Lives in spirit: Precursors and dilemmas of a secular western mysticism

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 41(2), 185–186 Spring 2005Published online in Wiley Interscience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002 /jhbs.20068© 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

B O O K R E V I E W S

Werner J. Cahnman. Jews & Gentiles: A Historical Sociology of Their Relations. Judith T.Marcus and Zoltan Tarr, Eds. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004. 253 pp.$44.95. ISBN 0-7658-0212-0.

At the time of his death on September 27, 1980, Werner J. Cahnman had completed themanuscript that Judith T. Marcus, Zoltan Tarr, and Transaction Publishers now offer us. In theirfine introduction, the editors make clear that Cahnman, a sociologist and promoter of Jewishcauses who was born in Munich to a German-Jewish family, defended a “survivalist”—as op-posed to an assimilationist—point of view. He believed, that is, that repudiation of Jewish iden-tity was too great a sacrifice for acceptance, were it to be offered, by the Gentile world.

As the somewhat loosely connected chapters of this book demonstrate, however,Cahnman was not optimistic about that acceptance, even if Jews proved willing to assimilate.As a historical sociologist interested primarily in recurring patterns of behavior in differenthistorical epochs, he had concluded that relations between Jews and Gentiles showed a re-markable, and not very encouraging, structural durability. To be sure, those relations were notinvariably unfriendly; genuine symbiosis was sometimes achieved. But conflict and hostilitywere the rule. Although it would be difficult to argue the point, it should be noted that the“shattering experience” of the Holocaust was always before Cahnman’s eyes.

To Gentiles, according to Cahnman, the Jew has always been a “stranger,” an outsider. Hewas, to begin with, a stranger to Christianity, having refused to believe that Jesus of Nazarethwas the Messiah. In time, however, Gentile hostility cut itself loose from theology and assumedsocioeconomic form. The pivotal moment in that secularizing transformation came whenChristians, who were forbidden to take interest on loans, began to identify usury, even wheninterest was not excessive, as a deadly sin. From then on, Gentiles could always justify the re-sentment and envy they often felt by citing, or manufacturing, socioeconomic grievances.

Drawing upon Norman Cohn’s classic, The Pursuit of the Millennium, Cahnman pointsout, in a thoughtful chapter entitled “The Revolt of the Masses,” that it was primarily thelower classes that were drawn to millenarian sects that demonized Jews as well as Church hi-erarchs; “repressed pagan emotions surfaced again,” Cahnman wrote. Like Cohn, he viewedmillenarian hysteria and hatred as ominous portents of Nazi populism and mass murder. Atthe same time, he made the important observation that dehumanization—the Jew as devil orunclean animal—always paved the way for murder.

Cahnman was ambivalent in his attitude toward the Enlightenment. He appreciated therole it played in Jewish emancipation but believed the asking price—“the dissolution ofJewish peoplehood”—to be too high. And though he himself seemed to think of Judaism pri-marily in ethical terms, he recognized that the weakening of religion led to a questioning ofmorality and ultimately to “the nihilism inherent in the Nazi movement.”

For Jews—and not Jews alone—Nazism led to the abyss, but Cahnman was not muchimpressed by what some others have regarded as promising experiments in human relations:the Soviet Union and the United States. There was nothing, he concluded, in the policies ofthe USSR that could be considered a new beginning in Jewish-Gentile relations. And to thequestion “Is America different?” he answered with an emphatic “no”; in the new world, “thepattern of the centuries,” even if less lethal, remained essentially unchanged. It comes as nosurprise, then, to learn that Cahnman sympathized with the state of Israel. But that only led

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him to fear that anti-Zionism was or would soon be a convenient cover for anti-Semitism.Recent events around the world make that fear seem real—all the more reason for men andwomen of good will to redouble their efforts.

Reviewed by LEE CONGDON, Professor of History, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA.


Hans Kruuk. Niko’s Nature: The Life of Niko Tinbergen and His Science of AnimalBehaviour. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003. 391 pp. $30.00 (cloth). ISBN0-19-851558-8.

