing engagement, and this en-
gagement made their science potent. While they may have failed in their aspirations to accel-
erate evolution and make Americans more intelligent, or to convince women not to wear
high-heeled shoes, they succeeded in making biology a standard part of American high school
education, in improving horticultural products, controlling invasive pests, and, through the pi-
oneering work of evolutionary biologist-turned-sex-researcher Alfred Kinsey, in influencing
“what Americans did in their most private lives.” (Or, if not what they actually did, at least
how they spoke and felt about it.)
426 BOOK REVIEWS
Pauly’s book is a much-needed corrective to the idea that the social world, when it im-
pinges on science, contaminates it. He shows us a world of scientists deeply engaged in a pro-
ject that they understood as simultaneously moral, social, political, and thoroughly scientific.
Pauly gives us an enlarged vision of what science has been in the past, and therefore of what
it might once again be in the future.
Reviewed by NAOMI ORESKES, Associate Professor of History and Director, Science Studies
Program, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0104.
Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World. New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. 588 pp. $30.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-374-19449-8.
Jenny Uglow’s very readable and enjoyable book provides an effectively managed, and
finely drawn, collective biography of the “Lunatics,” the members of the Lunar Society of
Birmingham, which met from the 1760s to the 1790s. The central members of this informal
Society were Erasmus Darwin, James Watt, Matthew Boulton, Joseph Priestley, and Josiah
Wedgwood. These five men of the subtitle are all virtually household names. Other less well-
known, but no less colorful, members included William Withering, James Keir, Richard
Lovell Edgeworth, Thomas Day, and Samuel Galton. At least since Robert Schofield’s (1963)
pioneering studies of 40 years ago, the Lunatics have been seen as both instrumental in, and
symbolic of, the pursuit of industrially connected scientific inquiry, as an early manifestation
of that provincial enthusiasm, thirst for knowledge and love of innovation that helped to drive
the industrial transformation of Britain. The Lunatics were at the center of the steam revolu-
tion, the expansion of the consumer culture, and the intellectual turbulence of the late
Enlightenment and of the American and French Revolutions.
Unlike much academic writing on this group, Uglow’s collective portrait brings the char-
acters to life, letting us see how the boisterous and fertile Erasmus Darwin, the dour and anx-
ious Watt, the risk-taking Boulton, and the other characters urged each other on through tri-
umphs, disappointments, and tragic loss. Rather cleverly organized into parts titled “Waxing,”
“First Quarter,” through to “Fourth Quarter,” and finally “Waning,” the book presents 40 care-
fully researched episodes, each of which could stand alone but participates in producing a cu-
mulative effect. A given individual takes center stage for a while and then moves to the back-
ground as the turn in the limelight of another arrives. The gradual progress through the
quarters of their collective lives conveys a powerful impression. Close-up one can get lost in
detail but, as with an impressionist painting, the overall effect, especially if this rather long
book can be read in a few sittings, is a clear and pleasing picture of a remarkable group.
The Lunar Men is a particularly fine example of “Sobel Effect” literature, directed to
popular audiences, that has burgeoned in the wake of Dava Sobel’s books Longitude and
Galileo’s Daughter (Miller, 2002; Sobel, 1995, 1999). Such work does a great service in
bringing the history of science to wider attention, but it can also risk overemphasis on indi-
vidual “heroic” biography. Uglow’s project rises above this danger, and being a collective bi-
ography, readily makes the point that science, invention, and innovation are a collective en-
BOOK REVIEWS 427
terprise rather than the simple, spontaneous product of individual genius. The book draws ex-
pertly and effectively on the latest academic work as well as on primary sources.
