Reflections upon having been elected a fellow of APA.

In this article, the author offers his reflections on being elected Fellow of the American Psychological Association as an historian of psychology. The author didn't start out as an historian. His bachelor and doctorate are both in psychology. But he did also certainly choose to leave psychology, then to return with a different perspective. So this election feels like an affirmation of that decision, and an endorsement of the scholarship that resulted: his service to science by other means, after he was himself "revised and resubmitted." Nearly two decades after his original departure from experimental psychology, the author has decided that "science" is the set of tested- and defended boundaries of what we think we know, which move as they're renegotiated. In other words, science is the shared collection and discussion of what has been accepted to be the case (as well as the process of careful revision). But it's also then the history of science that provides evidence to answer the philosophical "demarcation problem," not science itself. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

On Kuhn's case, and Piaget's: A critical two-sited hauntology (or, On impact without reference).

Picking up on John Forrester's (1949-2015) disclosure that he felt 'haunted' by the suspicion that Thomas Kuhn's (1922-96) interests had become his own, this essay complexifies our understanding of both of their legacies by presenting two sites for that haunting. The first is located by engaging Forrester's argument that the connection between Kuhn and psychoanalysis was direct. (This was the supposed source of his historiographical method: 'climbing into other people's heads'.) However, recent archival discoveries suggest that that is incorrect. Instead, Kuhn's influence in this regard was Jean Piaget (1896-1980). And it is Piaget's thinking that was influenced directly by psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis then haunts Kuhn's thinking through Piaget, and thus Piaget haunts Forrester through Kuhn. To better understand this second site of the haunting-which is ultimately the more important one, given the intent of this special issue-Piaget's early psychoanalytic ideas are uncovered through their interaction with his early biology and subsequent turn to philosophy. But several layers of conflicting contemporary misunderstandings are first excavated. The method of hauntology is also developed, taking advantage of its origins as a critical response to the psychoanalytic discourse. As a result of adopting this approach, a larger than usual number of primary sources have been unearthed and presented as evidence (including new translations from French originals). Where those influences have continued to have an impact, but their sources forgotten, they have thus been returned. They can then all be considered together in deriving new perspectives of Forrester's cases/Kuhn's exemplars/Piaget's stages.

On the implications of object permanence: Microhistorical insights from Piaget's new theory.

The authors' arguments reflect the dominant traditions of American Psychology. In doing so, however, they miss relevant insights omitted during the original importation (translation and popularization) of the foreign sources that informed the theories they built upon. Of particular relevance here are Piaget's last studies. These are presented to unpack the meaning of "object permanence" as a kind of representation.

Digital methods can help you . . . If you're careful, critical, and not historiographically naïve.

This special section on the digital history of psychology includes target articles by Ivan Flis and Nees Jan van Eck and Jeremy Trevelyan Burman, with comments by Melinda Baldwin, Ted Porter, and Chris Green. In his introduction to the section, Burman explains his original motivation in turning to tools borrowed from the digital humanities: helping graduate students to identify dissertation topics more easily, and thereby reduce completion times for the doctorate, while at the same time doing "good history." Since then, a new field-digital history of psychology-has blossomed. John Burnham, especially, is recognized here as an important interlocutor. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Through the looking-glass: PsycINFO as an historical archive of trends in psychology.

Those interested in tracking trends in the history of psychology cannot simply trust the numbers produced by inputting terms into search engines like PsycINFO and then constraining by date. This essay is therefore a critical engagement with that longstanding interest to show what it is possible to do, over what period, and why. It concludes that certain projects simply cannot be undertaken without further investment by the American Psychological Association. This is because forgotten changes in the assumptions informing the database make its index terms untrustworthy for use in trend-tracking before 1967. But they can indeed be used, with care, to track more recent trends. The result is then a Distant Reading of psychology, with Digital History presented as enabling a kind of Science Studies that psychologists will find appealing. The present state of the discipline can thus be caricatured as the contemporary scientific study of depressed rats and the drugs used to treat them (as well as of human brains, mice, and myriad other topics). To extend the investigation back further in time, however, the 1967 boundary is also investigated. The author then delves more deeply into the prehistory of the database's creation, and shows in a précis of a further project that the origins of PsycINFO can be traced to interests related to American national security during the Cold War. In short: PsycINFO cannot be treated as a simple bibliographic description of the discipline. It is embedded in its history, and reflects it. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Neglect of the foreign invisible: Historiography and the navigation of conflicting sensibilities.

