This article is a continuation of the challenge begun by early phenomenologists of the reductionistic scientism of Natural Science Psychology. Inspired by five distinctions of Emmanuel Levinas, it seeks to bring a deeper interruption of the seemingly unalterable force of mainstream psychology to model itself after the hard sciences. Levinas distinguishes the experience of totality from infinity, need from desire, freedom as self-initiated and self-directed from freedom as invested by and for the Other, active agency from radical (...) passivity, and the said from saying. Five commonly accepted characteristics of science, objective, empirical, causal, reducible, and value neutral, are used to compare three approaches to psychology: Natural Science, Phenomenology , and Psychology for the Other. Using the definition of science, “knowing the phenomenon as it shows itself,” this paper argue that Natural Science Psychology is the least “scientific,” Phenomenological Psychology is more scientific, and Psychology for the Other is the most “scientific” with its ethical command to allow the Other to reveal her/himself. This extravagant but compelling claim is illustrated with descriptions of research and therapy. (shrink)

This qualitative study used descriptive phenomenology to examine experiences of healing and reconciliation, for children of Holocaust survivors, through dialogue with children of the Third Reich. Descriptive phenomenological interviews with 5 participants yielded several common essential elements. The findings indicated that participants experienced a sense of healing of intergenerational trauma, a reduction in prejudice, and increase in motivation for pro-social behaviors. The degree to which these findings may reflect a shift in sense of identity, as well as the implications of (...) the findings for conflict resolution, intergroup conflict reduction and peace psychology are discussed. (shrink)

As documented by Darwin 150 years ago, emotion expressed in human faces readily draws our attention and promotes sympathetic emotional reactions. How do such reactions to the expression of emotion affect our goal-directed actions? Despite the substantial advance made in the neural mechanisms of both cognitive control and emotional processing, it is not yet known well how these two systems interact. Here, we studied how emotion expressed in human faces influences cognitive control of conflict processing, spatial selective attention and inhibitory (...) control in particular, using the Eriksen flanker paradigm. In this task, participants viewed displays of a central target face flanked by peripheral faces and were asked to judge the gender of the target face; task-irrelevant emotion expressions were embedded in the target face, the flanking faces, or both. We also monitored how emotion expression affects gender judgment performance while varying the relative timing between the target and flanker faces. As previously reported, we found robust gender congruency effects, namely slower responses to the target faces whose gender was incongruent with that of the flanker faces, when the flankers preceded the target by 0.1 s. When the flankers further advanced the target by 0.3 s, however, the congruency effect vanished in most of the viewing conditions, except for when emotion was expressed only in the flanking faces or when congruent emotion was expressed in the target and flanking faces. These results suggest that emotional saliency can prolong a substantial degree of conflict by diverting bottom-up attention away from the target, and that inhibitory control on task-irrelevant information from flanking stimuli is deterred by the emotional congruency between target and flanking stimuli. (shrink)

Previous research has established that goal tracking emerges early in the first year of life and rapidly becomes increasingly sophisticated. However, it has not yet been shown whether young children continue to update their representations of others’ goals over time. The current study investigates this by probing young children’s ability to differentiate between goal directed actions that have been halted because the goal was interrupted, and because the goal was abandoned. To test whether children are sensitive to this distinction, we (...) manipulated the experimenter’s reason for not completing a goal-directed action - his initial goal is either interrupted by an obstacle, or it is abandoned in favour of an alternative. We measure whether children’s helping behaviour is sensitive to the experimenter’s reason for not completing his goal-directed action by recording whether they complete the experimenter’s initial goal or the alternative goal. The results showed that children helped complete the experimenter’s initial goal significantly more often after this goal had been interrupted than after it had been abandoned. These results support the hypothesis that children continue to update their representations of others’ goals over time by the age of two, and specifically that they differentiate between abandoned and interrupted goals. (shrink)

