Correspondence between two people reveals their subjectivity and promotes knowledge acquisition beyond the academic realm. Abraham Maslow is a well-known figure in the academic world, and much has been written about his life, but little is known about his epistolary relationship with Walter Blumenfeld, a German psychologist who settled in Peru in 1935 and is considered the founder of scientific psychology in that country. This article analyzes the content of the 13 letters that Maslow and Blumenfeld wrote to each other between 1955 and 1959. It begins by presenting the life and work of each of them, and then reviews the letters in chronological order. This analysis reflects the personal and academic motivations of the two correspondents, who never met in person. They shared common interests, despite coming from different schools of thought (although not polar opposites), as they agreed on their holistic and molar perspective of psychology.
Everett Shostrom's 1965 Three Approaches to Psychotherapy films were created and used as demonstrations of how to do psychotherapy. After a brief account of how they came about, precises of the three films are presented to highlight major differences among them. These are followed by descriptions of post-filming reactions and interactions of the participants-Gloria Szymanski, Carl Rogers, Fritz Perls, and Albert Ellis. Consideration then is given to the possible impact of the "Gloria Films" on Americans' acceptance of psychotherapy as a pathway to self-improvement that competed with more longstanding views of psychotherapy as applied to the alleviation of serious mental illness. It is also argued that more recently, the films have been used to demonstrate how not to do psychotherapy and to reveal how psychotherapy can exploit as well as help. This work is a close study of the films that attempts to explain their enduring relevance and impact, while also providing an example of how changing historical, biographical, and sociocultural contexts must be considered in any commendations or criticisms concerning applied psychological practices such as psychotherapy. Particular attention is paid to Gloria Szymanski as central to the films' enduring impact.
In clarifying that Spinoza is not the first person to share insights about the necessity of a contrary, strong emotion in transforming an emotion, the present article focuses on expounding this perspective as embedded in the classical texts of Chinese medicine, along with illustrative examples of emotion-focused therapy in the historical case records of Chinese master physicians. Key features of this kind of emotion-focused therapy include (1) designing a new scenario that provides the client with an embodied alternate experience in the real world, thereby eliciting a strong emotion capable of overcoming the previously indulged one, and (2) implementing the scenario through collaboration with a person close to the client, or by securing the client's full trust in the physician. A comparison between the role of emotions in the holistic system of traditional Chinese medicine and the philosophical system of Spinoza, as presented in Ethics, reveals more variability than commonality. Even though the role of emotion in human functioning is recognized in Spinoza's system of thought, his approach to emotion regulation is fundamentally rationalistic. A closer review of contemporary psychological science and psychotherapy further reveals that cognition plays an intriguing role in the regulation and transformation of emotions. Against this background, the contributions and limitations of emotion-focused therapy in traditional Chinese medicine are evaluated, followed by the elucidation of its principles and the consideration of its integration with advancements in contemporary psychotherapy.
The existence of a "severe discrepancy" between measured ability and achievement has been the dominant criterion for identifying learning disabilities ("LD") in American education since its codification into federal law in 1977. In this article, I argue that the history of LD is best understood not through the emergence of a diagnostic label, but through the evolution of its methods of identification. By tracing the rise and decline of the IQ-achievement discrepancy model amid shifting legal, psychometric, and policy contexts, I aim to show how declining faith in IQ tests as measures of potential threatened the credibility of LD as a viable construct for identifyin and treating "unexpected" underachievement. Abandoning discrepancy and embracing more pragmatic approaches like response to intervention (RTI) reflected political compromises as much as discrepancy had represented decades before. But it also represented an effort by experts in the LD field to protect the scientific integrity of LD by more effectively targeting its most recognizable characteristic-the failure to learn in comparison to age-level peers. In the era of standards and accountability, this shift reflected the priorities of education reformers and the legislative impetus of No Child Left Behind. But it also represented a profound reorientation of the measurement of unexpected underachievement. By supplanting an increasingly discredited metric of intellectual potential (IQ), RTI and similar methods helped reinterpret LD as a specifically skills-based construct unrelated to perennially ambiguous notions of intelligence.
