A research archive · Cases 1874–2026 · File no. 001–034

Archive of Psychology

Thirty-four case files on the history of psychology: the people, their key studies, the sources — and how well the findings have held up to later repetition.

Psychoanalysis
1900–1945
Psychoanalysis
Folder 02
Psychoanalysis holds that a considerable part of what people do follows reasons they have no access to themselves. It did not come out of a laboratory but out of a consulting room — out of listening to patients whose complaints had no neurological explanation.
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Psychoanalysis holds that a considerable part of what people do follows reasons they have no access to themselves.
Behaviorism
1903–1938
Behaviorism
Folder 04
Behaviourism was an emergency brake. Psychology around 1900 worked with trained introspection, and when two laboratories reached different results there was no procedure to decide between them.
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Behaviourism was an emergency brake.
Cognitive Psychology
1974–1992
Cognitive Psychology
Folder 06
In the mid-1950s the forbidden topics came back. The occasion was less an argument than a tool: the computer supplied a vocabulary for talking about inner processes without having to experience them — input, storage, processing, output.
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In the mid-1950s the forbidden topics came back.
Social Psychology
1951–1971
Social Psychology
Folder 07
Social psychology studies how the thinking, feeling and acting of individual people are shaped by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others. It shifts the explanation of behaviour away from fixed traits of the person and towards the situation the p…
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Social psychology studies how the thinking, feeling and acting of individual people are shaped by the actual, imagine…
Humanistic Psychology
1943–1951
Humanistic Psychology
Folder 09
Humanistic psychology understood itself as a third force: not psychoanalysis, which thinks from conflict, and not behaviourism, which thinks from the reflex.
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Humanistic psychology understood itself as a third force: not psychoanalysis, which thinks from conflict, and not beh…

Measure / Experience
Before psychology was a discipline, it was a wager: that experience can be measured.
Folder 01— Beginnings
Drive / Defence
What is repressed does not disappear.
Folder 02— Psychoanalysis
Whole / Parts
The whole is something other than the sum of its parts.
Folder 03— Gestalt & Field
Stimulus / Response
Control the consequence and you shape the behaviour.
Folder 04— Behaviorism
Child / World
Children do not think less than adults. They think differently.
Folder 05— Development
Judgment / Error
The mind’s errors have a pattern.
Folder 06— Cognitive Psychology
Group / Obedience
The situation is stronger than the person believes.
Folder 07— Social Psychology
Model / Self
We also learn what we have only watched.
Folder 08— Learning & Personality
Meaning / Growth
Not what steers a person — what makes them grow.
Folder 09— Humanistic Psychology
Thinking / Healing
Change the thought and the feeling follows. A form of therapy stands on that.
Folder 10— Clinic & Therapy

34 files · 10 folders · Added to continuously

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Archive of Psychology

The field