In the relational literature, the subject of termination - the ending of an analysis - has received scant attention, and traditional Freudian or ego-psychological criteria are not always enough to assess the readiness to terminate therapy in the coconstructed, intersubjective analytic relationship. _Good Enough Endings _seeks to remedy this gap, bringing together contributions from contemporary relational thinkers, while at the same time engaging with ideas from other psychoanalytic perspectives. Topics given consideration include: Can there be a relational criteria or paradigm (...) for termination, and what would it include? How do treatment goals of the analyst and/or that of the patient affect the decision to terminate? How do recent developments in attachment theory and research influence the preparation to end analysis? What occurs for the patient after termination, and how do we assess the need for follow-up? Integrating elements of existing psychoanalytic theory with the fruits of the relational turn, _Good Enough Endings _expands and expounds upon the relational considerations in ending analysis, providing a resource for reflection and insight into the final - and perhaps most difficult - aspect of psychoanalytic treatment. (shrink)

The new life heralded by an artificial heart is hugely complicated: medically, socially, culturally, and experientially. In this paper, I argue that the compulsory presentation of medical data by artificial hearts can transform a patient’s prereflective experience of their own body and the world. First, I introduce the paracorporeal medical devices called artificial hearts. Second, I introduce the phenomenological approach of Merleau-Ponty, particularly his concern with prereflective, embodied awareness. Third, I consider how patients experience their bodies vis a vis their (...) hearts. I then argue that the representation of cardiac conditions by artificial hearts turns the body from the origin of experience to an object of experience. Fourth, I consider Merleau-Ponty’s notion of motor intentionality and a well-known interpretation by Dreyfus, known as absorbed or skillful coping. I argue that representations of cardiac conditions may interrupt prereflective experience and crowd-out coping. (shrink)

Organisational psychological defences protect the self-esteem and moral integrity of the organisational personality even at the expense of sacrificing the morality of actions. This paper analyses the spectrum of defences used by an oil refinery and its parent company during an oil spill incident. A hypothetical model of defences built on Swajkowski’s four responses to accusations of organisational misconduct – refusals, excuses, justifications and concessions – is tested through this case. On the basis of empirical findings it is obvious that (...) defences delay, impede and interrupt the mitigation and recovery actions of incidents. It is not possible to break the defence behaviour of individuals because it is a built-in psychological mechanism in all humans serving a valuable purpose of dosing the pain of injury. However, it is possible to separate individual and organisational behaviour so that automatic organisational procedures mitigate, recover and, ultimately, prevent incidents. The organisational psychological task of crisis management is to mitigate the organisation’s ego defences, recover from its emotional turmoil and prevent further traumas by making its ego stronger and more flexible. The argument of this paper is that in practice organisational defences act as bumpers against becoming too conscious of the gap between the corporate rhetoric and reality, as subconscious breaks against too fast change demands, and as batteries in their preconscious effort to prepare for the change. Organisational refusals act as bumpers, excuses as breaks and justifications as batteries, while concessions imply that a change towards a more responsible corporation is taking place. (shrink)

Those who favor and those who oppose the interruption of pregnancy with anencephalic fetuses answer the question ‘what is the right to life?’ differently. Those in favor argue that life exists only when it is ‘viable’; that is to say, when cerebral activities occur or may occur. Those who oppose it argue that it is not possible to describe ‘life’ as residing in a particular quality, since life ‘exists from conception’. In fact, in both cases, the noun ‘life’ is (...) being defined by a particular quality, either as ‘viable’ or as ‘existing from the time of conception’. Also, simply saying that ‘there is life’ cannot count as a neutral answer since those who utter such a sentence employ an unspecified criterion to establish if there is life or not. There are two possible ways to investigate this controversial matter: either we look for a definition of ‘life’ which is neutral and objective and does not reside in a particular quality or we try to establish whether or not the search for a neutral point of view can lead to a satisfactory answer. In this article we explore the argument against the interruption of pregnancy – as defined above – in order to show 1) the impossibility of establishing a neutral point of view regarding knowledge; 2) the existence of a psychological motivation which justifies the longing for an absolute criterion for the evaluation of human actions. This psychological motivation is analyzed from a Nietzschean perspective. (shrink)

