Ilm-al Nafsiat: The Science of Self

I spent pretty much all my free time last week studying for the psychology GRE subject test, and I have to say that I resent how much I now know about Freud. It’s not that I think studying the history of a discipline is pointless - far from it. But the history of psychology that the GRE tests is, how shall I put this… painfully white and Western.

A few years ago I taught a psychology class to a bunch of gifted kids. I wanted to give them a real and comprehensive history, so I decided to look beyond the big names I’d been taught in my undergrad classes: Skinner, James, Helmholtz, Ramon y Cajal. And I honestly didn’t expect to see much before the Enlightenment. Because like so many people, I’ve internalized the idea that the years between the fall of the Roman empire and the invention of the printing press were an intellectual wasteland, full of overbearing popes and bubonic plague. That Western Europe after the Reformation just picked up where the Greeks and Romans had left off. That there wasn’t a whole glorious culture of cultural progress and scientific achievement - the Islamic Golden Age - in between.

Here’s what I want to see on the GRE. They can sub out William “Fat People Are Jolly” Sheldon and Arthur “Black People Are Dumb” Jensen* to make room:

Abu Zyad al-Balkhi - This 9th century scientist from Khorasan (modern day Afghanistan) was the first cognitive psychologist. He criticized physicians for focusing on sicknesses of the body instead of sicknesses of the mind, and the distinction he made between exogenous/reactive depression - depression as a response to stressful life events - and endogenous depression - that “affliction of sorrow and distress, which persists all the time” - is still used by psychologists today. I also particularly like his suggestion that people carry around a few happy thoughts in their mind, to guard against unexpected bad news. Ibn al-Haytham - So brilliant and influential that he became known around Europe simply as “The Physicist”.  His work gave rise to whole fields of mathematics and engineering.  Perhaps most importantly, he was one of the first real practitioners of the scientific method.  (Some even credit him as the father of the scientific method, and also the founder of experimental psychology, a title usually given to Wilhelm Wundt, who lived nearly a thousand years later.)  Raised in 10th century Basra (modern day Iraq), he was one of the first vision scientists. Before him, many people believed that visual perception took place only in the eyes, not the brain, and that people shot rays of light from their eyeballs in order to see.  Al-Haytham set about using carefully controlled experiments to prove his alternate theory: that vision is due to rays of light bouncing off of objects and into our eyes, which send the information to the brain to be processed. Ibn Sina (latinized to Avicenna) - Along with Averroes, the most famous of the great Islamic polymaths.  His medical treatises guided Islamic and European doctors for hundreds of years after his death, and his detailed documentation of previously unmentioned neuropsychiatric phenomena (from the wikipedia article: “hallucination, insomnia, mania, nightmare, melancholia, dementia, epilepsy, paralysis, stroke, vertigo and tremor”) meant that these disorders were studied much more closely than they might otherwise. Al-Farabi - An early (782-951) proto social psychologist who believed in the “innate disposition of every man to join another human being or other men in the labor he ought to perform.” His work influenced Ibn Khaldun**, another Arabic philosopher living several centuries later who expounded on the psychology of social cohesion.

(I’ve been linking to wikipedia articles, but another great source for this info was this article: Psychology from Islamic Perspective. It’s behind a paywall, but you can email me for a copy.)

It’s a shame to see so many brilliant thinkers disappeared, and not just because a little variety in the study guides would make things more interesting - and easier to remember!

When we forget the intellectual and scientific debt we owe the Arab world, it becomes that much easier to stereotype the whole culture as “barbarians”, and to make modern Arabic and Muslim scholars feel marginalized. Psychology needs to open up it’s “canon” to include the brilliant minds of the Islamic golden age - and stop testing its students on a false history.

* - Okay, Jensen’s work and the race/intelligence debate are more complicated than that, but if you want to talk about a complex and potentially deeply offensive topic there are probably better ways to do it than a single question on a multiple choice test.

** - Ibn Khaldun was important to psychology, but apparently without peer as a historian and political theorist, and a founder of sociology. There are several English translations of his Muqaddimah, arguably the greatest work of history of all time.