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Hard-Nosed Psychologists

Some Reflections on Writing Psychology's History

Hornby Island, British Columbia

This article discusses some of the issues involved in writing a historiography of histories of psychological thought, using as an example the development of my own thinking while writing a history of behaviorism. Taking the approaches of narrative historians as a starting point, I ask if such approaches can be applied to the writing of psychology's history, concluding that narrative approaches are congruent only with the analysis of particular episodes in psychology's history, while the narrative mode itself entails grave conceptual difficulties. Histories of schools of psychological thought require the methods of historians of ideas. Following Hayden White, I maintain that the writing of large-scale intellectual history demands a prior act of imaginative structuring, so that any attempts to deal with the crucial notions of causation or agency must be mediated via an understanding of the structure of that act.

Key Words: behaviorism • historiography • history of psychology • intellectual history • narrative

Theory & Psychology, Vol. 10, No. 3, 399-412 (2000)
DOI: 10.1177/0959354300103005


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