A modified visual search task demonstrates that humans are very good at resuming a search after it has been momentarily interrupted. This is shown by exceptionally rapid response time to a display that reappears after a brief interruption, even when an entirely different visual display is seen during the interruption and two different visual searches are performed simultaneously. This rapid resumption depends on the stability of the visual scene and is not due to display or response anticipations. These (...) results are consistent with the existence of an iterative hypothesis-testing mechanism that compares information stored in short-term memory (the perceptual hypothesis) with information about the display (the sensory pattern). In this view, rapid resumption occurs because a hypothesis based on a previous glance of the scene can be tested very rapidly in a subsequent glance, given that the initial hypothesis-generation step has already been performed. (shrink)

We investigated the impact of frequency of interruptions in a simulated medical visual search task. Participants performed the visual search task during which they were interrupted by a number-classification task in 25, 50, or 75% of all trials, respectively, reflecting the frequency conditions. Target presence and interruption were varied within-subjects, and interruption frequency was varied between-subjects. Globally, on a frequency condition level, participants in the low frequency condition had longer mean response times for the primary visual search task (...) than in the high condition, but there were no other performance differences between the three frequency conditions. Locally, on the level of specific interruption effects, accuracy decreased directly after interruptions for target present but not for target absent trials. Furthermore, interruptions caused significant interruption costs, reflected in slower overall RTs in interrupted than in uninterrupted trials. The combined findings show that especially for critical visual search tasks as in the medical field, interruptions—regardless of frequency—should be avoided. (shrink)

The present research examines psychological momentum (PM), a perceived force that lay intuition suggests influences performance. PM theory is proposed to account for how momentum perceptions arise, and four studies demonstrate the influence of lay intuitions about PM on expectations regarding performance outcomes. Study 1 establishes that individuals share intuitions about the types of events that precipitate PM, and Study 2 finds that defeating a rival increases momentum perception. Study 3 provides evidence for the lay belief that as more PM (...) accumulates during a prior task, there should be more residual momentum left to carry over to a subsequent task, and Study 4 finds that an individual whose PM is interrupted is expected to have greater difficulty completing a task than is an individual whose steady progress is interrupted. Discussion focuses on linkages between PM and related constructs. (shrink)

Understanding when it is acceptable to interrupt a joint activity is an important part of understanding what cooperation entails. Philosophical analyses have suggested that we should release our partner from a joint activity anytime the activity conflicts with fulfilling a moral obligation. To probe young children’s understanding of this aspect, we investigated whether 3-year-old children (N = 60) are sensitive to the legitimacy of motives (selfish condition vs. moral condition) leading agents to intentionally interrupt their joint activity. We measured whether (...) children protested or released their partner by scoring their reactions. Our results indicate that children did not manifest different reactions when the motive behind their partner leaving was moral than when the motive was selfish. However, our data showed a stable pattern: regardless of the partner’s motives, some 3-year-olds take initiatives to release their partners from joint activity, suggesting that measuring release is a valuable tool for investigating joint action. -/- . (shrink)

This article addresses the feeling of strangeness about the perception of time that many people with ordinary lifestyles experienced during the quarantine imposed to fight the presence of COVID-19. It describes different aspects of psychological time affected by the interruption of a normal routine and suggests some cognitive mechanisms, attention, and memory that might have been at play, leading to perceive time as being more or less long. The article also describes the critical role of anxiety and temporal uncertainty (...) and how they may affect the functioning of an internal clock and reminds the reader that there are individual differences in time-related aspects of the personality that contribute to the variety of impressions about duration experienced during the quarantine. (shrink)

