Ethnographic Studies, No 11, Autumn 2009

Frederic Bartlett and the Idea of an Historical Alan Costall, Portsmouth University

have recognized an alternative viable George Humphrey has described the option for psychology (Connelly & ‘welcome’ he received when he took up Costall, 2000). He set out this alternative the first chair in psychology at Oxford in the context of a critique in which he 1946. warned psychologists against mistaking the historically situated for human [The] new professor ... found himself the universals. Referring back to what he jetsam of an acrimonious debate as to described as David Hume’s “‘science of whether he should exist at all. He heard the lions on the shore sniffing round him, human nature’ … with its strictly waiting for him to make a wrong move. empirical methods,” he argued that (Humphrey, 1953, p. 382) Hume had been mistaken in assuming “that human minds had everywhere and The chair was established to support the at all times worked like those of new Honours School of Psychology, eighteenth-century Europeans.” Philosophy and Physiology (PPP). Yet the main problem was the philosophers. However, Collingwood raised no And there were so many of them! As objection to such an empirical study, as Humphrey put it, Oxford had more long as it was recognized for what it philosophers “to the square mile than really was, a study of human nature in anywhere else, perhaps with the situ - in Hume’s case, “an historical exception of the Vatican” (1953, p. 382). study of the contemporary European mind” (Collingwood, 1939, pp. 115–116, R.G. Collingwood was one of the emphasis added). Yet, Collingwood philosophers at Oxford who did not never seriously explored the idea of an completely dismiss psychology as an historical psychology in a positive way, impossible science. In fact, as Oxford that is, as an alternative direction in philosophers go, Collingwood kept which psychology might develop into a himself remarkably well informed about science, along the lines, say, of Wundt’s new developments in psychology, cultural psychology, or Vygotsky’s including psychoanalysis. He even socio-historical approach to human 1 chaired a committee of the sub-faculty of development. philosophy in 1928 encouraging the establishment of a psychological At the time Collingwood was writing, laboratory (Connelly & Costall, 2000). Vygotsky’s main work had not been translated into English, and Wundt’s Nevertheless, Collingwood seemed to international reputation had suffered set prohibitive limits on what the new badly from his emphatic support of the psychology could properly take on. German cause during the First World According to Collingwood, it should War. There was, however, an example of restrict itself to the realm of sensation and the irrational, and so, in effect, 1 In contrast to Collingwood, Stephen Toulmin exclude both history and values. has been an enthusiastic proponent of the idea of However, as James Connelly and I have an historical psychology as developed in the pointed out, Collingwood seems also to work of Wundt and also Vygotsky (e.g. Toulmin, 1987).

24 Ethnographic Studies, No 11, Autumn 2009 an attempt at an historical approach to occupation, stimulated field work on the psychology that was available much problem of contact … . (Richards, 1939, closer to home, though not at Oxford, pp. 290-291) but at Cambridge.2 For many years, Bartlett, like Wundt When Frederic Bartlett (1886-1969) before him, has mainly been began to study at Cambridge, shortly remembered as an experimental before the First World War, the psychologist. In more recent years, there Cambridge psychologists had has been increasing recognition of established close links with Bartlett’s project for a socio-historical anthropology. Several of them had psychology. Most of the focus has been taken part in the anthropological put upon his still widely cited book, expedition to the Torres Straits in 1898 Remembering, published in 1932. Yet, (Costall, 1999), and two of the main by the time this book was written, figures, W.H.R. Rivers and C.S. Myers, Bartlett was, as I have argued elsewhere, led a kind of double life as both already on the retreat, opting for a safer psychologists and anthropologists. scientistic image of psychology with Bartlett’s own early research was which to promote his new department. concerned with what he called As he himself explained, when he had “conventionalisation”, the way material published Remembering he had already from one culture is assimilated into the moved beyond what he called his existing schemas of another culture. This “conventionalisation” phase (Bartlett interest in culture contact stemmed in 1958, p. 144). The First World War had part from the commitment within British interrupted the sequence of his thought, anthropology to the theory of cultural and he then came across Head’s diffusion. But the effects of culture individualistic notion of the schema contact were also an urgent political which led him to place a new emphasis issue: upon "constructive imagination and thinking" (p. 148). Interestingly, the Among English anthropologists the term subtitle of Remembering is A study in ‘culture contact’ has been chiefly restricted experimental and social psychology, but to the description of the changes caused in the book is hardly a synthesis. Bartlett’s native societies by the impact of European treatment of experimental and social civilization. The depopulation of the psychology is split into two separate Pacific, consequent on European halves, an early sign of Bartlett’s dissociation of these two interests.

