Carl von Clausewitz's treatise On War is one of the most read but also misinterpreted works of Western military theory. Focusing on the cognitive practice associated with the knowledge and the management of warfare named coup d’oeil will allow us to shed new light on Clausewitz's epistemological approach. The specificities of his perspective will be outlined by an extensive intellectual contextualization retracing the evolutions of military theory from 1760 to 1830 which have been largely ignored in previous discussions of the Prussian's general thought. Clausewitz's notion of coup d’oeil emerges as the result of an evolution of military cognition responding to the transformations of warfare from the Seven Years’ Wars to the Napoleonic era. In On War , this mode of understanding focusing on specific details to predict the probable course of a conflict amounts to a form of evidential knowledge similar to that highlighted by Carlo Ginzburg. Moreover, the determining role of sociopolitical factors in war and the importance of historical case studies to train officers affirmed by Clausewitz situate his theory of war at the crossroads of practical knowledge, case-based disciplines and the human sciences.
In May 1983, two women's health events were held in Scotland. The first was the Women and Health Conference (WAHC), co-organised by the Scottish Health Education Group (SHEG) and the World Health Organization (WHO) European Region. This conference was held in the town of Peebles, Scotland and hosted approximately 200 invited delegates, largely from Europe and North America. The second event, the Scottish Women's Health Fair (SWHF) was designed in direct response to the “closed and elite” WAHC and welcomed over 2,000 women from across Scotland to Edinburgh's city centre at the end of May. Using the archival materials from the SWHF and the WAHC and oral history interviews with SWHF organisers, this paper analyses the intersection and divergences between the grassroots approach of the SWHF and the national and global health agendas of the WAHC. I also explore the personal and collective ramifications of these fraught collaborations. While the SWHF ultimately remained “associated” and occurred alongside the conference, the organisers of the fair designed their event in opposition to the WAHC's top-down, medicalised, and universalised women's health agenda. In theory, these were two associated events and both had support from the SHEG. But in reality, the history of these two women's health events underscores deep professional and feminist divides about how to approach women's health issues and who was best positioned to effect change.
This article explores the role of expertise in the Czechoslovak prison system from 1960 to 1980. It specifically examines the Research Institute of Penology as a case study to demonstrate how scientific knowledge was applied to penal policy and practice. In the context of post-Stalinist reforms, expertise became an important element in the modernisation of the state, influencing changes within the prison system as well. During this period, psychologists and expert educators began working in prisons, and various research institutions were established to conduct penitentiary and penological research. The article investigates how psychological and educational expertise was utilised to reform prison practices and promote new methods of resocialisation. It also analyses the institutional and ideological constraints that influenced this process. Drawing on archival sources, published reports, academic articles by employees of the institute, and oral history interviews, the study identifies two key areas of research. The first area concerns the institutional position and influence of the Research Institute of Penology within the prison administration, while the second focuses on the implementation of its research findings. Notably, the study highlights the transnational exchange of knowledge, including the selective adoption of Western theories and methods despite political constraints. By analysing the dynamic and often contentious interaction between expert knowledge and state power, the article contributes to the historiography of socialist penology and the history of scientific knowledge in the context of state socialism.
This article traces the divergent approaches to the scientific analysis of facial and bodily movement from the 1950s to the 1970s. Drawing on the writings and exchanges of anthropologists Margaret Mead and Ray Birdwhistell, as well as psychologists Paul Ekman and Silvan Tomkins, it shows how their intellectual divide was sustained through different uses of visual technologies and coding practices. Cultural anthropologists working in dialogue with cybernetic thought prioritized the interpretive role of culturally patterned observers and remained cautious about relying on visual instruments to extend human perception. Psychologists, in contrast, oriented their attention toward the measurable physical changes captured in film and photographs, treating images less as interpretive mediators than as naturalistic recordings of human behavior. This divide crystallized around the concepts of code : either as culturally shaped rules that could be deciphered by trained observers or as discrete, machine-readable units inscribed through computerized techniques. By examining how professional identities, technological instruments, and the definitions of facial expressions as a scientific object took shape in the mid-20 th -century, this article demonstrates why these historical dynamics remain crucial for understanding the stakes of living with our faces coded in the era of automated facial expression analysis.
