History from the Top Down

Abstract

In recent years, interest in the history of psychology seems to have grown exponentially, which may or may not be a ‘good thing’. At least, judged by the number of new titles, including texts, monographs, and essay collections on historical topics, publishers apparently expect the field to provide them with a sizeable market even if not turning into ‘big business’. Although the upcoming centennial of the founding of the American Psychological Association and allied ceremonial events may account for part of this expansion, several other developments have contributed to it. To name two among them, there was first the post-Kuhnian redefinition of the task set for a disciplinary history. Secondly, psychologist-historians discovered a new cache of data in the form of unpublished archival source material — although even today the official APA publication manual still does not allow, in its meticulous prescriptions for proper references, for the legitimate existence of such unpublished material, thus providing us with a contemporary example of what Danziger discusses as the object-constituting activities deriving from supposedly neutral but in fact quite imperialistic methodologies.