In a recent forum contribution to the American Historical Review on the relationship between history and biology, Lynn Hunt proposed that the future of academic scholarship devoted to exploring the origins and development of modern selfhood would depend on the disciplinary alliance between history and neuroscience. Tabling, for the moment, the cogency of her central assertion, we can nevertheless agree that Hunt espouses a sentiment shared by many historians: “the question of the self is a huge and difficult subject on its own,” she writes, and historical analysis of some sort can help us make better sense of it.Footnote 1 The effort to do precisely that over the past several decades, through a variety of historiographic approaches, has engendered a remarkably sizable corpus of writings on the history and conceptual development of the modern, typically Western, self.Footnote 2
Indeed, the expression “history of the self” has become something of a scholarly signpost in its own right, signaling this vast corpus as well as the contributions that continue to be made to it. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that two recent and superb contributions to the intellectual history of mind and brain medicine have drawn so remarkably upon this historiographic tradition. At the outset of Localization and Its Discontents: A Genealogy of Psychoanalysis and the Neuro Disciplines, Katja Guenther insists that by discussing the history of mind and brain, the two knowledge fields that have “inform[ed] modern thinking about subjectivity most authoritatively . . . this book contributes to the growing field of research on the history of the self” (8). Michal Shapira paints a similar picture in her introduction to The War Inside: Psychoanalysis, Total War, and the Making of the Democratic Self in Postwar Britain. She explains that the task of her book is to understand the part played by mid-twentieth-century British psychoanalysis “in the specific historical making of a desired, functioning, ‘healthy’ democratic individual self” (7). The history of the self has become a useful framework, it seems, in relation to which emerging scholarship has been able to position itself both thematically and theoretically.
Guenther's Localization and Its Discontents and Shapira's The War Inside, though set in different historical periods and national contexts, nevertheless share several significant characteristics. They both represent substantial interventions into the broad history of psychoanalysis as well as into the promising fusion of intellectual history with the history of science and medicine.Footnote 3 Yet they also represent something of interest for an even broader array of historians—that is, an opportunity to examine more closely the stakes of historicizing the self.
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As it currently stands, however, the vast historiography of selfhood suffers from its own expansiveness. When viewed in its entirety, the scholarship does not collectively congeal into a coherent historical subfield but, rather, appears to function as a repository of sorts—a collection of varied, disparate, and often incompatible approaches to historicizing a capacious, even nebulous, concept. To the extent that the expression “history of the self” functions as a signpost to readers, it is not always apparent what exactly it signals.
The disciplinary, chronological, and methodological heterogeneity that makes up this scholarship is a salient indication that there is little consensus among scholars about what exactly a history of the self actually is or how it should be done, though certainly efforts have been made to resolve these questions.Footnote 4 For historians in particular, the lack of consensus doubtlessly has something to do with methodological differences, though I propose that the deeper lack of consensus stems from suppositional differences in what is meant by “selfhood.” We might attempt to resolve this impasse by posing a question comparable to what Peter Dear asks of the history of science: what is the history of the self a history of?Footnote 5 I would, however, suggest an alternative starting point, a slight inversion of Dear's inquiry, and one that sets aside the specific and thorny matter of defining selfhood: what kind of history is a history of the self? That is to say, what manner of historical analysis is it in the first place?