The spread of COVID-19 in Italy resulted in the implementation of a lockdown that obligated the first time the general populace to remain at home for approximately two months. This lockdown interrupted citizens’ professional and educational activities, in addition to closing shops, offices and educational institutions. The resulting changes in people’s daily routines and activities induced unexpected changes in their thoughts, feelings and attitudes, in addition to altering their life perceptions. Consequently, the present study explores how young adults perceived their (...) lives under lockdown during the final week of March 2020, when the reported number of daily coronavirus infections reached its peak in Italy. The research was carried out among 293 university students (234 women and 59 men) with an average age of 20.85 years old (SD = 3.23). The researchers asked participants to describe the emotions, thoughts and experiences that characterized their time under lockdown. The study analyzed specific narratives related to time and space using grounded theory methodology, which was applied using Atlas 8 software, leading to the creation of 68 codes. The study organized these codes into three specific categories: confined in the present, confined in the past, and striving toward one’s goals. Finally, the researchers also created a core-category labeled “continuity of being.” The results showed that the closure of open spaces caused a division in participants’ perceptions of time continuity, with many viewing themselves as feeling fragmented and as living the present in a static and fixed way. Additionally, participants also saw the present as being discontinuous from the past, while, simultaneously, projecting toward the future and the changes it might bring. Finally, this study examined further implications surrounding individual projecting among young people in greater depth. (shrink)

Recent scholarship has inquired into the socio-historical, discursive genesis of trauma. Trauma and the Ontology of the Modern Subject, however, seeks what has not been actualized in trauma studies - that is, how the necessity and unassailable intensity of trauma is fastened to its historical emergence. We must ask not only what trauma means for the individual person's biography, but also what it means to be the historical subject of trauma. In other words, how does being human in this current (...) period of history implicate one's lived possibilities that are threatened, and perhaps framed, through trauma? Foucauldian sensibilities inform a critical and structural analysis that is hermeneutically grounded. Drawing on the history of ideas and on Lacan's work in particular, John L. Roberts argues that what we mean by trauma has developed over time, and that it is intimately tied with an ontology of the subject; that is to say, what it is to be, and means to be human. He argues that modern subjectivity - as articulated by Heidegger, Levinas, and Lacan - is structurally traumatic, founded in its finitude as self-withdrawal in time, its temporal self-absence becoming the very conditions for agency, truth and knowledge. The book also argues that this fractured temporal horizon - as an effect of an interrupting Otherness or alterity - is obscured through the discourses and technologies of the psy-disciplines (psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy). Consideration is given to social, political, and economic consequences of this concealment. Trauma and the Ontology of the Modern Subject will be of enduring interest to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists as well as scholars of philosophy and cultural studies. (shrink)

Wittgenstein finished part 1 of the Philosophical Investigations in the spring of 1945. From 1946 to 1949 he worked on the philosophy of psychology almost without interruption. The present two-volume work comprises many of his writings over this period. Some of the remarks contained here were culled for part 2 of the Investigations; others were set aside and appear in the collection known as Zettel. The great majority, however, although of excellent quality, have hitherto remained unpublished. This bilingual (...) edition of the Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology presents the first English translation of an essential body of Wittgenstein's work. It elaborates Wittgenstein's views on psychological concepts such as expectation, sensation, knowing how to follow a rule, and knowledge of the sensations of other persons. It also shows strong emphasis on the "anthropological" aspect of Wittgenstein's thought. Philosophers, as well as anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists will welcome this important publication. (shrink)

