The Blue Monkey Review

Let me just start by saying that in what follows I mean therapy as real therapy, or something that would be recognizable and accepted as therapy—not, in other words, the therapeutistic. For this journey we need to keep our sites on therapy and the work of psychology in order to find our way to forms of these that become therapeutistic. But even though I generally see the TC as taking general and pervasive forms, it’s important to note that it has gained much more than a set of terms and metaphors from actual therapy.

One of the links that is clear to me but may seem factitious to readers is the connection between therapy and social control. Therapy, after all, deals with individual needs, and generally involves therapist and client in a struggle driven by the pain of the client. It can lead to a strong sense of self and self-esteem, to personal integration, and self-actualization. Yet, all of these worthy goals (no irony here) draw their power from a notion of mental health that may, itself, be more wishful thinking than human reality.

Or consider the connection between therapy and psychological testing (psychometrics). On the face of it, these two widely accepted technologies seem to have little in common. Therapy developed from the practices of asylum psychiatry and, at the end of the 19th century, from the work of neurologists. In the terminology of the late 19th/ early 20th century, a neurologist had an office-based practice that dealt with individual problems (“nerves”) that did not require institutionalization. Hence, Sigmund Freud never practiced psychiatry and did not develop his psychoanalytic techniques for the population served by psychiatrists. In the United States psychotherapy could only be practiced by physicians with special psychiatric training until after World War II. As we know, psychotherapy is now widely practiced by people without medical training, while contemporary psychiatrists probably offer less psychotherapy and more pharmaceutical help to patients.

Psychological testing, on the other hand, grew out of the needs of educators for instruments to separate students into special classes for the learning impaired. The early 20th century tests of French psychologist Alfred Binet quickly became popular in the U.S., and thanks to Lewis Terman were normed on American populations (hence the name Stanford-Binet). This, with the rise of a concept of general intelligence (invented by turn-of-the-century psychologist Charles Spearman who believed that a single underlying intelligence accounted for all intellectual differences) and the intelligence quotient (IQ) calculation of William Stern, made the IQ test a standard feature in American education. From its origin, then, psychological testing has meant social control. That is, an individual’s score on an IQ test determined whether s/he would remain in the regular classroom or not, and soon it would determine whether or not s/he would be admitted to an institution for the “feebleminded.” During World War I American psychologists convinced the U.S. Army to allow them to conduct testing on recruits. In the 18 months of American involvement more than a million recruits (my Uncle Walter among them) had to identify Christopher Columbus as the discoverer of America or decide what was wrong with a picture of a Barlow pocket knife. The Army Alpha and Beta test carried such egregious cultural biases that they should have destroyed psychological testing for all time. Instead, they convinced many psychologists and a wide swath of the middle-class that the average mental age of Americans was 14. [For more on intelligence see Stephen Jay Gould, Mismeasure of Man (including examples from Army Alpha and Beta) and Raymond Fancher, The Intelligence Men.]

The “findings” of the Army tests, although certified by leading psychologists around the country, were also challenged immediately and persistently. In a famous exchange in the Nation, Walter Lippman and Lewis Terman debated the value and validity of mental testing. What do the tests test? Lippman wanted to know. As John Carson, of the University of Michigan showed in his paper “No Exit: Intelligence and Its Critics in Postwar America,” this debate has persisted to the present. Americans generally feel that intelligence tests test learning rather than aptitude, that they are useful in some narrow areas (such as in the case of special education) but that they generally do not accurately reflect one’s own intelligence. Popularly, and academically, intelligence as a concept has continued to receive skeptical scrutiny. In a democratic, open society that places a high value on upward mobility, intelligence almost needs to remain malleable, negotiable, multiple, and contextual.

In spite of the deep skepticism of American citizens over intelligence as a concept and over the ability of the tests to accurately reflect this controversial entity, intelligence testing (and its handmaiden, the IQ) has become pervasive in American society and remains a potent tool of social control. One corporation, the Educational Testing Service, provides instruments that will determine whether and where one will attend college, law school, medical school, business school, and a long list of other institutions. Some version of IQ testing still places children into remedial or enriched environments, and the state and federal mandates that children with special needs all have an Individualized Education Plan only places greater value on the apparent value of IQ testing.

