Cambridge Studies in the History of Psychology – serie

This book explores the origins of the American intelligence testing movement. It follows the life and work of Henry Herbert Goddard, America's first intelligence tester and author of the most popular American eugenics tract, The Kallikak Family. The book traces the controversies surrounding Goddard's efforts to bring Alfred Binet's tests of intelligence from France to America and to introduce them into the basic institutions of American life - from hospitals to classrooms to courtrooms. It shows how testers used their findings to address the most pressing social and political questions of their day, including poverty, crime, prostitution, alcoholism, immigration restriction, and military preparedness. It also explores the broader legacies of the testing movement by showing how Goddard's ideas helped to reshape the very meaning of mental retardation, special education, clinical psychology, and the 'normal' mind in ways that would be felt for the rest of the century.

Constructing Scientific Psychology, published in 1999, was the first full-scale interpretation of the life and work of the major American neuropsychologist Karl Lashley. It sets Lashley's research at the heart of two controversies that polarized the American life and human sciences in the first half of the twentieth century. These concerned the relationship between 'mind' and 'brain' and the relative roles of 'nature' and 'nurture' in shaping behaviour and intelligence. The book explodes the myth of Lashley's neuropsychology as a fact-driven, 'pure' science by arguing that a belief in the power of heredity and a nativist and deeply conservative racial ideology informed every aspect of his theory and practice.

Jaap van Ginneken's study explores the social and intellectual history of the emergence of crowd psychology in the late nineteenth century. Both the popular work of the French physician LeBon and his predecessors are shown to be influenced and closely connected with both the dramatic events and academic debates of their day. Although LeBon is generally attributed as having created the field of crowd psychology, this study demonstrates how he derived most of his key concepts from immediate predecessors, yet refused to acknowlege his debt to them. Van Ginneken traces the descendants and heirs of the original authors throughout Europe, using unpublished correspondence to shed light on their mutual relations. Recognizing that LeBon's work was by far the most popular, the success of his work is shown to have a decisive influence on many major political leaders of the twentieth century, ranging from Theodore Roosevelt and Charles de Gaulle to Mussolini and Hitler.

It has been widely believed that psychology in Germany, faced with political antipathy and mass emigration of its leading minds, withered under national Socialism. Yet in The Professionalisation of Psychology in Nazi Germany Ulfried Geuter tells a radically different story of how German psychology, rather than disappearing, rapidly grew into a fully developed profession during the Third Reich. Geuter makes it clear that the rising demands of a modern industrial nation gearing up for a war afforded psychology with a unique opportunity in Nazi Germany: to transform itself from a marginal academic discipline into a state-sanctioned profession. This opportunity was mainly presented by Wehrmacht, whose demand for psychological expertise led to increasing support for academic departments, and to the expansion and standardisation of training programmes - a process of professionalization which culminated in 1941 with the creation of a state examination for Diplom, a professional psychology degree. Although the Wehrmacht's demand for its services fell along with the fortunes of the Nazi regime, the professional base psychology has carved for itself remained for the duration of the war and to this date.

The history of the social sciences has been marked by frequent and fierce debates on the rules of scientific methodology. Even the most general criteria - which are generally agreed upon in the natural sciences - are emphatically disputed in the social sciences. Presenting the history of psychology in the Netherlands as a case representative of Western social science, this book examines the divisive nature of social methodology more closely. The author scrutinises published books and articles, as well as archival material and taped interviews, to sketch a history in which psychologists call their colleagues semi-intellectuals who take lack of clarity for profundity or accuse them of undermining respect for men. As to the question of how such disagreements on the rules of sciences should be understood, this book contradicts the common picture in which social scientists only gradually came to understand how their profession should be scientifically practised.

It has been widely believed that psychology in Germany, faced with political antipathy and mass emigration of its leading minds, withered under national Socialism. Yet in The Professionalisation of Psychology in Nazi Germany Ulfried Geuter tells a radically different story of how German psychology, rather than disappearing, rapidly grew into a fully developed profession during the Third Reich. Geuter makes it clear that the rising demands of a modern industrial nation gearing up for a war afforded psychology with a unique opportunity in Nazi Germany: to transform itself from a marginal academic discipline into a state-sanctioned profession. This opportunity was mainly presented by Wehrmacht, whose demand for psychological expertise led to increasing support for academic departments, and to the expansion and standardisation of training programmes - a process of professionalization which culminated in 1941 with the creation of a state examination for Diplom, a professional psychology degree. Although the Wehrmacht's demand for its services fell along with the fortunes of the Nazi regime, the professional base psychology has carved for itself remained for the duration of the war and to this date.

