Medicine, Emotion and Disease, 1700–1950 pp 144-168 | Cite as
From Clever Hans to Michael Balint: Emotion, Influence and the Unconscious in British Medical Practice
Abstract
The story of Clever Hans, the mathematical wonder horse, is now relegated to undergraduate textbooks on psychology and ethology. Yet for a few years, at the beginning of the twentieth century, people all over the world thought he was a truly remarkable beast. Owned and trained by Russian aristocrat, Wilhelm von Osten, he had been coached for ten years in elementary mathematics using a collection of skittles, carrots and an abacus. After two years of intense tuition, Hans had mastered basic numeracy, tapping out the correct answers to arithmetical problems with his hooves. A few years later he had graduated to more complex algebraic feats and his reputation as mathematical prodigy soon brought him to the attention of the Berlin Board of Education. Inspired by the pedagogical possibilities raised by Hans’s tuition, the board established a twelve men investigative commission led by the Berlin psychologist, Carl Stumpf.1
Keywords
British Medical Journal Royal College Individual Psychology Private World National BiographyPreview
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Notes
- Ralph Harrington, ‘Railway Spine and Victorian Responses to PTSD’, Journal of Psychosomatic Research (1996), 40–1, pp. 11–4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Henri F. Ellenberger, Discovery of the Unconscious (1970), 171ff; Crabtree, Mesmer, pp. 164–68.Google Scholar
- For example, Robert Brudenell Carter, On the Pathology and Treatment of Hysteria (London: Churchill, 1853).Google Scholar
- On Sinclair, see Suzanne Raitt, May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).Google Scholar
- Francis Graham Crookshank, ‘Types of Personality with Special Reference to Individual Psychology’, Lancet (1930), 215, pp. 546–48.Google Scholar
- ‘The Name and the Word: Neo-Hippocratism and Language in Interwar Britain’, in David Cantor (ed.), Reinventing Hippocrates (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 280–301.Google Scholar
- Edward Mapother, ‘Tough or Tender. A Plea for Nominalism in Psychiatry’, Presidential address of the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine (1934), 27, pp. 1687–712.Google Scholar