The totemic use of an author in psychology: A century of publications of the work of F. C. Bartlett

Abstract

We have tried to retrace the contributions and dissemination of the work of the famous British psychologist F. C. Bartlett through various authors who have been inspired by his work, to a greater or lesser extent. To investigate these questions, we have chosen to carry out a bibliometric work. We were interested in the scientific articles available via the electronic library services (offered by the university and via Google Scholar). The only criterion that guided us in the inclusion in the corpus was the explicit nominative reference to Frederic Charles Bartlett on the whole article. The corpus collected (n = 731) concerns a period of almost a century (1920-2019). The results reveal two periods of increased publication, in 1985 (n = 20) and 2019 (n = 137). Nevertheless, while the name of the author is increasingly cited, most of the time it is only once in the body of the articles. A form of scientific automatism manifests itself in the form of a brief, systematic and automatic citation of the first edition of only one of his books. This "mystified" usage may well extend beyond this author, since Lewin is subject to the same stereotypical quotations and paradoxical marginalization in French-language social psychology textbooks (Pétard et al., 2001). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).