Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences最新文献

Yang Kuo-Shu—widely regarded as the Father of Chinese Indigenous Psychology—was the central figure in a four-decade movement that sought to reorient psychological research within Chinese societies toward culturally grounded foundations. The movement succeeded in establishing institutional infrastructures, cultivating successive generations of scholars, and producing a substantial corpus of studies attentive to local meanings and practices. Yet, this article argues that its ultimate aspiration—to construct an autonomous Chinese psychological system—remained unfulfilled. Drawing on extensive archival and historical materials, the study traces the intertwined trajectories of Yang's intellectual career and the indigenization project he led. It contends that the movement's fundamental limitation resided in an unresolved epistemological dependence on Western scientific metaphysics. Despite its anticolonial impetus, it inadvertently reproduced a form of academic self-colonization, remaining confined within the very ontological assumptions it sought to transcend. By situating this paradox within broader debates on decolonization and knowledge production, the article reexamines both the achievements and the enduring dilemmas of psychological indigenization in the Chinese context.

In 1954, Dorothy Martin predicted an apocalyptic flood and promised her followers rescue by flying saucers. When neither arrived, she recanted, her group dissolved, and efforts to proselytize ceased. But When Prophecy Fails (1956), the now-canonical account of the event, claimed the opposite: that the group doubled down on its beliefs and began recruiting—evidence, the authors argued, of a new psychological mechanism, cognitive dissonance. Drawing on newly unsealed archival material, this article demonstrates that the book's central claims are false, and that the authors knew they were false. The documents reveal that the group actively proselytized well before the prophecy failed and quickly abandoned their beliefs afterward. They also expose serious ethical violations by the researchers, including fabricated psychic messages, covert manipulation, and interference in a child welfare investigation. One coauthor, Henry Riecken, posed as a spiritual authority and later admitted he had “precipitated” the climactic events of the study.

This article casts new light on the life and work of influential child psychologist Margaret Lowenfeld, who devised the World Technique—a unique form of play therapy using miniature toys, sand and water—during the 1920s. Lowenfeld's experimental, child-directed practice expanded significantly in the postwar period, rivaling the psychoanalytic treatment of children by better-known therapists such as Melanie Klein and Anna Freud. Lowenfeld was a difficult and paradoxical figure, who described her World Technique as a “scientific instrument” for accessing preverbal experience while also conceiving of the child psyche in idealist and transcendental terms. Lowenfeld's creative and esthetic remedies for psychological illness provide us with an alternative reading of childhood experience and of the postwar psychotherapeutic scene. Most significantly, her work challenges the monolithic focus on family life and the maternal relationship which characterizes recent studies of postwar child psychology. Drawing on Lowenfeld's extensive personal papers and published works, this article explores her intellectual influences—including her friendships with Carl Jung and R.G. Collingwood—and the reasons behind her marginalization in the historical literature.

Liberation psychology was proposed by some authors in an attempt to assimilate the theories and practices of psychology to the liberation movements that developed so intensely during the seventies of the twentieth century. This paper analyzes the work of Antonio and Nicolás Caparrós, who were key figures in critical psychology both in Argentina and Spain at the time, We will focus on their critique of cultural colonization within psychology. Finally, we will explore their demand for psychology to become a tool for social change by studying the mechanisms of ideological control. Their proposals are related to a social and cultural context which, both locally and internationally, was marked by political movements seeking the transformation of society.