ABSTRACT
Psychology is a basic science that builds on the cultural histories of the many versions of human ways of living as Homo sapiens inhabits our planet. It is a science under close social surveillance from the time of its emergence in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries. Emerging "under the influence" has actually played a formative role in the making of the discipline. Sciences in general—and social sciences in particular—have been largely "socially blind" as to the role of the knowledge they generate in different "social practices." Psychology, dealing with socially relevant phenomena of human feeling, thinking, and acting in always nonneutral social contexts, is a good empirical example of such guidance processes. Psychology is fragmented not because it is empirical, but because it has been maintained at a distance from general issues that might be difficult to accept by persons and institutions if the findings of the science arrive at general knowledge about the human psyche.
