Bican Polat

New York University Shanghai, Humanities, Faculty Member

Johns Hopkins University, Anthropology and Humanities Center, Alumnus

Tsinghua University, Institute for World Literatures and Cultures, Post-Doc

Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey, Philosophy, Post-Doc

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L. Bican Polat is a Clinical Associate Professor of History at NYU Shanghai. He received his joint-degree PhD in Intellectual History and Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University in 2016, specializing in historical and social studies of science and medicine and historical epistemology.

His research focuses on the intertwined histories of the human and life sciences during the late modern period, with a particular emphasis on the emergence and evolution of developmental science and child psychiatry in America and Britain from the late nineteenth century to the present. Blending historical analysis with ethnographic and interpretive social science methods, he examines institutional changes, cultural transformations, and shifting thought styles and research practices that have shaped this medico-scientific field at the intersection of disciplines such as paediatrics, psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis, and psychobiology. His work also addresses epistemological issues in developmental science, such as model building, theory construction, and replicability. Additionally, he explores how empirical research in developmental science intersects with contemporary debates on social cognition, extended emotions, and collective intentionality, drawing on insights from philosophy of mind, phenomenology, and 4E (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) approaches in cognitive science and psychological anthropology.

Prior to joining NYU, Dr. Polat was a postdoctoral researcher in the Michigan Society of Fellows at Tsinghua University (Beijing, China) and Department of Philosophy at Boğaziçi University (Istanbul, Turkey). His work received the support of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and has appeared in publications including Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, ISIS, and Studies in History and Philosophy of Science.
Supervisors: Ruth Leys

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Papers by Bican Polat

Mental Hygiene, Psychoanalysis, and Interwar Psychology: The Making of the Maternal Deprivation Hypothesis

Isis, Journal of the History of Science Society, 2021

The maternal deprivation hypothesis was arguably the most discussed debate in midcentury psychiat... more The maternal deprivation hypothesis was arguably the most discussed debate in midcentury psychiatry. Combined with the gender ideology prevalent in America and Britain, it solidified the idea that the mother-child relationship had formative influence on personality development. This essay explores the formation of this hypothesis by situating its knowledge claims against an institutional innovation set to prevent juvenile delinquency and promote mental hygiene, the establishment of child guidance clinics on both sides of the Atlantic in the late 1920s. It then tracks the development of investigative agendas by child guidance practitioners, examining the practices they adopted to construct psychological knowledge claims in conformity with preventive objectives and positivist standards. Shifting the historiographical focus toward the clinical scenes in which psychological assertions were made, the essay examines how investigators sought to determine the “pathogenic” influence of early parental environment by way of estimating its emotional qualities. It argues that it was this positivist-determinist effort to achieve preventive goals that foregrounded the role of the mother in the etiology of personality disturbance and marked the knowledge field that came to be called the maternal deprivation debate.

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Modeling Mothering: The Development of an Experimental System in Neurobiology

History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 2021

This article explores the development of a rat model of mother-infant relationships from its orig... more This article explores the development of a rat model of mother-infant relationships from its origins in the psychosomatic investigations of the mid-1960s to its elaboration into a theoretical system in neurobiology. I reconstruct the research trajectory of a group of neurobiologists in the United States, with a focus on the experimental practices they adopted while building this animal model. Providing a microhistory of this decade-long undertaking, I show that what drove the development of the model in practice was a serendipitous finding about infants' response to maternal separation. Detected inadvertently, the pup's separation response acquired an epistemic significance of its own and reoriented the experimental system towards unanticipated paths. To explain this intriguing phenomenon, the neurobiologists kept on refining their material manipulations and stabilizing their experimental outcomes. They thus established a series of causal relationships that connected dysregulations of the infant's physiological systems to disruptions in maternal care. As important as this interactive stabilization of technique and objects in the laboratory was how the researchers theorized the network of relationships derived from this technically constituted objectivity. Highlighting the practice-driven aspects of model-building, I demonstrate that what facilitated this theoretical process was an integrated design of complementary experiments. The outcome of each separate experiment of the research program came to bear upon the outcomes of other experiments, informing the development of future manipulations. It was this strategically driven integration process that allowed the experimenters to build expanding networks of causal relationships and consolidate them into a neurobiological theory.

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Model-as-Replica, Model-as-Instrument: Representational Power and Contextual Versatility in Animal Models

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 2021

Existing scholarship on animal models tends to foreground either of the two major roles research ... more Existing scholarship on animal models tends to foreground either of the two major roles research organisms play in different epistemic contexts, treating their representational and instrumental roles separately. Based on an empirical case study, this article explores the changing relationship between the two epistemic roles of a research organism over the span of a decade, while the organism was used to achieve various knowledge ends. This rat model was originally intended as a replica of human susceptibility to cardiac arrest. In a fortunate stroke of serendipity, however, the experimenters detected the way mother-infant interactions regulated the pups' resting cardiac rate. This intriguing outcome thus became the model's new representational target and began driving the development of an experimental system. Henceforth, the model acquired an instrumental function, serving to detect and measure system-specific differences. Its subsequent development involved creating stimulus-response measures to explain and theorize those differences. It was this instrumental use of the model that pushed the experimenters into uncharted territory and conferred to the model an ability to adapt to varied epistemic contexts. Despite the prominence of this instrumental role, however, the model's representational power continued to guide research. The model's representational target was widened beyond heart rate to reflect other functional phenomena, such as behavioral activity and sleep/wake rhythm. The rat model was thus transformed from an experimental organism designed to instantiate cardiac regulation to a model organism taken to represent the development of a whole, intact animal under the regulatory influence of maternal care. This article examines this multifaceted transformation within the context of the salient shifts in modeling practice and variations in the model's representational power. It thus explores how the relationship between the representational and instrumental uses of the model changed with respect to the varying exigencies of the investigative context, foregrounding its contextual versatility.

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History of Ethnography and Ethnology: Section Introduction

The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences

Before Attachment Theory: Separation Research at the Tavistock Clinic, 1948-1956

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 2017

This article traces the formation of attachment theory to the pioneering research program of Bowl... more This article traces the formation of attachment theory to the pioneering research program of Bowlby and his colleagues at the Tavistock Clinic between 1948 and 1956. Through a discussion of the concepts and practices that informed Bowlby's program, I examine the efforts of his team to reconstruct psychoanalytic objects according to preventive objectives and operational criteria. I discuss how the exploratory techniques that Bowlby and his colleagues were developing during these years ultimately led to the establishment of a hybrid investigative framework, in which the prophylactic requirements of mental hygiene, the psychometric model of personality disturbances, the psychoanalytic theory of object relations, and a direct-observational methodology were brought to bear on the problem of the psychological consequences of early separation experiences. I further claim that this shift in investigative practice was crucial for the succeeding theoretical developments that eventually gave rise to the statistically validated constructs of attachment theory.

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