Keynote Speakers

Jill Morawski

Wilbur Fisk Osborne Professor, Psychology Department and Science and Technological Studies, Wesleyan University

Onto-Angst: Figuring the Subject in the History of Psychology

During her career Elizabeth Scarborough witnessed and contributed to major advances in the history of psychology. She brought awareness to the importance of studying lived experience and the social structures girding psychological science, notably gender. Elizabeth’s work along with that of colleagues and friends have boldly advanced the historian of psychology’s charge to document psychologists’ efforts to produce knowledge about the psychology of others. In the end, our historical interpretations themselves can be psychological. Fascinated by that densely layered psychologizing, my work has paid attention to both psychologists and historians’ representations of their numerous human subjects: research participants, consumers, financial supporters, and themselves.  The variations and asymmetries of these ontological claims (of agency, rationality, self-awareness and so on) are telling, albeit sometimes disconcerting. This talk takes up a related onto-angst, an uneasy feeling that emerged while studying the recent history of popular psychology. The discomfort arose when reviewing historians’ modes of understanding the publics, the objects and/or consumers of psychology, who are oftentimes configured as neoliberal subjects, yearning learners, sufferers of maladies, vulnerable groups, oppressed persons or harm-sensitive liberal individuals. Assessing these interpretive modes can enhance scholarly integrity yet, I propose, such appraisal also is crucial to our meaningful participation in the deeply distressed contemporary world. We need ask, what are the effects (if any) of our representations of psychology’s public?  To whom (if to anyone) are these characterizations of psychology’s recipients useful? Should we endeavor to make them useful? These queries coalesce in an overarching question of whether our histories can or should serve interventions in science, public discourse and/or public life.