As Darrin McMahon has pointed out, histories of the self are particularly indebted to the enduring and transforming tradition of the history of ideas.Footnote 6 Exemplified, particularly through citational practices, by the voluminous contributions of Charles Taylor and Jerrold Seigel, intellectual histories of the self tend to adopt a specific stance toward their object of analysis. As Jan Goldstein explains, these histories “regard [the self] as a perennial scientific object whose form and degree of cultural salience are prone to extremely wide variation.”Footnote 7 Put another way, these histories of “the idea of the self”—to borrow Seigel's title—examine theoretical elaborations of the self as a concept and explore the explicit principles and conceptual commitments that are central in its formalization within (usually) Western philosophical traditions. How and why John Locke links personhood with moral concernment and responsibility in the second edition of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding or the manner by which Marcel Mauss narrates the transformation of primordial mentalities into conscious proprietors of rights and moral value might count as examples of such historical endeavors.Footnote 8
Yet, at the same time, the history of the self has become a particularly important feature of recent history-of-science scholarship, given the recognition of the historical role that the sciences have played in defining and elaborating the dimensions of subjectivity both as an object of medical and psychological knowledge and as a normative ethical and epistemic constraint for scientific practitioners.Footnote 9 Of particular value to this scholarship is the Foucauldian legacy of thinking in terms of “technologies of self”; that is to say, imagining selfhood less as an elaborated concept and more as a process, activity, or practice—in short, an intelligible framework that congeals only through situated enactments.Footnote 10 Indeed Foucault declared in 1980, “While the history of science is without doubt an important testing ground for the theory of knowledge . . . it is also fertile ground for studying the genealogy of the subject.”Footnote 11 Still, Foucault's real impact for historians of science has been mediated through the work of history-adjacent scholars like Ian Hacking and Nikolas Rose.Footnote 12 In his essay “How Should One Do the History of the Self?”, Rose insists that a proper genealogy of the subject does not refer to “the history of changing ideas of the person” but rather to the history of “the practices in which persons are understood and acted upon.”Footnote 13
While certainly not exhaustive, this brief account does highlight two of the more common trends one finds in the historical analyses of selfhood: selfhood is, on the one hand, part of an economy of ideas and, on the other hand, embedded within an ensemble of practices. Indeed both Guenther and Shapira implicitly situate themselves, at least through their citational affinities, on opposing sides of this division.Footnote 14 We can see, then, an implicit dichotomy playing out methodologically in these varied histories of the self, a dichotomy organized not around the actual truth of the self (whatever that might be), but instead around the suppositional and conceptual commitments of historians. These tendencies replicate long-standing ambiguities that have plagued the efforts to essentialize selfhood after the seventeenth century: should the self be viewed according to concepts, theories, principles, and abstractions or according to praxes, sensibilities, materialities, and situated performances? This dichotomy seems to echo history's own disciplinary efforts to negotiate the problem of scale, which can often be divided along an inclination to follow either the movement of ideas or the particularities of material life. We might, furthermore, view this historiographic dichotomy as a hidden displacement and reinterpretation of the “two-cultures” epistemological detente which has so often marked accounts of the modern subject since the nineteenth century; selfhood is decipherable either through the traditions of the Geisteswissenschaften or, instead, through the determinations of a Naturwissenschaft.Footnote 15
The question of greatest relevance to historians seems to be whether histories of the self are destined, as it were, to play out some variation of this dominant dichotomy. Are the historiographic possibilities of selfhood somehow already delimited in advance?
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Guenther's Localization and Its Discontents: A Genealogy of Psychoanalysis and the Neuro Disciplines is a concise conceptual history of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century neuropsychiatry. The book is organized around the contributions of six researchers—Theodor Meynert, Carl Wernicke, Sigmund Freud, Otfrid Foerster, Paul Schilder, and Wilder Penfield—who represent an important lineage of medical thought. Indeed, Guenther's use of the term “genealogy” is quite precise, to the extent that she tracks a conceptual family tree, one that originates in the German neuropsychiatric writings of Meynert and Wernicke but which then bifurcates into disparate branches of disciplinary specialization (i.e. psychoanalysis and neurology/neurosurgery) in Europe and North America.
Through this genealogical analysis, Guenther is able to make sense of two dominant rifts within the history of brain medicine. The first concerns a prevailing, though contrasting, pair of practical approaches to neuroanatomical research, present from the early origins of nineteenth-century institutional neuroscience and persistent in some form even today. By the late nineteenth century, one of the most embedded suppositions in mind and brain medicine was that psychological and physiological categories could without much difficulty be transposed into one another, thanks to the belief that the brain was anatomically organized as a composition of discrete “centers,” each housing distinct mental functions. This doctrine of localization, or Zentrenlehre, as it was known in the German context, was bolstered through the practice of pathological anatomy as a primary means for gathering neuroanatomical data; this involved the postmortem identification of brain lesions and the retroactive correlation of those lesions to behavioral pathologies. On the other hand, Guenther examines how researchers negotiated and revised localizationist assumptions with what she calls a “connectomic” approach, which viewed the brain as a diffused network of distributed neurological “circuits” (1–8). In nineteenth-century brain medicine, the theory of the reflex functions of the nervous system embodied this diffusionist orientation towards neural “circuitry.” After 1850, reflex theory had become an equally dominant physiological assumption about the nature of nervous processes; reflex was viewed as the physiological principle that could explain not only simple mechanical links between sensory stimuli and motor responses but also higher-level psychological activities like mental association.