This paper examines Ethel Dench Puffer's psychological aesthetics, attempting to connect her academic research with her role as Director of the Institute for the Coördination of Women's Interests at Smith College. Psychologist, educator, and active participant in the women's rights movement of the 1910s-1930s, Puffer enrolled at Radcliffe College in 1897/1898 and earned her Ph.D. in 1902. She advocated for women's desire to balance marriage and career in several classic articles concerning the 'woman question' (1922 and 1929), specifically focusing on the continuity of women's education. More than 20 years after the publication of her book, The Psychology of Beauty (1905a), she drew on psychological concepts and methodology to support the effectiveness of her Institute's strategies, which aimed to help women integrate their professional and family lives. Echoing Mary Parker Follett, Puffer asserted that social progress arises from adopting modern psychology's methodologies to create an environment that encourages the integration of women's interests. She insisted that a desirable environment could make such integrated conduct a 'reflex response'-meaning it became possible and natural for women not to need to choose between motherhood and a flexible professional career. Her intertwining of aesthetic psychology and social issues resonates with (and indeed empowers) pragmatist conceptions of progress that presuppose the necessity of recognising individuals' concrete needs and capacities and of creating social mechanisms that enable those capacities to fulfil those needs effectively.
In Section One of an Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume distinguishes between two sorts of writing on human nature: first, one that appeals to common sense to make virtue seem attractive and, second, one that attempts to describe the principles governing the mind. Hume's defence of the second approach is in part a defence of the possibility of scientific psychology. Within the second approach, he distinguishes two parts: first, a descriptive branch he calls 'mental geography' and, second, a branch he compares to Newton's project in astronomy. In his defence of mental geography, Hume sketches an account of his method of enquiry in psychology. Common sense describes some basic faculties, philosophers can make finer distinctions within these, and introspection allows us to reliably describe ground-level processes. Hume's vision of Newtonian psychology is one that appeals to laws and forces and finds the hidden springs of the mind. His attempt to explain causal inference by appealing to the transfer of vivacity across associated perceptions in Part 2 of Section 5 is an attempt at Newtonian psychology: it's speculative, explanatory, and enunciates a putative psychological law.
This paper examines the pivotal role played by Moritz Wilhelm Drobisch (1802-1896) in the development of mathematical psychology, and his influence on the emergence of Fechner's psychophysics in 19th-century Germany. As a key figure in the Herbartian tradition in Leipzig, Drobisch refined Herbart's initial framework for applying mathematics to psychological phenomena while also addressing the fundamental theoretical challenges inherent in measuring intensive mental magnitudes. The study sheds light on how Drobisch's dual expertise in mathematics and philosophy enabled him to develop innovative methods for quantifying mental representations, most notably through his formulation of the "three-representation problem" as psychology's analog to celestial mechanics, and his mathematical treatment of qualitative color continua. By reconstructing the crucial yet overlooked connection between Drobisch's mathematical psychology and Gustav Theodor Fechner's psychophysics, this study sheds light on a critical chapter in the prehistory of experimental psychology, offering new perspectives on the mathematical foundations of modern behavioral sciences.
In 1929, Robert Hutchins became the president of the University of Chicago and one of his first reforms was to build the Committee on Child Development (CCD). The CCD came into existence when the nationwide Child Development Movement started waning. Hutchins and his old associates in the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial were interested in Child Development as a form of interdisciplinary social science, and their ideas greatly shaped the initial design of the Committee. Without wholehearted support from the department chairs, however, the CCD was eventually established as a compromise between the departments and the president. Into the late 1930s, the appointments made by the new divisional dean, Robert Redfield, opened new channels for cross-departmental collaboration. Under the chairmanship of Ralph Tyler, the Committee's name was changed to Human Development (CHD) in 1940. Meanwhile, community studies became the central focus of the Committee, which reflected the societal concerns of restoring social order while war and social dissolution were impinging upon the country. This paper analyzes two modes of interdisciplinarity emerging in two distinct stages of the development of the Committee, which were contingent upon the changing university structure, the shifting interests of the foundations, and the visions of different generations of scholars.
