This unique textbook offers an inspirational and engaging guide to psychology’s past and present, told through fascinating stories about the discipline’s charismatic personalities and the controversies they generated. Geoff Bunn introduces students to an array of conceptual and analytical tools for critical thinking and demonstrates how to apply these tools to understand a variety of historical controversies, psychological theories, and individual personalities.
Each chapter focuses on a core area of psychological study and integrates both conceptual and historical issues in a ‘guide on the side’ approach, encouraging students to form their own opinions of what they have read. The book takes an inclusive approach, integrating equality, diversity, human rights, and intersectionality issues throughout, and introduces students to often overlooked figures and areas of study.
The text is supported by an extensive tutor guide featuring lesson plans, resources, key sources, recommended readings, and tried-and-tested classroom exercises that utilise tools for critical thinking. This is the ideal undergraduate textbook for conceptual and historical issues in psychology, whether taught as a stand-alone course or integrated into other psychology modules.
Table of Contents:
Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1 The Contours of Murder: Phrenology and the Logic of Reductionism
Chapter 2 Darwin’s Shadow: Evolution and the Naturalisation of Mind
Chapter 3 The Skull That Sparked a Theory: Criminality and the Allure of Natural Kinds
Chapter 4 Remembering Herculine: The Looping Effects of Sexuality
Chapter 5 The Queen of the Hysterics: Hysteria and the Mimetic Body
Chapter 6 Pursuing Beauty: Psychological Laboratories and the Metaphysics of Measurement
Chapter 7 The Cat’s Cradle: Untangling the Psychological Complex
Chapter 8 A Troubled Cure for a Troubled Mind: Psychology’s Mastery of Metaphor
Chapter 9 The BITCH Bites Back: Categorisation and the Invention of Intelligence
Chapter 10 After the Flood: Companion Species and the Co-production of Psychology
Chapter 11 Pigeons Play Ping Pong: Behaviourism and the Crisis of the Paradigm
Chapter 12 ‘Three Generations of Imbeciles Are Enough’: Psychology, Biopower, and the Apparatus of Eugenics
Chapter 13 Broken Bodies, Wounded Souls: The Psychosomatic Protest of Shell Shock
Chapter 14 The Secrets of Black Magic: Industrial Psychology’s Technologies of the Self
Chapter 15 Duty, Uses and Abuses: Personality Psychology’s Modal Selves
Chapter 16 ‘An Ego that Only Desires Pleasure’: Psychoanalysis, Phallocentrism, and the Maternal Metaphor
Chapter 17 The Wisdom of the Crowd: Reification and the Authority of Statistics
Chapter 18 The Machine That Knew Too Much: The Lie Detector and the Discursive Production of Truth
Chapter 19 Into the Dome: The Material Culture of Child Psychology
Chapter 20 A Most Haunted House: Parapsychology’s Boundary-work
Chapter 21 Mad Travellers: The Historical Ontology of Psychological Categories
Chapter 22 Behind the Mask: Psychological Diagnosis and the Politics of Interpellation
Chapter 23 Telling Tales: The Cold War Parables of Social Psychology
Chapter 24 Hidden Treasures: Humanistic Psychotherapy and the Dialectic of Meaning
Chapter 25 Speaking Truth to Power: Community Psychology’s Critical Consciousness
Chapter 26 “You’re All Wet!”: Evolutionary Psychology and the Pleasures of Fantasy
Chapter 27 Language Games: The Cult of the Fact and the Enchantment of Discourse
Chapter 28 Unnatural Emotions: The Social Construction of Feelings
Chapter 29 The Power Within: Cognitive Psychology’s Embodied Cognition
Chapter 30 A Cold of the Soul: Positive Psychology’s Neoliberal Cure
Chapter 31 Ghost Stories: Romantic Love from Courtship to Situationship
Chapter 32 Tell Me Where It Hurts: Feminist Psychology’s Critique of Hegemonic Masculinity
Chapter 33 Acts of Resistance: Psychology and LGBTQIA+ Activism
Chapter 34 “This Is Who I Am”: Black Psychology and Critical Race Theory’s Unfinished Revolution
Chapter 35 The One with Rachel In It: Cognitive Neuropsychology and the Technological Sublime
Chapter 36 Train Wreck Looming: Conceptual and Historical Issues and the Crisis in Psychology
Appendix
About the Author :
Geoff Bunn is Reader in Psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, and an internationally-recognised researcher in the history of psychology and education.
