Reintroducing 20th Century authors in current psychology: some historiographic remarks

GARCÍA, LUCIANO NICOLÁS

Berlin

Conferencia; 41st Conference of the European Society for the History of the Human Sciences; 2022

Sigmund Freud PrivatUniversität

This paper aims to examine and discuss what kind of historical and epistemological operations are involved when past authors are recovered and put into dialogue with current discussions in psychology. As in most other disciplines, psychologists regularly use authors who produced in far times and geographies, though it is usually done without giving proper consideration of what it means for B. F. Skinner or Sigmund Freud to be cited in today’s research in South America or Central Europe. Besides the regular research that refers to familiar figures for western psychology, such as William James or Jean Piaget, there is also a growing literature that aims to bring back researchers whose production had substantial quality and originality that, for several reasons, are still unknown or have been disregarded or “invisibilized”. Yet such reintroduction of past figures is far from being a transparent operation; it involves several key epistemological and historiographical assumptions about how past theories and methodologies might work -or not- in current research. To historians of psychology, such operation cannot be simply tackled with a mere rejection of ahistorical accounts of the discipline or the denunciation of different forms of marginalization. The problem of current uses of past authors is connected with two issues: on the one hand, how canons are formed in a discipline and what is their function; and on the other, how to provide approaches that allow for a more rigorous and productive use of past knowledge in ongoing psychological research. This paper will present some criteria to avoid some problems with the geographical and historical relocalization of authors, and a discussion of what it means to highlight certain authors in a field that barely recognizes a shared canon of references, and because of that, is still open to new figures. Taking hermeneutic tools from reception aesthetics theories and transnational perspectives, this paper discusses the problem of the search for anticipations of present knowledges in past authors, the assumption that past ideas and vocabulary can be used in the present despite the fact that the historical conditions that produced them are no longer available, and the status of individual authors in the context of the circulations of knowledge and the actual conditions of research, both in epistemological terms as well as non-epistemic aspects of legitimation. The historical and geographical distances between the contexts of production and present ones mentioned brings to the forefront the problem of how concepts are appropriated in settings with different problems and disciplinary dialogues, how different political references change the accreditation of an author, and how innovation in psychology is considered. These topics will be tackled with examples from three different types of recent literature: one that discusses how authors were “rediscovered” in the West, such as the case of Lev Vygotsky or Continental Phenomenology in the Neurosciences; literature that stresses how some authors have been systematically disregarded, as the case of female psychologists in the USA or traditions in the western periphery; and a third type that advocates for mostly unknown authors considered to be still productive and relevant. The period covered is limited to the authors who produced between 1920s and 1970s in Europe and the Americas.