Background: In an unprecedented situation of interruption of the sporting dynamics, the world of sport is going through a series of adaptations necessary to continue functioning despite coronavirus disease 2019. More than ever, athletes are facing a different challenge, a source of discomfort and uncertainty, and one that absolutely alters not only sports calendars, but also trajectories, progressions, and approaches to sports life. Therefore, it is necessary to identify the levels of psychological vulnerability that may have been generated in (...) the athletes, because of the coexistence with dysfunctional responses during the COVID-19 experience, and which directly influence the decrease of their mental health.Methods: With a descriptive and transversal design, the study aims to identify the state of the dysfunctional psychological response of a sample of Spanish athletes. The DASS-21, Toronto-20, and Distress Tolerance Scale questionnaires were administered to a sample of high-level Spanish athletes in Olympic programs.Results: The results suggest that the analyzed athletes indicate high levels of dysfunctional response when their tolerance is low. In addition, the variables show less relational strength, when the capacity of tolerance to distress is worse and age is lower. At the same time, the greater the anxiety and uncertainty are, leading to more catastrophic and negative thoughts, the younger the athletes are.Conclusions: It is clear that both age and tolerance to distress are considered adequate protective factors for psychological vulnerability in general and for associated dysfunctional responses in particular. Moreover, the psychological resources offered by more experienced athletes are also a guarantee of protection against negativity and catastrophism. (shrink)

Chalmers introduced the hard problem of consciousness as a profound gap between experience and physical concepts. Philosophical theories were based on different interpretations concerning the qualia/concept gap, such as interactive dualism (Descartes), as well as mono aspect or dual aspect monism. From a bio-psychological perspective, the gap can be explained by the different activity of two mental functions realizing a mental representation of extra-mental reality. The function of elementary sensation requires active sense organs, which create an uninterrupted physical chain from (...) extra-mental reality to the brain and reflect the present. The function of categorizing reflection no longer needs sense organs, so that the physical chain to extra-mental reality is interrupted and now reflects the past. Whereas elementary sensation is an open system, categorizing reflection remains a closed system, separated from extra-mental reality. This creates the potentiality/reality gap, since prediction from the closed to the open system remains always uncertain. Elementary sensation is associated to specific qualia for each sense organ. Chalmers also attributed qualia to thoughts, with more neutral thought qualia. Thus at the qualia level, there is also an important gap, but now between specific sense qualia and neutral thought qualia. Since all physical concepts are simultaneously linked to neutral thought qualia, the hard problem might be explained by a qualia/qualia gap instead of a qualia/concept gap. The mental function of categorizing reflection induces the change from sense qualia to thought qualia by a categorization process. The specific sense qualia mosaic of an apple is reduced to physical concepts with neutral qualia by progressive categorization first to fruit, then to food, to chemicals and finally to calories. This might explain the gap felt in the hard problem, since specific sense qualia are completely different from neutral thought qualia, so that the hard problem could already be encountered at the qualia level. Since the gap of the hard problem is due to the interaction of different mental functions, it is compatible with a philosophical monism. (shrink)

Wittgenstein finished part 1 of the _Philosophical Investigations_ in the spring of 1945. From 1946 to 1949 he worked on the philosophy of psychology almost without interruption. The present two-volume work comprises many of his writings over this period. Some of the remarks contained here were culled for part 2 of the _Investigations_; others were set aside and appear in the collection known as Zettel. The great majority, however, although of excellent quality, have hitherto remained unpublished. This bilingual (...) edition of the _Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology_ presents the first English translation of an essential body of Wittgenstein's work. It elaborates Wittgenstein's views on psychological concepts such as expectation, sensation, knowing how to follow a rule, and knowledge of the sensations of other persons. It also shows strong emphasis on the "anthropological" aspect of Wittgenstein's thought. Philosophers, as well as anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists will welcome this important publication. (shrink)

Offers a sustained meditation on the role of interruption in modernity. This book departs from and elaborates an important but overlooked dimension of Walter Benjamin's discourse: the question of style as it bears upon temporality and spatiality. This work suggests that the time has come to revise existing paradigms.

