Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (30 page)

The first populariser of Binet’s scales in America was
H. H.
Goddard, the contentious director of research at the Vineland Training School for Feebleminded Girls and Boys in New Jersey.
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Goddard was a much fiercer Darwinian than Binet, and after his innovations mental testing would never be the same again.
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In those days, there were two technical terms employed in psychology that are not always used in the same way now. An ‘idiot’ was someone who could not master full speech, so had difficulty following instructions, and was judged to have a mental age of not more than three. An ‘imbecile,’ meanwhile, was someone who could not master written language and was considered to have a mental age somewhere between three and seven. Goddard’s first innovation was to coin a new term – ‘moron,’ from the Greek, meaning foolish – to denote the feebleminded individuals who were just below normal intelligence.
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Between 1912 and the outbreak of war Goddard carried out a number of experiments in which he concluded, alarmingly – or absurdly – that between 50 and 80 percent of ordinary Americans had mental ages of eleven or less and were therefore morons. Goddard was alarmed because, for him, the moron was
the chief threat to society. This was because idiots and imbeciles were obvious, could be locked up without too much public concern, and were in any case extremely unlikely to reproduce. On the other hand, for Goddard, morons could never be leaders or even really think for themselves; they were workers, drones who had to be told what to do. There were a lot of them, and most would reproduce to manufacture more of their own kind. Goddard’s real worry was immigration, and in one extraordinary set of studies where he was allowed to test the immigrants then arriving at Ellis Island, he managed to show to his own satisfaction (and again, alarm) that as many as four-fifths of Hungarians, Italians, and Russians were ‘moronic.’
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Goddard’s approach was taken up by
Lewis Terman,
who amalgamated it with that of Charles Spearman, an English army officer who had studied under the famous German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt at Leipzig and fought in the Boer War. Until Spearman, most of the practitioners of the young science of psychology were interested in people at the extremes of the intelligence scale – the very dull or the very bright. But Spearman was interested in the tendency of those people who were good at one mental task to be good at others. In time this led him to the concept of intelligence as made up of a ‘general’ ability, or
g,
which he believed underlay many activities. On top of
g,
said Spearman, there were a number of specific abilities, such as mathematical, musical, and spatial ability. This became known as the two-factor theory of intelligence.
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By the outbreak of World War I, Terman had moved to California. There, attached to Stanford University, he refined the tests devised by Binet and his other predecessors, making the
‘Stanford-Binet’
tests less a diagnosis of people in need of special education and more an examination of ‘higher,’ more complex cognitive functioning, ranging over a wider spread of abilities. Tasks included such things as size of vocabulary, orientation in space and time, ability to detect absurdities, knowledge of familiar things, and eye–hand coordination.
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Under Terman, therefore, the IQ became a general concept that could be applied to anyone and everyone. Terman also had the idea to multiply Stern’s calculation of the IQ (mental age divided by chronological age) by 100, to rule out the decimal point. By definition, therefore, an average IQ became 100, and it was this round figure that, as much as anything, caused ‘IQ’ to catch on in the public’s imagination.

It was at this point that world events – and the psychologist Robert Yerkes – intervened.
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Yerkes was nearly forty when the war started, and by some accounts a frustrated man.
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He had been on the staff of the Harvard faculty since the beginning of the century, but it rankled with him that his discipline still wasn’t accepted as a science. Often, for example, in universities psychology was part of the philosophy department. And so, with Europe already at war, and with America preparing to enter, Yerkes had his one big idea – that psychologists should use mental testing to help assess recruits.
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It was not forgotten that the British had been shocked during the Boer War to find out how poorly their recruits rated on tests of physical health; the eugenicists had been complaining for years that the quality of American immigrants was declining; here was a chance to kill two birds with one stone – assess a huge
number of people to gain some idea of what the average mental age really was and see how immigrants compared, so that they too might be best used in the coming war effort. Yerkes saw immediately that, in theory at least, the U.S. armed services could benefit enormously from psychological testing: it could not only weed out the weaker men but also identify those who would make the best commanders, operators of complex equipment, signals officers, and so forth. This ambitious goal required an extraordinary broadening of available intelligence testing technology in two ways – there would have to be group testing, and the tests would have to identify high flyers as well as the inadequate rump. Although the navy turned down Yerkes’s initiative, the army adopted it – and never regretted it. He was made a colonel, and he would later proclaim that mental testing ‘had helped to win the war.’ This was, as we shall see, an exaggeration.
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It is not clear how much use the army made of Yerkes’s tests. The long-term significance of the military involvement lay in the fact that, over the course of the war, Yerkes, Terman, and another colleague named C. C. Brigham carried out tests on no fewer than 1.75 million individuals.
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When this unprecedented mass of material had been sifted (after the war), three main results emerged. The first was that the average mental age of recruits was thirteen. This sounds pretty surprising to us at this end of the century: a nation could scarcely hope to survive in the modern world if its average mental age really was thirteen. But in the eugenicist climate of the time, most people preferred the ‘doom’ scenario to the alternative view, that the tests were simply wrong. The second major result was that European immigrants could be graded by their country of origin, with (surprise, surprise) darker people from the southern and eastern parts of the continent scoring worse than those fairer souls from the north and west. Third, the Negro was at the bottom, with a mental age of ten and a half.
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shortly after World War I, Terman collaborated with Yerkes to introduce the National Intelligence Tests, constructed on the army model and designed to measure the intelligence of groups of schoolchildren. The market had been primed by the army project’s publicity, and intelligence testing soon became big business. With royalties from the sales of his tests, Terman became a wealthy as well as a prominent psychologist. And then, in the 1920s, when a fresh wave of xenophobia and the eugenic conscience hit America, the wartime IQ results came in very handy. They played their part in restricting immigration, with what results we shall see.
