I am currently working on an undergraduate Honors project researching the history of psychology through war and peace. I am curious to understand how war, as well as peace, has influenced the development of psychology and the leading psychologists of the respective time periods. In addition to this, I am also exploring female and male psychologists' perspectives on war and peace (if the old theory that men are agressive and women are passive is correct or not through psychologists). Thank you for anything you may be able to enlighten me on!

-- Amanda Wykert (mandella17@hotmail.com), March 21, 2002

Answers

Here are a few tips you might want to follow up. (1) Intelligence testing in the U.S. got an enormous boost from WWI because the military agreed to have all recruits (hundreds of thousands of them) tested (using the "Army alpha" (verbal) and "Army beta" (non-verbal) intelligence tests. ostensibly to distinguish "officer material." More specific kinds of abilities testing became popular in during WWII -- especially test that would distinguish good potential fighter pilots from others. (2) In the UK, Alan Turing's work on a machine to break the German's military codes led directly to the invention of the computer, and from there, in the 1960s, to modern cognitive science. (3) During the "cold war", there was a great deal of emphasis on "preparedness." Originally this meant *military* preparedness, but was co-opted by lobby groups to include "intellectual" preparedness as well. As a result, the US military in the 1950s handed out huge grants for all kinds of research, including Noam Chomsky's revolutionary work on linguistics. The military was, of course, also heavily involved in the developement of computers, information processesing, and signal detection theory. There is a story that I believe is at least mostly true that George Miller's undergraduate honors thesis was declared a national secret, and all the members of his committee had to get special clearance in order to read it.

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), March 22, 2002.

Oh! Of course another line you might want to follow is the development of the treatment of psychopathology (both psychiatric and psychological) as a result of both World Wars (and later ones as well). Thousands of traumatized (both physically and mentally) soldiers coming back from the front created an enormous demand for effective treatments. One example you might want to look into is Rivers, William H.R. (1920). _Instinct and the unconscious: A contribution to a biological theory of the psycho-neuroses_, which is available on-line at http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Rivers/.

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), March 22, 2002.

The movement of clinical psychologists into the field of psychotherapy was also a result of WWII. The VA hospitals desperately needed clinicians, and this eventually led to licensing laws, accredited training programs etc. Some of that history is included in Meehl, P. E. (1955). Psychotherapy. In C. S. Stone & Q. McNemar (Eds.). Annual review of psychology (357-378). Stanford, CA: Annual Reviews. There is also quite a bit of this history in John Reisman's A History of Clinical Psychology. Some of the histories of feminist psychology also examine how women entered the work force during WWII and thus changed both the field of psychology and the culture in general.

-- Hendrika Vande Kemp (hendrika@earthlink.net), March 22, 2002.