Psychology Society & Subject

Charles W Tolman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781136140204
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

One result of the European student movements of the late 1960s was a critique of the mainstream, bourgeois social sciences. They were seen as irrelevant to the real needs of ordinary people and as practically and ideologically supporting oppression. The discussions around psychology in Berlin at the time became increasingly focused on whether the discipline could in fact be reformed. Among the latter was a group under the leadership of Klaus Holzkamp at the Free University who undertook an intensive critique of psychology with a view to identifying and correcting its theoretical and methodological problems and thus laying the groundwork for a genuine 'critical' psychology. Psychology, Society, and Subjectivity relates the history of this development, the nature of the group's critique, its reconstruction of psychology, and its implications for psychological thought and practice. It will be of interest to anyone keen on making psychology more relevant to our lives.

Part I

Dissent

Chapter 1

Ideology, power, and subjectivity

Berlin, 2 July 1967, 8.20 p.m. The life of Benno Ohnesorg is ended by a bullet fired from a police pistol. Ohnesorg was 26 years old, married, a student of Germanic and Romance languages and literature at the Free University of Berlin. He did not have a reputation for being radical or even particularly political. His only active affiliation was with the Evangelical Congregation at the university.

The Shah of Iran was in Berlin on an official state visit. On 1 July there had been a meeting of about 2,000 students at the Free University to protest against the Shah’s friendly reception by the city and federal governments. They heard testimony of the Shah’s cruel and unjust treatment of his own people from an exiled Iranian. They were already acquainted with the circumstances of the Shah’s restoration to power by the CIA, the same CIA now identified with the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam. A decision was taken to demonstrate the following day as the Shah arrived at the city hall. There was also to be a protest in the evening outside the Opera House where the Shah and his wife, together with a gathering of carefully selected German dignitaries, were to attend a special performance.

The afternoon’s demonstration started like most of the demonstrations that had become increasingly frequent in the preceding two years. It might have ended in the usual way too, but for one thing. The Shah had brought his own cheering team of about 80 men dressed in business suits and carrying clubs of about four feet in length. While the students were being kept at a distance from the city hall by barricades, these ‘Shah boosters’ ranged freely in the intervening space. At some point, in response to jeers, they let loose with their clubs on the student demonstrators. After a few moments of this, the police came on to the scene in force, not to restrain the Shah’s henchmen but to assist them in dispersing the students.

News of this travesty spread quickly, with the result that in the evening at the Opera House the number of demonstrators was larger than expected and the mood decidedly more acrimonious. No attempt was made by police to keep protesters away from the scene, but the demonstrators, once there, were shoved by a force of about 800 policemen back on to the sidewalk across the wide avenue from the Opera House and squeezed between a wall at their backs and police barricades on the street side. The Shah and his party arrived. Placards were waved, slogans shouted, and chants sounded: ‘Mo-Mo-Mossadegh!’ ‘Shah, Shah, Charlatan!’ Just before 8 o’clock all the dignitaries had arrived and the doors of the Opera House were closed. The crowd of demonstrators was about to break up, some urging others to return at 10 o’clock, others discussing where to go for a beer and conversation. A few minutes later, the president of police, Erich Duening, apparently unhappy with the slowness with which the students were leaving, gave the order: ‘Truncheons out, disperse the crowd!’

The police attacked. For most of the students there was nowhere to go. Those at either end of the confined crowd fled down the broad avenue, others took to adjoining side streets with police in pursuit. A few of these found themselves cornered in a covered parking area. Benno Ohnesorg was among them.

Someone reported hearing a young man’s voice: ‘Please, please, don’t shoot.’ There was a shot. A policeman was heard to say: ‘You must be crazy, you could have hit one of us.’ Frank Krüger, a music student, was an eye-witness:

I was right there when the shot went off. I saw how a swarm of six or eight policemen attacked the student [Ohnesorg], how they went after him with their truncheons, how he just stood there in the midst of them, passive and defenceless. Then I saw the flash from the pistol. It was at about head level. In the next moment the student was lying on the ground, motionless.

(‘Knüppel frei’1967:46)

At first the police claimed that Ohnesorg died of a skull fracture. It was soon admitted, however, that it was a bullet in the head. The police officer Karl-Heinz Kurras, at the time in plain clothes, claimed he shot in self-defence. This claim was at first accepted by the police and Senate but a later inquiry showed it to be untenable and Kurras was charged with negligent homicide. The trial was held the following November. The court determined that Kurras had indeed pulled the trigger but it could not decide his actual culpability. On this technicality he was acquitted.

