The Clay of Evolution: Megalomania in (Evolutionary) Psychology.

This article is an attempt to reply to a number of theoretical and epistemological issues frequently addressed in contemporary evolutionary psychology. We adopt a critical approach to both the empiricist conceit so often underlying the discipline and its core premises around the relationship between mind and biological evolution. As an alternative we take a constructivist view from which we propose to broach that relationship through the so-called Baldwin effect. That phenomenon, widely known among evolutionary biologists today, enables us to elude simplistic approaches to the problem of the relationship between psychology and evolution. It also affords a perspective for re-focusing the issues on the activity of organisms and the classic inter-connections among phylogenesis, historiogenesis and ontogenesis. The study concludes with a warning about the limitations to explanation that should be assumed by any psychological postulate with universally comprehensive pretensions, an issue evocative of the inevitable and structural crisis in which psychology should agree to transpire.

La psicología como técnica de subjetivación / Psychology as a technique of subjectification

Se propone de forma tentativa una concepción de la Psicología que pretende desplazar las cuestiones epistemológicas (qué clase de ciencia es, de serlo) y las teóricas y metodológicas (cuál debe ser su objeto y su método) adoptando una perspectiva basada en la genealogía de cuño foucaultiano y en la antropología de la ciencia de autores como Bruno Latour. Para ello, se marca distancia con la llamada Psicología crítica y se argumenta que la Psicología importa más por lo que hace que por lo que dice (aunque decir es también hacer) y que funciona ante todo como una práctica de subjetivación. Se termina revisando brevemente algunos trabajos que intentan mostrar ese funcionamiento en casos concretos

A conception of psychology is tentatively proposed which aims to displace epistemological questions (what kind of science it is, if it is a science) and theoretical and methodological questions (what its object and its method should be). Instead, a perspective is adopted that is based on Foucauldian genealogy and the anthropology of science by authors such as Bruno Latour. An attempt is made to create distance with respect to so-called critical psychology. It is argued that psychology matters more for what it does than for what it says (although saying is also doing) and that it functions mainly as a practice of subjectivation. This paper ends by briefly reviewing a number of works that attempt to show this functioning in specific cases

Psychological keys in the study of African American religious folk songs in the early work of Howard W. Odum (1884-1954).

This study focuses on the analysis of the early work of Howard W. Odum (1884-1954) and the examination of the psychological aspects that marked his reflection on African American music. This analysis reveals many of the aspects that were generically shared by the psychological agenda of the period when analyzing aesthetic experience and activity. Outstanding among these are the relationship of the musical phenomenon with very basic or primary affective-emotional dimensions, the conception of the musical phenomenon as an indicator of the cognitive-affective development of human groups, its expression in the form of cultural and complex intersubjective products, or its possible participation in the technoscientific design of social reform and progress. The simultaneous treatment of all of these aspects in Odum's work brings to light the interdisciplinary framework in which early psychology moved, while revealing the theoretical and ideological contradictions and controversies that enveloped the discipline, above all, at the point where it attempted to place itself at the service of the constitution of self-governed individuals. All in all, Odum's work also reflects the crucial role that early psychology attributed to art as a privileged medium to give meaning to experience and the human being's vital purposes. (PsycINFO Database Record

Pequeños ciudadanos: la construcción de la subjetividad infantil en la primera puericultura española e hispanoamericana / Small Citizens: The Construction of the Child in the First Subjectivity Spanish and Latin American Childcare

En este artículo abordamos el origen de la puericultura moderna como práctica de subjetivación. En concreto, analizamos desde este punto de vista las técnicas de crianza infantil recomendadas, en una muestra de 23 manuales de puericultura españoles e hispanoamericanos, publicados entre 1898 y 1939. Dichas técnicas estaban subordinadas a la construcción de un modelo de sujeto, cuyo horizonte era el del ciudadano responsable, adaptado y autogobernado, dentro del contexto definido por la biopolítica de la época. Los planteamientos eugenistas servían a gran parte de los autores de los manuales -casi todos médicos- para defender la necesidad de asegurar la salud física y moral de la nación, mediante la crianza científica de los niños que serían los futuros ciudadanos.

In this paper we study the origin of modern scientific childcare as a practice of subjectivation. From this point of view, we analyse the parenting or child-rearing technologies which are proposed in a sample of 23 Spanish and Latin American early childcare handbooks published between 1898 and 1939. These technologies of subjectivation should be understood as an important element of a process for the construction of subject as a responsible, adapted and self-governing citizen. These technologies should also be understood in the context defined by the biopolitics and the development of eugenics, which helped many authors -most of them doctors- to defend the need to ensure the physical and moral health of nation through a scientific rearing of little children, that is to say, the future citizens.

Citizen weeks or the psychologizing of citizenship.

Arland Deyett Weeks (1871-1936) was an American educator and social reformer who published The Psychology of Citizenship in 1917 with the intention of compiling the psychological, psychobiological, and psychosocial knowledge needed for governing modern democratic Western industrialized societies, as well as offering suggestions for intervention and social reform in the educational, legal, and occupational domains. His point of view can be placed within the progressive social and intellectual movement that characterized the policies of the United States in the first decade of the 20th century. His sociopolitical ideas were fed by transcendental and pragmatic sources, especially with respect to the way of dealing with tension between the individual and the collective. Modern psychological techniques (occupational, educational, legal psychology, etc.) nourished his reform program. In this article, we contextualize Weeks's book within these ideas and show its historical significance in the sociocultural and intellectual context that gave it meaning.