History of Psychology最新文献

Constantine the African's (ca. 1080/1536a) Two Books of Melancholy were based on earlier Arabic texts. The work is distinguished, firstly, by being a compact systematic account of a single mental disorder termed melancholy, and, secondly, by appearing in Latin before most other writings about mental disorder. In it, Constantine presents a biological account that attributes the proximate cause of the disorder to unhealthy bodily fluids or humors, and particularly to black bile. However, the humoral disorder may in turn come from unhealthy lifestyles, emotional shock, or disposition from conception. Treatments focus on the patient's diet, bathing, and exercise, with the addition of some pharmaceutical remedies. Many of Constantine's ideas and recommendations are found in later medieval medical and theological writing. Although there are important differences from present-day approaches to mental disorder, there are also many similarities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

This article aims to analyze how fascism influenced the crisis of Italian psychology, a phenomenon already highlighted in historiographical literature (Hatfield, 2012; Lombardo, 2014, 2015; Mandler, 2011; Mülberger, 2014a, 2014b; Sturm & Mülberger, 2012). Fascism shaped Italian culture by establishing a regime that ultimately denied fundamental constitutional rights, such as freedom of association and political pluralism, and by shifting cultural orientations. Initially rooted in a secular and anticlerical framework, the regime later granted Catholicism a special status, formalized through agreements with the Catholic Church in 1929 (the Lateran Pacts). During this period, key figures in Italian intellectual life, such as Emilio Bodrero (1874-1949)-a nationalist philosopher, rector of the University of Padua, and Undersecretary of the Ministry of Education-rose to prominence. This article will examine his correspondence with psychologists, highlighting how the crisis of Italian psychology was a microhistorical aspect of a broader transformation occurring at the macrolevel across Italian society during the fascist era. Ultimately, the shifts in psychology during Bodrero's tenure coincided with the discipline's wider crisis in Italy. Studying his case may provide an empirical lens for understanding the historiographical concept of crisis. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Charles Spearman is somewhat of an enigmatic figure in psychology's history. While most historians of psychology agree that he made notable contributions, there is no consensus about the research agenda from which his contributions originated. Since typical methods for studying a researcher's agenda provide relatively limited information in the case of Spearman, we approached the problem differently. Under the reasoned assumption that the student research projects he guided would manifest his agenda, we examined the content of those projects. What emerged from our inquiry is a research agenda that appears broader and more complex than what is often presented in modern history of psychology texts. We discuss some implications of our findings as well as some possible future directions for historical inquiry into Spearman. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

In 1924, Marie Bonaparte, who would later become a prominent French psychoanalyst, conducted one of the first scientific surveys of female sexual pleasure. In contemporary discourse, her work on women's sexuality is characterized as an obsession, attributed to her allegedly frigid nature. This article draws on recently released archival materials from the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, to replace Bonaparte in the history of sexology and women's struggles to make their voices heard in academic circles. Faced with misogyny and sometimes harassment, she was forced to bypass the male physician and create a "carnal network" through which she persuaded other women to be intimately measured and interrogated to understand the nature of female pleasure. Going back to the roots of Freud's famous question, "What does woman want?" and examining Bonaparte's quest for sexual freedom and her complex relationship with her famous analyst, we argue that Freud was not truly asking a question about femininity but rather warning his student about the restrictions women should place on themselves in the society. Overall, we suggest that Bonaparte's theses can be better understood through the conceptual framework of "situated knowledges" as articulated by Donna Haraway. Indeed, it is from her and other women's bodies that she produced a knowledge that competed with the dominating male gaze on women's bodies. Far from being the product of a frigid neurotic or a Freudian zealot, Bonaparte's work was an early manifestation of the collective empowerment of women in society throughout the 20th century. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

In mid-1960s Montréal, a team of psychiatrists affiliated with the city's Jewish General Hospital identified a disturbing trend in their family therapy practice. The children of concentration camp survivors exhibited forms of severe maladjustment and psychopathology despite their parents' seeming good mental health. These clinical cases examined through a cybernetic-informed family therapy suggested to the psychiatrists that certain forms of trauma could be transmitted across the generations to those who had not experienced the camps firsthand. When daily newspapers publicized this theory in 1968, it met with organized opposition from Montréal's community of Holocaust survivors. The public outcry led the main researcher Vivian Rakoff to drop this line of inquiry. The concept of intergenerational trauma only started gaining traction a decade later in the United States through a network of support groups established in major urban centers by the now grown children of the camp survivors. Following the activism of Vietnam veterans, feminists, and their allies in the helping professions, trauma had acquired new cultural legitimacy in 1970s. It could describe social harms while downplaying the sufferer's personal culpability for their maladjustments. Leaders of these new support groups rejected the Montréal psychiatrists' clinical diagnosis while creating horizontally organized therapeutic spaces to talk about this shared trauma in ways that promoted forms of self-discovery and expression. The Montréal psychiatrists both did and did not discover in the 1960s what became known as intergenerational trauma. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

