Internationalizing the History of Psychology

Adrian C. Brock

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780814707388
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría en psicología

While the United States was dominant in the development of psychology for much of the twentieth century, other countries have experienced significant growth in this area since the end of World War II. The percentage of those in the discipline who live and work in the United States has been growing smaller, and it is now impossible to completely understand the field if developments in psychology outside of the United States are ignored.

Internationalizing the History of Psychology brings together luminaries in the field from around the world to address the internationalizing of psychology, each raising core issuesconcerning what an international perspective can contributeto the history of psychology and to our understanding of psychology as a whole. For too long, much of what we havetaken to be the history of psychology has actually been thehistory of American psychology. This volume, ideal for student use and for those in the field, illuminates how what we have been missing may change our views of the nature of psychology and its history.

Contributors: Ruben Ardila, Geoffrey Blowers, Adrian C. Brock, Kurt Danziger, Aydan Gulerce, John D. Hogan, Naomi Lee, Johann Louw, Fathali M. Moghaddam, Anand C. Paranjpe, Irmingard Staeuble, Cecilia Taiana, and Thomas P. Vaccaro.

Chapter 1

Constructing Subjectivity in Unexpected Places

Johann Louw

I started my academic career twenty-five years ago, in a new, small university in a remote area of South Africa. I had just completed a postgraduate degree in the Netherlands, and I was overwhelmed with a feeling of isolation and being far away from it all—in more than one sense. Over the years parts of this sense of being stuck far from the center remained; after all, I lived not only on the southern tip of Africa, but it was also apartheid South Africa. It surely felt like a huge drawback to be a psychologist-academic so far from what I perceived (together with most psychologists in the world) as “the center”: Europe and North America.

But fifteen years or so ago I lost that sense of being on the periphery of things in at least one regard: in my academic life as a psychologist. As I grew older, and as different things in Psychology¹ started to interest me, I came to realize that, even if it were true, this was a strength, rather than a drawback.

What brought about this change in perception; that to live and work in Africa as a psychologist might, in fact, be an advantage rather than a handicap? In short, it came about through my interest in the history of psychology. During the 1980s I continued my studies toward a Ph.D. in the Netherlands, focusing on aspects of the history of South African psychology. Gradually I came to realize that the study of psychology itself is one of the most rewarding and enlightening things a psychologist can do. In particular, it was the relationship between the discipline, its subject matter, and the social reality beyond the discipline, which struck me as a fundamental aspect of the discipline and its relation to the kinds of person we have become.

I arrived at an interest in these matters via the history of Psychology. It was not history per se that interested me; it was what could be done with history as a way of making sense of the discipline, its subject matter, and its social foundations. It was only later that I realized what I was interested in was a history of the present, in Michel Foucault’s (1975) terminology. Or, as Roger Smith wrote in a well-known paper, a “‘present-centred’ history in the sense that it constructs a past in order to expose the conditions making possible our present, a present which otherwise appears as a given or ‘natural’ reality” (1988, p. 150).

When Psychology emerged as an independent discipline in Western Europe (and the United States) in the second half of the nineteenth century, it did so against the backdrop of social and cultural processes that have been in place for centuries (Jansz 2004 provides a good summary of these processes). In these societies, human beings increasingly saw themselves as autonomous individuals with a unique internal mental state. Psychology’s emergence as a discipline intersected with a certain kind of subjectivity, already in place by the second half of the nineteenth century. Indeed, it could be argued that these were the “conditions of possibility” for Psychology—that it could come into existence because of receptivity for subjective, individual states in these societies.

The historical development of these kinds of subject of course preceded the emergence of academic and professional Psychology, and the discipline can claim no real contribution to this process. However, the situation changed quite dramatically in the twentieth century. The historical expansion of Psychology in Western Europe and the United States, especially after World War II, had an impact on society, as expressed in the increasing numbers of university departments, students, fields of practice, professionals, et cetera. But Psychology achieved more than simply an extension of its academic and professional numbers, along with its field of expertise. During the twentieth century, it became a powerful part of the cultural and historical processes that we characterized as individualization and the development of inwardness. It contributed in a major way to the formation of the “psychological subject”, in which individual human beings interpret themselves and others as having a unique subjective, internal mental state, with important truths about ourselves contained in the structures or forms of the interior world.