Across the mental health professions, the metaphor of "boundaries" serves to designate a metaethics of therapist-patient conduct that ranges from the clinical setting to the therapeutic relationship. Though once rare, by the 1990s, boundary nomenclature had attained a notable presence, designating tangible limits to therapists' conduct. Like fences at a precipice, clinical boundaries were introduced to safeguard therapists from perilous missteps. Mapping a variety of potential dangers, the metaphor and associated lexicon evolved most obviously from growing wariness of therapists' sexual involvement with patients, though was informed too by the rising challenges of litigation, managed care, and the vagueness of professional codes. Being a neologism without language specific to any therapy system, the metaphor transcended many professional disagreements. Intrigued by its endurance as a ubiquitous instrument without philosophical, legal, or empirical grounding, our study explores discursive devices that bolstered its success. Early proponents capitalized on a metaphor's capacity to make visible some forms of therapy and hide others while obscuring an authorial purchase. Terminology like "slippery slope" and "boundary flexibility" highlighted therapists' vulnerabilities to transgression yet also sustained ambivalence about the parameters of safety. Diagnoses of therapist boundary violators as psychologically impaired shifted attention toward risks facing "normal" as well as disordered practitioners, and case study vignettes enacted boundaries just as they dramatized therapists' missteps. In its enduring success, clinical "boundaries" joined company with other professional neologisms which were motivated by then-current problems and engineered by professionals in ways that reshaped their work.
Empathy is considered to be an important aspect of any care relationship. However, not all authors agree on a definition of this concept nor on the facets that compose it. In order to contribute to this debate, this article will propose a study of the sources of empathy, which are to be found in early intersubjectivity. In this context, the research carried out 40 years ago by the developmental psychologist Daniel Stern is particularly significant. Stern discovered the complex process of affect attunement between a mother and her baby and found that this phenomenon underpins the dynamics of interpersonal communion and communication. In light of these insights, we will apply the affective attunement model to the care relationship in hospitals through an analysis of two clinical examples. These examples will enable us to identify the bi-directional dimension of affective attunement, which enables a patient to be active in the healthcare relationship, to do his/her 'patient's work' (Anselm Strauss), and to empower him or herself. Finally, these hypotheses concerning attunement and misattunement in the care relationship will lead us to a de-idealised and arguably more realistic conception of empathy.
This article reexamines Frank Ramsey's interest in Freudian psychoanalysis, seeking to understand how it makes sense with his behaviorist legacy which prioritized observable behavior rather than human depth. I analyze the private notes the English philosopher, mathematician, and economist took when reading Freud's works, a presentation he delivered to an intellectual society about the concept of sublimation, his imaginary dialogue with John Stuart Mill on Freud, obscure private notes he wrote about behaviorism, and his 1922 and 1926 critiques of John Maynard Keynes's logical view on probability. I argue Ramsey valued psychoanalysis for sketching a higher plane of abstraction that accounted for how past tragedies-rather than present circumstances-determine human reality and action. I show that this deeper insight into psychoanalysis, later de-emphasized by future psychoanalysts in 1920s Vienna and 1950s America, was the one Lou Andreas-Salom & eacute; encouraged Freud to develop between 1911 and 1915-who then had an indirect influence on Ramsey, including his views on feminism. Ultimately, I find the logic of Ramsey's critique of Keynes psychoanalytically consistent.
This article addresses the problem of the spectral presence of the past by developing an alternative account to those offered by memory studies and contemporary philosophies of presence. I focus here on the historical thought of Portuguese essayist Ant & oacute;nio S & eacute;rgio, who like other intellectuals of the first half of the 20th century, such as Collingwood or Croce, postulated the thesis of a "living history" capable of transcending the "spectral" kind of historical discourses used at that time as support and propaganda for totalitarian political regimes. I study the theoretical approaches that S & eacute;rgio advanced in this regard in his Introdu & ccedil;& atilde;o Geogr & aacute;fico-sociol & oacute;gica & agrave; Hist & oacute;ria de Portugal (1941), as well as the discursive strategies that he developed there by practicing a historiography in accordance with his concept of a "living history." I suggest that the epistemological perspectivism, paratactic style, encyclopedic tone, and montage structure of S & eacute;rgio's Introdu & ccedil;& atilde;o provide an early example of the type of discourse that Hayden White characterized as "postmodernist history." I argue that, through a series of formal avant-garde, modernist discursive strategies, S & eacute;rgio created a model of historiography able to show its own society (as well as future societies) how to free itself from the "spectres" of nationalist-totalitarian history and politics-that is, from essentialism, objectivism, uncritical thinking, and unreflective nostalgia.
