The "prehistory" of psychology: thoughts on a historiographical illusion.

Abstract

Although it is no longer as current as in the past to identify the "birth" of "scientific psychology" with the establishment of Wilhelm Wundt's laboratory in 1879, Hermann Ebbinghaus's dictum, "Psychology has a long past, but a short history," continues to inspire many authors, and to sustain the belief that there is a "prehistory" of psychology prior to the discipline's institutionalization and professionalization since the last third of the nineteenth century. Such "prehistory" is generally reconstructed by selecting the "psychological ideas" of past thinkers and looking for psychological themes in a variety of intellectual contexts, from medicine to theology. When one, however, considers the origins and uses of the word "psychology" in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, the structure and contents of the scientia de anima in Aristotelian contexts, and how such science was remade in the eighteenth century, it becomes possible to write the early history of psychology as a discipline while avoiding the anachronisms and idiosyncrasies that afflict most reconstructions of its "long" prehistorical past.