The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts by EllenHermanReview by: Elizabeth LunbeckIsis, Vol. 87, No. 1 (Mar., 1996), pp. 202-203Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/235807 .

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202 BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS, 87: 1 (1996)

women, the acquisition of power rests on the knowledge generated about the assumptions in- visibly embedded in this culture's social insti- tutions.

Lunbeck clearly describes the emergence be- tween 1900 and 1930 of a new gender synthesis, based on a repudiation of Victorian beliefs about sex, marriage, womanhood, and manhood, from psychiatrists' access to the private lives of pa- tients; she considers how it influenced the struc- ture of psychiatry's thought and practice. The power of the science of psychiatry resides in its definition of what is normal, as expressed through its diagnostic classification of mental disorders and through its institutions. The early twentieth-century beliefs that Lunbeck desig- nates as the sexual politics of marriage existed because the Victorian concepts of relationships, abuse, and men's and women's sexual natures and work interests, and the intolerability of the Victorian institution of marriage for both women and men, had not successfully been challenged.

Lunbeck summarizes the manifest content of her historical research by concluding that psy- chiatry's professional status rose as its scope of authority broadened from the insane to the sane

and as the sites in which psychiatrists practiced multiplied. The latent content challenges the cre- ative reader to interpret the process of mutual interaction of knowledge, gender, and power that resulted in psychiatry's and women's identities in 1930. For those who believe that the past is the key to the present, this history of the science of psychiatry inspires fruitful thought about the current evolution of psychiatry's identity in the midst of health care reform. It is a worthwhile study for those who want to shape the future in- stitution of medicine and the future roles of psy- chiatrists and women.

SALLY K. SEVERINO

Ellen Herman. The Romance of American Psy- chology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts. xiv + 406 pp., illus., index. Berkeley/Los An- geles: University of California Press, 1995. $35.

The peculiarly American belief that self-disclo- sure yields truth has inspired a small mountain of popular polemic and scholarly commentary from all points on the political spectrum, the bulk of it highly critical, even scornful, of psy-

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A group Rorschach test conducted by the Office of Strategic Services during World War/ for selection purposes Ofrom Hermnan, The Romance of American Psychology).

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BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS, 87: 1 (1996) 203

chology and those who fall under its sway. In the last thirty years, the critiques of figures as various as Thomas Szasz, R. D. Laing, Christo- pher Lasch, and Andrew Scull have cohered into a broad-stroke condemnation of psychologiza- tion that enjoys widespread cultural currency. Yet despite the experts' warnings, individuals continue to employ psychological explanations, to flock to therapists, and to reveal their inner- most secrets on national television. The century- long ascendancy of psychological ways of think- ing and knowing continues apace.

Ellen Herman's book enters the ongoing dis- cussion of psychology's influence and provides the most comprehensive account yet of psychol- ogy's public fortunes in the second half of the twentieth century. Herman shows how psy- chological experts-largely psychologists and psychiatrists-successfully pursued their pro- claimed goal of establishing "a larger jurisdic- tion for psychology" in matters beyond the nar- rowly clinical. World War II is her starting point; psychiatrists screened recruits, psychologists as- sessed morale, and both treated the casualties of war. Having gained access to the policymaking arena, such experts benefited from the postwar expansion of federal government support for and use of behavioral science. A series of chapters shows how central psychological expertise was to cold warriors abroad and at home, from pre- dicting and controlling third world revolutions to explaining race relations and accounting for urban violence.

Herman tells her story from the top down, fo- cusing almost entirely on experts. This approach cannot tell us why ordinary citizens would have found the experts' perspectives and recommen- dations compelling (if indeed they did), and al- though the book chronicles the spread of a psy- chological perspective beyond the institutional settings explored, it cannot explain this phenom- enon except in the most general terms. These are limitations found in nearly every account of the rise of psychology. What sets Herman's account apart is her insistence that psychological knowl- edge could be put to both oppressive and liber- ating uses. Feminism, the subject of an espe- cially interesting chapter, is her case in point. Early 1970s feminists condemned prevailing psychological wisdom, attacking Freud, "mom- ism," and the equation of femininity and passiv- ity-in short, psychology's central place in the maintenance of patriarchal authority. Yet femi- nists were unacknowledged participants in the psychological culture they branded as the en- emy. Betty Friedan conscripted the language and precepts of humanistic psychology, with its stress on positive growth and self-actualization,

to the feminist cause, and early women's liber- ationists explored their gender's subjective experience in consciousness-raising groups, col- lectively exploring identity by means of intro- spection and emotional self-exposure. Psycho- logical knowledge was, in Herman's telling, at bottom neither feminist nor antifeminist; rather, its privileging of experience and its linking of the self and society, the personal and the politi- cal, account for its paradoxical appeal.

Herman's reach is broad, her conception of psychology capacious. In consequence, compre- hensiveness sometimes wins out over acuity; the genealogies of control and freedom, power and knowledge, self and society that she promises to interrogate are too often merely asserted. Still, as an account of psychology's complex public career, Herman's account is unmatched.

ELIZABETH LUNBECK

Brigitte Nagel. Die Welteislehre: Ihre Ge- schichte und ihre Rolle im "Dritten Reich." 188 pp., illus., apps., bibl., index. Stuttgart: Verlag fur Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften und der Technik, 1991. DM 25 (paper).

Hanns Horbiger does not have the name recog- nition of Ptolemy or Copernicus, nor do histo- rians of science consider him a luminary in the pantheon of scientists. Yet Adolf Hitler wanted to include Horbiger, the creator of the world ice theory, in a monumental building memorializing these three figures and their "great world views." Heinrich Himmler was also a great supporter of the theory, usually considered a pseudoscience. Because the Third Reich has often been por- trayed as hostile toward science and its leaders as having had little understanding of it, histori- ans are naturally curious to discover what kind of science they embraced and why.

In her slim volume, apparently a master's the- sis, Brigitte Nagel explores the history of the world ice theory and its role in the Third Reich. She examines the content of Horbiger's theory, its effect on specialists and laypeople, and its intellectual basis. Almost half of the book con- sists of an appendix that presents archival doc- uments, including minutes of the Society for Cosmotechnical Research and letters to and from various leaders of the Nazi movement. It is a solid master's thesis.

The world ice theory purports to be an expla- nation of the creation of the world; Horbiger, an Austrian engineer and amateur astronomer, called it a glacial cosmogony and cosmotech- nology. According to Horbiger, the essence of

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