Journal of the history of the behavioral sciences
January 1, 2012
David C Devonis
4 citations
Timothy Leary, a cultural icon of the 1960s, has been largely overlooked in the history of psychology, partly because his career shift toward psychedelic experimentation and dismissal from Harvard in 1963 made him seem to have left the field. However, examining his full career and intellectual influences reveals unacknowledged continuities with psychology, suggesting he deserves a more prominent place in the discipline's history and that his work poses important challenges.
Journal of the history of the behavioral sciences
October 1, 2020
Yu-Chuan Wu
3 citations
Nakamura Kokyō studied a woman with a split personality who lived as his maid from 1917 until her death in 1940, serving as his muse and assistant in promoting abnormal psychology. Multiple personality was central to Nakamura's theory of the subconscious, based on dissociation. It also became a flashpoint in his disputes with religious groups, who invoked Western psychical research to modernize their doctrines of spirit possession. Nakamura distinguished his psychological view from spiritual understandings by emphasizing individual memories—especially traumatic ones—and hysteria. His views on memory and hysteria conflicted with both academic mainstream and cultural beliefs, which may partly explain the limited success of his campaigns.
Journal of the history of the behavioral sciences
April 1, 2025
Tal Davidson, Patric Plesa
2 citations
Betty Eisner was a key figure in the early era of psychedelics research, but her career also serves as a cautionary example of problematic therapeutic practices, including the misuse of authority and control during the 1960s and 70s counterculture. Her work, set against the backdrop of the Human Potential Movement and integrative experiences, helps explain the decline of the first wave of psychedelic research. The dangers associated with figures like Eisner may account for the slower adoption of group therapy approaches and the limited inclusion of social context in the more cautious second wave of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.
Journal of the history of the behavioral sciences
April 1, 2025
Lisa Kampen
2 citations
Mary Whiton Calkins challenged the traditional view that American pragmatism was purely a logico-philosophical movement opposed to idealism. She argued that pragmatism includes psychological, logical, and metaphysical doctrines, and she characterized "metaphysical pragmatism" as a form of idealism. Calkins held that psychology should study reality as experienced through introspection, while philosophy should address the metaphysical nature of that reality. She understood pragmatism's pluralism as a "pluralistic personalism," where reality consists of a plurality of conscious selves. She rejected metaphysical pragmatism because she believed pluralism could not account for absolute truth, but she supported psychological pragmatism as metaphysically neutral.
Journal of the history of the behavioral sciences
February 1, 2026
Hiroshi Matsui, Kohei Yanagawa
Edward Tolman, known for cognitive maps and latent learning in rats, is usually seen as a forerunner of cognitivism because his intervening variables were later treated as mental representations. Yet the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty drew on Tolman's sign-Gestalt concept, interpreting it as non-representational and using it in his relational account of behavior. Merleau-Ponty recast Tolman's ideas into a view of behavior as structured, embodied interaction between organism and environment. These reformulated insights later helped found enactivist cognitive science, which emphasizes perception-action co-constitution and dynamic agent-environment coupling. Tolman's own framework remained ontologically ambiguous, allowing his work to influence both cognitivism and its opponent, enactivism.
Journal of the history of the behavioral sciences
July 1, 2024
Jan Kornaj
The development of concepts of psychosis at the Jewish Hospital in Warsaw evolved through several phases from 1898 to 1943, shaped by European psychiatric ideas and local social and historical changes. Initially, first chief physician Adam Wizel focused on hysteria, while Maurycy Bornsztajn later introduced psychoanalytic perspectives. In the second decade, classification of psychoses became central; after Poland regained independence, psychosis became the main focus. Gustaw Bychowski and Władysław Matecki advanced psychoanalytic understanding, Bornsztajn developed his concept of psychosis, and Władysław Sterling contributed to biological views of schizophrenia. In the final period, economic crisis and staff departures reduced publications, but Bornsztajn refined his concept of somatopsychic schizophrenia and Matecki introduced pseudo-neurotic schizophrenia. The psychoanalytic approach was supplemented by phenomenology, and several physicians advocated psychoanalytic psychotherapy for psychotic patients.