When Michael Hunter first publicized the idea of ‘Psychoanalysing Robert Boyle’ I understood that his main aim was to test three competing psychoanalytical theories against the historical evidence provided by the life and work of Robert Boyle. Although this would have been a valuable exercise, and one that the British Society for the History of Science meeting partly engaged, the papers by Brett Kahr, John Clay and Karl Figlio published here raise some far more compelling issues which I shall explore in the ensuing discussion. Before turning to this discussion I offer a few introductory remarks.

It is hard to think of a better subject for the exercise of retrospective analysis with which we are here concerned than Robert Boyle, the leading British scientist of his day, and arguably the most significant before Newton. A prolific and influential author, Boyle was lionized in his time both for his scientific achievement and for his piety and philanthropy. Of late, he has been the subject of attention from a variety of viewpoints which, as we shall see, raises the issue of how he is best understood. In particular, I want to argue that, for all his eminence, there are complications about Boyle's personality that cry out for scrutiny, and it is on the implications of these that I will dwell in the latter stages of my paper.

Boyle was born into one of the most privileged aristocratic families in England. His father, Richard Boyle, Earl of Cork, was Lord High Treasurer of Ireland before the Civil War, and Robert, the youngest – and, as he himself claimed, favourite – son, was brought up in an opulent, privileged setting, surrounded by servants and with an entrée at the royal court. His elder brothers were suave and active figures, only too ready to be involved in the fighting of the Civil War – in which one, Viscount Kinalmeaky, was killed, though two others, Lords Dungarvan and Broghill, survived to go on to high state office under both Cromwell and Charles II. This background undoubtedly had a significant influence on Boyle, giving him an aristocratic demeanour to which his contemporaries almost automatically deferred. It also made him familiar with the mindless social milieu of landed society, in which it was all too easy (in Boyle's own words) to ‘squander away a whole afternoone in tatling of this Ladys Face & tother Lady's Clothes; of this Lords being Drunke & that Lord's Clap; in telling how this Gentleman's horse outrun that other's Mare’.

Privilege brings obligations – noblesse oblige. Boyle came from a deeply privileged background. If we are to locate him through twentieth-century eyes in order to rediscover his psychic space, then this background needs to be borne in mind. It was a constant shaping force for him. Twentieth-century eyes mean a new perspective. As Eliot wrote of Pascal, Boyle's contemporary, ‘every generation sees preceding ones differently. Pascal is one of those writers who will be, and who must be, studied afresh by men in every generation. It is not he who changes, but we who change. It is not our knowledge of him that increases, but our world that alters and our attitudes towards it’ – and so it is with Boyle.

Boyle's childhood was beset by tragedy. From a psychological point of view, there can be fewer worse tragedies than the premature loss of a mother. His mother died of consumption when he was three. She was forty-two and he was her fourteenth and penultimate child. It seems clear that this early loss haunted him for the rest of his life, its unconscious effect always there. At some level he may have felt partly responsible for her death – that his birth had helped to wear her out, to finish her off, to consume her. It would seem that he missed out on mourning in the conventional sense, or rather in the sense that Freud emphasized as being all-important in his paper ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. Boyle did use, in his autobiographical writing as ‘Philaretus’, the word ‘disaster’ to describe this early tragedy, and it is a powerful enough word in the context. But what happened to his grief ? Was it worked through? Was it lived with? Or was it just sublimated into his work, his wide range of preoccupations? Was it something that remained as a constant, underlying refrain in his life, that he needed to defend himself against?

Refrigeration has become so well established over the last 125 years that today a crude ice maker becomes a boon for primitive people in the jungle or desert. Only a total dislocation in energy sources will quickly loosen the connections between people and cooling. A few centuries ago, Hippocrates (460–377? B.C.) observed: ‘most men would rather run the hazards of their lives or health than be deprived of the pleasure of drinking out of ice’ … In the U.S.A. [today], 750 million frozen Eskimo Pies are sold annually and seven ice cream plants are said to be operating in Moscow … Like the men of Hippocrates, a lot of people will resist any curtailment in food and freezing operations. They have come to expect these for survival in our present social and industrial orders.

These remarks, asserting the extent to which the people of the United States of America regarded refrigeration not as an optional luxury but as a necessity for survival even at the height of the energy crisis of the late 1970s, formed part of a contribution to a massive 11-volume international compendium, Alternative Energy Sources, produced in 1978 in response to Western concerns about rising oil prices and falling reserves. An enthusiastic advocate for geothermal energy, the contributor's perception provides a vivid contextual starting point for our study of Paul Theroux's novel The Mosquito Coast (1981). In this novel the central narrative focuses upon a New England family's rejection of post-war American consumer society with its imperative to ‘build automobiles that would fail within five years and refrigerators that would fail in ten’. The novel indeed explores some of those very kinds of alternative energy sources which had been exciting scientists and inventors (often on or beyond the fringes of scientific orthodoxy) since the early 1970s when journals such as The Ecologist had begun to prophesy an end to energy-driven economic growth in the western world.

It is a tempting exercise, both historically and psychoanalytically, to contribute to a psychoanalytic understanding of Robert Boyle. Over many years, historians of science have been amassing evidence of science as a social activity, part of the culture of its time. As these studies progress, they stumble into psychoanalytic territory willy nilly. Indeed, the very notion of enquiry into nature becomes a psychoanalytic issue, as soon as we think of it as an emotionally charged approach to an object. If we think of Boyle as an early modern scientific investigator and as a personification of the tensions surrounding the investigation of nature as an object in the psychoanalytic sense, then we have a double reason for bringing a psychoanalytic understanding to bear upon him.

