The Social before Sociocognitive Theory: Explaining Hypnotic Suggestion in German-Speaking Europe, 1900-1960

The article intends to retrace and review German discourse on hypnotic suggestion from 1900 onward, demonstrating the variety of arguments advanced to account for the social relationship in the hypnotic setting well before the emergence of sociocognitive theory. Using Spanos’s distinction between “happenings” and “doings,” it shows how, in the case of the “social” in early 20th century German texts on (hypnotic) suggestion, the passive observer, recipient, or victim of hypnosis, a trope familiar to the discipline for many decades, was called into question. This image, however, was not called into question by scientists experimenting in laboratories. On the contrary, the neurologists, psychologists, and philosophers who proffered a new way of seeing suggestion, one that privileged the hypnotic as well as the reciprocity between hypnotist and hypnotic, were part of a wider movement within the social sciences (grounded in hermeneutics, phenomenology, and Gestalt theory) that distanced itself from “positivistic” methodologies and “scientistic” verities. The article, then, seeks to remind readers that the sociocognitive perspective does not define the sociopsychological study of hypnosis

Verführung, Hingabe, Auftrag: Hypnose und Verbrechen in Deutschland nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg

Seduction, surrender, command: hypnosis and crime in Germany after the First World War (Title in English

Annual Survey of Virginia Law: Corporate Law

Despite its widely held reputation as being a bastion of all things conservative, Virginia has long been a leader on the frontier of corporate and partnership law. As a recent example confirming its progressive reputation, one need look no further than the 1991 passage of legislation permitting the formation of limited liability companies. While the amount ofactivity in corporate law this year was far from notable, the legislation and judicial decisions from the past year continue to demonstrate Virginia\u27s corporate activism

Speculating About Society, Analyzing the Individual: Where Freudian Accounts of Antisemitism Go Wrong

In January 1847, Branwell Brontë wrote a letter to his friend J. B. Leyland quoting from Lord Byron’s satirical epic Don Juan (1819–24). This was an unusual choice of allusion given that the topic is Byron’s feelings of longsuffering that Branwell usually related to other Byron works such as Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18) and Manfred (1817). This essay explores the reasons why the stanzas to which Branwell refers seemed a more appropriate literary touchstone at a point in his life when he was publicly suffering personal and professional embarrassment as he struggled to come to terms with romantic disappointment and his heavy drinking

Agency, Free Will, Self-Constitution: New Concepts for Historians of German-Jewish History between 1914 and 1938?

This article discusses recent work on German-Jewish agency between 1914 and 1938. To find out whether ‘agency’ might be a helpful category for examining the crises facing Central European Jewry in this period, the article addresses the subject from the perspectives of individual and collective agency, applying classifications that philosophers have employed to make sense of human conduct. As I hope to show, these delimitations are only a preliminary step in trying to determine the explanatory power of agency. Whether the latter can serve as a tool in future work on modern German-Jewish history depends on the suitability of more specific philosophies of agency. Here the work of Christine Korsgaard and especially Michael Bratman may prove helpful in reflecting both on the self-understanding of German Jews in the first decades of the twentieth century and on their ‘freedom of action’ once this self-understanding was called into question. There is reason to see planning structures—grounded in the diachronic organization of our temporally extended selves—as basic to our individual and collective agency. Without ‘planning agency’, I will argue, ‘agency’ refers to mere action or choice