Stay Free
Introduction to Issue 21
by Carrie McLaren
In 1999, sixty psychologists and psychiatrists sent a letter to the American Psychological Association (APA) urging it to oppose advertising to children. You had to admire their moxie: The APA represents a field that practically owes its existence to advertising.
The roots of the psychology industry date from the turn of the 20th century, when both advertisers and psychologists were scorned by their peers. Economists, bankers, and executives equated ad men with sideshow barkers, while scientists considered psychologists no better than fortune-tellers. To bolster their credibility, ad agents turned to psychologists and vice versa. By applying psychological theories to advertising, psychologists hoped to prove themselves practical; by incorporating psychology in ad campaigns, ad agents hoped to prove themselves scientific. (Psychology wasn’t yet seen as a science, but that’s another story.) John B. Watson, America’s answer to Pavlov, personifies the triumph of both fields–the founder of behaviorism, which dominated psychological theory in the 1930s, he was also a vice president of J. Walter Thompson, a leading advertising agency at the time and currently the world’s largest ad firm.
Psychologists allied themselves with business in other ways, as in "human engineering." Ana Marie Cox explores this history in her article on employee personality testing (p. 22), while Gaylord Fields and Matthew Flaming expose the psychological notions at work in another economic realm: grocery shopping (pp. 32 and 34).
Like psychology, psychiatry has been shaped by business interests–and though we’re calling this the psychology issue of Stay Free!, it is equally about psychiatry. (Psychology covers everyday habits of the mind; psychiatry deals with aberrations.) In his stellar history of the lobotomy, Elliot Valenstein (interview, p. 12) describes how the field of psychiatry has, like psychology, faced economic pressures. Thrifty state governments, competition from neuroscientists and nonmedical therapists, and a burgeoning pharmaceutical industry have ultimately contributed to psychiatry’s turn away from an environmental approach to mental illness and toward biological models.
The point of this issue of Stay Free! is a simple one: Both psychology and psychiatry purport to help people yet remain seriously conscribed by money and politics.
Read a few free essays, see the contents page, then go buy this excellent magazine
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