Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences Volume 28, October 1992

BOOK REVIEWS

PERSPECTIVES ON THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY M. BREWSTER SMITH

Ernest R. Hilgard. Psychology in America: A Historical Survey. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987. xxix + 1009 pp. $45.35 (cloth)

Gary Collier, Henry L. Minton & Graham Reynolds. Currents of Thought in American Social Psychology. NY: Oxford University Press, 1991. xi + 335 pp. $39.95 (cloth)

These are two quite extraordinary books on the history of American psychology, which belong in the hands of a11 respective stakeholders in the discipline of psychology and the subdisciplines of social psychology in psychology and sociology - scholars, teachers and professionals. It can be said of each that there is no other book like it: both are unique. Of course, only Hilgard’s erstwhile Yale colleague Neal Miller, slightly junior, competes with him for recognition as Dean of American scientific psychology. Hilgard can and does draw on personal memories and anecdotes that go back to the 1929 International Congress of Psychology, which met in New Haven (at which he was charged with introducing the distinguished foreign visitors to James Rowland Angell, then president of Yale), but the account thus brightened is based on scrupulous reference to sources reflecting the best modern historical scholarship. Collier, Minton, and Reynolds write from a Canadian base, where by self-ascription they comprise “a collaborative team that includes a more traditionally trained social psychologist, a historian of psychology, and an intellectual historian” (p. viii). Their book is written seamlessly as if by a single author, and is unusual in giving essentially equal billing to the psychological and sociological versions of social psychology.

First about the Hilgard volume, a fat one of about a thousand pages. The book, which masquerades as a textbook with “boxes” and chapter summaries, is indeed a survey, comprehensive in its coverage at the cost of sometimes necessarily cursory treatment of complex matters. It is a historical survey of psychology, not just of its more preten- tious general systems. Indeed, the nineteenth-century background and the traditional schools and systems up to 1935 occupy only the first hundred pages, which are very well done. The next sixteen chapters take up in turn each of the diverse major topics and fields of psychology, from sensory processes, perception, learning and remember- ing, and cognitive psychology through consciousness, feeling and emotion, and from action, motivation, and volition, to comparative, physiological, personality, developmen- tal, social, clinical, and industrial/organizational psychology and the psychology of in- telligence. These chapters include treatment of the relevant European antecedents and bring each topic up to the present. The book concludes with a penultimate chapter on the organization of American psychdogy (stopping before the turmoil about “reorganiza- tion” of the American Psychological Association that led to the departure of the American Psychological Society), and a final chapter on psychology as a science, which takes into account the present conflicts with humanistic or hermeneutic conceptions.

That any single author could still encompass this extraordinary range with the general surefootedness and good sense that Hilgard displays is amazing. Hilgard’s preparation

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for the task is of course equally extraordinary, from his central lifetime participation in psychological affairs, including major research on learning during the heyday of neobehaviorism and on hypnotism after World War 11, to writing standard textbooks on theories of learning and general psychology and participating in their periodic revi- sion, as well as his major organizational and administrative involvements.

He does not depend on his own good memory and scholarship: in a page of acknowledgment, he lists thirty-two psychologists who reviewed various chapters for him in draft. The result is a remarkably wise and dependable account, with a minimum of error and misjudgment.

This is mainly an “internalist” history, though the occasions when Hilgard attends to the institutional and social context are handled well - for example, why scientific psy- chology arose mainly in the German universities rather than in England or France (13-16), or why the study of creativity came to the fore in the early 1950s (236-237). There is strong emphasis on the major individual contributors to American psychology and their intellectual lineages. Thus, inserted vignettes one or two pages long treat seventy-eight psychologists whose portraits are reproduced, with brief biographical data being pro- vided on a number more in the footnotes gathered at the end of the book. These infor- mal biographies are very well done, often with personal touches from Hilgard’s recollec- tions-but the emphasis on names, so many of them, would make the book difficult to use as a text even at the graduate level, in spite of the textbook-like summaries at the end of each chapter.

I read the book as a wise and dedicated act of love for psychology at a time when centrifugal trends seem to predominate. Hilgard pays proper attention to the major con- troversies and criticisms. He is exemplary in calling attention to the unresolved status of the big philosophical issues like the mind-body problem and free will. I particularly admired his chapters on “Consciousness, the subliminal, and altered states” and “Action, motivation, and volition” as bringing good sense to bear on disorderly areas. He does not withhold his judgments of controversial topics like parapsychology. All told, Psy- chology in America is a serious contribution toward holding American psychology to- gether. His treatment of one substantive issue after another reminds me of my memories of work with him at Stanford over fifty years ago when his graduate students could count on him to challenge us to penetrate to the psychology in whatever problem we were considering-not to get lost in the surface trivia with which the literature is always rife.

I mention a few defects simply to show that I actually read the book. One is a real blooper. On page seventy-three, Hilgard unnecessarily perpetuates a misreading of Brentano’s perplexing term, intentional inexistence. He is more or less right about intentionality, but gives the bum steer that “inexistence” involves “attention to objects that do not ex- ist.”’ On page 602, he has Rensis Likert involved with the “Division of Intensive Surveys of the Office of War Information,” not the Division of Program Surveys of the Depart- ment of Agriculture. Since Hilgard was a central participant in the Washington war- time scene, this must be one place in which he depended on fallible personal memory. Having read in Collier, Minton, and Reynolds about the prominent role of Herbert Spencer’s theories in pre-Jamesian American thought, I find it regrettable that Hilgard gives Spencer merely passing notice, only in the chapter on emotion. And since Sig- mund Koch has been such a persistent critic of the goal of theoretical unification in psychology, conceiving the field rather as a loose family of psychological studies,2 I wish Hilgard had also discussed Koch’s perspective in his final chapter on Psychology as a Science. These are small cavils compared with the generally high quality of the book.

