This article assesses the reputation of Mary Somerville in the 1830s and suggests that critical confusion over her status in the changing world of early nineteenth-century science is not new. Drawing on Somerville’s own writings, contemporary newspaper and periodical reviews, political debates and unpublished manuscripts, Somerville's ‘uniqueness’ as a public figure is examined through the eyes of both the nascent scientific community of the time as well as the wider audience for her work. Somerville's status as a popularizer and an educator is more complicated than may have previously been assumed and can be both confirmed and undermined by an analysis of contemporary public opinion. Although her works were directed at the public who indirectly paid her pension for services to science, Somerville's private and published comments about and within her writings offer an alternative interpretation. Despite an apparent turn to more popular works in order to bolster her finances, Mary Somerville relished the specialist aspect of her writings and valued the difficulties which prevented the ordinary reader from obtaining ultimate insight into celestial mechanics.

Argument

I wish to propose that the history of genetics reflects the history of the concept of reductionism in the life sciences. Reductionism is the thesis that explanation of laws or phenomena in one realm by those of another realm are always likely to be successful as explanations. By 1900 reduction of biology to the laws of chemistry and physics was not self evident: Although bottom-up preformationist explanations were largely inadequate for development, top-down epigenetic hypotheses often adopted metaphysical assumptions. Similarly, top-down theories of evolution as dependent on the accumulated impact of the past confronted those of bottom-up notions of fitness of specific traits that are relevant for future evolution. Mendel's 1865 methodological reductionist study of inheritance of traits was embraced in 1900 as evidence for reduction at the conceptual level. With the achievements of research of the mechanisms of inheritance, genetics became increasingly genocentric in its explanatory arsenal of development, and accordingly it was in conflict with the top-down, life-as-organized-systems' notions of embryology. Similarly, evolution was conceptually reduced to changes of gene-frequencies in populations. It was, however, precisely the increasing attempts to ground the bottom-up approach at the molecular level that eventually pushed conceptual reductionism to its crisis. Modern developments of molecular and computational methods finally forced, or allowed, researchers to apply bottom-up methodologies to top-down systems' analyses.

The bulk of this address concerns itself with the extent to which professional scientists were involved in popular science writing in early twentieth-century Britain. Contrary to a widespread assumption, it is argued that a significant proportion of the scientific community engaged in writing the more educational type of popular science. Some high-profile figures acquired enough skill in popular writing to exert considerable influence over the public's perception of science and its significance. The address also shows how publishers actively sought ‘expert’ authors for popular material, but at the same time controlled what was published in accordance with their perception of what would sell. At a more popular level of writing there were many semi-professional authors who, while not active scientists, exploited close contacts with the scientific community. Here there was a strong emphasis on the practical applications of science.

The address concludes by suggesting parallels between popular science writing in this period and the present state of popular writing about the history of science.

Argument

Larry Laudan defends “methodological naturalism” – the position that scientific methodology can be fully empirical and be subject to radical change without sacrificing the rationality of science. This view has two main components: (a) the historical claim that just as substantive science has changed and developed in response to new information and evidence, so have the basic rules and methods which guide theory appraisal in science changed in response to new information about the world; and (b) the philosophical claim that all aspects of science are in principle subject to radical change and evolution in the light of new information about the world. In this paper, I argue that one main historical example used by Laudan, namely, the scientific revolution that accompanied the change from the corpuscular to the wave theory of light, does not in fact support the view that there have been radical methodological changes in the history of science.

How does the advancement of the sciences relate to the ways in which their founding figures are remembered? According to the stark picture painted by Alfred N. Whitehead in 1917, “the establishment of a reverential attitude towards any statement made by a classical author” had barred the progress of logic for several centuries: “Scholars became commentators on truths too fragile to bear translation. A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost” (Whitehead 1917, 115). In the eyes of many critics (who often tend to equate science and logic in similar fashion), Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis may well be an example of such a lost cause. From the founding book The Interpretation of Dreams ([1899] 1900) to his very last statements, Freud never ceased to affirm that psychoanalysis was a science: “What else can it be?” (Freud 1940, 282). Yet not only the fact that he has become one of the classic authors of the twentieth century, but also a number of very specific traits of psychoanalytic institutions (such as the numerous schisms resulting from personal fights between their members) have nourished the suspicion that Freud was less the founder of a science than of a sort of quasi-religious movement, a secular sect thriving on a personality cult.

Argument

Sociologists and historians have long favored externalist over internalist accounts of practices in the clinical disciplines. This has been particularly true in the case of the so-called new patient or borderline personality, which a range of commentators have located in culturally resonant narratives of decline. I argue here that these narratives, while pleasing, do not hold up as history; most problematic is their assumption that the appearance of the borderline portends the emergence of altogether novel forms of modal personhood. Internalist accounts of the category's consolidation are equally problematic in asserting a coherence and a stable referent that repeatedly proves elusive. In the end, I suggest that a complex account of disciplinary practice that attends to knowledge production in the clinical encounter supports the conclusion that the new patient was new to psychoanalysis. Whether or not he was altogether new cannot be established, undermining the critics' certitude and prophecies of decline.

Argument

The paper explores the use of Freud's methods of dream interpretation by four English writers of the early twentieth century: T. H. Pear, W. H. R. Rivers, Ernest Jones, and Alix Strachey. Each employed their own dreams in rather different ways: as part of an assessment of Freud's work as a psychological theory, as illustrative of the cogency of Freud's method and theories as part of the psychoanalytic process. Each adopted different approaches to the question of privacy and decorum. The paper argues that assessment of the impact of Freud's work must take account of the application of the method to the researcher's own dreams and the personal impact this process of analysis had upon them, and must also gauge how the dreamers' deployment of Freud's methods influenced their explicit relationship to him and his theories.