This article explores the historical context in which the concept of microaggression was produced and the psychological model that supported it. Microaggression has become a popular term used to describe the stress of minoritized groups beyond the experience of racism. This article presents a genealogical perspective informing the contemporary uses of the term. The concept of "microaggression" was developed by Black psychiatrist Chester Middlebrook Pierce (1927-2016), professor of psychiatry and education at Harvard University. Pierce played an important role in conceptualizing the relationships between the mental health of individuals and groups, and their environment. The career and story of Chester M. Pierce bear witness to the construction of the relation between racism and mental health in a therapeutic culture "in the making." Through a selective biographical account of the career and research of Pierce, this article examines what brought him to coin the term microaggression. It also considers the wider context of the political mobilization of behavioral sciences to understand and address social inequalities in the United States. The notion of microaggression was a conceptual tool used by Pierce to describe how racism is perpetuated as a psychological phenomenon and to help develop awareness of the need to propose defensive strategies. The contextualization of Pierce's research and achievements aims therefore to contribute to the history of American "therapeutic culture" and the discussion of the role that psychological concepts such as microaggression are assumed to play in the psychologization of power relations and everyday life. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

This article explores one of the origins of the notion of "safe space." Its aims are twofold: First, by using the early history of feminist consciousness-raising (CR) as a lens, it draws out consequential shifts in the methods and rationales for creating and maintaining psychologically safe group environments. Second, by doing so, the essay aims to complicate contemporary debates surrounding the use of safe spaces. The rules we today associate with the establishment of such environments (demanding confidentiality, suspension of judgment) were initially prompted by egalitarian concerns about power imbalances within CR groups. As the method circulated beyond circles of radical feminists in the early 1970s, however, its aims and targets changed, letting it converge with self-help and encounter groups. The reform-oriented National Organization for Women both aided in the wider diffusion of CR while also constricting the practice. As the epistemic aims of CR became deemphasized in the process, such groups now more often took on emotional-supportive functions. Safety concerns, in turn, shifted toward protecting participants from the potential psychological harms of group experiences. These psychological safety measures were subsequently adopted by psychologists and educators, whereas in activist circles, in the 1980s, safe spaces, similarly, became places of refuge from external oppression and internal strife. Making safe spaces safer in this way represented a fundamental shift in how psychological safety within group environments was conceived. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

This introduction to the special section of History of Psychology argues for the centrality of the interpersonal-as an object of psychological knowledge, a condition of knowledge production, and as a site of social intervention and transformation-in the history of psychotherapy and of the psy sciences more generally. We situate this focus within broader historiographical and sociological debates and feminist historiography. The articles that make up this section revisit episodes where the psychological disciplines were employed to critique, challenge, or otherwise subvert existing power structures and dynamics. They highlight two aspects that have been neglected in the literature: the political projects of psychological practitioners and the ways in which these actors viewed or treated the interpersonal as a site of scalable social interventions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

This article examines Sigmund Freud's first publication in French, written in 1893, the year of Jean-Martin Charcot's death. Following his stay at the Salpêtrière (1885-1886), Freud published an article on hysterical paralysis in the Archives of Neurology, appearing alongside Charcot's obituary. This publication marked a pivotal epistemological shift in Freud's intellectual trajectory from neurology to psychoanalysis. Influenced by Charcot's clinical demonstrations, Freud began distancing himself from strictly neurological explanations of hysteria in favor of psychological interpretations. His assertion that hysteria "behaves as if anatomy does not exist" represented a significant departure from the organicist tradition of late 19th-century medicine. This transition established a conceptual foundation for exploring psychological phenomena independently of their neurological substrates, while not entirely rejecting biological anchoring. The article situates Freud's 1893 publication within the broader context of emerging psychiatric thought and discusses how contemporary neuroscience offers new perspectives on the psychological-neurobiological relationship that Freud initially explored through different methodological approaches. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

The word association task has been a standard form of assessment and research tool for over a century, used for investigating how concepts are associated with each other and how they are linked to words. In the 1950s, researchers at the Loyola University, Chicago altered the original free word association test instructions in a fundamental way. They asked participants to provide the word that they thought most other people would say. The purpose of this new manipulation was to assess peoples' ability to reflect on intrapersonal knowledge. The ideas of Henry Stack Sullivan (1892-1949) and David Rapaport (1911-1960) about the role of interpersonal relations to mental health were used to frame the approach. The concept of "communality of thought" represents the mental process that was being measured. In the mid-20th century, psychologist Vincent V. Herr, SJ (1905-1971) directed a research project exploring the relation between linguistic, cognitive, and emotional resources by testing people having various age, sociocultural, educational, and personality characteristics. The aim was to assess peoples' degree of empathy to "the unknown other." This approach represented an interesting innovation in psychological assessment. It gained little traction in the field because of a variety of contextual circumstances. The development of this assessment and the theorizing around it is revisited here to consider its significance as a means of addressing research questions in psychology, psychiatry, and linguistics on issues of interest regarding a normative notion of shared social linguistic knowledge. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).