Writing the recent history

ArgumentThe life of the pioneer electroencephalographer, William Grey Walter, initially appears to be a paradigmatic example of the process of network building and delegation identified by Michel Callon and Bruno Latour. In his professional career, Walter continually repositioned himself, moving from an unhappy beginning as an expert in the apparently useless and suspect technology of the EEG, to become a self-styled crucial mediator in subjects as diverse as medical diagnosis, forensic detection, marriage counseling, and international diplomacy. This position was achieved moreover through the construction and co-option of human and mechanical accomplices -laboratory assistants, electrical tortoises, and mechanical analyzers -which sustained his research and propagated his arguments. However in contrast to Callon and Latour's atomistic account of scientific power and agency, this paper will extend their analysis to explore the impact of network building and delegation on domestic life, human desire, and personal identity. Walter's engagement with the complexities of love and the human brain demonstrates how the transformative power of scientific rhetoric extends simultaneously into both the organization of the world and the subjectivity of the individual.What would be the use of a neuroscience which cannot tell us anything about love?Programs of the Brain (Young 1978, 143) In the early 1950s the neurophysiologist and electroencephalographer, William Grey Walter, began to speculate on the future evolution of the human brain. Rejecting the vision of disembodied nervous systems and dome-headed descendants proposed by the populist authors of pulp science fiction, Walter instead imagined a series of linked transformations that would encompass our neural organization, technology, and society. He argued that our future evolution would be an indirect process, in which the development of new mechanisms of information storage and communication would allow the brain to shake off its mundane operations and embark instead on a process of mental growth through play and speculation. As Walter wrote:

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Although the compound adjective ‘psychosocial’ was first used by academic psychologists in the 1890s, it was only in the interwar period that psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers began to develop detailed models of the psychosocial domain. These models marked a significant departure from earlier ideas of the relationship between society and human nature. Whereas Freudians and Darwinians had described an antagonistic relationship between biological instincts and social forces, interwar authors insisted that individual personality was made possible through collective organization. This argument was advanced by dissenting psychoanalysts such as Ian Suttie and Karen Horney; biologists including Julian Huxley and Hans Selye; philosophers (e.g. Olaf Stapledon), anthropologists (e.g. Margaret Mead) and physicians (e.g John Ryle and James Halliday).This introduction and the essays that follow sketch out the emergence of the psycho-social by examining the methods, tools and concepts through which it was articulated. New statistical technologies and physiological theories allowed individual pathology to be read as an index of broader social problems and placed medical expertise at the centre of new political programmes. In these arguments the intangible structure of social relationships was made visible and provided a template for the development of healthy and effective forms of social organization. By examining the range of techniques deployed in the construction of the psychosocial (from surveys of civilian neurosis, techniques of family observation through to animal models of psychotic breakdown) a critical genealogy of the biopolitical basis of modern society is developed.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Emotions maintain an ambivalent position in the economy of science. In contemporary debates they are variously seen as hardwired biological responses, cultural artifacts, or uneasy mixtures of the two. At the same time, there is a tension between the approaches to emotion developed in modern psychotherapies and in the history of science. While historians see the successful ascription of affective states to individuals and populations as a social and technical achievement, the psychodynamic practitioner treats these enduring associations as pathological accidents that need to be overcome. This short essay uses the career of the Glaswegian public health investigator James L. Halliday to examine how debates over the ontological status of the emotions and their durability allow them to travel between individual identity and political economy, making possible new kinds of psychological intervention. The University of Chicago Press" W E LIVE," James L. Halliday gloomily concluded in 1949, in an "Anal Age." At a time when the British people were embracing optimistic plans for social reconstruction following the sacrifices of World War II, Halliday, an investigator for the Scottish Department of Health, proposed a more cynical analysis of the human situation. In a number of programmatic articles, radio interviews, public lectures, and his book Psychosocial Medicine (1947), he claimed that the British population had entered a period of terminal decline.1 He did not attribute this decline to external calamities (such as the world

The idea of a conflict between demonology and psychiatry has been a foundational myth in the history of medicine. Nineteenth-century alienists such as J.-M. Charcot and Henry Maudsley developed critiques of supernatural phenomena in an attempt to pathologize religious experience. Modern historians have reanalyzed these critiques, representing them as strategies in medical professionalization. These accounts all maintain an oddly bifurcated approach to the perceived conflict, treating demonology as a passive and unchanging set of practices, while medicine is depicted as an active and aggressive agent. An examination of early twentieth-century demonological literature reveals a very different story. Fundamentalists and Pentecostalists engaged with the problems of conversion and possession, developing sophisticated models of the normal and the pathological in spiritual experience. Their writings drew upon medical and psychiatric sources ranging widely from Pastorian germ theory to Jacksonian neurology. This article explores the points of contact between the medical and demonological communities in order to demonstrate the contested nature of biomedical innovation.