Evolving Perspectives on the History of Psychology

Evolving Perspectives on the History of Psychology presents a collection of some of the best historical scholarship that has appeared in APA journals over the last three decades. In articles that explore important milestones, controversies, and transitions in the history of psychology, contributors discuss a wide range of psychological developments from Yerke's experiments to feminist methodology. This reader effectively places a wide variety of ideologies, prominent figures, and psychological concepts in a larger historical context, making complex historical and social perspectives simultaneously accessible and challenging to students.

Rather than merely celebrating great men and historical events, as many histories of psychology have done, this "new history" of psychology places people and events in social and temporal perspective. What emerges is the humanness of psychology, its human successes, failings, and compromises. Every reader who cares about psychology will find their understanding enriched by this collection.

Contributors

Introduction

I. Methods of Historical Inquiry

Introduction

1. History Without the Past
   —Thomas H. Leahey
2. Epistemological Debates, Feminist Voices: Science, Social Values, and the Study of Women
   —Stephanie Riger
3. The Crisis of Experimentalism in the 1920s: E. G. Boring and His Uses of History
   —John M. O'Donnell

II. Establishing the Discipline of Psychology

Introduction

4. A Reappraisal of Wilhelm Wundt
   —Arthur L. Blumenthal
5. Contributions of American Mental Philosophers to Psychology in The United States
   —Alfred H. Fuchs
6. William James and the Art of Human Understanding
   —David E. Leary
7. Testing the Limits of Sense and Science: American Experimental Psychologists Combat Spiritualism, 1880–1920
   —Deborah J. Coon
8. Origins and Early Years of the American Psychological Association, 1890–1906
   —Michael M. Sokal
9. The Origins of the Psychological Experiment as a Social Institution
   —Kurt Danziger

III. Psychology as a Natural Science

Introduction

10. The Mythical Revolutions of American Psychology
    —Thomas H. Leahey
11. From Machine to the Ghost Within: Pavlov's Transition From Digestive Physiology to Conditional Reflexes
    —Daniel P. Todes
12. Whatever Happened to Little Albert?
    —Benjamin Harris
13. On Prediction and Control: B. F. Skinner and the Technological Ideal of Science
    —Laurence D. Smith

IV. Psychology as a Social and Behavioral Science

Introduction

14. G. Stanley Hall: From Philosophy to Developmental Psychology
    -Sheldon. H. White
15. The Mental Testing Community and Validity: A Prehistory
    —Richard T. Von Mayrhauser
16. Gordon Allport, Character, and the "Culture Of Personality"
    —Ian A. M. Nicholson

V. Psychology Between the World Wars

Introduction

17. Unemployment, Politics, and the History of Organized Psychology
    —Lorenz J. Finison
18. Organized Industrial Psychology Before Division 14: The ACP and the AAAP
    —Ludy T. Benjamin, Jr.
19. Cultural Contexts and Scientific Change in Psychology: Kurt Lewin in Iowa
    —Mitchell G. Ash
20. On Publishing Controversy: Norman R. F. Maier and the Genesis of Seizures
    —Donald A. Dewsbury

VI. The Practices of Psychology

Introduction

21. Clinical Psychology Seen Some 50 Years Later
    —David Shakow
22. An Asocial Psychology and a Misdirected Clinical Psychology
    —Seymour B. Sarason
23. The Return of the Repressed: Psychology's Problematic Relations With Psychoanalysis, 1909–1960
    —Gail A. Hornstein

VII. Psychology in the Public Interest

Introduction

24. Assessing Psychology's Moral Heritage Through Our Neglected Utopias
    —Jill G. Morawski
25. Placing Women in the History of Psychology: The First American Women Psychologists
    —Laurel Furumoto and E. Scarborough
26. "The Defects of His Race": E. G. Boring and Antisemitism in American Psychology, 1923–1953
    —Andrew S. Winston
27. Recontextualizing Kenneth B. Clark: An Afrocentric Perspective on the Paradoxical Legacy of a Model Psychologist–Activist
    —Layli Phillips

About the Editors

Wade E. Pickren grew up in then-rural central Florida, where he roamed the forests and orange groves. After an early adulthood marked by communal living, hitchhiking around the country, and serving as a Christian minister, he returned to college and completed his BS in psychology at the University of Central Florida. He left the ministry when he entered the University of Florida's Graduate Program in Clinical and Health Psychology, intending to become a clinical psychologist. However, after he completed his MA in clinical psychology, he took a history of psychology course with Donald A. Dewsbury and found his true intellectual interest. He switched programs and earned his PhD in the history of psychology with a minor in the history of science. He now serves as director of archives and library services at APA and is the editor of the section on the history of psychology and obituaries in the American Psychologist. His scholarly interests include the history of post-World War II American psychology, psychology and the public, and the history of religion and psychology.

Donald A. Dewsbury was born in Brooklyn, New York; grew up on Long Island; and received an AB degree from Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. After completing his PhD in psychology at the University of Michigan with Edward L. Walker, he spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California at Berkeley with Frank A Beach. Through much of his career he has been a comparative psychologist with a special interest in the evolution of reproductive and social behavior. He now works primarily in the area of the history of psychology, with an interest in comparative psychology.

He is the author or editor of 12 books, including Comparative Animal Behavior (1978) and Comparative Psychology in the Twentieth Century (1984). He has published more than 300 articles and book chapters. He is a Fellow of APA's Division 1 (Society for General Psychology), 2 (Society for the Teaching of Psychology), 6 (Behavioral Neuroscience and Comparative Psychology), and 26 (History of Psychology); of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; of the American Psychological Society; and of the Animal Behavior Society (ABS). He has served as president of the ABS and of APA's Divisions 6 and 26. He is the historian for Divisions 1, 6, and 26; of the Psychonomic Society; of the ABS; and of the Cheiron Society.