2 Frederic Bartlett became the first professor of psychology at Cambridge in 1931, and The revisionist accounts of Bartlett, as eventually the most powerful figure within an early champion of an historical British psychology. As such, he was in the psychology disagree about his eventual historically unique position of being able to fix commitment to that ideal. The the professorial appointments throughout Britain anthropologist, Mary Douglas (1987, p. for many years, and, in this way, also engaged in another form of promotion, that of a kind of 81) claimed that Bartlett simply dropped mindless, introverted, the idea, and she portrayed Bartlett as a that persists to the present-day. In fact, this kind victim of his institutional setting. Yet, of psychology has received a new lease of life the institutional setting of early where the same old experiments are being Cambridge psychology was not pre- conducted all over again, but now connected to impressively expensive brain-imaging ordained, and Bartlett, as an astute equipment. academic politician, must have played some part in the transfer of his department from the faculty of Moral

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Sciences to Natural Sciences. In any research was related to the case, he seems to have been pleased with Government’s post-war re-housing the outcome. As he recalled, “the initiative, and Bartlett was keen on the Psychological Laboratory was … placed work because of its wider policy where it properly belonged, with implications. But, locally, he was Physiology, Biochemistry and Pathology pushing the line about psychology being . . . Very nearly all the subsequent a hard science, and Lee’s research did changes have grown out of this one.” not exactly fit in: (Bartlett, 1937, p. 108; emphasis added). . . . halfway through my Ph.D, round about In contrast, Derek Edwards and David 1951, Bartlett was making a big play (he Middleton (1987) portray Bartlett as a spent a lot of time on university politics, hero-figure resolutely championing a where he was very influential) to shake off socio-historical approach to psychology the image of “Moral Sciences”. . . . He called me in one day and explained, throughout his career. apologetically, that my particular dissertation project was a bit of an In fact, Bartlett’s eventual attitude to embarrassment to him in this campaign. It socio-historical psychology could best could hardly have been more quantitative be described as NIMD-ism: let’s have a (I was the first to adopt Discriminant radical historical psychology, but Not In Function Analysis from Physical My Department. He never appointed any Anthropology to Social Psychology!) but it social psychologists to his department. was not experimental — it was He even discouraged social approaches observational. This was the main source of in relation to applied research. David the problem. Anyway, he asked if I would Duncan, who was a member along with be so kind as to seek affiliation to a more Bartlett of the Scientific Advisory congruent Department and he made several Committee of the National Institute of suggestions, including Anthropology and Human Ecology. I followed up the latter Industrial Psychology, has described and received a warm welcome. (Lee, 1995) Bartlett as a “cantankerous reactionary … [who] definitely had the boundaries In fact, although Lee was no longer of psychology as an applied science very officially a member of Bartlett’s tightly drawn, for others at any rate” department, nothing changed. He (Duncan, 1999; emphasis added). continued to remain in the department Duncan’s qualification - “for others at with Bartlett, and successfully any rate” - is telling. Bartlett never completed his thesis in 1954. forgot his commitment to this alternative historical conception of psychology. As In the end, Bartlett came to regret the he himself put it, it remained his official version of psychology he had so “leading interest” (Bartlett, 1957, p. 72). carefully promoted, that of an essentially experimental science, and a highly There was a conflict between Bartlett’s introverted one at that. Beate Hermelin efforts to present Cambridge psychology told me that when she was a young as a ‘hard’, natural science, and his student and newly arrived in , “leading interest” in social psychology. she met Bartlett at Cambridge at a Sometimes, this led to absurd situations. particularly tedious research meeting After the Second World War, Bartlett (most likely, therefore, one held by the obtained research money from the Experimental Psychology Society). She Rockefeller Foundation to help Terence said she was embarrassed that she could Lee complete his research on people’s hardly conceal her disappointment about sense of urban neighbourhood. The the triviality of the research. “Oh yes,”

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Bartlett, confided to her, it’s all gone to mean pre-social that we can take wrong. I wish I’d written novels instead” psychology to be prehistoric. The (Hermelin, 1994). truth is that there are some individual responses which simply do not occur Bartlett set out his idea of an historical outside a social group. To look for psychology in his book, The psychology these outside such a group is to court of primitive culture, published in 1923. failure, and leads inevitably to This book was based on lectures he had speculation and guess-work. (Bartlett, given at Bedford College, in London, 1923, pp. 11-13.) with the encouragement of W.H.R. Rivers. At the very outset of his book, In his 1923 book, Bartlett envisaged Bartlett takes on what he calls "the time- social psychology not merely as a honoured question of the relation supplement to general psychology, but between sociology and psychology". He as an inclusive approach to human refers to Rivers’ claim that the psychology that was social and historical sociologist could, and indeed should, to the core. In contrast to Collingwood, disregard psychological facts, and and indeed most so-called cultural "rigorously confine his attention to psychologists, including Vygotsky, as purely social determination" (Bartlett far as Bartlett was concerned, there were 1923, p. 25). Bartlett agrees with this hardly any aspects of human psychology position as far as the sociologist is beyond the reach of history. concerned, and he provides plenty of examples of group processes, such as the Bartlett was promoting an approach to elaboration of rituals (see pp. 161, 206-8 the individual as necessarily nested & 212-3), where there is “no necessary within a social order. We discover, as it connexion with conscious purpose, and were, the individual - what is individual [the result] is, in fact, rarely or never - within the group (pp. 279-280). We foreseen by any individual” (p. 161). start with those conditions that are But he insists that the argument does not general to all groups, then consider those work both ways. Psychology cannot processes which are specific to the divorce itself from sociology, for that group, such as particular modes and would tempt us to do exactly what we mechanisms of the transmission and should avoid - seek explanations which maintenance of culture. Only then, "always … go back to the individual as Bartlett insists, may we "legitimately he may be pictured to exist outside of attempt to go further" (if indeed the any social group" (p. 8). group is sufficiently open to direct observation) and "try to trace what are Bartlett purpose was to challenge the the variations of individual attitude in possibility of what he called a regard to the specialised social “prehistoric psychology”: responses":