There is, nevertheless, a certain rosiness about the picture that Uglow paints. There is ev-
idence, for example, that Matthew Boulton was a truly ruthless individual in business, a point
that doesn’t come out strongly here. Maureen McNeil’s Under the Banner of Science (1987),
which centers on Erasmus Darwin but also characterizes the Lunar group, conveyed in a way
that Uglow does not, some of the less appealing aspects of the Lunatics’ “bourgeois” tenden-
cies. Inventiveness and enthusiasm were part of their story, but so too were grasping accu-
mulation, legal street fighting, exploitation of subordinates and workforces, and hard-nosed
ideological political manipulation. The Lunatics’ charmed lives were not uniformly charming.
Seeing the group occasionally from “outside” rather than exclusively through its members’
mutual interactions would show more of this darker side of the lunar circle. It is an aspect that
we don’t see much of in these pages.
This criticism aside, The Lunar Men is to be thoroughly recommended as a reliable and
engaging introduction to a remarkable group of men, their multifarious works and ideas, their
families, and the turbulent historical period through which they lived.
REFERENCES
McNeil, M. (1987). Under the banner of science: Erasmus Darwin and his age. Manchester: Manchester University
Press.
Miller, D. P. (2002). The Sobel effect. Metascience, 11, 185-200.
Schofield, R. E. (1963). The Lunar Society of Birmingham. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Sobel, D. (1995). Longitude: The true story of a lone genius who solved the greatest scientific problem of his time.
New York: Walker.
Sobel, D. (1999). Galileo’s daughter. New York: Walker.
Reviewed by DAVID PHILIP MILLER, School of History and Philosophy of Science, The
University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia.
Dennis Raymond Bryson. Socializing the Young: The Role of Foundations, 1923-1941.
Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 2002. 225 pp. $67.95 (cloth). ISBN: 0-89789-662-9.
Dennis Bryson offers a detailed and informative analysis of the attempts by American
social scientists and philanthropic foundation officers in the 1920s and 1930s to engineer the
socialization of children and young people into more cooperative and sociable persons. The
hope was that such persons would, in turn, help construct a more peaceful and less conflicted
social order. The author suggests that a useful starting point is Foucault’s assertion that “the
socialization of the young plays an important role in modern strategies for the government of
the population” (p. xvi). Beyond Foucault, other theorists he draws from include Georges
Canguilhem and Donna Haraway. The result is a dense theoretical thicket of special termi-
nology and specialized usage of common language.
The topics that Bryson covers in the volume include child study, parent education, high
school education, the culture and personality movement of the 1930s, and the emergence of
428 BOOK REVIEWS
the permissive parenting style. Rockefeller foundations, for example, the Laura Spelman
Rockefeller Memorial (LSRM), are the major focus on the philanthropic side. The work of
various social scientists, including Margaret Mead, Robert Lynd, and Edward Sapir, is ana-
lyzed as well. The primary figure throughout the book, however, is Lawrence K. Frank (1890-
1968), whose background as a social scientist (economics) was critical for his role as a foun-
dation officer.
From 1923 until 1929, Frank more or less created the area of child study and parent edu-
cation through the deployment of more than $5.5 million from the LSRM. After the LSRM
closed, Frank continued his efforts through the Spelman Fund and the General Education Board.
At first, Frank’s theoretical orientation was behavioral, but psychoanalytic views and the prem-
ises of the loosely organized culture and personality movement soon came to inform his work.
How influential was the work of Frank? One way to determine this influence is to exam-
ine the sources the author used. Chapter endnotes reveal a variety of sources, including books,
journal articles, and a rich trove of archival materials on Frank. The published materials indi-
cate that Frank’s views were part of the intellectual mix in the modernization of child devel-
opment study. While the lists of archival materials are impressive, the author relies too heavily
on sources of the various foundations. By and large, the archival materials cited are conference
papers that Frank gave. How do we know whether they influenced the thinking and the work
of his peers? When the author concludes that the aims of the foundations did not succeed, was
that true of Frank’s ideas as well? Does the author mean to indicate that the failure of the foun-
dations’ social engineering program was due to the inadequacy of Frank’s views?
