by DK
Judging the insane sane
In the second part of Rosenhan’s study, he falsely informed the staff at a teaching and research hospital (who were aware of the first study) that during the next three months, one or more pseudo-patients would try to be admitted to the hospital, and they were asked to rate each new patient on the likelihood of them being a pseudo-patient. Of 193 genuine new admissions, 41 were judged suspect by at least one member of staff, and 23 were flagged as possible pseudo-patients by at least one psychiatrist.
Rosenhan’s work generated an explosion of controversy, and led many institutions to take steps to improve their care of patients.
DAVID ROSENHAN
David Rosenhan was born in the US in 1932. After gaining a BA in psychology from Yeshiva College, New York City, he moved to the city’s Columbia University to study for his MA and PhD. He specialized in clinical and social psychology, and became an expert in legal trial tactics and decision-making. From 1957 to 1970, he taught at Swarthmore College, Princeton University, and Haverford College, then moved to Stanford, where he taught for nearly 30 years. He continues to work at Stanford as professor emeritus of psychology and law. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was a visiting fellow at Oxford University. He founded the Trial Analysis Group and has long been a major advocate for the legal rights of mental health patients.
Key works
1968 Foundations of Abnormal Psychology (with Perry London)
1973 On Being Sane in Insane Places
1997 Abnormality (with Martin Seligman and Lisa Butler)
See also: Emil Kraepelin • R.D. Laing • Leon Festinger • Solomon Asch • Erving Goffman • Elliot Aronson • Thigpen & Cleckley
IN CONTEXT
APPROACH
Mental disorders
BEFORE
1880s Pierre Janet describes MPD as multiple states of consciousness and coins the term “dissociation.”
1887 French surgeon Eugene Azam documents the multiple personalities of Felida X.
1906 US physician Mortin Prince reports Christine Beauchamp’s case in The Dissociation of Personality.
AFTER
1970s US psychiatrist Cornelia Wilbur reports Sybil Isabel Dorsett’s case and links MPD definitively with child abuse.
1980 The American Psychiatric Association publishes the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder, legitimating MPD.
1994 MPD is renamed Dissociative Identity Disorder.
Multiple personality disorder (MPD, later known as dissociative identity disorder) is a mental condition in which an individual’s personality appears to present as two or more distinct identities. MPD was first reported in 1791 by Eberhardt Gmelin; over the following 150 years, a further 100 clinical cases were documented. It was believed that the condition arose from childhood abuse, and could be cured by integrating the sub-personalities back into the main personality.
One of the most famous cases of multiple personality disorder is that of Eve White. Eve was referred to Thigpen and Cleckley in 1952, suffering from severe headaches and occasional blackouts. She was a neat, rather prim, young woman, aged 25, married, with a four-year-old daughter. Eve would remain in treatment for 14 months.
Eve described to the doctors a disturbing episode: she had bought some extravagant clothes she could not afford, yet had no memory of the purchase. As she recounted this, her demeanor began to change. She looked confused, then the lines of her face altered. Her eyes widened, and she smiled provocatively. She spoke in a bright, flirtatious tone, requesting a cigarette, even though Eve did not smoke.
This was “Eve Black,” a separate personality so distinct that she even suffered from a skin allergy to nylon that Eve White did not. Eve White was unaware of Eve Black, while the latter was wholly aware of the former, and was full of derision for her: “She’s such a damn dope….”
"‘When I go out and get drunk,’ Eve Black said, ‘she wakes up with the hangover.’"
Thigpen & Cleckley
Distinct personalities
Both personalities were submitted to extensive psychological testing. Eve White had a marginally higher IQ than Eve Black; both fell in the “bright, normal” category. Personality dynamics were explored using the Rorschach test (in which subjects report their perception of inkblots). There were dramatic differences: Eve Black showed a dominant hysterical tendency, and the ability to conform. Eve White showed “constriction, anxiety, and obsessive compulsive traits” and an inability to deal with her hostility.
Eve’s condition was believed to result from childhood abuse, so efforts were made to work back into her early childhood, using hypnosis to provoke the emergence of Eve Black. Eventually, an attempt was made to summon both personalities at once; Eve fell into a trance. She woke as a third personality: this was Jane, the third face of Eve—a more capable and interesting character than Eve White. She seemed to combine the assets of both Eves, without their weaknesses. While neither Eve was aware of Jane, she was aware of them both.
Jane appeared to be a balanced compromise between the two Eves, and she was nurtured as the personality with the best grasp of the complex dynamics of the three personalities: the two Eves were integrated into her character.
Full-blown cases of MPD such as Eve’s are rare, but it is now thought that less pronounced cases are more common. The careful documentation of in-depth case studies like Eve’s has resulted in diagnostic and treatment protocols that make MPD highly treatable.
