Some Aspects of Mid-Century Psychiatry: Experimental Psychology [1953]

I have been asked to consider the relations of experimental psychology to psychiatry. Although the term "experimental psychology" has been widely accepted as "the psychology of the generalized, human, normal, adult mind as revealed in the psychological laboratory" (Boring, I950), such a narrow definition is now not justified, considering the breadth of modern psychology and the methodological ferment which characterizes it. I shall, therefore, deal rather with what I judge to be included within the spirit of the term, and trespass beyond the literal meaning by defining "experimental psychology" to be that psychology which is oriented to the laboratory and its controls, but which may be concerned with phenomena in non-laboratory situations where the attempt is made to achieve control of conditions. The "mind" may be animal as well as human, child as well as adult, aberrant as well as normal. The ensuing discussion will, I trust, provide the contextual body for this skeletal definition.