This essay is intended first as a contribution to historiography, and only second as a contribution to the history of developmental psychology. It is therefore a discussion--primarily--of the doing of the history of psychology, rather than of its content. Briefly put: American psychology, including its associated approaches to the history of psychology, is not adequately equipped to benefit fully from the contributions of foreign scholars. To make the resulting argument clear, two archive-driven microhistories are reviewed, contrasted, augmented with new archival research, and synthesized: Yeh Hsueh's (2004) examination of the nomination process at Harvard University that led to the awarding of an honorary doctorate to Jean Piaget in 1936, and Marc Ratcliff and Paloma Borella's (2013) examination-just recently published in French-of a similar process that resulted in Piaget's hiring at Geneva in 1929 and his eventual promotion in 1940. Comparing the authors' different approaches to similar content then affords this article's larger argument: we need to broaden our sensibilities so we can see high-quality foreign contributions for what they are. Several interesting insights result if we do. Among them: although Piaget's theory is today mistakenly criticized for being asocial, and this serves as justification for countering his early works with Vygotsky's posthumous critique, it emerges from these archival studies that Piaget may have in fact chosen to present himself and his work as nonsociological (when this was not the case) for reasons unrelated to his intellectual project. Such examples then broaden the discussion of "neglect of the foreign invisible" to include suppression--even censorship (by self or other)--which in turn reflects the primary problem afforded by internationalization: by what standards are we to judge the contributions of "foreigners" into "our" discipline?

Hearing the inaudible experimental subject: Echoes of Inaudi, Binet's calculating prodigy.

Historians of psychology have traditionally focused on ideas (intellectual history), the "great men" who produced them (an older style of biography sometimes called "hagiography"), or-more recently-the influence of the contexts that shaped them (social and cultural history). A still more recent approach is to bring in those invisible subjects whose experiences have previously been ignored, most often through histories focusing on the discipline's forgotten women or minority contributors: "history from below" (subaltern history). A variation on this was popularized in the history of psychiatry (viz., "patient voices") and has since been carried into the history of psychology (e.g., "feminist voices"). The latest innovation is to focus on what Jill Morawski has referred to as "the discipline's experimental subjects." (These are the collective done-to, rather than the doers, of psychological research.) This history is one of those: an attempt to look behind Alfred Binet to find an influence that shaped his work. The purpose is thus to "give voice" to this unheard-from subject-the until-now inaudible Jacques Inaudi (including excerpts from newspaper interviews and translations from his recently discovered autobiography)-and at the same time advance Morawski's historiographical project. We then get a glimpse of what it was like to be a child prodigy in France in the 1880s, as well as what securing scientific patrons could do for one's prospects. By focusing specifically on Binet's unheard-from experimental subject, we are also afforded new perspectives of the history of late-19th century French psychology (reflecting another emerging interest, "international history"), and we gain new insights into the prehistory of contemporary Binet-style intelligence testing.

Profiles of international archives: Les archives Jean Piaget, University of Geneva, Switzerland.

This research report provides a look behind closed doors at the Jean Piaget Archives in Geneva, Switzerland. It situates the potential visitor, contextualizes the Archives in its own history, and then describes what scholars can expect to find. New details about Piaget's views on Equal Rights and Equal Pay are also provided, including a look at how they affected the women who worked his factory (esp. Bärbel Inhelder). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).

History from within? Contextualizing the new neurohistory and seeking its methods.

"Histories from below" sought to give voice to those ordinary folk whose social position had failed to afford them great power, wealth, or responsibility: the neglected undocumented. Now, Lynn Hunt (2009) calls for a revolution that would task historians with giving voice to feelings--what I will call a "history from within." This is what led her to endorse Daniel Lord Smail's (2008) suggestion that historians appeal to neuroscience and thereby construct a "new neurohistory." The purpose would be to introduce a common factor to all human stories: a tool to think with when describing what it was like (cf. Nagel, 1974). If successful, this would be quite powerful: in Hunt's view, such a project could lead to a universalization of human rights. But the program is not without challenges, one of which is to provide an acceptable explanation for the type of looping causation that applies to bio-cultural kinds. Smail's solution involves an appeal to evolutionary theory, but how this solves the problem of causation is not clear. Here, therefore, an attempt is made to clarify his solution. Smail and Hunt's views on the role of evidence in history are also made plain. The paper then concludes by importing related ideas from the recent history of philosophy. If one is going to have a brain-based view of felt-history, then the neurohistorian's task is to situate historical individuals in contexts of shared experience--to not just read evidence through lenses of intellectual "thought collectives" (generalized from paradeigma), but also through "experiential" or "moral categories" (aisthánomai).

Jean Piaget: Images of a life and his factory.

In this article, I use a new book about Jean Piaget to introduce a new historical method: examining "psychological factories." I also discuss some of the ways that "Great Men" are presented in the literature, as well as opportunities for new projects if one approaches the history of the discipline differently and examines the conditions that made that greatness possible. To that end, the article includes many details about Piaget that have never before been discussed in English. Attention is drawn, in particular, to Piaget's collaborators: the hundreds of workers at his factory in Geneva, many of whom were women. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).