Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [494]
Copyright © 1993, 2007 by Morton Hunt
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States in different form by Doubleday, in 1993.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the previous edition as follows: Hunt, Morton M., 1920–
The story of psychology / Morton Hunt.
p. cm.
1. Psychology—History. 1. Title.
BF81.H86 1993
150′.9—dc20 92-15131
eISBN: 978-0-307-56830-4
www.anchorbooks.com
v3.0
Introduction:
The Fissioning of Psychology—
and the Fusion of the
Psychological Sciences
We have come a long way.
We have seen philosophers progress from metaphysical speculations and fancies about the mind to a quasi-scientific understanding of some of its processes, and at last, aided by physiologists, extract psychology from philosophy and establish it as an independent science.
We have seen, too, that like other immature sciences, in its early decades as an independent field of knowledge psychology developed no truly unifying theory but only a number of special theories, each of which explained particular phenomena. The theories were the work of great men—men like Wundt, James, Freud, Watson, and Wertheimer— but great though they were, none was the Newton of psychology.
Their followers, however, thought otherwise. The early decades of scientific psychology were “the era of the schools”—there were at least seven in the 1930s1—and the adherents of each claimed that their school’s theory could make a coherent science out of the chaotic mass of findings and mini-theories that had been accumulating since the time of Helmholtz. But by the middle of the last century, many psychologists had begun to think that none of the existing theories had or could become the unifying paradigm of psychology. Neither Wundtian theory nor behaviorism, for instance, had anything useful to say about such matters as problem solving or decision making; Freudian theory cast no light on such matters as perceptual processes or learning; Gestalt theory was unenlightening about child development. As Nevitt Sanford, then of Stanford University, said in 1963, “The great difficulty for general psychology is that the ‘general’ laws so much admired and so eagerly sought are never very general. On the contrary, they are usually quite specific.”2
This could mean that psychology was simply not advanced enough to permit anyone to conceive an overarching theory. But it could mean something quite different: that psychology is not a science in the same sense as physics, chemistry, or biology; that it is a cluster of scientific fields that, though related, are too disparate to fit into the framework of a single theory. Two decades ago, in a summing-up of the condition of psychology, William Kessen, a distinguished developmental psychologist, and his co-author, Emily D. Cahan, wrote in American Scientist:
Lying at the deepest level is the conviction (for some of us, no more than a suspicion) that psychology is not susceptible to unifying ontological and epistemological premises any more than it is susceptible to definition by a particular content, a particular method, or a particular functional process…In the extreme version of this view, psychology has no core problem; rather than elevating perception or learning or problem-solving into a model for all psychology, we must recognize that psychology is as wide as the human mind and as rich in variety.3
The story of psychology since the end of the era of the schools seemed for several decades to prove that conviction (or suspicion) correct. A number of new theories had appeared, but they pertained to specific fields of psychology, not all or even most of the discipline. No school claiming jurisdiction over the whole territory had been