History of Psychology最新文献

Reviews the book, Max Wertheimer, Productive Thinking by Viktor Sarris (2020). This volume contains a reproduction of the original edition of Max Wertheimer's study of productive thinking, published posthumously in 1945, with a brief preface and a more extensive introduction by Viktor Sarris, Professor Emeritus of General Psychology and former holder of the Max Wertheimer Chair at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. In his introduction, Sarris briefly summarizes the 1920 study, and then provides a chapter by chapter account of the 1945 volume's content, summarizing the results in a section called "Wertheimer's Credo." The original edition of Productive Thinking has been out of print for some time, as has a second edition, with an additional article by Wertheimer, published in 1959 by his son Michael Wertheimer, himself a professor of psychology. An expanded edition was published in 1982, but is now also out of print. This republication of the original text offers an opportunity to libraries as well as students of teachers of psychology to acquaint themselves with a classical study, which is infused with the lively spirit of inquiry characteristic of its author, but is more often cited than read. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Jacob Levy Moreno, the well-known creator of psychodrama, had a close epistolary relationship with the Spanish psychiatrist Ramón Sarró; a collection of these letters has been located in the Sarró personal archive, deposited in the Library of Catalonia. After locating and arranging this correspondence, we proceeded to analyze and contextualize its contents. The analysis of this collection serves as a basis to outline the context in which the relationship between Moreno and Sarró developed, the role played by certain psychotherapy congresses in strengthening their relationships, and the process that resulted in the University of Barcelona awarding Moreno Doctor Honoris Causa. This study has allowed us to identify certain areas of how psychodrama was received in Spain during the 1960s and reflect on the creation of international collaboration networks and the creation of schools and professional and academic legitimation strategies in the wake of the approaches to group psychotherapy and psychodrama that Moreno developed while based in New York. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

At a time when New York was best positioned to influence the development of the profession of psychology in the mid-twentieth century, efforts to pass licensing or certification in Albany floundered for more than 15 years due to opposition from physicians and psychiatrists. That changed when Rollo May emerged as the leader of New York psychologists' lobbying effort in 1952, and he turned their losing and defensive campaign against organized medicine into a winning and offensive one. He inspired his fellow pioneering psychologists to withstand the "overwhelming power" of organized medicine and see their profession through its "frontier struggles," which culminated in the Empire State's psychologist regulation law in 1956. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Article presents 2021 Society for the History of Psychology award winners. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Forty-two years ago, a small group within the Cheiron Society formed a dissident caucus, the Upper Left Hand Corner Club (ULHCC). The founding document, preserved in an old file folder, featured a diagram of the place of the history of psychology in relation to other fields, such as social history and the history of ideas. The goal of the caucus was to move the history of psychology to the upper left-hand corner of the diagram. That meant shifting the history of psychology from a somewhat immature version of the history of ideas, in which the precursors of late 20th century psychological theories could be discovered in the work of earlier figures ranging from Wilhelm Wundt and William James to William Wordsworth and Isaac Newton (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Now in its 25th year, the journal has become an important institution within the discipline since an article of the editor's (on Aristotle's theory of mind) was the first to appear on its pages in back in 1998. It is the editor's aim to build the journal in ways that serve the community of historians of psychology even better than it has over the past quarter of a century. First, the editor intended to follow and expand even further the previous editor's impressive efforts to have the journal reflect the diversity of its disciplinary community. Second, the editor also hopes to encourage innovative practitioners of the historiographic craft-especially digital researchers-to look to the journal as a friendly outlet. Third, in sympathy with APA's adoption of the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) guidelines, the editor will work with authors to ensure that the sources of their historical claims are as clear as possible. Finally, please allow the editor to personally invite you, the reader, to assist me in supporting and enriching this journal. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Adolphe Quetelet was a Belgian polymath who aimed to advance aggregate-level statistical tools as a unifying framework for all scientific disciplines. In doing so, Quetelet adopted the astronomer's Law of Error (i.e., the normal distribution curve) and applied it to the study of moral and social phenomena in developing his notion of physique sociale (social physics). Quetelet further focused his attention on l'homme moyen (the average man) and, as such, argued that the average value of a distribution should be of primary concern in the study of human attributes. In the present article, I examine the influences that these ideas had on the methodological practices of late 19th- and early 20th- century psychologists. I illustrate how the dominant methodological approach implemented by psychologists in the early 20th century was deeply rooted in the demography of Quetelet's social statistics. In particular, I argue that psychologists' adoption of the Neo-Galtonian model of research was successful because it embraced Quetelet's determinism, emphasis on average values, and grouping of distributions based on type. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

This article will compare the life and work of two Marxist psychologists of the midtwentieth century, George Politzer (1903-1942) and Ferenc Mérei (1909-1986). Both were Hungarian Jews who were educated at the French Sorbonne. They were both involved in covert activities related to the French Communist movement in the 1920 and 1930s. As young communist intellectuals, they combined Marxist ideology with the need to elaborate a new psychology. I present their work as an alternative to better known versions of Marxist psychology, namely, Freudo-Marxism and Soviet action theories. Unlike these theories, Politzer and Mérei created a partly empirical, partly theoretical psychological oeuvre that operationalized the ideas of a concrete dramatic psychology anchored in the actual social life of humans. Politzer and Mérei shared desire for a psychology that is rooted in dynamics, changes, and interactions-a psychology that is rooted in the human drama, rather than in abstractions of academic laboratory psychology, and in the static topography of Freud. For Politzer, the critique of traditional psychology was mainly conceptual. Mérei looked for concrete psychology in data from field work in social psychology and from applied clinical research. The work of Mérei provided an empirical, concrete psychology, which eventually led to an influx of many new psychologists within the field in Hungary. Politzer's contributions, in contrast, remained largely conceptual and philosophical. The main message of their work is that it is an almost impossible task to combine a Marxist-Communist engagement with a commitment toward traditional civic values of enlightenment and rationality. The combination of social-political commitment and an analysis of concrete human interactions remained a formal combination, rather than a real synthesis. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).