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Lisa Blackman's (1994) conception of a "history of the present" is one that I find very attractive. Based on Foucault's archaeology of knowledge" (Foucault, 1972), she summarizes her project as follows: The object of a 'history of the resent' is to frame a problem within present understandings, and to determine 'how' that problem came to be rendered within a specific assemblage of objects, concepts, subject positions and strategies. The problem is translated into a question, with the purpose of interrogating the past in order to make the conditions of possibility of the present intelligible, that is, 'how' was it possible to think of individuals in terms of certain psychological capacities, 'how' was it possible to make sense of hallucinations as fundamentally pathological phenomena, 'how' was a particular form of the individual subject constituted historically? (Blackman, 1994, pp. 491-492)Some methodological details of what Blackman is proposing are original, but it will be clear, especially from the last of her questions, that her project is one that has long been exemplified in the work of Kurt Danziger under the rubric of "critical historiography." On examining Danziger's treatment of what I shall now, following Blackman, call "history of the present," we find an essential distinction between two varieties of that history, a distinction that is vital to the overall project. As Danziger maintains, histories of the present may be either "critical" or "celebratory" (1994; after Forman, 1991) or "ceremonial" (1991; after Harris, 1980). It is clearly not the latter that Blackman is advocating. It is of course the celebratory history of the present that we find in too many of our history-of-psychology textbooks. Danziger describes its project as follows: It can retrace the steps by which the pinnacle of the present was reached; it can describe the errors along the way. But in any case it will take the conventional wisdom of the present as its standard and judge the past by that. In other words, this will be Whig history, and whatever it discovers about the past will be implicitly a celebration of the present and of the steps by which it was achieved. This is 'feel good' history which will never have any impact on current scientific practices. Its place in the life of the discipline is not in the area of research or knowledge generation but in the area of public relations through undergraduate training. These are the services which disciplinary history renders to the central scientific tasks of the discipline. (Danziger, 1994, p. 469). The critical version of the history of the present on the other hand is based on an understanding of the discipline as a social construction. It focuses on "social problems of science or on science as a social problem" (Forman, 1991, p. 83; quoted in Danziger, 1994, p. 470). Danziger identifies three potential effects on the discipline: "it could affect conceptions of the subject-matter of psychology, the understanding of its practices, and the nature of its social contribution" (1994, p. 479). This critical potential is viewed by many as subversive and politically dangerous. Its practitioners are thus understandably unpopular and often find themselves "outside the pale as far as the disciplinary community is concerned" (Danziger, 1994, p. 470), especially if they are "marginal insiders," as most who study and teach the history of psychology are. All this will already be clear to those who have read Danziger's Constructing the Subject (1990) and especially to those who have used it in teaching. A history of the present implies a "history of the past." I do not wish to dwell on this much beyond noting that it is both possible and actual. For anyone grown weary of celebratory drudgery and/or the risks and hazards of criticism, the past can be exceedingly seductive. There is a comfortable harmlessness in antiquarianism that provides some degree of professional safety, while, at the same time, offering a preoccupation that can be as absorbing as the best kind of detective work. As Danziger observed in 1991, some of this work may be devoted to questions like "Is A buried in B's grave?" (p. 333), but one cannot be unqualifiedly disapproving of this kind of archival snooping. It is capable of providing, and certainly has provided, significant material for the use of critical historiography. In his 1990 book Danziger put to effective use a number of works that themselves would fall into this category. But let me turn to another history, which I think is at least implicit in Danziger's work: I shall call this the "history of the future." There is of course a sense in which a critical history of the present is already a history of the future. What is the point of developing a critique of present concepts, practices, and social contributions, if it is not to re-orient the discipline with respect to future concepts, practices, and social contributions? Surely, the critique of the experimental method and its obsession with measurement and statistical analysis that tells us of how we came to accept as dominant this manner of constructing the subject within psychology is concerned with informing us how this method is laden with problems, how it is often conceptually and methodologically self-defeating, and how it all too frequently violates the interests of precisely the socially and historically situated, concrete human beings whom we study, and that something ought to be done about it. The question then is: What is to be done? For most of our colleagues the answer to this question will be complicated by professional interests. They have spent much of their lives learning to do psychology like this; they are getting their work published; they have the esteem of their colleagues -at least in their subdisciplines-; and they are advancing in the academic hierarchy. Everything seems to be on the side of the status quo. To give that up would be to risk losing everything that had been gained through so many years of hard work. And, in any case, what are the alternative possibilities? Even among those who listen and seem to understand the critique sympathetically, we often discover a monumental failure of the imagination. On the other hand, there are those few who confidently move ahead with new concepts, practices, and eventual social contributions. Often as not, we see them reaching back to Vygotsky, Bühler, Dilthey, Wittgenstein, Volo_inov, Nietzsche, or even Herder and Hegel. But no one, I wager, who is effective at this is simply reproducing the thoughts and methods of historical figures. Rather, their works are studied as sources of inspiration, as sources of ideas about alternative ways of doing psychology. The kind of history exemplified herethe "history of the future," as I am calling ithas the express purpose of stimulating an expansion of the possibilities for a future psychology. I shall sketch two examples. The first is taken from Danziger's Constructing the Subject (1990). After having laid out a compelling case that the real, concrete person has in at least the last century of psychology's history been sacrificed at the altar of "arithromophic methodolatry," Danziger offers the reader the consolation of a positive instance, which he called the "lost continent: Lewin's Berlin group" (1990, pp. 173ff.). Lewin's work in Berlin provides an example of how scientific knowledge of concrete subjects not only could be but in fact has been historically produced. Lewin's work was "marked by an intense sense of the embeddedness of the personality in social situations" (p. 174). This was translated into an understanding of the experiment itself as a social situation in which "the relationship of subjects and investigators, being part of the situation, was necessarily part of the object of investigation" (p. 174). The work of Tamara Dembo is cited as an example of how this produced a "type of analysis [in which] the social practice of investigation for the first time becomes an object of research interest" (p. 175). The treatment of the experiment as a social situation in this way made it superfluous, if not impossible, to generate "results expressed in terms of relationships among independently defined variables" (p. 176). This did not mean the abandonment of quantification, but a use of it that now made it serve knowledge production rather than the other way around. And, as these examples illustrate, when it is used in this way it has a function and appearance that are quite different from what we teach in our introductory methods courses. A number of important characteristics of an alternative possible practice are modelled here. The treatment of investigation as an inherently social one leads to a participatory form of research design. Quantification is no longer used as a means of abstraction. Social situations reveal the play of structures that cannot be captured in operational descriptions and empirical measures; it becomes necessary to distinguish, as Lewin did, between "phenotype" and "genotype" (p. 177). The work also reveals conceptions of scientific generalization and law that differ radically from those that have become customary for us. Whether one agrees with the details of what Lewin did or concluded is largely beside the point. The work of Lewin, his colleagues, and students, offers a strong contrast with the currently hegemonic methodology. It can, at the very least, fire the imagination sufficiently to glimpse possible paths through the present quagmire. It should not go unnoted here that Lewin has played a similar role in other critical accounts as well (e.g., Holzkamp, 1991, p. 100). Let me turn to my second example, that of researching the history of Canadian psychology. One obvious present benefit of this is the contribution it makes to a concrete national identity in our discipline. This is crucial to overcoming the cultural imperialism that, Danziger has noted with approval, is currently being replaced by a healthier "polycentric position in which there are diverse but intercommunica-ting centers of psychological work that reflect a diversity of local conditions and traditions" (1994, p. 477). In this sense alone, research on Canadian psychology would count at least as a critical "history of the present." With respect to the future, research on psychological thought of the Canadian past also serves much the same critical, future-oriented function as a reexamination of Lewin's Berlin work. Where the hegemonic ideology of our discipline has left us utterly devoid of any conception of the concrete, situated person, certain major figures in our own history -G. P. Young, J. C. Murray, J. Watson, and G. S. Brett in particular- were animated by a very clear vision of the unity of subject and society. For these thinkers, the person was not only situated but was a conscious moral agent, who was the true historical subject of his or her action and lived experience. Their science could never have been "value-free," purporting to deal only with the universal, ahistorical, asocietal, abstract individual. Their understanding was often clearly reflected in the causes to which they attached themselves in their non-academic lives, such as Murray's personal crusade for the rights of women and workers. We will not learn much from these philosopher-psychologists about experimental methods, but surely we will want our future methods and practices, as well as our concepts and social contributions, to reflect that vital moral dimension of human psychical existence that they knew to be inextricable from the necessary situatedness of subjects. John B. Watson is reported to have said near the end of his life, "when you're dead, you're all dead" (Buckley, 1989, p. 182). For others who are more relevant to a history of the future, however, a line from Simonides of Ceos (479 BCE) is more apt: "they have died but they are not dead" (Campbell, 1991, p. 526). And, if I am right, this will be true not only for the present but also for the future. Indeed the future health of psychology may very well depend on its history having a future.