Niko Tinbergen was a Nobel Prize–winning ethologist—a student of animal behaviorin relation to natural conditions. He was a man of remarkable talents and skills who was, atthe same time, both modest and self-effacing. Portrayals of Tinbergen have been uniformlylaudatory, with praise heaped upon praise for this “curious naturalist.” Because this book,the first full-length biography of Tinbergen, was written by one of his former students, onemight expect yet more hagiography. In Niko’s Nature, however, Hans Kruuk provides a bal-anced, critical overview of Tinbergen’s life and work. Although he obviously admiredTinbergen, Kruuk discusses the weaknesses as well as the strengths of his work and pro-vides the first truly critical summary of Tinbergen’s oeuvre. Kruuk appears to have suc-ceeded in his goal to apply his experience in the objective study of nonhuman animals tothe study of his mentor and friend. If anything, he may have bent over backward too far tocriticize his mentor and his work.

Tinbergen grew up in the Netherlands where, like many Dutch youth, he grew to love na-ture study and athletics. He completed a doctorate in zoology at the University of Leiden in1932 and later joined the faculty there. Tinbergen sharpened his approach to animal behaviorwith studies of birds, wasps, fish, butterflies, and other species, both in the Netherlands andon an expedition to Greenland. In 1937, he worked with Konrad Lorenz at the Lorenz familyhome near Vienna; some would date the founding of ethology from that interaction. DuringWorld War II, Tinbergen was imprisoned as a Nazi hostage after protests at the university. Hemoved to Oxford University in 1949 and there published many important works, includingThe Study of Instinct (1951), The Herring Gull’s World (1961), and Curious Naturalists(1958). A gifted filmmaker, his film Signals for Survival became a classic. Tinbergen’s (1963)delineation of the famous “four questions” of ethology (essentially, the immediate causation,development, evolutionary history, and adaptive significance of the behavior) was among hismost important contributions. In 1973, he shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicinewith Lorenz and Karl von Frisch. He died in Oxford in 1988.

It appears that Tinbergen himself imparted a critical attitude in his students that facili-tated Kruuk’s approach. Although Tinbergen was a master of insightful, but relatively simple,experiments, Kruuk is critical of the small numbers of subjects and lack of quantification inTinbergen’s research. Some of Tinbergen’s classical studies have not held up well as the phe-nomena have been reevaluated with newer methods. Kruuk suggests that expectations oftenbiased Tinbergen’s results. Although he was a master at communicating his results to popular

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audiences, Kruuk regards this as being at the expense of excessive oversimplification of theresults. His “good-of-the-species” explanations have been largely discarded. Kruuk showsthat the motivation for Tinbergen’s move to Oxford was more complex than he indicated. Heis also critical of Tinbergen’s failure to link behavior to ecology effectively.

Tinbergen often expressed guilt over being paid to watch animals rather than working tobenefit humanity more directly. Late in his career, he turned his attention increasingly towardhuman problems, especially childhood autism. Kruuk regards that effort, motivated by a deeplove of children, to have been unsuccessful and to have done his reputation little good. Hetreats his Nobel Prize lecture, dealing with both autism and the “Alexander technique” forbody use, as “a silly mistake on Niko’s part” (p. 280).

Personally, although Tinbergen appeared modest and unassuming, he could be extremelydemanding on those around him. He was subject to bouts of deep depression, especially dur-ing the last 20 years of his life.

A comparative psychologist might quibble with Kruuk’s stereotype of the field, his fail-ure to credit John B. Watson’s field studies of bird behavior that anticipated Tinbergen’s, andhis references to Robert Yerkes as a zoologist and to C. R. Carpenter as “Hale.” The illustra-tions in the book are excellent, but the index is perfunctory.

Kruuk, and I, greatly admire Tinbergen as an extremely important pioneer in the studyof animal behavior. He was a clear thinker and an effective communicator. With all of hisflaws, Tinbergen was an influential scientist of the first rank. This book provides an excellentperspective on what it is truly like to do science shorn of unrealistic embellishments. It is agood read.

REFERENCE

Tinbergen, N. (1963). On aims and methods of ethology. Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie, 20, 410–429.

Reviewed by DONALD A. DEWSBURY, Professor of Psychology, University of Florida,Gainesville, FL.


Bruce Caldwell. Hayek’s Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek. Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2004. xi + 489 pp. $55.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-226-09191-0.

