History of psychology
August 31, 2026
Aurelio Molaro
This article reconstructs the central features of the phenomenological anthropology developed by the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger through a close reading of the first part of his 1942 treatise Grundformen und Erkenntnis menschlichen Daseins [Basic Forms and Knowledge of Human Dasein], a work that has received limited attention in the English-language historiography of phenomenological...
History of psychology
August 1, 2024
John R. Snarey, Joel Mclendon
1 citation
William James delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902, and his 20 lectures were published as The Varieties of Religious Experience. While the book is a classic in the psychology of religion, little to no attention has been given to the immediate context of James's lectures or his state of mind and perspectives during his delivery of each. This...
History of psychology
November 1, 2020
Matei Iagher
This article aims at placing Henri Delacroix's (1908) book on the psychology of mysticism in the context of debates in the psychology of religion in the earlier part of the 20th century. I argue that Delacroix's work was authored as part of a wider debate that Delacroix maintained with the American school of the psychology of religion regarding the role of emotions in religious experience. As I...
History of psychology
February 1, 2020
Walter Melo, Pedro Henrique Costa de Resende
6 citations
William James (1842-1910) is recognized as one of the main proponents of the then-emergent field of scientific psychology in the 19th century, and Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) is regarded as one of the most prolific authors within the fields of psychiatry and psychology of the 20th century. Previous studies have highlighted the practical and theoretical impact of James on the work of Jung. The...
History of psychology
May 1, 2019
Simon Kemp
During the later Middle Ages, a number of religiously oriented people behaved in ways that we would consider unusual, yet it was unusual for them to be regarded as mentally disordered. This article reviews late medieval thinking and practice with regard to mental disorder and also with regard to the discernment of spirits, that is, how it could be decided whether an experience or impulse to do...
History of psychology
August 1, 2018
Erika Dyck, Patrick Farrell
21 citations
The decade of the 1950s is well known among historians of psychiatry for the unprecedented shift toward psychopharmacological solutions to mental health problems. More psychiatric medications were introduced than ever before or since (Healy, 2002). While psychiatric researchers later credited these drugs, in part, for controlling psychotic, depressive, and anxious symptoms-and subsequently for...
History of psychology
November 2016
Michael E Staub
In the course of the 1970s and 1980s, theories derived from neuropsychological research on the bisected brain came rapidly to achieve the status of common sense in the United States and Canada, inflecting all manner of popular and academic discussion. These theories often posited that the right hemisphere was the seat of creative expression, whereas the left hemisphere housed rationality and...
History of psychology
February 1, 2011
Liliana Albertazzi
12 citations
Between the 1920s and 1930s, Renata Calabresi conducted pioneering laboratory researches on the nature, extensity, and quality of the psychic present. Her analyses stemmed from the Central European tradition initiated by Stern, Brentano, Meinong, and Benussi. Her work has remained largely unrecognized, because of both the decline of the underlying theoretical paradigm, namely descriptive...
History of psychology
May 2010
John A Mills
Working in a psychiatrically innovative environment created by the Government of Saskatchewan, Canada, Abram Hoffer and Humphry F. Osmond enunciated the adrenochrome hypothesis for the biogenesis of schizophrenia in 1952, slightly later proposing and, apparently, demonstrating, in a double-blind study, that the symptoms of the illness could be reversed by administering large doses of niacin....
History of psychology
August 1, 2000
G Jahoda
Levy-Bruhl exerted a powerful influence, seldom considered, on Piaget. The Levy-Bruhlian thesis of a "pre-logical mentality" characterized by "mystical participation" is outlined, together with its initial reception. The first evidence of Piaget's interest in it dates from 1920, and when he began his studies of children's thinking he compared it with that of 'primitives," also adopting...
History of psychology
August 1999
G J Boudewijnse, D J Murray, C A Bandomir
J.F. Herbart (1824/1890b) provided a mathematical theory about how mental ideas (Vorstellungen) in consciousness at Time 1 (T1) could compete, possibly driving 1 or more Vorstellungen below a threshold of consciousness. At T1 a Vorstellung A could also fuse with another, B. If at a later T2, A resurfaced into consciousness, it could help B to re-resurface into consciousness. This article...