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The lessons of psychoanalysis held by Vittorio Benussi in Padua between 1926 and 1927 reveal the other aspect of his interests: that which regards psychoanalysis and its method. These unpublished lessons, which we are printing here for the first time, are preserved in the historical Archives of Italian psychology of the Università di Milano-Bicocca. I have assigned to them the title of Inventario di psicanalisi (Inventory of Psychoanalysis) for their character, unprecedented in the Italy of the 1920s, of a first record of the lexical and theoretical world of psychoanalysis. Since they were not intended for publication, the lessons were written without the urgency of ordering facts and interpretations, and without resorting to the rhetoric of linguistic conventions. A reading of them makes evident how the Benussian attempt to integrate experimental psychology and analytic method is still unresolved. In these pages everything is shown in an incipient stage, in a contracted and intricate prose; while things are complicated by the hermetism of the style, the terminological oscillations, the theoretical density; and yet, these unpublished notes should be read like a palimpsest in which each word has been written, erased, and rewritten, in a work that remains unique in twentieth-century European psychology.

Alfred Binet (1857-1911) is considered the most representative exponent of the second generation of French experimental psychologists. His scientific work was inspired both by the experimentalism that Théodule Ribot and Hippolyte Taine introduced in France at the end of the 1870s, and by that of Wundt. Drawing from numerous sources, Binet was able to elaborate a psychology that focused on experiments and a controlled observation of pathological phenomena, with the objective of differentiating them from normal phenomena. His scientific production was moreover characterized by the emphasis placed upon the experimental study of "superior" psychic phenomena and, in particular, on their measurement. The aim of this paper is to describe the stages and sources of the "psychological" study of intelligence, which constituted precisely the fil rouge that had indispensably to be followed in order to fully understand the originality of all of Binet's research, whose most mature product was undoubtedly represented by the development of the Echelle métrique de l'intelligence, the first intelligence test in the history of psychology.

Through the publication of a previously unpublished exchange of letters, this paper examines the relations between the Italian psychologists Sante De Sanctis and Vittorio Benussi. The collaboration between the two scholars, which emerges from the 23 letters presented here, was solid and long-lasting both on the scientific plane and on the personal one. It began in 1905 on the occasion of the Fifth International Congress of Psychology held in Rome, and it terminated more than 20 years later, in 1927, with the death of Benussi, who took his own life. The Benussi-De Sanctis correspondence (1905-1927) is part of a archive, denominated the "Sante De Sanctis (1893-1935) Archive," which has been recently constituted on the basis of commonly shared archival criteria. In order to facilitate a better understanding of the general context of Sante De Sanctis's scientific relations, the Appendix contains an analytical list, divided into 170 files, of all those who sent letters to him between 1893 and 1935.

Gabriele Buccola is remembered as the first Italian psychologist to have developed a rigorous program of laboratory research. The careful examination of the instruments and experimental planning of his psychochronometric investigations reveals the indissoluble bond between theory and experimentation that defines a scientific conception of psychology on the basis of a differential methodology. For Buccola it is important to demonstrate that there exist "laws" that govern the mental processes, and that there exists a time that regulates human reactions and behaviour, considering however the individual differences and various factors that can bear influence to increase or decrease it. The use of 'intelligent' instruments proves to be fundamental within a model of experimentation directed towards pointing out individual differences and not just identifying the general laws of mental functioning. Buccola in this way imparts a psychological characterization to the study of mental illness--placing him as an initiator of experimental psychopathology, which will have a significant development in Europe thanks precisely to the work of Kraepelin--along with a differential and clinical-experimental bent to the emerging Italian scientific psychology. Lastly, the attention directed to the study of complex mental processes leads Buccola to lay the foundation in Italy for the study of the subjective experience of time.

This paper synthetically outlines the process that from the botanical researches, evolutionary theories, and mineral-cycles discoveries, beginning from the second half of the nineteenth century, has led to the development of ecology as an autonomous scientific discipline. At the beginning of the twentieth century, this development intersected the studies on thermodynamics and systems theories, which together with a great variety of natural, technical, and social sciences, became integrated in the constituting ecological science. From the 1950s onward, systems theory has notably constituted an important contribution in the shaping of ecology, some of whose most influential and controversial approaches, namely ecosystems ecology and global ecology, are deeply characterised by the systems theorists' influence.

