Culture, history, and psychology: Some historical reflections and research directions

Abstract

Psychologists have typically narrated their discipline’s history so as to glorify an experimental method, which analyzes the mind independently of cultural and historical factors. In line with Jahoda’s sociocultural sensitivity to psychology, this article critically interrogates the plausibility for this vision of psychology as cut off from wider social processes, and offers an alternative based on a re-appropriation of concepts and methods from psychology’s past that highlight cultural processes. This approach is illustrated with a study of how people remember history narratives on the basis of cultural resources taken over from social groups they belong to, and which thus embed them within a stream of history. Both psychologists’ narratives of their discipline and people’s everyday memory of history are shown to be motivated toward the justification of particular visions of social reality.