Abstract
Scientific objects encourage us to imagine moments of discovery, collegial witnessing and citational webs. Yet, the process of creating narratives about scientific objects also enables and necessitates a certain kind of thinking: positing an origin that precludes previous instantiations (however different or varied); presuming that this origin has affects on future uses and developments of the term; ignoring the fragmentation, failures and accidents that surround and/or inform the creation of a concept; and pretending to provide an exhaustive history.
Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark shapeless substances but cannot bring into being the substance itself
Mary Shelley, Introduction to Third Edition of Frankenstein, 1831, 171
Applied metaphysics assumes that reality is a matter of degree, and that phenomena that are more or less intensely real in the colloquial sense that they exist may become more or less intensely real, depending on how densely they are woven into scientific thought and practice
Lorraine Daston, Biographies of Scientific Objects, 2001, 1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Works cited
Abraham, Tara. ‘(Physio)logical Circuits: The Intellectual Origins of the McCulloch-Pitts Neural Networks.’ Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 38 (2002): 3–25.
Allen, Garland. Life Science in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1978.
Armstrong, Tim. Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.
Beers, Clifford. The Mental Hygiene Movement. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1923.
Bousefield, P. and W.R. Bousefield. The Mind and its Mechanism. New York, E.P. Dutton, 1927.
Burnham, John. Paths into American Culture: Psychology, Medicine, and Morals. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1987.
Cartwright, Lisa. Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1995.
Clarke, Edwin, and L. S. Jacyna. Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts. Berkeley: California UP, 1987.
Daston, Lorraine, ed. Biographies of Scientific Objects. Chicago UP, 2000.
Eccles, J. C. ‘Do Mental Events Cause Neural Events Analogously to the Proba-bility Fields of Quantum Mechanics?’ Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 227. 1249 (22 May 1986): 411–28.
Eccles, J. C. ‘Evolution of Consciousness.’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 89 (1992): 7320–4.
Eno, Henry Lane. Activism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1920.
Ernst, Paul. ‘From the Wells of the Brain.’ Astounding Stories 35 (October 1933): 48–54.
Forel, Auguste. Hypnotism; or, Suggestion and Psychotherapy; A Study of the Psychological, Psycho -physiological and Therapeutic Aspects of Hypnotism. Trans. H. W. Armit. New York: Allied, 1949.
Foucault, Michel. ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy and History.’ Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. D. F. Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977.
Freud, Sigmund. ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology.’ 1895. The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 1. Trans. James Strachey and Anna Freud. London: Hogarth Press & Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1966. 283–397.
Freud, Sigmund. The Complete Letters ofSigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fleiss, 1877–1904. Trans. Jeffery Moussaieff Masson. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1985.
Germine, Mark. ‘The Concept of Energy in Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology.’Annals of the New York Academy of Science 843 (1998): 80–90.
Grob, Gerald N. Mental Illness and American Society, 1875–1940. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983.
Haraway, Donna. How Like a Leaf: An Interview with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve/Donna J. Haraway. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Haraway, Donna. Modest Witness@Second-Millennium.FemaleMan-Meets-OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.
James, William. ‘A Plea for Psychology as a Natural Science.’ Philosophical Review 1 (1892): 146–53.
Karczman, Alexander. ‘Sir John Eccles, 1903–1997; Part 2. The Brain as a Machine or as a Site of Free Will?’ Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 44. 2 (2001): 250–62.
Landy, Frank. ‘Hugo Munsterberg: Victim or Visionary.’ Journal of Applied Psychology 77 (1992): 787–802.
Machamer, Peter, Rick Grush and Peter McLaughlin, eds. Theory and Method in the Neurosciences. Pittsburgh UP, 2001.
Marston, William. Emotions of Normal People. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928.
Marston, William, C.D. King, and E.H. Marston. Integrative Psychology; A Study of Unit Response. London: Harcourt, Brace, 1931.
Martin, Emily. ‘The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male–Female Roles.’ Signs 16. 3 (1991): 485–501.
Martin, Emily. The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction. Boston: Beacon, 1992.
McCulloch, Warren. Embodiments of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988.
Micale, Mark. The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America, 1880–1940. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004.
Munsterberg, Hugo. The Psychological Laboratory at Harvard University. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1893.
National Committee for Mental Hygiene. Handbook of the Mental Hygiene Movement and Exhibit. New York: The National Committee for Mental Hygiene, 1913.
Oudshorn, Nelly. Beyond the Natural Body: An Archeology of Sex Hormones. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Pollock, Walter Herries. ‘The Phantasmatograph.’ Longman’s Magazine 34. 199 (May 1899): 58–69.
Rabinbach, Anson. The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue and the Rise of Modernity. New York: Basic Books, 1990.
Revonsuo, A. ‘On the Nature of Explanation in the Neurosciences.’ Theory and Method in the Neurosciences. Eds. P. K. Machamer, R. Grush and P. McLaughlin. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh UP, 2001. 45–69.
Richardson, Theresa R. The Century of the Child: The Mental Hygiene Movement and Social Policy in the United States and Canada. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989.
Rousseau, George. Nervous Acts: Essays on Literature, Culture and Sensibility New York: Palgrave, 2004.
Shelley, Mary. ‘Introduction to Third Edition (1831). ’ Frankenstein. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.
Strachey, James. ‘Editor’s Introduction to Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology.’ The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 1. Trans. James Strachey and Anna Freud. London: Hogarth Press & Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1966. 283–93.
Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.
Ward, Steven. Modernizing the Mind: Psychological Knowledge and the Remaking of Society. Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2002.
Weinbaum, Stanley. A Martian Odyssey and Other Science Fiction Tales: The Collected Short Stories of Stanley G. Weinbaum. Westport: Hyperion, 1974.
White, William. ‘The Origin, Growth and Significance of the Mental Hygiene Movement.’ Science 17. 1856 (1930): 77–81.
Wundt, Wilhelm. Outlines of Psychology. Leipzig, 1887.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2010 Melissa M. Littlefield
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Littlefield, M.M. (2010). Matter for Thought: The Psychon in Neurology, Psychology and American Culture, 1927–1943. In: Salisbury, L., Shail, A. (eds) Neurology and Modernity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230278004_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230278004_14
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-31324-2
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-27800-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)