This essay proposes to reconstruct the project of experimental psychoanalysis initiated by Vittorio Benussi in the Psychology Laboratory of the University of Padua between 1919 and 1927. For Benussi, the language of the unconscious never refers back to an experimental or psychoanalytical context, but always to a possible relationship between the two. From the contact between these perspectives, there emerges one of the most extreme attempts at knowledge of the mind: the "real psychic analysis." Here Benussi is at the core of the idea of measuring the psyche, and his style is aligned with the experimental psychopathology research conducted by E. Bleuler and C.G. Jung at Burghölzli, Zurich, with the assignment of the laboratory practice to areas precluded to the experimentalist. But the Freudian lexicon is not sufficient to explain the unconscious. Benussi summons new instruments to the center of his reflection: the "physiological unconscious," the "metric analysis of breathing," the "base sleep," and the "emotional functional autonomy." If the Benussian discourse places itself at the borderline between experimentation and depth psychology, it is within this limit that it expresses its theoretical peaks and its tragic conclusion.

In 1879 Wundt's laboratory of psychology was opened in Leipzig, and it has been the landmark ever since for the beginning of modern experimental psychology. Its founder, Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt, was the first to successfully demarcate the areas of scientific psychology as being distinct from either physiology or philosophy, thus guaranteeing the survival of psychology, which was regarded as an autonomous discipline set upon a secure institutional framework. This paper attempts to clarify the basic facts and concepts related to the roots of scientific psychology in Germany, i.e., the context in which the "Founding Father" worked, as well as of those predecessors who proposed the topics and apparatus of his laboratory. Attention will be paid in particular to the psychophysical methods of Weber and Fechner, especially in regard to colour perception. In this context, an outline is presented of the history of reaction time experiments in astronomy, physiology, and psychology, and of the role played by the scientific instruments. It is shown how the methodology of physics and physiology contributed to the emancipation of scientific psychology and to the formation of its orientation.

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.

This paper illustrates the specific nature of the contribution made by the psychology of William James to the construction of modern scientific psychology. Universally recognized as the father of American scientific psychology, William James still remains a much-debated scientist, mainly for two reasons. First, he was interested in subjects that were often very far from the narrow and traditional approaches taken by the greater part of his contemporary colleagues. Secondly, in order to enlighten psychological issues, he continued to adopt multidisciplinary contributions, rather than selecting only those that stemmed from experimental and specifically laboratory contexts. James has been recently inserted in the more complex international consortium of psychologists, psychiatrists, physicians, psychotherapists, and philosophers that has been called "the French-Swiss-English-and-American psychotherapeutic alliance." This does in reality seem a more appropriate framework for understanding the specificity of James's psychology. In order to illustrate the peculiar Jamesian way of thinking about psychological issues, this paper undertakes an examination of his classical concept of the "stream of thought." Here, in fact, many different contributions converge in defining and outlining "the primary fact of consciousness"--personal, subjective, and introspective observation; philosophical arguments; "mental experiments," and psychopathological experiences; but, most of all, neurological data derived specifically from brain physiology. This last contribution has been too often underestimated, as has also the background of James's training in the development of experimental psychology, neurology, and physiology at Harvard before 1890. The paper concludes with the assertion that James represents the prototype of a new way of defining the scientific quality of modern psychology, far from the narrow definition given by the laboratory experimentalists fresh from the German universities at the end of the nineteenth century.

In Italy, the emergence of a psychology that can be considered "scientific" is not an event that can be easily ascribed to a precise date. It involves instead a general shift of ideas, gradual initiatives of a cultural and institutional nature, and new approaches to research, all of which together, in the course of the last thirty years of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century, form a "critical mass" that identifies psychology as an autonomous science, distinct from both philosophy and from neurophysiology and psychiatry. This event is embedded in--and favoured by--a matrix of positivist and evolutionist thought, which gives rise to the necessity and to the problem of confronting the study of mental phenomena with a "positive method," and therefore of detaching such phenomena from their philosophical grounds in order to lead them within the sphere of science. Among the numerous elaborations upon this theme, the works that occupy a particularly prominent place are those of the positivist philosopher Roberto Ardigò and of the anthropologist Giuseppe Sergi, who in view of their theoretical proposal of a "new" science of the mind are considered the precursors or pioneers of "scientific" psychology in Italy. The same positivist philosophical-cultural background simultaneously induced some psychiatrists to open their mental health centres to the first researches of a strictly psychological nature to be conducted with the experimental method. In this regard, a particularly important figure is that of Gabriele Buccola, who was especially dedicated to these investigations and was the first Italian scholar to approach in a systematic way experimental research on mental phenomena. Little by little, in the years bridging the two centuries, a second generation of scholars, for the most part psychiatrists by formation (among whom Ferrari, De Sanctis, Kiesow, and De Sarlo), began to hold lessons of experimental psychology in the universities, to open laboratories specifically dedicated to psychological research, to develop experimental investigations inspired by different models, and to draft the first applications of the discipline in the clinical, educational, labour, and judiciary fields. Considered as a whole, the numerous initiatives undertaken indicate clearly how in those years--and especially in 1905 when several very significant events took place simultaneously--a new psychological science was definitively born also in Italy.