This book provides a genealogical perspective on various forms of mind reading in different settings. We understand mind reading in a broad sense as the twentieth-century attempt to generate knowledge of what people held in their minds – with a focus on scientifically-based governmental practices. This volume considers the techniques of mind reading within a wider perspective of discussions about technological innovation within neuroscience, the juridical system, “occult” practices and discourses within the wider field of parapsychology and magical beliefs. The authors address the practice of, and discourses on, mind reading as they form part of the consolidation of modern governmental techniques. The collected contributions explore the question of how these techniques have been epistemically formed, institutionalized, practiced, discussed, and how they have been used to shape forms of subjectivities – collectively through human consciousness or individually through the criminal, deviant, or spiritual subject. The first part of this book focuses on the technologies and media of mind reading, while the second part addresses practices of mind reading as they have been used within the juridical sphere. The volume is of interest to a broad scholarly readership dealing with topics in interdisciplinary fields such as the history of science, history of knowledge, cultural studies, and techniques of subjectivization.
Author(s): Laurens Schlicht; Carla Seemann; Christian Kassung
Series: Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture
Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: xiii+275
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
1 Introduction
Mind Reading as Contest Zone
Part I Technology and Mind Reading: Perspectives on Media and Occult Practices
2 Electrical Potential: Mind Reading as Collaborative Action
Harvesting Human Signals
Mental Mapping for Commerce: Multimer
Selling a “Brainwave Symphony”
Concluding Thoughts
3 The Omega Factor: The Revival of Telepathy in the 1970s
Psychotronic Technologies
The New Age: Magic or Terror?
Periodizing Peak Psi
4 Visualizing Thoughts: Photography, Neurology and Neuroimaging
5 How Stage Magic Perpetuates Magical Beliefs
Studying the Success of Deception: Mind-Over-Mind Routines
Conclusions on the Success of Deception: Commonalities from Mind-Over-Mind Routines
General Conclusion
Part II Reading and Interpreting the Criminal Mind: Practices of Policing and Political Control
6 The Idea of Reading Someone’s Thoughts in Contemporary Lie Detection Techniques
Introduction
On Understanding the Lie and Its Detection
Who May Read Mind and Soul? Polygraphs in German Courtrooms
Mind Reading as Science? Lie Detection in the Neuropsychological Laboratory
Conclusion
7 Reading the Criminal in the Austrian School of Criminology: Unveiling the Deviant Character Through Measurement and Intuitive Introspection
Between Exact Science and Everyday Psychology—Hans Gross
Intuitive Introspection—Adolf Lenz
Instrumental Lie Detection and Registration of Expression—Ernst Seelig
Epistemological Conclusions
8 Reading Children’s Minds: Female Criminal Police and the Psychology of Testimony, ca. 1920–1944, the Cases of Maria Zillig and Berta Rathsam
Female Criminal Police
Psychology
Zillig’s Experiments on Children’s Lies
The Case of Berta Rathsam
Conclusion
Abbreviations
9 Mind Reading Through Body Language in Early Spanish Criminology and Juridical Psychology
Introduction
Techniques of Mind Reading in Early Criminology
Anthropometry of the Criminal Body
Deciphering the ‘Social Body’: The Vocabulary of the Mischievous Mind
Managing Criminality Through Juridical Psychology
Techniques of Bodily Mind Reading in Mira’s Textbook on Juridical Psychology (1932)
Muscular In-Tensions: Criminological Uses of Mira’s Personality Test
Final Discussion: Reading Criminal Propensity Through Bodily Characteristics and Actions
10 “Talk to Each Other—But How?” Operative Psychology and IM-Work as “Micro-Totalitarian Practice”
Introduction
A Short History of “Operative Psychology” in the GDR
The “IM System” in the GDR
How to “Open Up” and “Win Over” an IM
“Relationship Work” in the MFS—A Preliminary Definition
“Relationship Work” as a Micro-Totalitarian Practice
11 A New Look for Psychology: Reading the Political Unconscious from the Authoritarian Personality to Implicit Bias
The Psychological Front and the Post-war Reconstruction of Psychology
Experimenting from the Left
The Red Scare and the Cooling of Cognition
Reviving New Look
Conclusion
Index
