Psychology And Historical Interpretation

What kind of psychology should be used in historical interpretation? How should it be used, and on what range of historical problems? These are some of the basic questions addressed by the distinguished contributors.

What contributions can psychology make toward understanding the course of individual lives and the flow of historical events? After an introduction which reviews the intellectual and institutional history of the field, chapters by distinguished contributors explore the uses of psychoanalysis, neo-analytic theory, and academic psychology in historical interpretation. Substantive examples range from Joseph Stalin to Alice James, sexuality in Victorian England, the U.S. Continental Congress, and advances in psychohistorical studies of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. The conclusion re-examines the conceptual foundations of psychohistory, outlining its differentiated internal structure and its relationships to adjacent fields such as psychological anthropology, historical sociology, and political psychology. The volume as a whole is intended to advance and deepen the debate about the relationships between psychology, biography, and historical interpretation.

In a lively and subversive analysis, psychologist John Lambie explains how to see another person's point of view while remaining critical – in other words how to be 'critically open-minded'. Using entertaining examples from history and psychology, Lambie explores the implications of critical open-mindedness for scientific and moral progress.

Exploring the relationship between psychology and history, this book considers how the disciplines could benefit from a closer dialogue.

If the reader will excuse a brief anecdote from my own intellectual history, I would like to use it as an introduction to this book. In 1957, I was a sophomore at an undergraduate liberal arts college major ing in medieval history. This was the year that we were receiving our first introduction to courses in philosophy, and I took to this study with a passion. In pursuing philosophy, I discovered the area called "philosophical psychology," which was a Thomistic category of inquiry. For me, "philosophical psychology" meant a more intimate study of the soul (psyche), and I immediately concluded that psychology as a discipline must be about this pursuit. This philosophical interest led me to enroll in my first introductory psychology course. Our text for this course was the first edition of Ernest Hilgaard's Introduction to Psychology. My reasons for entering this course were anticipated in the introductory chapter of Hilgaard's book, where the discipline and its boundaries were discussed, and this introduction was to disabuse me of my original intention for enrolling in the course. I was to learn that, in the 20th century, people who called themselves psychologists were no longer interested in perennial philosophical questions about the human psyche or person. In fact, these philosophical questions were considered to be obscurantist and passe. Psychology was now the "scientific" study of human behavior. This definition of psychology by Hilgaard was by no means idiosyncratic to this introductory textbook.

This edition approaches psychology as a discipline with antecedents in philosophical speculation and early scientific experimentation. It covers these early developments, 19th-century German experimental psychology and empirical psychology in tradition of William James, the 20th century dubbed "the age of schools" and dominated by psychoanalysis, behavioralism, structuralism, and Gestalt psychology, as well as the return to empirical methods and active models of human agency. Finally it evaluates psychology in the new millennium and developments in terms of women in psychology, industrial psychology and social justice