Through the work of historians like Kurt Danziger, Graham Richards, Nikolas Rose, Ian Hacking, and others, we know how Psychology’s practices, vocabulary, techniques, and knowledge are thoroughly implicated in the formation of new kinds of persons, of different “subjects.” Indeed, the “turn inward” intensified once Psychology emerged and flourished in the twentieth century. Roger Smith portrayed the pervasive construction of the psychological subject, as “the internalization of belief in psychological knowledge, so that it acquired a taken-for-granted quality, altered every-one’s subjective world and recreated experience and expectations about what it is to be a person” (1997, 575).

It is this literature, and approach to subjectification, that I believe have much to offer to the discussion about internationalizing the history of Psychology. When the discipline migrates to countries outside its historical heartland, countries that do not share the cultural and historical processes mentioned above, a lack of fit between the discipline and its sociohistorical context is introduced. As a result, the discipline is often criticized in terms of a lack of responsiveness to different cultures or for its cultural one-sidedness. These critiques are often phrased in terms of “Eurocentric” (e.g., Bulhan 1985; Howitt and Owusu-Bempah 1994), “Westocentric” (Holdstock 2000), “individuocentrism” (Holdstock 2000), “irrelevance” (Berger and Lazarus 1987), and “ethnocentrism” (e.g., Marsella 1998). Various remedies are then suggested to rectify the situation, framed as the opposite of these terms: the discipline must be made more practically relevant, community-orientated, socially responsive, Afrocentric, and so on.

But this debate misses the historical processes involved when Psychological knowledge is employed to achieve positive goals in virtually all countries where Psychological expertise is valued. Although these processes often operate on a large scale, and affect many people, they often go unnoticed—maybe because they are so much part of our everyday lives. I would argue that they provide a line of inquiry that is particularly fruitful if we want to understand what happens to Psychology in societies outside the heartland of the discipline, when psychological practices and techniques are employed at different sites and in a variety of institutions. Nikolas Rose (1990) has shown, for European and American Psychology, how subjects are created through the micropowers of the clinical interview, the psychological test, and the epidemiological survey, in institutions like the school classroom, the military parade ground, the factory, and the mental hospital. It is on such a microlevel that the individual gets in touch with subjectifying practices, or, as Rose put it: “The subject is less the outcome of cultural history than of a history of what Foucault terms ‘techniques of the self’” (2000, 152).

Although the focus in the chapter is on microprocesses, there is a larger background against which they play themselves out. Rose’s starting point is the link between liberal societies and psychology: “The history of psychology in liberal societies joins up with the history of liberal government” (Rose 1996b, 12). In liberal democracies citizens are defined as individuals with rights and freedoms, and the values of individuality, freedom, and choice are greatly emphasized. Thus a powerful individualizing force already exists at a constitutional level—in post-apartheid South Africa, for example, chapter 2 of the Constitution contains a Bill of Rights, which states: “This Bill of Rights is a cornerstone of democracy in South Africa. It enshrines the rights of all people in our country and affirms the democratic values of human dignity, equality and freedom” (quoted from the 1996 South African Constitution, to be found at http://www.gov.za/constitution/1996). In the regulation (or government) of social and economic life, the rights of free and equal citizens must be protected, while positive objectives such as health promotion, disease prevention, and labor productivity have to be pursued. Rose (1990; 1996b) has argued that Psychology is attractive to all modern (or modernizing) societies, as a result of its promise to achieve socially desirable objectives through the disciplining of human differences, among other things.

