No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
This year saw the first joint meeting of the ESHHS and its North American counterpart, Cheiron. The idea of bringing the two societies together may be evaluated from at least two different angles: one organizational and one academic. In this report, I leave the organizational aspects aside, except to congratulate the local host, Adrian Brock, and his staff on a smoothly organized conference, in which all the participants felt very well taken care of. When it comes to the academic, I concentrate on three different aspects: (1) the challenge of defining the object, (2) the range of historiographical approaches, and (3) all the different forms of understanding which appear when the whole world is gathered in an academic assembly of this kind. In organizing my report around these aspects, my aim is to provide an analysis of some international tendencies within current research in the history of human behavioral sciences.
(1) DEFINING THE OBJECT The huge number of subjects represented in the presentations reflects, first of all, the breadth of the field. This is probably the most fascinating aspect of research networks like ESHHS and Cheiron. Instead of taking the field of the human sciences as something well defined, we see a great variety of events, figures, and research schools, many of which are marginal today. In this sense it is an open question what the object of research in the history of the human sciences is, and how to approach it. The term "crisis" may reflect this. One important session was the symposium about "crisis in psychology," in which John Carson, Annette MΓΌhlberger, and Uljana Feest contributed papers about different aspects of early twentieth-century debates about crisis in psychology. The symposium on Freud-to which Ruud Abma, Jaap Boos, David Lee, and Gavin Miller contributed papers and John Burnham served as discussant-could also be understood in terms of reconsidering the object of study. The renaissance of the reading of Freud in the Netherlands at the turn of this century reflects, as far as I can see, a more or less new understanding of the psychological object in the sense that it is mostly given in texts, narratives, and discourses. Several other sessions, or perhaps even most of them, may also be understood in these terms-sessions such as that on "Genius and Insanity" with papers given by Laura Ball, Kieran McNally, and Betty Bayer; and the symposium on "The Very Modern Homosexual" with papers given by Peter Hegarty, Nicola Curtin, Kirsten Leng, and Toni Brennan. The symposium on "Female Psychologists"-with papers given by Maria Sinatra, Elzabeth Valentine, Miki Takasuna, Angela de Leo, Lucia Monacis, and Elizabeth Scarborough as discussant-illustrate the actuality of the unknown; and the session on "Social Psychology with Reference to Milgram's Obedience Research"with papers given by Cathy Faye, Sam Parkovnick, James Good, and John Greenwood as discussant-illustrated that what is thought to be known can be challenged. Even the keynote address on "The Earliest Days of Autism," given by Ian Hacking, must be understood as a story of how a particular object of research came into being and changed over time.
π SIMILAR VOLUMES
This article is a real pleasure to read. Pooley traces the history of an "invented tradition": the disciplinary origins of mass communication research. The subject of this story is a brief summary of the communication research field composed by Paul Lazarsfeld and Edward Shils in 1955. In Personal I
The society was founded in 1968 to promote international and multidisciplinary cooperation in scholarly activity and research into the history of the behavioral and social sciences. Between twenty and thirty papers will be presented over the three-and-one-half-day period. The format of the sessions
This article is a real pleasure to read. Pooley traces the history of an "invented tradition": the disciplinary origins of mass communication research. The subject of this story is a brief summary of the communication research field composed by Paul Lazarsfeld and Edward Shils in 1955. In the text e