2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
Hannah␣ L. Landecker Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
Microcinema: Time Lapse Cinematography in Biology 1909-1930
This paper addresses the early recruitment of cinematography to microscopical
studies of the living cell in the first decades of the twentieth century. Time lapse
technique—taking images at regularly spaced intervals, and then projecting the
film at 16 frames per second—greatly accelerated the movements and actions of
living cells seen on film. This gave access to a whole range of cellular phenomena
which happened at a speed too slow for the human observer to perceive. Such
dynamic representation of living cells stood in stark contrast to the contemporaneous
widespread use of histological techniques which required that the cells first be
killed and then stained, creating a still image of a dead cell. The film itself had a
different relation to time than other forms of experimental observation or evidence
it was a trace of cellular movement or activity that could be repeatedly shown to
large audiences, projected at different speeds, forwards or backwards. This historical
exploration of the “microcinema” analyses the role of these films as forms of
research in which the scientist was the cinematographer, and thus accesses a littlestudied
area of the history of experimentation.
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Susan␣ M. Lanzoni Harvard University
On the Common Ground of Experience:
Ludwig Binswanger’s Phenomenological Psychopathology
The analysis of psychopathological experience using the philosophical tools of
phenomenology was the central innovation of Ludwig Binswanger’s (1881-
1966) Daseinsanalyse or “existential analysis.” Along with other Central
European psychologists and psychiatrists of his time, Binswanger questioned
the application of natural scientific methods to human psychology, and turned
to the growing discipline of philosophical anthropology to help define human
nature. Yet, as the director of the Swiss Bellevue Asylum from 1911-1956 and a
practicing psychiatrist, Binswanger also had more empirical goals. His project
was to develop a phenomenological approach that would be wedded both to the
psychic realities of individual disturbed patients and to the concern of articulating
systematic structures of human existence in the tradition of the human sciences.
Rooting his philosophical analysis in patient experience was a way of forging
this link, although such a hybrid approach was not without its critics. My paper
will examine the tensions and productive insights of Binswanger’s peculiar mix
of psychopathological assessment and the philosophical articulation of existential
structures. The technique of Wesenschau or a “seeing of essences,” as described
by Husserl, was the means by which Binswanger analyzed the actions, words
and thoughts of schizophrenic and manic patients. These aspects of patient
experience were not seen as independent signs of the disorder, but were to be