Hayek was one of the great intellectual figures of the twentieth century and has left be-hind a complex legacy. He contributed to many different academic disciplines, and at thesame time was an active crusader for liberalism, the prime mover behind the Mont Pelerin so-ciety, and the inspirer of several free-market think tanks, such as the Institute of EconomicAffairs in London. Much of his life was spent battling against dominant orthodoxies—so-cialism, Keynesianism, and positivism—and it was only in the 1970s and 1980s that he re-ceived some belated recognition, as he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1974and feted as the great philosopher of freedom by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Yetin the 1960s, Hayek was a forgotten figure. He had abandoned his work on economic theory

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soon after he published The Road to Serfdom in 1944, and turned to social and political phi-losophy. But his great work, The Constitution of Liberty, which sought to rethink the founda-tions of a liberal society, made little impact at first. Hayek’s brand of liberalism was thoughtto be out-of-date, a throwback to the Victorian era. Although he is much better known todayand there is a thriving secondary literature on his work, few economists bother to read him,and he is often dismissed by scholars in other disciplines without any attempt to understandthe subtlety and range of his thought.

Bruce Caldwell’s major new study of Hayek is the perfect antidote to this. Caldwell hasdevoted much of his professional career to the study of Hayek and the schools of thought andthe individuals who influenced him, and this book is the result. It is a meticulous reconstruc-tion of the development of Hayek’s ideas and explores the many paradoxes and challengesHayek’s work presents. Caldwell is one of the last of that fast-vanishing species, historians ofeconomic thought who still teach in economics departments, and his book has an importantsubtheme. Hayek’s work provides an important critique of the positivist methodology of mod-ern economics and, properly understood, offers an alternative way to do economics. In a pas-sionate epilogue, Caldwell makes a plea for the economics profession to take the history ofits own discipline seriously in order to understand the major methodological issues involvedin the study of economics that that history reveals, and which most economists wrongly be-lieve to have been settled. The book is worth reading just for this.

The book begins with a long survey of the Austrian School and the political and intel-lectual context in which it arose. Particularly noteworthy is Caldwell’s discussion of GustavSchmoller and the German Historical School, as well as his very detailed exploration of thethought of Carl Menger. He then analyzes Hayek’s intellectual journey and the challenges ofinterpretation to which his work gives rise, and which have frequently occasioned controversy.Caldwell is always interesting and often illuminating on many obscure aspects of Hayek’swork, as well as the big issues, such as Hayek’s pioneering work on economics and knowl-edge, his contribution to the socialist calculation debate, his critique of positivism, his rela-tionship to Mises and Popper, and his views on evolution and methodological individualism.This is a book about Hayek as an economist and his particular “Austrian” understanding ofeconomics, as an enquiry that acknowledged the limits of economics as a science and soughtto contribute to the development of “economic reasoning.” It will become an essential refer-ence point for future studies of Hayek.

Reviewed by ANDREW GAMBLE, Professor of Politics, University of Sheffield, England.


Karen S. Budd and Trevor Stokes (Eds.). A Small Matter of Proof: The Legacy of DonaldM. Baer. Reno, NV: Context Press, 2003. 328 pp. $46.95 (paper). ISBN 1-878978-43-8.

This book is a festschrift honoring an icon of behavior analysis, Donald M. Baer. In the45 years of his postdoctoral career, Don Baer made enormous contributions to the literatureencompassing the theory and methodology of basic and applied behavior analysis.Concurrently, his seminal, beautifully written papers involving a behavior-analytic approachto the conceptual underpinnings of development have had an immense influence on the con-

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ceptualization of development within the field of behavior analysis, and also influenced thecorpus of developmental theory. In 2002, about ten weeks before Don Baer’s scheduled re-tirement from his role as Distinguished Professor of Human Development and Psychology atthe University of Kansas, his then and former students and colleagues, great admirers all, con-vened a symposium to celebrate the themes of Don’s work through the years, with their ownquality contributions. That heterogeneous collection of 25 papers (including several papers towhich Don Baer contributed directly) and one touching poem constitute this festschrift pub-lication. Alas, Don Baer’s death from natural causes occurred unexpectedly a fortnight fol-lowing the convening of the symposium.

