Review of Normalizing the ideal: Psychology, schooling, and the family in postwar Canada.

Abstract

Book Reviews - Comptes rendus de lecture MONA GLEASON Normalizing the Ideal: Psychology, Schooling, and the Family in Postwar Canada Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999, 196 pp. (ISBN 0-8020-8259-9, Cdn$19.95, Softcover) Reviewed by HANS POLS The history of psychology in Canada has not received the attention it deserves. Mona Gleason's book, Normalizing the Ideal, is a bold attempt to sketch the development of the discipline and its influence on child-rearing practices and education in post-war Canada. Unfortunately, the author appears to have been guided by a theoretical perspective that can best be characterized as an uninspiring blend of Michel Foucault, Christopher Lasch, and reductionist 1970s feminist scholarship. The result is a number of sweeping statements that are asserted but not demonstrated. My comments on this book may be taken as suggestions for future historians of psychology in Canada. Gleason describes how, in post-war Canada, psychologists concentrated on mental hygiene and child development research, as well as on attempts to disseminate the results of such research among the population. In her analysis, psychologists were driven by the self-interested motive of professional advancement to widen their client base significantly to include normal adults and children as their prime targets. Psychologists successfully redefined education, child development, and family life in psychological terms, thereby guaranteeing the necessity of professional intervention in cases when children, parents, families, and schools were not living up to the standards they had defined. By defining the normal in terms of the ideal, very few individuals could live up to the standards psychologists prescribed, so such intervention was bound to be frequently needed. Seen this way, smart and power-hungry psychologists successfully created the market for their own services by intruding in the private realms of family life. Gleason's portrayal of the development of psychology, regardless of how appealing it might be as a portrayal of a psy-conspiracy, is inadequate on several counts. First, throughout the book, psychology is presented as a monolithic discipline characterized by complete consensus, theoretical unity, and a singleminded purpose of influencing society. As a consequence, the fragmented nature of psychological discourse and the many disagreements between psychologists escape the author's attention. It is, for example, definitely true that during the inter-war years, mental hygiene research and popularization was the dominant component of psychological practice (which was, as the author acknowledges on, e.g., p. 40, the consequence of financial necessity). However, after World War II, the mental hygienists were marginalized by a new generation of psychologists who emphasized laboratory experimentation over an interest in applications. The infamous but influential MacLeod report (1955) characterized Canadian psychology as suffering from premature professionalization in forgetting to first build a science of human behaviour and rushing into application unprepared. The powerful discipline of psychology Gleason sketches as being able to singlehandedly change Canadian conceptions of child development, adjustment, and normal human behaviour proves, upon closer inspection, to represent a rather small faction of activist psychologists who, at the height of their supposed influence, had become completely sidelined by academic psychology, which emphasized research and disparaged application. This prompts the question of how a small faction of marginalized psychologists could exert such a strong influence on Canadian society. Second, Gleason claims that psychologists forced their definitions of normalcy upon an unsuspecting and innocent population by intruding into previously private realms and extending the tentacles of its expertise in building up a professional tyranny. This made most citizens dependent on the advice and expertise of psychologists for business they had previously been able to conduct on their own. …