American Psychology, 1922-1947

Here is the raw material of a discipline finding itself. These fifty-three journal articles, published between 1922 and 1947, capture American psychology in its most formative and turbulent decades. Watson is remaking behaviorism into a science of observable action. B.F. Skinner is just beginning his work. Psychologists are grappling with intelligence testing, trying to measure the unmeasurable, while others are publishing deeply troubling research on race that their successors would spend decades dismantling. Simultaneously, Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow are planting the seeds of humanistic psychology, arguing that the laboratory has forgotten what it means to be human. This is not a textbook telling you what happened. It is the actual voice of a field arguing with itself about consciousness, measurement, heredity, and purpose. Some of these papers changed the world. Others are preserved here as evidence of what the world once believed. Together, they document the messy, contentious birth of the science of mind.