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Rhyming Reason: The Poetry of Romantic-Era Psychologists (Englightment World)
Rhyming Reason: The Poetry of Romantic-Era Psychologists (Englightment World) Summary:By Michelle Faubert
DISCIPLINARY POWER AND THE MODERN SUBJECT In this study, I introduce a hitherto virtually unknown body of work – the poetry of Romantic-era psychologists – and argue that the poets can be viewed as a distinct group because of their common intellectual interests, poetic themes and ideas about their own cultural roles as doctors of the mind. In their anthology of psychological texts, Th ree Hundred Years of Psychiatry, Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine note, ‘It is a curious fact how many psychiatric physicians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries devoted leisure to writing verse, most of it minor and long forgotten’.1 I argue that this verse is much more than a curiosity and that its status as ‘minor poetry’ does not do justice to its signifi cance for Romanticism, the history of psychology and the broad fi eld of literary criticism that explores the intersection of psychology and literature of any period. Th e verse of early psychologists aff ords many important insights into the relationship between science and poetry in the Romantic era, a relationship that inevitably shapes our thinking about disciplinarity. In my exploration of the fi elds’ reciprocal infl uences, I will show how psychologists used literary methods to develop their professional identities and psychological theories, how features of the broader psycho-medical culture of the Scottish Enlightenment are refl ected in Romantic-era literature, and, as I will explain in this preface, how this interrogation leads us to far-ranging new insights about Romantic-era subjectivity and the relation of disciplinary power to literature. My study of the poetry of Romantic-era psychologists traces a general pattern from egalitarianism to authoritarianism, but the real story is more complex than that. I will show that English psychology was infl uenced by the democratic and knowledge-sharing tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment and that this tradition was tied directly to the decision of many psychologists to write poetry, making the poetry itself an expression of their liberal politics. However, as will become clear, even this poetry illustrates the subjectifying nature of disciplinary power in the end. My conclusion is not that the earliest psychologist-poets were insincere in their stated desire to spread knowledge about psychology through verse or that later fi gures betrayed the original motivations of their forebears, but that this pattern illustrates the inescapable nature of disciplinary power as subjectifying. At the risk of sounding like I am providing an apologia for my theoretical choices, I wish to outline briefl y why I use a Foucauldian approach in this project. A study of the psychologist-poets of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries virtually demands a Foucauldian approach for several reasons. First, this study focuses on a little-known group of writers and such eff orts at canonexpansion are unavoidably infl uenced by Foucauldian theory. In describing the formation of psychology immediately aft er the ‘Classical period’, moreover, as Foucault calls the period from 1650-1789, I study both a discipline and a time that anyone familiar with Foucault’s writings in even a cursory way will recognize as suggestive of his work, particularly his most famous work, Madness and Civilization, in which he locates the development of our modern notions of madness in the formation of psychology aft er the Classical period, which overlaps with my study in obvious ways. Finally, in later works like Th e History of Sexuality and Th e Order of Th ings, Foucault expands his treatment of psychology by singling out the discipline as one of the academic fi elds of knowledge through which modern power was developed through its creation of the subject. Th e ‘power/knowledge’ dynamic that derives from his thinking about disciplinary power and the creation of the modern subject is the lynchpin upon which all of Foucault’s later theory rests, as Robert Strozier argues in Foucault, Subjectivity and Identity: Historical Constructions of Subject and Self .2 In this volume, Strozier uses Foucault’s notion of the historicized subject as the backdrop for his enlightening discussion of how the Sophist notion of the ‘originating Subject’ has ruled throughout the history of Western philosophy. In so doing, Strozier confi rms that Foucault’s entire oeuvre is oriented towards an understanding of the subject, even when he did not engage directly with the subject in his earlier works about the formation of ideas about madness and the discipline of psychology. I agree with Strozier because I believe that to study the roots of psychology, as Foucault does (and I do), is to study the early days of the modern subject. Foucault’s work is