Eve’s story was popularized in a book and a film, The Three Faces of Eve, which captured the public’s imagination and made Eve’s case the most famous example of Multiple Personality Disorder.
CORBETT H. THIGPEN & HERVEY M. CLECKLEY
Corbett H. Thigpen was born in Macon, Georgia. USA. His childhood interest in amateur magic endured throughout his life, and he was inducted into the Southeastern Association of Magicians’ Hall of Fame. Thigpen graduated from Mercer University in 1942, and from the Medical College of Georgia in 1945. He served in the US Army during World War II, then in 1948 he began his distinguished career as a psychiatrist in a private practice with Hervey M. Cleckley. For two decades, the pair taught in the departments of psychiatry and neurology at the Medical College of Georgia. Thigpen was known as “the professor who received a standing ovation after every lecture.” He retired in 1987.
Hervey M. Cleckley was born in Augusta, Georgia. In 1924, he graduated from the University of Georgia, where he was also a keen sportsman. He won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University, graduating in 1926. He spent his entire career at Georgia Medical School, in a variety of positions, including that of founding chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Health Behavior. In 1941, he wrote The Mask of Sanity, a seminal study of psychopaths.
Key works
1941 The Mask of Sanity (Cleckley)
1957 The Three Faces of Eve (Thigpen & Cleckley)
See also: Pierre Janet • Timothy Leary • Milton Erickson
DIRECTORY
Investigation into the workings of the mind dates back to the earliest civilizations, although it was largely philosophical in nature, rather than scientific in the modern sense. It was only with major advances in the biological sciences in the second half of the 19th century that a truly scientific analysis of our mental processes became possible—giving rise to psychology as a distinct area of study. The ideas and discoveries of some of the key researchers in the field have been examined already in this book, but many more have contributed to the growth of psychology as a respected science in its own rig
ht. From structuralists to behaviorists, from psychoanalysts to cognative therapists, the people discussed below have all helped deepen our understanding of our uniqueness as human beings.
JOHN DEWEY
1859–1952
American John Dewey greatly influenced the development of the science and philosophy of human thought in the first half of the 20th century. Although primarily a behaviorist psychologist, his application of the philosophy of pragmatism on society had a major impact on educational thinking and practice in the US.
See also William James • G. Stanley Hall
W.H.R. RIVERS
1864–1922
William Halse Rivers Rivers was an English surgeon, neurologist, and psychiatrist who specialized in the relationship between the mind and the body. He published several key papers on neurological conditions, including hysteria. He is best known for his work on “shell shock” (post-traumatic stress disorder), and is also considered one of the founders of medical anthropology. The methods of cross-cultural analysis Rivers used on an expedition to the Torres Straits Pacific islands laid the foundations for future field study.
See also: Wilhelm Wundt • Hermann Ebbinghaus • Sigmund Freud
EDWARD B. TITCHENER
1867–1927
Englishman Edward Bradford Titchener studied experimental psychology, first at Oxford and then in Germany under Wilhelm Wundt. He moved to the US in 1892, where he became known as the founder of Structural Psychology, which breaks down the experiences of humanity and arranges them into elemental structures. As Structural Psychology is based on introspection, it was at odds with behaviorism, which was growing in popularity. By the 1920s, Titchener was fairly isolated in his beliefs, though he was still widely admired. He wrote several textbooks on psychology including: An Outline of Psychology (1896), Experimental Psychology (1901–1905), and A Textbook of Psychology (1910).
See also: Wilhelm Wundt • William James • J.P. Guilford • Edwin Boring
WILLIAM STERN
1871–1938
German-born William Stern was a leading figure in the establishment of developmental psychology. His first book, Psychology of Early Childhood (1914), was based on observations of his own three children over 18 years. His method—“personalistic psychology”—investigated the individual developmental path, combining applied, differential, genetic, and general psychology. A pioneer in forensic psychology, he was the first to use the nomothetic-idiographic approach. Stern is best remembered for his work on the intelligence quotient (IQ) tests to calculate a child’s intelligence. A single-number score is awarded by dividing the “mental age” of the test-taker by his or her “chronological age” and multiplying by 100.
See also: Alfred Binet • Jean Piaget
CHARLES SAMUEL MYERS
1873–1946
At Cambridge University, Myers studied experimental psychology under W.H.R. Rivers, and in 1912 he set up the Cambridge Laboratory of Experimental Psychology. During World War I, he treated soldiers for “shell shock” (a term he invented). After the war, he was a key figure in the development of occupational psychology. His books include Mind and Work (1920), Industrial Psychology in Great Britain (1926), and In the Realm of Mind (1937).