The publication’s chapters are organized into five parts and a postscript. Part One, on“Standards of Evidence and Proof,” includes: K. S. Budd’s “Strategies of Generating Proof inApplied Research”; B. S. Parsonson’s “Visual Analysis of Graphs: Seeing is Believing”; I. S.Schwartz’s “Social Validity Assessments: Voting on Science or Acknowledging the Roots ofBehavior Analysis?”; and E. Gambrill’s “Science and Its Use and Neglect in the HumanServices.” Part Two, on “Learning and Developmental Concepts,” includes: J. Rosales-Ruiz’s“D. M. Baer’s Developmental Psychology: Why Wait? Shape It!”; R. G. Wahler’s “Visionaryin the Study of Stimulus Control Processes”; C. L. Poulson’s “Generalized Imitation: AnEmpirical and Conceptual Analysis”; J. W. Halle’s “Response Classes: Don Baer’sContribution to Understanding Their Structure and Function”; T. Stokes and D. M. Baer’s“Mediated Generalization: An Unfinished Portrait”; and E. K. Morris’s “Context andContextualism: Conceptual Confusion, Contextual Clarification.” Part Three, on“Applications of Science,” includes: S. Ala’i-Rosales, S. Thorisdottir, and B. C. Etzel’s“Behavioral Teacher Training Programs”; K. P. Klatt, J. A. Sherman, and J. B. Sheldon’s “InSearch of the Origins of Positive Behavior Supports: Evolution or Revolution?”; K. J.Brothers and A. P. Cammilleri’s “The Baer Necessities: Observation, Measurement, andAnalysis”; K. Silverman, S. T. Higgins, and W. K. Bickel’s “The Therapeutic Workplace:Applied Behavior Analysis in the Treatment of Drug Dependence”; and R. A. Baer’s“Mindfulness and Behavior Analysis: An Application of the Writings of D. M. Baer.” PartFour, on “Mentoring, Teaching, and Advocacy,” includes: O. I. Lovaas’s “Opening the Roadto an Enlightened Future”; F. D. Horowitz’s “Recipe for a Department: One Part Baer, OnePart Wright, Add Other Ingredients, Stir, and Nurture”; D. J. Bernstein’s “Analysis of SociallyImportant Behavior: Don Baer’s Influence on Teaching”; T. Stokes’s “Generalized Imitationand Generalized Elaboration of a Personal Style of Behavioral Science”; K. S. Budd’s“Research Student of Donald M. Baer: Karen S. Budd”; T. Stokes’s “A Genealogy of AppliedBehavior Analysis”; and K. S. Budd’s “A Tribute to Donald Baer: A Children’s Advocate inAcademic Robes.” Part Five, “In His Own Words,” includes: P. Purvis’s “A Conversation withDon Baer”; W. L. Heward and C. L. Wood’s “Thursday Afternoons with Don: Selections fromThree Teleconference Seminars on Applied Behavior Analysis”; and D. M. Baer’s “Advisingas If for Research Productivity.” Finally, the postscript consists of a lovely poem titled “Is itFair. . .” by Elsie M. Pinkston.

Like festschrifts of the past, this volume is uneven—perhaps it would be more appropri-ate to say flexible—in style in that, in addition to original chapters, it contains reprinted papers(Chapters 19, 20, 22, 25), multiple papers of the editors, and papers of which Don Baer is theinterviewee (Chapter 23, 24), author (Chapter 25), or coauthor (Chapter 9). At the same time,this volume contains diverse, well-written chapters on method and theory in basic and appliedbehavior analysis that could be of great use to researchers, practitioners, and students alike.

The contents and pattern of chapters in this book give a picture of a multifaceted, inno-vative, brilliant giant whose focus was the experimental approach to human behavior. Don

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Baer was an exemplar who trained a generation of first-class behavior scientists, professorsand teachers, and practitioners in the area of behavior analysis in psychology, education,human development, developmental disabilities, language, medicine, and social work.

Reviewed by JACOB L. GEWIRTZ, Professor of Psychology and Director, Behavior AnalysisGraduate Program, formerly Director, Developmental Psychology Doctoral Program, FloridaInternational University, Miami, FL.