Bryson states that his focus was on the experts and their benefactors, not the consumers
of the expertise. He argues that the more important direction of influence in the socialization
of the young flowed from the experts to the public, but doesn’t offer any proof that that was
so. To be fair, he does state that other scholarship has convincingly portrayed that public as
active interpreters and resisters rather than passive recipients of child rearing advice, but dis-
counts that scholarship.
The book is a useful addition to the literature on philanthropy and the social sciences.
However, its overreliance on one figure and one set of research resources lessens its impact.
Reviewed by WADE E. PICKREN, Historian and Director of Archives, American Psychological
Association, Washington, DC.

In writing my book, my intention was to examine a series of foundation projects aimed
at managing social conflict and disorder by means of the promotion of knowledge and tech-
niques oriented toward child rearing, education, culture and personality, etc. Given this goal,
I cannot imagine better sources than the foundation archival materials and the papers of the
key administrator (Frank) of these projects. Contrary to Pickren’s assertion, the archival ma-
terials cited in my book were not “by and large” conference papers presented by Frank, but
rather were internal reports, memoranda, minutes of meetings, letters exchanged by project
participants, and so on. These documents were often written by or involved Frank, but this is
besides the point. As internal foundation documents, they provide invaluable insight into the
inner workings of the projects examined. Pickren’s charge that I discount scholarship sug-
gesting the active reception of expert advice on child care is also unfounded. In fact, as I
clearly state in my book, I fundamentally agree with Julia Grant’s argument in her excellent
Raising Baby by the Book that mothers actively interpreted and at times even resisted expert
advice. My point is not that influence and power flow in a unilateral, top-down fashion from
BOOK REVIEWS 429
the experts to the consumers of expertise, but rather that power operates in a dialogic manner,
by means of mutual influence and interaction.
DENNIS BRYSON, Department of American Culture and Literature, Bilkent University, Ankara,
Turkey.
Irina Sirotkina, Diagnosing Literary Genius: A Cultural History of Psychiatry in Russia,

1880-1930. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. 269 pp.
$45.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-8018-6782-7.
Sirotkina has written an intellectually demanding history of Russian psychiatry, during

a certain time and from a particular point of view. The time is a key one: by 1880 modern-
ization was a watchword in the Empire; then came the revolutions and the early Soviet period;
and the book ends as Stalinist repression begins. The particular approach is to emphasize
pathographies, medical biographies of famous people by doctors who never treated them,
usually done after their deaths (in this case, psychiatric portraits of great Russian writers). In
Russia during this period, some psychiatrists believed that psychology’s insights into human
nature were similar to those of the best writers. Furthermore, the educated public in Russia
held authors in such high esteem (especially relative to the West) that psychiatrists, repre-
senting an emerging specialty of small size and dubious distinction, could actually embellish
their professional image by casting light on the beloved authors.
The writers are well-known but the psychiatrists are not. Such prominent Russian psy-
chiatrists as Korsakov or Bekhterev are barely mentioned, presumably because they did not
take an active interest in pathographies. The first chapter is devoted to Nikolai Gogol and the
pathographies of him by V. F. Chizh and N. N. Bazhenov. Chizh had fairly strong connections
to important Germans, Wundt and Kraepelin, and found that the great writer’s insanity re-
sulted from defects of inner organization. Bazhenov, on the other hand, saw Gogol’s genius as
an example of “progeneration,” a step toward a more perfect future form of human being; the
environment being unsuitable for someone so gifted, insanity understandably resulted.
In chapter two, Dostoevsky is the “patient” (he probably suffered from epilepsy and hal-
lucinations), but his wonderful descriptions of soul-sick characters also make him a kind of
colleague of the psychiatrists. Comparing pathographies of Chizh and Bazhenov again, we
learn that the former was politically fairly conservative and provincial, whereas the latter was
fairly radical and achieved a career in Moscow. Chapter three, on Lev Tolstoy, introduces the
psychiatrist N. Osipov, a Russian pioneer of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. Tolstoy’s re-
puted illnesses included obsession and melancholia; Osipov’s problem was how to translate
the powerful core of Freud into something useful for psychiatry in Russia. An opponent of
Bolshevism, he went into exile during the Civil War.