Testing can also have a major impact on where you work and how far you rise in your job. Tom Chappelear in his paper “Danger! Pseudo-Psychologist at Work!” showed that after World War I tests developed by psychologists were heavily marketed to businesses. But these were not IQ tests. By the 1920s psychologists claimed the ability to quantify the personality, and either as academics or entrepreneurs began to make tests available to American business. For their part, business seems to have responded cautiously at first. Only after World War II did testing become more or less normal in corporations, though the types of tests could vary wildly. Some companies still relied on physiognomic charts. In fact, the rapid rise in testing led to the use of clearly inadequate or poorly administered tests. Although these gave greater weight to the judgments of personnel experts within corporations, academic psychologists began to fear that pseudo-scientific testing hurt psychology in general. Also during the 1950s, non-psychological commentators on business began to see testing as irrelevant to the real needs of business. William H. Whyte, in Organization Man offered a primer on how to cheat on the personality tests.

Criticism of testing led to changes in the testing regimen. In fact, during the 1960s and 1970s businesses began to abandon the typical personality test of the 1950s in favor of tests based on more humanistic approaches. Rather than search for personality flaws, tests moved toward finding natural abilities or temperamental leanings. Tests, in fact, turned toward the language and goals of therapy.

I don’t think that the convergence of testing and therapy is merely contingent. Testing emerged in the early 20th century out of a 19th century project of attempting to quantify the mind. Wilhelm Wundt, for instance, measured “the speed of thought” in a famous experiment on attention. American psychologists favored “functionalism,” that is, they wanted to deal with the mind in action, not in the abstract. And, they wanted to find tools to expand the realm of psychology in action. Defining and then quantifying such important concepts as intelligence and personality allowed psychology to take a role in education, corrections, treatment of the mentally challenged, and therapy. Psychological tests quickly became a fundamental element of work with many populations, including the institutionalized. Testing, from the beginning, became a therapeutic technology.

Sometimes, testing became the basis of therapy. Alexandra Stern, author of Eugenic Nation (U California Press), gave a paper that traced the career of the Institute for Family Relations, a California-based organization that spread across the United States. Distressed couples who came to the IFR took the Johnson Temperament Analysis (click here for a sample report) that rated temperaments on a variety of scales and so offered insights as far as the individuals need for improvement. While the JTA, with its diagnoses of “masculine protest” and “frigidity” may seem to us like a complete fraud, its use highlights the ways in which a therapy with a clear notion of mental health can nevertheless be complicit with other cultural forces for conformity.

And the IFR offers another interesting connection. The Institute grew out of the work of Paul Popenoe, a tireless advocate of eugenics, the movement for better families and more genetically fit children. Popenoe wrote widely on marriage, family, and eugenics in the pre-war period, and after the war, along with the IFR, he also promoted his views in a syndicated TV program, Divorce Court (I grew up with this program), and in his Ladies Home Journal column, “Can This Marriage Be Saved.” Late in the 1960s Popenoe joined conservative/evangelical groups that mounted the sexual counterrevolution, and some of Popenoe’s ideas (along with a new form of the JTA) have passed into Christian marital counseling.

The many connections we see here make up part of the matrix of the TC. But, the many panels I attended all made clear the power and discussion, criticism, and disciplined study (call it “better science” if you want to). I don’t think we need to abdicate to an analysis drawn from Michel Foucault (I didn’t find a soapbox in Copely Square on which I could stand to plead for a moratorium on the mention of Foucault for at least five years). These “discourses” are not simply hegemonic/emancipatory. They exist within a democratic culture that values discussion and opposition. If the power of such reifications as IQ seemingly sweep all before them, I can assure you that an irate (and active) parent can make a huge difference in how institutions treat a child even if they claim to justify their actions with legitimate scores. Individuals and groups need to remain vigilant in finding and naming bad science and bad therapy. Please note that among commentators on Blue Monkey that the most perceptive critics of therapy are therapists. Our guide isn’t Foucault, but Aristotle, who saw virtue in the mean behavior. No one wants to live in a world in which there is a deficiency of social control. Bad guys need jails. Drug addicts and the mentally ill need treatment. But neither does anyone desire a world of excessive social control. Yet, to find that mean (and Aristotle recognized this too) is hard work, the product of all our best thought. But it is the only way to the ethical life.