In the American South at the turn of the twentieth century, the legal
segregation of the races and psychological sciences focused on selfhood
emerged simultaneously. The two developments presented conflicting views
of human nature. American psychiatry and psychology were optimistic
about personality growth guided by the new mental sciences. Segregation,
in contrast, placed racial traits said to be natural and fixed at the
forefront of identity. In a society built on racial differences, raising
questions about human potential, as psychology did, was unsettling.
As Anne Rose lays out with sophistication and nuance, the introduction
of psychological thinking into the Jim Crow South produced neither a
clear victory for racial equality nor a single-minded defense of
traditional ways. Instead, professionals of both races treated the
mind-set of segregation as a hazardous subject. Psychology and Selfhood
in the Segregated South examines the tensions stirred by mental science
and restrained by southern custom.
Rose highlights the role of southern black intellectuals who embraced
psychological theories as an instrument of reform; their white
counterparts, who proved wary of examining the mind; and northerners
eager to change the South by means of science. She argues that although
psychology and psychiatry took root as academic disciplines, all these
practitioners were reluctant to turn the sciences of the mind to the
subject of race relations.
