A History of Psychology 6ed: From Antiquity to Modernity

by Leahey; Thomas

• ISBN13: 9780131114470
• ISBN10: 0131114476
• Edition: 6th
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-07-02
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

This narrative history of psychology from the ancient Greeks through the present focuses on the main philosophical themes that have guided thinking in psychology, while carefully considering the subject in its religious, social, and literary contexts.Topics include: background to psychology, containing information about the origins, spirituality, the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries; founding psychology, including scientific psychology, and Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis; and modern psychology.An excellent reference work for psychologists and psychoanalysts.

Table of Contents

Background to Psychology

Science, History, and Psychology

Origin of Politics, Philosophy, Science, and Psychology: The Classical World

Spirituality and Individualism: The Middle Ages and Renaissance

The Scientific Revolution and Creation of Consciousness: The Seventeenth Century

Enlightenment and the Science of Human Nature: The Eighteenth Century

To the Threshold of Psychology: The Nineteenth Century

Founding Psychology

The Psychology of Consciousness

The Psychology of the Unconscious: Sigmund Freud and Psychoanalysis

The Psychology of Adaptation

Psychology in Modernity

The Conspiracy of Naturalism

Behaviorism

Cognitive Science

The Rise of Applied Psychology

The Psychological Society

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

FROM PREVIOUS PREFACESOne should always read a book's preface to find why the author wrote the book, the author's goals and orientation, and who and what influenced the author's ideas. In a book that has been through many editions, the preface will reveal how the author's views have changed, what is new, and what has been abandoned.Human beings make history--political, military, social, and scientific. In the history of science, ideas are especially important, for science is a changing collection of ideas to which short-lived human beings make contributions. This is not to deny that human personalities and institutions play a role in shaping science; but it is to say that the history of science can be written and studied in more than one way. One may choose to study the history of a science as a succession of great scientists and their major contributions to the field. Or one may study the history of a science as an institution, recording the founding of laboratories and the intellectual genealogies of generations of scientists. Or, finally, one may study the history of a science solely as a collection of scientific concepts that evolve over time, paying relatively little attention to the personal histories of the scientists who formulate the concepts or the laboratories that put them to the test. Since historians have limited space at their disposal, they cannot practice all three kinds of scientific history, no matter how desirable that might be. In this book, I try to take a balanced approach, discussing concepts, psychological thinkers, and institutions.Another important option is open to a historian of science. Older histories of the sciences were generallyinternalhistories, considering the development of the technical ideas of each science independent of the broader intellectual and social context in which the science operated. More recently, histories of the sciences have tended to beexternalhistories, considering the outside intellectual and social context and its effects on the development of the science. Again, I have tried to balance internal and external approaches. I always place the development of psychological thought in its historical context, but I also try to capture the arguments that psychologists have had about their subject matter as a science.No historian can be neutral to the subject matter. Historians must care about it enough to want to understand it and to make it come alive for others. Historians must be fair; they must weigh argument and counterargument; and finally, they must choose. Historians must choose some facts over others, for they cannot record everything. They must choose to discuss some thinkers and not others, for not all are equally great--although greatness is hard to define. Historians must choose some concepts over others, for some have survived while others have become extinct. They must choose some interpretation to put on the facts, events, people, and concepts written about, for history is an understanding of the past.One of the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus reads, "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." The distinguished historian of ideas, Sir Isaiah Berlin, used this cryptic fragment to representone of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and it may be, human beings in general. For there exists a great chasm between those, on the one side the hedgehogs, who relate everything to single central vision . . . a single, universal organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance--and, on the other side the foxes, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and often contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way . . . . (The Hedgehog and the Fox, Toughstone, New York, 1954).Dame was a hedgehog; Shakespeare a fox. Plato, who devised an ideal Republic, was a hedgehog; Socrates, the