Historiography on the emergence of the Human Right to Health (HRH) and the positive definition of health in the World Health Organization (WHO) Constitution has largely traced their roots to social medicine. This article complements that view by examining the genealogy of both through the influence of Mental Hygiene (MH) and its entanglement with eugenics. The conceptual framework interweaves Michel Foucault's and Giorgio Agamben's perspectives on the convergence of sovereignty and biopolitics. The analysis covers developments from the early to mid-20th century, including the rise of MH and its key innovations and displacements, such as the individual-environment adjustment matrix, its eugenic connections, and the emergence and shifts of child guidance and the interdisciplinary turn. These trajectories are shown to converge in the WHO's constitutional process through Brock Chisholm's biopolitical project to produce an apolitical, well-adjusted, efficient, and fully pacified "world citizen"-an ideal he embedded in the HRH and promoted as the Constitution's final drafter and the organisation's first director-general. The article concludes that the HRH represents both a landmark in the pursuit of social justice within the welfare-state matrix and a product of dis/ableist and sanist technocratic rationality that must be recognised and urgently redressed.
This article analyzes the historical emergence of a decidedly cinematic approach to social-scientific experimentation: The shift from a model of inquiry in which film serves as a tool to record kinetic events generated under experimental conditions to one in which experimental situations are arranged and filmed narratively to maximize their demonstrative power. This evolution becomes starkly visible when one compares the pioneering use of film by Wolfgang K & ouml;hler in his studies of chimpanzee intelligence on the eve of World War I with the techniques that his prot & eacute;g & eacute; and colleague Kurt Lewin would adopt in the 1920s and refine in the 1930s. By the time Lewin produced his famous motion picture of democratic and authoritarian "group atmospheres," and in active dialogue with developments in avant-garde filmmaking, an unabashedly cinematic mode of social-scientific inquiry had become acceptable. This mode of inquiry aligned the production of laboratory events with codes of documentary filmmaking recognizable to mass audiences, so as to speak more directly to those audiences' political stances. The article draws on this history to reflect on the revelatory power of modes of experimentation that establish a genuine relationship with the medium in which they seek to make social phenomena manifest.
In 1972, psychologist Jerome Kagan boldly proclaimed that research he had recently conducted on the Maya of Guatemala would overturn the most cherished assumption in his field of child development. He insisted that early deprivation did not doom a child to a lifetime of debility. These children, even without recourse to expert intervention, proved remarkably ‘resilient’ against life's many hardships. Despite his priority in using the term, Kagan's Guatemala study rarely appeared in reviews of resilience as the concept entered the psychological mainstream in the 21 st century. Now ubiquitous in psychological science, community activism, and humanitarian policy, the nature of resilience's ‘ordinary magic’ has proved elusive. The absence of Kagan's study from these narratives illuminates what does and does not count as psychological resilience. I identify three historical prerequisites for the emergence of contemporary resilience theory. The first is the ‘discovery’ after World War II of how early ‘deprivation’ led to lifelong psychic damage, and the mobilization of this knowledge in critiques of the welfare state. The second precursor was the rise of psychiatric epidemiology as a way of knowing where the actuarial risk factor became ontologically real. A final prerequisite was the coloniality of being in an Anglophone field's fascination with, often literal, island communities for natural experiments among the poor. This genealogy illuminates the historical expansion of psychological damage from trauma resulting from a discrete, extraordinary event to Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) combining and accreting in the body. It shows how resilience functions as both a critique and an intensification of therapeutic culture.
This article explores a duality inherent in care between the treatment of disease and the care of the person; or, as Winnicott might put it, between the dimensions of cure and care. It shows how these two dimensions are distinct from one another, despite their entanglement in care practices, and argues that their effect in practice varies sharply according to the situation. Taking as a starting point Nathalie Zacca & iuml;-Reyners's analysis of the care of dependent older adults in nursing homes (EHPADs), I argue that the care-cure dimensions may be understood as a particular case of the more general duality of our relation to the world and to others. I then consider Hartmut Rosa's account of this duality, between an instrumental relation and a relation of resonance. According to Plessner's philosophical anthropology, this duality in our relation to the world arises from a distinctly human property: the capacity to sustain a double relation both to the environment and to oneself, at once immediate and mediated through the perspectives of others. Plessner characterizes this condition as the human being's 'eccentric' or decentered positionality. Understanding this duality at the core of ordinary human experience - and the continual adjustments required to preserve its equilibrium - may shed light on the duality inherent in care, where balance must likewise be ceaselessly recalibrated, in response to circumstance, between its different dimensions.
