The Psychological Complex

Psychology, Politics and Society in England 1869-1939 NIKOLAS ROSE The psychological complex ‘x5 ckrt- eex The psychological complex Psychology, politics and society in England, 1869-1939 Nikolas Rose Routledge & Kegan Paul London, Boston, Melbourne and Henley First published in 1985 by Routledge & Kegan Paul plc 14 Leicester Square, London WC2H 7PH, England 9 Park Street, Boston, Mass. 02108, USA 464 St Kilda Road, Melbourne, Victoria 3004, Australia and Broadway House, Newtown Road, Henley-on-Thames, Oxon RG9 lEN, England Set in Sabon, 10 on 12pt by Columns Ltd, Reading and printed in Great Britain by Billings and Son Ltd, Worcester. © Nikolas Rose 1985 No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Rose, Nikolas S. The psychological complex. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Psychology. 2. Social psychology. 3. Environmental psychology. I. Title. [DNLM: 1. Behavior. 2. Psychology. 3. Social Environment. BF 121 R797p] BF57.R56 1985 150 84-29814 ISBN 0-7100-9808-1 (pb) Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1 The moral subject of psychology 11 2 The psychology of populations 39 3 Heredity versus environment 62 4 The psychology of the individual 90 5 The measure of intelligence 112 6 Hygiene and welfare 146 7 The psychological family 176 8 Psychology and the clinic 197 Conclusion 220 Notes 232 Bibliography 255 Index 286 Acknowledgments This work has taken a long time to bring to some sort of a conclusion, and in the course of it I have incurred many debts. I owe most to the many other works of research, scholarship and analysis which I have plundered so unceremoniously in construct- ing my own account, no doubt distorting their arguments to suit my own ends. These other texts are the conditions of possibility for my own; their specific contributions are evident on every page. The work was carried out under the auspices of the Department of the Sociology of Education at the University of London Institute of Education where, from 1975 to 1978, I was the recipient of a grant from the Social Science Research Council. Tony Green showed patience and good humour as my supervisor over the many incarnations of the thesis on which this book is based, and gave me much sound advice. Graham Burchell and Colin Gordon talked to me at a very early stage in the work, enabled me to think of the form which it should take, and encouraged me to write a paper, published in the journal Ideology & Consciousness in 1979, which was an early version of the account which appears here in Chapters 2 to 5. Anna Wynne helped considerably, by putting much of the text on to a word processor when time was short. Hilary Allen read all the drafts at least once, and with great care and kindness showed me where spelling, grammar and argument went astray. Diana Adlam has discussed psychology with me over many years and in many ways, helped me clarify my ideas and made me feel this work had some interest when I had lost all sense of it. To my other friends who suffered some of the burden of this study, my thanks; I am sorry to disappoint your expectations. Introduction In studying the psychology of the individual, sleep, madness, delirium, somnambulism, hallucination offer a far more favourable field of experience than the normal state. Phenomena which in the normal state are almost effaced because of their tenuousness appear more palpable in extraordinary crises because they are exaggerated ... human psychology will have to be constructed by studying the madness of mankind, the dreams and hallucinations to be found on every page of the history of the human spirit. Ernest Renan, 18901 Since the end of the Second World War, psychological expertise has been increasingly deployed around a range of practical problems and within a large number of administrative and reformatory practices. Psychological agents and techniques are involved in assessment and diagnosis of problems of individual conduct in institutional sites such as hospitals, schools, prisons, factories and in the army. An analogous range of psychological specialisms has arisen — clinical psychology, educational psychology, criminal psychology, industrial psychology, military psychology and so forth. How is one to account for the emergence and functioning of these new knowledges and techniques for the conceptualisation, regulation and amelioration of the problems of personal and social life? In the authoritative histories of psychology, the discipline is considered to be fundamentally the science of the normal mental functioning of human beings, and the accounts of the origins of 2 Introduction the modern psychological enterprise are constructed in this light. The roots of psychological modernity appear to be traceable through a long tradition of reflections on the human psyche, stretching back across the span of written history. A history which takes as its organising principle the normal human mind can order the ideas it examines along a continuous path, in terms of the extent to which they grasped, enabled us to grasp, or were obstacles to the grasping in thought of this real object of knowledge. Considered from this perspective, the social deploy- ment of psychological expertise can only be seen as a by-product, often unexpected and unintended, of the advances of our knowledge of the functioning of the normal mind and its role in behaviour. Hence the various aspects of psychology which concern themselves with practical and technical questions can be conceived of as the application to specific problems of the knowledge gained in the study of the normal mind. The practical issues with which psychology is bound up are thus pertinent only to this penumbra of applied psychology; the central core of psychological discourse has a history which is indifferent to them. Even where it is allowed that there are links in this field of `application' between social questions and psychological develop- ments, these concern only the pressing need to derive useful techniques from our knowledge of psychological normality. Whilst it is indeed the fortunate status of psychology to be enlivened by, and relevant to, questions of everyday life, its status as a knowledge is independent of them. Thus if the constitution of psychology as a scientific discipline was quickened or even induced by certain practical problems, even if it allowed of an application of this scientific knowledge to certain technical tasks, it was nonetheless an occurrence in a pure theoretical space, in which a union was achieved at last between a discourse motivated only by a desire to know and its object, the human individual, which pre-existed it and awaited it. So if, in this practical field, psychology has been chiefly concerned with problems of pathology, of those who for some reason are failing to function normally, it is implied that psychology can recognise and diagnose such pathology because of the knowledge which it already possesses of the normal mind. A knowledge of normal mental processes thus appears to be the condition and basis for the application of scientific techniques to the problems posed by abnormality. Introduction 3 The present study contests such an analysis. Modern scientific psychology in England was not born in the quiet and reflective atmosphere of the academy. The place now occupied by psychology within the practices of social administration and regulation has not been established through the application of established psychological doctrines to pressing practical problems. Nor have we seen a knowledge of the normal mind turned to account in the understanding of pathology. If anything, the issue is more usefully posed the other way round. The conditions which made possible the formation of the modern psychological enterprise in England were established in all those fields where psychological expertise could be deployed in relation to problems of the abnormal functioning of individuals. Whilst most histories of psychology trace the roots of psychology back through a continuous series of speculations about the mental life of humans from time immemorial, there is a common acceptance that something significant occurred in a period from about 1875 to about 1925. Both from the standpoint of the historian, and that of contemporary participants, something appears to happen over this fifty-year period, in Britain and Western Europe as well as in the United States, which has the character of an `event'. This event appears to consist of the translation or extension of certain recurrent questions about the nature of humans from the closed space of philosophy to a domain of positive knowledge: the formation of psychology as a coherent and individuated scientific discourse. Obviously there is nothing definite about the boundaries of this period of transition: they can be drawn differently according to the criteria brought to bear upon the historical record. Nonethe- less one can trace over this period a shift within the organisation of disciplines in the universities, and the progressive institutional delineation of psychology from philosophy and logic on the one hand and from biology and medicine on the other. One can see the establishment of institutions and departments specific to psychology — psychological laboratories for example. One can see the formation of groupings of individuals who identify themselves as psychologists, who are trained by psychologists and who have

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