The final chapters cover the early Soviet period. The discussions of psychiatrists become
more complicated (I. A. Sikorskii, G. I. Rossolimo, and F. E. Rybakov in chapter four; L. M.
Rozenshtein and G. V. Segelin in chapter five), while the discussions of writers become
somewhat thinner (Gorky, a little on Esenin, no mention of Maiakovskii). Chapter four dis-
430 BOOK REVIEWS
cusses an optimistic, early Soviet program for mental hygiene, to avoid future cases of men-
tal illness. The focus of the final chapter is the Institute of Genius, lesser known than similar
Soviet creations (e.g., Institute of Brain, Institute of Work) but certainly fitting for this book.
Sirotkina makes no “strong case”—for example, that the writers or the pathographies ac-
tually influenced the psychiatry, although at times it is tempting to think about such links.
Instead this is a cultural, literary history involving psychiatrists, showing medical science in
context. That in itself is a laudable accomplishment. The text is a nearly flawless production,
clearly written, with full notes and bibliography, a useful index, but no illustrations. The
sources include many articles from Russian psychiatric and literary journals.
Certainly their writers have been extremely important to Russian culture, and it is inter-
esting to discover the psychiatrists’ attitudes towards them. However, as this is the first book
in English on Russian psychiatry of this period, the appetite is only whetted for more com-
prehensive studies of Russian psychological science. In Russian Psychology: A Critical
History (1989), David Joravsky also emphasizes the role of literature in Russian psychologi-
cal thought, but as wide-ranging as that work is, it is limited by Cold War restrictions on
sources and also seems limited by a Cold War attitude. Sirotkina and her colleagues (in Russia
and elsewhere) have many fresh fields to plow; they will hopefully continue to unearth riches
and reveal more of them, even to those who cannot read Russian.
REFERENCE
Joravsky, D. (1989). Russian psychology: A critical history. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Reviewed by DAVID K. ROBINSON, Associate Professor of History, Truman State University,

Kirksville, MO 63501.
Melinda Given Guttmann. The Enigma of Anna O. Wickford, RI: Moyer Bell, 2001. 413
pp. $27.95 (cloth). ISBN 1-55921-285-3.
Everyone, it seems, wants a piece of Anna O. The famous pre-psychoanalytic patient

who launched a thousand ships has become in recent years a kind of Rorschach test for his-
torians and biographers. Biographies of Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheim), in other words, can
often be more indicative of the personal agendas of their authors than of the qualities of her
own life. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen’s Remembering Anna O. (Borch-Jacobsen, 1996), for in-
stance, is manifestly about the cultural context of Pappenheim’s symptoms—but Borch-
Jacobsen’s primary aim is to indict Freud for fabricating not only large fragments of her case
but also many of the myths that later shrouded both Pappenheim and her physician, Josef
Breuer. Melinda Guttmann’s The Enigma of Anna O., on the surface, follows a similar format.
Guttmann is a postmodern performance artist, literary critic, and poet. From the outset, she
seeks to make literary, spiritual, and personal contact with Pappenheim. Admittedly subjec-
tive, therefore, her biography eschews traditional form and is instead part psychohistory, part
feminist exegesis, part ode, and part conventional narrative. The book is as much about
Guttmann’s own spiritual journey as it is about Pappenheim’s.
BOOK REVIEWS 431
Nonetheless, there are historical merits to this decision. Guttmann’s literary interests
bring out aspects of Pappenheim’s life that have not been the focus of other biographies.
Specifically, Guttmann builds her biography around the many short stories, plays, poems, au-
tobiographical essays, letters, and prayers that Pappenheim wrote both during and after her
hysterical illness. The biography begins with several chapters about the onset of Pappenheim’s
hysterical symptoms while she was on vacation with her family in the summer of 1880, which
gradually worsened during her father’s fatal struggle with tuberculosis. The following chap-
ter then contains a short story that Pappenheim wrote during one of her visits to a sanatorium.