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Like Hilgard, Collier, Minton, and Reynolds ground their historical treatment of American developments in the European background - their case involving particularly the roots of American social psychology in Wundt, Marx, Durkheim and the French psychopathologists. (On this European background, Karpf s American Social Psychof- 0gy3 remains a useful additional resource, especially on the Herbartian Volkerpsycholo- gists who are neglected here). Apart from briefer histories of psychological social psy- chology by Allport and Jones,4 this is the only current historical treatment available, and it is remarkable for attending to both the psychological and the sociological species of the genus, which from a cladistic viewpoint have different phyletic origins and have intersected and partly melded only occasionally in parallel trajectories. (The authors document the essential independence of these trajectories by an exhaustive analysis of citations in social psychology textbooks of authors in the two disciplines, over the entire history of the fields since the texts by McDougall and Ross in 1908.)’

Currents of Thought in American Social Psychology contrasts with the Hilgard book in focusing more on orienting ideas than on substantive problems. Its final chapter, on Postmodernism, is the best brief exposition I know of this current critical perspec- tive, including its precursors in Chicago pragmatism, Russian “cultural” psychology, Wittgenstein, and phenomenology. The authors embrace postmodernism, but cautiously, hoping to broaden and revivify mainstream empiricism, not to overthrow it. They write,

We believe that a postmodern psychology holds promise for the future. It can in- corporate aspects of traditional social psychology and still offer new forms of theories and research as well as aiding and abetting social change . . . The heroes in this book include Durkheim, Dewey, Mead, Wittgenstein, Vygotsky, and Merleau-Ponty. . . [P]ostmodernism is still in its infancy. It has been more successful as a critique of conventional social psychology than as a set of coherent and fully developed alternatives (291 -292).

The book has heroes and makes strong criticisms, from a perspective with over- tones of postmodernism and critical theory. The psychologist reader will sense an em- phasis on sociological conceptions that have been the target of psychologists’ systematic selective inattention.

Written in an even readable, textbook style, the book summarizes deftly the cen- tral theoretical positions, ideas, and issues linked with the major psychological and socio- logical theorists. It is very well informed. Insofar as I can judge, its citations are con- sistently apt, and its summaries very well done, only rarely off center. In keeping with modern historical scholarship, it takes a more externalist perspective than the Hilgard volume. I am not fully persuaded by the externalist interpretations, which sometimes do not seem plausible and are undocumented except for citing the opinions of other social critics. Thus, it seems pat and unconvincing to me to link the fad of dissonance theory to choice dilemmas that prevailed in post-World-War-I1 consumerism and “pos- sessive individualism,” and the subsequent decline of consistency theories to the em- phasis on conflict in the protest movements of the 1960s. Maybe there is something to this, but it seems more a matter for after-dinner chat than serious history. How are externalist ineterpretations to be established?

This generally fine book, which ought to be read by all graduate students in psycho- logical and sociological socia1 psychology programs, and their teachers, is marred by sloppy editing and proofreading resulting in errors like dates for Peirce of 1893-1914 (14), citation of Louise (not Lois) Murphy (101), Margaret Mead‘s Arameni (not Arapesh; 119), William (not David) Riesman (180), and Else Frenkel-Brunswik as a Viennese

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psychiatrist (not psychologist; 194). As a card-carrying personologist, I regret that the authors accept as gospel Mischel’s early critique of dispositional attribution in personality theory and Lee Ross’s label of the “fundamental attribution error” for virtually any at- tribution to personality, which my colleagues in social psychology still take as received doctrine, in spite of consensual support for interactional or transactional positions by those who are informed about current personality research and theory, including Mischel himself .6

Both the volumes under review have the goal of resisting centrifugal trends as their latent agenda. Whether psychology persists as an institutionalized discipline, or whether two social psychologies continue their mainly independent coexistence, is not going to be much influenced by them. Nevertheless, excellent historical treatments of the different sorts that they represent can only promote the enrichment and more coherent develop- ment of their subject fields. Both books should be widely read.

NOTES

1. See F. Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, 0 . Kraus, Ed. (NY: Humanities Press, 1973), pp. 88-89. Boring’s History is also clear on this matter. He provides the useful translation “imminent objec- tivity”: E. G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology (NY: Century, 1929), p. 350. 2. For example, S. Koch, Language, Search Cells, and the Psychological Studies, in Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 1975 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1975). 3. F. B. Karp f, American Social Psychology: Its Origins, Development and European Background (NY: McGraw-Hill, 1932). 4. G. W. Allport, “The Historical Background of Social Psychology,” in G . Lindzey and E. Aronson, Eds. Handbook of Social Psychology, 3rd ed. (NY: Random House, 1985), pp. 1-46; E. E. Jones, “Major Developments in Social Psychology During the Past Five Decades,” in G . Lindzey and E. Aronson, ibid.,

5 . W. McDougall, Introduction to Social Psychology (London: Methuen, 1908); E. A . Ross, Social Psychology: An Outline and Source Book (NY: McMillan, 1908). 6. W. Mischel, Personality and Assessment (NY: Wiley, 1968); L. Ross, “The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process,” in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 10, L. Berkovitz, Ed. (NY: Academic Press, 1977).

pp. 47-107.