What role does context play in the mind and brain sciences?Footnote ¹ This introductory article, “Of Means and Ends,” explores that question through its focus on the ways scientists and physicians engaged with and constructed technology in the mind and brain sciences in the twentieth century. This topical issue addresses how scientists, physicians, and psychologists came to see the ends of technology as important in-and-of themselves. In so doing, the authors of these essays offer an interpretation of historian Paul Forman's revisionist and highly contextualist chronology of the twentieth century, which presents the comparatively recent tendency to aggrandize the ends of technology as evidence of a major, epochal transformation in the epistemic culture of twentieth-century American science. This collection of papers suggests that it was in the vanguard of such fields as psychology, psychiatry, and neurophysiology in North America and Europe that the ends and applications of technology became important in-and-of themselves.Footnote ²

The authors of this topical issue respond to several provocative papers historian Paul Forman has published that advance the revisionist thesis that this tendency to aggrandize the work of technology can be understood as one part of a major epochal transformation in the social and cultural context of American and European science. Forman's chronology is sweepingly broad-brush, pointedly critical and polemic, and now also unavoidable as a serious contemplation of the contemporary direction of science and medicine. In his papers, Forman argues that two large cultural epochs – Modernity and Postmodernity – can be distinguished in the twentieth century. He defines Modernity as an epoch in which moderns were concerned chiefly with “means” as opposed to “ends,” with science and expertise rather than technology, and with statements concerned mainly with methods and procedures rather than ultimate questions. For moderns, Forman argues, the ends of technology were underwhelming. At some point, likely after the Second World War, a different cultural mode began to influence science and technology, a mode that he terms postmodern. The epoch of Postmodernity, which Forman distinguishes from the canonical texts of postmodernism, contrast with moderns in almost every possible way. They became ever-increasingly impressed by technology and especially with its ends. In consequence, expertise and procedurism fell out of fashion in the postmodern epoch. Workers in science, and the public writ large, replaced the former bulwarks of modernity with an avid appreciation of ends, with disdain and even contempt for discussions of means, and with denigration of expertise; they placed high value upon the entrepreneurial or transgressive spirit. Postmoderns, moreover, came to evince a distinct dislike of any procedurist state, with its modernist-inspired regulations, rules, and expectations of obedience and compliance (Forman Reference Forman2007; Forman Reference Forman2010; Forman Reference Forman2012).

“Of Means and Ends” can be understood as a series of micro-level case studies tracing the chronology of this cultural transformation in the mind and brain sciences. Born out of the nineteenth century, both the modern state and the mind and brain sciences invariably traced their origins to earlier political, philosophical, and scientific debates. Many scholars have shown in compelling ways that the mind and brain sciences were influenced by cultural styles that can be rather succinctly captured through reference to such words as romantic, positivist, modernist, Victorian, or Darwinian. Aware of those earlier influences, these essays record the ways psychologists, psychiatrists, physiologists, and neurologists endeavored to resolve the differences stipulated by such divergent traditions by establishing a common culture concerned with methods and procedures for their field's sciences and clinical practices (Richards Reference Richards1987; Clarke and Jacyna Reference Clarke and Jacyna1992; Smith Reference Smith2007). These essays thus reveal how increasingly the question of adapting those sciences to the needs of industry, the military, or government agencies and ministries, established not only new pressures in those fields but also convinced figures in them that focusing on ends and applications was the surest way to enrich their fields’ knowledge. It was this transformation that ultimately animated public controversies, unrest, and distrust in the ends of the procedurist state and its tools, which came to include the disciplines of psychology, psychiatry, physiology, and neurology. In sum, it is our view that these essays tell the story of how multiple approaches to the sciences of the mind and brain resolved their eclecticism through the development of methods and procedures, which in turn culminated in a science and medicine of multifaceted applications in the context of Postmodernity.Footnote ³

As the essays in this issue make clear, the general details of the story of the development of the mind and brain sciences parallel Forman's epochal chronology. At the same time, many of these essays illuminate tensions and potential sites of contestation between their own chronologies and that proposed by Forman. Some psychologists active in the twentieth century, for example, looked back to the nineteenth century as a golden age for the mind and brain sciences. Others, meanwhile, cast distinctions between pure and applied science as essentially meaningless or artificial (see Herman Reference Herman1995 for a thorough discussion).

On the one hand, these differences reflected complicated conjunctures that Forman purposely underdetermines as he studies science and technology from his macroscopic view. Yet, the institutional and generational identities explored by the authors of these essays suggest that pre-Modernist nostalgia and Modernist mentalities persisted, as it were out-of-time, and in both of Forman's putative epochs. As Andrew Scull and Roderick Buchannan point out in this issue, people outlive their epochs; institutional changes occurred differently and differentially locale by locale. In other words, generational changes and differentiated institutional cultures muddy clear distinctions.