Guttmann continues to alternate between primary source and analytic chapters in order to il-
lustrate the spiritual bridge between Bertha’s “private theatre”—the stories she would tell
Breuer late at night as part of her talking cure—and the public roles Bertha would take as a
feminist and Jewish activist. In her later years, Pappenheim was celebrated for founding two
influential Jewish agencies in Germany: the Jüdischer Frauenbund in 1904, the first national
organization of Jewish women in Germany, in her crusade against white slavery and prostitu-
tion in the Jewish communities of Germany and Poland; and the Home for Wayward Girls in
Neu Isenberg in 1908. Guttmann continues to weave together primary and secondary sources
from Pappenheim’s life until her death in 1936.
Ultimately, Guttmann uses her analysis of Pappenheim’s life history to draw conclusions
about her spiritual and religious development: “The primary theme of the whole book is the
conversion of Bertha Pappenheim’s ‘private theatre’ into her ‘public theatre.’ One must, in other
words, transform the inner self in order to transform the world” (p. 16). Pappenheim, who
never married and frequently meditated on the spiritual consequences of never having had chil-
dren of her own, appears here as a woman increasingly drawn to the spiritual power of Judaism.
Written for a general audience familiar with feminist and postmodern studies, rather
than for historians per se, The Enigma of Anna O. is nonetheless an engrossing story.
Pappenheim’s writings, many of which have never been published or translated into English,
take center stage, and they are wonderful. Guttmann is at her best when she is setting the stage
for Bertha’s own voice. Historians of the behavioral sciences can appreciate The Enigma of
Anna O. for offering a glimpse into the spiritual and literary private life that informed
Pappenheim’s public roles as both psychoanalytic muse and Jewish social activist.
REFERENCE
Borch-Jacobsen, M. (1996). Remembering Anna O.: A century of mystification. New York: Routledge.
Reviewed by RACHAEL ROSNER, Research Associate, The Danielsen Institute, Boston

University, Boston, MA 02215.
Rab Houston and Uta Frith. Autism in History: The Case of Hugh Blair of Borgue.
Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000. 207 pp. $26.95 (paper). ISBN 0-631-22088-7.
Historians of mental illness are often squeamish about applying current diagnostic cate-
gories to people in the past. Recent scholarship has shown that all illnesses are to some ex-
432 BOOK REVIEWS
tent constructed in time. But historians sometimes regard illness categories for which etiol-
ogy is unknown, or which lack an observable physical lesion, or which need to be diagnosed
from behavior, as especially tenuous. These illness categories may require special caution
when applied to other eras. Autism, though, may be an ambiguous case. Evidence for a ge-
netic component in etiology is very strong, but the etiology has not been established defini-
tively, and the disorder is diagnosed entirely through the observation of behavior.
In presenting Hugh Blair, a member of the landowning class in eighteenth-century Scotland,
Autism in History demonstrates a refreshing lack of squeamishness. Blair’s contemporaries most
often called him an idiot or a fool. A large amount of documentation about him survives because
of a court case concerning plans for him to marry. The court needed to determine whether Blair
was mentally competent and subjected him to a battery of tests. The results provide a rich source
of information about his mental status. Houston and Frith argue persuasively that “the differences
between a modern-day clinical diagnosis of mental disorder and an eighteenth-century judgement
about mental capacity are not as large as might be presumed” (p. 11).
Houston and Frith thoroughly reconstruct the social context of the case. We learn the mean-
ings of class, gender roles, and other social norms in impressive detail. These descriptions are
interwoven with more modern clinical portraits of autism, and the similarities with Blair’s pres-
entation are elaborated in detail. Although Houston and Frith conclude confidently that they are
looking at a case of the same condition we now call autism, they remain sensitive to the ways
that historical conditions could influence the perception or presentation of the disorder.
