Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences:Vol. 33(2), 179–180 Spring 1997© 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. CCC 0022-5061/97/020179-02

Roger Smith. Inhibition: History and Meaning in the Sciences of Mind and Brain. Berke-ley: University of California Press, 1992. 333 pp. $45.00 (cloth)

Roger Smith’s latest contribution to history of science, as with his Trial by Medicine,displays complete mastery of the primary and secondary materials as well as original andsuggestive interpretive powers. Inhibition is a book about a word, but a word used over longstretches of time and in various contexts in such a way as to challenge absolutist notionsabout the objectivity of science or its alleged cultural aloofness. In his provocative “Reflec-tions” at the end of the current work, Smith concludes that

“. . . the language of inhibition integrated scientific and lay visions of control andthereby retained a seductive potential for those writers who desired a human sciencespeaking to and for general as well as specialized audiences.” (p. 229)

In this passage readers will discover the burden of the subtitle of the work; Inhibitionexamines the concept of inhibition in physiology, psychology, and the larger culture andreaches the conclusion that the seemingly and utterly “natural” mechanisms and processes towhich the term has been attached were themselves drawn from the broader contexts of poli-tics and morality. What is offered, then, is a treatise in what is at once philosophy of historyand sociology of knowledge. The central argument finds support and exemplawithin the sci-entific and discursive communities in which the tension between excitation and inhibition,anarchy and restraint, freedom and control, is expressed in a different voice but with muchby way of foundational shared meanings.

There are, then, two books in one in this scrupulously researched volume. The historianof psychology will find in these pages a detailed account of some of the seminal research andtheory on which notions of psychophysiological inhibitory processes are based. Non-special-ists will be well instructed by the pages devoted to the reflex-concept, the pioneering researchof Robert Whytt, the controversies surrounding the ever controversial Marshall Hall, the emer-gence of the Russian school (Sechenov, Pavlov), the influence of Sherrington (and the influ-ences on Sherrington). But even in these pages, in which historical scholarship might extricateitself from sociology of knowledge, the former seems dangerously porous to the latter. Per-haps a single example (pp. 145 ff.) will reveal what I take to be the danger. Though acknowl-edged by Smith as a leader in the cause of physiological psychology, Alexander Bain is said tooffer a “charming example” of the use of technical or scientific concepts for essentially moralor moralistic purposes. Thus is Bain’s brief passage about the value of early rising and the for-mation of character plumbed for its subtext: Bain speaks of a conflict between indulgence and“the collective interests of life”, and ends the lesson with reference to “. . . a current of ner-vous power. . . sapping the vanquished impulse.” What this leads Smith to conclude is thatBain has “. . . internalized conventions of social order,” though he “. . . contributed nothingto working out the relation at the level of empirical detail. He provided no physiological ana-logues for the conflict of motives and the formation of moral habits” (p. 147).

But Bain’s writings do, indeed, urge such analogues on the reader; analogues quite sys-tematically eschewed by Bain’s close friend, J. S. Mill. In his Science of Education,not tomention his The Emotions and the Willthere are numerous analogies developed between thenervous and the social, the physical and the moral. Now, the question that naturally arises isless whether this reinforces Smith’s thesis than whether something peculiar or suspect is atwork here. Bain, of course, was satisfied that the sensory, cognitive, volitional and affective

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dimensions of life were to be understood in terms of the functional organization of the ner-vous system. For all the complaints against phrenology, duly noted by Bain,he still advanceda defense of the general perspective. So it would be entirely unsurprising for him—and forall who subscribed to just this genre of psychobiology—to understand any number of social,moral and political dispositions as reflective of underlying physiological processes.

Since the time of the pre-Socratics, the culture of thought has hosted broad conceptionsof the normal or the ideal emerging from states of conflict. Plato’s charioteer, Aristotle’s me-son ariston, Fichte’s dialectic of freedom—the list is longer than an arm. Psychology andneurophysiology (unlike physics and astronomy) were to be sciences whose subject-matterwas drawn from the experiences of life. On the (highly arguable) assumption that scientificlaws are but redescriptions of experience it was predictable that the daily and historicalrecord of parties in conflict, laws and the lawless,pressure and counter-pressure would find amore foundational explication in the physiology of excitation and inhibition.

This much offered as a mild cavil, I can assure readers that the pages of Inhibition willinform and stimulate.

Reviewed by Daniel Robinson,Professor of Psychology, Georgetown University, Wash-ington,DC 20007.

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