... the attempt to find the beginning of If we can do this successfully for all our social customs and institutions in problems we have taken the final step in purely individual experience may be the development of a complete social essentially a mistaken one. In general psychology. For we have now effected a terms our problem is to account for a union between that study of the individual as such which is the concern response made by an individual to a of general psychological investigation, given set of circumstances of which and that account of the psychical the group itself may always be one. conditions of behaviour in the group … It is only if we interpret individual

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which social psychology sets itself to Natural Sciences, was that an historical pursue. (Bartlett, 1923, p. 280) conception of psychology hardly conformed to what his colleagues in the Bartlett also challenged the standard faculty regarded as serious science. But contrast between the primitive and Bartlett also had his own methodological civilized mind. According to Bartlett, the misgivings. Indeed, by 1957, he came to usual contrast was based upon a the following gloomy conclusion: misleading comparison, "not between the primitive man and the ordinary To us, as to [Rivers], there seems little member of a modern social group, but chance of developing a sound social between the former and the scientific psychology unless first the problems of expert at work within his own field" its methodology can be settled. But we (Bartlett, 1932, p. 284). have given up the idea that it possible to establish a method on the grounds of its So far I have tried to convey the gist of rationality, or indeed any other general Bartlett’s idea of an historical ground. ... [There is now] a muddle ... psychology. But why did Bartlett fail to (Bartlett, 1957, pp. 75-6.) pursue this project? Mary Douglas Bartlett is widely celebrated within (1987, p. 81) once nicely observed that psychology for encouraging researchers “psychologists are institutionally to ‘loosen up,’ and ensure that their incapable of remembering that humans experiments are relevant and stay close are social beings. As soon as they know to real life. And yet Bartlett became it, they forget it.” I now want to identify obsessed with the strictures of method in some of the issues that keep leading a way I still find puzzling. Very early in psychologists to forget - or in Bartlett’s his career, Rivers had somehow case, suppress - the idea of psychology managed to convince Bartlett that the as history. I will start with Bartlett’s own method of experimental psychology was hang-ups. fundamental to anthropological research, even though, as Bartlett himself Already, in his second book, admitted, Rivers never actually Remembering, Bartlett is framing his explained to him exactly how this was commitment to the idea of an historical supposed to work out! It seems to have psychology in a grudging way. When he been a kind of conversion experience: explains that the group can influence the individual both directly, through the I can bring back to mind very clearly the actual presence of other people, and also first time I met Rivers. Already he had indirectly, through the influence of the reduced the large, somewhat military group's beliefs, conventions, customs, looking moustache which adorns his traditions, and institutions, he seems far earlier photographs. He seemed to me from happy with the implications: tall, spare, sharp-shouldered, full of nervous though quiet energy. He sat on a … this is, theoretically speaking, rather sofa in a large room untidy with books troublesome, because it seems to mean and papers. A College 'gyp' brought up that everything in psychology belongs to tea, two or three bits of bread and butter, social psychology, except idiosyncrasies and some very sawdusty Madeira cake. and such forms of reaction as are He ate nothing and drank only milk and immediately and dominantly determined water. He told me then, and many times by physical stimuli. (Bartlett 1932, p. later, that if I wanted to study 243; emphases added.) anthropology, or, I gathered, do anything else that was any good, I must first spend One obvious problem, given the many hours in the psychological Department had moved from Moral to

