Philosophers from time immemorial have discussed what it means to be human, which often involved asking questions recognized today as being psychological. Some historical accounts trace such questions back to ancient Greece, as Christopher D. Green and Philip R. Groff do in Early Psychological Thought: Ancient Accounts of Mind and Soul. Most general presentations, however, begin their historical treatments in temporal proximity to Wilhelm Wundt’s establishment of the first experimental psychology lab in 1879. Scientific thought and research focused on figuring out the basic aspects of human behavior were burgeoning in the middle of the nineteenth century, which paved the way for the emergence of scientific psychology. As one would expect, such a complex undertaking led to false starts in the development of knowledge and its application.
Just as early physicists erroneously postulated the existence of phlogiston, believed to be the substance released when something burned, or of the ether, supposedly the medium through which electromagnetic radiation flowed, psychological thinkers in the prescientific era made claims that are now recognized as highly flawed. One major difference between physics postulates and psychological hypotheses, however, is that social and cultural beliefs have always played a major role in psychological theorizing. Prepsychology ideas were often used as the supposed scientific basis for prejudice and discrimination against those already on the margins of society.
For example, Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences argues why he thought some groups are superior to others, using what was considered the latest scientific evidence. The critical factor was the inheritance of traits, which today would be regarded as genetic. Not surprisingly, he believed that people of his social status were superior and should be encouraged to reproduce. As such, he was one of the progenitors of the pseudoscience of eugenics, a belief held by many people at the turn of the twentieth century, including many (if not most) psychologists. In Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell, Paul A. Lombardo documents the egregious use of eugenic ideas that led to the involuntary sterilization of thousands of Americans, ideas subsequently adopted by so-called race scientists in Nazi Germany. The professional literature of psychology was rife with writing that accepted eugenic ideas at that time.
One specific concept associated with eugenic thinking was intelligence. In 1923, Carl C. Brigham concluded in A Study of American Intelligence that the overall intelligence level in the United States was declining due to increasing numbers of immigrants of intellectually inferior races and ethnicities. The remedies he proposed in the book included restricted and selective immigration laws and “prevention of the continued propagation of defective strains in the present population.” (Brigham later recanted his conclusions as being “without foundation.”) Brigham’s presentation was quite highly criticized on statistical and methodological grounds, although the beliefs he stated were consistent with socially accepted ide-as. Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man provides a popular rebuttal of the kinds of ideas Brigham advanced, although Gould’s analysis has been subject to significant criticism.
One famous case that supposedly documented the perils of reproduction by supposedly unfit people was the case of the Kallikak family descendants, as described by Henry Herbert Goddard in The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness. (The pseudonymous family name was a portmanteau based on the Greek words for “good” and “bad.”) Based on the scion Martin’s dalliance with a supposedly “feeble-minded” barmaid, his descendants constituted two branches, one eugenically fit and the other unfit. The pregnancy resulting from the barmaid led to a line of descendants labelled as “feeble-minded.” In contrast, the children born to his wife and their descendants were described as eugenically acceptable. The feeble-mindedness of one lineage was believed to be the result of poor genetic material. In reality, Goodard’s analysis was wrong, and he later concluded that his writing about the Kallikaks was inaccurate. An examination of the barmaid’s descendants showed many high functioning, successful people. Nonetheless, with his eugenic beliefs he advocated that “feeble-minded” people be prevented from reproducing by housing them in sex-segregated facilities, like the Vineland Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys, an institution he led in Vineland, New Jersey, for over a decade.
Another pseudoscientific approach to understanding people involved phrenology, the idea that the shape of the skull mirrors the shape of the brain so that it is possible to identify which areas of the brain are highly developed (i.e., bumps on the skull) or deficient (i.e., depressions in the skull). Although scientists rejected phrenological ideas fairly quickly after they were first posited in the nineteenth century, the ideas persisted culturally into the twentieth century.
In the collection Gall, Spurzheim, and the Phrenological Movement: Insights and Perspectives, editors Paul Eling and Stanley Finger and their contributors show how phrenological ideas spread. They also point out that fallacious phrenological ideas spurred valid research that has led to modern neuroscience as researchers began to systematically study the brain.
In Materials of the Mind: Phrenology, Race, and the Global History of Science, 1815–1920, James Poskett further reveals the degree to which phrenological ideas were quite widespread. Believers in phrenology argued that the natural order of races placed some at the top and others at the bottom, sometimes advancing religious arguments to support their ideas. Related conceptually to phrenology is physiognomy, an attempt to use facial features to identify people with certain personality characteristics. It is entirely pseudoscientific, but it reflects one of the many varied approaches adopted in the at-tempt to understand people.
Another domain that led to ineffective application is the treatment of mental illness. Prior to the current medical and psychological models, physicians relied on remedies that generally did not work because then (as now) the basis of psycho-logical problems was unknown and subject to much erroneous speculation. Approaches in the prescientific era were routinely punitive rather than curative, as described by Mike Jay in the illustrated book This Way Madness Lies: The Asylum and Beyond. Other interesting histories of psychiatry include Edward Shorter’s A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac and Owen Whooley’s critical review of this discipline in On the Heels of Ignorance: Psychiatry and the Politics of Not Knowing.