The contributors to this volume argue that psychologists and their predecessors have invariably turned to metaphor in order to articulate their descriptions, theories, and practical interventions with regard to psychological functioning. By specifying the major metaphors in the history of psychology, these contributors have offered a new key' to understanding this critically important area of human knowledge. This book describes and analyses the ways in which psychological accounts of brain functioning, consciousness, cognition, emotion, motivation, learning, and behaviour have been shaped - and are still being shaped - by the central metaphors used by contemporary psychologists and their predecessors. The volume is a stylistically and substantively coherent work of essays on a theme which has become an issue of central concern in a variety of disciplines ranging from linguistics and literary studies to cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy. Through the identification of these metaphors, the contributors to this volume have provided a remarkably useful guide to the history, current orientations, and future prospects of modern psychology.

As a philosopher, psychologist, and physician, the German thinker Hermann Lotze (1817-81) defies classification. Working in the mid-nineteenth-century era of programmatic realism, he critically reviewed and rearranged theories and concepts in books on pathology, physiology, medical psychology, anthropology, history, aesthetics, metaphysics, logic, and religion. Leading anatomists and physiologists reworked his hypotheses about the central and autonomic nervous systems. Dozens of fin-de-siècle philosophical contemporaries emulated him, yet often without acknowledgment, precisely because he had made conjecture and refutation into a method. In spite of Lotze's status as a pivotal figure in nineteenth-century intellectual thought, no complete treatment of his work exists, and certainly no effort to take account of the feminist secondary literature. Hermann Lotze: An Intellectual Biography is the first full-length historical study of Lotze's intellectual origins, scientific community, institutional context, and worldwide reception.

The contributors to this volume argue that psychologists and their predecessors have invariably turned to metaphor in order to articulate their descriptions, theories, and practical interventions with regard to psychological functioning. By specifying the major metaphors in the history of psychology, these contributors have offered a new key' to understanding this critically important area of human knowledge. This book describes and analyses the ways in which psychological accounts of brain functioning, consciousness, cognition, emotion, motivation, learning, and behaviour have been shaped - and are still being shaped - by the central metaphors used by contemporary psychologists and their predecessors. The volume is a stylistically and substantively coherent work of essays on a theme which has become an issue of central concern in a variety of disciplines ranging from linguistics and literary studies to cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy. Through the identification of these metaphors, the contributors to this volume have provided a remarkably useful guide to the history, current orientations, and future prospects of modern psychology.

Inventing Our Selves proposes a radical new approach to the analysis of our current regime of the self, and the values of autonomy, identity, individuality, liberty, and choice that animate it. It argues that psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy and other 'psy' disciplines have played a key role in 'inventing our selves', changing the ways in which human beings understand and act upon themselves, and how they are acted upon by politicians, managers, doctors, therapists, and a multitude of other authorities. These mutations are intrinsically linked to recent changes in ways of understanding and exercising political power, which have stressed the values of autonomy, personal responsibility, and choice. This critical history diagnoses and destabilises our contemporary 'condition' of the self, to help us think differently about the kind of persons we are, or might become.

This book explores the origins of the American intelligence testing movement. It follows the life and work of Henry Herbert Goddard, America's first intelligence tester and author of the most popular American eugenics tract, The Kallikak Family. The book traces the controversies surrounding Goddard's efforts to bring Alfred Binet's tests of intelligence from France to America and to introduce them into the basic institutions of American life - from hospitals to classrooms to courtrooms. It shows how testers used their findings to address the most pressing social and political questions of their day, including poverty, crime, prostitution, alcoholism, immigration restriction, and military preparedness. It also explores the broader legacies of the testing movement by showing how Goddard's ideas helped to reshape the very meaning of mental retardation, special education, clinical psychology, and the 'normal' mind in ways that would be felt for the rest of the century.

Constructing the Subject traces the history of psychological research methodology from the nineteenth century to the emergence of currently favored styles of research in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Kurt Danziger considers methodology to be a kind of social practice rather than simply a matter of technique. Therefore his historical analysis is primarily concerned with such topics as the development of the social structure of the research relationship between experimenters and their subjects, as well as the role of the methodology in the relationship of investigators to each other in a wider social context. The book begins with a historical discussion of introspection as a research practice and proceeds to an analysis of diverging styles of psychological investigation. There is an extensive exploration of the role of quantification and statistics in the historical development of psychological research. The influence of the social context on research practice is illustrated by a comparison of American and German developments, especially in the field of personality research. In this analysis, psychology is treated less as a body of facts or theories than a particular set of social activities intended to produce something that counts as psychological knowledge under certain historical conditions. This perspective means that the historical analysis has important consequences for a critical understanding of psychological methodology in general.

The history of the social sciences has been marked by frequent and fierce debates on the rules of scientific methodology. Even the most general criteria - which are generally agreed upon in the natural sciences - are emphatically disputed in the social sciences. Presenting the history of psychology in the Netherlands as a case representative of Western social science, this book examines the divisive nature of social methodology more closely. The author scrutinises published books and articles, as well as archival material and taped interviews, to sketch a history in which psychologists call their colleagues semi-intellectuals who take lack of clarity for profundity or accuse them of undermining respect for men. As to the question of how such disagreements on the rules of sciences should be understood, this book contradicts the common picture in which social scientists only gradually came to understand how their profession should be scientifically practised.

