1882

James McKeen Cattell took hashish for the first time on Oct. 4 while in Baltimore. His diary records, "I have found a new world." Cattell experimented widely with drugs as a young man.

1907

Sigmund Freud's treatment of Ernst Lanzer, who became known as "Rat Man," began on Oct. 1 in Vienna, Austria. The case history of "Rat Man," an obsessive neurotic, augmented Freud's theories of the symbolic expression of repressed sexual and aggressive impulses.

1909

The new U.S. Food and Drug Administration seized 40 barrels and 20 kegs of Coca-Cola syrup near Chattanooga, Tenn., because it contained caffeine, a suspect substance at the time. To prepare their defense, Coca-Cola hired psychologist Harry Hollingworth to study the effects of caffeine. His studies found that caffeine increases wakefulness and Coca-Cola was acquitted.

1968

Based partially on evidence linking criminal behavior with the presence of an extra Y chromosome in men, Laurence E. Hannell was acquitted of fatally stabbing a 77-year-old woman in Melbourne, Australia. Testimony during Hannell's trial indicated he was an XYY male. The court ruled that he had been legally insane at the time of the murder.

1970

Sen. John McClellan (D - Ark.) led the U.S. Senate in rejecting the report of President Nixon's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, which found no evidence for a causal connection between pornography and criminal behavior or deviant sexual behavior.

1993

Ted Strickland, PhD, the first psychologist elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, was sworn into office. Strickland represented the Sixth District of Ohio, where he was a consulting psychologist at the Ohio Correctional Facility. Strickland, a Democrat, was defeated in 1994, when Republicans won control of both the House and Senate, but then was re-elected two years later.

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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