7 August 2020
The committee to select the best article in History of Psychology for Vol. 22 (2019) is delighted to announce its unanimous choice: Sebastiaan Broere (2019). “Picturing Ethnopsychology: A Colonial Psychiatrist’s Struggles to Examine Javanese Minds, 1910–1925,” 22(3), 266-286. This article offers an exceptionally rich and nuanced analysis of Dutch psychiatrist C. F. Engelhard, who set out in the first decades of the twentieth century to apply the clinical expertise acquired in the Netherlands to native subjects in Java with the aid of psychological tests – with entirely ambiguous results. As Broere demonstrates, Engelhard was very much a scientist of his time. He was unable in any meaningful way to see beyond the blinders of his own imperialist imagination. With this excellent essay, Broere provides a model of historical inquiry: thoroughly researched, always accessible, and fascinating to read from start to finish. It adds substantially to our understanding of the overlapping histories of colonial psychiatry, psychometric testing, ethnopsychology, and the dilemmas of cross-cultural social scientific research.
Broere, S. (2019). Picturing ethnopsychology: A colonial psychiatrist’s struggles to examine Javanese minds, 1910–1925 History of Psychology, 22(3), 266–286.