No matter what side is taken, all widely accepted accounts of the student movement in Germany agree that this incident represented the single most important, galvanizing moment in the movement’s development, a development in which the Free University of Berlin played a leading role and which ultimately produced a critical psychology. In order to understand this we need to look backward from the Ohnesorg incident in order to see how the Free University of Berlin became the centre of political and academic dissidence in Germany, and forward from it to see how the killing’s galvanizing effect expressed itself in the academic scene at the university.¹

ORIGINS OF THE FREE UNIVERSITY OF BERLIN (FUB)

Berlin got its university in 1810, rather late by European standards. The driving force behind its establishment had been Wilhelm von Humboldt. It was named after the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm. Under his name it came to its end in 1945 after 12 years of Nazi rule. By the end of the war the university lay in both physical and moral ruins. Its principal physical location was on the avenue Unter den Linden, which was now in the Soviet sector of the divided city. The Soviet military administration set about its reconstruction almost immediately. Until 1948 the British and French occupation authorities displayed a total lack of interest in the university. The Americans were ambivalent. While they half-heartedly entertained ultimately unfruitful plans for their own involvement in the re-establishment of higher education in Berlin, the military authorities took active measures to prevent students at the re-opened university from residing in the American sector and to prevent residents of their sector from attending the university.

The restarted university and its students suffered as well from ambivalences of a different sort. The Soviet authorities promised a free and democratic institution that would put itself at the disposal of young people who, under more ordinary circumstances, would not have been able to attend university. This was primarily to affect people from the lower middle and working classes. Others who had suffered under the Nazis were also to be favoured. At first, the promise was largely kept and the students enthusiastically embraced the new freedom. Interference from the authorities increased, however, reaching a peak in March 1947 when several student leaders were arrested for allegedly spying for the West. This was only one sign of the mounting Cold War. The year that followed saw an increased tightening of control with politically motivated demotions of faculty and dismissals of students. Finally, after the dismissal of some key student political leaders, a strike was called for 23 April 1948 and students were urged to attend a meeting at the Hotel Esplanade in the British sector. The Eastern press reported that only 300 students showed up. Western papers reported 2,000. This meeting played a key role in motivating the Americans to establish an alternative university in their sector.

From the very start, there was widespread suspicion of the Americans’ motives, certainly in the East but also in the West. Whatever the motives, however, a new university was founded in 1948 with a large contribution of funds from the Ford Foundation. Basically, the new university presented itself as undertaking to deliver on the promises about freedom and democracy with which the old one, now called the Humboldt University, had been re-opened. Much to their credit, the Americans left most of the university’s organization to the Germans, including students, many of whom had migrated over from the ‘Linden University’, bringing with them many of the progressive ideals that had been disappointed there. They continued, for instance, to insist on a significant student voice in administration and preferential admission for members of disadvantaged groups. The end result was unique in the history of German universities. The new Free University of Berlin represented a progressive model that would continue to attract politically concerned students from all parts of Germany over the decades that followed. The Free University of Berlin, in short, had its beginning in protest and dissidence, and soon established a tradition of anti-elitist, anti-authoritarian, politically tolerant and progressive thought and practice.²

BEGINNINGS OF THE STUDENT MOVEMENT

The tradition of political engagement established at the Free University could hardly remain confined, however, to the precincts of the university itself. The university was, after all, quite self-consciously an aspect of the society around it. It could also not continue to develop without straining its limits. It seems now in retrospect that political engagement would necessarily turn into protest and finally spill over on to the streets of the city itself. One of the first public demonstrations occurred in December 1964, when several hundred students protested at the visit of Moïse Tshombé, the premier of the Congo, whom they held responsible for the death of the popular leftist leader Patrice Lumumba.

A turning point in this connection was reached in the spring of 1965. The student government, AStA (Allgemeiner Studenten-Ausschuss), invited a journalist and two other guests to take part in a symposium or debate on the political course taken by Germany since the war. The journalist, Erich Kuby, had been critical of the FUB administration since 1949 and had already been declared persona non grata in 1958 by the Rector, who then refused to allow Kuby to speak at the university on two occasions in 1960 and 1963. Rector Herbert Lüers once again intervened, refusing to allow Kuby to speak. The students, doubtless taking their cue from the ‘Free Speech Movement’ at the University of California, protested that their rights under the university’s constitution were being violated. They claimed the right to hear any person speak in any open area on campus at any time on any subject. A series of strikes and demonstrations ensued involving over 3,000 students. This set of events marked the beginning in earnest of the student protest movement at the FUB. The number and frequency of public demonstrations increased after May 1965. The issues ranged widely from local ones concerning the administration of the university to international ones, becoming increasingly focused on the Vietnam war. In April 1967 a group of students was arrested for allegedly plotting against the life of the American vice-president, Hubert Humphrey. Police searches, however, only turned up some small smoke-bombs and a large supply of powdered pudding mix. The students called themselves the ‘Horror Commune’, but they became better known as the ‘pudding assassins’. Whatever humour may have been expressed in the idea of slinging pudding at an American vice-president vanished with the death of Benno Ohnesorg.³

