[spsp-members] Joint Commission Online Colloquium in HPS: Session with L. Bican Polat

[Pulkkinen, Karoliina J via spsp-members]

On behalf of the Joint Commission of DHST/DLMPST<https://iuhpst.org/pages/inter-division-commissions/joint-commission.php>, I am happy to announce that our first session of 2026 will be with L. Bican Polat, who is currently a Visiting Scholar at the School of Anthropology, University of Oxford. He previously served as a Clinical Associate Professor of History at NYU Shanghai and as a postdoctoral research fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows at Tsinghua University (Beijing). He received his joint-degree PhD in Intellectual History and Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University, specializing in the historical and social studies of science and medicine, as well as historical epistemology. His research examines the emergence of developmental science and child psychiatry from the late nineteenth century to the present, with particular attention to the institutional shifts, cultural transformations, and research practices that have shaped this medico-scientific field at the intersection of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, psychology, and neuroscience. His work has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the Consortium for the History of Science, Medicine and Technology, and has appeared in journals including Isis, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, and Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences.


Pluralizing HPS: Integrating Sociological Perspectives into the History and Philosophy of Scientific Psychology

This talk draws on the history of attachment theory to show how an integrated HPS approach benefits from engagement with sociological analysis. Historically, the concept of attachment derives from Freud’s notion of “anaclitic object-choice”(1914), which described the infant mind’s directedness toward caregivers as emotionally invested “internalized objects”—an account closely aligned with Brentano’s concept of intentionality (1874). In psychoanalysis, such infantile dynamics were not treated as accessible through third-person observation. Instead, they were inferred within the intersubjective space of a one-on-one clinical encounter, co-constructed by patient and analyst over the course of prolonged psychotherapy. Through transference, patients unconsciously projected early emotional patterns onto the analyst, enabling the retrospective reconstruction of object-choice as affect-laden structures of intentionality embedded in early lived experience. Only within this second-person engagement could early relational patterns be constituted as objects of inquiry.


Over the twentieth century, however, this intentional dynamic acquired a new form of objectivity. Through interwar child guidance research, postwar exchanges with ethology, and later neuroscientific developments, this experience-centered concept was progressively transformed into a measurable dimension of a psychobiological research paradigm. The paper traces how this epistemic transformation unfolded through historically situated research practices oriented toward administrative aims, particularly delinquency prevention, mental hygiene, and social adjustment. Drawing on archival research and philosophical analysis, and guided by Danziger’s notion of investigative practice (1990), the paper examines how macro-level social objectives and micro-level research interactions jointly stabilized attachment as a calculable, mind-independent phenomenon within developmental science. By foregrounding the cognitive and practical dimensions of research activity, this integrated approach shows how administrative aims, discursive resources, and institutional arrangements contribute to the production of conceptual content in developmental psychology. In doing so, the talk demonstrates how sociologically informed HPS can deepen historical explanation and sharpen philosophical critique in the study of scientific psychology.


The session will be held on Thursday, 15 January at 13:00-14:30 (UK time). To gain access to the Zoom link, please provide your email through the following link: https://forms.gle/wvj3T4FwRcFf4zPM8


Best wishes,
Karoliina Pulkkinen


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