ABSTRACT
Teaching the History of Psychology course is both a great joy and an enormous challenge. It is always a pleasure to teach a course about a topic one loves, of course, but the history course presents the instructor with problems not found in other courses. For one thing, teachers of the history course seldom have been trained as historians of psychology, whereas courses in social psychology, for example, are often taught by professional social psychologists. Consequently, the level of preparation can be daunting for the person asked to teach history, and the feeling of being out of one’s depth when teaching the course can be persistent. A second difficulty is student resistance. Many students come into the course having survived Western Civ or other history courses that seemed, to them at least, to involve little more than memorizing names and dates, organizing lists of the causes of war X, and placing the proper names of countries on blank maps. Then they come across the name of psychology’s most prominent historian (you know who) and they just roll their eyes and prepare for what they assume will be a long and “boring” semester.
