This book offers the first complete study of the origins of American intelligence testing. It follows the life and work of Henry Herbert Goddard, America's first intelligence tester and author of the famous American eugenics tract, The Kallikak Family. The book traces the controversies surrounding Goddard's efforts to bring Alfred Binet's tests of intelligence from France to America and to introduce them into the basic institutions of American life--from hospitals to classrooms to courtrooms. It shows how testers used their findings to address the most pressing social and political questions...

Constructing Scientific Psychology is the first full-scale interpretation of the life and work of the major American neuropsychologist Karl Lashley. It sets Lashley's research at the heart of two controversies that polarized the American life and human sciences in the first half of the twentieth century. These concerned the relationship between "mind" and "brain" and the relative roles of "nature" and "nurture" in shaping behavior and intelligence. The book explodes the myth of Lashley's neuropsychology as a fact-driven, "pure" science by arguing that a belief in the power of heredity and a...

Jaap van Ginneken's study explores the social and intellectual history of the emergence of the field of crowd psychology in the late nineteenth century in France and Italy. Both the popular work of the French physician LeBon, considered the "father" of this field, and his predecessors are shown to be influenced and closely connected with the dramatic events and academic debates of their day. Although LeBon is generally thought of as the creator of the field of crowd psychology, this study demonstrates how he derived most of his key concepts from immediate predecessors, without acknowledging...

Metaphors in the History of Psychology describes and analyzes the ways in which psychological accounts of brain functioning, consciousness, cognition, emotion, motivation, learning, and behavior have been shaped--and are still being shaped--by the central metaphors used by contemporary psychologists and their predecessors. The contributors to this volume argue that psychologists and their predecessors have invariably turned to metaphor in order to articulate their descriptions, theories, and practical interventions with regard to psychological functioning. By specifying the major metaphors in...

This book offers the first complete study of the origins of American intelligence testing. It follows the life and work of Henry Herbert Goddard, America's first intelligence tester and author of the famous American eugenics tract, The Kallikak Family. The book traces the controversies surrounding Goddard's efforts to bring Alfred Binet's tests of intelligence from France to America and to introduce them into the basic institutions of American life--from hospitals to classrooms to courtrooms. It shows how testers used their findings to address the most pressing social and political questions...

The history of the social sciences has been marked by frequent and fierce debates on the rules of scientific methodology. Even the most general criteria agreed upon in the natural sciences are emphatically disputed in the social sciences. Presenting the history of psychology in the Netherlands as a case representative of Western social science, this book examines the divisive nature of social methodology more closely. The author scrutinizes published books and articles, as well as archival material and taped interviews, to sketch a history in which psychologists call their colleagues...

This is the first full-length historical study of Gestalt psychology--an attempt to advance holistic thought within natural science. Holistic thought is often portrayed as a wooly-minded revolt against reason and modern science, but this is not so. On the basis of rigorous experimental research and scientific argument as well as on philosophical grounds, the Gestalt theorists Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Kohler and Kurt Koffka opposed conceptions of science and mind that equated knowledge of nature with its effective manipulation and control. Instead, they attempted to establish dynamic...

This book examines the work of social and personality psychologists who, in the 1930s, criticized the increasingly restrictive vision of scientific life being promoted by neobehaviorist social scientists. This critique has been overlooked by historians who have concentrated on the rise of neobehaviorism, rather than the challenges advanced by such "rebels within the ranks" as Gordon Allport, Gardner Murphy, and Lois Barclay Murphy. All three contributed to ongoing public and professional debates about democracy and the authority of scientific knowledge in New Deal America.

Psychologists on the March argues that the Second World War had a profound impact on the modern psychological profession in America. Before the war, psychology was viewed largely as an academic discipline, drawing its ideology and personnel from the laboratory. Following the war, it was increasingly seen as a source of theory and practice to deal with mental health issues. With the support of the federal government, the field entered a prolonged period of exponential growth that saw major changes in the institutional structure of the field that spread to include the epistemological...

Constructing Scientific Psychology is the first full-scale interpretation of the life and work of the major American neuropsychologist Karl Lashley. It sets Lashley's research at the heart of two controversies that polarized the American life and human sciences in the first half of the twentieth century. These concerned the relationship between "mind" and "brain" and the relative roles of "nature" and "nurture" in shaping behavior and intelligence. The book explodes the myth of Lashley's neuropsychology as a fact-driven, "pure" science by arguing that a belief in the power of heredity and a...