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Wikipedia lists 36 obsolete psychological categories. These include drapetomania, a supposed mental disorder that led enslaved African Americans to run away; hysteria, the host of motor, psychic and sensory disturbances that were supposedly gender-aligned; and neurasthenia, the fatigue, headache, lassitude and irritability that were purportedly a by-product of overcivilization.
In some instances, an older psychological label was discarded and replaced by a more sophisticated, nuanced or less pejorative terminology. Think of derogatory, eugenics-aligned terms like imbecile or idiot that have thankfully been jettisoned. In other instances, an older vocabulary was replaced by a new conceptual framework. Thus, hysteria is now considered a conversion disorder. In still other cases, the diagnosis and indeed the disorder itself seemed to gradually disappear.
A recent journal article in Current Directions in Psychological Science by Mohammad Atari and Joseph Henrich raises an intriguing question: What might be gained if psychology were treated as a historical science and psychological categories were viewed through a historical lens?
Unlike psychohistory, the interpretation of historical events with the aid of psychological theory, and the history of psychology, the development and evolution of psychological concepts, disorders, theories and treatments and the discipline’s understanding of mental illness, historical psychology traces the differing forms that cognition, emotions, intelligence, memory, perception, personality and reasoning have taken over time and across space.
This emerging field, which is, of course, an outgrowth of social psychology, studies psychological phenomena in particular historical and cultural contexts and the economic, political and social factors that influence these shifts in human psychology.
We already know that psychological terms, labels and concepts undergo far-reaching changes over time, with older categories replaced by newer and hopefully more sophisticated or nuanced classifications. We also know that the timing, incidence, prevalence and expression or manifestation of certain disorders, emotions or behaviors has changed over the years.
But what if we were to go further and view such foundational concepts as attention, motivation, identity or executive function historically—that is, as historically shaped? That’s the question that Atari and Henrich raise.
Their scholarship and others’, suggests that it is possible to trace shifts in notions of cognition, identity, personality, the self, by studying, in addition to historical texts and artifacts and etymology and philology, behavioral prohibitions, rituals and taboos and theological beliefs and concepts. Through these sources, scholars can trace shifting attitudes toward ambition, anger, curiosity, emotional expression, happiness, love, identity, interpersonal reciprocity, rational calculation and social mobility.
To take one example that has been studied by historical psychologists Is belief in an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent supreme being or supernatural force with a system of prescribed beliefs, including a conception of the afterlife where good is rewarded and evil punished linked to the need for stability in societies that were rapidly increasing size, scale and complexity?
Or to take another example: Why in late antiquity did Christian societies in the West develop a set of prescriptions surrounding marriage—banning arranged marriage, cousin marriage, levirate marriage (to a deceased brother’s widow) and polygyny? To what extent did these prohibitions represent an effort to weaken the extended kin group and tribal connections and establish the primacy of monogamous nuclear families—thus contributing to a distinctive “WEIRD” (Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) psychology, with its supposed emphasis on a distinctive balance of attitudes involving individualism and collectivism, risk aversion and risk taking, group trust and distrust, independence and conformity and partiality and impartiality toward non-kin and strangers (or what is known as impersonal prosociality)?
Then, there are historical and cultural differences in attitudes regarding the psychology of sex differences, with a number of historical psychologists arguing that there are persistent differences in societies that practiced plow agriculture (which required very high levels of upper-body strength and was associated with men) and hoe agriculture (which was typically performed by both women and men).
I share Atari and Henrich’s interest in viewing psychology from a historical perspective. I have myself written about the emergence and construction of the new disorders of childhood, disabilities, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, dyslexia and peanut allergies, that only came to be recognized at particular historical moments. I also sought, in my history of adulthood, The Prime of Life, to advance a post-Eriksonian conception of psychosocial development.
I am, of course, not alone in my interest in trying to situate cultural understandings of human psychology in particular historical and cultural contexts that aren’t confined to the Western world.
Over a decade ago, Ethan Watters, an author and journalist who has written extensively on psychiatry and social psychology, published Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, which argued that the definition, categorization, form, treatment, prioritization, expectations and even the subjective experience of mental illness and various mental disorders is a product of distinct historical, sociological and cultural circumstances.
