Images of the disciplining of psychology, 1890–1940

ABSTRACT

Over the course of psychology’s first several decades, the language used to convey the subject matter gradually shifted from being free and literary to being strictly constrained and disciplined by increasingly focused theoretical demands. The project described here, “Disciplining Psychology,” aimed to depict this transformation by generating images of the faces of three highly influential psychologists—William James, Sigmund Freud, and B. F. Skinner. Each image is composed of the words used in one of each individual’s most important books. The tightening of the disciplinary vocabulary is revealed in the differences among the three arrays of words themselves, but I have also striven to reflect it in the aesthetic aspects of each image. The method used here could easily be extended to a wider array of authors, texts, and psychological topics.

KEYWORDS:

• B. F. Skinner
• data visualization
• history of psychology
• Sigmund Freud
• William James

Notes

^1. There is, of course, debate even about that. Some have argued that the discipline of “psychology” dates back to the 1820s (Gundlach 2004), the 1810s (Teo 2007), or even earlier (Hatfield 1995). For a more general overview, see also Vidal (2011).

^2. This was the website’s name when I created the images. It has since been renamed WordArt.com.

Additional information

Funding

The author gratefully acknowledges financial support for this research from the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes on contributors

Christopher D. Green

Christopher D. Green was trained in computational cognitive science and in the philosophy of science at the University of Toronto. He also has an educational background in music and theater. He has worked in the History & Theory of Psychology program at York University since 1993. For the past several years, he has co-directed a digital history of psychology laboratory there known as The PsyBorgs.