How can intellectual history help us to understand psychological theories?

Eckart Scheerer

pp. 327-334

in: Michael E. Hyland, William J. Baker, René van Hezewijk, Terwee (eds), Recent trends in theoretical psychology, Berlin, Springer, 1990

Abstract

An attempt is made to describe the uses of intellectual history for understanding and criticizing psychological theories. The historical analysis of mental products works at three levels, defined by the degree of articulation of mental products and the broadness and type of social support for them. The top level comprises the doxography of theories, the history of problems, the history of concepts, and the history of ideas. The middle layer is the domain of intellectual history proper. The bottom layer consists of the study of mentalities and belongs to historical psychology rather than to the history of psychology. A model for intellectual history recently proposed by Lindenfeld is reviewed, where a distinction is made between systems and embodiments and their respective social functions. Lindenfeld's model is applied to explain certain peculiarities of German psychology during the Weimar Republic. It is concluded that the widespread and often purely rhetorical use of the Ganzheit concept indicates that the concept had the function of an embodiment in Lindenfeld's sense.