Ferdinand de Saussure thought that Linguistics would be part of "Social Psychology" which was part of "General Psychology". But these terms must have meant something very different to what they mean today. How can I find out what they might have meant to Saussure in 1912?

-- Jeff Ryan (thephilosoph@hotmail.com), June 28, 2001

Answers

This is sheer conjecture, but the timing is such that he may have been thinking of Wilhelm Wundt's "Volkerpsychologie," which Wundt conceptualized as the psychology of communal, as opposed to individual processes. Language, myth, religion, culture in general and indeed all of the "higher" mental functions were in the domain of Volkerpsychologie, which Wundt believed could not be pursued by experiment in the laboratory, but required instead comparative and historical modes of analysis.

-- Raymond Fancher (fancher@yorku.ca), July 01, 2001.

The first edition of Saussure's _General Course in Liguistics_ was published in 1916. The phrase "social psychology" had, I believe, been popularized by William McDougall's and E.A. Ross' textbooks on the topic, both published in 1908, less than a decade before Saussure's book. I'm afraid I don't know enough about the details of either Ross' or McDougall's conception of the field to relate either to Saussure specifically, nor do I know whether Saussure read either of them (a good biography of Saussure might tell you). You might take a look at them in the course of your research.

-- Christopher Green (cgreen@utoronto.ca), July 01, 2001.

[Posted for EIT by cg.]

Saussure, if I remember right, along with Andre Breton, was mixed up at one point with investigations of Theordore Flournoy's case of Helene Smith (See the recent Princeton University Press reissue of Flournoy's *From India to the Planet Mars*). Ms Smith, somewhere between a medium and a multiple personlity, claimed knowledge of Sanskrit, Chinese, and Martian, along with her other languages. Linguists became interested in the case because her Martian speech appeared to be the first instance of a complete grammar but in a totally artificial language.

The social psychology to which Saussure refers is undoubtedly that of the French Experimental Psychology of the Subconscious, and the so-called French-Swiss, English and American psychotherapeutic axis to which both French and American social psychologies of the subconscious at the time belonged. Dissociation theory was the reigning model of consciousness, and personality was conceived as a spectrum of different states of consciousness, not as a single unity. Historians are generally familiar with LeBon and Tarde in the French literature, or they write about figures such as Ribot, but from the angle of German science, but they remain generally unaware of the connections to American works such as those of James Mark Baldwin, or more particularly Boris Sidis. Sidis's Psychology of Suggestion, or his other works on dissociation and multiple personality, for instance, linked the fields of abnormal and social psychology. As well, The second half of William James's lectures on Exceptional Mental States clearly articulate a then modern dynamic social psychology of subconscious states along the lines Saussure is referring to. This emphasis was significantly defined by James's connection to Ribot, Binet, Charcot, and Janet, beginning in 1882. And because of the still overarching Germanic bias in the history of both American and French psychology, historians will have not looked either in the various issues of the Journal and Proceedings of both the American (1885-89) and (British) Societies of Psychical Research (1882-1910), pretending instead that the only legitimate psychology of that period was a reductionistic, Germanic, and laboratory oriented one defined by the physiologists and psychophysicists, or the English mental testers (and later in the US then by the behaviorists), so what is in these other sources must not really be legitimate psychology. Tut, tut.

> How can Ifind out what they might have meant to Saussure in 1912?

Try Theodore Flournoy's *Spiritism and Psychology* (1911).

-- Eugene I. Taylor (etaylor@IGC.ORG), July 08, 2001.