Abstract
This chapter lays out ten interrelated arguments about the purposes of history for contemporary psychology. These reasons are put forward here both as an introduction to the present volume and as arguments in their own right. All are present, but scattered and often enough implicit rather than spelt out, in the existing literature. These arguments constitute reasons why history has, or might have, or should have significance for psychologists. It may be helpful for further discussion to have reasons such as fostering disciplinary identity, perspective, critique, advancing unifying theory, doing justice to the historical content of knowledge, and so on, expressed in a systematic (if not comprehensive) way. At the heart of the reasons are, first, philosophical questions about the nature of scientific knowledge, the proper subject matters of psychology, and the authority of current approaches as science, and, second, practical, organizational, and social policy questions about the resources committed to psychology or, more precisely, distributed among the different domains of psychological activity. Most of the reasons speak to the world of psychologists, but the author, a historian of science and not a psychologist, argues that the deeper issues at stake, to do with the nature of psychology as science, raise wider questions about being human and the purposes for which knowledge is a goal at all.
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Notes
- 1.
I comment on the sheer difficulty (perhaps impossibility) of agreeing a description, let alone definition, of psychology. One deep reason (to which Graham Richards, in particular, draws attention—Richards, 1987, 2002, pp. 6–7) is that one word refers both to states people have and to the study of those states, with the implication that history of psychology should encompass both the history of states people have and knowledge of those states. (For further comment, see argument 1.8.) There are no precise general descriptive terms for the (staggeringly) varied occupations called psychology. The once common terms, “applied psychology” and “scientific psychology”, will not do, as they imply a separation in principle between scientific and applied domains, which few people now accept; besides, there are marked differences between scientific psychology as a natural science and scientific psychology as a cultural, interpretive, or hermeneutic science and so on.
- 2.
- 3.
All the same, as I argue below, I think it is incontrovertible to say that such research and practices nevertheless tacitly accept a certain version of historical knowledge, though it is so taken for granted that is invisible: the dismissal of history is itself a historically constructed position.
- 4.
A good example is the presentation of the important figurehead of culture in Georgia, the physiologist and researcher of the brain, an opponent of Pavlovian science in the Soviet period, I. S. Beritashvili: Tsagereli and Doty (2009).
- 5.
Brought into teaching clearly in Pickren and Rutherford (2010).
- 6.
It was these weaknesses that first led me to venture into this kind of commentary: Smith (1988).
- 7.
Bruce Alexander and Curtis Shelton even explicitly substitute “psychology” for “moral philosophy” in order to write more clearly for students, thus devaluing history, which is not at all their stated purpose (Alexander & Shelton, 2014, p. 309).
- 8.
I leave it to Toomela’s contribution to deal with the conception of progress in science and the sense in which this conception requires history. Toomela, unlike Sarton, detaches progress in science and humane progress, and his chapter is about progress in science.
- 9.
I place “schools” in scare quotes because of the difference between loose reference to a theoretical orientation and historically and socially precise delineation of a research and teaching institution (whether of associated people or with a specific institutional location).
- 10.
He has done the same for mental illness: Pietikäinen (2007).
- 11.
I also quoted this decisive passage, in the context of a larger argument for history, in Smith (2007, p. 207).
- 12.
For reassertion of critique, faced by “the neuro-turn” in history, as in psychology, see Cooter (2014).
- 13.
“Interprefactions” is the authors’ term for “the transmutation of interpretations and constructions into positive facts” (Borch-Jacobsen & Shamdasani, 2012, p. 144).
- 14.
The authors are persuaded by a statement at the end of Daniel Robinson’s Intellectual History of Psychology, “that psychology is the History of Ideas”: Alexander and Shelton (2014, p. 458, Note 8); Robinson (1995, p. 366). The core difficulty, I think, is that Alexander and Shelton treat psychology as given, a universal category, even though they do not say what they think it denotes. They therefore treat what psychologists now do, which is broad enough, along with what they think they should do, which is even broader as it extends to both “wisdom” and political participation, as appropriately labelled by one term. They use one term to cover anything in the past that they find “speaks” to the actual or ideal activities of modern psychologists. Their humanistic goals are ones many people share. But scholarly history of psychology will question the unanalysed status of the category, psychology, and in particular will want to know when, where, and why such a category, in terms that historical actors themselves would recognize, came into use. Robinson’s position, as stated in the phrase quoted, would seem to equate human self-understanding with psychology. That appears intellectual imperialism of a high order.
- 15.
For another good example of what might be involved in writing history of psychology in light of this (though the paper is not written under the heading of history of psychology—why should it be?), see Toews (2004).
- 16.
Valsiner provides the example of the forgotten past of German post-Hegelian psychology and dialectics. While the psychology of Benecke and others is certainly now little known, to render this a persuasive resource for contemporary psychologists will, I suggest, require unpacking the apparatus of dialectical concepts and demonstration of relevance to specific modern psychological problems or research programmes.
- 17.
For the earlier history, see Jahoda (2007). Psychologie und Geschichte (1989–2002) aimed to connect studies in history of psychology and historical psychology, but this proved hard to sustain. For an exposition of historical psychology, see Staeuble (1991, 1993). For Francophone work, especially of Ignace Meyerson, see Pizarroso (2013).
- 18.
For the argument that cultural or historical psychology, through research on the psychological character of people, can play a mediating role between psychologists and historians of psychology, see Pettit and Davidson (2014).
- 19.
- 20.
I place a lot of emphasis on narrative as a source of meaning (MacIntyre, 1977; Smith, 2007). There is no agreed view about this, but this is not the place to go into the philosophical issues.
- 21.
“Genealogy” is Nietzsche’s, and subsequently Foucault’s, term, taken from the study of family relations; see Nehamas (1985, pp. 100–105).
- 22.
In more recent work, bringing a social science approach to social change linked with the neurosciences, Rose, though hardly interested in history, still finds it necessary to sketch in a lot of historical background (Rose & Abi-Rached, 2013). I hope my arguments explain why. It is this being “drawn into history”, in spite of an author’s stated purposes, that is of interest now. (A parallel might be made to the way even Rose and many scientists, in spite of antipathy, are “drawn into” philosophy.)
- 23.
As argued most famously in British culture by John Henry Newman in the 1850s (Newman 1996, Discourse V).
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Smith, R. (2016). History of Psychology: What for?. In: Klempe, S., Smith, R. (eds) Centrality of History for Theory Construction in Psychology . Annals of Theoretical Psychology, vol 14. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42760-7_1
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