ArgumentIn the 1940s–50s, one of the most central questions in psychological research related to the nature of neurosis. In the final years of the Second World War and the following decade, neurosis became one of the most prominent psychiatric disorders, afflicting a high proportion of military casualties and veterans. The condition became central to the concerns of several psychological fields, from psychoanalysis to Pavlovian psychology. This paper reconstructs the efforts of Chicago psychiatrist Jules Masserman to study neurosis in the laboratory (...) during the 1940s and 1950s. Masserman used Pavlovian techniques in a bid to subject this central psychoanalytic subject to disciplined scientific experimentation. More generally, his project was an effort to bolster the legitimacy of psychoanalysis as a human science by articulating a convergence of psychoanalytic categories across multiple species. Masserman sought to orchestrate a convergence of psychological knowledge between fields that were often taken to be irreconcilable. A central focus of this paper is the role of moving images in this project, not only as a means of recording experimental data but also as a rhetorical device. The paper argues that for Masserman film played an important role in enabling scientific observers to see agency and emotion in the animals they observed. (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper explores the relationship between the medium of motion-picture film and the representation of autobiographical memory during the middle decades of the twentieth century. The paper argues that a reciprocal relationship developed between film and memory, in which film was understood as an externalized form of memory, and memory an internalized record of personal experience similar in many respects to film. Memory was often represented as an object-like entity, preserved in stable form within the body, and able to be (...) extracted by the right stimulus or trigger. A particularly important community in which this representation was developed was psychotherapeutic practitioners with psychoanalytic orientations, particularly during and shortly after the Second World War. In special circumstances, therapists and others claimed, records of past life events could be projected, film-like, onto the screen of an individual's conscious, replaying previous experiences in real time. The paper develops a social historical account of this relationship, and reflects on its significance for the history of selfhood in the twentieth century. (shrink)

This essay discusses the yoked history of witnessing in science and the law and examines the history of attempts, over the past century, to use science to improve the surety of witness testimony. It examines some of these projects, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. The essay argues that modern psychology offers a particularly problematic form of expertise because its focus is a task central to the jury’s mandate, the evaluation of a witness and his or her testimony. It concludes (...) that a key feature of modern disputes over the legal relevance of psychological techniques is not the quality or character of the expertise being offered to the court but, rather, the question of whether expertise is needed at all and under what circumstances it should impinge on the jury’s decision making. (shrink)

This essay discusses the yoked history of witnessing in science and the law and examines the history of attempts, over the past century, to use science to improve the surety of witness testimony. It examines some of these projects, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. The essay argues that modern psychology offers a particularly problematic form of expertise because its focus is a task central to the jury’s mandate, the evaluation of a witness and his or her testimony. It concludes (...) that a key feature of modern disputes over the legal relevance of psychological techniques is not the quality or character of the expertise being offered to the court but, rather, the question of whether expertise is needed at all and under what circumstances it should impinge on the jury’s decision making. (shrink)