The Mirror and the Mind: A History of Self-Recognition in the Human Sciences by Katja Guenther

Abstract

Is history a mirror? One steals glimpses of this question throughout this excellent book, even though the author never steps through the looking-glass to answer it directly. Guenther’s subject is the mirror test, defined broadly as the use of mirrors to probe the capacity for self-recognition. This is a serious and superb intellectual history, tracking how mirrors function as material and metaphorical reflections of cognition across a range of fields. But the book also reflects aspects of the historian’s craft, or at least of the assumptions we bring to it. Near the frame, where the glass warps, there is a flickering image of the historian at work, projecting a model of the mind many of us take for granted onto the very figures who brought that model into being.Guenther’s chapters sketch a menagerie of human and non-human animals placed before mirrors. From Charles Darwin’s son in 1840, to many monkeys over the last century, to patients with “phantom limb” a decade ago, test subjects have helped hone ideas about consciousness, cognition, and cultural difference. In the first chapter, we watch the capacity for self-recognition become a milestone in child development; in the second, this capacity becomes quantitative data amid psychology’s shift toward behaviorism. Subsequently, robots and apes trouble our human exceptionalism by reacting to their reflections, and a wide range of humans in the second half of the book do the same by failing to react to theirs. Guenther gathers, chapter by the chapter, an exciting cast of characters around the scientific and medical mirror.And that is to say nothing of the book’s main subjects, the researchers and clinicians who scribbled notes and published papers about those whose behavior they observed. Figures like the cybernetician William Grey Walter and the psychiatrist Hilde Bruch drive the plot, even as apes and children (including Guenther’s own) are the ones looking in the mirror. It is in the ideas and ambitions of these scientific and medical practitioners that readers will begin to feel that they are staring not at historical actors, but at historians—that is, at themselves. After all, history is often classified as a human science, and we historians observe and account for behaviors as much as Guenther’s psychologists and primatologists do. What might we learn about our own limits by attending to theirs? How might The Mirror and the Mind be a mirror of our own minds?The advent of the “proper” mirror test, or the “mark test,” is a case in point. Developed in the late-1960s for infants and chimpanzees, testers “marked” subjects with dye and then exposed them to their reflections. If subjects rubbed at the dye, it was a sign that they saw “themselves” in the mirror, rather than a playmate or a rival. Gordon Gallup, one of the test’s inventors, used it to stretch the still-dominant paradigm of behaviorism. By plotting changes in chimpanzee behavior over time, Gallup thought he was seeing the kind of higher-level cognitive functions many strict behaviorists had sworn off. What Guenther reminds us, in exploring the development of the mark test, is that the human sciences must bridge a gap—in this case, from apes scratching to self-recognition. Psychology, on this view, is the story we tell connecting brains and behavior.What does this have to do with history? More than meets the eye. Guenther’s history of the mark test, told through the efforts of Gallup and others, reflects our own approach. How do we know what goes on in the heads of our actors? We bridge a gap, just as Gallup did. We infer motives and mental state by observable traces, and in doing so we practice the very behaviorism that Guenther so admirably historicizes. As a field, we have taken many “turns”: social, cultural, material, affective. But at the heart of each is the same model of the mind, of inner lives revealed through outward action. Guenther’s story is not a materialist one of mirrors “themselves,” nor an affective one of their delights. Instead, this book both explores and extends a particular approach to ideas, seeking them out in animal behavior. That the animal behavior in question is scientific research into the same set of questions only enhances the mirror-ball effect of Guenther’s beautiful book.