This work provides a psychological perspective on globalization. It argues that multicultural experience may facilitate a merge of different cultural values, which forms a distinctively new state of mind. Experience with multicultural settings expands conceptual category boundaries, interrupts categorical thinking, and subsequently creates a new frame of thought. Studies identifying the important role of the multicultural experience in cognitive development and enhancement of creative abilities are presented to support this argument. The article questions the validity a of common critique that (...) globalization brings the world to the unified model of thought. It argues that this critique is an oversimplification of the matter caused by individuals' closed-mindedness and unreceptiveness to a new experience. (shrink)

As clinical-psychological scientists and practitioners increasingly work with diverse populations of traumatized people, it becomes increasingly important to attend to cultural models that influence the ways in which people understand and describe their responses to trauma. This paper focuses on potential uses of the concept of cultural script in this domain. Originally described by cognitive psychologists in the 1980s, scripts refer to specific behavioral and experiential sequences of elements such as thoughts, memories, attention patterns, bodily sensations, sleep abnormalities, emotions and (...) affective expressions, motivation, coping attempts and ritualized behaviors that are relevant to posttraumatic adjustment. We differentiate between experiences of traumatic stress that are scripted (e.g., cultural explanations are available) versus unscripted. Further characteristics such as script tracks, the effect of script interruptions, and contextual fit of scripts with other cultural models are also described. We consider examples of traumatic stress associated with war and organized, sexualized violence from ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ world regions. The concluding part of this review describes a number of possibilities for methodological approaches to assessment of cultural scripts. Capturing central elements of the script(s) of trauma would aid psychological researchers and clinicians in understanding the experiences of trauma in cultural context, which could ultimately lead to better clinical service opportunities worldwide. (shrink)

Philosophical interest in intentional action has flourished in recent decades. Typically, writers in the field of action theory seek necessary and sufficient conditions for a movement's being an action, conditions derived from a conceptual analysis of everyday action ascriptions. However, only a naturalistic account of intentional action, an account whose methods and aims are continuous with those of the empirical sciences, will truly help further our understanding of action as a biological phenomenon. ;Action is naturalized as a species of movement (...) that is both purposive and self-controlled, using these terms in novel senses. Various psychological and physiological models of purposiveness have been offered, including negative feedback, motor program, and dynamical systems models. However, while such non-historical models offer valuable insights into the nature of how organisms control their movements, they fail as general models of purposiveness because consideration of a movement's selectional history is required in order to classify movements as unitary behaviors rather than merely accidental motions. Non-historical models also fail to cover instances of unsuccessful purposive movements and cases of "functionally emergent behaviors." For such reasons, purposiveness must be seen as an historical property of movements; a movement is purposive insofar as it has a Millikanian proper function. ;An agent's capacity to exert a high degree of control over its movements marks the second key underlying property of action. I highlight an aspect of behavior-control which empirical theorists have largely ignored, namely the extent to which agents "could have done otherwise" than how they have in fact acted upon particular occasions. Self-control in this "could have done otherwise" sense is naturalized in terms of "modulatory interconnectivity." Modulatory interconnectivity involves the extent to which an agent's internal behavior-control modules facilitate behavioral interruptability via the interaction of informational links of inhibition and/or suppression. The greater the extent to which an agent's behavior-control modules have the capacity to modulate one another's activities, the more the agent has the capacity for self-control in the "could have done otherwise" sense. This view is elucidated and supported with the aid of models from robotics and neurophysiology. (shrink)

Mindfulness for the High Performance World provides a unique approach to mindfulness training, built upon the principles of Buddhist philosophy written in line with the Dalai Lama’s description of meditation and mindfulness as “Science of the Mind”. This unique volume explores mindfulness as a learnable skill in context with the underpinnings of the teachings of Eastern psychology. The authors, Norm, a physician, cancer researcher and triathlete and Karolynn, a psychotherapist, mindfulness meditation teacher and marathoner, live and work in a (...) high-stress, high-expectation world. Their approach is rooted in an understanding that thoughts produce biochemical and physiological changes and provides a strategic framework to instruct an individual on how to categorize types of thoughts. After harnessing this ability, one is positioned to become both more aware of his or her thoughts as well as the specific patterns of sensations they produce, or Sentinel SitesSM. The awareness of what the mind is doing and the ability to interrupt a thought pattern and/or control the response almost instantly leads one to having a healthier life, improved relationships with others and better adaptability to one’s environment. Emphasizing the importance of physical activity and nutrition, the authors present a systematic approach for people who want to learn and incorporate mindfulness and transform how they live without having to divert their lives and careers. Offering itself as an accessible and skill-based introduction to the principles, practices, and benefits of mindfulness, Mindfulness for the High Performance World is a useful resource for students, athletes and professionals living and working in high-performance, high-stress environments and also for mindfulness practitioners seeking to deepen their skill level. (shrink)

