ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

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

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This double symposium examines how psychotherapeutic knowledge has been produced, circulated, negotiated, transformed, and contested across different disciplinary, institutional, and cultural contexts. Psychotherapy has long been a relatively neglected area of research in the history of the “psy” sciences, despite greater attention in recent years (e.g. Marks, 2017, 2018; Rosner, 2018; Shamdasani, 2018; and Amouroux, Berger, Jaccard & Aronov, 2023). Papers in this symposium contribute to this growing strand of scholarship by analyzing, on the one hand, how material practices in and of psychotherapy articulate with epistemic functions in psychotherapy research. Through papers focusing on the work of Carl Rogers and Aaron Beck, in particular, we aim to elucidate the ways in which different instruments, technologies, and paper and textual tools have organized and shaped the production of therapeutic knowledge. On the other hand, therapeutic practices also mobilize distinctive epistemic practices which require a pluralist perspective for their comprehension. Hence, our papers also explore how therapeutic knowledge has been circulated, translated and negotiated through different disciplinary contexts, including psychoanalysis, neurology, psychological research, medicine, psychiatry and clinical psychology, while attending to the particularities of different national and institutional contexts, particularly in Germany and the USA. Throughout, the symposium attends to the ways different epistemic and disciplinary practices have not only validated particular forms of therapeutic knowledge while marginalizing others, but also shaped the social norms and forms of subjectivity that psychological interventions bring into being.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Lisa Malich, University of Luebeck

Individual Presentations

• Rushing To Prove Them All Wrong: Objectivity, Openness, and the Weaponization of Psychotherapy Research in Professional Authority Disputes in American Clinical Sciences, 1920s-1940s - Catriel Fierro, History of Science Institute - Autonomous University of Barcelona

• Non-directive Therapy and Directive Narration? Epistemic and Textual Dynamics in Carl Rogers’s Psychotherapy Cases - Kim Hajek, Technical University of Munich

• Paper Tools at Beck’s Center for Cognitive Therapy: Materializing Epistemic Values and Shaping Research, Training and Therapeutic Practice - Iván Moya Diez, IMGWF, University of Luebeck

• Nervous mothers, cared-for children and the right environment: attachment theory in West and East Germany, 1950–1980 - Viola Balz

Session Organizers

• Iván Moya Diez, IMGWF, University of Luebeck

• Kim Hajek, Technical University of Munich

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