5 December 2011

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.

Room B15, UCL Anatomy Building, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT

For poster and location map: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/histmed/events/Stephen_Casper_seminar

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