Prologue

While Lashley established his political point of view early in his career, and was never able or willing to shake it, the significance of maintaining such beliefs did change radically during the first half of the century. In the first few decades, through the 1920s, racist beliefs, even virulently racist, would hardly have been surprising. Racism was the expected and constant concomitant of the study of human biology, psychology, and anthropology. By the 1930s, however, this accepted norm had begun to erode; and by the early 1940s, for a variety of reasons, an atmosphere of antiracism had arisen in the biological and social sciences. It had become distinctly unfashionable to express racist views publicly or in one's science; life scientists were trying furiously to distance themselves from the notion that certain races were inferior to others.

In this chapter I will argue that even amid this shift toward the apolitical, the hereditarian assumptions that historically had always marked scientific studies of human differences persisted even after 1940. Lashley's work, particularly his participation in the NRC Committee on Human Heredity and his late interest in behavior genetics, conforms to this broader trend: a surface of neutrality, undergirded by an unshaken belief in the power of heredity.

In his controversies with Herrick and with Hull, we have seen how Lashley maintained a strictly biological approach to psychology, an approach that emphasized the hereditary shaping of behavior and rejected environmental influence. We have seen how he fashioned an image of himself as a “pure” scientist, focused on facts and “basic research,” equally unconcerned with theory and with social applications. We have seen how his biological approach and his self-proclaimed neutrality worked hand in hand as he argued against the reformist orientation of Progressive psychobiology and the environmentalism that underlay behaviorism. While both psychobiologists and behaviorists envisioned their science as a means of social engineering, as a tool for the rational management of people, Lashley avoided most of this rhetoric of control. He seems to have believed that the purpose of science should not be social betterment; and the absence of such betterment rhetoric from his work has allowed his neutral image to flourish.

In this chapter, I will show that Lashley's purist, biological standpoint led him not only into the two controversies already discussed, but also into a longstanding opposition to Freudian psychoanalysis. This opposition figured prominently during his tenure at Harvard (1935–1942), and led to the debacle that forced his withdrawal from active membership in the Harvard psychology department.

Three months after the creation of the Emergency Committee in Psychology in August 1940, the National Research Council sponsored a Conference on Psychological Factors in Morale. Twenty-five psychologists attended the two-day meeting, held in Washington. Gordon Allport, a social psychologist at Harvard who served as APA president in 1939, chaired the sessions. Organizational problems dominated the agenda, particularly the relation of the Emergency Committee to morale work. Discussion revealed a generational split, with younger members of the conference expressing some misgivings about organizing under the wing of the newly formed Emergency Committee. Allport thought the issue of morale merited wide consideration: “is not morale so gigantic a problem that it ought to feature large in the work of the NRC and not be located as a tail to the Emergency Committee's kite?” He argued that it might be best to “assemble a mixed group of social scientists” as a subcommittee.

Allport, slightly senior to the younger group of social psychologists, was well aware of his role as a representative of their interests in the psychological establishment. In addition to his prominent Harvard perch, he had been the first APA president to be identified with the field of social psychology. Before the conference, he had been involved in the Committee for National Morale, a civilian initiative organized by Arthur Upham Pope, a Persian art expert who had been active in similar efforts during the First World War.

Personnel work, ranging from the initial selection of soldiers to the rehabilitation of combat casualties, was at the center of psychologists' wartime effort. It absorbed the energies of the largest fraction of the profession and involved a large number of psychologists with no previous experience in test design, construction, and administration. Their work addressed the fundamental task of sorting manpower.

In the great triumvirate of personnel procedures – selection, classification, training – the third task presented a distinct set of challenges. Although existing mental testing techniques were readily adapted for the selection and classification of soldiers, as we have seen, it was less clear how psychology might contribute to the development of effective training procedures. Experimental psychologists, many of whom had previously worked mainly with animals, took up the challenge and applied their knowledge about sensation, perception, and learning to the problems of training people.

