Marga Vicedo’s Intelligent Love: The Story of Clara Park, Her Autistic Daughter, and the Myth of the Refrigerator Mother is a love letter to intellectual mothers. And Vicedo’s warm and astute delivery exemplifies the blending of love and intellect Vicedo discerns in her subject, Clara Park. The book is centered around Park, whose odyssey of… Read more →
Tag: psychology
The Politics of Method: An Interview with Henry Cowles
“The scientific method does not exist. But ‘the scientific method’ does.” So begins Henry M. Cowles’s new book The Scientific Method: An Evolution of Thinking from Darwin to Dewey about the very idea that science could be reduced to a single set of steps. Cowles argues that appeals to such a method – “shared across… Read more →
Discovery, Interrupted
It was the third and final week of my first dissertation research trip. I’d spent my first two weeks moving slowly through the collections at the University of Akron’s Cummings Center for the History of Psychology (CCHP). It was a joy to take my time getting to know the clinical psychologists who would feature in… Read more →
Miscarriage and Memory-Making: An Uneasy Relationship
When the Guardian journalist Hadley Freeman wrote about her miscarriage in early 2017, many readers praised the fact that this common, yet woefully misunderstood experience had been so candidly aired. Miscarriages do not elicit the type of kindly curiosity that ‘successful’ reproductive experiences often do, such as the pregnancy revelation, the swelling bump, or the… Read more →
“I Would Rather Have My Own Mind”: The Medicalization of Women’s Behavior in Ireland, 1914-1920
When he brought her to the asylum, twenty-four-year old Katie’s father was asked to describe what behaviors or actions had marked her “attack.” He noted, first, that she suffered from “some uterine trouble,” and secondly, that she was “addicted to reading Novels, esp. Modn. cheap ones. Fond of amusement and gay society.”1 It sounds like… Read more →