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ON 24 October 1901, 10 people met at University College London to form a psychological society. Exactly a hundred years later, on 24 October 2001, The British Psychological Society will mark its centenary with a celebration at the Science Museum in London, and simultaneous events in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Since 1901, the Society has grown until membership stands at more than 32.000. The first 10 members included a laboratory worker, a lecturer, an educational worker, a physiologist, a psychiatrist and a `private individual interested in things of the mind' (Edgell, 1947, p.113).
Today, members of the Society still include lecturers, researchers, technicians, neuropsychologists, educational psychologists and clinical psychologists, and these have been joined by occupational, forensic, counselling and health psychologists, as well as the numerous subdivisions of specialities within the discipline.
All of these will be represented in the various events organised for the centenary year, events which will take the opportunity not only to look back, but to look forward to the next century of psychology and beyond.
A centenary slogan competition resulted in the choice of `Bringing Psychology to Society'. This motto for the centenary year, devised by member Michael Davis, aptly distils a key aim of The British Psychological Society, which is to `promote the advancement and diffusion of a knowledge of psychology, pure and applied'.
Since 1998, a British Psychological Society Centenary Fellow, Dr Geoff Bunn, has been...