300 BOOK REVIEWS

Journal of the Hlstory of the Behavioral Sciences

Volume 26. July 1990

Hugo Vezzetti, Ed. El nacimiento de la psicologia en la Argentina. Pensamento

psicoldgico y p o s i t i v h o . Buenos Aires: Puntosur Editores, 1988.221 pp. (Reviewed
by George Mora)

The book consists of sixteen papers discussing the establishment of psychology as

a science in Argentina, all of which were published during the first two decades of this
century. The papers are divided into four sections: historiography, problems and areas,
university programs, and scientific congresses. In the introduction, the editor outlines
the main aspects of the early development of psychology in Argentina: the transition
from the idealistic to the positivistic emphasis in textbooks of psychology; the fields
of social psychology, clinical psychology, child psychology, and experimental psychology;
the university programs dedicated to psychology; and the formation of a national society
of psychology. Although the theoretical themes in the various papers were heavily in-
fluenced by European schools, their practical applications relates to psychology in Argen-
tina. The book is relevant for historians of psychology and historians of ideas.

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences

Volume 26, July 1990

Rafael Huertas Garcia-Alejo. Locura y degeneracidn. Psiquiatria y sociedad en el

p o s i t i v h o franc& Madrid; Consejo Superior de Jnvestigaciones Cientificas. Centro
de Estudios Histbricos, 1987. 181 pp. (Cuadernos Galileo de Historia de la Ciencia,
no. 5). (Reviewed by George Mora)

The theme of degeneration, very popular a century ago, gradually fell into oblivion
and received progressively less attention in historical surveys of psychiatry. Recently,
this trend has been reversed with a renewed interest in this subject, possibly because
of the influence of the advances in knowledge about hereditary factors in mental illness
as well as the upsurge in psychobiographical studies. This book brings forward the in-
terplay between mental illness and degeneration in France in the second half of the nine-
teenth century.
Predictably, the book begins with a discussion of Benedict August Morel’s Truitk
des dkgknkrkscences(1859), in which mental illnesses are attributed to aberrations from
the norm, almost comparable to moral deviations from an ideal prototype. From the
individual, this approach is extended to society, resulting in a “psychiatric-sociological
positivism” (Klaus Dorner). Besides Morel, the other outstanding exponent of the theory
of degeneration is Valentin Magnan, who postulated alcoholism as the main etiological
factor for mental degeneration. Indeed, the second chapter is dedicated to alcoholism
and degeneration, a connection that Magnan investigated statistically. The connection
between alcoholism and criminality led to the study of social pathology and to the ac-
ceptance of one of the tenets of social Darwinism, that those living at the margin of
society would be eventually condemned to extinction.
In the following chapter, from the concern with social pathology and, necessarily,
social defense, emerged the interest in the criminal, mainly represented by the Italian