Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences最新文献

The US Army employed organizational and behavioral sciences in the context of the emerging Postindustrial political economy to shape its new strategic thought in the 1980s. This article examines how a group of military intellectuals in the Army applied ideas from these sciences to promote officer decision-making and decentralization while maintaining the Army's culture and ethics. They had significant reservations about bringing new ideas from the social sciences into the Army because Robert McNamara's modern cybernetic strategy had scarred the Army's morale and sense of self during the Vietnam War. Instead, the intellectuals carefully adapted ideas into the Army with an unsentimental attitude as it emerged from its post-Vietnam decline so it could fight complex maneuver warfare. Their strategic thought in the late Cold War made the Army a flexible global-spanning force for the unipolar moment in the 1990s and early 2000s.

A large literature has formed around the question of how Freud's Jewishness and/or Judaism influenced his psychological discoveries and development of psychoanalytic theory and methods. The article organizes the literature into several core theses but brings new clarity and insight by applying two essential criteria to demonstrate an impact of Judaism on Freud's thinking: direct content and historical timing. First, there should be evidence that Freud incorporated actual content from Jewish sources, and second, this incorporation must have occurred during the most crucial period of Freud's early discovery, conceptualization, and development of psychoanalysis, roughly 1893–1910. Thus, for example, Bakan's well-known theory that Freud studied Kabbala is completely negated by the absence of any evidence in the required time period. Part I reviews the literature on the influence of Freud's ethnic/cultural Jewish identity. Part II introduces the Judaic sacred literature, explores Freud's education in Judaism and Hebrew, and presents evidence that Freud had the motive, means, and resources to discover and draw from the “Dream Segment” of the Talmud—along with the traditional Judaic methods and techniques of textual exegesis. Freud then applied these same Judaic word-centered interpretive methods—used for revealing an invisible God—to revealing an invisible Unconscious in four successive books in 1900, 1901, and 1905.

The primary aim of this article is to give a more detailed exposition of the cultural, personal, and theoretical contexts in which the Viennese psychoanalyst, Herbert Silberer's theories were born. When assessing the broader picture that this approach offers, it can be concluded that Silberer was an innovative thinker who inspired several of his contemporaries. Recognized in many respects by the society and scholars of this time, he represented quite a different viewpoint that was significantly influenced by several forms of Western esoteric thinking. Yet his main aim was to contribute to the field of psychoanalysis and develop a theory in which rationalistic psychoanalytic interpretations were combined with nonreductive approaches to mystical experiences. Silberer's name is frequently mentioned in a specific context in which his tragic suicide is emphasized rather than his innovations. Upon evaluating the materials recording Silberer's private life, it seems very likely that his suicide was not triggered by the criticism of Freud alone. Silberer's family affairs, his relationship with his father, and his financial and professional struggles could have all contributed to his tragic decision. This paper contends that Silberer's oeuvre deserves greater attention and must be evaluated based upon its own merit.