Blackman, L. M. (1994). Whatis doing history?: The use of history to understand the constitution of contemporary psychological objects. Theory & Psychology, 4, 485-504.

Buckley, K. W. (1989). Mechanical man. New York: Guilford.Campbell, D. A., (Ed. & Trans.) (1991). Greek lyric (Vol. 3). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Danziger, K. (1990). Constructing the subject. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Danziger, K. (1991). Introduction to the special issue on "New developments in the history of psychology." History of the Human Sciences, 4, 327-333.

Danziger, K. (1994). Does the history of psychology have a future? Theory & Psychology, 4, 467-484.

Forman, P. (1991). Independence, not transcendence, for the historian of science. Isis, 82, 71-86.

Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge. London: Routledge.

Harris, B. (1980). Ceremonial versus critical history of psychology. American Psychologist, 35, 218-219.

Holzkamp, K. (1991). Psychoanalysis and Marxist psychology. In C. Tolman & W. Maiers (Eds.), Critical Psychology (pp. 81-101). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Charles Tolman is Professor of psychology at the University of Victoria. He is author of Psychology, Society, and Subjectivity (Routledge, 1994), editor of Positivism in Psychology (SpringerVerlag),coeditor with W. Maiers of Critical Psychology (Cambridge University Press, 1991), and coeditor with I. Lubek, R. van Hezewijk, & G. Pheterson of Issues and Trends in Theoretical Psychology (Springer, 1995).

Fuente:
History and Philosophy of Psychology Bulletin. Vol. 7, No. 2, 1995. Special Issue Tribute to Kurt Danziger