Generations of “wasted chances”: Władysław Heinrich and psychology in Poland.
The aim of this article is to present Władysław Heinrich as one of the pioneers of Polish psychology. In the first part, Heinrich’s achievements are presented in the broad context of the political, ethnic, and cultural situation in Polish territory as well as with regard to some of the most important figures in Polish psychology from the 19th and early 20th centuries (e.g., Wiszniewski, Ochorowicz, Abramowski, Twardowski). The outlined characteristics of several projects for practicing psychology show the academic centers with which Polish researchers entered into dialogue (e.g., Brentano and Freud in Vienna, Flournoy ...
Source: History of Psychology - February 25, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
The late antique history of psychology: The test case of introspection.
This article argues for the need to broaden the scholarly focus on the history of the modern discipline of psychology to include the history of psychological knowledge. It seeks to demonstrate the benefits to be derived from this endeavor by focusing on late antique psychology and presenting the novel methods of psychological investigation that emerged within the Christian monastic movement, especially introspection. Far from being a historically recent invention, I argue that introspection was systematically and self-consciously employed by late antique monks as a method for producing knowledge about the human mind. Yet r...
Source: History of Psychology - February 25, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Mental disorder and mysticism in the late medieval world.
This article reviews late medieval thinking and practice with regard to mental disorder and also with regard to the discernment of spirits, that is, how it could be decided whether an experience or impulse to do something was the consequence of God or a good spirit, an evil spirit, or some purely human cause. Many of the criteria for discerning a good spirit were behavioral, for example, consistently showing humility and discretion, and were clearly distinct from those displayed in mental disorder. A comparison of the criteria for mental disorder with those used to discern spirits shows how the distinction between mental d...
Source: History of Psychology - February 7, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Promoting the history of the discipline in Brazil: The new book series “Classics of psychology”.
Most of the psychology programs in Brazil have mandatory courses on the history and foundations of psychology, whatever names such courses may receive. In any case, Brazilian psychology students are supposed to acquire knowledge about the historical development of psychological theories and psychology as a science and profession, which would allow them to adopt a critical perspective toward their own theoretical and practical choices. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: History of Psychology)
Source: History of Psychology - February 4, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
The largest undertaking of translating Piaget into Chinese.
As scholars across the world commemorate the 40th anniversary of Piaget’s death, in 2020, a 10-volume Collected Works of Jean Piaget will begin to appear in China’s bookstores. This translation was edited by Qiwei Li, a prominent psychologist at East China Normal University in Shanghai and an International Associate of Fondation Archives Jean Piaget in Geneva. Li oversees a team of 53 Chinese scholars who are completing the most comprehensive Chinese translation of Piaget’s works to date, a project that is financially supported by China’s State Publishing Foundation and that will be published by Henan University Pr...
Source: History of Psychology - February 4, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Psychology in National Socialism [Psychologie im Nationalsozialismus] at Sigmund Freud Private University Berlin, July 27–28, 2018.
Forty years after the end of World War II, historians and psychologists finally began to thoroughly investigate the involvement of psychological theory and practice with the National-Socialist regime. After this first wave of critical self-reflection, however, very little systematic work has been done to expand our historical knowledge of the darkest chapter in the history of German psychology. As part of a running project on the history of psychology during National Socialism in Austria, the Sigmund Freud Private University (SFU) Berlin hosted a 2-day conference about this topic that was open to the general public. (PsycI...
Source: History of Psychology - February 4, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Society for the History of Psychology news.
Bill Woodward published Psychologists Investigate Existential Issues, 1880–2000 with Linus Books in 2018. This reader contains primary and secondary sources on existential issues of various topics. Its content has been taught as a course for four decades at the University of New Hampshire. The volume contains a sample syllabus and questions on the readings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: History of Psychology)
Source: History of Psychology - February 4, 2019 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Developmental psychologies in the Roman world: Change and continuity.