THE ‘CRITICAL UNIVERSITY’

The seriousness of protest not only increased in intensity, it also increased in scope. Criticism, initially focused on violations of rights within the university, had generalized to criticism of city, state, national, and international policy now finally to knowledge itself, its production, dissemination, and relation to practice. With regard to the dissemination of knowledge, for instance, Axel Springer, owner of several popular right-leaning newspapers and magazines in Germany (not to be confused with the highly reputable Springer Verlag), became a particular target of the FUB student movement under the leadership of Rudi Dutschke. Dutschke cited Springer for gross misuse of his ideological power and called for the expropriation of his publishing empire (‘Wir fordern’ 1967). But the most important single event for our concern here was the founding in July 1967 of the Critical University.⁴

The Critical University was organized by Wolfgang Lefèvre, president of the FUB student assembly, Sigrid Fronius, and Wolfgang Nitsch from the Max-Planck-Institute for Educational Research, with the cooperation of about 40 other students and faculty members. Their critique began with their own institutions. According to their ‘calendar’ (of which 6,000 copies were printed), the old-style institutions of higher learning, including now the FUB, ‘had finally transformed themselves from ivory towers into ivory factories in which professorial specialtyidiots trained student specialty-idiots’ (‘Dr. crit.’ 1967). They urged that henceforth the students forming the elite left would have to lead double lives: half idiot and half revolutionary. It was the function of the Critical University to look after the revolutionary side.

The self-defined tasks of the Critical University, now divided among 30 working groups, were double in nature. On the one hand, they were to attempt to form alliances with workers. They would offer educational workshops for working people and assist them in diagnosing the problems they faced in a bourgeoisdominated society and in formulating effective political action. On the other hand, they would conduct critical activity within the FUB, holding seminars on the political aspects of education, criticizing course contents, examinations, and the educational aims and practices of German universities in general.

Needless to say, the administrative authorities of the FUB denied the Critical University use of any of its facilities and even undertook a legal examination of its programme and activities to determine if charges might be brought against the students involved. The Critical University managed, however, to survive long enough to fuel further developments of a similar nature.

A leaflet circulating at the University of Mainz read:

In Berlin people are now being shot, but not just at the wall. In East Berlin demonstrations are prohibited; in West Berlin demonstrations are prohibited. In East Berlin what the Magistrate doesn’t like is suppressed; in West Berlin what the Senate doesn’t like is suppressed. Berlin remains Berlin.

(‘Knüppel frei’1967: 46)

DEVELOPMENTS IN THE PSYCHOLOGICAL INSTITUTE

Meanwhile, in the Psychological Institute debates were taking on a more openly political nature. One in particular was to set the tone for what was to follow. Professor Hans Hörmann, then director of the Institute, had reiterated his ‘liberal’ view of the relation between psychology and society as part of his address at a memorial service at the FUB for Benno Ohnesorg. Hörmann’s understanding of this relationship put the individual conscience at the centre. Psychology as science was accordingly essentially value-free. Psychology’s link to values and societal practice was the individual psychologist. It was up to the individual to see that psychological knowledge was used in the correct interests. Judgement of correctness was also left up to the individual. This was a judgement, in Hörmann’s view, that no individual could escape.

An impassioned and eloquent rebuttal based theoretically on the Critical Theory of Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas⁵ came from a student of the Institute, Irmingard Staeuble. Hörmann’s view, she maintained, showed insufficient appreciation for the essentially political nature of science. It was just such an innocuous view of science that had encouraged the conclusion – false, in her view – that the universities during the Third Reich had merely been used by the Nazis and that the proper corrective had been to return universities to their more ‘natural’ state of neutrality, leaving implications for the well-being of society to the responsibility of the individual conscience. By Staeuble’s analysis, science and the universities were never neutral; they existed necessarily in one interest or another. Fact and consciousness were always mediated by societal and historical context. The boundaries between philosophy, science, ideology, and society faded under this analysis, revealing a necessary, interrelated whole. Psychologists who failed to see this were simply putting themselves blindly into the service of prevailing ideologies.

A little later, Staeuble offered these biting observations on contemporary psychology:

Looking at the areas in which psychologists have mainly been active, it must be concluded that (a) they work in the immediate service of imperialism (military research, ‘psychological defence’); (b) they work in the service of the capitalist economy (market research, advertising); (c) they have an indirect effect on the stabilization of bourgeois ideology (research on communications and opinion); (d) they advance the efficient performance of individuals within the system of this society (selection methods of all kinds, industrial psych...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Dissent
• Part II Critique
• Part III Reconstruction
• Part IV Towards practice
• Notes
• Further reading
• References
• Name index
• Subject index