ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Juncture moments in the development of the psy-sciences. A comparative analysis of the shift to neuroscience in the 1990s Decade of the Brain

• In Event: The Making of Psychotherapeutic Knowledge: Research Practices, Epistemic Cultures, and Disciplinary Negotiations 2

English Abstract

The 1990 "Decade of the Brain" initiative by the United States prompted a worldwide follow-up and shift in funding towards neuroscientific research. Where neuroscientists and science studies scholars have since highlighted the effects of this “Neuro-Turn” in the present, historians of the psy-science have rather taken it as a starting point to trace continuities to more distant pasts. As a consequence, the DOB has been black-boxed into narratives of rupture or continuity.
This paper will argue that such events should be explained as a juncture moment where various trajectories intertwined and multiple directions were possible. Drawing on my archive research at 12 psychiatric and neuroscience research institutions alongside qualitative interviews with neuroscientists in the United States, Netherlands, Japan, and Germany, I will highlight the pathway-decision-making processes that established neurobiological approaches as the dominant direction while subordinating psychology as an auxiliary science. Specifically, I will argue that paying attention to the “Narratives of Contingency” employed by scientific decision-makers to steer these debates can enable historians to explain why certain epistemological approaches gained momentum while others were foreclosed.
In doing so, this paper argues that writing a pluralist history of science does not mean merely being attentive to alternative voices and epistemologies but rather explaining the mechanisms of marginalization. This case study of the Decade of the Brain as a contingent juncture moment in the development of the psy-sciences, thereby ultimately aims to illustrate how the history of science can contribute to contemporary debates about the directionality of science.

Author

• Wessel De Cock, Humboldt University Berlin