A common view among ancient historians about Roman attentiveness to children’s psychological development needs reconsideration. The view holds that Romans ignored children’s cognitive ontogeny, perceiving early childhood as a largely undifferentiated life stage. A separate but related issue is the problematic claim that Roman childhood was entirely a matter of social construction. I present evidence from over four hundred years of Roman writing to make three points against Roman neglect of children and radical social construction. First, a consensus (granted our limited number of sources) about “developmental psychol...
Source: History of Psychology - December 13, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Between sacred and profane: Possession, psychopathology, and the Catholic church.
In Catholic culture, and especially within the Italian Catholic environment, there has recently been a significant revival of the practice of exorcism. This is a fact noted by historians such as Levack (2013) and Young (2016). The article intends to show how this phenomenon is related to a series of important historical turning points, the most important of which is the recent collaboration between exorcists and Catholic psychologists and psychiatrists to establish a differential diagnosis between real possession and mere psychopathology. The recent revival of exorcism in Italy is particularly noteworthy because it reverse...
Source: History of Psychology - December 3, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
The theory and practice of Thomas Verner Moore’s Catholic psychiatry and psychotherapy.
Thomas Verner Moore (1877–1969), a Catholic priest, psychologist, and psychiatrist, developed a Catholic psychiatry in the first half of the 20th century. Following a brief description of Moore’s life, this article develops his psychiatric theory, beginning with its grounding in Thomistic philosophical thought. The relationship between reason and faith, the place of the soul in psychological theory, and a central role for Catholic moral teaching were three Thomistic principles vital to Moore’s thinking. Defining psychology as the science of personality, and the study of personality as central to psychiatry, Moore art...
Source: History of Psychology - November 29, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Announcements.
Presents a call for papers for the 18th Conference of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology August 19–23, 2019. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: History of Psychology)
Source: History of Psychology - November 12, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Digital humanities as the historian’s Trojan horse: Response to commentary in the special section on digital history.
The commentaries by Baldwin (2018), Green (2018), and Porter (2018) on the 2 articles (Burman, 2018; Flis & Van Eck, 2018) in this special section provide a unique perspective on digital humanities approaches to history of psychology. Each of the commentators approached the topic through their own lens—Melinda Baldwin as a historian of scientific journals, Christopher Green as a pioneer in digital history of psychology, and Ted Porter as a historian of quantification. In my response, I tried to reply to the 3 comments by critically discussing 4 themes the special section has raised: the relationship between digital histo...
Source: History of Psychology - November 12, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Digital history of psychology takes flight.
The articles authored by Flis and van Eck (2018) and by Burman (2018) serve as fine examples of the ways in which digital historical methods can illuminate aspects of psychology’s past that would probably not be possible otherwise. This success, however, presents no reason to think that digital history is some kind of threat to conventional historiography or that former aims to replace the latter. The two can work complementarily—so closely, in fact, that it sometimes becomes difficult to know which of the two one is practicing at any given moment. Multiple skill sets need not define the historian as being a particular...
Source: History of Psychology - November 12, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Digital humanism.
Much history of psychology presumes a discordance between its humanistic methods and the focus on rigorous statistical reasoning that is typical of the field it studies. However, the conditions of abundant data typical of digital humanities tend to relax the constraints of tests of significance and to allow greater freedom to try out alternative interpretations within the frame of a single study. At the same time, the elusiveness of rigorous standardization within a very large database, especially if it stretches over wide spaces or many decades, may be seen to demand meticulous source criticism of a sort that has more oft...
Source: History of Psychology - November 12, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
A perspective from the history of scientific journals.
In their articles for this special issue on digital humanities, Jeremy Burman (2018) and Ivan Flis and Nees Jan van Eck (Flis & van Eck, 2018) examine how psychology journals can be used as sources for large-scale data sets that might illuminate the development of psychology as a research discipline. In my commentary, I seek to situate these two articles in a broader history of scientific publishing and offer further thoughts on the possibilities and pitfalls of data-based methods for the history of scientific publishing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: History of Psychology)
Source: History of Psychology - November 12, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
