Governed by Affect: Hot Cognition and the End of Cold War PsychologyByMichaelPettit, Oxford University Press, 2024. 361 pp. $49.95 (cloth). ISBN: 9780197621851

Michael Pettit describes himself on his faculty homepage as a “critical historian of psychology.” It is an entirely fitting description. Written from within the department of psychology at York University in Toronto, which is in turn situated in the Faculty of Health, Pettit seems excellently positioned to target the intellectual and political shortcomings of the discipline of psychology from the 1940s to the present, and especially its claims to being a science of health. Most of the targets in this story are south of the border, giving the author a polite distance from his subject matter, but I do wonder what his immediate colleagues think. For psychologists who like to read the troubling history of their own discipline, this book should be uncomfortable. Pettit promises two things: to “make historical sense of recent developments in psychology” and, through this, to “cast new light on the changing historical experience of personhood” (p. 1). The first promise is fulfilled in great depth. The narrative is emplotted as a form of tragedy, of a piece with American imperialism, with psychology abandoning at various stages its finer sensibilities for democracy and the expansion of civil rights, and its capacity to listen with an egalitarian ear, to exploit new markets, shifting from the academy (and the laboratory) to the clinic in the process. Minor notes concerning psychology's contribution to the struggle for equality against structural barriers of sexism, homophobia, and racism—that is, the effects of society on the psychology of the individual and the collective—are soon steamrolled by vested interests in the American Psychological Association overwhelmingly concerned with getting paid, especially by exerting political influence to gain therapeutic autonomy from psychiatry and to tap into the list of things covered by third-party health insurance. This takes place in a broader context (including significant counterpart histories in the UK and Israel) of shifting attention, from cognitivism to affective science, the allure of automaticity, and the fetish for the face, in all of which the human tends to get lost in favor of a functional metaphor drifting from mechanism to computer to network. The psychological gaze, as a generality, missed the person altogether in its quest to define a machine it could get paid for fixing. Or just to get paid. In all this, there is a backdrop of militarism, or at least of the opportunities provided by military association to realize new powers and new veneers of professionalism. There are a few damning phrases in the book that characterize the whole: “psychology certainly privatized social problems, attributing mental health [sic] to personal defects remedied through individualized care” (p. 126); disciplinary hubris shaped a central conceit of the psychologist's “unique position in diagnosing human fallibilities while somehow remaining aloof from those same dynamics” (p. 167); and psychology “functioned as science-looking technology for providing persuasive results without any regard for the truth… the benign bullshit provided cover for the harmful because not even psychologists could tell the difference anymore” (p. 294). The second promise, about the experience of personhood, cannot be delivered through the approach taken here. A piece of the puzzle of the experience of personhood might be had by this top-down look at the creep of psychology and affective science into everyday life, with Pettit coming closest in the chapter on the shifting fortunes of American self-esteem, but the rest of the pieces can only be assembled through a different methodology. The notion that psychology enables a “form of personhood” (p. 25) is fascinating, and doubtless many paying customers bought into the templates psychologists provided for them. But it is crucial to understand that in most cases these forms were the changing products of the psychological agenda (and its politics), and not in any way a representation or analysis of personhood in general. The history of the modern self and the experience of personhood requires a much broader approach that captures the biocultural, linguistic, religious, intellectual, technological, material and social fabric of human experience from the point of view of the subject, not his or her therapist. These themes do crop up in Pettit's book, but as artefacts of the situated psychological imagination, not of the lived experience of Americans in general. Aside from a passing reference to one book by Peter Stearns (misidentified as an intellectual historian), Pettit seems unfamiliar with historians of emotions and experience and their work in the last two decades. That's a pity because they have much to offer precisely to this strand of his intended contribution. This important account of the rise of affective science, in particular, might have been even more persuasive were it embedded in a broader historiographical framework. Pettit is strong on the political context, at least insofar as the fortunes of psychology are concerned. The Cold War framing perforce puts psychology in the broad fabric of national and international ideological agendas, showing the extent to which the discipline was directed, even squeezed, by concerns beyond the ivory tower as well as the political commitments within it. This is a decidedly plural, messy story that balances contradictory currents in Cold War American politics and society. The difference and the distance between high political machinations and the American person are not really accounted for, but the political implications of psychological expertise ready to serve power are explored in grim detail. It terminates in psychology's seeming return to Victorian moralism in service of neoliberalism, and to the underwriting of torture in the name of counterinsurgency intelligence gathering. And all this in the context of a disciplinary reputation floundering on the rocks of replicability. There are also occasional references to the effects of political forces on the personal lives of psychologists themselves and their clients. Some of them, as with Else Frenkel-Brunswik, for example, read like tragic vignettes. Others, like Albert Ellis' “rational” and essentially heteronormative sexuality peddled via cheap print and pornography, were soon overtaken by the objections of those individuals who insisted they would rather speak for themselves. Other psychologist biographies seem to flow with the current and extension of American power, both soft and hard, in a way that made psychology and its vision of the human a thoroughly but narrowly American concern. Insofar as this book documents the “cultivation of a psychological society” (p. 63), it documents it only from the perspective of the discipline of psychology, its practitioners, and limited evidence from their clients or critics, not of a psychological society in more general terms. There are telling moments that illustrate this gap, as when “the clinically depressed replaced the habitually neurotic as the default therapeutic subject. Depression was at once indelible going back to antiquity and utterly modern” (p. 92). Here, and consistently, we learn more about the shifting diagnostic and analytical categories of psychologists than we learn about the experience that took place either within them or beyond them. That shifting conceptual categories had and have an effect on experience is undeniable, but how that works is best pursued elsewhere.

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