Ceramic Fowler Bust circa 1850; Photo Courtesy
of the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences in Australia (5)

Read my mind. 

Tarot cards, psychic readings, crystal balls. They’re as much about glimpsing into ourselves as they’re about looking into the future. While parapsychology exists on the fringes — entertaining but dubious — it speaks to our preoccupation with understanding the mind and human behavior. We try to put our hands on the abstract by systematizing the Self — grasping for clues. Now we look to psychology in our search to understand the mind, but that’s not the whole story. There are other systems, other answers, other approaches — like phrenology. 

But before we talk about that, come back in time with me. The year is 1897. The setting is the University of Leipzig. Wilhelm Wundt releases a sigh of relief. He has just finished the final lecture on experimental psychology unlocking introspection and consciousness. He’s proud. The abstract alongside lab experience makes the program more rigorous — more legitimate (1). Pay attention. You’re witnessing the birth of ‘modern’ psychology. Or are you?

Wundt’s psychology is labelled modern, because it’s composed of formal proposals backed by institutional power. It’s distanced from the messiness of culture and belief —it’s empirical (1). Yet, that’s only part of the story, because Wundt’s thinking is embedded in webs of knowledge — histories and legacies that stretch deep into the past.

Let’s untangle the web and explore a paradigm that came before. A problematic and racially charged one at that.  

Enter phrenology. A global movement that revolutionized understandings of the brain in the early 19th century. At its height in the Victorian era this mental ‘science’ claimed its practitioners could read a person’s mental faculties and personality by feeling the bumps and contours of her skull (6). 

Well — science isn’t quite the right word. 

People were skeptical about phrenology even during its height. In fact, the Parisian physiologist François Magendie coined the term pseudoscience to describe it (6). Yet, the students of Franz Joseph Gall — the Viennese physician who created phrenology — still spread it throughout Europe before introducing it to the United States.

Around 1830, Johann Spurzheim — a student of Gall and the inspiration of pioneer phrenologist George Combe — crossed the Atlantic pursuing his mission to spread phrenology to the general public (3). His popular lectures taught about the shapes and contours of the skull explaining how specific bumps marked specific traits. Phrenologists called these traits faculties and understood them as common identifiers of personality (5). 

Skulls and casts saturated these public lectures awing audiences and taking Americans by storm. Like the Fowler brothers — Orson and Lorenzo — self-trained phrenologists that started a phrenology empire of Self-Instructor manuals, journals, and personal readings at offices in England and the United States (2).  

The Fowlers’ offices in Philadelphia and New York City mixed science and entertainment. Their New York office was one block from P.T. Barnum’s American museum where the Fowler’s posted ads sensationalizing their Phrenological Cabinet and the novelty of phrenological readings (2).

Material culture was integral to the spectacle of phrenology. Ideas moved through networks of exchange like the Fowler’s ceramic busts meant as 3-D guides for lectures and consultations across the globe (5).  

These busts mapped phrenological faculties — like Cleverness, Secretiveness, and Combativeness — that were controlled by “organs” (or areas ) of the brain (4). Phrenologists organized these traits into five groups including: affective, sentimental, intellectual, perspective, and reflective categories (2). Balance was key to a healthy mind. This mental ‘science’ oriented towards materiality and tactile ways of knowing, which made the inner-workings of the mind more concrete and arguably more problematic. 

Phrenology wasn’t neutral. It was wrapped up with race science tied to racist hierarchies and stereotypes of non-white people. The faculties associated the mind and brain by claiming quantifiable access to a person’s character and trajectory. This had the potential to naturalize social systems in conscious and unconscious ways under the guise of ‘scientific’ knowledge. Phrenology became a powerful political language as a “universal science of character” during the Victorian age when understanding personality and regulating behavior dominated public discourse (6). 

It’s social implications are heard in the words of George Combe at a public lecture in NYC when he holds aloft a Native American skull explaining that it showed the “Destructiveness, less Cautiousness, [and] less Benevolence” of Native American people — a combination that made them a poor option for enslavement. Then he picked up an African skull showing a gentler nature and relative ease of subdual — making African descendants a ‘viable’ source for slaves (6). 

Phrenological readings naturalized racial differences. Creating group norms that were supposedly empirical, but were actually co-constituted by racial politics of the 1800s. Phrenology read non-white crania as deviant, which stripped these groups of ‘scientific’ agency and denied participation causing a stark divide to grow between the scientists and the studied.

So, even as phrenologists claimed that the ‘science’ was “accessible to all” it was only ever universal-ish.

 

Works Cited

1. Baker, David B., and Heather Sperry. “History of Psychology.” NOBA. Accessed April 24, 2021. https://nobaproject.com/modules/history-of-psychology.  
2. Branson, Susan. “Phrenology and the Science of Race in Antebellum America.” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 15, no. 1, 2017, pp. 164–193., doi:10.1353/eam.2017.0005. 
3. Cooper, Helen, and Peter Cooper. Heads or the Art of Phrenology. London Phrenological Soc., 1983. 
4. Fowler, O. S., et al. The Self-Instructor in Phrenology and Physiology: With Over One Hundred New Illustrations, Including a Chart for the Use of Practical Phrenologists. Fowler & Wells Co., Publishers, 23 E. 21st Street, 1899. 
5. Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (MAAS). “Phrenological Bust,” https://collection.maas.museum/object/40842 (accessed March 11, 2020). 
6. Poskett, James. Materials of the Mind: Phrenology, Race, and the Global History of Science, 1815-1920. The University of Chicago Press, 2019.