In addition, Houston and Frith amass convincing data to show that Blair was, in fact,
autistic. It might be possible to quibble with their retrospective diagnosis, but they make a
highly plausible case. The payoff, though, from this exercise is modest. Autism in History
is not one of those microhistories that attempts to reveal a hidden social world through the
analysis of an individual. Rather, the authors are trying to use what is already known about
a social world to elucidate the illness. What we primarily learn about the illness is that it
probably existed before its modern definition. This may strike a blow against dogmatic
forms of historical relativism, but I doubt there are many who are opposed in principle to
the idea that autism might have existed in previous eras. Houston and Frith’s findings might
also discourage those who believe that the etiology of the illness is related to distinctively
modern factors, such as ingredients in vaccines, but their book cannot address recent claims
of increasing incidence of autism, since it is based on a single case. Perhaps we would
profit more from assuming that it is possible that certain diagnostic categories are applica-
ble to earlier periods in history, and treating this as a premise more than a conclusion in fu-
ture research.
Reviewed by JONATHAN SADOWSKY, Castele Associate Professor of Medical History, Case
Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH 44106.
Robert J. Richards. The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age
of Goethe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. 587 pp. $35 (cloth). ISBN 0-
226-71210-9.
BOOK REVIEWS 433
The Romantic Conception of Life is a study of the conceptions of living nature developed
during the early German Romantic period, situated in the personal lives of their authors.
Focusing upon the Jena Romantics, Schelling, Goethe and the scientists in their circles, it pro-
vides detailed readings of key texts, punctuated by portraits of the individuals discussed—
portraits filled out by exhaustive attention to letters and diaries.
In this ambitious and learned work, Richards makes an important contribution to the his-
torical reevaluation of Romantic biology. He rightly contends that before any assessment of its
significance can begin, it is necessary to have a nuanced understanding of the science in its re-
lationship to the Romantic movement and contemporary philosophy, which this book sets out to
provide. Richards emphasizes that the Romantic figures he discusses were not opposed to
Enlightenment reason, as ordinarily presumed, but on the contrary intensely preoccupied with
exploring the potential of human reason. Moreover, they were deeply engaged with its philo-
sophical legacy, such as the problem posed by Kant regarding the apparent teleological ordering
of living organisms. He attributes the discontinuities of Enlightenment with Romantic science
to the latter’s emphases on the organic productivity of nature, on the aesthetic appreciation of
nature’s creativity, and on the attribution of freedom and morality to nature. Richards effectively
demonstrates how these emphases enabled important contributions to the understanding of life
in the period that acted as foundations for later developments in nineteenth-century biology.
The boldest and most controversial argument of the book is that Darwin was a Romantic.
The closing chapter provides convincing examples of how Romantic theories of archetypes
and Humboldt’s vision of nature contributed to Darwin’s evolutionary ideas. It also makes
more general suggestions as to how the Romantic emphases on organic productivity, aesthet-
ics and morality were significant parts of its legacy and hence of the environment informing
Darwin’s thinking, without claiming a direct descent of ideas. Moreover, Richards provides
detailed examination of the evolutionary theories of German figures like Schelling and
Goethe, and an analysis of their differences from other contemporary and subsequent evolu-
tionary theories—one of the most engaging and original contributions of the book. Yet
Richards’s interest in nineteenth-century evolutionary theory hovers over the whole, giving a
teleological orientation to the book and framing his reading of the Romantic texts. This is par-
ticularly true of Richards’s discussion of archetype theory. An important aspect of the legacy
of German thought on nineteenth-century biology, Richards rightly emphasizes the centrality
of Goethe’s theory of the archetype to his biological ideas. But he overemphasizes its cen-
trality to Schelling, and thus fails to attend to the significant differences between Goethe’s and
Schelling’s philosophies of nature and conceptions of the organic. Casting the Romantic con-
ception of life so wide as to include Darwin will certainly give the book deserved attention.