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laboratory learning the psycho-physical to use Bartlett’s own term, prehistoric. methods. I did. (Bartlett, 1956, p. 82) For them, scientific laws should be universal. It is breathtaking the way that Throughout his career, Bartlett kept the ‘laws’ they claim to discover are returning to this issue, and kept coming simply assumed to be universal, even up with his own solutions about how when based, as they often are, on the experimental psychology was supposed most restricted of ‘samples’: to make its crucial contribution. He eventually settled upon the strange idea When I mention a psychological subject, I that somehow the experimental mean a subject from a Western, psychologists, by carefully pursuing industrialised culture; and not only from a what they, at least, regarded as decidedly Western industrialised culture, but an non-social problems, would somehow, in American; and not only an American, but a the process of their research, perfect an college student. (Jahoda, 1970, p. 13) appropriate method suitable for the anthropologists in the field. In other However, it is also remarkable the extent words, an historical psychology would to which the so-called ‘cultural have to wait until the appropriate psychologists’, despite their seemingly methods had been devised for it by an radical emphasis upon cultural diversity, experimental, and essentially set their own definite limits on how individualistic, psychology: much people might differ despite their different socio-historical circumstances. One thing is so immediately obvious that it Their concern is, presumably, that a hardly needs to be said. It is rarely if ever socio-historical approach to psychology possible to obtain results from controlled could go too far, morally and politically. laboratory investigations which are It might challenge the very principle of immediately valid and important in the psychic unity. It has become almost field of social psychology. . … The standard within cross-cultural primary problem for the laboratory psychology to insist - and assume - that psychologist interested in social it is only the content, not the form, of psychology is, not that he should at present try to investigate admittedly important human mentality that can differ in facts in any wide social setting, but that he different socio-historical circumstances. should try to devise the most exact For example, this a priori distinction is methods possible for an investigation of maintained in the work of Michael Cole, facts which have a definite social one of the leading figures in modern application. These methods he must then cultural psychology. As John hand on to the field psychologist, who will Greenwood has noted, use them as faithfully as he can, not hesitating to introduce modifications if None of Cole’s illustrative samples of necessary, though with as little departure cultural psychological theory and as possible from whatever exactness of practice constitute illustrations of control the laboratory has been able to historically or culturally local forms of achieve. (Bartlett 1939, pp. 25-26) psychological functioning: they are all readily interpretable as different cultural There are wider reasons why or historical manifestations of putatively psychologists shy away from taking universal forms of psychological history seriously. For those coming from functioning. (Greenwood, 1999, p. 511, a background in experimental emphasis added; see also Tulviste, 1991) psychology, it has always been tempting to mark out a domain of human Even Vygotsky set up a dualism between psychology that is universal and hence, two lines of human development: the biological and cultural. Furthermore,

29 Ethnographic Studies, No 11, Autumn 2009 despite his socio-historical approach to In a discussion of Wittgenstein’s human development, the eventual objections to psychology, Goldfarb has outcome of development is to render the argued that Wittgenstein’s real person as asocial. According to an complaint was that psychology was influential, neo-Vygotskyan metaphor, scientistic, not that it was scientific. adults provide the “scaffolding” that Unfortunately, by the time of supports the child’s development. But it Wittgenstein and Collingwood, this is a is, of course, in the nature of scaffolding distinction that could no longer be easily that it will be eventually removed, thus made. With the rise of scientific leaving us with a self-standing naturalism in the nineteenth-century, construction: the autonomous individual ‘science’ and ‘scientific objectivity’ had posited by standard psychological both come to take on quite a new theory. meaning (Turner, 1974; Daston, 2000). The newly professionalized science had In contrast to the ‘competition,’ become political, challenging the therefore, Bartlett’s historical existing authorities, and claiming its own psychology would have been truly exclusive access to the truth. Science radical. It would not, as in the case of became scientistic. (It is remarkable how Wundt, have been restricted to the the standard texts with such promising ‘higher mental functions’, nor titles as “What is this thing called committed to the dualisms, current science?” never mention this rather within socio-historical psychology, of important historical fact.) form and content, and biology and culture. Yet, in Bartlett’s case, he did not Furthermore, even if among the simply put strict limits on the scope of sciences, the scientific gains of ‘history’ in his version of historical psychology and sociology are still psychology. He suppressed the entire widely regarded as puny, these project over the course of his long disciplines were crucial for fulfilling the career. claim that science – in other words, scientists – had the final world not only regarding how the ‘world’ really works, Bartlett and Collingwood and but also human affairs. Thus, if no more the idea of an historical than ‘place holders,’ the creation of psychology departments of psychology and sociology was essential, ideologically, to this whole social transformation. Finally, I want now to return to Collingwood, and address what are, in Collingwood was no fool and must have effect, two versions of the same recognized the strategic role of question: psychology in the promotion of the new scientistic science. His polemic against 1. If Bartlett had developed his psychology was surely at one with historical psychology, would Wittgenstein’s Collingwood have recognized it as a proper way for psychology to a trenchant attempt to protect and develop? conserve a domain of knowledge and form of understanding from erosion and 2. Why did Collingwood not pursue distortion by the scientific spirit of the the idea he himself had floated of an age. (Hacker, 2001, p. 42). historical psychology (Connelly & Costall, 2000)?

