Frank Fremont-Smith

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Frank Fremont-Smith (1895–1974) was an American administrator, executive with the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, president of British General Rees's World Federation of Mental Health.[1], know together with Lawrence K. Frank as motivators of the Macy conferences: [2], and as promotor for interdisciplinary conferences as platforms for advancing knowledge.

Fremont-Smith started working in the 1920s at the department of neuropathology at the Harvard Medical School in Boston, Mass. He was married to Frances Hopkinson Fremont-Smith, and the youngest of their three sons was Eliot Fremont-Smith (1929-2007) a former critic for the New York Times.[3]

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[edit] Work

Fremont-Smith's was familiar with cybernetics' prehistory, which dated back to around 1930, when he helped establish an informal conversational network on subjects such a neurophysiology and Walter Cannon's 'homeostasis'.[2]

In 1942 Frank Fremont-Smith organized The Cerebral Inhibition Meeting, sponsored by the Josiah Macy Foundation, together with Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, and five others members of the (later) Cybernetics Group attended. Meeting focused on "physiological mechanisms underlying the phenomena of conditioned reflexes and hypnosis as related to the problem of cerebral inhibition."[4] The Cybernetics Group became known among its members as the "Man-Machine Project," Other participants were Warren McCulloch, Arturo Rosenblueth, Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, and Lawrence K. Frank. Rosenblueth, a protégé of Norbert Wiener and set out the broad parameters of the proposed effort. Speaking on behalf of Wiener and John von Neumann, he proposed to draw together a group of engineers, biologists, neurologists, anthropologists, and psychologists, to devise experiments in social control, based on the quack claim that the human brain was nothing more than a complex input/output machine, and that human behavior could, in effect, be programmed, on both an individual and societal scale.[5]

Between 1946 and 1953 Fremont-Smith's worked as Medical Director in the Macy Foundation, when ten Macy Conferences were a set of meetings of scholars from various disciplines held to discuss "Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems".[6] It was one of the first organized studies of interdisciplinarity, spawning breakthroughs in systems theory and leading to the foundation of what later was to be known as cybernetics.

In 1959 Frank Fremont-Smith, as head of the Macy foundation, was the organizer of the first ever held conferences on LSD.[4] When Fremont-Smith he retired as the Foundation's Medical Director, he was encouraged to apply the concept of Interdisciplinary Communications Program (ICP) to the field of the biological sciences in general. He began the series Interdisciplinary Communications Program (1968-1976) at the Smithsonian Institution.[7]

[edit] Publications

Articles by Frank Fremont-Smith
  • 1932, "The Nature of the Reducing Substances in the Blood Serum of Limulus Polyphemus and in the Serum, Cerebrospinal Fluid and Aqueous Humor of Certain Elasmobranchs", with Mary Elizabeth Dailey in: Biological Bulletin, Vol. 62, No. 1 (Feb., 1932), pp. 37-41
  • 1953, "Rights and responsibilities." in: N C Med J. 1953 Sep ;14 (9):405-8
  • 1958, "The mental health aspects of the peaceful use of atomic energy", in: Am J Orthopsychiatry. 1958 Jul ;28 (3):456-66
  • 1960, "World mental health year". in: Hosp Prog. 1960 Feb ;41 :46-8
  • 1961, "Communication across scientific disciplines", in: J Child Asthma Res Inst Hosp Denver. 1961 Mar ;1 :4-14.
  • 1961, "The Interdisciplinary Conference". in: AIBS Bulletin, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Apr., 1961), pp. 17-32.
  • 1963, "The Interdisciplinary Conference". in: J Asthma Res. 1963 Sep ;65 :3-10
  • 1964, "Medical care, education and research. The role of foundations in mediacal research". in: N Engl J Med. 1964 Dec 24;271 :1348-51
  • 1965, "Small Conferences", in: Science. 1965 Jun 25;148 (3678):1669-1670
  • 1969, "The neurological justification for the use of interruption in communication." in: Trans Am Neurol Assoc. 1969 ;94 :160-4.
  • 1971, "The neurological justification for the use of interruption in communication.", In: Perspect Biol Med. ;14 (2):333-8
About Frank Fremont-Smith
  • 1937, "The cerebrospinal fluid" by drs. Merrit and Fremont-Smith", in: Science, Friday nov 5 1937.
  • 1948, Lander, J. "New Opportunities for the Improvement of Mental Hospitals:Frank Fremont-Smith. Mental Hygiene XXXI, 1947". in: Psychoanal Q., 17:567. pp. 354–362.
  • 1974, Harry C. Meserve. "Frank Fremont-Smith: 1895–1974" in: Journal Journal of Religion and Health, Issue Volume 13, Number 2 / April, 1974 DOI 10.1007/BF01532748, pages ii-iii.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Anton Chaitkin, British Psychiatry: from Eugenics to Assassination, retrieved 15 April 2008
  2. ^ a b HISTORY OF CYBERNETICS by the ASC, retrieved 15 April 2008
  3. ^ Eliot Fremont-Smith, 78, Former Times Critic, Dies - New York Times
  4. ^ a b LSD, Mind Control, and the Internet: A Chronology, retrieved 15 April 2008
  5. ^ Jeffrey Steinberg (2000), " From Cybernetics to Littleton: Techniques of Mind Control" in: Executive Intelligence Review, May 5, 2000, retrieved 15 April 2008
  6. ^ ASC Cybernetics History of the Macy Conference, retrieved 15 April 2008
  7. ^ Record Unit 300 - Interdisciplinary Communications Program, Records, 1968-1976

[edit] External links