Elizabeth McNeill, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, will give a talk as part of the Medical Heritage Library Spring Speaker Series, co-hosted by Harvard Medical School. Her talk is titled "The Animal Soul between Natural Philosophy and Natural Science: Friedrich August Carus, Peter Scheitlin, and Wilhelm Wundt (1808-1885)." Her abstract is as follows:

This talk concerns the 19th-century origins of studying animal behavior, which is commonly traced back to Darwin’s experiments in the late 1830s at the London Zoological Gardens with the aim of researching mental evolutionism. I complicate this origin story by resituating it within the 19th-century history of psychology in the German-speaking world and, more specifically, the slow, contentious rise of animal psychology as a viable object and mode of scientific study. By tracking the shift from the question of the “animal soul” to that of the “animal expression of emotions” over the course of the 19th century, I draw into relief the tenuous position of “the animal” (and those who wished to study its inner life) in emerging psychological fields, as the positivist, experimental natural sciences gradually dethroned natural philosophy.

This mid-century paradigm shift is the point from which my inquiry unfolds. I contend that this unique moment gave rise to a wholly new way of thinking about animals: one which recognized animal expression as an outward manifestation of animal soul (or as Darwin would have it, emotion). My objective, then, is to underline the importance of 19th-century animal psychology for early-20th-century formulations of animal behavior and communication. I do not merely trace a prehistory of Wundtian experimental psychology, post-Wundtian new psychology, new animal psychology, or ethology. Rather, I assert that the animal’s place in psychology is a history in its own right and that it began well before Wilhelm Wundt was born. As I demonstrate by recovering the intellectual lineage of Friedrich August Carus (1770-1807), Peter Scheitlin (1779-1848), and Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), 19th-century German-language animal psychology was supplanted by and yet deeply influenced what one could call an “animal experimental psychology” that came to fruition in the early 20th century. With Scheitlin as the missing link in this history of animal psychology, I center my interrogation on his paradoxically forgotten yet foundational contribution to the study of animal behavior and communication. In doing so, I restore Scheitlin to his place in the history of science while tracing the 19th-century reverberations of the term he coined: “science of the animal soul” or, as Wundt disdainfully called it at century’s end, “animal psychology.”