This article explores a programme of dream analysis carried out by Major Kenneth Hopkins during the Second World War, conducted in the unlikely circumstances of a POW camp. Hopkins, who was captured in 1940 and held in two camps within Germany, collected and analysed over 500 dreams from his fellow prisoners. The article seeks to place this project within historical context, connecting it to other dream analysis projects, including that of Mass-Observation (M-O), which was contemporary to Hopkins. Hopkins's project has clear similarities to other observational cultures in the interwar period, including both M-O and popular ornithology. It also seeks to explore the motivation behind Hopkins's attempts to collect dreams, his bibliography and sources, and his goals for the project. Ultimately, Hopkins's analysis combined psychological and psychoanalytic theory with experimental and observational techniques to produce what he conceived to be a unique insight into the psychical impact of imprisonment. Hopkins's death in 1942 prevented him from publishing the results of his analysis, but it exists as an early example of what would later be called 'citizen science' focused on the mind in captivity.
This special issue of History of the Human Sciences offers a comparative exploration of the medical or health humanities in France and the United States, highlighting both convergences and divergences in their intellectual trajectories. While French thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Georges Canguilhem, and Paul Ricoeur are widely cited in Anglophone scholarship, the distinctively French traditions within the field remain underexplored. Conversely, the Anglo-American medical humanities gained visibility in France only in the late 2010s. This volume traces the evolution of the field in both contexts, emphasising the French focus on norms, vitality, and the negative, and the Anglo-American emphasis on hidden values, cultural determinants of health, the biopsychosocial model, and narrative. A shared commitment to the concept of care emerges as a key point of convergence. The issue includes contributions on the philosophical foundations of care (Lef & egrave;ve and ffrench), the linguistic and conceptual challenges of translating 'care' across traditions (ffrench), and the phenomenological and affective dimensions of caregiving (Pachoud and Schwering). It also features empirical and collaborative research on care practices (Aujoulat and Ricadat), a philosophical analysis of recognition and agency in clinical encounters (Rashed), and a critical gerontological perspective on narrative and ageing (Zimmermann). The final article (Vickers) offers a genealogical account of the narrative-based medical humanities (1980-1995), arguing for its foundational role in shaping the field. Together, these articles aim to foster greater cross-cultural dialogue and methodological pluralism, offering a critical ontology of care that integrates existential, social, and biological dimensions of health and illness.
In this article, we shall discuss the role of collaborative and transdisciplinary research, and its potential for the co-production of scientific and field knowledge that may serve the purpose of the medical humanities. Transdisciplinary research adds to the challenge of interdisciplinary dialogue – that of involving societal stakeholders to whom the research is accountable. The outcome of such research, in terms of generating knowledge that be both scientifically sound and useful for practice, depends on the quality of the partnerships that are created and constantly discussed and adjusted. We argue that the dialogue between researchers, patients, and clinicians, as well as between disciplines and methods, which is key in this type of research, is likely to increase healthcare providers’ sensitivity to their patients’ emotional and social states and needs, as well as their reflexivity about their own experiences and practices. We are, however, aware of some possible risks and drawbacks associated with this type of research. These are acknowledged and discussed. An important issue in researching the lived experience of chronic illness is that of identity work. We shall use this conceptual category to illustrate, with reference to our own work, the role of triangulating concepts and methods from different disciplines, the role of involving relevant stakeholders in meaningful ways, and the role of the researchers’ own subjectivity and reflexivity in constant dialogue with those of the co-researchers, while conducting research on phenomena of significance to the field of medical humanities.
This article maps the entangled (re-)birth of pathological gambling as a medical issue in 1980s West Germany, exploring how self-help group members and 'psy' scientists negotiated expertise on excessive gambling behaviour. Taking into account transnational contacts and transfers, it argues that self-help groups played a crucial role in the construction of pathological gambling as an illness. First, the article shows how it was gamblers who - supported by transnational connections and media coverage - were a driving force in the pathologisation of their own behaviour by establishing 'experiential expertise' through self-help groups. Second, it demonstrates how professionals reinforced their authority of interpretation over the topic of excessive gambling against the backdrop of the already existing self-help movement by either rejecting or embracing the illness concept prevalent among Gamblers Anonymous. Finally, the article shows how, on the one hand, self-help groups relied on psy-knowledge and its producers, and how, on the other hand, the groups as well as the notion and practice of experiential expertise were integrated into professional therapies, thereby creating a fusion of experiential and scientific expertise into a larger therapeutic health system.
