Whether by choice or by chance, psychologists at Harvard University have been making headlines for more than a century. Beginning with William James, author of The Principles of Psychology (1890), America's oldest academic institution has harbored a succession of prominent and controversial figures. James, credited with starting the first psychological laboratory in the country, lost faith in the emerging discipline as it became preoccupied with the experimental method in the production of new knowledge. Before abandoning psychology for philosophy, however, he arranged for a major expansion of the Harvard laboratory, including the importation of experimental Hugo Münsterberg from Germany to direct it. Münsterberg, who was hired in 1892 as a representative of the pure research ideal, proved to have equally strong convictions about the importance of applied psychology and became a highly visible proponent of the social utility of psychological knowledge. During the First World War, Münsterberg's outspoken views on the superiority of German culture made him a lightning rod for criticism, and his loyalty was called into question. In 1916, a few months before the United States entered the war, a stroke killed him while he was delivering a public lecture.

Münsterberg's eventual successor was Edwin G. Boring, who became director of the laboratory in 1924 and set out to restore the primacy of experimental work in psychology, at Harvard and elsewhere. Like his predecessors, he became one of America's best-known psychologists.

Intelligence Testing and the Machine Analogy

Hull's conflict with Lashley took place on three levels. On the most obvious level, theirs was a dispute about the structure and function of the nervous system. Lashley believed the brain functioned as an equipotential system, as a whole, and that a certain amount of brain tissue was necessary, regardless of its location, for proper functioning. For Hull, the nervous system was a mosaic of discrete connections between stimulus and response, each particular connection activated by an impinging stimulus.

On a disciplinary level, they clashed about the proper relationship of psychology to the other sciences: for Lashley, psychology was completely reducible to the biology of the brain and closely connected to neurology and embryology. But Hull believed that psychology was the most basic of the social sciences and should work toward their unification, without reference to the “molecular” sciences. And on the most basic level, they were divided on the issue of the relative importance of heredity and environment in determining behavior.

In May 1945, as the war was entering its final stages, Harvard president James Bryant Conant appointed a blue-ribbon panel to advise him on how to cope with the chaotic situation in psychology at the university. Like a set of competing fiefdoms, Harvard psychology was divided among several powerful figures and scattered across a number of administrative units. Christened the University Commission to Advise on the Future of Psychology at Harvard, the twelve-member group was headed by Rockefeller Foundation executive Alan Gregg, a physician, and included a number of prominent educators and psychologists. Rather than focus exclusively on the Harvard case, however, the group was charged with the broader task of determining “the place of psychology in an ideal university.” That Harvard might approximate the ideal and thereby provide a blueprint for the rest of the academic world was an unspoken assumption.

The commission labored for two years before publishing its report, The Place of Psychology in an Ideal University. The report contained few surprises, as it endorsed most of the changes that were already occurring in the postwar expansion of psychology. The group affirmed the notion that psychology was valuable for a wide variety of other fields and should be incorporated into professional training for education, medicine, business, law, theology, and engineering. It recommended that working contact between all psychologists on a campus be maintained and that training programs for applied psychologists be developed further.

“Enfin! Enfin en Amérique!” exclaimed Edouard Claparède at the opening session of the Ninth International Congress of Psychology in early September 1929. The French psychologist was welcoming more than eight hundred colleagues from around the world who had gathered at Yale University to participate in the first such international meeting ever held in the United States. From the time of the First International Congress of Psychology that took place in 1889 in Paris, proposals had been made to hold a meeting in America, but political and economic circumstances had intervened. Finally, on the fortieth anniversary of the first congress, delegates from twenty-one foreign countries convened in New Haven, Connecticut. Although most hailed from Europe and the Soviet Union, there were also representatives from China, Japan, India, Australia, New Zealand, Egypt, and Brazil. Outnumbering their foreign guests nearly seven to one, American psychologists were proudly demonstrating the growth and prosperity of the discipline in their country.