One of the criticisms of a psychoanalytic enquiry into any historical figure or situation is that the object of study is not present in the way a patient is present. It is not simply that the patient is not there – after all, there is documentary evidence to stand in for the missing person – but that the key feature that makes the enquiry psychoanalytic is missing. There is no transference, and no way to monitor the accuracy of interpretations. That means that the analyst cannot sit in the place of the objects in which the subject has an intense emotional investment, and from which vantage the subject of these investments can be studied. In that sense, the enquiry cannot be said to be properly psychoanalytic in method.

BBC Education and The Wellcome Trust: Medicine Through Time. Videotape: incorporating five 25 min programmes. London: BBC Educational Publishing, 1998, ISBN 0 563 376953, £24.99.

Teachers' Resource Pack, with four theme booklets, over 40 picture sources, posters, time lines, pupils' worksheets etc. London: BBC Educational Publishing, 1998, ISBN 0 563 376392, £19.99.

BBC Education Website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/medicine/.

It was in the late 1970s that the Schools History Project first launched its ‘developmental studies’ programme to help youngsters understand how changes in science and technology have impacted upon human life at different periods. Possible topics included Farming through the ages – surely one of the most important as we might see it today – and Warfare through the ages, but in the event it was Medicine Through Time and Energy Through Time which were developed most fully. By the 1990s the first of these had achieved a firm and regular place as a component of GCSE courses and about one third of all those taking history exams in the GCSE now study it. The involvement of the BBC and the Wellcome Trust in developing resources to support the work was therefore amply justified by its standing in the current curriculum.

On 31 May 1936 Professor Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, wrote a letter to the Austrian littérateur Arnold Zweig, warning him about the dangers of undertaking biographical research. Freud intoned that ‘anyone turning biographer commits himself to lies, to concealment, to hypocrisy, to flattery, and even to hiding his own lack of understanding, for biographical truth is not to be had, and even if it were it couldn't be used’.

As a psychoanalyst, Freud knew only too well how readily each individual person employs the ubiquitous mechanisms of defence such as repression, projection, splitting and idealization, all of which operate to conceal our deepest, innermost affective states; and he questioned therefore how accurately someone could write a life history. Freud harboured other anxieties about the craft of biography. In his classic monograph on Leonardo da Vinci, published in 1910, the great Viennese analyst not only lamented ‘the uncertainty and fragmentary nature of the material relating to him which tradition makes available’, but also questioned the very enterprise of psychologically informed biographical work itself.

The Oral History Project of the British Society for the History of Science (BSHS) ended on 10 July 1998, after almost nine months' duration. Twenty-nine interviews are now available on fifty-eight tapes and in transcript – not all, but nearly all of them on open access for scholars. With this oral history project, the BSHS commemorates its fiftieth anniversary. In particular it pays tribute to the field in the decades 1945–65, during which the historical, philosophical and sociological study of science and technology expanded in an unprecedented way, not least of all in higher education. Who were the individuals involved in this expansion, what factors contributed to its coming about, what purposes did the subject serve, what changes did it undergo, what audiences and functions had the BSHS, how was the process of expansion situated within the larger cultural and political context of the time and did it reflect that context? The project sought to explore these and similar questions.

The project's purpose was to gather material which would otherwise go unrecorded, and thus to create an archival resource for future research, consisting of the interviews (on tape and in transcript), returned questionnaires and any material (biographical or other) received in the course of this project.

In December of 1675, in a desperate race with Christiaan Huygens over a patent for a spring-regulated watch, Robert Hooke, FRS (Fellow of the Royal Society of London) characterized the clock maker Thomas Tompion as a ‘Slug’, a ‘Clownish Churlish Dog’ and a ‘Rascall’, because Tompion was making a watch of Hooke's design too slowly for the latter's taste. It was Hooke's watch, not Tompion's; Hooke was the patron and Tompion the client. Fifty years later Tompion's apprentice, George Graham, made watches and clocks and quadrants for other Fellows of the Royal Society, yet these instruments were known as Graham's clocks and Graham's quadrants. Language such as Hooke had used towards Tompion was inconceivable towards Graham; he was a member of the Royal Society's governing body, the Council, and had published several significant papers in the Society's journal, the Philosophical Transactions, in which his testimony on and experiments in astronomy, magnetism, horology and metrology were unquestioned. Yet in the early decades of the eighteenth century one could still go to his shop in London's Strand and buy a watch or a clock from him. Like Tompion, George Graham, FRS was a shopkeeper. Nor was he alone in the eighteenth century, at that supposed bastion of gentlemen, the Royal Society. Nearly two-thirds of the membership had to work for a living in one way or another, some rather grandly as high government officials, senior army officers, clerics with ample livings and physicians and lawyers with large and successful London practices ; others more modestly as sailors, surgeons, apothecaries, schoolteachers, engineers, attorneys and instrument-makers. The latter group included some of the most scientifically eminent members of the Royal Society in the eighteenth century: the sailor James Cook (geography), the printer Benjamin Franklin (electricity), the teacher and preacher Joseph Priestley (chemistry), the instrument-maker and engineer James Watt (chemistry), the musician William Herschel (astronomy), and the silk weaver and optician John Dollond (optics). None of these men were gentlemen (though many of their sons or grandsons became so) yet they made science and were acknowledged to have done so; their papers were published and their best work awarded medals.