The Psych 101 Series James C. Kaufman, PhD, Series Editor Department of Educational Psychology University of Connecticut David C. Devonis, PhD, received his doctorate in the history of psychology from the University of New Hampshire’s erstwhile pro- gram in that subject in 1989 with a thesis on the history of conscious pleasure in modern American psychology. Since then he has taught vir- tually every course in the psychology curriculum in his academic odys- sey from the University of Redlands in Redlands, California, and the now-closed Teikyo Marycrest University (formerly Marycrest College in Davenport, Iowa) to—for the past 17 years—Graceland University in Lamoni, Iowa, alma mater of Bruce Jenner and, more famously for the history of psychology, of Noble H. Kelly (1901–1997), eminent con- tributor to psychology’s infrastructure through his many years of ser- vice to the American Board of Examiners in Professional Psychology. Dr. Devonis has been a member of Cheiron: The International Society for the History of Behavioral and Social Sciences since 1990, a con- tributor to many of its activities, and its treasurer for the past 10 years. Currently he is on the editorial board of the American Psychological Association journal History of Psychology and is, with Wade Pickren, coeditor and compiler of the online bibliography History of Psychology in the Oxford Bibliographies Online series. History of Psychology 101 David C. Devonis, PhD Copyright © 2014 Springer Publishing Company, LLC All rights reserved. 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Contents Preface vii Prologue 1 Chapter 1 The 1920s 23 Chapter 2 The 1930s 41 Chapter 3 The 1940s 67 Chapter 4 The 1950s 87 Chapter 5 The 1960s 109 Chapter 6 The 1970s 133 Chapter 7 The 1980s 161 Chapter 8 The 1990s and Beyond 185 Epilogue: An Interview 213 v CONTENTS Appendix I: Some Notes on the Characters 245 Appendix II: Suggestions for Further Reading 253 References 255 Index 271 vi Preface n 1989, I finished my graduate studies and took a job at a college in Southern California as a replacement for a fac- ulty member who was moving back East. It had always been my dream to live in California, and when I got there II set about becoming a Californian right away. The first stop was the Department of Motor Vehicles to change my New Hampshire license plates for new California ones—number 2NZB642—and the next was the local office of the Automobile Club of Southern California (ACSC). There they gave me a membership card and a fat, dark-blue plastic envelope full of information, including the one thing most essential to existence in Southern California then and now: the ACSC map of the Los Angeles freeway system. This was before GPS. Maps were printed on paper and were stored, badly refolded, in the glove compartment, and hauled out to be consulted with one eye while looking ahead with the other; an early version of texting while driving. A couple of months later I was sitting by the pool at my apart- ment complex, on an 80-degree day in January, faced with teach- ing, the next week, the history of psychology for the first time. I had just received my doctorate in that area from the University of New Hampshire, but had never before taught the course to an undergraduate group. How would I be able to present simply the complex past of psychology? While thinking over this question, my eyes fell on the freeway map, and the result is the following drawing. vii PREFACE In the upper half of the map, I tried to illustrate a chrono- logical sequence showing how modern psychology emerged from philosophy, converging over time with science, coming up from the lower half, compressing religion down to a thin stream that eventually went underground. As far as I could, I marked the main cities and towns (theorists, inventors, scientists, and other intellectual ancestors) and tried to map them so that plausible paths of influence connected them. Once my students and I got over the initial shock, we found it answered our purposes well. It expresses what I think about the past, which is that it is always there and we can always travel around in it easily, on good roads constructed by historians, translators, and others who have kept the past alive. Not only can we drive wherever and for however long we like, but we can also return to the present with whatever we find useful on our travels. Of course, as the general semanticists told us, the map is not the territory, and maps are notoriously incomplete. I still wonder how I left out all the imaginative writers and artists that have informed not only psychology but all that has preceded it. Many of the relative distances between thinkers and even some of the connections are, I am sure, inaccurate if not plain wrong. But as a heuristic device for finding individuals and ideas in psychol- ogy’s ancient past, it works well. When I drew it, in 1990, courses in the history of psychology were often based on textbooks in which the histories of individuals marked on the map, and the ideas associated with them, made up well over half of the course. That was the case for the first history of psychology course I took in 1981. By 1990, though, it was already clear that a map such as I had drawn had more than a little irony to it, leaving out as it did at least 80 years of development since the point at which it stopped. I suppose that drawing it was, for me, at some uncon- scious level a way of asserting that the recent past is the interest- ing one, the one that needs our attention, interest, and research. Twenty-five years of teaching and writing about the history of psychology have convinced me that the past 80 years in psy- chology, in the United States and in the world at large, is at least as interesting a historical period as any comparable period in the ix PREFACE past, and that it can stand on its own with any of them. So, think of this book as the continuation of my 1990 freeway map, as a sketch or a conceptual map of the routes that psychology, mainly in the United States, has taken since 1930 to reach our present time. Attending to the recent rather than the ancient past has sev- eral advantages for those approaching the history of psychology for the first time. For one thing, much of the story will be new enough that the events will be somewhat familiar, both from other modern history courses and also from family and personal histories. Another advantage is that the issues that have arisen in times nearer to our own are not only historical but in most cases still lively in psychologists’ thinking. Connecting them to their origins will help provide what one eminent historian called a “usable past.” I have tried to show as many continuities between psychology’s past and present as I could, given the limitations of a basic treatment of the subject. I have also tried to present the story in a way that will give you a framework for placing yourself and your experiences into the larger story of this vitally necessary field, psychology.