My Great Escape: finding the roads to freedom

Last month, I read a letter in The Psychologist:

“Professor Alec Rodger . . . at Birkbeck, underlined that in developing a career there were at least two opposing strategies . . . to match an individual’s inclinations and abilities with external circumstances and opportunities. For some, a headlong target-oriented approach was appropriate in developing one’s career; while for others . . . . both external fortune and internal inclination better prescribed a procrastinatory (though agile at the right moment) strategy.” (Mallory Wober, May 2014)

The author, a social psychology researcher at my school some 45 years ago, encouraged my nascent interest in psychology, albeit with a formidable reading list.

In 1969, New Hall (now Murray Edwards) gave me a great escape from school.

The expected Oxbridge route was an extra term at school after A Levels, preparing for scholarship exams, in a conventional subject (English Literature, for me). This was not what I wanted. I discovered New Hall and its extraordinary entrance process: one paper, three essays “for which you could not possibly prepare”. I applied to read Moral Sciences (Philosophy), hoping to read Experimental Psychology for Part 2. I wrote my essays with exhilaration. The interview day was one of wonder: appreciating the architecture, having a wide-ranging and challenging conversation with Miss Murray, and then meeting two women who seemed to me almost magical, in their different ways. One began, “I’m Susan Haack. I’m a logician. If P hook Q . . .”.. The other, Jenny Teichman, began, “Ah! You’re the one who wrote that essay . . . . Now argue against it”. I was filled with amazement that this place and these people were real, and that I might be able to make good my early escape from school and join them.

Understanding Past Understandings

Few psychologists, even the social ones, take an interest in history. We often assume that the knowledge we have now is what matters, and that even a paper written ten years ago is out of date. In some cases, this may be true, but my recent work takes a rather different perspective.

I am a sociocultural psychologist, working especially on mental health problems. My interests focus on how people make sense of the world around them within their social groups and communities. How does shared knowledge develop and change? What impact does it have on our actions and interactions?

This poses a problem: it is easy enough to find out what people might think about mental health problems now: we can conduct surveys and interviews, analyse the media and so on. But how do we study the ways in which this might have changed from understandings fifty, one hundred or three hundred years ago?