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Now what could constitute a more Britain. Istanbul: Baha Matbaasi. profound threat to humanistic understanding than a self-consciously Bartlett, F.C. (1958). Thinking: An historical psychology encroaching into experimental and social study. London: the domain of history? This surely is George Allen & Unwin. why Collingwood was so concerned to put such tight boundaries around the Collingwood, R.G. (1939). An scope of modern, scientific, psychology. autobiography. Oxford: Clarendon But this could also explain why Press. Collingwood, the historian, and someone who never missed a chance to have a Collingwood, R.G. (1940). An essay on ‘go’ at psychologists whenever they metaphysics. Oxford: Clarendon Press. overstepped those boundaries, Connelly, J. & Costall, A. (2000). R.G. nevertheless did not rant against David Collingwood and the idea of an Hume’s proposal for a ‘science of historical psychology. Theory & human nature’ – even though, as Psychology, 10, 147-170. Collingwood insisted, it was inevitably historical by its very nature. In Hume’s Daston, L. (1992). Objectivity and the time, science had not become scientistic, escape from perspective. Social Studies and a science of psychology, the big of Science, 22, 597–618. hope of scientism, had not yet been enlisted to its cause. Douglas, M. 1987. A case of institutional forgetting. In How institutions think (pp. 81-90). London: References Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Bartlett, F.C. (1923). Psychology and Duncan, D. (1999, May 5). Letter to primitive culture. Cambridge: Alan Costall. Cambridge University Press. Edwards, D. & Middleton, D. (1987). Bartlett, F.C. (1932). Remembering: A Conversation and remembering: Bartlett study in experimental and social revisited. Applied , psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge 1, 77-92. University Press. Goldfarb, W. (1989). Wittgenstein, mind, Bartlett, F.C. (1937). Cambridge, and scientism. Journal of Philosophy, England: 1887-1937. American Journal 86, 635-642. of Psychology, 50, 97-110. Greenwood, John D. (1999). From Bartlett, F.C. (1939). Suggestions for Völkerpsychologie to cultural research in social psychology. In F.C. psychology: the once and future Bartlett, M. Ginsberg, E.J. Lindgren, & discipline? Philosophical Psychology, R.H. Thouless (Eds.), The study of 12, 503-514. society: methods and problems (pp. 24- 45). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hacker, P.M.S. (2001). Wittgenstein and the autonomy of humanistic Bartlett, F.C. (1956). Changing scene. understanding. In R. Allen & M. Turvey British Journal of Psychology, 47, 81-7. (Eds.), Wittgenstein: Theory and the arts (pp. 39-74). London: Routledge. Bartlett, F.C. (1957). Some recent developments of psychology in Great Hermelin, B. (1994, November 24).

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Personal communication, London. to be the way that any creature could possibly exist in the world. If we did not Humphrey, G. (1953). Five years in the categorise things we would be in chaos, Oxford chair. British Journal of in a blooming buzzing confusion. So you Psychology, 44, 381–382. have plenty of cross-cultural research about how different people categorize Jahoda, G. (1970). A cross-cultural things differently, but nevertheless based perspective in psychology. Advancement on the assumption that categorization of Science, 27, 1-14. itself is a universal and fundamental cognitive function. For example, there Lee, T. (1995, July 25). Letter to Alan has been extensive work on cultural Costall. differences in colour categorization. […] The investigators travel to exotic places, Monk, R. (1991). Ludwig Wittgenstein: come out from the bushes, or wherever, the duty of genius. London: Vintage. with a case full of colour samples, and Richards, A. I. (1939). The development on the look out for interesting cultural of field work methods in social differences. But [they look] within strict anthropology. In F.C. Bartlett, M. limits. First of all, of course, they take it Ginsberg, E.J. Lindgren, & R.H. for granted that everyone understands Thouless (Eds.), The study of society: what a psychology experiment is methods and problems (pp. 272-316). supposed to be about, and, in this London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. instance, that everyone shares the same Toulmin, S. (1978). The Mozart of abstracted notion of ‘colour.’ The only psychology. New York Review of Books, issue up for grabs, empirically, as far as September 28, 1978, pp. 51-57. the researchers are concerned, is how the people being studied draw the Tulviste, P. (1991). The cultural- boundaries between different colours. So historical development of verbal for most cultural psychologists, thinking. Commack, NY: Nova Science. categorization and the ‘objects’ to which it is applied are largely taken for granted. Turner, Frank Miller (1974). Between science and religion: The reaction to Wes Sharrock scientific naturalism in Late Victorian Sorry, so what exactly is Greenwood England. New Haven: Yale University criticising Cole for? Press. Alan Costall Well for precisely doing that. For not Discussion going for broke. In my example, for not considering whether the people they are Wes Sharrock studying actually share our sense of 3 Could you give me an example of the colour as an abstracted property. Can kind of thing Greenwood was talking about when criticising Cole? 3 Saunders, B.A.C. (1995). Disinterring

basic color terms: A study in the Alan Costall mystique of See Saunders, B.A.C. Take categorisation. Within cognitive (1995). Disinterring basic color terms: A psychology, categorisation is seen very study in the mystique cognitivism. much as something universal and History of the Human Sciences, 8, 19– fundamental, rather than a specific and 38, & Saunders, B.A.C., & Brakel, J. situated kind of practice. It is supposed van (1997). Are there nontrivial

