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.
Notes
1. There is, of course, debate even about that. Some have argued that the discipline of “psychology” dates back to the 1820s (Gundlach Citation2004), the 1810s (Teo Citation2007), or even earlier (Hatfield Citation1995). For a more general overview, see also Vidal (Citation2011).
2. This was the website’s name when I created the images. It has since been renamed WordArt.com.
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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.