The Ninth International Congress signaled that American psychology had come of age. Scientific psychology had begun in Europe during the latter part of the nineteenth century and was soon imported to North America, where it flourished with remarkable vigor. According to the 1929 Psychological Register, an international directory, there were more professional psychologists in the United States than in the rest of the world combined. The United States also led the world in producing knowledge in psychology, outstripping Germany in the 1920s and contributing over one-third of the total number of published papers in the field by the end of the decade.

Prologue

In The Triumph of Evolution, the historian Hamilton Cravens argued that by 1941 many natural and social scientists working in the United States had managed to resolve their ancient dispute over the relative values of nature and nurture in development. Heredity and environment were interdependent, cooperating factors, they concluded; their effects were not separable, nor was one more important than the other.

Earlier in the century, according to Cravens, most biologists, psychologists and sociologists had tended to come down on one side or the other, stressing the role either of innate constitution or of learned behavior. But by 1941 they had “recognized the complexity of human nature and behavior” and declared the nature-nurture dichotomy “artificial, unproductive and perhaps unscientific.” Eager to take up new questions, life scientists formulated a new interactionist model: on the basis of this new synthesis they forged a science of man, a truly interdisciplinary study of humanity that took into account both biological and cultural evolution. This triumph of evolution and resolution of the controversy ushered in an era of interdisciplinary scholarship.

The resolution of this longstanding controversy, however, was far from a universal conclusion. While many prominent life scientists did indeed pronounce a harmonious end to the dispute, in less visible or less public arenas the old debate continued to rage unabated, and continued to exert a powerful influence on the sciences of life and mind.

In September 1939, just after the war in Europe broke out, Gordon Allport delivered his presidential address at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, held at Stanford and Berkeley, California. Reflecting on the historical symbolism of meeting for the first time on the shores of the Pacific, he noted that events across the Atlantic had placed “the burden of scientific progress in psychology” on the profession. Faced “with the responsibility for the preservation and eventual rehabilitation of world psychology,” the Harvard professor asked, “Are we American psychologists equipped for the versatile leadership demanded by our comprehensive discipline?” He proposed to answer his rhetorical question through an analysis of “the psychologist's frame of reference” as it was reflected in the pages of the psychological literature over the preceding fifty years.

Among the trends he observed was a rapid rise in the use of statistics, to the point that nearly half of the published literature relied on them. There was also a noteworthy increase in the use of animals as subjects and a concomitant growth in the proportion of methodological studies of all kinds. His data suggested “the development of a notable schism between the psychology constructed in a laboratory and the psychology constructed on the field of life.” In a footnote, Allport went on to call attention to the unwitting hypocrisy of some academic purists when they criticized applied psychology: “Outside the laboratory he lives a cultured and varied life of a free agent and useful citizen.

Prologue

To this point, I have maintained that the distinguishing features of Lashley's science were his opposition to theory and applications and his rhetoric of neutrality, and that these were accompanied by his increasing conviction that intelligence was biologically based and hereditarily determined. These last two chapters will demonstrate that Lashley's trademarks were more than simply coincidental aspects of his neuropsychology. Taken together and placed in their historical context, these characteristic features of Lashley's science comprised a powerful political statement: they made an argument for the social status quo, and against political change, progressive reform, and particularly against racial integration.

How can this be, though, when statements on race, or political views of whatever sort, are nowhere to be found in Lashley's work; when, in fact, his deliberate neutrality precluded any reference of the kind? Why would a scientist cultivate such a studied political neutrality, if his purpose were to address the political problems of his age that troubled him? And how can a historian presume to know what those political problems were, and whether or not the scientist's work meant to address them, if there is no mention of politics of any kind anywhere in the body of that work?

It is true, as we have seen, that there are no explicit political references in Lashley's scientific papers: his public persona seems entirely apolitical.