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we find people who are actually doing Question things in a radically different way from So, is it like Wittgenstein when he had to us, not just doing what we happen to do get out, he had to go to an island to get but differently, that is the criticism. his ideas together for the Investigations because he was just strangled by the Dave Francis place? I don’t really know anything about Bartlett, so can you say a bit more about Alan Costall how Bartlett went about creating the It is interesting about Wittgenstein and scientific psychology at Cambridge and psychology at Cambridge. Wittgenstein well, why it had to go that way? You got involved in some of the early work seem to be implying that it had to go that on the psychology of music for example. way. Is it to do with university politics, C. S. Myers, Bartlett’s ‘patron’ at the immaturity of a new department, Cambridge, was very much into that sort where they must appear to fit in with the of stuff. Curiously, despite the later methods that were in accord with Wittgenstein’s view that experimental scientism? psychology was terminally confused, I have found no signs in my work of Alan Costall personal tensions between the One of the main sources of experimental philosophers and psychologists at psychology was experimental Cambridge that there were at Oxford. physiology of senses, and the research of people like Helmholtz and even Fechner, But to get back to Bartlett. He was faced so there was an already established with two problems. The first was the model of what an experimental extent to which the new psychology psychology ought to look like. should be identified with experimental Interestingly, at the beginning of psychology. To a large extent this had Bartlett’s book on remembering there is been decided for him, when Myers a penetrating critique of a certain notion established the Laboratory of of what experiments should look like. Experimental Psychology. The second He talks about how the psychologist problem was what form experimental should not “stand in awe” of the psychology should take. Kurt Danziger “stimulus.” In fact when Bartlett did any has emphasized the obvious but widely kind of research on his own behalf, it did repressed fact that the psychology not accord at all with the strict ideal of experiment is an institution. To get experiment promoted within his own people to take part in the exercise they department at Cambridge. Bartlett have to understand what they are letting published a strange book on thinking themselves in for. Furthermore, when he retired and I think it is experimental psychology has taken significant that he published it only after distinctly different forms. It is interesting he had retired. It was based on with Wundt’s experimental psychology interviews and asking people how they that it was the subject who was actually solve problems and all the rest of it. It the expert, and who typically published didn’t look a bit like Cambridge the paper. The experimenter was just a experimental psychology. technician, presenting things for the expert ‘subject’ to respond to. There is another kind of model which Danziger describes as developing in France, in constraints on color categorization? relation to hypnotism, etc., where the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 20, 167– subjects, themselves, do not know what 228.

33 Ethnographic Studies, No 11, Autumn 2009 is going on. Another kind of model is set completely puzzled - I do not understand up in America where you have students him. taking part in large groups, aware that they are contributing to science, but One more thing, you seem to be talking again they don’t really know what is as if the history of psychology was going on, since such knowledge is starting in Cambridge at this point, and supposed to contaminate the results. The these people were, at this point, insisting curious thing is that Bartlett opted for that psychology should be an empirical precisely the ‘physicalist’ model of discipline. It just seems to me that it experimentation that he so famously can’t be like that. If you take it back to criticized in the first chapter of what I was digging out of Collingwood Remembering. My view is that with the (quite deliberately in a biased way) the move of the Department from Moral to business actually starts in 16th century. Natural Sciences, Bartlett became […] So if this is right then you would trapped. Research had to be done, seen have had a variety of psychologists, to be done, and also to look much like some of them philosophical like in what his colleagues in physiology (with Scotland, some of them actually whom the psychologists shared the empirical scientists like those dealing building), and the research funders, etc. with memories and perceptions. So what thought it should look like. Bartlett was account do you give of somebody like responsible for many staff without Rivers, doing something that he is doing, tenure who were funded by short-term would Collingwood have to say research contracts. something about that?

