Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

That the historical geography of the modern city is intertwined with the practice of biopolitics has in recent years gained wide currency. In this paper I seek to deepen and complicate this perspective by focusing on Weimar Berlin (1919–33) and on the active role of the experimental life sciences in manufacturing a new habitus for a rapidly modernising metropolis. To do so, I investigate the ways in which contemporary psychiatric theories and experimental practices seized on and transformed different aspects of the metropolitan experience, and turn, in particular, to accounts of the psychotechnical testing enterprise (Psychotechnik). In addition to the development of a series of experimental embodiments which were scientifically fashioned and tested, I also shift attention to the widespread dissemination of new realms of everyday conduct that were equally tasked with accommodating the impact of the modern urban experience. Ultimately, I hope to show to what extent the various incarnations of Weimar psychiatry were themselves enrolled in a larger project of policing and recuperating a national Gemeinschaft. As I argue, these experimental arrangements not only represented another example of the pervasive injunction of the period to ‘perform or else,’ but also spoke to the wide governmental reach of a pouvoir psychiatrique (Michel Foucault, 2003 Le Pouvoir Psychiatrique Seuil, Paris) through which experimental procedures for analysing, shaping, and regulating a new habitus were introduced, tested, and widely circulated.

This paper is concerned with the establishment of child psychology at the end of the 19th century and with its applied uses in the field of physical education. During this period psychology evolved from a philosophical field content with generalised statements about the human soul to a scientific field concerned with measuring and individuating the psyche. This paper focuses on how while psychology quickly laid claim to establishing the contours of normative mental health it was simultaneously deployed in the service of identifying and bolstering normative physical health. As interiority was systematically brought within the realm of science, the traditional metonymic connection between physicality and morality materialised into a new relationship between the self and its numerical existence. This relationship is explored here through an examination of physical-health testing in New York schools during the Progressive Era. My aim is to draw out the manifold ways in which psychological technologies were absorbed into spatial practice, supporting the claim of this theme issue that the proliferation of psychology can be traced through multiple governing practices and into specific geographies.

In reconfigurations of the ‘nature’ of the English child and childhood in the early 20th century a key role was played by the Malting House Garden School in Cambridge, England, founded by the unorthodox trader and inventor Geoffrey Pyke and codirected by pioneer educator and psychoanalyst Susan Isaacs. Known scurrilously in the town of Cambridge as ‘a pregenital brothel’, the Malting House School was supported by ecologist A G Tansley and psychologist Jean Piaget amongst others for its ‘copious and careful record of phenomena’. Though short lived, the Malting House School experiment became widely known through popular and influential books, written by Isaacs on early childhood development and education, based largely on data collected at the school. Less is known concerning Pyke's applications of psychoanalytic knowledge, his powerful scientific networks, and his grand vision for a new form of education. With recently recovered records and other archival documents, I seek to contribute to a historical geography of localized psychoanalytic knowledge by exploring the tangle of disciplinary relations in the mutual and imaginative constitution of two pillars of the Malting House School: natural science and psychoanalysis. In particular, I examine what Isaacs referred to as ‘the ecological point of view’ as well as the place of hatred in relation to the nursery school's attempted manufacture of infant scientists eager to ‘find out’. For Pyke, the main threat to the “vigorous survival of an intelligent bourgeoisie” was the Oedipus situation, as described by Sigmund Freud. Through new educational techniques that recognized powerful emotion between generations, Pyke sought to help mould a race that would be able to survive the great changes which he expected science to create in our environment.

Agoraphobia—literally fear of the agora, the Greek place of assembly or marketplace— emerged as a named disorder in 1871 and, from the start, stymied physicians who attempted to explain its cause. They found it difficult to explain why overwhelming anxiety overtook otherwise ‘sane’ individuals in particular settings. In this paper I argue that the affective nature of agoraphobic anxiety could neither be explained by nor captured within the accounts of space perception and representation put forward in the late-19th-century clinical literature. Those accounts relied on a ‘specular’ model in which the individual was able to represent to himself or herself that which he or she perceived; in contrast, the patients' experiences of overwhelming anxiety were characterized by a temporary loss of the symbolization of spatial relations and could not, therefore, be understood within a specular economy. I read late-19th-century attempts to account for agoraphobia, then, not as exemplars in a typology of ‘psy’ practices, but, rather, as a failure of the psy complex to map the spatial coordinates of agoraphobic anxiety adequately.

In this paper I explore the geography in the ideas of one 19th-century psychological physician, Thomas Laycock, seeking to show how his understanding of ‘madness’ rested upon an ‘imaginative historical geography’ that explained the contents of a mad person's consciousness as reversions to the mental worlds of other peoples living in other periods and places. I reconstruct Laycock's ideas about memory, notably what he understood by ‘ancestral memory’ rooted in ancestral times and spaces, and I relate these ideas to his deeper conceptualisations of the time – space fabric of creation. I also examine Laycock's approach to the letters and drawings of one unnamed artist – patient, showing that it is possible from other sources to give this patient a name (William James Blacklock) and even a ‘voice’ of sorts; and I suggest that Laycock was guilty of failing to engage properly with this evidence, yet also of overinterpreting it at the same time. Acknowledging the dangers of ‘presentism’ in this paper, I critique how Laycock's ideas captured ‘otherness’ in a grid of ‘sameness’ largely indifferent to the very different, perhaps unknowable, imaginings present in madness (and in all who depart from established norms). My contribution should be taken as a circumspect effort to write a ‘critical and effective history’ inspired by Foucault's claims in the introduction to The Order of Things (1970, Tavistock Publications, London) about the relationship between ‘the Same and the Other’.

An individualisation of responsibility and risk is underway in US and UK pensions, as both state and employers scale back insurance commitments that expanded during the post-1945 era. Approached from the perspective of the Foucauldian-inspired governmentality literature, this neoliberal reworking of responsibility and risk across state and occupational pensions is characterised by the summoning up of the responsible individual worker as an entrepreneurial investor subject. Collective insurance, as a technology for constructing, managing, and pooling ‘risk’ as potential danger, is sidelined in favour of the promotion of individual investment to calculate, embrace, and bear ‘risk’ as opportunity or reward. As pension guides produced by state agencies for popular consumption illustrate, only financial market investment appears as capable of providing the individual with a secure and ‘free’ retirement. Contradictions in neoliberal government ensure, however, that the investor as a subject position that is called up in this discourse is not simply an identity that is performed by individuals.