Almost from the start of the war, experimental psychologists were involved in applied research on the psychological problems engendered by modern weapons technology. Consciously or not, such weapons were designed with human operators in mind, and the engineers responsible for building them had to rely on some notion of human physical and psychological capacities. Some weapons, such as rifles, had evolved over such long periods that their basic configuration was set and largely unproblematic for the average user. Other technologies, such as range finders and fire-control devices on large shipboard guns, were newer, and the fit between the hardware and its human handler was not always good.

In April 1928, with the publication of A History of Experimental Psychology a year away, Edwin Boring wrote to Carl Murchison about his need for “facts concerning the scientific development of certain individuals” that could be obtained only from autobiography. Murchison, a psychologist at Clark University, was an active editor and publisher of psychology books and periodicals. Soon plans were laid to invite influential psychologists to contribute their life stories to a series of edited volumes entitled A History of Psychology in Autobiography. The rationale for the project was stated simply and directly: “Since a science separated from its history lacks direction and promises a future of uncertain importance, it is a matter of consequence to those who wish to understand psychology for those individuals who have greatly influenced contemporary psychology to put into print as much of their personal histories as bears on their professional careers.” The first volume, comprised of contributions from fifteen psychologists, was published in 1930. Two more volumes appeared, in 1932 and 1936, before the series was abandoned.

In 1952, not long after the publication of the second edition of A History of Experimental Psychology, the series was revived. Now Boring had his turn as a contributor, and he produced a remarkably candid account of his personal and professional life. He traced his career chronologically and ended with an attempt to put himself in perspective by outlining what he saw as the major aspects of his personality.

By 1944, only a decade after he led psychology at Harvard to independent departmental status, Edwin Boring faced a serious challenge to the status quo he had helped to create. Differences between what Boring called the “sociotropes” and the “biotropes” in the department were threatening to split the faculty into warring camps. The biotropes included Boring and his allies, who emphasized the more traditional and experimental parts of psychology, such as sensation, perception, psychophysics, and psychophysiology. In contrast, the sociotropes were more oriented toward the social sciences in their studies of social, clinical, and personality psychology. At Harvard they included Gordon Allport, Henry Murray, and their associates.

The wartime salience of sociotropic psychology emboldened Murray and Allport to join forces with their colleagues in anthropology and sociology to propose a new department that would focus on social behavior. They argued that existing institutional arrangements favored traditional experimental psychology and would not allow them to pursue their ambitious goal of a unified science of human personality, society, and culture. Although Boring had some sympathy for the sociotropic point of view, he was unwilling to make fundamental changes in the psychology department's program. That reluctance, coupled with efforts of sociologist Talcott Parsons and other powerful Harvard faculty members, led to the creation of the separate Department of Social Relations in 1945. Chaired by Parsons and with Samuel Stouffer directing the laboratory, it brought together sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists interested in personality and social behavior.

As the American psychology community mobilized for national defense after the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, the possible contributions of female psychologists were overlooked or ignored. The exclusion of women became glaringly obvious at the joint annual meeting of the American Psychological Association (APA) and the American Association for Applied Psychology (AAAP) in September 1940, where reports on preparations for war dominated the discussions. Gladys Schwesinger, chair of the AAAP's Section of Consulting Psychology, disgustedly noted that, “as the list of activities and persons rolled on, not a woman's name was mentioned, nor was any project reported in which women were to be given a part.” Even worse, there was no promise that things would change. Some of the women protested, but with little effect. Summarily ignoring their professional status, the male leaders informed them that tradition favored the services of men in wartime. Women were supposed to “keep the home fires burning.” At best, they could expect to “wait, weep, and comfort one another.”

Unwilling to take no for an answer, about thirty of the women met to lobby for a role in mobilization efforts. They promptly confronted Robert Brotemarkle, the AAAP representative to the Emergency Committee, with two pressing questions. Would women be omitted from the National Register of Scientific and Specialized Personnel that was being collated? And would they gain representation on the all-male Emergency Committee itself?

