Psychometric Means: Neuropsychiatry and the Ends of Psychometric Testing
Stephen T. Casper, Assistant Professor, Clarkson University, Humanities and Social Sciences
The Rorschach Test, Slosson Intelligence Test, Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory – each test is a psychometric tool that transformed
neuropsychiatry. Judged one way, such tools readily fit into the developmental history of psychiatry and neurology; they are a part of the narrative of those field’s advances in understanding, intervening, and treating people with mental illnesses. At the
same time, the advent of such tools also fits into a history of neuropsychiatry as a record of the rise of obsessional observational and evaluative techniques and technologies that formed, disciplined, and supervised individuals, groups, and societies.
Both narratives rather neatly parallel a more general thesis recently advanced by Paul Forman that revises contemporary understanding of the relationship between science and technology
in the (distinct) ages of modernity and postmodernity. Using psychometrics – especially the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory – to illustrate its case, this paper compares these two narratives for the history of psychometrics and contrasts both with
Forman’s more general observations. It appears that the advent of psychometrics, the contexts in which psychometrics developed, as well as the alternative historical narratives themselves, parallel Forman’s more general historical claims.
Seminar, Monday 5 December 2011, 5.30 pm, University College London
For more details:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/histmed/events
Dr Carole Reeves
UCL Centre for the History of Medicine
University College London
Division of Biosciences
Medical Sciences Building, Room 1MO1
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT
Tel +44 (o)207 679 3223
www.ucl.ac.uk/histmed