His book notes that mental illnesses are not evenly spread across the world, that disorders’ symptoms take culturally distinctive forms and that psychological and emotional distress has been expressed in very different ways: through fugue states or paralysis or fits in Victorian-era Europe or, in our own time, in distractibility, impulsiveness, disorganization, low frustration tolerance and various kinds of dysphoria. He goes so far as to argue that cognition, moral reasoning, inferences about other peoples’ motivations, interpersonal boundaries and conceptions of the self, identity and human beings’ psychological makeup vary across cultures and historical era.
But, he adds, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the authoritative U.S. guide to the diagnosis of mental health and brain-related conditions, has had a profound impact, homogenizing categories and treatment protocols across the world. In his words:
“[McDonald’s] golden arches do not represent our most troubling impact on other cultures. Rather, it is how we are flattening the landscape of the human psyche itself. We are engaged in the grand project of Americanizing the world’s understanding of the human mind.”
However, because Watters is not a developmental or social psychologist or neuroscientist, his humanistic and sociocultural and contextual perspective, with its Vygotsky-esque emphasis on cognitive, physical and social environments, wasn’t treated with the respect or significance it deserved.
Others, including Suzanne R. Kirschner and Jack Martin (former presidents of the American Psychological Association’s Division of the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology) have sought to show how interactions with others within a sociocultural context influence cognition, emotion, memory, identity, personality and other psychological constructs in their 2010 edited volume, The Sociocultural Turn in Psychology: The Contextual Emergence of Mind and Self.
Their goal was to provide an alternative to overly neuroscientific, biological or interiorized approaches to psychology. However, their humanistic and interpretive approach—with its emphasis on dialogic, discursive, constructionist, hermeneutic, narrative and neo-Vygotskian modes of analysis—has had greater impact on therapy and on instructional design and learning theory than on academic scholarship within the discipline.
Currently, most cultural approaches to psychology are cross-societal, not historical and ignore change over time. Atari and Henrich liken this social psychological approach to an exhibition of static photographs rather than a movie, “dynamically connecting those snapshots to provide context-rich insights about why, when and how things got to where they are now.”
But what if we were to think more dynamically and diachronically? A number of striking examples have recently appeared.
William Casey King’s cultural and theological history of Ambition, shows how an attitude or personality attribute, long regarded as a sin and a vice, came, over time, to be regarded as a virtue or as a normal human character trait. Somewhat similarly, Barbara M. Benedict’s Curiosity and Marjorie Swann’s Curiosities and Texts trace how an emotion associated with the occult and regarded “as an unsavory form of transgression or cultural ambition” came to be viewed as the driving force behind scientific discovery, invention, technological advance, problem solving, exploration and colonial conquest and the acquisition of the spoils of empire.
We live in a time when certain disorders—addictive disorders, anxiety disorders, dissociative disorders, mood disorders, neurocognitive and neurodevelopmental disorders, paraphilia, personality disorders, psychotic disorders and stress or trauma-related disorders—attract special attention and have displaced other ways of understanding behavior.
Let’s not treat these disorders ahistorically. Rather than regarding our present-day concerns as timeless, static, fixed, invariable and unchanging, we need to understand what it is about our era and contemporary society that encourages and enables certain behaviors and psychologies and how earlier societies dealt with somewhat similar issues.
A recent essay collection, Richard Bourke and Quentin Skinner’s History in the Humanities and Social Sciences, describes how, over time, disciplines that originally adopted a self-consciously historical approach, largely abandoned that perspective and adopted analytical approaches and statistical methods modeled on the natural sciences. Curiously, this volume omits psychology, while including anthropology, economics, law, philosophy, political science and sociology. But as Atari and Henrich suggest, psychology, too, can be understood through a historical lens.
Many of the social scientists that I most admire—like Ira Katznelson, Barrington Moore, Orlando Patterson, Theda Skocpol, Charles Tilly and Immanuel Wallerstein—are historically minded. Yet unlike most historians, they are more attentive to theory, social structure, systematic comparison and long-term historical processes.
I am of the view that the social sciences would benefit from a renewed encounter with history and that history, in turn, would profit from a closer interaction with the human sciences and their theoretical and methodological approaches.
Historians need to recognize that without engagement with social science theory and demographic, econometric and statistical methods, history will lapse into antiquarianism and irrelevance.
In turn, social scientists must recognize that all identities are historically constructed, all events and developments are historically contingent and our emotions, psychology, attitudes, institutions, behaviors, values and outlooks are historical artifacts that are a product of a dynamic and ongoing process of construction, deconstruction and reconstruction.
