What was the “self” in a society that defined “selves” in rigid racial categories and controlled the interaction of those selves in nearly every conceivable way? Psychology began to explore the mutable “self” in the modern sense just as legal segregation in the South defined racialized “selves” as immutable and subject to countless everyday restrictions, a paradox explored in this rich and thoughtful book. Rose begins with the southern self “before psychology,” when a deep fatalism, reinforced by the conservative evangelicalism of the region, governed interpretations of mental illness, but also in which the mentally ill were accepted as part of the community, like Benjy in William Faulkner's novel Sound and the Fury. In the first third of the twentieth century, psychology as a science slowly began to find its way into southern institutions. The education of children was key, for “children anchored a new sense of the psyche as complex, comprehensible, and susceptible to guidance” (52). Standards of professional psychological training and practice, formerly nonexistent or abysmal, slowly raised, and psychological teaching found its way into black medical institutions such as Meharry (in Nashville).

But “for every time that mental science challenged racial segregation,” Rose concludes, “psychology elsewhere adapted to prejudice.” That conclusion reiterates throughout the book, as the institutions and practices of segregation proved to be as adaptable as the human mind itself, according to modern psychological science. For one thing, acceptance of psychology for black children in schools was not matched by any such acceptance of psychiatry for black adults, given white views that “mental problems and medical solutions were too complex for the race” (74). And northern philanthropy, key in funding elementary black education, furthered the racial gap in access to psychology. Northern foundations sought “to make schools instruments of progress that were respectful of the social order,” but the South's “strenuous faith, widespread poverty, and color line gave school psychology and medical psychiatry very different responses” (81). Longstanding white southern folklore about the “childlikeness” of blacks deafened even sympathetic ears to pleas to understand the complex mental states of black adults.

For readers of this journal, chapter 4, “In the Southern Borderland of Mind and Soul,” will prove most interesting and pertinent. As psychology and religion entered into an alliance in the mid-twentieth century—the age of therapeutic religion and the model of pastors as counselors—the promise of psychology for the South appeared on its way to fulfillment at last: “A psyche pictured as free from the restraints of the body and caste seemed marvelously susceptible to renewal” (118). Yet, once again, psychology proved unequal to the task of directly addressing segregation; and once again, it skirted around it, evaded it, or simply ignored it. Varieties of “faith healing,” but of the psychological and the religious kind, “largely bypassed racial inequality and so left it intact” (119). In this chapter, Rose fascinatingly explores pentecostalism's joining of religion and medicine, a kind of twentieth-century conjure which defined illnesses as spiritual and treated them through prayer and touching the body with magical ointments. The liberal Protestant excitement about psychologically therapeutic religion was matched by the pentecostal revival of healing. In the excitement about both, however, segregation remained an obdurate reality, so resistant to change in part because those who might change it simply failed to address it centrally.

Black intellectuals adopted psychology earlier and more avidly than whites. This made good sense; if the human mind was malleable and subject to change and self-correction, then so were the institutions created by those minds. But of course black intellectuals fought against numerous obstacles—institutional, financial, and psychological—and made only limited headway; they tended to analyze “racism” as a national psychological problem. For their part, white intellectuals earlier in the century (such as Howard Odum, the pioneering sociologist at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill) focused on the “folk” and their culture in a way that tended to reify rather than undermine segregation. Later in the century, conservative southern psychologists latched onto bell curve–style arguments about what purportedly were demonstrated by intelligence tests (that is, whites were naturally smarter, an immutable fact of nature).

“Psychology and segregation shared a taste for civility,” Rose deftly points out, with the ironic result that “Hopes for growth and self-fulfillment … posed a cultural threat in a society that made the races unequal” (2). Except for a few passages about lynching and national texts that treated the South as deranged, the sheer power of violence that undergirded the southern social order never quite clearly comes into focus here. Rose is interested in how civility defines even unjust social orders and how psychologists (consciously or not) furthered that by looking elsewhere other than region and place and by focusing on abstract and ahistorical theories of human personality, detached from the human personalities created by the segregated South. I desired one more chapter in this fine book, one that would focus more explicitly on power relations in this segregated society—and how those power relations depended on a usually barely submerged violence and fear. The argument presented here is exquisite and original, but for me never quite fully explains the “southern men” explored in Faulkner's novels, in Lillian Smith's essays, and in Neil Young's song.