a well-known and helpful foil that demonstrates the wider cultural signifi cance of an unfamiliar body of work: Romantic-era psychologists’ verse. Psychology is always bound up with self-refl exivity and subjectivity. Arnold Davidson summarizes Foucault’s work in a way that confi rms this link: Foucault claimed that he had undertaken to study the history of subjectivity by studying the divisions carried out in society in the name of madness, illness, and delinquency and by studying the eff ects of these divisions on the constitution of the subject. In addition, his history of subjectivity attempted to locate the “modes of objectivation” of the subject in scientifi c knowledge.3 Th e science of the study of madness and the topic of subjectivity in the scientifi c realm are dual signifi ers for the discipline of psychology, which is a language – or, eventually, a series of languages when diff erent psychological approaches were defi ned – through which we are encouraged to speak and understand our subjectivity (amongst other disciplinary models, including literary ones). We deceive ourselves if we attempt to argue that psychology is about ‘the mind’, as though we are studying an object removed from our own personal experiences. Since we all have minds, we study our own minds when we study psychology; thus, psychology is the systematization of subjectivity, a concept that I will develop in Chapter One. Early psychologists announced their new fi eld as the science of self-refl exivity: Th omas Brown wrote in 1798 that anyone in the mental sciences ‘should “be capable of abstracting his own mind from himself, and placing it before him, as it were, so as to examine it with the freedom and with the impartiality of a natural historian”’.4 In Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Brown contends, ‘Th e belief of the identity of self, then, as the one permanent subject of the transient feelings remembered by us, arises from a law of thought, which is essential to the very constitution of the mind’.5 On one hand, Brown contends that the study of psychology entails self-refl exivity; in the next quotation, Brown makes self-refl exivity attendant upon consciousness itself and thereby performs the function of all psychological writing: to make the reader refl ect upon her own mind in a particular way. Other psychologists devised their own ‘particular ways’ for the reader to understand themselves, which we know as psychological approaches. Th ey are, in this study, moral philosophy, nerve theory, moral management, associationism and phrenology.6 Th ese psychological approaches are some of the languages of disciplinary power through which we understand ourselves as subjects. Bernbauer and Mahon sum up Foucault’s approach to the self in terms that are helpful here: ‘Th ese practices [of self-refl exivity in the confessional] produced a unique form of subjectivization in the human being. Th e self is constituted as a hermeneutical reality, as an obscure text requiring permanent decipherment’.7 Th e priest and, later, modern power in its manifestation as psychology, do not only enforce the moral imperative of self-refl ection on the subject; the discipline of psychology also provides the context for this act and the language with which to express its fi ndings. Studying the intersection between early psychology and Romantic literature entails some important philosophical questions that I think the poetry of early Romantic psychologists can help to answer. Th e most important of these questions concerns the function of Romantic subjectivity. It is a critical commonplace to defi ne Romantic writers as intrepid explorers into subjectivity, the self, the mind and ways of seeing our own identities.8 Th e most common explanation for this interest has been historical and philosophical: as the old story goes, by retreating into and celebrating subjectivity as the source of all truth, the Romantics rebelled against eighteenth-century empirical notions of the objective world as the source of knowledge and the normalizing forces of a government bent on crushing revolution. Many critics have shown that the Romantics, in their infi nite curiosity and erudition, learned a great deal about the new discipline of psychology and even neuroscience.9 I argue that these circumstances were related and had a much wider-ranging existential signifi cance than has been previously argued. I will even suggest that the Romantics’ knowledge about subjectivity and psychology are not only signs of their rebellion and intrepid erudition, but also of self-preservation, in a sense. Th e result was a kind of Georgian catch-22: in a culture that was increasingly defi ned by its relationship to the disciplines, to remain ignorant about the content of these disciplines was to reject existential completeness, while to learn the language of these disciplines was to become a subject of power........................................... Please select one mirror to download
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