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RR 2012/248 Encyclopedia of the History of Psychological Theories Edited by Robert W. Rieber Springer New York, NY and Dordrecht 2012 2 vols. ISBN 978 1 4419 0425 6 £449 $679 Also available online (ISBN 978 1 4419 0463 8)
Keywords Encyclopedias, History, Philosophy, Psychology
Review DOI 10.1108/09504121211251664
Psychology as an academic discipline has a very short history compared with most other sciences. Like other parvenus it has overcompensated by inventing an enormously long prehistory involving practically any philosopher who ever expressed a view on human nature, and has developed an obsessive interest in its own past. A chemist or biologist who shows an interest in the history of science tends to be assumed by his colleagues to be past doing original research - the history of most sciences is the province of the retired scientist not of the current practitioner. I am always surprised that sociology lacks a similar obsessive interest in its own story: I know of very few widely-respected books or journals devoted to the history of sociology, but the history of psychology has developed a massive literature all of its own. I am, at the moment of writing, waiting with interest for the opportunity to look through a couple of major new books that have just come out - a new Oxford history (Baker, 2012) and a Wiley-Blackwell book (Cheung and Hyland, 2012), that will be joining established texts from Sage (Shiraev, 2011), Allyn & Bacon (King et al. 2009), Prentice-Hall (Lawson et al. 2007) etc, etc, not to mention the articles published in the journals History of Psychology, History of the Human Sciences, History & Philosophy of Psychology Bulletin and the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, or the numerous major links to be found on the History of Psychology web-site http://elvers.us/hop/
Psychology is a very eponymous science. Every major psychologist has some theory or test named after him, so biographies and autobiographies of psychologists form an important part of its historical literature. Aside from innumerable monographs and articles, these are catered for by the History of Psychology in Autobiography book series, first edited by Carl Murchison et al. (1930-) but, since volume four, known by the name of its wonderfully eponymous editor E.G. Boring. The History of...