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Points of View in the Modern History of Psychology

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Points of View in the Modern History of Psychology Points of View in the Modern History of Psychology Edited by Claude E. Buxton Department of Psychology Yale University New Haven, Connecticut 1985 ACADEMIC PRESS, INC. (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers) Orlando San Diego New York London Toronto Montreal Sydney Tokyo Passages from the following are reprinted by permission of the publishers: Newell, Α., Duncker on Thinking, in S. Koch & D. Leary (Eds.), A Century of Psychology as Science. Copyright 1985 by McGraw-Hill. Neisser, U., Cognitive Psychology. © 1967 by Prentice-Hall. COPYRIGHT © 1985 BY ACADEMIC PRESS, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS PUBLICATION MAY BE REPRODUCED OR TRANSMITTED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY MEANS, ELECTRONIC OR MECHANICAL, INCLUDING PHOTOCOPY, RECORDING, OR ANY INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL SYSTEM, WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER. ACADEMIC PRESS, INC. Orlando, Florida 32887 United Kingdom Edition published by ACADEMIC PRESS INC. (LONDON) LTD. 24-28 Oval Road, London NW1 7DX LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA Main entry under title: Points of view in the modern history of psychology. Includes indexes. 1. Psychology— History. I. Buxton, Claude E. BF81.P57 1985 150\9 85-4010 ISBN 0-12-148510-2 (alk. paper) PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 85 86 87 88 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contributors Numbers in parentheses indicate the pages on which the authors' contributions begin. Mitchell G. Ash (295), Department of History, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa 52242 William Bevan (259), John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Chicago, Illinois 60603 Arthur L. Blumenthal (19, 51), Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts at Boston, Boston, Massachusetts 02125 Claude E. Buxton (1, 85, 113, 417), Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut 06520 Horst U. K. Gundlach (383), Institut für Geschichte der Neueren Psy- chologie, Universität Passau, Federal Republic of Germany Rom Harré (383), University Lecturer in Philosophy of Science, Fellow of Linacre College, Oxford University, Oxford OX1 4JJ, England, and Department of Philosophy, State University of New York, Binghamton, New York 13901 Frank S. Kessel (259), Department of Psychology, University of Hous- ton, Houston, Texas 77004 Alexandra W. Logue (141,169), Department of Psychology, State Univer- sity of New York, Stony Brook, New York 11794 Alexandre Métraux (383), Institute of Psychology, University of Heidel- berg, Federal Republic of Germany Andrew Ockwell (383), Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford OX2 6UD, England Karl H. Pribram (345), Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305 Daniel N. Robinson (345), Department of Psychology, Georgetown Uni- versity, Washington, D. C. 20057 Robert S. Steele (197, 221), Department of Psychology, Wesleyan Uni- versity, Middletown, Connecticut 06457 Kathleen V. Wilkes (383), St. Hilda's College, Oxford OX4 1DY, England xi Preface There are always some people, and I am one of them, who are curious about why an author takes on the hard labor of producing a book or, in the present era of edited books, why anyone should take on the busi- ness of persuading collaborators, editing, indexing, and the rest of it. The matter is rather simple, however, in this case. After teaching the history-and-systems course to psychology undergraduates for several decades, I gave it up because I finally found the available reading mate- rial beyond redemption by my lifelong interest in teaching. This gave me both opportunity and cause to analyze my boredom with the course I had just quit teaching. It did not take me long to realize (I suppose I had "known" it earlier) that the traditional books of Heidbreder and Woodworth, and their successors and imitators as well, had a "low ceiling" for contemporary students. The question then became how to provide the intellectual stretch and the interest that were so badly needed. It was clear enough that new material was needed, but preparing it presented two problems. One, it seemed to me, was that to set out deliberately to write a textbook in this particular case would be know- ingly to intend a rehash. When that is realized, it is at once clear that what is needed is to redirect scholarship so that historiography can yield a higher level of understanding of why and how various systems or viewpoints arose. Any textbook writing, to be worthwhile, must be informed by that new scholarship. Edna Heidbreder's Seven Psychologies of 1933 and Robert Woodworth's Contemporary Schools of Psychology in its editions of 1931, 1948, and 1964 did a great service to several generations of students. However, since about 1965, history has become a resurgent field of study in psychology, and one realization has been that while Heidbreder's and Woodworth's books are a rich source of historical materials, the history