Psychology’s tryst with the subaltern goes deep. It is ironic that the relation has not been acknowledged save in a passing manner. The story begins in Leipzig where in 1879 the first Psychology laboratory was set up by Wilhelm Wundt in the periphery of the university there. It drew students whose hobbies turned into formal learning leading to university degrees. The likes of Kraepelin, famous for schizophrenia research, were drawn to the laboratory. At that point in time, as in centuries prior, the hospitals rather asylums for ‘lunatics’ were marked by bedlam where poor mental patients were put behind bars and excluded from the social mainstream. The richer members of society kept their ‘mads’ hidden away in attics.

The persons having psychological problems were however sometimes paraded for the amusement of the rich who visited these Institutions as benefactors. After the French Revolution (1789-1794) that nation took the lead in treating mental patients of humble background with compassion. The humanitarian mission spread across the ‘civilized’ world – asylums became mental hospitals. The Lumbini clinic was set up in the Calcutta of the 1940s with the same mission. Meanwhile, a sea change was taking place in the world of Psychology transforming it from its philosophical beginnings to a model of Social Science. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) had ushered in the psychological model in the treatment of neurosis by psychoanalysis of his middle class patients. His neglect of poor patients left much to be desired. But the subaltern was finding a way into the research work of Faris and Dunham in the 1930s. They found that mental disorders, especially schizophrenia, were more common in underprivileged areas.This was the beginning of the social causation or sociogenic hypothesis of mental disorders.

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It was later explained that persons belonging to the underprivileged sections of the society encountered more of life’s stresses in the shape of lack of educational facilities and employment as well as overarching poverty. Criminal activities also figured prominently in this ecosystem. This hypothesis was contested by another more plausible one – the social drift or social selection hypothesis which was proposed by social scientists Goldberg and Morrison in 1963. It posits that persons with mental disorders like schizophrenia show downward social mobility. They find it difficult to secure employment and drift into neighbourhoods lived in by people of ‘lower class’.

It implies marginalization and abandonment by their peers. A compromise has been worked out thereafter. In 1992 Dohrenwend and fellow investigators found that the social causation hypothesis worked best in depression and the social drift hypothesis in cases of schizophrenia. The theme leads us to the cotton fields of the United States of America during the 1920s where the declining price of cotton and inflationary pressures led to the prevalence of lynching of the poor black agricultural labour. This perhaps set the stage for the Frustration-Aggression hypothesis in its most rigid form which posits that frustration results in aggression and aggression is the inevitable consequence of frustration by Dollard and the Yale group in 1939.

Soon this hard stance was changed to accommodate other causes of aggression. Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs arguably best represents the leitmotif. It lists needs according to precedence from the lowest that is physiological needs and on to that for self actualization. It implies that people who are poor are so busy in satisfying their hunger and ensuring their safety that they do not give much thought to the realization of their potential. The Maslovian theory of 1943 is supported by David McClelland’s view articulated about two decades later that the subaltern lacked achievement motivation (nAch). Even societies were judged according to the need for achievement inherent in them. The theme is discerned even in the area of family size.

In India large families bring on poverty, exceptions are hard to come by. This trend is noted not only in India but also in other lower middle income countries. It finds relevance in the Confluence Model proposed by Zajonc and Markus in 1975 when the family planning movement in India was gaining strength. The Confluence Model says that the IQ of siblings is related with the size of the family with larger families having children of lower intelligence. This model obviously courted controversy. In a similar vein, the Cognitive Reserve hypothesis introduced by Yaakov Stern in 2002 following up investigations by Katzman and others in the 1980s and the 1990s says that the buffer stock of education, occupation, IQ before illness and intellectual activities offers protection against severity of Dementia in old age.

The whole IQ movement is biased towards the middle class with IQ tests full of idioms used in their everyday parlance. Even the problems used in assessment of IQ are within the ambit of the middle and upper middle classes. This sets a trap for the persons of lower socioeconomic status to fare badly in IQ tests. Culture-free testing using non- verbal and performance – based problems to be solved has addressed this issue to some extent. The subaltern requires social equity to bridge the narrowing gap. (The writer is Professor, Department of Home Science, University of Calcutta.)