About the Book
Socrates, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Mesmer, William James, Pavlov, Freud, Piaget, Erikson, and Skinner. Each of these thinkers recognized that human beings could examine, comprehend, and eventually guide or influence their own thought processes, emotions, and resulting behavior. The lives and accomplishments of these pillars of psychology, expertly assembled by Morton Hunt, are set against the times in which the subjects lived. Hunt skillfully presents dramatic and lucid accounts of the techniques and validity of centuries of psychological research, and of the methods and effectiveness of major forms of psychotherapy.
Fully revised, and incorporating the dramatic developments of the last fifteen years, The Story of Psychology is a graceful and absorbing chronicle of one of the great human inquiries—the search for the true causes of our behavior.
Table of Contents:
Prologue: Exploring the Universe Within
A Psychological Experiment in the Seventh Century B.C.
Messages from the Gods
The Discovery of the Mind
PART ONE : PRESCIENTIFIC PSYCHOLOGY
1 The Conjecturers
The Glory That Was Greece
The Forerunners: Alcmaeon, Protagoras, Democritus, Hippocrates
The “Midwife of Thought”: Socrates
The Idealist: Plato
The Realist: Aristotle
2 The Scholars
The Long Sleep
The Commentators: Theophrastus, the Hellenists, the Epicureans, the Skeptics, the Stoics
Roman Borrowers: Lucretius, Seneca, Epictetus, Galen, Plotinus
The Patrist Adapters: the Patrists, Tertullian, Saint Augustine
The Patrist Reconcilers: the Schoolmen, Saint Thomas Aquinas
The Darkness Before Dawn
3 The Protopsychologists
The Third Visitation
The Rationalists: Descartes, the Cartesians, Spinoza
The Empiricists: Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, the Empiricist-Associationist School
German Nativism: Leibniz, Kant
PART TWO: FOUNDERS OF A NEW SCIENCE
4 The Physicalists
The Magician-Healer: Mesmer
The Skull Reader: Gall
The Mechanists
Specific Nerve Energy: Müller
Just Noticeable Differences: Weber
Neural Physiology: von Helmholtz
Psychophysics: Fechner
5 First Among Equals: Wundt
As Good a Birth Date as Any
The Making of the First Psychologist
The Curious Goings-on at Konvikt
Wundtian Psychology
Sic Transit
6 The Psychologist Malgré Lui: William James
“This Is No Science”
Adorable Genius
Founding Father
Ideas of the Pre-eminent Psychologizer
Jamesian Paradoxes
7 Explorer of the Depths: Sigmund Freud
The Truth About Freud
The Would-Be Neuroscientist
The Hypnotherapist
The Invention of Psychoanalysis
Dynamic Psychology: Early Formulations
Success
Dynamic Psychology: Extensions and Revisions
But Is It Scientific?
Decline and Fall—and Revival
8 The Measurers
“Whenever You Can, Count”: Francis Galton
Galtonian Paradoxes
The Mental Age Approach: Alfred Binet
The Testing Mania
The IQ Controversy
9 The Behaviorists
A New Answer to Old Questions
Two Discoverers of the Laws of Behaviorism: Thorndike and Pavlov
Mr. Behaviorism: John B. Watson
The Triumph of Behaviorism
Two Great Neobehaviorists: Hull and Skinner
The Impending Paradigm Shift
10 The Gestaltists
A Visual Illusion Gives Rise to a New Psychology
The Rediscovery of the Mind
The Laws of Gestalten
Out-of-Reach Bananas and Other Problems
Learning
Failure and Success
PART THREE: SPECIALIZATION AND SYNTHESIS
Introduction: The Fissioning of Psychology—and the Fusion of the Psychological Sciences
11 The Personality Psychologists
“The Secrets of the Hearts of Other Men”
The Fundamental Units of Personality
Measuring Personality
Making Order out of Chaos
Learned Personality
Body, Genes, and Personality
Late Word from the Personality Front
12 The Developmentalists
“Great Oaks from Little Acorns Grow”
Grand Theory and Nontheory
A Giant, and a Giant Theory
Cognitive Development
Maturation
Personality Development
Social Development
Development from A to Z
13 The Social Psychologists
No Man’s Land
A Case of Multiple Fatherhood
Closed Cases: Cognitive Dissonance, the Psychology
of Imprisonment, Obedience, the Bystander Effect
Ongoing Inquiries: Conflict Resolution, Attribution, Others
The Value of Social Psychology
14 The Perception Psychologists
Interesting Questions
Styles of Looking at Looking
Seeing Form
Seeing Movement
Seeing Depth
Two Ways of Looking at Vision
15 The Emotion and Motivation Psychologists
Fundamental Question
Somatic Theory
ANS and CNS Theory
Cognitive Theory
Patchwork Quilt
16 The Cognitivists
Revolution
Revolution No. 2
Memory
Language
Reasoning
Is the Mind a Computer? Is a Computer a Mind?
New Model
And the Winner Is—
17 The Psychotherapists
Growth Industry
Freud’s Offspring: The Dynamic Psychotherapists
The Patient as Laboratory Animal: Behavior Therapy
All in the Mind: Cognitive Therapy
A Miscellany of Therapies
But Does It Really Work?
18 Users and Misusers of Psychology
Knowledge Is Power
Improving the Human Use of the Human Equipment
Improving the Fit Between Humans and Their Jobs
The Use and Misuse of Testing
Covert Persuasion: Advertising and Propaganda
Psychology in the Courtroom
Beyond the Fringe
19 Psychology Today
Portrait of a Psychologist
Portrait of a Science
Schism
Psychology and Politics
Status Report
Notes
References
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Author :
Morton Hunt is an award winning science writer who has writen for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Harper's among many other publications. He is the author of The Natural History of Love, and The Universe Within. He lives in Gladwyne, PA.
Review :
“A magnificent traversal of an infinitely fascinating landscape by one of the great science writers of our time.”—Chicago Tribune“The definitive guide to those wishing to grasp man’s search to understand the mind.”—The Chattanooga News-Free Press“Masterful. . . . A story of psychology that is deep, wide, and, by turns, flowing, curious, familiar, surprising, intriguing.”—Contemporary Psychology“A tour de force of popular exposition.”—Publishers Weekly
