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Rebecca Lemov's book is a three-part overview of American behavioral psychology, roughly between the Progressive era and the early 1970s, written in a popular or “crossover” style. The first part covers the origins of behaviorism, centering on the work of Jacques Loeb, James Watson, and B. F. Skinner and on the Rockefeller Foundation's funding of psychology and social science before World War II. The second part, the heart of the book, concerns the encounter between behaviorism and psychoanalysis or, more precisely, behaviorist attempts to translate psychoanalysis into the language of conditioned responses between the 1930s and the 1960s. The third part is centered on the Cold War and includes material on brainwashing, the famous Milgram experiments on authority, and Yale University's Institute of Human Relations. Overall, the material is familiar and the treatment competent but profoundly undertheorized. One key problem is that the author fails to take seriously the scientific aims of behaviorism, namely to account for learning and memory in terms of the stimulus/response model of the nervous reflex. Properly understood, this was a broad project, which could include much of psychoanalysis (as Sigmund Freud's drawings of reflex arcs in chapter seven of The Interpretation of Dreams attests) and aspects of American pragmatism (viz. John Dewey). A second problem is periodization. Lemov focuses on John Dollard, Clark Hull, Hobart Mowrer, and Neal Miller's attempts to create “an all-purpose, American style therapeutic-slash-engineering technique” by reducing psychoanalysis to behaviorism (p. 7). That, in itself, is fine. But she should then have situated behaviorism in the context of nineteenth- century American psychology, without whose spiritualism twentieth- century scientism cannot be understood. And she breaks off her story just before the rise of cognitive psychology, with its profound connections to molecular genetics and neuroscience—in other words, just as behaviorism gets interesting.
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