Historicizing Mind Science: Discourse, Practice, Subjectivity

Abstract

It is no longer necessary to defend current historiography of psychology against the strictures aimed at its early text book incarnations in the 1960s and 1970s. At that time, Robert Young (1966) and others denigrated then standard textbook histories of psychology for their amateurism and their justifications propaganda for specific standpoints in current psychology, disguised as history. Since then, at least some textbooks writers and working historians of psychology have made such criticisms their own (Leahey 1986; Furumoto 1989). The demand for textbook histories continues nonetheless. Psychology, at least in the United States, remains the only discipline that makes historical representations of itself in the form of “history and systems” courses an official part of its pedagogical canon, required, interestingly enough, for the license in clinical practice (see Ash 1983).1In the meantime, the professionalization of scholarship in history of psychology has proceeded apace. All of the trends visible in historical and social studies of other sciences, as well as in general cultural and intellectual history, are noe present in the historical study of psychology. Yet despite the visibility and social importance of psychology's various applications, and the prominence of certain schools of psychological thought such as behaviorism and psychoanalysis in contemporary cultural and political debate, the historiography of psychology has continued to hold a marginal position in history and social studies of science.