Phenomenology and the Mind Sciences: 'Hybrid Intellectuals' in German and American Culture

Trustees Of Boston University, Boston

Investigators

Abstract

SES 01214950 Alfred Tauber/Susan Lanzoni, Boston University Phenomenology and the Mind Sciences: "Hybrid Intellectuals" in German and American Culture This is a postdoctoral fellowship that focuses on the phenomenological psychiatrist and psychologist, "hybrid intellectuals" native to German-speaking lands in the early twentieth century who became influential in the United States in the middle of the century. Phenomenological philosophy is the study of consciousness, with roots in Franz Brentano's path breaking work on empirical psychology, but most fully identified with the work of Edmund Husserl, and then given an existential flavor by Martin Heidegger. As an approach that gave precedence to the analysis of conscious experience, it was not only an extremely influential philosophy in early twentieth century Europe, but one that a number of contemporary psychiatrists and psychologists found could be applied in scientific domains. The postdoctoral fellow explored the meeting of these two worlds in a dissertation that is a case study of Ludwig Binswanger (1881-1966), the Swiss psychiatrist who turned to phenomenology to explicate psychotic experience. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Alfred I. Tauber at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University, the co-PI will strengthen her philosophical understanding of phenomenology, while conducting research on the history of phenomenological psychiatry in Germany. Further training in philosophy should assist her in comprehending the intricacies of different variants of phenomenological philosophy. The research focuses on three other hybrid intellectuals of the period, Erwin Straus, V.E. von Gebsattel and Eugene Minkowski, all of whom found merit in using phenomenological methods in psychology and psychiatry. The fact that Binswanger was not alone in creating this interdisciplinary approach demonstrates that there were specific intellectual and cultural resources in the German-speaking world that enabled such projects to flourish. While examining the uses of phenomenology for these other practitioners, the PI sets their work within the larger intellectual currents of the period. A second part of the research project tracks the influence of these practitioners and their ideas in the United States. The co-PI follows both the movement of German emigrants to the US in the 1930s and the influence of newly translated European texts in the 1950s. The ways in which these European ideas were received on American soil demonstrates the critical importance of cultural and institutional factors in promoting different forms of interdisciplinarity. The American setting was quite different from the German: disciplinary lines between philosophy and psychology had grown more rigid, and American psychologists and psychiatrists were oriented to practical outcomes and therapeutic solutions. Therefore, American phenomenological psychiatrists and psychologists had distinct agendas, and encountered different obstacles in comparison to their earlier European counterparts. This project track these "hybrid intellectuals" along an historical and cultural trajectory in order to illuminate the shifting possibilities of interdisciplinarity as an historically mediated phenomenon.