Lashley and Watson

While he was working under Jennings's direction, Lashley began a fruitful collaboration with John B. Watson. Twelve years Lashley's senior, Watson had been trained in comparative psychology at the University of Chicago by Henry Herbert Donaldson and James Rowland Angell. He had initially been attracted by the iconoclasm of the physiologist Jacques Loeb, but Donaldson and Angell dissuaded him from doing his Ph.D. work with Loeb. Instead, Watson wrote his dissertation on the correlation between brain growth and learning ability in rats. For several years afterwards he taught psychology at Chicago.

In 1908, Watson became professor of psychology at Johns Hopkins, and the following year, when his immediate superior James Mark Baldwin resigned, Watson was promoted to the senior professorship in psychology. By then he was already beginning to formulate a materialist position in psychology, which reached full expression in his 1913 behaviorist manifesto, “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It,” published in the Psychological Review. “Psychology, as the behaviorist views it,” Watson wrote, “is a purely objective, experimental branch of natural science. …” Unlike his teachers Donaldson and Angell, Watson believed that psychology could become a real science only by focusing on the study of behavior and ceasing its attempts to determine the content of the human mind.

In my interpretation, Karl Lashley's life and work illustrate three basic themes that I want now to review and to tie together. The first is the idea that during the period from 1910 to 1955, the mind-body problem – the puzzle of the relationship between consciousness and matter – became inseparably involved with the nature-nurture dispute: which was the greater determinant of intelligence and ability, heredity or environment? It is difficult to find a life scientist from the first half of this century who did not express an opinion on the nature-nurture question, especially as genetics developed in scientific and social significance, and the question took on increasing urgency. As a result, understanding psychologists' and biologists' answers to the problem of mind, brain, and behavior is impossible unless those answers are seen in the light of the nature-nurture debate.

In late November 1945 a group of about 150 American psychologists gathered near Washington, D.C., to discuss the impact of World War II on their work. Navy Captain John G. Jenkins, chair of the psychology department at the University of Maryland, reflected on the amazing transformation the war had wrought on the profession. In the space of five years military attitudes had changed dramatically. At the start of the war psychologists entered the services “under the conviction that things were so bad that any available magic should be tried, even psychology.” A few short years later they were “going out the big front door” with the band playing “Hail to the Psyche.” As evidence of wartime professional success, Jenkins cited the establishment of permanent divisions of psychology within the military services.

On a more somber note, Jenkins mused about how the atomic bomb seemed to render such professional self-congratulations beside the point. The use of nuclear weapons to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki four months earlier had also “destroyed much of the basic framework of the social world we inhabited before the war,” making it impossible for psychologists to return to the academic world they had left a few years earlier. Now psychologists, along with scientists and citizens everywhere, were caught up in the challenges of a new era of global insecurity.

In projecting psychology's ambiguous but exciting future, Jenkins articulated a developmental model that divided the history of the science into three phases.

At the turn of the twentieth century America's foremost psychologist held out the hope that perhaps the “moral equivalent of war” could be found to redirect human energy away from destructive purposes into more positive channels. William James died in 1910 and thus was spared the experiencing of two world wars that gave the lie to the dream he so eloquently expressed. One can only wonder what his reaction would have been to the fact that those global conflicts were not only fought with the aid of tools provided by his fellow psychologists but that they stimulated and shaped the discipline he did so much to establish.

After modest but steady growth from the late nineteenth century, when it was first introduced into American colleges and universities, the field of psychology boomed after the First World War. Between 1919 and 1939 the number of psychologists grew tenfold, from approximately three hundred to three thousand professionals. The Second World War had an even more dramatic and enduring impact. The psychology community had expanded by another order of magnitude by 1970, with more than thirty thousand professionals registered as members of the American Psychological Association. In 1995, fifty years after the end of World War II, the number of psychologists in the United States was approaching a quarter of a million.