The question at the heart of this study has a history of more than two thousand years; while it has invited solution after solution, it never seems to get solved. How is “the marvellous phenomenon of the mind” produced from “the enigmatic three-pound mass of tissue known as the brain”? How can chemicals, cells, electrical signals – in short, matter – give rise to our consciousness, our thoughts, dreams, hopes and fears? How can two such different categories of existence bear any relationship to each other, much less be born, live, and die together?

Why the mind-body problem has remained so peculiarly intransigent despite repeated attacks is in itself a question worthy of consideration; that it continues to invite attacks cannot be disputed. In his recent book Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett asked, “how could the brain be the seat of consciousness?” and then proceeded to give the following answer:

The Biological Approach to Psychology

Lashley's rejection of behaviorism involved not only a disavowal of the reflex theory, but also an equally strong denial of the importance of environmental influences on behavior. The anti-environmentalist emphasis of his argument is especially clear in his exchange of views with Walter S. Hunter in the Journal of General Psychology.

In 1930, Hunter published a criticism of Lashley's concept of cerebral equipotentiality, in which he claimed that Lashley's data did not demand a new theory of neural activity but rather conformed to the reflex arc theory. The central issue was whether behavior was peripherally or centrally controlled; with the behaviorists, Hunter argued that environmental stimuli, acting through the senses, determined behavior, while Lashley claimed that the central nervous system acted independently of the environment. Citing a great deal of evidence to prove that sensory stimulation controlled the various habits that Lashley's rats displayed, Hunter wrote:

In 1940, Chauncey McKinley Louttit (1901–1956), a clinical psychologist from Indiana University, sought and received a commission from the U.S. Navy. As the navy's first psychologist, he hoped that war work would provide a way out of his professional frustrations. Louttit had done much to advance the cause of clinical psychology during the 1930s and was eager to broaden his already extensive networks. The author of a standard textbook in the field, published in 1936, he was involved in the founding of the American Association for Applied Psychology in 1937 and was serving as executive secretary of the group.

Louttit, trained as a comparative psychologist under Robert Yerkes in the late 1920s, was ambivalent about making a career in clinical psychology and entered the field reluctantly after graduate school as a temporary employment expedient. His career illustrates the marginal status of clinical psychology before World War II.

Louttit's first paid employment in psychology prefigured his later career. After receiving his bachelor's degree from Hobart College in 1925, he became an assistant to Stanley D. Porteus, director of research at the Vineland Training School for the Feebleminded, in New Jersey. Earlier, under Henry H. Goddard, Vineland had become one of the first sites for the use of psychological tests for the diagnosis and treatment of mental problems. After several months, Porteus recommended Louttit to Robert Yerkes for a graduate assistantship at Yale. The timing was fortunate.

When Lashley arrived at the University of Chicago in 1929, he associated himself with a group of scientists whose work was permeated with the hope for human betterment. He had been recruited to the department of psychology at Chicago in order to help advance the program in “psycho-neurology,” the integration of psychology and biology envisioned by Herrick and his colleagues. While Lashley supported the American school's goal of unifying the sciences of brain and behavior, he became deeply opposed to their Progressive social ideals. He adopted their general embryological perspective, and Child's gradient theory in particular, but consistently rejected the implications of progress that were supposed to go along with it.

Lashley and Embryology

Lashley's use of the embryological model in his own work correlating brain function and behavior did not spring up instantaneously upon his arrival in Chicago. As early as 1917 he had been self-consciously borrowing terms from that field. References to Child's gradient theory, however, began to appear in Lashley's work only in 1926 and continued until 1935, when Lashley left Chicago for Harvard.

In the summer of 1943 a paperback book entitled Psychology for the Fighting Man appeared in U.S. bookstores and Allied post exchanges around the world. The pocket-sized Penguin edition, costing twenty-five cents, joined a list of books aimed at the wartime mass market, both military and civilian. Directed to “the fighting man himself,” the volume adopted a conversational tone in explaining “what you should know about yourself and others.”

