Leys’ work focuses on the history of the human sciences, from the late 19th-century to the present, with a special focus on the history of 20th and 21st-century
psychiatry,
psychology,
psychoanalysis, and the
cognitive sciences. Early in her career she undertook the organisation of the very large archive of the correspondence and the personal and institutional papers of the Swiss-American psychiatrist
Adolf Meyer. This work led Leys to focus her attention not only on the history of certain European scientific discoveries, such as the
reflex concept, the topic of her dissertation, but on American developments as well. Leys has described her approach as a historian as “genealogical,” in the sense given that term by the French philosopher
Michel Foucault. This means that she does not try to present crucial episodes in the history of the topics she is examining in a linear manner, or as part of continuously unfolding historical developments. Rather, she aims to show that those episodes have had both an eruptive character, as if the problems involved were occurring for the first time, and also a recurrent character, because each episode repeats the same difficulties and contradictions that had troubled conceptualisations from the start. Thus, in her book
Trauma: A Genealogy (2000), Leys traces the development of the theorisation of the concept of
trauma from its origins in late 19th-century theories of
hysteria through its various reformulations as
shell shock,
war neurosis, and
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). She emphasises that throughout its long history the conceptualisation of trauma has experienced the recurrence of certain persistent, unresolved conceptual and empirical difficulties. These difficulties have concerned the role attributed to ‘imitation’ or identification in the trauma victim’s experience of shock. In particular, she analyses the continuous tension or oscillation in the theorisation of trauma between two competing accounts. Leys argues that, on the one hand, victims of trauma have been conceptualised as so swept up in the scene of violence that they blindly and unconsciously imitate or
identify with the aggressor, to the point that they are later unable describe or bear witness to what they have seen and experienced. On the other hand, victims of trauma have also been conceptualized differently, as suffering in a mode that allows them to remain spectators who can see and represent to themselves and others what was happening and hence can testify to their experience. The result of the second approach is to deny the idea that victims of trauma are complicitous with the traumatic violence, and to establish instead a strict dichotomy between the victim and the aggressor. the history of approaches to the emotions since WW II; the history of the concept of newborn imitation; and the history of claims concerning the unconscious influence of words or other stimuli (primes) in activating automatic actions. In each case, she tends to identify certain stubborn conceptual conundrums within approaches to these topics, conundrums that constantly threaten to undermine the coherence of dominant approaches. She has described her approach as not only genealogical but as histories of the present. She attaches special significance to the issue of intentionality in the human sciences and the difficulty cognitive science faces when it tries to operationalise intention and meaning. She argues that we are living in a time of crisis in the psychological sciences owing to inability of researchers to reproduce many of the most influential experiments in the field. Leys frequently homes in on such moments of crisis in order to examine the cracks in the theoretical and research paradigms that can be seen to have haunted those fields all along. and her book on the history of priming research likewise takes as its starting-point a failed replication of a famous experiment ostensibly demonstrating the unconscious influence of words connoting old age on the speed with which the experimental subjects walked on leaving the laboratory. == Selected publications ==