APRIL TIME CAPSULE

1588

Thomas Hobbes was born on April 5. His social philosophy proposed that people are motivated by self-interest, later called "psychological hedonism." He was an early empiricist who asserted that physical events produce mental experiences. He supposedly was born prematurely because his mother was frightened by news of the approach of the Spanish Armada.

1802

Dorothea Lynde Dix was born on April 4. Dix helped found 32 hospitals for people with mental illness and 15 training schools for people with mental retardation. During the Civil War she organized and ran the military nurse service. Her work began when, as a student, she cared for a few mentally ill convicts in miserable circumstances at the House of Correction in Cambridge, Mass.

1914

Reflecting his split with Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung resigned the presidency of the International Psychoanalytic Association on April 20.

1949

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) was founded on April 1, as provided by Public Law 79-487. NIMH replaced the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) Division of Mental Hygiene, which was itself a 1930 reconstruction of the USPHS Narcotics Division.

1967

On April 3, B.F. Skinner, well known for his tendency to ignore thought and subjective experience, wrote in his notebook: "Strange to say, I am an Emersonian, a Thoreauvian. I want what they wanted. But I want it as part of a successful conception of human behavior. Maybe 'Walden Two' was an apter title than I knew."

1977

In Ingraham v. Wright, the U.S. Supreme Court concluded on April 19 that corporal punishment in the schools is not unconstitutional. An earlier similar case (Baker v. Owen, Oct. 20, 1975) that the court refused to hear prompted the APA Council of Represen-tatives to oppose corporal punishment in a resolution passed Jan. 24, 1975.

Source: APA Historical Database, created and maintained by Warren R. Street, Central Washington University, and published as "A Chronology of Noteworthy Events in American Psychology" (APA, 1994).



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