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.

Although the voices of professional psychologists became more numerous and audible in postwar America, they hardly constituted a monopoly on discussions about psychology and modern life. Other experts on human behavior, such as sociologists, psychiatrists, and anthropologists, offered their views to an eager public, as did various critics and commentators. The extent and variety of discourse on “the psychological society” seemed to indicate that psychology had moved to the forefront of public consciousness.

The notion that Americans lived in a “psychological society” took hold rapidly in the 1950s and had become a commonplace by the 1960s. Contemporary awareness of the changing social environment was stimulated by works that plumbed the meaning of modern life. Many commentators, both inside and outside academe, framed their analysis in terms of the relations between personality and culture. Among the first studies to appear after the war was David Riesman's evocatively titled book The Lonely Crowd (1950), which explored the personality characteristics of people living in a mass society, particularly the shift in the location of people's moral compass from within themselves (“inner-directedness”) to outside agents (“other-directedness”). His concern over the decline of individualism was shared by William H. Whyte, Jr., a writer for Fortune magazine. In The Organization Man (1956), he traced the rise of a set of values that privileged collective belonging, whether to a corporation, research enterprise, or other group.