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RR 2016/092 INS Dictionary of Neuropsychology and Clinical Neurosciences (2nd edition) Edited by David W. Loring Oxford University Press Oxford 2015 xiii + 397 pp. ISBN 978 0 19 536645 7 £34.49 $49.95 Also available as an e-book
Keywords Dictionaries, Neuropsychology
Review DOI 10.1108/RR-11-2015-0277
It is generally accepted that psychology, as a separate discipline, started with Wundt's opening of the first psychology laboratory in Leipzig in 1879. Clinical applications of psychology were initially frowned on as savouring of the recently discredited "treatments" of mesmerism, electrical stimulation, etc. By 1896, however, Lightner Witmer, a follower of Wundt, had opened the world's first psychology clinic. Due to the lack of any effective method of studying the living brain, the emphasis at that point was entirely on the workings of the mind. Neither the psychoanalysts nor the behaviourists, who, between them dominated most of the twentieth-century psychology, paid any real attention to the brain at all. Aside from the obvious difficulty of finding non-obtrusive ways of studying the physical operations of the brain, there was, again, some feeling of embarrassment over the recently debunked study of phrenology. This absence of an organic basis led to the general impression, still quite widely held, that psychology is airy-fairy unreal semi-science.
Neuropsychology is defined here as "research and clinical practice characterizing the relationship between brain structure, brain functioning [including clinical disease and syndromes] and behaviour". Though the term was first used in the 1930s, it was not really until the 1960s that non-invasive methods of studying the brain started to become available, allowing the development of a bridge between neurology, psychology and psychiatry. The International Neuropsychological Society was founded in 1967. The need...