Ivan Leudar: Alan Costall: There are several things. One, I am Bartlett provides several accounts of his completely puzzled by the comment on meeting with Rivers. In an appropriately Rivers, and that he was actually insisting Bartlettian way, the details are not that only through using experimental consistent. (In one version it is not even methods can you move psychology Rivers but one of his fellow researchers somewhere. I am puzzled because who puts the spell upon Bartlett.) You Instinct and the Unconscious for need to remember that Rivers initially example is actually very interesting, and established his reputation for his work nowhere there is he using an on the physiology of the senses. One experimental method - he examines his version Bartlett gives of the role of own practice reflectively. What he does experimentation is that it is a kind of is almost ethno-methodological: he initiation. Anyone who hasn’t gone works, he reflects on what he does, he through the discipline of doing uses his knowledge. It is very interesting experimental psychology is going to be how in doing this he reworks nicely the careless. So it is partly a kind of idea of repression [for him it depends on discipline thing, stopping people being education and training rather than being ‘sloppy’. But there is also the issue of something in the universal human calibration which kept coming up in the nature] and he has got something which context of psychophysics: becoming is very vivid. So, why would a man like aware of the characteristics and that, who obviously knows what he is limitations of the observer. So, one way doing when he is doing it, why would he or another, there is this aspect of actually be insisting that psychology has initiation. This is how it worked out in to use experimental methods? I am just the USA. Famous psychologists, like Thorndike, having done their initial

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work in experimental psychology, put John Pickstone experimentation aside. This in part was So to continue then in your spirit, to for financial reasons (there simply underline the huge importance of weren’t the jobs in experimental physiology in Cambridge: I think in psychology). But the idea was that once most places it ranks closely with they had gone through the training they medicine but at Cambridge it ranks with were now scientifically transformed. I physics. […] It has terrific power. […] suppose it is like the anthropologists. As part of its selling power is this training PhD students they undergo a punishing thing, which is particularly important for time, suffering in the ordeal of field- medics [...] There must be clear parallels work. Then they come back home, get there. an academic position, and spend the rest of their careers taking it easy and Alan Costall publishing. Bartlett (along with his other Some of the people I have interviewed main mentor, Myers) certainly made have said how embarrassing they found these points, but it is also the case that it as psychologists even to be sharing the Bartlett also reckoned that same building with distinguished experimentation, in some form, would physiologists, some of them Nobel Prize be necessary as the standard method for winners. an historical psychology. John Pickstone Ivan Leudar What I am less clear about is the other The other thing was really a comment part of the local context where a guy expressing a small disagreement. It is on could go to sociology, or to human Vygotsky and Russia when he and Luria ecology which is a very peculiar were working there. I wouldn’t think formation. So if you could just say a that there was actually any official little about that and then we will switch presupposition about the psychological and I will ask about Collingwood in unity of mankind then. In fact it would Oxford and what sort of local politics be the exact opposite, you would have there were campaigning against different classes and these would be psychology. quite different mentally, some progressive and some backward, and Alan Costall what Vygotsky would be doing would be So about Cambridge first: I have found actually standing up for an individual. I no references to these developments in always thought that, even though he has my work on Bartlett. The first chair in a theory of socialisation and sociology was not established until 1970, internalisation, that theory actually the year after Bartlett died, and, reflects the situation in Russia at the according to its first holder, there was time when people are being re-educated, not much going on beforehand.4 I do not sometimes quite forcefully, but even that re-education in his way is never a 4 "Today ... I find myself with the heavy situation in which you become responsibility of justifying a new chair in a completely engulfed by and in the social. discipline which in this university is still Vygotsky is always leaving a niche for striving for full recognition. ... There are two the individual to resist and which salient features which distinguish the state of actually allows one to be natural. sociology in Cambridge from the situation found in many other major universities. First, the decision to establish a chair in sociology was taken only very recently; and second, there are many members of the

35 Ethnographic Studies, No 11, Autumn 2009 know about human ecology at Industrial Psychology, so I can Cambridge, but I guess this was a post- understand why Bartlett could feel so war development, so Bartlett would be vulnerable and so prepared to shape close to retirement. Cambridge psychology to what those surrounding him thought psychology at The Second World War changed the Cambridge should look like. whole picture with all the military research that was going on. Bartlett gets John Pickstone shifted even more into a sort of What about Oxford, when Collingwood engineering style of psychology because is making polemics against psychology, of the war work, and through the to what extent is that appropriate to the influence of Craik, an amazing student local context? from Scotland who came to work with Bartlett and absolutely charmed him. Alan Costall Craik really gets into this kind of His targets are not local. They are people engineering approach to psychology but like Freud, Lloyd Morgan at Bristol, and again I think Bartlett begins to see how it Spearman at London. After all, there is starts to go wrong in the hands of some not much local going on. There weren’t of his other students. I have letters of any psychologists in Oxford worth Bartlett’s where he is extremely negative ‘going for’ until quite a bit later. The about the triviality of their work based thing with Collingwood is that he had no on mechanical analogies. initial misgivings about psychology as long as it behaves itself, and restricts Going back to the early days with itself to the limited agenda he set for it. Bartlett, one of the things worth bearing in mind is that Bartlett gets to James Connelly Cambridge just before the First World Can I just pick up on that? There are War, and very soon all of the other two, maybe three points. The first point people go off and in some way or is - I think Collingwood had a general another get involved in the war work. So concern with psychology and its place in he is left pretty well on his own and in a explanation or understanding. When you very vulnerable position because the come to the particular Oxford context I department really had not got a very safe think there are at least two events which base. The laboratory would not have are important here. I mean one is the been there in any case unless Myers, proposal to set up a psychological whose family were very rich, had not put laboratory in Oxford which was earlier up the money. It was a funny set-up. than the proposal to set up the course After the war, Bartlett was still very and Collingwood was involved in both much on his own, James Ward had given because it went to the philosophers to up any interest in this new psychology, discuss whether or not the psychology Rivers died just after the war, and then laboratory should be set up. Essentially Myers goes away in a huff and sets up the point was, we should look after it so the NIIP, the National Institute of that they don’t overstep their boundaries […] It wasn’t that he was opposed to it university, junior as well as senior, who do so much that it should be kept in its not regard sociology as a proper academic place. And the same with any joint subject." Barnes, John Arundel, 1970, proposal for psychology programmes Sociology in Cambridge. Inaugural lecture and so on. The other point worth making of the Professor of Sociology, 15 October, [is that] Collingwood went to Haldane’s 1970. Cambridge: Cambridge University laboratory and participated in and Press, p. 1.

