ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Rushing To Prove Them All Wrong: Objectivity, Openness, and the Weaponization of Psychotherapy Research in Professional Authority Disputes in American Clinical Sciences, 1920s-1940s

• In Event: The Making of Psychotherapeutic Knowledge: Research Practices, Epistemic Cultures, and Disciplinary Negotiations 1

English Abstract

When reflecting on his long-running conflicts with organized psychiatry, psychotherapy researcher Carl Ransom Rogers portrayed his work in the 1940s as a legitimation strategy grounded in methodological innovation and differential professional capital, having “tried to move ahead so rapidly and so far that the right of psychologists to practice in a field in which they were preeminent in research, and fully equal in practice and in theory building, could not be challenged” (Rogers, 1980, pp. 54–55). This paper reconstructs the specific professional and epistemic contexts in which psychotherapy research became an effective professional instrument during the Interwar period. Psychiatrists, particularly mental hygienists and orthopsychiatrists, remained committed to an idiographic, case-method approach to theory and technique based on qualitative, gross clinical observations and crystallized in private, often inarticulate clinical experience. This stance led them to portray psychotherapy as an “art”, actively opposing efforts to make therapy public or operationalize core concepts. In this environment, the scientific culture of clinical psychologists became a comparative epistemic advantage. Showcasing what Lorraine Daston has called ‘objectivity without perspective’, their training in experimental design, statistical analysis, procedural standardization, and a technological reasoning enabled psychologists to challenge psychiatric claims to authority by “lifting the veil” on the therapeutic process and interrogating fundamental psychiatric tenets and assumptions. The rapid adoption of phonographic recording, minute statistical examination of full treatments, and new technological theories of therapeutic mechanisms between 1939 and 1945 thus appears as the instantiation of specific epistemic virtues deployed strategically in the pursuit of professional legitimacy.

Author

• Catriel Fierro, History of Science Institute - Autonomous University of Barcelona