On the other hand, all of these essays hint at other macro-level conjunctures that serve only to enhance and validate Forman's observations – from the actual emergence of disciplines in brain and mind sciences and specialties in biomedicine, to the recognition of the value of technologies for the production of scientific knowledge, and ultimately to a growing appreciation for and application of the ends of technology. Indeed, in those moments when the authors of these essays approach more contemporary periods, their analyses of American culture and politics sound similar notes to those forcefully ringing throughout all of Forman's work, not least in their explorations of public controversies that coincided with counter-culture movements during the Cold War period.

From these viewpoints, these historicizing studies cumulatively suggest that the mind and brain sciences were in the vanguard of these trends – perhaps even determinative in ushering in that transformation. In the early twentieth century, disciplinary and specialist identity mattered enormously to psychologists, psychiatrists, physiologists, and neurologists, as they endeavored to resolve their many differences by establishing common methods and procedures for their field's sciences and clinical practices. For many of those scientists and clinicians, the opportunity of adapting their disciplines to the needs of industry, the military, or government agencies and ministries represented an essential means of convincing competitors and publics of the legitimacy of new and novel knowledge in the mind and brain sciences. At the same time, it also focused their disciplines, and their patrons, more on ends and applications than many might have preferred for a “pure science.” It was this transformation from means to ends that ultimately animated the public controversies and distrust of, as Forman terms it, the modernist procedurist state and its tools (Rose Reference Rose1989; Danziger Reference Danziger1990; Engstom Reference Engstrom2003; Kennaway Reference Kennaway2012).

This collection begins, not in the chronological period before Forman's putative Modernity, but rather in its heart, with Jason Miller's essay on the interwar and war-time career of Harvard psychologist Henry A. Murray (1893–1988), who pioneered the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), a projective psychological test that became part of the regime of assessment used by the American intelligence services. The test, Murray claimed, revealed the complexities of an individual's unconscious. It was, he also stipulated, a scientifically objective research tool that provided one means of dredging unconscious depths. Yet curiously, although Murray framed the test within modernist procedural imperatives, it is clear that he himself drew upon Romantic modes of psychology out of step with modernist imperatives. The picture of Murray, then, is one of a man purposefully out of time – indeed Miller observes that Murray identified himself as embodying that anachronism. Thus while Murray's technology properly conjured the anxieties and tendencies of Modernity, Murray situated his research program in a heroic and manly tradition of psychology and claimed these as virtues embodying the ideals of a better Age.

The tensions between technology and science had, of course, been long evident before Murray created the TAT, especially in the work of neurophysiologists in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Justin Garson, taking up this point, investigates in his essay the ways that Edgar Douglas Adrian of Trinity College Cambridge (1887–1977), in sharp contrast to the intentionally self-fashioned anachronism of his contemporary Murray, adopted a contemporary and technologically-derivative lexicon of “information,” “message,” “signaling,” “translation,” and “interpretation” in order to theorize and demonstrate the physiological properties of the nervous system. Where Murray sought romantic languages for his psychology, Adrian cultivated technological vocabulary. In a significant sense, Adrian's linguistic and technical mergers reflected the novel, geopolitical realities of the early twentieth century. The vacuum tube had been a central technology during WWI for amplifying radio signals in military communication; shortly after the war, Adrian and others, no doubt drawing on wartime experiences, used the vacuum tube for amplifying the electrical activity of nerves. Garson thus sharply contrasts Adrian's language and techniques from those used by his nineteenth-century predecessors, and Garson shows that a specific communication technology, the thermionic vacuum tube, drove Adrian's deployment of the language of information in his studies of the function of the nerves. Importantly, however, Garson recognizes that Adrian saw the vacuum tube only as a preferred means of doing science; Adrian fixated less upon the ends of the technology for modern society or commercial applications. In this way, Adrian exemplified the Modernist style. Technology served him as a means for doing science, but he did not direct his science towards developing technology.

One scientific world where the means/ends distinction began to break down more sharply than in neurophysiology was psychotechnics, which Harvard psychologist Hugo Münsterberg ultimately defined as the application of psychology to the practical problems of art, industry, education, and law. There were, as Jeremy Blatter argues in his contribution, significant pitfalls to transposing the “pure science” of the psychological laboratory into the uncontrollable sites of everyday life. Blatter suggests that the ideals of pure and applied science, so pronounced in the Progressive Era, might be recast in the case of psychology as a highly contested renegotiation of the geographic and epistemic limits of psychological science and expertise. Münsterberg's unusual industrial collaborations, especially with early film producers, not only made the utility of technology for science transparent, but importantly, as Blatter claims, demonstrated that technology itself could produce novel insights and new discoveries about the function of the mind and brain. Hence, Blatter illustrates in the case of psychotechnics that it was possible in the early twentieth century for a laboratory psychology in contact with everyday life to enter commercial relationships that not only often conflicted with the means and ends of “pure science” but showed that those ends might lead to new discoveries in science. Psychotechnics not only foreshadowed alternative approaches to the ideals of pure science, but also made clear that the field possessed potential justifications for aggrandizing the applications of science.