In the rest of the chapter I examine two institutions (or sites) in contemporary South Africa, where techniques and practices of a liberal democracy are employed that invite citizens to be certain kinds of people. I believe these are particularly useful in investigating how the psychological subject is constructed in “nonpsychologized” communities. South Africa shares with other developing countries what Fathali Moghaddam (1993) referred to as a “dualism” in society. It consists of a modern industrial sector overlaid by the traditional society of a “Third World country”, with fundamental cultural rifts between the two sectors. Although the modern/traditional is not as sharply drawn as might be suggested here, Psychology is of course much closer to the modern than to the traditional sector, I show that there are subjectifying factors at work in both sites that bring members of the traditional sector much closer to Psychology than one would expect, and that they do so almost imperceptibly. These are the recently completed hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and an HIV/AIDS prevention program.

Commission Hearings

A major objective of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was to restore “the human and civil dignity of such victims by granting them an opportunity to relate their own accounts of the violations of which they are the victims” (Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, No. 34 of 1995; see http://www.polity.org.za). Its Human Rights Violations Committee encouraged (for example, by means of radio and newspaper advertisements and posters) victims of such violations to approach the TRC to relate what happened to them. The victims’ accounting of events became known as “telling their stories” and was the key mechanism in the hearings on human rights abuses. Fiona Ross (2003) drew on earlier work to portray story-telling as the capacity to narrate life events, as it relates to the self, to a wider audience.²

An intriguing part of this for the purposes of this chapter is that storytelling was constituted as an authentically African mode of communication (Ross, 2003). In the words of Archbishop Tutu:

Storytelling is central, not only to many religious practices in this country but also to the African tradition of which we are a part. Ellen Kuzwayo is quoted … as saying: “Africa is a place of storytelling. We need more stories, never mind how painful the exercise may be.…Stories help us to understand, to forgive and to see things through someone else’s eyes.” (Tutu 1996, 7)

There is a substantial international literature that reflects the belief that testimony heals (Agger and Jensen 1990, for example). This belief was translated quite directly in the practices of story-telling of the TRC. Commissioners frequently spoke of the healing powers of story-telling—more attractive than psychotherapy for them, because it is situated within an African cultural tradition. Although the report acknowledges that “not all storytelling heals. Not everyone wanted to tell his or her story”, on the whole, the commission believed that it was beneficial to do so (TRC 1998, Vol. 5, 352; also Vol. 2, 112). Ross (2003) speaks of biomedical and psychological metaphors used by the commission to describe its work in terms of “healing.”

Two illustrations from these testimonies will have to suffice to indicate that what was originally narrated here reflected a subjectivity that was quite far removed from the Western psychologized individual.

First, Ross worked with women from Zwelethemba, an African township outside Worcester, a town in the wine- and fruit-growing region of the Western Cape Province, about an hour’s drive from Cape Town (and elsewhere in South Africa). It struck her that these women came to provide testimony of what had happened to their husbands and their children, and not so much about what happened to them. A commissioner had this to say: “Women are articulate about describing their men’s experiences but are hesitant to talk about themselves. … The pain expressed has been the pain of others, not of themselves” (Ross 2000, 29).

The harm inflicted on others nevertheless changed these women, but even then they described their lives in terms of physical health changes. Ross (2000, 60) quoted unpublished research reports that indicated that women talked about psychosomatic and psychological problems they experienced. The women interviewed in Ross’s study mostly reported the psychosomatic consequences of their experiences: high and low blood pressure, diabetes, stress, and dizziness. In Vol. 5, p. 141, of their report, the commission says: “There is also evidence that people exposed to trauma, even indirectly, are more likely to develop stress-related illnesses such as heart disease and high blood pressure.”

Similar findings were reported in a study conducted in the same Zwelethemba Township from where Ross drew her interviewees (Skinner 1998, 184–187). These researchers were more specific in describing the medical and psychological symptoms among the 45 people they studied. They found:

• At least 22 percent reported headaches, “physical weakness”, and “other body pain.”

• Some 51 percent reported feeling “sad or down”, and 40 percent said they cried easily. One-third of the respondents said they were unable to “feel emotions”; 33 percent also reported feelings of anxiety, fear or worry.

• About 55 percent said they tried to keep busy so that they did not think about the “trauma”—but it is not clear who uses this word.

