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...

It has been widely believed that psychology in Germany, faced with political antipathy and mass emigration of its leading minds, withered under National Socialism. Yet in The Professionalization of Psychology in Nazi Germany, Ulfried Geuter tells a radically different story of how German psychology, rather than disappearing, rapidly grew into a fully developed profession under the Third Reich. Author Geuter makes it clear that the rising demands of a modern industrial nation preparing for war afforded the field with a unique opportunity: to transform itself from a marginal academic discipline...

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...

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...