ABSTRACT
The first thing likely to strike any new student of Psychology is probably its sheer diversity. Its subdisciplines range from Physiological Psychology to Social Psychology, and the approaches adopted from experimental to philosophical. Also puzzling is that apparently near-synonymous titles are given to different subjects, such as ‘learning’ and ‘memory’, ‘reasoning’ and ‘intelligence’. Nor are the discipline’s boundaries very rational: the dances of honeybees belong in Comparative Psychology, but what about human dancing? That is the business of anthropologists – who also study kinship while psychologists study parenting. More disturbingly, this diversity extends to the very goals and ‘projects’ of the discipline. Psychologists are far from agreed that their task is ‘to predict and control behaviour’; many see it in rather opposite terms as enabling people to understand themselves sufficiently well that they can, among other things, resist attempts to predict and control them. And pondering on how this chaotic situation arose are historians of Psychology.