A keyword search of "sex therapy" in the New York Times shows a rapid rise for articles covering the discipline in the 1970s, an equally rapid reduction in the 1980s, and further decline in the 1990s and into the 2000s. This surprising inflection, given that sex as a marketable construction did not decline in the late 20th century, opens room to examine sex therapy in the contexts in which it could and could not be successful. Sex therapy as a distinct intervention emerged in the 1960s, based on Masters' and Johnson's obstetric-gynecological research focus on satisfying, conjugal sex, and was boundaried by the optics of medical respectability. Sex therapy viewed sex as a bodily, visible, and behavioral phenomenon, with sexual problems conceived as overt and physiological symptoms and syndromes of the body. Correspondingly, sex therapy offered behavioral techniques to white middle-class clients to ameliorate dissatisfying sex. These conceptions were met with success and popularity in the 1970s, with thousands of sex therapy centers opening nationwide in just a few years. However, with the Reagan administration and AIDS crisis in the early 1980s, sex therapy quickly regressed as a respectable source of medical expertise about sex. Simultaneously, biomedical interventions more broadly replaced medicalized solutions for pre-conceived medical problematics. The introduction of Viagra in 1998 was a biomedical replacement of the medicalized sexual problems created by sex therapy, situated on the observable body. When a seemingly even more bodily and behavioral bio-medical solution to its problematics competed with sex therapy for its same white middle-class client base, sex therapy could not maintain public awareness of its disciplinarity.
Tolman, an experimental psychologist renowned for his research on the “cognitive map” and “latent learning” in rats, pursued his career within the tradition of behaviorisms. In the history of psychology, he is positioned as a precursor to cognitivism. This is because the concepts he introduced as intervening variables were later interpreted as having a representational nature. On the other hand, the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty was also influenced by Tolman's concepts, particularly his theory of sign-Gestalt. Merleau- Ponty’s ideas, especially as developed in The Structure of Behavior, have had a profound impact on the notion of embodiment within enactivism. Enactivism, as a school of thought opposing representationalism, sharply contrasts with cognitivism, which places Tolman at the intersection of two opposing intellectual currents. This paper, thus, reexamines Tolman’s ambivalent nature, exploring how it arose and reassessing his ideas as a precursor not only to cognitivism but also indirectly to enactivism. We argue that Merleau- Ponty inherited Tolman’s concept of sign-Gestalt as having a non-representational nature and utilized it within his relational account of behavior. While Tolman’s own theoretical framework remained ontologically ambiguous, Merleau-Ponty recast his insights into a conception of behavior as a structured, embodied interaction between organism and environment. These reformulated insights subsequently provided a conceptual foundation for enactivist cognitive science, particularly in its emphasis on the co-constitution of perception and action, and the dynamic coupling of agent and environment. By tracing this lineage, we can move beyond the standard narrative and reposition Tolman as an intellectually ambivalent figure whose work served as a hidden source for both cognitivism and enactivism.
Yang Kuo-Shu-widely regarded as the Father of Chinese Indigenous Psychology-was the central figure in a four-decade movement that sought to reorient psychological research within Chinese societies toward culturally grounded foundations. The movement succeeded in establishing institutional infrastructures, cultivating successive generations of scholars, and producing a substantial corpus of studies attentive to local meanings and practices. Yet, this article argues that its ultimate aspiration-to construct an autonomous Chinese psychological system-remained unfulfilled. Drawing on extensive archival and historical materials, the study traces the intertwined trajectories of Yang's intellectual career and the indigenization project he led. It contends that the movement's fundamental limitation resided in an unresolved epistemological dependence on Western scientific metaphysics. Despite its anticolonial impetus, it inadvertently reproduced a form of academic self-colonization, remaining confined within the very ontological assumptions it sought to transcend. By situating this paradox within broader debates on decolonization and knowledge production, the article reexamines both the achievements and the enduring dilemmas of psychological indigenization in the Chinese context.
In 1954, Dorothy Martin predicted an apocalyptic flood and promised her followers rescue by flying saucers. When neither arrived, she recanted, her group dissolved, and efforts to proselytize ceased. But When Prophecy Fails (1956), the now-canonical account of the event, claimed the opposite: that the group doubled down on its beliefs and began recruiting-evidence, the authors argued, of a new psychological mechanism, cognitive dissonance. Drawing on newly unsealed archival material, this article demonstrates that the book's central claims are false, and that the authors knew they were false. The documents reveal that the group actively proselytized well before the prophecy failed and quickly abandoned their beliefs afterward. They also expose serious ethical violations by the researchers, including fabricated psychic messages, covert manipulation, and interference in a child welfare investigation. One coauthor, Henry Riecken, posed as a spiritual authority and later admitted he had "precipitated" the climactic events of the study.
