Psychologists on the March: Science, Practice, and Professional Identity in America, 1929-1969 (review)

James H. Capshew. Psychologists on the March: Science, Practice, and Professional Identity in America, 1929-1969. Cambridge Studies in the History of Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. xii + 276 pp. Tables. $59.95 (cloth), $19.95 (paperbound).

In 1900 the American Psychological Association, then in its ninth year, could boast 127 members; ninety years later, the number of American psychologists had approached a quarter million. Psychology had been transformed from a struggling academic discipline into a mammoth scientific and therapeutic profession of enormous cultural significance--a profession with powerful ties to medicine, education, business, engineering, and the federal government. Explaining this transformation is the ambitious task of James Capshew's impressive study. While his primary emphasis is on the momentous changes instigated by the Second World War, he surveys several key decades, beginning with the International Congress of Psychology's first American meeting in 1929 and ending with the APA's 1969 convention on "Psychology and the Problems of Society."

In analyzing the continual reshaping of this discipline's identity, Capshew pays particular attention to the ways that professional ideals, individual practices, and cultural concerns interacted. To epitomize these interactions, he punctuates his broader narrative with a series of intriguing "interludes" chronicling the career of psychologist-historian Edwin G. Boring. In his 1914 dissertation, Boring advocated experimental introspection, for he inserted a tube into his own stomach to study alimentary canal sensations. Boring's 1929 A History of Experimental Psychology, a colleague concluded, was actually a manifesto for those who "yield to no emotional desire to leave the laboratory in order to save society" (p. 27). By the 1940s, however, world events had changed even Boring's professional perspective, for he dated his next book's preface as 6 December 1941, "the last day when pure scholarship could be undertaken with a clear conscience" (p. 92). His conception of his own discipline continued to evolve, for he soon co-wrote Psychology for the Fighting Man (1943) and candidly confessed to having turned to psychoanalysis because he felt "insecure, unhappy, frustrated, afraid" (p. 210). In his final years, he continued to blend the professional with the personal as psychology's "chief necrologist," Capshew writes, "wrapping his subjects in a verbal shroud for their journey to the scientific Valhalla" (p. 260).

If Boring's experiences vividly suggest the struggles among experimental, applied, social, and clinical psychologists to redefine their field, other vignettes intertwined into this narrative are equally intriguing. There is Boring's student, S. S. ("Smitty") Stevens, whose Harvard Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory achieved wartime fame by reducing airplane noise and clarifying radio communications. Less successful in winning military support was behaviorist B. F. Skinner's proposal to train pigeons to be "kamikaze pilots" capable of guiding a missile to its destination by pecking at an image. Postwar psychologists prove fascinating as well; among those profiled is Dr. Joyce Brothers, who promoted her profession on the new medium of television by first winning the $64,000 Question in 1955 as an expert on boxing.

This book's most significant contribution, however, is its exceptionally clear analysis of institutional history. Thus, Capshew carefully elucidates the complex web of wartime organizations that undertook dozens of new tasks--among them, classifying and selecting recruits with special skills, surveying social attitudes affecting military and civilian morale, and preparing psychologists to work in military hospitals. Such work would prove of immense significance in expanding psychology's postwar domain. Capshew also follows psychologists who produced textbooks, designed curricula, tried to integrate women into the profession, or worked to restructure the APA--tasks that illustrate the struggle to identify a common core for a discipline increasingly being pulled apart.

By carefully synthesizing large bodies of data while simultaneously humanizing his subjects, Capshew's deeply researched and lucidly argued narrative goes a long way toward explaining psychology's remarkable evolution. The result...