This is a full-length historical study of Gestalt psychology - an attempt to advance holistic thought within natural science. Holistic thought is often portrayed as a woolly-minded revolt against reason and modern science, but this is not so. On the basis of rigorous experimental research and scientific argument as well as on philosophical grounds, the Gestalt theorists Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Kohler and Kurt Koffka opposed conceptions of science and mind that equated knowledge of nature with its effective manipulation and control. Instead, they attempted to establish dynamic principles of inherent, objective order and meaning, in current language, and principles of self-organization, in human perception and thinking, in human and animal behavior, and in the physical world. The impact of their work ranged from cognitive science to theoretical biology and film theory. Based on exhaustive research in primary sources including archival material, this study illuminates the multiple social and intellectual contexts of Gestalt theory and analyses the emergence, development and reception of its conceptual foundations and research programmes from 1890 to 1967.

During the 1930s, psychologists Gordon Allport, Gardner Murphy, and Lois Barclay Murphy emerged from the fields of social and personality psychology to challenge the neo-behavioralist status quo in American social science. Willing to experiment with the idea of 'science' itself, these 'rebels within the ranks' contested ascendent conventions that cast the study of human life in the image of classical physics. Drawing on the intellectual, social, and political legacies of William James' radically empiricist philosophy and radical Social Gospel theology, these three psychologists developed critiques of scientific authority and democratic reality as they worked at the crossroads of the social and the personal in New Deal America. Appropriating models from natural history, they argued for the significance of individuality, contextuality and diversity as scientific concepts as they explored what they envisioned as the nature of democracy, and the democracy of nature.

Psychologists on the March argues that the Second World War had a profound impact on the modern psychological profession in America. Before the war, psychology was viewed largely as an academic discipline, drawing its ideology and personnel from the laboratory. Following the war, it was increasingly seen as a source of theory and practice to deal with mental health issues. With the support of the federal government, the field entered a prolonged period of exponential growth. With this growth came major changes in the institutional structure of the field that spread to include the epistemological foundations of psychology. This book is a sustained study of this important era in American psychology. Moving back and forth between collective and individual levels of analysis, it provides a narrative that weaves together the internal politics and demography of psychology in relation to the cultural environment.

Psychologists on the March argues that the Second World War had a profound impact on the modern psychological profession in America. Before the war, psychology was viewed largely as an academic discipline, drawing its ideology and personnel from the laboratory. Following the war, it was increasingly seen as a source of theory and practice to deal with mental health issues. With the support of the federal government, the field entered a prolonged period of exponential growth. With this growth came major changes in the institutional structure of the field that spread to include the epistemological foundations of psychology. This book is a sustained study of this important era in American psychology. Moving back and forth between collective and individual levels of analysis, it provides a narrative that weaves together the internal politics and demography of psychology in relation to the cultural environment.

During the 1930s, psychologists Gordon Allport, Gardner Murphy, and Lois Barclay Murphy emerged from the fields of social and personality psychology to challenge the neo-behavioralist status quo in American social science. Willing to experiment with the idea of 'science' itself, these 'rebels within the ranks' contested ascendent conventions that cast the study of human life in the image of classical physics. Drawing on the intellectual, social, and political legacies of William James' radically empiricist philosophy and radical Social Gospel theology, these three psychologists developed critiques of scientific authority and democratic reality as they worked at the crossroads of the social and the personal in New Deal America. Appropriating models from natural history, they argued for the significance of individuality, contextuality and diversity as scientific concepts as they explored what they envisioned as the nature of democracy, and the democracy of nature.

Constructing Scientific Psychology, published in 1999, was the first full-scale interpretation of the life and work of the major American neuropsychologist Karl Lashley. It sets Lashley's research at the heart of two controversies that polarized the American life and human sciences in the first half of the twentieth century. These concerned the relationship between 'mind' and 'brain' and the relative roles of 'nature' and 'nurture' in shaping behaviour and intelligence. The book explodes the myth of Lashley's neuropsychology as a fact-driven, 'pure' science by arguing that a belief in the power of heredity and a nativist and deeply conservative racial ideology informed every aspect of his theory and practice.

Inventing Our Selves proposes a radical new approach to the analysis of our current regime of the self, and the values of autonomy, identity, individuality, liberty, and choice that animate it. It argues that psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy and other 'psy' disciplines have played a key role in 'inventing our selves', changing the ways in which human beings understand and act upon themselves, and how they are acted upon by politicians, managers, doctors, therapists, and a multitude of other authorities. These mutations are intrinsically linked to recent changes in ways of understanding and exercising political power, which have stressed the values of autonomy, personal responsibility, and choice. This critical history diagnoses and destabilises our contemporary 'condition' of the self, to help us think differently about the kind of persons we are, or might become.