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During the first half of the twentieth century, a psychological trope dominated critical analyses of the U.S. South: think W. J. Cash's The Mind of the South (1941), Lillian Smith's Killers of the Dream (1949), or Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man (1952). This trope's power culminated in the central role that psychological testing conducted by Kenneth B. Clark and Mamie Phipps Clark played in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). And yet, as Anne C. Rose suggests, the South had a problematic relationship with psychology, a science of selfhood. First, the region's white patriarchy envisioned an organic society, where the individual was rooted firmly, perhaps immutably, in intimate social relations and expectations. And second, psychology's “hopes for growth and self-fulfillment … posed a cultural threat in a society that made the races unequal” (p. 2). Rose's new book examines the consequences of psychology's coming south. It is not meant to be an institutional history of mental health in the South or of psychological disciplines in southern universities, though fascinating details on both topics surface throughout. Rather, Rose's purpose is to determine why “the once-dominant American psychology of personhood did not better serve the South” (p. 15).
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