The second large-scale rift that Guenther examines is disciplinary in nature, between two research fields that, in a certain respect, together formalized in German mind and brain medicine right around the turn of the century—namely psychoanalysis and clinical neurology. These are not arbitrary objects of examination; according to Guenther the tension between localizationist and connectivist approaches to the brain and nervous system and the attempt by advocates of connectivism to critique, resolve, or break free from localizational assumptions actually enabled the very emergence of psychoanalysis as a theory of mental pathology and a technique for its treatment. Not only that, but this tension continued to animate formative developments within twentieth-century neurosurgery across the North Atlantic.
The first third of the book is devoted to Meynert and Wernicke, who most ardently formalized connectivist responses to Zentrenlehre assumptions. For Meynert, the brain was not merely an amalgamation of decomposable parts and functions but also a complex system of associations that could be somatically described by virtue of the reflex theory of brain functions rather than in strictly localizationist terms. Wernicke, a student of Meynert's, extended his mentor's ambivalence toward the localizationist project by demonstrating the applicability of the reflex theory of association to clinical practice. Wernicke wanted to understand how a clinician could make sense of a mentally ill patient's observable symptoms from both a psychiatric and a neurological standpoint. By viewing mental illnesses as disruptions to a psychical reflex arc—that is to say, to a neural circuitry rather than a localized region of the brain—the clinician, according to Wernicke, could, through interrogative techniques, identify aberrations in psychical reflexes while also ascertaining the likely site and nature of lesions affecting reflex pathways in the brain. Guenther views Wernicke as one of the earliest figures to demonstrate the limits of pathological anatomy in grounding psychiatric medicine, focusing instead on clinical observation and ushering in psychiatry's eventual privileging of clinical observation over biological reduction.
The rest of the book presents case histories of subsequent researchers who were inheritors of the neuropsychiatric model developed by Meynert and Wernicke, but who also represented the fragmentation of that model to some extent. Guenther extends her examination to the work of Otfrid Foerster and his neurological therapeutics, to Paul Schilder's development of the “body schema” theory, and to Wilder Penfield's paradigm of the sensory–motor homunculus and developments in psychosurgery. Yet the chapter of perhaps greatest interest concerns Freud's role in this conceptual lineage. It is in this chapter that Guenther rigorously and convincingly reworks the long-standing and hitherto unsatisfying narrative of Freud's transition from neurology to metapsychology. As Guenther writes, Freud's “formulation of psychoanalysis was not so much a break from earlier brain science, but rather can be more productively understood as a radicalization of its principles” (72).
The crux of Guenther's analysis revolves around Freud's writings during the 1890s and an underlying transformation that took place in his conception of a lesion. As early as 1891 Freud assumed a strictly anatomical view of lesions that debilitated the neural circuitry linking brain centers. But as Freud continued to adopt a more ubiquitously associationist view of the brain, it became less efficacious to view lesions in a strictly physical sense. Instead Freud embraced a more abstracted conception of a “functional” lesion; that is, a psychical lesion—a wounding understood not in terms of histological damage but as an interruption in the diffused network of neural circuitry (79). The methods of pathological anatomy that were most helpful in locating brain lesions in postmortem patients became somewhat useless as Freud's clinical interests were redirected to hysteria in the early 1890s. The neural “damage” of a hysterical patient would not appear as a localizable injury but as a dispersed disarrangement in the organization of the nervous system—a disruption that could remain anatomically imperceptible. But as Guenther is very clear to assert, while this view abandoned the doctrine of strict cerebral localization, it did not abandon other principles of physiology, since it was partially predicated on the physiological model of nervous association formulated by Meynert and Wernicke.
Indeed, as Guenther further argues, by 1895 Freud had refined his conception of pathology to include not only interruptions or failures in the organization of neural circuitry, but pathogenic reorganizations of that circuitry as well (84). According to Guenther, Freud's development of his theory of pathogenic reorganization was formative for the development of psychoanalysis as we know it. Pathogenic associations could transgress the threshold separating consciousness from nonconscious psychical reflexes. “In this way,” Guenther writes, “the radicalization of the association model in Freud's work allowed him to break the relationship between it and consciousness and consequently to imagine the possibility of higher functions detached from consciousness. The unconscious was born” (86). If pathology was a problem related to nervous organization, then therapy amounted to the establishment of healthy organizational pathways, what Freud called “associative correction” (88). Guether's central intervention, however, is in amending the story of psychoanalysis's emergence from the lineage of German neuropsychiatry. Freud did not adopt a more psychologized version of the Meynert–Wernicke model, but actually rejected psychological paradigms, which tended to affirm a fairly facile somatic reliance on pathological anatomy and localization doctrines. As Guenther argues, Freud's earliest formulations of psychoanalytic principles were paradigmatically much more rigorously physiological in nature. An “uncritical assumption of oppositions like physiology–psychology or soma–psyche,” she concludes in the chapter, “can obstruct an understanding of psychoanalysis and its history” (94).
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In similar fashion, Shapira's The War Inside: Psychoanalysis, Total War, and the Making of the Democratic Self in Postwar Britain also seeks to reframe our understanding of psychoanalysis and its history. The book is set within the context of mid-twentieth-century British psychoanalysis, which Shapira intentionally construes in the widest possible sense as an “intellectual constellation,” looking beyond the traditional psychoanalytic divisions and boundary disputes in order to focus on a variety of practitioners who shared some fundamentally similar psychiatric suppositions (5). As a consequence of the destabilizing effects of mass violence during World War II, particularly the aerial bombardments of London, the language of traumatic experience, typified in the form of fear and anxiety, spread among the populace as examples of emotional disturbances that were no longer simply restricted to wartime soldiers. As Shapira explains, “The war produced a greater willingness among officials to think in a psychological manner rather than mostly along the class-biased lines about the ‘bad habits’ of the urban working class” (60). Psychoanalysis was able to capture the magnitude of these debilitating psychologies, while also giving voice to public and professional concerns of the havoc that fear and anxiety could pose for democratic citizenship. Indeed, according to Shapira, British psychoanalysis was able to gain a prominent cultural foothold from the 1930s to 1960s precisely through its emphasis on the medical, social, and political dangers of fear, anxiety, and aggression even among otherwise normal citizens. Shapira insists that “psychoanalysts were on the radical side of the spectrum of ideas as they argued that deeper, inner emotional processes were operating during the time of war—as well as peace” (86).
Yet psychoanalysis did not merely give voice to a suddenly urgent problem in mid-century British society; it also provided a solution in the psychological development of children and the role that family life should play in providing the dynamics necessary for both mental health and healthy citizenship. Psychoanalysis, Shapira writes, “offered a most thoroughgoing, theoretically ‘deep’ portrayal of inner life, and provided new and increasingly popular ways of conceptualizing the dynamics of aggression, fear, and anxiety among children separated from their families, while describing the threat those children could pose to democratic society” (59).
The War Inside is also a story about how psychoanalysis became something of a political technology during a moment in which the British model of juridical political democracy based on rights and laws increasingly began to take the form of a disciplinary democracy, where freedom was both defined and constrained through regimes of proper conduct, family regulation, and mental health. Not only were certain medical norms derived from psychoanalytic discourse translated into disciplinary techniques of governance, but, conversely, psychoanalysis reinforced its formal and institutional development precisely through its ability to address sociopolitical problems. In particular, psychoanalytic practitioners (again, broadly construed for Shapira), generally maintained an equivalence between the mental health of the populace and a salubrious democratic citizenry, while arguing that mental health could only truly be guaranteed in childhood and in the child's psychodynamic relation with her parents, who, according to these practitioners, should for the sake of the child ultimately aspire to fairly conservative gendered norms of “motherhood” and “fatherhood.”
What is most crucially at stake for Shapira, however, is to understand how the role played by psychoanalysis in mid-century British debates on healthy democratic selfhood ultimately resulted in the fashioning of what Shapira calls “constructed sensitivities.” What she means here is the newly interiorized and affectively charged perceptions, emergent after the 1940s, of what counts as mental health, familial responsibility, child rearing, and political well-being, which, while historically contingent, “now often seem commonsensical, even instinctual or natural” (236). The War Inside, then, is part of a scholarly tradition that expands upon the historically constructed nature of affects and interiorities, with a focus on the production of a specific emotional “truth”: that children must be cared for, that they must be cared for by a primary caregiver (who really ought to be the mother), that the negligence in doing so may result in serious mental disturbances, and that mental disturbances readily translate into threats to the body politic. Shapira explains quite early on in the book that her interest is “not whether these emotions [fear and anxiety] were prevalent or not,” but to show how psychoanalysis demonstrated “the acceptance of the expression of these feelings in this period and how . . . it was now more widely believed that fear and anxiety were universal reactions to war” (41). It seems to me that this is precisely what many reviewers have ignored in their analyses of The War Inside—by focusing on the empirical realities of Shapira's claims, they have entirely overlooked the fact that she is not writing a natural history of emotions but, rather, the history of the performative effects of a medical discourse on what counts as a normative political truth.
The earlier chapters of the The War Inside examine the work of Anna Freud and Melanie Klein and their respective research on childhood psychology, facilitated by the mass evacuation of children during the war, as the site of potential psychiatric and political danger and so, therefore, the object of necessary therapeutic rehabilitation. Shapira looks beyond the classic Freud–Klein dispute in order to focus on the underlying similitude of their conclusions. One conclusion concerned what was for both Freud and Klein the normal and otherwise unavoidable anxieties and “inner aggressiveness” inherent to subjectivity, something that demanded proper management through familial dynamics rather than repression or evasion (123). Another central conclusion concerned the intertwinement of inner emotional turmoil—the “war inside”—with the external and psychologically inciting chaos and destruction of wartime violence—the “war outside” (77).
In later chapters, Shapira discusses the continued refinement of these new medical theories while also exploring the various ways in which they were disseminated to British society during and after the war. A prominent example for Shapira is Donald Winnicott's BBC radio broadcasts on mental health, childhood development, and the role of family that he delivered for over twenty years starting in 1943, and through which Winnicott promulgated fairly conservative gender norms with regard to women as stay-at-home mothers. Shapira also discusses how these new psychoanalytic conceptions of healthy democratic selfhood found a site of transmission in expert testimonies and legislation aimed at child welfare reform and new institutional reform movements during and after World War II, such as the Institute for the Scientific Treatment of Delinquency, which were devoted to reimagining criminality as an effect of developmental psychology gone awry.
These final chapters of The War Inside emphasize the truly public presence and circulation of mid-century British psychoanalysis, which did not restrict itself to the private lives of a limited number of wealthy patients. Shapira insists, “British psychoanalysis was an immensely influential political discipline committed to reform, according to a set of ideas that tied together mental health, balanced selfhood, and the preservation of democracy” (237). The War Inside concludes with a discussion of the wartime and postwar development of attachment theory and separation anxiety, particularly through the work of John Bowlby, which Shapira views as a concern with the implicit psychological (and so, eventually, the political) dangers of separating children from their mothers, first during wartime evacuations, and afterwards in the specific case of childhood hospitalization. In a way, separation anxiety functions as a kind of paradigmatic case study of how “constructed sensitivities” became a political technology, tying together medicine and administrative power into what has effectively become today the “natural” state of things. “In this context,” writes Shapira in her final chapter, “the emotional lives of children as future citizens became a matter for public and official concern and an issue that required expert knowledge and guidance” (202).
