This special issue considers the significance of film to the establishment and development of scientific approaches to the mind. Bonnie Evans explores how the origins of film technologies in 1895 in France encouraged a series of innovative collaborations, influencing both psychological theorisation, and new filming techniques. Jeremy Blatter explains how Harvard psychologist Hugo Münsterberg created early films specifically designed to engage audiences using psychological tactics. Scott Curtis’ article examines how Yale psychologist Arnold Gesell was able to extract scientific data from (...) a film. Felix Rietmann’s article explores a collection of infant observation films from the 1930s and 1960s and how they developed unique narratives of mothers’ engagement with their children that did not necessarily match up with dominant scientific theories. Janet Harbord's article considers how a trilogy of films made at the Maudsley Hospital in the 1950s engaged with innovative film-making techniques that captured behaviour as discrete units. Seth Watter further examines how William S. Condon's use of the unique technology of the Bell and Howell 173BD projector in the 1960s created new understandings of human behaviour that could not have been predicted in advance, and which were highly influenced by the technology itself. Finally, Des O’Rawe explores how radical approaches in both anti-psychiatry, and documentary film-making in the 1960s created new opportunities for audiences to engage with different psychological states. All of these developments in film and psychology continue to influence understandings in both these fields to the present day. (shrink)

Este texto es el resultado de un ejercicio crítico de lectura, de mi lectura de Derrida como lector de Freud. A partir del análisis que hace Derrida en su ensayo "Freud y la escena de la escritura", discuto la necesidad de radicalizar algunas de las consecuencias que se siguen de la analogía que Freud establece entre el aparato psíquico y cierta máquina de escritura. Uno de los fenómenos que se desprenden de pensar la psique como un texto es que el (...) sujeto habita incesantemente en la tensión de un entre: entre la herencia y lo porvenir. Este entre devela una temporalidad sui géneris donde los tiempos pasado, presente y futuro se mezclan y se funden. This essay is the result of a critical reading exercise, of my reading of Derrida as a reader of Freud. From Derrida's analysis in his text "Freud and the Scene of Writing", I argue the necessity of radicalizing some consequences that emerge from the analogy established by Freud between the psychic apparatus, and a certain writing machine. One of the phenomena that thinking the psyche as a text points to is that the subject relentlessly dwells in the tension of a between: between the inherited and what is to come. This between unveils a sui generis temporality where past, present and future mingle and fuse. (shrink)

This paper addresses the visual culture of late-19th-century experimental physiology. Taking the case of Johann Nepomuk Czermak as a key example, it argues that images played a crucial role in acquiring experimental physiological skills. Czermak, Emil Du Bois-Reymond and other late-19th-century physiologists sought to present the achievements and perspective of their discipline by way of "immediate visual perception." However, the images they produced and presented for this purpose were strongly mediated. By means of specifically designed instruments, such as the "cardioscope," (...) the "contraction telegraph," and the "frog pistol," and of specifically constructed rooms, so-called "spectatoriums," physiologists trained and controlled the perception of their students before allowing them to conduct experiments on their own. Studying the material culture of physiological image production reveals that technological resources such as telegraphy, photography, and even railways contributed to making physiological facts anschaulich. At the same time, it shows that the more traditional image techniques of anatomy played an important role in physiological lecture halls, especially when it came to displaying the details of vivisection experiments to the public. Thus, the images of late 19th century physiology stood half-way between machines and organisms, between books and instruments. (shrink)