Margaret Kohn. Radical Space: Building the House of the People. Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press, 2003. 203 pp. $45.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-8014-3992-2. $19.95 (paper).ISBN 0-8014-8860-5.

Some day, historians looking back on the social sciences might label the start of thetwenty-first century as the time when space and place were (re)discovered as vital tools ofanalysis. Recognition of how location, geography, distance, and architecture matter for socialand political processes is swiftly becoming canonical, and lingering skeptics might well jointhe choir after reading Margaret Kohn’s investigation of the spatialization of radical demo-cratic politics. There is irony, of course, in the timing of this spatial turn in the social sciences.Just when place seems ready to disappear altogether (erased by instant communication andcirculation, obliterated into sameness by cultural globalization, transcended by vastly moresalient identities that have nothing to do with where one is or was), political scientists and so-ciologists now take up the question: where did it all happen?

Radical Space is a terrific book when the author stays on task and refrains from repeat-ing what she has already written. Kohn is at her best when she describes and theorizes sitesof political resistance in Italy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: housesof the people, chambers of labor, cooperatives, and mutual aid societies. These places are si-multaneously and irreducibly both physical (material) and social, and Kohn deftly avoids theconceptual calamities created when one is said to determine the other. She emplaces the par-ticipatory democratic politics of subaltern groups (mainly workers, but also the unemployed,self-employed artisans, recent migrants from the country, and farm workers) in the buildingswhere such resistance was expressed, nurtured, and organized. Challenging Marx, Kohn ar-gues that this mobilization did not happen immediately in the factories themselves, whichwere all too successful in manufacturing docile workers (as Foucault would have it).Moreover, radical democracy could not take root in the bourgeois public sphere—cafés,clubs, salons, parlors—because such Habermasian spaces reproduced hierarchy and exclu-sivity. By contrast, the casa del popolo provided a place where the relatively powerless couldgather for conviviality and mundane interactions (buying things at the co-op), but more im-portantly for political debate, mutual socialist edification, and announcements of solidarity.

Kohn argues that built-places are not always sources of durability or fixity, but some-times become sources of transformative social movements. Moreover, she contends that a fullunderstanding of radical democratic politics requires attention not only to the social structuralpositions of those involved, but also to the enabling sites where such class interests are medi-

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ated through face-to-face interactions. These arguments hinge on a tight connection betweenplace and politics, which Kohn links in several ways. Buildings evoke memories of the pastand also imagine anticipated futures: houses of the people were architecturally designed asmodels of a society where the contributions of each person to the betterment of the collec-tive—without intrusions of arbitrary power or concerns about capital accumulation—wererendered in legible walls and spaces. Physical places are sites for the enactment of scripted“encounters” (as Erving Goffman called them), where certain aspects of social relations arediminished in significance while others are thrown into high relief (for example, inside themutual aid societies, the source of need was less important than the willingness of the asso-ciation to help its least fortunate members). The doors of buildings regulate traffic, and soallow for the development of shared identities among those who pass through. The Italianchambers of labor became physical embodiments of a coalition of diverse political organiza-tions, enabling a common identity to emerge from those who arrived from different neigh-borhoods, different lines of work, and different classes.

Sadly, the book wanders from its center of strength. Kohn appends a chapter on mu-nicipalism that deals with present-day Italian politics and displays few connections to corediscussions of the emplacements of radical democracy a century before. The balance oftheory and empirical detail is weighted in the former direction, made worse by annoyingredundancy (Francesca Poletta’s work on “free spaces” is glossed in the same words on p.105 and p. 128). Kohn offers only tantalizing hints of a comparative spatial analysis thatwould perhaps persuade anybody that different forms of political expression are shaped bydistinctive spaces and places. Perhaps the author will write a second book, in which shepursues in greater detail an analysis of the floor plans and geographies of “fascist” places,churches (in Italy, always the counterpoint to socialism), and liberal bourgeois cafés—which, through observed contrasts, would convince even the most doubting Thomas thathouses of the people were as vital for radical democracy as Margaret Kohn believes themto be.

Reviewed by THOMAS F. GIERYN, Professor of Sociology, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN.


Gerald N. Grob. The Deadly Truth: A History of Disease in America. Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 2002. x + 349 pp. $35.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-674-00881-2.