But the broad historical claims of its concluding part sit uncomfortably with the careful con-
textual analyses of early Romantic figures and their texts of the earlier chapters.
Richards is one of the few historians of science to have deeply engaged with the difficult
philosophical texts of German idealism vital to understanding conceptions of life in the
Romantic period. The results are highly insightful discussions of how the figures he discusses
resolved the problem of understanding the teleology of the individual organisms into the prob-
lem of understanding nature as a whole, and of how they understood the self-organization of
the universe as correspondent to the self-organization of the mind, thus relating developing
knowledge of nature to developing knowledge of the self. But Richards rejects the claims of
Fichte and Schelling, and of many of their modern interpreters, that they were continuing
Kant’s critical project. Thus he reads Fichte and Schelling as making the perplexing claim that
the world is constituted by the mind, when they are better understood as extending Kant’s ex-
amination of the conditions for cognition of the world. He also finds in Kant a clear boundary
434 BOOK REVIEWS
between reflective judgments of the organic and determinative judgments of mechanical bod-
ies, whereas Fichte and Schelling started from the ambiguities they found in Kant’s attempts at
such demarcations. But it is precisely the great merit of Richards’s excellent book, the most
substantial work on Romantic science now available, that it invites debate with scholars in the
field at the level of detailed analysis long enjoyed by historians of science of other periods.
Reviewed by JOAN STEIGERWALD, Associate Professor of History and Philosophy of Science,
York University, Toronto, ON, Canada M3J 1P3.

Joan Steigerwald has provided a clear and perceptive representation of the intentions of
my book. I am grateful for her generous assessments and certainly will not cavil with them. I
would like just briefly to discuss a few issues about which she expresses some hesitation.
First, I am acutely aware that my depiction of the Romantic sources of Darwin’s theory fails
the test of orthodoxy; though I am comforted that a few other scholars are beginning to draw
similar conclusions. Once provided with the right historical spectacles, I think that evidence
for “Darwin’s Romantic biology” protrudes as obviously as his own shining pate. His por-
trayal of the moral and aesthetic features of nature, his endorsement of recapitulation theory,
his organic conception of nature, his progressive characterization of evolution, his employ-
ment of the archetype, as well as the distinctively Romantic reading that guided the formula-
tion of his theory—all of this and more makes, I think, a persuasive case. Undoubtedly,
though, the common view of Darwin as a relentless mechanist who deprived nature of intrin-
sic value remains an image deeply entrenched in the historiography.
Steigerwald has noted that I do not regard Fichte and Schelling as merely extending
Kant’s epistemological and metaphysical proposals. This is an issue that divides scholars of
German idealism. I argue that when Fichte and Schelling dismissed as risible Kant’s “thing-
in-itself ” (an object about which Kant claimed nothing could be known, though he himself
seemed to know a lot about it), we should take their laughter seriously. Perhaps only the spe-
cialist will hyperventilate about this problem, but it is one that has multiple ramifications for
the history of the human sciences in the nineteenth century and even today.
Finally, Steigerwald suggests that I exaggerate the impact of Goethe’s influence on
Schelling, especially in respect to archetype theory. The dispute is another of those that might
excite only the devotees of German idealism. Yet the case is one of many that display, I think,
the necessity of examining close personal relations in order to understand the more abstract
relations of ideas. My book might be read as one long argument for the necessity of keeping
the authorial genie in the well-wrought urn. Goethe was a magnetic personality and his inti-
mate intervention in Schelling’s near suicide bound the two individuals in a sympathetic union
that secreted into their philosophical and scientific beliefs—or so I argue.
Some of Steigerwald’s conceptions differ from mine, but we are in solid agreement that
Romanticism had a far-reaching impact on nineteenth-century science, forming several of its
deeply flowing and powerful currents.
ROBERT J. RICHARDS, The University of Chicago.

Book Reviews: Steven Pinker. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York: Viking

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Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol.

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