Similar tensions, increasingly exaggerated, manifested themselves regularly in the interwar American movement towards psychometric research in psychology and psychiatry and the various aptitude tests to which such research and its applications gave rise. As Rebecca Schilling and Stephen T. Casper detail in their essay on the development of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), such tools readily fit into the developmental history of the mind and brain sciences. They were a part of the narrative of those fields’ advances in scientific understanding. Psychometric applications that facilitated state or professional intervention in the lives of people with mental illnesses, from this view, was but a consequence of basic science research. At the same time, the advent of interventionist psychometrics fits into a cultural history of the rise of evaluative techniques and technologies that increasingly formed, disciplined, and supervised individuals, groups, and societies. As the case of the MMPI makes clear, such tendencies towards managing democracy and propagandizing for normative cultural myths, a commonplace in Postwar America, contributed to enormous social unrest in the Civil Rights Era. The normative picture of human function created by the MMPI, among other similar products of expert culture, became in popular imagination simply untenable in Cold War America. The cultural backlash that ensued, while predicating much on a novel theory of human individuality and the normalness of transgressive behaviors that had been formally branded psychopathologies, very much defined a counter argument to the presumptions of cultural Modernity. Was a postmodern consensus – à la Forman – emerging?

By the 1970s, as contributor Brian Casey observes, these public controversies erupted yet again over the proposed use of brain operations to curtail violent behavior. Civil libertarians, civil rights activists, leaders of the anti-psychiatry movement, and U.S. Congressmen charged psychosurgeons, the Department of Justice, and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) with furthering an unethical political project: the suppression of America's marginalized populations. Several government-sponsored investigations into psychosurgery rebutted this charge and led to an officially qualified endorsement of psychosurgery while calling attention to the need for more “scientific” understanding and better ethical safeguards. Although this conflict was certainly a confrontation between members of the public and the psychiatric establishment, Casey argues, in parallel with Casper and Schilling's study of the MMPI, that the psychosurgery debate can also be seen as a continuing clash between preoccupations with the ends of technology (on the part of protestors and psychosurgeons) on the one hand, and alternative State-led preoccupations to shore-up the epistemic means of science and expertise on the other.

As all of these case studies make clear, there are abundant historical examples potentially augmenting Forman's prospective chronology of science and technology. At the same time, it is not easy to translate Forman's narrative from the micro to the macro level, not least because current historiography may lean the other way. Andrew Scull, in a précis of American psychiatry and psychology that is as ambitious as Forman's studies, identifies myriad sites of contestation for those professions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: 1) the asylum and the couch, 2) psychoanalytic psychiatry and clinical psychology, and 3) the emergence of psychopharmacology. Each site, Scull observes, could be construed as its own epoch in the history of psychiatry and psychology. Each site preceded the next; each accorded to its own multi-generational patterns and logics, and each might also as easily be construed a backdrop for the case studies that precede Scull's in this volume. Scull observes, however, that many of the key controversies in psychiatry and psychology, including those that marked recent revisions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, revolved precisely around the inability of psychiatrists and psychologists to divine a means of credibly grounding knowledge in their fields. In perhaps a twist on Forman's chronology, it is possible to infer from Scull's account that many of the tendencies Forman observes in his studies most strongly accord with patterns found in psychiatry and psychology in the last three decades.

Whither, then, such grand historiographic impulses/ambitions? In his epilogue to this volume, Roderick Buchanan wonders whether Forman ever intended to extend his thesis so far beyond the natural sciences or to engage with the human and biomedical sciences. If so, Buchanan suggests that the wash-up of perspectives between the micro-studies and macro structure appearing in this volume raise more questions than they answer, especially about the desire and even value of seeking essentializing categories for epochs in the history of science and medicine such as Modernism and Postmodernism. There is, too, Buchanan notes, a distinct tension manifested in this volume between the projects of science and biomedicine. If Forman's chronology reflects well on the changing relations of technology and science in the twentieth century, then Buchannan wonders whether medicine presents an alternative historical picture, one that seems in the era of Postmodernity ever-more overwhelmed by proceduralist tendencies and means-orientation.

This contemplation of the development of the mind and brain sciences, and the place of technology in the construction of the many fields of knowledge that take mind and brain as their object, cannot fundamentally resolve such questions. Perhaps, however, this volume can justify a different sort of claim implicitly complementary to Forman's studies. Many historians of science and medicine still rely upon arguments peculiar to the last decades of the twentieth century. It may well be time, then, to follow the most ambitious element of Forman's project, and start historizing the now fleeting twentieth century in rhetoric suited to our time rather than in languages that would have been more recognizable to actors from the past.