Gerald Grob’s ambitious study conceptualizes disease as a complex interaction amongbiological pathogens, human hosts and their immune systems, genetics, environment, and liv-ing conditions. It charts changing trends in mortality and morbidity within the geographicalboundaries of the present-day United States, from the pre-Columbian period to the end of thetwentieth century. Marshalling an impressive array of evidence, Grob integrates statistics andanalysis into a readable narrative. He distinguishes in his preface between two approaches tothe history of disease: (1) social construction, which attempts to uncover past experiences andinterpretations of disease, and (2) analysis of the “biological reality” of disease. Though headopts the latter, his narrative is interwoven with excerpts from poems, broadsides, letters, di-

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aries, fiction, and reports to health committees, which provide indispensable glimpses of theimpact of the biological realities he examines upon individual human lives.

The work is structured chronologically, focusing on the patterns of disease that arose inparticular groups of people: the pre-Columbians, ravaged by diseases from Europe; the firstsettlers in New England; later colonizers of the West Coast; landowners and slaves in theSouth; workers confronting occupational hazards; and modern city-dwellers. Around the startof the twentieth century, infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, measles, cholera, influenza,and malaria receded in importance, to be replaced by chronic conditions such as cancer andcoronary heart disease as life expectancy increased. Rather than focusing on individual pa-tient-physician relationships, the study examines broader public health technologies such assanitation, water, housing, and quarantine, though it often emphasizes their limitations.

Grob also stresses the existence of medical enigmas. Why, for instance, did mortality andmorbidity rates from infectious diseases decline significantly after 1900, several decades be-fore the introduction of antibiotics? Why did rising material prosperity in the nineteenth cen-tury fail to translate into better health? What are the exact causes of coronary heart diseaseand cancer? He recommends caution in the face of continuing uncertainty. For as well asforming a narrative history, the work has a polemical argument: “The faith that disease is un-natural and can be conquered rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of the biologicalworld” (p. 3). Drawing on the work of the French scientist and philosopher René Dubos, Grobargues that advances in therapeutic techniques since the Second World War (vaccines, antibi-otics, surgical interventions) have led to unrealistic expectations of a disease-free future.Since disease is never static, owing to biological mutation and changing environmental con-ditions, scientists and policymakers should abandon their faith in eradicating disease alto-gether and focus on more modest tasks such as providing humane treatment for sufferers.

One of the best-known American historians of medicine, Grob is the author of numerousworks on mental illness. One might therefore have hoped for more detail on this subject,when, as he notes, caring for the mentally ill was the single largest item in most state budg-ets during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, the work is set to become astandard reference in the history of medicine, and forms a valuable counterpart to social con-structionist interpretations of disease. Rejecting uncritical belief in medical progress, it arguespersuasively that disease will endure.

Reviewed by MIRANDA GILL, Research Fellow, Pembroke College, University of Cambridge,Cambridge, UK.


Daniel M. Ogilvie. Fantasies of Flight. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 258 pp.$29.95. ISBN 0-19-515746-X.

Daniel Ogilvie has written a lively and interesting book about the origins and psycho-logical correlates of a common human fantasy theme. It was his thesis topic in graduateschool and he now brings to bear some 35 subsequent years of research and teaching in per-sonality. “Wide ranging” would be an understatement for this book. The types of evidence ad-duced include autobiography, biography, life history interviews, projective tests, essays,

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newspaper reports, movies, and paintings. The subjects include J. M. Barrie and his creationPeter Pan, Carl Jung, Freud on daVinci, Dumbo, a murderer interviewed and interpreted byTruman Capote, a UFO cult leader, Marc Chagall, a man who rose to 16,000 feet in a lawnchair, and also two more traditional case studies. The criterion for having “fantasies of flight”is a broad one. In some instances, there is direct evidence of such fantasies in reverie, dreams,or responses to so-called projective tests. In other cases, the existence of such fantasies is as-sumed on the basis of such things as working on flying machines, believing in UFOs, paint-ing pictures of levitating people, or writing a popular story of a boy who can fly. Casting sucha wide net gives the book great scope and variety.