The dream, then, is the chief gate by which we can enter into the knowledge of the unconscious…. Thoughts and desires, which, if they attempted to dominate consciousness in waking life, would be promptly suppressed, arise, develop and expand to an astonishing extent in the dream.

This statement, of course, is entirely independent of the implications of any one “theory of dreams.” Its truth is evident to anyone who has honestly recorded or considered his own dreams for even a short period.

(Elliot Smith and Pear 1917, 61)

Argument

This paper explores the relationship between the medium of motion-picture film and the representation of autobiographical memory during the middle decades of the twentieth century. The paper argues that a reciprocal relationship developed between film and memory, in which film was understood as an externalized form of memory, and memory an internalized record of personal experience similar in many respects to film. Memory was often represented as an object-like entity, preserved in stable form within the body, and able to be extracted by the right stimulus or trigger. A particularly important community in which this representation was developed was psychotherapeutic practitioners with psychoanalytic orientations, particularly during and shortly after the Second World War. In special circumstances, therapists and others claimed, records of past life events could be projected, film-like, onto the screen of an individual's conscious, replaying previous experiences in real time. The paper develops a social historical account of this relationship, and reflects on its significance for the history of selfhood in the twentieth century.

Argument

Throughout his career as a writer, Sigmund Freud maintained an interest in the evolutionary origins of the human mind and its neurotic and psychotic disorders. In common with many writers then and now, he believed that the evolutionary past is conserved in the mind and the brain. Today the “evolutionary Freud” is nearly forgotten. Even among Freudians, he is regarded to be a red herring, relevant only to the extent that he diverts attention from the enduring achievements of the authentic Freud. There are three ways to explain these attitudes. First, the evolutionary Freud's key work is the “Overview of the Transference Neurosis” (1915). But it was published at an inopportune moment, forty years after the author's death, during the so-called “Freud wars.” Second, Freud eventually lost interest in the “Overview” and the prospect of a comprehensive evolutionary theory of psychopathology. The publication of The Ego and the Id (1923), introducing Freud's structural theory of the psyche, marked the point of no return. Finally, Freud's evolutionary theory is simply not credible. It is based on just-so stories and a thoroughly discredited evolutionary mechanism, Lamarckian use-inheritance. Explanations one and two are probably correct but also uninteresting. Explanation number three assumes that there is a fundamental difference between Freud's evolutionary narratives (not credible) and the evolutionary accounts of psychopathology that currently circulate in psychiatry and mainstream journals (credible). The assumption is mistaken but worth investigating.

Argument

The psychoanalytic setting counts today as one of the familiar therapeutic rituals of the Western world. Taking up some of the insights of the anthropology of science will allow us to account for both the social and the material arrangements from which Freud's invention emerged at the end of the nineteenth century out of the clinical laboratories and private consulting rooms of practitioners of hypnosis. The peculiar way of neglecting or forgetting the object world and the institution of the psychoanalyst as a “transference object” will be traced back to multiple reconfigurations in the history of hypnotism in France and in Germany. In this process, different practitioners tried to achieve a synthesis of clinical work and experimental psychology, with the aim of objectifying knowledge about human subjectivity. While Freud retained the claim of psychoanalysis performing an experimental situation, he set apart his own setting from the objectifying practices which were characteristic of this experimental psychology located in the clinic and the private consulting room.

It is not easy to over-estimate the importance of the part played by hypnotism in the history of the origin of psychoanalysis. From a theoretical as well as from a therapeutic point of view, psycho-analysis has at its command a legacy which it has inherited from hypnotism.

Sigmund Freud, A Short Account of Psycho-Analysis ([1923] 1924, 192)

Argument

The argument of this paper is to situate The Interpretation of Dreams within an historical context. It is, therefore, impossible to believe Freud entirely when he staged himself in his letters to Fliess as a mere discoverer. In reality Freud also felt he belonged to a learned community of dream specialists, whom I call “dreaming scientists” and “scientific dreamers.” Instead of speaking, as Ellenberger does, in terms of influence, I will be offering as an example a portrait of Freud as a reader of two French authors, Maury, and indirectly, Hervey de Saint-Denys. I will analyze how Freud staged himself as replacing Maury and dreaming sometimes like Hervey de Saint-Denys. My premise in this work is that we must forget Freud, in order to adventure into a learned dream culture peculiar to the nineteenth century. Only afterwards can we come back to Freud and place him in this context as a creative heir.

Argument

In 1980, when the diagnosis of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was introduced into the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III), survivor guilt – a symptom long associated with trauma of the Holocaust and other extreme experiences – was included in the list of symptom criteria. But in the revised edition of the manual of 1987 (DSM-IIIR), survivor guilt was demoted to the status of merely an “associated feature” of the condition. Now that survivor guilt has disappeared from the official lexicon of trauma, shame has come to take its place as the emotion that most defines the traumatic state. This paper examines the rationale for the shift from survivor guilt to shame in the context of the American Psychiatric Association's revisions. It argues that the shift can be understood as yet another manifestation of the oscillation between mimetic and antimimetic theories of trauma that, I have argued in my book Trauma: A Genealogy (2000), has structured the understanding of trauma from the start.

Argument

The analogy between dream and film represents a central thread in the psychoanalytic discussion of cinema. Using examples taken from films created between 1900 and 1906, this paper develops a typology of dream scenes in early film. The basis for the proposed typology is provided by the dream knowledge in circulation toward the end of the nineteenth century. This knowledge was fed by a great variety of sources, some of them in the proximity of scientific research and some of them far from it, including wish-fulfilling prognostic models and those based on the reservoir of memory or on bodily stimuli. By setting cinema in a context of contemporary dream psychologies, it is possible to trace the specific conditions under which the analogy between dream and cinema could become effective.