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The question, however, remains: what sorts of history of the self do Guenther's and Shapira's scholarly contributions yield? In Localization and Its Discontents, Guenther makes a point of articulating the various conceptions of subjectivity that were often implicitly embedded within the different models of the brain and nervous system that she examines, from Meynert's account of reflex associations to Penfield's sensory–motor homunculus. But Guenther's analysis reveals a far more radical claim, and one that pertains perhaps most directly to the present, or at the very least to what other historians are at present asserting about “the self and its history.” In her AHR contribution, which I cited at the outset of this essay, Lynn Hunt aimed to provide a solution to the thorniness of modern selfhood as an object of historical analysis, writing, “Given the uncertainties about selfhood (what it is and how it is produced), it might seem that any history of the self is next to impossible, yet new tracks are being laid towards that destination, and they are leading towards neuroscience.”Footnote 16
As a rejoinder to Hunt, what Guenther corroborates so superbly is that the distinctions that exist today between neuroscientific (and other biomedical) truth claims about the self and truth claims drawn from other branches of the human sciences are not grounded on some metaphysical foundation of veracity. By dissecting the family tree from which clinical brain research broke from psychological traditions that have since been adopted as part of the larger humanistic Geisteswissenschaften, Guenther has revealed how much the viability of a neuro-history of the self is ultimately a performance of neuroscience's (and biomedicine's) constructed historical authority. To overvalue the neurosciences in opposition, say, to psychoanalytic models of the self, which have become a mainstay of humanistic approaches to subjectivity, is to disregard the deep historical and conceptual imbrication of these two models, an imbrication which implies that the disciplinary authority enjoyed by brain research cannot in fact have strictly arisen from scientific innovation alone. Guenther's analysis substantiates a crucial point, echoed by recent critical scholarship, that we are not neuroscientific subjects because of the validity of neuroscientific claims; rather the institutional and economic authority of neuroscience and biomedicine has produced disciplinary effects and regulatory norms wherein the “truth” of the self has become largely biomedical in nature.Footnote 17
And it is here where the link to Shapira's The War Inside becomes apparent. Shapira's use of the term “democratic self” is not intended, it seems, to denote a psychological reality or a metaphysical given, but rather a political technology, fueled by the disciplinary effects of medical knowledge and administrative power. Reviewers have been critical of what they believe to be the ill-defined nature of Shapira's “democratic self,” lamenting that it remains something of an empty concept.Footnote 18 But this is to overlook the novel and counterintuitive transformation to political personhood that Shapira is attempting to describe through it—that is, an individual deemed healthy, normal, and most importantly benign and docile. Shapira's democratic self is innocuous, not risky, not dangerous, and capable of being managed in the increasing absence of direct state intervention and under the guise of other regulatory constraints such as family, security, and health. The more “democratic” this “self” aspires to be, the more interiorized must her self-disciplining become. This is the dark irony that Shapira so clearly illustrates. The real concern of the book is not whether and how the British populace actually experienced or adopted this novel conception of selfhood (certainly an important topic of investigation); instead, the concern is with the historical production of a new value structure for the self.
It seems, then, that what Localization and Its Discontents and The War Inside have at least implicitly in common as histories of the self is that they can both be understood as at least tacitly dispensing with the idea–practice binary in favor of viewing selfhood historically as the transformation of normative values and truth effects. While both contributions are deeply embedded within their own contexts and archives, through these two books we can begin to see how much the efficacy of a history of self resides in avoiding claims to what the self ultimately is and considering instead that the self, whatever it may be, is merely akin to what Ian Hacking calls an “organizing concept,”Footnote 19 something that continually forms and refashions changing and often transient systems of value. Perhaps “self” simply denotes whatever normative value and validity we attribute to ourselves and others at any given time; that is, what allows any given individual to count as a “person” in the first place and what gives me my sense of mattering. If this is correct, then the history of self is an analysis of those norms and truth values, whatever they may be. It is a history that always asks, why those norms and values, at those times, in those ways? It is a history that understands “self” to be a normative framework, and not one that perennially subsists but one that must be performatively reenacted and repeated, time and time again (sometimes as ideas, other times through practices). It is a history not of a natural object but of the continual reconstitutions of normative imperatives and their truth effects. I would venture that we must, as historians of modern selfhood, embrace this more radical “history” that has quietly inhabited the enduring articulations of selfhood, from Locke's Essay to the claims of contemporary neuroscientists. Instead of taking for granted selfhood's persistence as a historical inevitability, we must interrogate not only its iterations, but its very iterability.
