Psychiatry in social science
I’m on a train coming back from a week of work in the archives and the APSA annual meeting. The particular collection I was looking at was the papers of Harold Lasswell, an important 20th-century political scientist. I don’t think many political scientists are “important” in the way Lasswell was, and I don’t think Lasswell’s importance has been fully appreciated, despite several awards named in his honor. And, after this visit, I don’t think historians of American institutions fully appreciate how much Lasswell helped to shape the post-war U.S. national security state (but that’s the subject for a conference paper, not an entry in my public notebook).
The reason Lasswell first caught my eye, actually, was an attack on him by Thomas Szasz in Psychiatric Justice. I had known a little bit about Lasswell because two students had written nice undergraduate theses on him with me. One student’s thesis, in particular, got me very curious about Lasswell and his apparent use of Freudian concepts. I had known him primarily as the author of a pithy aphorism about politics being “who gets what, when, how.” I knew he had made some contributions to the rise of behavioralism in the discipline, and had also written a canonical piece of early international relations theory about some concept he termed “the garrison state.” I had, at that point, probably never consciously read him.
Of course, when Lasswell’s Freudianism came to my attention via a student paper, I presumed that the student was, if not mistaken, exaggerating or stretching the claim. Although it was an honors thesis, undergraduates tend toward hyperbole. And then I saw Thomas Szasz write about Harold Lasswell suggesting that a corps of “policy scientists” deploy around the country to conduct social psychiatry to assist citizens in their healthy adjustment to the psychic demands of democratic life. That certainly got my attention and sent me to the primary texts.
I found when I read Lasswell’s Psychopathology and Politics that my student had not been exaggerating. And when I read Lasswell’s Power and Personality, I found that neither had Szasz. At first, I thought these projects were more connected than they have turned out to be. There’s no indication in Lasswell’s papers that he had any sustained or deep engagement with Thomas Szasz. Any debate was one-sided, and I think Szasz was partly picking a fight to try and get social scientists to pay attention to him (“rage-baiting,” or “engagement farming” in the parlance of our times) and there is no debate that could be staged between them as an intellectual set piece à la the Dewey-Lippmann debate or the Du Bois-Washington debate. But they do mark two poles of the intellectual current that carried psychiatry as an intellectual project from an interpretivist activity to a positivist one.
What I find most interesting about Lasswell was his willingness to use the tools of psychiatry for the purposes of social adjustment. I am interested in how Lasswell thought the state should use psychiatric knowledge for its own national interest. And I am interested in how Lasswell justified it, if he did at all. After my visit to the archives, I’m increasingly thinking that he didn’t. After all, he wrote in his 1936 book Politics: Who Gets What, When, How that thinking might be great for “locating oneself as an object among objects in the march of time,” but it was also useful as a way to “discover ways and means of gaining goals.” I think his work on behalf of the state was in part a test of this hypothesis about the role of thinking.