Breadth and an engaging style are strong points of this book (and possible drawbacks forsome readers). Reading it, one hears the voice of a skilled and energetic teacher of undergrad-uates: the chapters are short and punchy, often ending with a look forward to the next install-ment; summaries of complex theories are simple and clear; and the style is vivid, personal, andoften colloquial. Ogilvie is brave enough to risk seeming at some points facile or trivializing.

Summarizing the thesis of a book like this runs a similar risk. With this kind of enquiry,the conviction is in the detail, and the conclusion stated alone is likely to fall flat (as it were).Suffice it to say that Professor Ogilvie believes that fantasies of flight are connected to (andprobably stem from) an attempt to restore the experience of oneness, of merger, associatedwith a loving mother. Or as he puts it more generally, such fantasies embody the “wished-for reunion with nurturing love objects” (p. 191). J. M. Barrie is the central example in thisbook, occupying over 50 pages. It is a persuasive example, involving a young boy whosemother fell into a deep depression upon the death of an older son. The young J. M. proceededto devote his creative energies to reviving his mother, by engaging her in storytelling, by im-itating his deceased brother, by doing anything that might bring a rare smile to her face.Ogilvie traces the ways in which the Peter Pan stories may reflect both this childhood strug-gle and the major developmental arrest in the area of intimacy that seems to have character-ized Barrie’s adult life.

The Barrie example, relying on both biography and autobiography for evidence, seemsto be the founding case on which Ogilvie’s hypothesis was derived. The rest of the book canbe seen as a testing out of this notion in nine other instances, with varying degrees of success.To my eye, the example of Chagall is the least persuasive, relying heavily on the assumptionthat every levitating female is a maternal figure. At the other extreme is the description of“Tonka,” a recent college graduate who volunteered for a personality study on the model ofHenry Murray’s work in the 1940s and 1950s at the Harvard Psychological Clinic. TheMurray model involves a range of information (autobiography, extensive interview,Rorschach test, and Thematic Apperception Test) and more than one assessor to minimize theelement of projection in interpretation. The range of data here, and the opportunity to askquestions rather than just read between the lines, makes for a persuasive and interesting de-scription of a person. This is the method Ogilvie favors, and the larger purpose of his book isto make an eloquent plea for the persistence of the case study in personality psychology.

Professor Ogilvie speaks with a wry sadness about the evolution of the field of person-ality psychology over the last 50 years. He describes it as having, in the quest to be properlyscientific, come to focus on a small number of “traits” (now narrowed down to five, he says)in large numbers of people. Personality psychology, in his view, has virtually merged with so-cial psychology in the sense of being largely interested in situational, socially observable fac-tors. A sense of internal complexity, “personality” as we used to mean it, has been lost.Personality psychology seems now totally dedicated to what Gordon Allport referred to as thenomothetic as opposed to the idiographic. Ogilvie wants to restore some balance.

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Of course, the tension between the generic and the specific is always with us. This showsitself in one of the ironies of this book. While making a plea for the idiographic, the authorseems to have a penchant for the nomothetic when it comes to interpretation. He acknowl-edges using Freud as a straw man, someone who sees only sexual meanings in dreams offlight, while acknowledging in a footnote Freud’s statement that the meaning of such fantasiesdepends on the individual and the context (e.g., that person’s associations). The view of psy-choanalysis here often has a 1950s flavor, where caves are always wombs and people have“mother complexes” or a “fixation at the oral stage.” While this sort of generic interpretationcertainly has a history in psychoanalysis, the development of an object relations approach andan interest in narrative have made it seem rather old-fashioned. This view of psychoanalysisseems part of the author’s general rejection of anything “clinical.” (Disclosure: Ogilvie and Iwere in parallel tracks in the same graduate department, one in personality psychology andthe other clinical.) He offers what one thinks must be a parody, in which the clinical approachcan only label people as “diseased,” as “weird,” as “odd.” In doing so, he replicates a split thathas troubled psychology from the beginning and, more importantly, he risks cutting himselfoff from his potential allies. After all, the closest descendant of Murray’s “diagnostic council”is the clinical case conference, where information from different sources is interpreted and in-tegrated in a group aiming for the fullest understanding of a particular person.

