ABSTRACT
The bridges between social psychology and other fields of inquiry flow in both directions, but I focus here primarily on the flow into social psychology. My own social psychological work has been greatly influenced by bridges with knowledge from many other disciplines. Among these are anthropology, biology, philosophy, sociology, and, within psychology, abnormal, cognitive, cross-cultural, developmental, and the psychoanalytic tradition. I suppose if I were going to focus in on any one of these, it would be the broad psychoanalytic tradition of Freud, Rank, Jung, Adler, Horney, Fromm, Lifton, and Yalom because so few social psychologists embrace this heritage explicitly and yet so much of their work has been either influenced or anticipated by this rich intellectual inheritance. But rather than promote any one bridge, in this brief essay, I’d like to offer a perspective on how social psychology has generally been doing with regard to building such bridges.
