ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Not So Automated Psychotherapy. Psycho-Scientists Test Computers in the 1960s

• In Event: Rewiring Humans 2: Biology, Psychotherapy, and Philosophy in the Age of Digital Computers

English Abstract

It is well known that, starting in the early 1950s, a growing number of people, often inspired by the ideas of young cybernetics, began to think of the human brain as a computer and to describe interfaces between humans, machines, animals, and the environment.
Less well known is the diversity with which people from the psycho-sciences (psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis), the old guardians of knowledge about the human psyche, thought with and about computers in the USA in the 1960s.
Many of them dreamed, in the jargon of the time, of automating the psycho-sciences. But just as ubiquitous as automation was, just as varied were scientists' ideas about what it meant, and even more varied were its practical implementations.
The computer as a research tool in psychology had already been considered in the first computer handbook, “Giant Brains, or Machines That Think,” published in 1949. In any case, many saw the computer as a way to reduce bureaucratic paperwork. Others used it as a metaphor for the brain's thinking, as in a well-known prediction from 1958: “[W]ithin ten years most theories in psychology will take the form of computer programs, or of qualitative statements about the characteristics of computer programs.” Other psycho-scientists wondered how the process of psychotherapy could be automated. What did this say about psychotherapists and their view of humanity and especially themselves?
It turns out that it was not always technical possibilities that determined the thinking of these dreaming scientists, but rather culturally developed ideologies. With the advance of computerization, those partially divergent ideas were not resolved. Some scientists saw their original hopes exposed as exaggerated through their first hands-on experiences, while others, especially in the fields of artificial intelligence and cognitive science, continued dreaming with each new generation of hardware.

Author

• Magnus Rust, University of Basel