See also: Kurt Lewin • Solomon Asch • Raymond Cattell • W.R.H. Rivers
MAX WERTHEIMER
1880–1943
Together with Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler, Czech psychologist Max Wertheimer founded Gestalt psychology in the US in the 1930s. Gestalt built on existing theories of perceptual organization. Moving away from Wundt’s molecularism, Wertheimer advocated the study of the whole, famously saying “the whole is more than the sum of its parts.” He also devised Pragnanz, the idea that the mind processes visual information into the simplest forms of symmetry and shape.
See also: Abraham Maslow • Solomon Asch
ELTON MAYO
1880–1949
In the 1930s, while Professor of Industrial Management at Harvard, Australian Elton Mayo carried out his groundbreaking Hawthorne Experiments. Using disciplines drawn from psychology, physiology, and anthropology, he examined over a five-year period the productivity and morale of six female workers as he made changes to their working conditions. The most surprising outcome was the way the workers responded to the research itself. The Hawthorne Effect, as it is now known, is an alteration in human behavior that occurs when people know they are being studied. This discovery had a lasting impact on industrial ethics and relations, and research methods in social science.
See also: Sigmund Freud • Carl Jung
HERMANN RORSCHACH
1884–1922
As a Swiss schoolboy, Rorschach was called Klek (Inkblot), because he was always drawing. He later devised the inkblot test, whereby responses to specific blots may reveal emotional, character, and thought disorders. He died, aged 37, a year after his “form interpretation test” Psychodiagnostics (1921) was published. Others later developed the test, but this gave rise to four different methods, each flawed. In 1993, American John Exner united them all in the Comprehensive System—one of the most enduring psychoanalytical experiments.
See also: Alfred Binet • Sigmund Freud • Carl Jung
CLARK L. HULL
1884–1952
American Clark Leonard Hull’s early studies included psychometrics and hypnosis. He published Aptitude Testing (1929) and Hypnosis and Suggestibility (1933). Informed by his objective behaviorist approach, Hull’s Mathematico-Deductive Theory of Rote Learning (1940) measured all behavior (including animal) by a single mathematical equation. He developed the theory in Principles of Behavior (1943), which examined the effects of reinforcement on the stimulus-response connection. His Global Theory of Behavior was one of the standard systems of psychological research at the time.
See also: Jean-Martin Charcot • Alfred Binet • Ivan Pavlov • Edward Thorndike
EDWIN BORING
1886–1968
One of the most important figures in experimental psychology, Boring specialized in human sensory and perceptual systems. His interpretation of W.E. Hill’s reversible old woman/young maid drawing led to it becoming known as the Boring Figure. At Harvard in the 1920s, Boring moved the psychology department away from psychiatry, turning it into a rigorously scientific school that unified structuralism and behaviorism. His first book, A History of Experimental Psychology (1929), was followed by Sensation and Perception in the History of Experimental Psychology (1942).
See also: Wilhelm Wundt • Edward B. Titchener
FREDERIC BARTLETT
1886–1969
Frederic Bartlett was Cambridge University’s first Professor of Experimental Psychology (1931–51). He is known for his memory experiments where participants were asked to read an unfamiliar, mythical story composed by Bartlett (such as The War of the Ghosts) before retelling it. Many added details that were not in the original story, or changed meanings to fit their own specific culture. Bartlett concluded that they were not remembering but rather reconstructing the text.
See also: Endel Tulving • Gordon H. Bower • W.H.R. Rivers
CHARLOTTE BUHLER
1893–1974
German-born Bühler founded the Vienna Institute of Psychology in 1922 with her husband, Karl. Her studies of childhood personality and cognitive development expanded to include the course of human development throughout life. Rather than Jung’s three stages of life, she proposed four: birth—15; 16–25; 26–45; and 46–65. Bühler found links between adult emotions and early childhood. Her World Test is a therapeutic device that uses a set of numbered miniatures to reveal a child’s inner emotional world. After publishing From Birth to Maturity (1935) and From Childh
ood to Old Age (1938), she moved to the US. In the 1960s, Bühler helped to develop humanistic psychology.
See also: Carl Rogers • Abraham Maslow • Viktor Frankl • Gordon Allport
DAVID WECHSLER
1896–1981
During World War I, Wechsler, a Romanian-born American, worked as an army psychologist alongside Edward Thorndike and Charles Spearman, administering the Army Alpha Test for group intelligence. He later developed Binet’s tests, adding nonverbal reasoning. Wechsler believed intelligence lies not only in the ability to think rationally, but also in the ability to act purposefully and to deal effectively with one’s environment. In 1939, the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale was published, followed a decade later by the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (1949). The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (1955) is still the most widely used intelligence test.
