The recall of events from the individual and collective past

pp. 221-236

in: Klaus F. Riegel, Psychology of development and history, Berlin, Springer, 1976

Abstract

Recent studies in life-span developmental psychology (Baltes et al., 1970; Riegel and Riegel, 1972; Schaie and Strother, 1968a, 1968b), related to explorations in the sociology of generational shifts (Bengtson and Black, 1973; Riley, Johnson, and Foner, 1972; Ryder, 1965), have explicated the confounded changes in the individual and in society. These advances have been made possible through the elaboration of developmental research designs (Baltes, 1968; Schaie, 1965, 1970). Primarily, the psychological studies have focused upon formal explorations and not upon the underlying sociohistorical processes that, in principle, were recognized as influencing the growth of the individual. The sociology of generational shifts, on the other hand, directed its attention toward these sociohistorical processes but did not explore their impact upon the development of the individual. The following four studies investigate the interactions between individual-psychological and cultural-sociological changes. In particular, I apply the paradigm of developmental psychology to the study of history and the paradigm of historical inquiries to the study of the growing individual.