Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences最新文献

From the second half of the nineteenth-century treatment of “imbecile” children in Britain underwent significant change. Examining the period from 1870 to 1920 when imbecility became a discrete category, and a matter of concern in policy and practice, this paper focuses on conceptualizations around fright, idleness, morality, and parental mental state as behavioral, emotional, and psychological causes and attributions of “imbecility” in children. I view this in light of the Victorian emotional culture of “care and control,” which was driven by a shift in cost-cutting and fear of the impact of “imbecile children” on society, justifying exclusions, defining boundaries, and driving change. In light of the legacy of the “deserving/undeserving paradigm” and “care and control” agenda propagated by the Poor Law established in 1834 in England (and in 1845 in Scotland), “idleness” and “immorality” implied a form of abnormality, while “fright” could cause abnormality, and all needed to be controlled. Furthermore “fright” was classified as an (external) emotional event or trigger that has a lasting impact, and an early indication of including psychological factors (in addition to somatic) in explanations of “deficiencies.” Using the Scottish National Institution for the Education of Imbecile Children founded in 1862 and the Waifs and Strays Society for destitute children, established in London in 1881 as examples, I argue that concerns about the rise of “mental deficiency” in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods were driven by moral panic as a force for social control, and to a lesser extent, the concept of care.

The paper reviews and summarizes the historical research that has been carried out in recent decades to explore the connections between esotericism and psychology while highlighting the typical historical and contemporary ways in which psychology and esotericism are linked. This examination underscores why academic research on esotericism is relevant to psychology, including why a substantive definition of esotericism made within the context of psychology is essential. Based on the sources currently at our disposal, it is asserted that the influences of esotericism have never been peripheral to psychology. The foundations and basic features of “esoteric psychology” unfolding within various theoretical frameworks are described. With this paper, the author aims to contribute to the emergence of a critical yet open and flexible discourse that recognizes the impact of esotericism on psychology and is ready to evaluate these influences in an objective way.

International literature on the history of Russian psychology is largely limited to the development of Activity theory and cultural-historical theory. This paper aims to go beyond these limits by introducing a figure little known to an international audience, Boris Parygin, who emerged in the 1960s with his “grand” project for the development of Russian social psychology, significantly different from the Soviet psychology “mainstream,” stemming from Vygotsky, Luria, and Alexei Nikolaevich Leontiev. We demonstrate that Parygin's works belong to a theoretical and methodological tradition of social and humanitarian scholarship that had been developing in Russia since 1870s. This was a broad and inter-disciplinary stream of theoretical and methodological developments, including authors like Berdyaev, Mikhailovsky, and so on, that embraced various disciplines (primarily, psychology, sociology, and philosophy). Despite the fact that Parygin's project did not receive substantial support from the soviet academic community, his ideas concerning personality and emphasis on the importance of individual choice and self-determined activity mediating the impact of social surroundings, have become relevant in the context of current discussions in the international science about individual agency, including debates concerning the transformative potential of the individual upon the social structure under conditions of “morphogenetic society” (M. Archer) or “neo-structuration” (P. Sorokin).