The definition of acedia presents unique conceptual problems among the eight Evagrian logismoi. Its descriptions are so complex and varied as to render the concept seemingly incoherent. This article argues that the conceptual unity of acedia has been obscured by the translation of Evagrian logismoi into the ‘deadly sins’ tradition, resulting in a category error. Acedia is more properly understood, not as a psychological state or a sin, but rather as an array of demonic temptations with the unifying end-goal of (...) interrupting the anchoritic ideal of sustained contemplation. (shrink)

Maybe, before we speak of time, or maybe whilst we are speaking of time, or maybe after we have spoken of time, in the various modes of time’s insistence to exist, one should give time to the talk of time. There are various different modes of time’s insistence to exist, such as quantum physics in conversation with relativity theory where time is constructed as a fourth dimension of space. Or there are the modes of time in history, religion, psychology (...) and philosophy, and each of these modes is composed, and composes its own specific object called time, and a particular subject who understands and interprets time in that particular mode. Yet, before, whilst or after these modes of time’s insistence to exist, one should maybe give time to time’s time. Give time for the various times to articulate themselves in the various modes of existence, thereby creating both a whole plurality of differing subjects, as well as plurality of differing objects, all called ‘time’. Once time has been given time to talk its talk, to articulate itself within the various modes, it will be interrupted by the articulations of time in various modes of time still to come. These disruptions of time by time always still to come opens the door for a theological narrative – a narrative on time, but created by the coming of messianic times, interpreted in the mode of hope but also in the mode of a promise from the past. (shrink)

Until recently, the development of the modern sciences has usually been described as a continuous unfolding of constantly expanding and differentiating research institutions on the one hand, and the accumulation of more and better knowledge on the other. The changes that have occurred both in scientific institutions and in the direction and content of research in the course of revolutions or comparable political changes pose significant challenges to such accounts. I would like to propose an interactive approach to this issue. (...) Instead of accepting a linear, deterministic model of scientific change as a result of political upheaval, I suggest that such political changes present an array of challenges to and possibilities for the interruption, redirection, reconstruction or effortful continuation of research. The central claim is that scientific development in times of political upheaval has proceeded in Germany primarily by means of increasing cooperation of scientists with the state, involving a process that I call the technologization of basic research. But this is not always a one-sided affair involving the subordination of science to practical politics or to ideology. Rather, I argue, what occurs is themobilization or reconstruction of physical, institutional, financial, cognitive and/or rhetorical resources. Such mobilizations can proceed in various directions: the state or agencies within it can mobilize scientists as resources in the interest of achieving certain political aims; scientists can convert themselves into such resources (or claim that they are doing so); or both things can happen at once. The approach is exemplified by examining continuities and changes in the situations of the sciences following the major turning points of 20th-century German history, symbolized by the dates 1918, 1933, 1945 and 1990. Considered in particular are: scientific changes in Germany following the Nazi takeover and creative innovations by émigré scientists working in different cultural settings; the massive transfer of scientific resources after Nazi Germany's defeat and attempts to carry on and reconstruct science in the two postwar German states; and the massive reorganization of scientific institutions in eastern Germany after unification. The examples come primarily from biology and experimental psychology, but physical sciences and particular branches of technology are considered as well. (shrink)