As Britain's first professor of epidemiology, Major Greenwood (1880-1949) is an important figure in the formalisation of British epidemiology. His contribution derives less from enduring methodological innovations than from his advocacy for analytical statistics in medicine; his analytical focus on health at the population level; his emphasis on the social and environmental determinants of health; and his capacity to translate these ideas for government action. Over three chronological sections, this article details how Greenwood's feted career - and the institutionalisation of British epidemiology - derives from his particular approach to epidemiology and from its growing political and economic utility. The first section shows how Greenwood's population-level perspective developed from eugenic analyses of medical and demographic data. The second illustrates how Greenwood's career gathered momentum during the First World War, with epidemiology offering insight into the conditions of military and industrial labour. Finally, as the government's go-to medical statistician and chair of Epidemiology and Vital Statistics at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Greenwood's interwar career evidences the newfound relevance of epidemiology for both British and British-imperial government. Greenwood's biography illustrates how and why epidemiology gathered biopolitical relevance prior to the advent of the National Health Service. Despite personally advocating for more generous government spending, Greenwood's epidemiology offered a means to maximise health outcomes for the largest number of people, facilitating the economising logics necessary for early-century state medicine. Ultimately, Greenwood's career provides a vehicle to understand how epidemiological reasoning responds to political-economic demands, here gaining purchase and patronage amidst the industrialism, militarism and imperialism of Britain's early 20th century.
The article explores the transnational circulation of sound-based expertise that came together in the establishment of audio forensics in Cold War Poland and Czechoslovakia. It is the first to study the Polish Phonoscopy Lab, the first ever audio forensic police department, founded in 1963 to carry out original research on speaker identification and distorted speech. It shows the complexity of sound dissection science behind the Iron Curtain, where detailed methodology, the use of precision technological equipment, and the application of up-to-date phonetic, acoustic, and linguistic knowledge, as well as practical guidelines for trained group listening, were developed. It argues that by developing such methodology, the Polish and Czechoslovak phonoscopy labs were leading the way in reformulating the notion of sound-based objectivity in forensics. By examining the transfer of methods, theories, technological devices, and visions between the Cold War East and West, the article shows that from the point of view of the development of expertise, there were specific advantages of the embeddedness of forensics in the structures of the totalitarian state, which granted access to technologies, ensured a steady supply of cases, and simplified investigation procedures.
This paper demonstrates the important role that Oswald Spengler's skeptical philosophy played in motivating Edmund Husserl's The Crisis of European Sciences (1936). To date, almost no scholarship has considered the place of Spengler in Husserl's critique of philosophical skepticism and his philosophy of history. To underscore the relationship between Spengler and Husserl, this paper draws extensively from a previously ignored and untranslated source in English scholarship: the Spenglerheft (1921), published in the journal Logos, which Husserl co-edited. These essays, published during the Spengler-Streit, anticipate many of the arguments which Husserl would develop a decade later in the Crisis. They thereby evidence that Husserl's turn to the philosophy of history in the Crisis participated in a broader effort to overcome a Spengler's philosophical skepticism, and that Husserl's method clearly builds on arguments being levelled explicitly against Spengler in the Spenglerheft. The Spenglerheft emerges as a critical moment in advancing a philosophically robust dialogue between Spengler and Husserl.
In my study, I examine, through Hungarian examples, how self-help books in the 1960s introduced responsibilization in addressing 'nervousness'. Originally interpreted in a neoliberal context, self-help can also be applied in socialist conditions because it does not aim for societal transformation but rather addresses issues on an individual level. I argue that responsibilization, as a form of governing technology, appeared early in relation to nervousness because it concerns a well-defined problem area and state healthcare was unable to provide an effective response, emerging as part of a smaller-scale psycho-boom that preceded the broader expansion of psy-knowledge traditionally associated with the 1970s. The individual's responsibilization goes hand in hand with the irresponsibility of the state, and the concept implies that rather than providing freedom to address the problem, it offers a repertoire of behaviors expected within the given framework, to which the individual must voluntarily commit (self-governance). There were specific characteristics of the Hungarian context that supported the emergence of self-help literature, partly rooted in political factors (like the revolution of 1956), and partly in psychiatric professional traditions. Alongside psychoanalysis, Marxist concepts and practical Pavlovian techniques played important roles, creatively psychologizing socialist citizens and proposing solutions to their psychological issues. All this, in addition to responsibilization, also signifies the development of a more caring relationship with the human body and psyche, compared to the earlier cult of self-control.
