Most histories of psychology weave a story around the rise of objective methods of investigation and the decline of subjective introspection. This paper sidesteps such disciplinary stories by describing self-scrutiny as a practice that moved through a variety of cultural, social and technological contexts in early twentieth-century America. Edmund Jacobson's technique of 'progressive relaxation' is offered as a case in point. Jacobson, a Chicago clinician, developed this cure for nervousness out of his earlier research under E. B. Titchener, an experimental (...) psychologist at Cornell University. Like Titchener's method of 'experimental introspection ', progressive relaxation was a laboratory-based activity designed to transform the practitioner's sensibilities through the fastidious repetition of simple tasks. But while experimental psychologists ultimately rejected introspection as the core of their disciplinary project, the American public embraced progressive relaxation as a practical technique for mastering the new conditions of modernity. (shrink)

This article examines the study of mind and behavior at the University of Chicago through the career of Charles Judson Herrick, neuroanatomist and psychobiologist. Herrick’s views on human nature, education, and social control are discussed in the context of the progressive evolutionism pervading the university in the early twentieth century. The religious background of Herrick’s work is important to understanding the service ethos that permeated his science, which was also the basis of his interest in pragmatism and of his opposition (...) to certain tenets of behaviorism. Herrick was dedicated to interdisciplinary collaboration, which he thought crucial to the development of psychobiology. His relationship with Karl S. Lashley in the 1920s is analyzed. Their disagreements about the relationship between science and humanism, as revealed in their views on behaviorism, did not prevent them from working together to articulate a holistic theory of brain function and learning. (shrink)