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By Root 1498 0

founded, and in fact the field of psychology burst apart and became a number of autonomous fields of specialization. By 1990 the American Psychological Association had recognized fifty-eight fields of psychology and had forty-five “divisions” (membership subgroups) representing those fields—the fission products of the split-up. And on it goes: Today APA recognizes some seventy fields of psychology and has fifty-six divisions.

Michael Gazzaniga, president of the Association for Psychological Science (APS, formerly the American Psychological Society), recalled in a recent article that some years ago Leon Festinger epitomized the problem when telling him why he was quitting psychology for archaeology: “I realized I was learning more and more about less and less.”4

Today, Gazzaniga said in the article, “every psychology department carries this curse, as does every field of human endeavor. We split, titrate, and specialize as a way of becoming experts on at least something. We then protect that turf as if it were life itself. We frown on the integrative and feel it is sort of for lightweights.” But in fact he himself has recently moved from Dartmouth to the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he now heads an interdisciplinary institute attracting “collaborators from philosophy, biology, psychology, anthropology, computer science, and the humanities…in the hunt for a better understanding of mind.”

That, in a nutshell, is what has been happening to psychology. Ever since the decline and fall of behaviorism, psychology has been fissioning into specialties—and yet in recent decades, especially in the past two, a stunning and invaluable reaction has been taking place. Under the pressure of developments in other behavioral sciences, as well as neurobiology and computer science, a number of psychology departments and special institutes within universities have created interdisciplinary programs aimed at a larger and deeper understanding of the human mind. Fission is being countered by intellectual fusion.

From here on, accordingly, we will not follow a single chronological story but will look at what has happened in each of six principal fields of psychology and in the psychotherapies. We will see and appreciate the specialization that has advanced their work—and threatened to choke them—and the synthesis that is currently making psychology an extraordinarily exciting and illuminating science, a true science of the mind. Whether this course will result in a new grand theory, a unified theory of mind, or only several interlocking theories remains to be seen.

Finally, in chapters 18 and 19, we will briefly look at a number of other aspects of contemporary psychology that could not be given fuller treatment without unduly fatiguing the reader as well as the author.