From its bright red cover to its snappy chapter titles, Psychology for the Fighting Man was designed to capture the attention of the average reader. The twenty short chapters were written to stand individually and could be read in any order. The topics ranged across the entire spectrum of contemporary psychology, from motivation (“Morale”) to sensation and perception (“Sight as a Weapon”), from personnel selection (“The Right Soldier in the Right Job”) to social and cultural psychology (“Differences among Races and Peoples”).

Psychology for the Fighting Man became a bestseller, with nearly 400,000 copies in circulation by the end of the war. The book was reviewed widely upon publication. The press was positive, if somewhat bland, in its evaluations. The New York Times Book Review called it “a why-you-behave-as-you-do sort of a book, scientifically accurate, militarily correct and keyed to interest men of action whether colonels or corporals or anyone literate enough to read a newspaper.” Psychologists gave it high praise and tended to find their own prejudices confirmed in its pages.

As psychology boomed in America during the 1950s Edwin Boring was flourishing. He continued working his usual schedule after reaching normal retirement age at the beginning of the decade and finally achieved some measure of personal satisfaction in his professional accomplishments. He had found an important role for himself as psychology's great communicator.

Within the profession, Boring continued to add his voice to discussions about psychology's past, present, and future. He was called upon to provide counsel and advice to the American Psychological Association on important matters of policy and procedure. For instance, in 1954, at the height of the hysteria over Communist subversion whipped up by Senator Joseph McCarthy, Boring was appointed chair of the APA Committee on Freedom of Enquiry, which was charged with the task of exploring ways to protect academic freedom.

In 1955 the American Psychological Association launched a new journal devoted to book reviews. It was christened Contemporary Psychology and Boring served as editor. He sought a cosmopolitan style modeled after the New Yorker or the Saturday Review. Known as CP (in a sly play on the well-known abbreviation for the Communist Party), the new bimonthly journal provided a platform for its editor to pronounce on all things psychological in a column entitled “CP Speaks.”

The journal was an immediate success. In addition to providing timely and indepth reviews of the burgeoning literature of psychology, it fostered discussion of professional as well as technical issues.

The Rise of the Laboratory

In Lashley's neuropsychology, the laboratory, as opposed to the clinic or the field, was not simply the privileged site of knowledge production; it was the only source of reliable psychological fact. Lashley and his students cared little for the applied aspects of their discipline, not because they lacked interest in social control, but because for them the laboratory served as a substitute for society. Within its walls, they created a place where any social situation that was of concern could be simulated. By subsuming of all other aspects of life, the laboratory achieved preeminence in Lashley's neuropsychology.

The preeminence of the laboratory in Lashley's science had three main consequences for the production of psychological knowledge. First, anything that could not be investigated in a laboratory was effectively stricken from the scientific record. What couldn't be studied within the laboratory walls wasn't science. Much of human psychology, consequently, was either excluded or redefined to fit inside a laboratory. Second, because experimentation with humans was strictly limited, the analogy between human beings and animals – particularly rats – took on a heightened significance and validity. Humans and the “lower” organisms were entirely comparable; any suggestion of a qualitative leap, of progress in evolution, was denied.

Prologue

Since Lashley's death in 1958, historians of psychology have done little to modify his own assessment of the history of psychology and his role in it. They imply that in so highly technical a field as neuropsychology, the aim of which is to describe the neural basis of consciousness, there is room only for the most disinterested of truth-seekers. That is certainly what Lashley considered himself, and historians have not challenged his portrayal. Lashley has become a symbol to psychologists of a perfectly neutral scientist. He was, according to himself and others, led to his conclusions purely by induction from his experimental results; free of preconceptions, he never hesitated to tear down any theory, including his own. Indeed, after his brief early endorsement of behaviorism, he never became an ardent follower of any psychological movement, preferring to point out their weaknesses and their conflicts with what he considered the facts. From the mid-1920s onward, Lashley rejected a collection of theories, and by the 1950s he was rejecting the notion that any theory could ever explain the complexities of psychology.

Lashley's opposition to theory has become legendary among psychologists. He himself stressed it in his papers and addresses – writing, for example, that “[a]lways the question, How? punctures the bubble of theory, and the answer is to be sought in analysis and ever more analysis.”