in them is, in a way, incidental to their compara- xiii xiv Preface tive presentation of points of view. Furthermore, as a result of the many recent studies, history can now be the main focus, and the result, as the text shows, is a more advanced and more interesting treatment of psy- chological points of view. The second problem in writing history in this area arises from the need for special knowledge, the expert knowledge that enables the his- torian to appreciate subtleties of the history being written. To be sure, such intimate knowledge of an area can blind one to one's preconcep- tions of it, but it is important to remember that the discipline of histori- ography emphasizes avoiding that very weakness. With that reassur- ance, I was persuaded that the most desirable history of systems or points of view would come from people who had considerable experi- ence of the viewpoints about which they wrote, and it was this kind of person who should be invited to participate. (Let it be noted that no known partisans were approached.) I am sure I was convinced of the validity of this approach partly because, in my more impressionable years, I was a student or faculty colleague of some historically great proponents of particular viewpoints, most notably Kurt Lewin, Wolfgang Köhler, Kenneth Spence, and Clark Hull. Each was convinced he was on the right track, each "gave off sparks" intellectually and energized his faculty associates and students into research and theoret- ical activity, and each acknowledged (if only in private!) the imperfec- tions as well as the prospective perfectibility of the viewpoint for which he stood. They were members of a mighty intellectual tribe, and I still admire their contributions. Of the mechanics of seeking authors who would agree to my sketchy conceptions of the chapters and accept final responsibility for writing them as they "should" be written, I say nothing further except that I am grateful for their scholarship and for the cooperation that saw the task finally to completion. 1 Of History, and the Nature of This Book CLAUDE E. BUXTON INTRODUCTION In the past, psychology has had its important historians whose names every psychologist knows. Within the last two decades, however, the number of scholars in the field has multiplied rapidly. There are several reasons for this. The immediate cause relates to the familiarly named "knowledge ex- plosion." Increasing numbers of graduate students and faculty, in aca- demic pursuits reflecting broadened opportunities for scholarship, have shared in the spillover of time, energy, and resources to fields less well studied in the past—in this instance, the history of psychology. As is true in many other flourishing areas of psychology, the study of its history has been marked with significant names such as Brett, Boring, and Murphy, scattered across the twentieth century. Attributes shared by these scholars include an unusually broad personal mastery of di- verse subfields of psychology and a long life-span, during which a bal- anced perspective and a capacity for mature evaluation could accrue. A number of scholars in this near-heroic mold have since appeared, and in addition more and more people are absorbed in limited, specifi- cally defined historical researches leading to journal publications and 1 POINTS OF VIEW IN THE Copyright © 1985 by Academic Press, Inc. MODERN HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISBN 0-12-148510-2 2 Claude Ε. Buxton presentations of scholarly papers. Such efforts require some degree of specialized competence and frequently result in a book by several au- thors expert in their respective subfields of the history of psychology. This kind of book, even though it may be an interim phenomenon in the growth of many scholarly fields, constitutes a valuable addition to the tools and scholarly resources used to explore and interpret our history. It seems to be increasingly true that history is seen as a way to find meaning in the mass of contemporary psychological scholarship. This explanation for the enhanced interest in history is supported by a real- ization that in psychology, more than in most fields, historical study is relevant to the present. Julian Jaynes (1973) feels rather strongly about this: As a laboratory investigation, psychology is only a century old . (but) its history . is . .a continuing discussion of the perennial and enduring prob- lems of human and animal nature . Current work on the nature-nurture problem, on emotion and intellect, on thought and language, on the problem of consciousness—all are simply the most recent voices in discussions which have been reverberating through history for more than two thousand years . It is relevant to present research, (p. x) In psychology, perhaps in contrast to some other scientific fields, it would be only a little unusual, and not at all irrelevant, if an experimen- talist studying the fundamental nature of memory should get it into his or her head to reread Ebbinghaus, or if a clinical psychologist should develop a hypothesis from an idea of Freud's to be tested against an alternative interpretation of adolescent behavior.
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