• At least 13 percent reported drinking or taking drugs, although the majority of them said that they “seldom” did so.

Skinner’s study concluded that the profile of respondents indicated the presence of post-traumatic stress disorder. But these clearly were the conclusions of the researchers; not one of the interviewees in the study used these terms, or even the term “trauma.”

In addition, in many of the verbatim quotes in the report, it is clear how these African survivors of violence spoke of external events rather than an interior life (often despite invitations from the commissioners). Indeed, Ross gives evidence of how detention and arrest were experienced, and were dealt with by young people:

Many in Zwelethemba considered contact with prison cells to be defiling. Detention was believed to expose young people to (symbolic) pollution and on their release, some young people … were ritually cleansed (ukuhlanjwa) in an attempt to remove the effects of contact with evil and to protect against a repetition of detention. Not all families subscribed to the ritual but even those who did not subscribe to notions of ritual pollution felt defiled by their contact with prison. (2000, 143)

In our terms we could say that these young people had experienced a loss of personal agency but framed it as caused by an intruding spirit and in need of a cleansing ritual. Individual agency is experienced as diminished, but framed in a very nonpsychological way.

When the work of the TRC was done, and their five-volume report handed in, these story-telling practices did not come to an end. The Institute for the Healing of Memories, for example, runs weekend workshops in an encounter group format for South Africans of all social, racial, and political affiliations based on the premise that telling one’s experiences of the apartheid years can lead to a process of healing. The Cape Town–based Trauma Centre for Victims of Violence and Torture is another nongovernmental organization that offers trauma debriefing and counseling to victims of political and criminal violence. One of the groups it assists is the Khulumani (Western Cape) Support Group, a victim support and advocacy group in Cape Town. Khulumani is composed of victims of apartheid-era political violence, and they too engage with this therapeutic mode of story-telling. Trauma Centre counselors facilitate the story-telling sessions of Khulumani.

What stories do people tell at these sessions, and how do they tell them? The stories are most often about persecution at the hands of the police and the loss of loved ones, either through violence in their communities or while in police custody. Christopher Colvin (2002) states that these stories are “tight” in their construction, reduced to the essential elements needed to make the point—what happened, to whom, where, and when. There is little exploration of why these things might have happened or of what life is like in the present. The facilitators are the ones who offer some very quick comments about what might be going on psychologically with those telling or listening to these stories. Colvin says that these comments are not designed to be interpretations of stories or analyses of individual storytellers—rather, they are supposed to be general commentaries on the overall nature of psychological trauma and recovery.

Caution has to be exercised when considering the effect of the TRC as an institutionalized truth-telling exercise. This was a fairly limited exercise in terms of numbers of people reached, and the commission lasted for only a few years. Nevertheless, it dominated the South African social discourse in the time that it operated. Its hearings were broadcast live on radio and television (later reduced to weekly or daily summaries), newspapers carried daily summaries, and for those with such access, the commission had an active Website. Thus one could claim that the commission reached quite a broad audience, both nationally and internationally. The number of people testifying before the Human Right...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Constructing Subjectivity in Unexpected Places
• 2 Transatlantic Migration of the Disciplines of the Mind: Examination of the Reception of Wundt’s and Freud’s Theories in Argentina
• 3 From Tradition through Colonialism to Globalization: Reflections on the History of Psychology in India
• 4 History of Psychology in Turkey as a Sign of Diverse Modernization and Global Psychologization
• 5 Origins of Scientific Psychology in China, 1899–1949
• 6 Behavior Analysis in an International Context
• 7 Internationalizing the History of U.S. Developmental Psychology
• 8 Psychology and Liberal Democracy: A Spurious Connection?
• 9 Double Reification: The Process of Universalizing Psychology in the Three Worlds
• 10 Psychology in the Eurocentric Order of the Social Sciences: Colonial Constitution, Cultural Imperialist Expansion, Postcolonial Critique
• 11 Universalism and Indigenization in the History of Modern Psychology
• Postscript
• Contributors
• Index