Psyche Read Free

hygiene movement, which emphasized heredity and adopted a eugenicist framework toward both “bettering the race” and preventing its degeneration. One of the tenets of this set of beliefs, which came to dominate English Canadian social reform in the 1910s and 1920s, was a belief in innate intelligence and the “overriding influence of heredity upon capacity.” 9 Through the Canadian National Council for Mental Health (1918) and later the Toronto-basedEugenics Society of Canada (1930), prominent citizens, academics, and social reformers influenced immigration policy and public understanding of the issue. 10 Mass intelligence testing and the educational experiment surrounding the Dionne quintuplets captured the public’s imagination. The Dionnes, born in 1934 and legally stolen from their parents when they were made wards of the Province of Ontario, became part of the twenty-four hour a day psychological developmental program of Dr William Blatz of the St George’s School for Child Study and the expanding Psychology Department, University of Toronto. The young girls were not only Ontario’s most important tourist attraction but were also seen as an extraordinary research opportunity for exploring the impact of nature/nurture: as the girls were believed to be genetically identical, differences between them had to be explained by environment. 11
    Even after Brett moved away from psychology, he maintained links with the discipline. In 1926 he was appointed to the Board of Directors of the St George’s School for Child Study, operated by Dr William Blatz and funded by the Canadian National Committee for Mental Health. 12 In 1927 he was one of the founders, with Carl Murchison and Edward Titchener, of
The Journal of General Psychology
. Brett also maintained an interest in nature/nurture debates. Philosophy 1A, his course on “Introduction to Ethics” instituted in 1931-32., was described as a study of “The basis of morals in human nature; the influence of heredity and environment; standards, motives, and sanctions of conduct; application to the problems of personal conduct and social relations.” 13 Ultimately, however, Brett believed in education and culture. Michael Gauvreau has described him as concerned that “modern civilization was the fruit of a fine balance of humanistic and scientific knowledge; here was the high road between freedom and determinism. At stake was the question of how to preserve that freedom in the face of the knowledge that much of human behaviour was determined by biological and environmental forces.” For Brett, who rejected psychological behaviourism, “philosophy and history assured the possibility of rational action.” 14
    This view may have been seen as slightly old-fashioned at the time, but Brett was not the only social scientist in the 1930s to oppose the behavioural trends in psychology and the wide public support for eugenics that was eventually destroyed by Nazi German’s extreme application of its logic. 15 Brett’s rigid adherence to a scholarly agenda focused on intellectual unity is a striking contrast to the independent and “natural” character of Psyche, who is “unbiased by ready-made social strictures.” 16 His very public presence among Canadian intellectuals is a complete contrast to the emotional absence of Psyche’s father, whose loss is registered only through his wife’s pain. Psyche’s emotionally removed father differs from the emotionally present father expected in the postwar period. 17
    It might seem that a link with Brett could be found in Psyche’s gradual understanding of her name. She is aware of her given name because it was printed on the nightshirt she was wearing on the day of her kidnapping. But the word, with its opening two consonants, is unrecognizable to her foster parents and hard for the young child to pronounce. However Psyche’s intuitive sense that