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38 - Psychologism and the Child

from PART IV - SOCIAL SCIENCE AS DISCOURSE AND PRACTICE IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE LIFE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Ellen Herman
Edited by
Theodore M. Porter  and
Dorothy Ross
Theodore M. Porter
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
Dorothy Ross
Affiliation:
The Johns Hopkins University
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Summary

Psychologism is an elusive phenomenon in modern Western culture, located everywhere and nowhere, meaning everything and nothing at all. It refers to the discursive practice of using psychological explanations to make sense of individual and collective experience, and especially to link the two together. Because this explanatory resource is located in the slippery space between academic social science, clinical professionalism in psychology and medicine, and popular culture, psychologism is not fully at home in either the history of science or intellectual history. It has nevertheless often elicited sweeping cultural interpretations.

Psychologism was initially championed by psychological professionals and their enterprising partners in Progressive Era reform before World War I. During this early phase, it was linked to the administration of subjectivity by means of normalizing technologies – standardized tests given to individuals by schools or by the military, for instance. More than a handy toolbox for the managers of mass society, psychological discursive practices were imported into individual projects of self-fashioning. By 1945, they had migrated to popular audiences who began as objects but soon became avid consumers of disciplinary knowledges and practices, inspiring individuals to embrace the varieties of therapeutic experience as the surest path to mental well-being and happiness.

Among the many American figures who promoted a psychological world-view were the Progressives Henry Herbert Goddard and William Healy. At midcentury, professional experts Margaret Mead and Benjamin Spock achieved the status of cultural icons. At the end of the century, Oprah Winfrey was psychologism’s most visible proponent, and her massive and enthusiastic audience indicated how thoroughly the therapeutic sensibility had trickled down to the grass roots.

Type
Chapter
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The Cambridge History of Science , pp. 649 - 662
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2003

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