Controlling Minds: Guo Renyuan, Behavioral Psychology, and Fascism in Republican China

Baum, Emily

doi:10.1179/1547402x15z.00000000050

Cited by 8 publications

(10 citation statements)

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“…17 Tsung-yi Lin, Head of the Department of Psychiatry at NTUH, also declined the initiative, commenting that "no specialists of this kind" could be provided by his department. 18 This unsuccessful initiative represented the discontinued work on psychological sciences under the Chinese Nationalist government after WWII (Baum, 2015) and unveiled the division between the ideologies of the medical profession and the state in the immediate postwar period.…”

Section: Psychiatric Imagination Of the Statementioning

confidence: 99%

Psychiatrists’ agency and their distance from the authoritarian state in post-World War II Taiwan.

2020

History of Psychology

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By the end of World War II and in the shadow of the Cold War, many Asia-Pacific nations developed their psychiatric disciplines and strengthened their mental health care provision. This article examines the activities of the first generation of psychiatrists in Taiwan during the postwar period, focusing on their self-fashioning during the transition of a medical discipline. At this time, psychiatry was imagined by the state and by professionals as a science serving different clinical and political objectives. Psychiatrists, however, enjoyed a relatively unrestricted environment that allowed them to gradually form a professional identity. At the height of the Cold War, the state attempted to use psychiatry for political ends. Because of its initially malleable nature and undeveloped content, psychiatry could be employed by various authorities for diverse purposes, including patient care, scientific inquiry, psychological warfare, and even political probes to obtain crucial information. Nevertheless, psychiatrists sought to create spaces where they could develop their professional autonomy and prevent exploitation amid complicated political polemics.

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Section: Psychiatric Imagination Of the Statementioning

confidence: 99%

Psychiatrists’ agency and their distance from the authoritarian state in post-World War II Taiwan.

2020

History of Psychology

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“…These applications of psychology were consistent with the American-leaning nationalist government's favorable attitude toward social engineering, which involved psychologists in the military, industrial, and mental health sectors (S. Yan, 2015). It should be noted that these social interventions were strictly based on scientific findings or at least scientific imaginaries (Baum, 2015). In contrast, the communist party, arising from guerilla warfare, had had little control over psychological research institutes and had received no scientific aid from psychologists.…”

Section: Historical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Empirical Observation to Social Intervention: The Marxization of Psychology in China, 1949–1958

Gao

2019

Review of General Psychology

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This article examines the Marxization of psychology in the first decade of socialist China, between 1949 and 1958. In this movement, a loose group of radical intellectuals called for the replacement of the empirical observation model popular in psychology with a social intervention model as exemplified by educators. This paradigmatic, transdisciplinary shift would encompass three epistemological–ontological nexuses. First, the radical intellectuals accused ahistorical empirical observation of failing to recognize that the Chinese mental capacity, so far impaired by class domination, could display tremendous growth in socialism. Second, they criticized experimental and naturalistic contexts of observation for revealing the human mind to be mechanistic rather than purposeful. To recognize human agency, psychologists must transform their objectivist conceptualization of reality to a sociopolitical one. Third, they denounced the ideal of value neutrality for eschewing political engagement while permitting instrumental rationality and its hidden normative judgments. The solution lay in a refocusing on mental content instead of mental process as the object of inquiry. By examining the Marxization of psychology in socialist China, this article aims to foster reflection on how Chinese and Western psychologists’ research assumptions are shaped by their sociopolitical milieux.

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“…Para unos, el marco filosófico-político del cual parte este referente de la ciencia del comportamiento se halla esencialmente en el fascismo y el conservatismo (Chomsky, 1984;Foucault, 2007, Baum, 2015; y para otros, en una especie de anarquismo o "libertarismo idílico" de izquierda (Dinsmoor, 1992;. De hecho, han habido también enconadas polémicas entre los propios simpatizantes del análisis de la conducta acerca de si la visión conductista de la naturaleza humana se acomoda mejor a las contingencias proporcionadas por el capitalismo (Rakos, 1988ab, 1989, o por las del socialismo (Ulman, 1989, Dittrich, 2019.…”

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¿En qué parte del espectro ideopolítico se podría ubicar a Skinner? Un análisis conceptual

Montgomery

2022

Rev. revoluciones

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En este artículo se aborda el problema de la posible identificación del principal propugnador del conductismo radical, B. F. Skinner, con alguna ideología política en particular. Para llevar a cabo el análisis se consideraron tres orientaciones ideopolíticas y sus respectivas variantes: anarquismo individualista y colectivista, liberalismo clásico y moderno, y socialismo revolucionario y evolucionista; que fueron confrontadas de manera conceptual con las ideas de Skinner sobre la naturaleza humana, la libertad, la igualdad, la democracia, la perspectiva de sociedad, la idea de autoridad y la economía; obteniéndose una síntesis de las coincidencias que señala una influencia predominante en primer lugar del anarquismo colectivista. Complementariamente se utilizaron los reactivos del test de Nolan para ubicar tales ideas en el espectro ideopolítico, que, según el resultado, estarían inclinadas ligeramente hacia la “centro-izquierda”. Al final, se reflexiona críticamente sobre este último punto y sus repercusiones posibles frente a la disyuntiva entre la libertad individual y la convivencia colectiva.

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Controlling Minds: Guo Renyuan, Behavioral Psychology, and Fascism in Republican China

Cited by 8 publications

References 0 publications

Psychiatrists’ agency and their distance from the authoritarian state in post-World War II Taiwan.

Psychiatrists’ agency and their distance from the authoritarian state in post-World War II Taiwan.

From Empirical Observation to Social Intervention: The Marxization of Psychology in China, 1949–1958

¿En qué parte del espectro ideopolítico se podría ubicar a Skinner? Un análisis conceptual

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