Prologue

In an obituary of his mentor, Frank Beach described the life and career of Karl Spencer Lashley as the embodiment of many contradictions. Lashley, Beach wrote, was a “[f]amous theorist who specialized in disproving theories, especially his own,” and an “[i]nspiring teacher who described all teaching as useless.” Perhaps the most astonishing of these ironies is that Lashley was an “[e]minent psychologist with no earned degree in psychology.” Indeed, Lashley received formal training neither in neurology nor in psychology, the sciences which became the foci of his mature work. Lashley himself noted:

For Beach and the historians who have followed him, the problem has been to understand adequately how Lashley became renowned in fields for which he had little preparation. Most recently, in fact, Darryl Bruce has argued that Lashley's “shift” from his undergraduate work to his mature research occurred in several distinct steps, from bacteriology, to zoology and genetics, to comparative psychology, to learning, and finally to the neural basis of learning.

The postwar alliance for scientific professionalism began to peak around 1970 as the distinctive contours of the psychology community began to merge with the cultural landscape of America. A seemingly limitless market for psychological expertise enabled the profession to continue its remarkable expansion, with no end in sight. In 1970 membership in the American Psychological Association reached more than 30,000, an increase of nearly a hundred-fold over the span of a single professional lifetime.

By this time scientific interests and social concerns had coalesced around the study of personality and the concept of the self. Interest in personality theory was high among academic psychologists, reinforced by the “golden age” in the popularization of psychoanalytic ideas in the postwar period. Possessing vast interpretive flexibility, the self was constructed as an object of research and a locus of personal and cultural concern. After disappearing for decades from the psychological literature, theoretical and empirical studies of the self proliferated after the war. Between 1940 and 1970 some two thousand publications related to the concept of the self appeared.

The cultural preoccupation with the self was already well established when writer Tom Wolfe christened the 1970s the “Me Decade.” In a series of brilliant essays he captured the widespread and intense self-absorption of the American middle class that was associated with sexual liberation, recreational drug use, psychotherapeutic and religious cults, and various other forms of self-indulgence.

This book began as my dissertation in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University in the early 1990s. It was an exciting context in which to be studying the history of science: a radical skepticism toward scientific authority and scientific truth had begun to be taken as the sine qua non of serious historical scholarship. Science, my colleagues and I were taught, was thoroughly informed by society; scientific theories and practices were products of culture, not nature; laboratory experimentation was an elaborate ritual ripe for anthropological analysis. In our seminars and discussions, there was the pervasive sense that we were breaking with tradition, riding the wave of a revolutionary new approach to the field.

In part what made these new ideas so exciting was the debate that swirled around them. Not everyone at Cornell was a “social constructivist,” and the controversy about the relationship between science and culture was heated and ongoing. As a graduate student, I found it impossible not to define my work somehow in relation to the arguments I observed and participated in.

While I became persuaded of the usefulness of a social constructivist perspective in doing history of science, I was also acutely aware of the criticisms brought against it.

Archives of the History of American Psychology, Bierce Library, University of Akron, Akron, Ohio.

This is an extremely well-organized and well-catalogued archive, and Lashley appears both as correspondent and as subject in a number of collections of papers. The richest material, however, is in the Kenneth W. Spence Papers, which contains correspondence – dozens of letters in all – between Lashley, Spence, and Clark L. Hull; and correspondence about Lashley between Spence and Hull. The archive also holds Lashley's responses to a questionnaire sent to eminent scientists by Lauren Wispe.

Archives of the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.

The collection of Lashley materials here includes mainly unpublished writings from the period of his directorship of the laboratory, most notably the annual reports of the director. There is also a great deal of material relating to Lashley's participation in various scientific societies, including the National Academy of Sciences, and government-sponsored scientific committees, including the Committee on Sensory Devices, the Committee on the National Science Foundation, and the Committee on Human Heredity. The archive also holds many of the books that were in Lashley's own library at his death.

The Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives, The Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Baltimore, Maryland.