Professor Ogilvie quotes Henry Murray’s despairing over academic psychology’s lack ofinterest in important problems, and his career in academia seems, at times, to have given hima taste of the same despair. In that sense, this is a brave book, going against the grain of con-temporary personality theory and practice. It is probably a lost cause. It seems highly unlikelythat the values that currently shape publication, research grants, and tenure (or, in the clinicalarea, what insurance will pay for) will change in the direction of the intensive study of the in-dividual. More likely, the methods championed by Murray will continue to survive primarilyin teaching and training, whether it be of undergraduates interested in psychology or gradu-ate clinicians. Daniel Ogilvie has given us both a lively book and a fitting memorial to amethod.

Reviewed by ROBERT MAY, Amherst College Counseling and Mental Health Service,Amherst, MA.


Harry Hunt. Lives in Spirit: Precursors and Dilemmas of a Secular Western Mysticism.Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003. 357 pp. $22.95 (paper). ISBN 0-7914-5804-0.

Scholars in the history of psychology should sit up and take notice of this book. It is awake-up call to the narrowness of focus that has plagued the history of psychology since1929, after which E. G. Boring’s History of Experimental Psychology was implicitly pre-sumed to be the only legitimate history defining the field. Boring himself admitted to GordonAllport that someday he also hoped to write the history of personality psychology and devel-opmental psychology, and so on, but he just didn’t have time. This allowed his work, by acci-dent or by design, to stand as a definitive history of the entire field in the minds of the re-

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ductionistic materialists, who believed among themselves, like Boring, that such other histo-ries were not worth writing in the first place.

However, Hunt’s book, which comes out of the SUNY Series in Transpersonal andHumanistic Psychology, is not so much a history of psychology as the orthodox experimen-tal laboratory types would know it as it is an historical and philosophical analysis of largeparts of experience that reductionistic psychologists have not been able to study until recentlyaround problems of altered states of consciousness. Hunt’s point of contact is the liberal wingof cognitive psychology, where he stretches the cognitivists’ credibility with the subject of in-terior mystical experience as interpreted by Western thinkers such as William James, MaxWeber, and Ernst Troeltsch, until it interfaces with other investigations in religion, sociology,existential phenomenology, and depth psychology. His discussions of Gurdjieff and Jung,however, push the discussions over into the history of the occult, which seems to take the bookoff the radar screen of traditional historians of psychology.

My own thesis, however, is that since there is more than one definition of psychology incommon currency, there must be more than one history. I divide the history of psychology intothree streams: the experimental, the clinical, and the experiential. The first gives Boring hisdue, while the second challenges the less than definitive historians of clinical psychology tobecome more sophisticated about the roots of their own tradition, not from Wundt and Witmer,but through the French Experimental Psychology of the Subconscious. The third gives a legit-imate lineage to a uniquely American psycho-spiritual tradition in the folk culture, of whichtranspersonal is its most contemporary representative. Its unique avenue into the academy isthrough its original parent, humanistic psychology and a science of the whole person, whichcame out of the macro-personality theories of the 1930s and 1940s around Allport, Murray, andthe Murphys—the so-called Jamesean arc in American functional psychology.

The work, of course, has its drawbacks. It begins with a chapter on A. H. Almaas and hisDiamond teachings, which Hunt has mastered and which he puts forth as the lens throughwhich he intends to view the psychology of Western mysticism. Better he should have set thehomage to the guru aside and argued instead for his particular epistemology within the phi-losophy of science. There is also a tendency, reminiscent of Ken Wilber, where the author con-fuses his own phenomenology for how others uniquely view themselves.

Nevertheless, the work is well written, of significant scholarly caliber, and provocative forthe issues it raises about the psychology and sociology of mystical consciousness in a Westerncontext. It should be a red flag for historians of the old order. The university tradition of ex-perimental psychology no longer exclusively defines the field, and the histories that continueto pour out that try to pretend that the physiological, the cognitive, and the behavioral are theonly legitimate epistemologies defining psychology will soon become a thing of the past.

Reviewed by EUGENE TAYLOR, PhD, Saybrook Graduate School, San Francisco, CA, andHarvard University, Cambridge, MA.

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Lives in spirit: Precursors and dilemmas of a secular western mysticism

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