36 Ethnographic Studies, No 11, Autumn 2009 observed the experiments on the Wittgenstein’s misgivings about the very physiology of perception just before idea of a psychology in the end. Haldane died. I presume he did this before 1936, as Haldane died in 1936. Mathieu Marion Collingwood refers to this in the lectures Okay let’s put it that way, there is a very on realism that he wrote in that year. As narrow field in which there is no far as Collingwood was concerned, this problem with doing this physiological was very good, interesting experimental inquiry that is psychology - everything science which he was perfectly prepared else is confusion […] to accept as being a valid form of knowledge. The problem is when Alan Costall psychology then goes and tries to I am not an expert on Collingwood, and explain too much or explains what he one thing that puzzled me when I was thinks it categorically cannot explain. So working with James Connelly on our I think you can say very clearly that in paper on Collingwood, was that this sense he was in favour of the science Collingwood identifies two issues in of psychology but not in favour of its relation to putting limits upon the scope improper extension. of a naturalistic psychology, but they do not seem to be connected together by Alan Costall him. The first is the normative, or I think in the end it is the very idea of a criteriological, as not being properly part science of psychology that he doesn’t of psychology, but there is also the other like. Because it is not only trying to open point about the historically situated not up a space of naturalistic explanations being a proper subject for psychology. It but also threatening to close down other seems to me there are plenty of spaces, namely humanistic examples where we can talk about understanding. people going about their business as being historically situated but which I Mathieu Marion would not count as criteriological. For I wanted to pick up on something that example, the way people walk. Mauss has been said, in reply to what you said. talked about this, years ago, in terms of I think he never had any qualms in as body techniques, people in different much as psychology was committed to cultures walk differently but is that the sort of experimental stuff about normative? perception […] and even in the autobiography I do not think he has any Mathieu Marion qualms – In your story about Bartlett moving away from social psychology - what was Alan Costall his interaction with the philosophers? - But it is that issue, about overstepping Because all through his lifetime the the boundary. You find him going for philosophers were saying extremely people, I mean some of this is very ad negative things about psychology […] hominen. Ivan quoted this thing from our and couldn’t it be the case that actually paper as it happens, Donagen says, having been sort of brainwashed by all ‘every psychologist to whose notice it these idealist philosophers […] that in has been brought has been justly angered the end he sets up next to physiology and by what Collingwood wrote of forget about the rest […] Could there be psychology in his Essay on something like this also involved? Metaphysics.’ I am probably brought to this inference by thinking about

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Alan Costall footballers, how they scored goals, on It is interesting, but I am not aware of gambling, and so on. Yes? any kind of real interactions between Bartlett and the philosophers, and this is Alan Costall curious because the Tripos degree Yes! involved both philosophy and psychology. According to the accounts of people who took the course, the teaching was completely compartmentalised. You did your psychology and you did your philosophy, pretty much like a lot of so- called ‘joint honours’ schemes in other universities.

Alan Collins There is a story, isn’t there, about him going up to Cambridge to do philosophy and he gets to the squash, meets Russell and Moore and decides not to do philosophy.

Wes Sharrock I was just wondering whether something like this was involved: it is a feature certainly of sociology that the people who have the schemes to make a science always assume that it is someone else’s work to deliver it. They are not interested in working it out once they have laid out how it is to be, somebody else can go and do it. I was carried right back to my earliest days here when of course one of the reasons we got involved in ethnomethodology was that we were fed up with what we then called programmatics, which were the endless delivery of new manifestos with no follow through. Not a lot has changed since then. A small but nice example of the discontinuity between the top of the organisation and the underlings might have been here because as we understood in the 60’s when the Manchester Psychology Department was under Cohen [then head of the department], if you worked in the department you did rats and fruit-flies with absolutely no admission of anything else. Cohen wrote books on

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