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The last medical beneficiary of World War I was psychoanalysis. After the assassination of the archduke in Sarajevo, Freud himself was at first optimistic about a quick and painless victory by the Central Powers. Gradually, however, like others he was forced to change his mind.
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At that stage he had no idea that the war would affect the fortunes of psychoanalysis so much. For example, although America was one of the half-dozen or so foreign countries that had a psychoanalytic association, the discipline was still regarded in many quarters as a fringe medical speciality, on a level with faith healing or yoga. The situation was not much different in Britain. When
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
was published in translation in Britain in the first winter of the war, the book was viciously attacked in the review pages of the
British Medical Journal,
where psychoanalysis was described as ‘abounding nonsense’ and ‘a virulent pathogenic microbe.’ At other times, British doctors referred slightingly to Freud’s ‘dirty doctrines.’
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What caused a change in the views of the medical profession was the fact that, on both sides in the war, a growing number of casualties were suffering from shell shock (or combat fatigue, or battle neurosis, to use the terms now favoured). There had been cases of men breaking down in earlier wars, but their numbers had been far fewer than those with physical injuries. What seemed to be crucially different this time was the character of hostilities – static trench warfare with heavy bombardment, and vast conscript armies which contained large numbers of men unsuited for war.
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Psychiatrists quickly realised that in the huge civilian armies of World War I there were many men who would not normally have become soldiers, who were unfit for the strain, and that their ‘civilian’ neuroses would express themselves under the terror of bombardment. Doctors also learned to distinguish such men from those who had more resilient psychoses but through fatigue had come to the end of their tether. The intense scrutiny of the men on the stage in the theatre of war revealed to psychology much that would not have been made evident in years and years of peace. As Rawlings Rees noted, ‘The considerable incidence of battle neurosis in the war of 1914–18 shook psychiatry, and medicine as a whole, not a little.’ But it also helped make psychiatry respectable.
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What had been the mysteries of a small group of men and women was now more widely seen as a valuable aid to restoring some normality to a generation that had gone almost insane with the horror of it all. An analysis of 1,043,653 British casualties revealed that neuroses accounted for 34 percent.
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Psychoanalysis was not the only method of treatment tried, and in its classical form it took too long to have an effect. But that wasn’t the point. Both the Allied and Central powers found that officers were succumbing as well as enlisted men, in many cases highly trained and hitherto very brave men; these behaviours could not in any sense be called malingering. And such was the toll of men in the war that clinics well behind enemy lines, and even back home, became necessary so that soldiers could be treated, and then returned to the front.
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Two episodes will show how the war helped bring psychoanalysis within the fold. The first occurred in February 1918, when Freud received a copy of a paper by Ernst Simmel, a German doctor who had been in a field hospital as a medical staff officer. He had used hypnosis to treat so-called malingerers but had also constructed a human dummy against which his patients could vent their repressed aggression. Simmel had found his method so successful that he had applied to the German Secretary of State for War for funds for a plan to set up a psychoanalytic clinic. Although the German government never took any action on this plan during wartime, they did send an observer to the International Congress of Psychoanalysis in 1918 in Budapest.
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The second episode took place in 1920 when the Austrian government set up a commission to investigate the claims against Julius von Wagner–Jauregg, a professor of
psychiatry in Vienna. Wagner-Jauregg was a very distinguished doctor who won the Nobel Prize in 1927 for his work on the virtual extinction of cretinism (mental retardation caused by thyroid deficiency) in Europe, by countering the lack of iodine in the diet. During the war Wagner-Jauregg had been responsible for the treatment of battle casualties, and in the aftermath of defeat there had been many complaints from troops about the brutality of some of his treatments, including electric-shock therapy. Freud was called before the commission, and his testimony, and Wagner-Jauregg’s, were soon seen as a head-to-head tussle of rival theories. The commission decided that there was no case against Wagner-Jauregg, but the very fact that Freud had been called by a government-sponsored commission was one of the first signs of his more general acceptance. As Freud’s biographer Ronald Clark says, the Freudian age dates from this moment.
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‘At no other time in the twentieth century has verse formed the dominant literary form’ as it did in World War I (at least in the English language), and there are those, such as Bernard Bergonzi, whose words these are, who argue that English poetry ‘never got over the Great War.’ To quote Francis Hope, ‘In a not altogether rhetorical sense, all poetry written since 1918 is war poetry.’
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In retrospect it is not difficult to see why this should have been so. Many of the young men who went to the front were well educated, which in those days included being familiar with English literature. Life at the front, being intense and uncertain, lent itself to the shorter, sharper, more compact structure of verse, war providing unusual and vivid images in abundance. And in the unhappy event of the poet’s death, the elegiac nature of a slim volume had an undeniable romantic appeal. Many boys who went straight from the cricket field to the Somme or Passchendaele made poor poets, and the bookshops were crammed with verse that, in other circumstances, would never have been published. But amid these a few stood out, and of those a number are now household names.
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The poets writing during World War I can be divided into two groups. There were those early poets who wrote about the glory of war and were then killed. And there were those who, killed or not, lived long enough to witness the carnage and horror, the awful waste and stupidity that characterised so much of the 1914–18 war.
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Rupert Brooke is the best known of the former group. It has been said of Brooke that he was prepared all his short life for the role of war poet/martyr. He was handsome, with striking blond hair; he was clever, somewhat theatrical, a product of the Cambridge milieu that, had he lived, would surely have drawn him to Bloomsbury. Frances Cornford wrote a short stanza about him while he was still at Cambridge: