Questions à Erik Linstrum, Assistant Professor à l'University of Virginia et spécialiste des relations entre sciences et domination impériale. Son dernier ouvrage Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire vient d'être publié par Harvard University Press.

Les techniques qui ont contribué à la naissance de l'idée moderne d'esprit – les expériences en laboratoire, les tests mentaux et la psychanalyse – ont toutes été créées en l'espace de quelques années autour de 1900. Ce qui m'a frappé est que ces années marquaient également l'apogée, ou quasiment, de l'impérialisme européen à travers le monde. Je me suis donc intéressé à la relation entre ces deux phénomènes. Plus particulièrement, je me suis demandé si la psychologie a été utlisée comme un «outil impérial» renforçant la domination européenne autant en termes pratiques qu'en termes idéologiques de la même manière que l'anthropologie, la botanique, la médecine et d'autres sciences occidentales renforçaient la domination européenne. On a beaucoup écrit sur la psychiatrie dans les colonies britanniques et françaises ; depuis Folie et déraison (1961) de Michel Foucault, l'asile a été vu à la fois comme un mécanisme de répression et comme une affirmation symbolique que certains groupes étaient plus rationaux, et donc plus civilisés, que d'autres. Mais à quelques exceptions près, les tests psychologiques moins spectaculaires et plus quotidiens, comme ceux visant à mesurer la perception, quantifier l'intelligence ou représenter les émotions et les attitudes ont été peu étudiés par les chercheurs. Est-ce que ces techniques ont également généré des connaissances utiles pour les dirigeants coloniaux ? La réponse que j'ai trouvée est étonnamment ambiguë.

En même temps, la psychanalyse a bien entendu été utilisée autrement ce qui a eu pour effet de renforcer les hiérarchies impériales. Influencés par Freud, certains responsables britanniques ont fait valoir que les traumatismes les plus profonds ont été infligés sur les esprits africains non pas par les impérialistes européens mais plutôt par les mères africaines qui ont nourri au sein leurs nouveau-nés sans retenue dans les premières années de leur vie, puis ont brusquement retiré leur affection. C'était l'idée du «sevrage traumatique» qui attribuait les défauts supposés de la personnalité africaine - le manque d'indépendance, la peur de l'autorité, l'instabilité émotionnelle - aux pratiques éducationnelles des enfants. Les scientifiques britanniques avançaient que la famille africaine posait un obstacle au changement économique et social parce que, dysfonctionnelle, elle étouffait un sentiment de soi dans le berceau. Aussi bizarre que cela puisse paraitre aujourd'hui, des variations de cette idée sont restées influentes parmi les experts de l'Organisation Mondiale de la Santé et d'autres institutions mondiales dans les années 1950. Ces derniers ont ainsi entretenu l'hypothèse que les experts occidentaux étaient nécessaires pour introduire l'idée de progrès dans les personnalités africaines. Paradoxalement, la quête pour confirmer l'universalité de la psychologie a parfois abouti à approfondir le sentiment de différence.

Comme Edward Saïd et beaucoup d'autres l'ont montré, les connaissances approfondies apportées par les experts n'ont pas été qu'un simple rempart contre la domination impériale ; elles ont pu tout aussi bien la perturber, la renverser, et la saper. La psychologie n'a pas résolu les problèmes de gouvernement des populations colonisées ; elle les a plutôt accentués. Les chercheurs en psychologie ont dû trouver le même équilibre précaire que celui cherché par les administrateurs coloniaux : un équilibre entre le «traditionnel» et le «moderne», entre ce qui appartient à la communauté et à l'individu ou entre ce qui tient de la particularité des cultures et de l'universalité des revendications à gouverner. Tout comme les colonisateurs, les psychologues ont eux aussi échoué à transformer les sociétés colonisées de façon aussi spectaculaire qu'esperé.

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Why psychology?

The techniques which created the modern idea of the mind—laboratory experiments, mental testing, and psychoanalysis—all came into being in the space of a few years around 1900. It struck me that those years also marked the high point, or close to it, of European imperialism around the world. So I became interested in the question of whether and how these two phenomena were related. More particularly, I wondered whether psychology functioned as a "tool of empire"—strengthening European rule both in practical terms and in ideological terms—in the same way that anthropology, botany, medicine, and other Western sciences did. Much has been written about psychiatry in the British and French colonies; ever since Michel Foucault's Folie et Déraison (1961), the asylum has been seen both as a mechanism of repression and as a symbolic statement that some groups were more rational, and therefore more civilized, than others. But with a few exceptions, the less spectacular, more quotidian operations of psychology—measuring perception, quantifying intelligence, mapping emotions and attitudes—have received little attention. Did these techniques also generate useful knowledge for colonial rulers? The answer I found was surprisingly ambiguous.

What role did psychology play in British colonialism in Africa?

It might be useful to distinguish between a few different kinds of projects. Some researchers in the interwar period saw Africa as a laboratory which could allow them to verify whether theories of mind were truly universal. So one group of investigators, led by anthropologist Charles Gabriel Seligman at the London School of Economics, set out to determine whether Freud’s model of the unconscious held true across cultures. In the British colonies of Nigeria, the Gold Coast (Ghana), Nyasaland (Malawi), Uganda, and Sudan, they recorded dream narratives in accordance with Seligman’s instructions, probing for associations and the meaning of symbols in the style of a psychoanalytic session. The results challenged imperialist assumptions in a few different ways. First, it turned out that repressed desires, condensed meanings, and other elements of the Freudian unconscious figured just as prominently in African minds as in European minds; contrary to longstanding stereotypes of the carefree, “happy go lucky” native, the emotional life of colonial subjects had the same depth and complexity as that of colonial rulers. And second, many African dreams centered on the image of tyrannical and violent Europeans—officials, missionaries, traders—who resorted to force to impose their will. The study of the unconscious, in short, gave voice to fears and hatreds which could not be expressed otherwise.

At the very same time, of course, psychoanalysis deployed in other ways reinforced imperial hierarchies. Some British officials, influenced by Freud, argued that the most profound traumas were inflicted on African minds not by European imperialists but rather by African mothers who breast-fed newborn infants without restraint in the first few years of life and then abruptly withdrew their affections. This was the idea of “traumatic weaning,” which attributed the supposed defects of the African personality—lack of independence, fear of authority, emotional instability—to child-rearing practices. By smothering a sense of self in the cradle, British observers argued, the dysfunctional African family posed an impediment to economic and social change. Bizarre as it seems today, variations on this idea remained influential among experts at the World Health Organization and other global institutions into the 1950s, entrenching the assumption that Western experts were needed to help mold personalities with the capacity for progress. So the quest to confirm the universality of psychology sometimes ended up deepening a sense of difference.

Another strand in the history of psychology in British Africa was not scientific but bureaucratic; these efforts were less concerned with verifying theories than with making the institutions of imperial rule run smoothly. Already in the late 1930s, officials in Kenya began using intelligence tests to select applicants for a limited number of places in government schools. During the Second World War, many different kinds of mental tests—tests of intelligence, tests of technical and vocational skills, tests of personality and leadership potential—were used to organize indigenous military recruits across the British Empire. The apparent success of this program encouraged authorities in the final years of colonial rule to turn to mental tests as a seemingly ready-made solution for all manner of social problems. How to allocate scarce educational opportunities? How to select factory workers and civil servants? The seemingly impersonal, machine-like, almost automated quality of “psychometrics” allowed the British to navigate these quandaries while deflecting blame from the legacies of discrimination and deprivation under colonial rule.

Mental testing, like psychoanalysis, had ambiguous political effects. On the one hand, it strengthened British claims for the fairness and efficiency of colonial rule by suggesting that “meritocracy” rather than racial hierarchy governed the fate of colonial subjects. On the other hand, the fine-grained data produced by testing made generalizations about the supposed inferiority of African minds hard to sustain. Psychologists working for the colonial state pointed out, for instance, that a good number of Africans outscored their European counterparts in intelligence. They also stressed that differences in culture, education, and experience made it virtually impossible to compare the abilities of different groups. And they drew attention to the burdens of racism and poverty which complicated their work with colonized populations. Mental testing had great promise as a “tool of empire”—but it was, from the imperialist perspective, an unreliable tool in practice.

What does the history of psychology tell us about the history of empire?

Expert knowledge was not only a bulwark of imperial power, as Edward Said and many others have argued; it could disrupt, subvert, and undermine imperial power as well. Psychology did not solve the problems of governing colonized populations so much as it dramatized those problems. Researchers in psychology had to strike the same precarious balance as colonial rulers: balancing the “traditional” and the “modern,” the communal and the individual, the particularity of cultures and the universality of claims to govern. Like colonial rulers, too, psychologists failed to transform colonized societies as dramatically as they hoped.

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