ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides a fairly coarse-grained overview of the psychological thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It offers the same amount of space to a more fine-grained examination of the developments of the nineteenth century. The book also provides a detailed account of the three major theoretical movements of the twentieth century: psychoanalysis, gestalt, and behaviorism. The history of the sciences in general can be divided into three large periods: the ancient, beginning with the flowering of Greek philosophical genius about 2500 years ago; the medieval, beginning around the year 400 AD. The final period is the modern, which began phasing in during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, becoming unequivocally established by about the middle of the seventeenth century. The book concludes with considering some general questions concerning the values and pitfalls of psychological theorizing.
