Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [0]
THE STORY OF
PSYCHOLOGY
Morton Hunt has been a freelance writer specializing in the behavioral sciences since 1949. His articles have appeared in many national magazines, including The New Yorker and The New York Times, and have won him numerous prizes including the Westinghouse A.A.A.S. Award for best science article of the year. He has written twenty-one books, the best known of which are The World of the Formerly Married (about the lives and psychology of separated and divorced people), The Universe Within (cognitive science), and the earlier edition of this present book. He lives in Gladwyn, Pennsylvania, with his wife, writer and psychotherapist Bernice Hunt.
A L S O B Y M O R T O N H U N T
The Natural History of Love
Her Infinite Variety:
The American Woman as Lover, Mate and Rival
Mental Hospital
The Talking Cure
(with Rena Corman and Louis R. Ormont)
The Thinking Animal
The World of the Formerly Married
The Affair: A Portrait of Extra-Marital Love
in Contemporary America
The Mugging
Sexual Behavior in the 1970s
Prime Time: A Guide to the Pleasures and Opportunities
of the New Middle Age (with Bernice Hunt)
The Divorce Experience (with Bernice Hunt)
The Universe Within:
A New Science Explores the Human Mind
Profiles of Social Research:
The Scientific Study of Human Interactions
The Compassionate Beast: What Science Is Discovering
About the Humane Side of Humankind
How Science Takes Stock: The Story of Meta-Analysis
The New Know-Nothings: The Political Foes of the
Scientific Study of Human Nature
To Bernice,
for reasons beyond counting
READER
I here put into thy hands what has been the diversion of some of my idle and heavy hours; if it has the good luck to prove so of any of thine, and thou hast but half so much pleasure in reading as I had in writing it, thou wilt as little think thy money, as I do my pains, ill bestowed.
JOHN LOCKE, “The Epistle to the Reader,”
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
CONTENTS
Prologue: Exploring the Universe Within
A Psychological Experiment in the Seventh Century B.C. 1
Messages from the Gods
The Discovery of the Mind
PART ONE: PRESCIENTIFIC PSYCHOLOGY
1 The Conjecturers
The Glory That Was Greece
The Forerunners: Alcmaeon, Protagoras, Democritus, Hippocrates
The “Midwife of Thought”: Socrates
The Idealist: Plato
The Realist: Aristotle
2 The Scholars
The Long Sleep
The Commentators: Theophrastus, the Hellenists, the Epicureans, the Skeptics, the Stoics
Roman Borrowers: Lucretius, Seneca, Epictetus, Galen, Plotinus
The Patrist Adapters: the Patrists, Tertullian, Saint Augustine
The Patrist Reconcilers: the Schoolmen, Saint Thomas Aquinas
The Darkness Before Dawn
3 The Protopsychologists
The Third Visitation
The Rationalists: Descartes, the Cartesians, Spinoza
The Empiricists: Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, the Empiricist-Associationist School
German Nativism: Leibniz, Kant
PART TWO: FOUNDERS OF A NEW SCIENCE
4 The Physicalists
The Magician-Healer: Mesmer
The Skull Reader: Gall
The Mechanists
Specific Nerve Energy: Müller
Just Noticeable Differences: Weber
Neural Physiology: von Helmholtz
Psychophysics: Fechner
5 First Among Equals: Wundt
As Good a Birth Date as Any
The Making of the First Psychologist
The Curious Goings-on at Konvikt
Wundtian Psychology
Sic Transit
6 The Psychologist Malgré Lui: William James
“This Is No Science”
Adorable Genius
Founding Father
Ideas of the Pre-eminent Psychologizer
Jamesian Paradoxes
7 Explorer of the Depths: Sigmund Freud
The Truth About Freud
The Would-Be Neuroscientist
The Hypnotherapist
The Invention of Psychoanalysis
Dynamic Psychology: Early Formulations
Success
Dynamic Psychology: Extensions and Revisions
But Is It Scientific?
Decline and Fall—and Revival
8 The Measurers
“Whenever You Can, Count”: Francis Galton
Galtonian Paradoxes
The Mental Age Approach: Alfred Binet
The Testing Mania
The IQ Controversy
9 The Behaviorists
A New Answer to Old Questions
Two Discoverers of the Laws of Behaviorism: Thorndike