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An Advanced Guide to Psychological Thinking

Critical and Historical Perspectives

Robert Ausch

Psychology is a diverse assortment of fields with distinct referents, often using the same terms, and it is not always easy to identify its shared assumptions. At base, the academic variants tend to include the notion that mental activity takes place in hard-to-access inner spaces, making it more appropriate to study behavioral manifestations of it, yet all of it can be represented in an expert language with a confusing relationship to physiological mechanisms. An Advanced Guide to Psychological Thinking: Critical and Historical Perspectives focuses on several key areas in psychology: learning, the brain, child development, and psychotherapy, and identifies several conceptual tensions that ground psychological understanding of various phenomena. These include a tension between “inside” and “outside,” structure and function, higher and lower, and description and explanation; all have historically generated confusion at the heart of the discipline. As psychology was transformed into the study of consciousness in the late nineteenth century, and the science of behavior in the early twentieth, the disciplines of psychology struggled to distinguish between what was properly inside and what was outside mind, person, and organism as well as what forms the study of these “insides” would take. Additionally, it was unclear how to reconceive the traditional structures of the post-Cartesian mind in the terms of evolutionary functionalism without losing sight of the fact that the mind has its own organization or the historical connection between mind and higher forms of being. Psychology’s influence today, particularly that of post-Freudian therapeutics, has extended far beyond the university, creating a therapeutic sensibility by which Westerners make sense of themselves and their world. An Advanced Guide to Psychological Thinking performs the vital task of helping psychology recognize its own foundations.

Lexington Books

Pages: 280 • Trim: 6⅜ x 9¼

978-0-7391-9542-0 • Hardback • May 2015 • $143.00 • (£110.00)

978-0-7391-9543-7 • Paperback • November 2016 • $59.99 • (£46.00)

978-0-7391-9544-4 • eBook • May 2015 • $57.00 • (£44.00)

Subjects: Psychology / Neuropsychology, Philosophy / General, Psychology / Applied Psychology, Psychology / Cognitive Neuroscience & Cognitive Neuropsychology, Psychology / Cognitive Psychology & Cognition, Psychology / Psychotherapy / General

An Advanced Guide to Psychological Thinking

Critical and Historical Perspectives

Hardback

Paperback

eBook

Summary

Psychology is a diverse assortment of fields with distinct referents, often using the same terms, and it is not always easy to identify its shared assumptions. At base, the academic variants tend to include the notion that mental activity takes place in hard-to-access inner spaces, making it more appropriate to study behavioral manifestations of it, yet all of it can be represented in an expert language with a confusing relationship to physiological mechanisms. An Advanced Guide to Psychological Thinking: Critical and Historical Perspectives focuses on several key areas in psychology: learning, the brain, child development, and psychotherapy, and identifies several conceptual tensions that ground psychological understanding of various phenomena. These include a tension between “inside” and “outside,” structure and function, higher and lower, and description and explanation; all have historically generated confusion at the heart of the discipline. As psychology was transformed into the study of consciousness in the late nineteenth century, and the science of behavior in the early twentieth, the disciplines of psychology struggled to distinguish between what was properly inside and what was outside mind, person, and organism as well as what forms the study of these “insides” would take. Additionally, it was unclear how to reconceive the traditional structures of the post-Cartesian mind in the terms of evolutionary functionalism without losing sight of the fact that the mind has its own organization or the historical connection between mind and higher forms of being. Psychology’s influence today, particularly that of post-Freudian therapeutics, has extended far beyond the university, creating a therapeutic sensibility by which Westerners make sense of themselves and their world. An Advanced Guide to Psychological Thinking performs the vital task of helping psychology recognize its own foundations.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 280 • Trim: 6⅜ x 9¼

978-0-7391-9542-0 • Hardback • May 2015 • $143.00 • (£110.00)

978-0-7391-9543-7 • Paperback • November 2016 • $59.99 • (£46.00)

978-0-7391-9544-4 • eBook • May 2015 • $57.00 • (£44.00)

Subjects: Psychology / Neuropsychology, Philosophy / General, Psychology / Applied Psychology, Psychology / Cognitive Neuroscience & Cognitive Neuropsychology, Psychology / Cognitive Psychology & Cognition, Psychology / Psychotherapy / General

Author

Robert Ausch teaches psychology at New York University and Pratt Institute. He has published on a range of topics including social science methodology and the philosophy of psychology.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter One: The Creation of Mind
Chapter Two: A Multiplicity of Psychologies
Chapter Three: Methods of Psychology
Chapter Four: The Principles of Learning
Chapter Five: Biology, Brain and Behavior
Chapter Six: On Developmental Thinking
Chapter Seven: The Cure of the Soul in the Age of the Therapeutic
Conclusion
Works Cited
About the Author

Reviews

Psychology is more complicated than one might imagine, and there is still a long way to go in characterizing explanations of thought and behavior. This message resonates in this book as Ausch traces the development of psychological ideas from classical times to the present. Ausch stresses the philosophical underpinnings of psychological theory, presenting the persistent debates between psychological structure and function as explanatory mechanisms and distinguishing between description and explanation. One point that emerges repeatedly is that description often quietly morphs into explanation as theorists reify presumptive cognitive and emotional concepts. The author shows quite compellingly how philosophical ideas have driven the various psychological models since natural philosophers became psychological scientists. He is especially thorough in depicting the theories associated with learning, with biology and behavior, and with development. He also provides insight into the tension between laboratory research and complex real-world behavior. This is a valuable book, in particular because the philosophy-psychology connection is often overlooked in presentations of psychology’s history. Readers will benefit from a background in philosophy. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.
— Choice Reviews

This historical-philosophical treatment traces the twisting path from psychology's early assumptions, choices, blind spots, and misdirections to current explanations of what we claim to know about mind and behavior and why we seem to be so sure. Highlighting common themes that tie together disparate arenas within modern psychology, this thought-provoking corrective to triumphalism is useful for both mainstream and critical approaches to the field.

— Dennis Fox, University of Illinois at Springfield

An Advanced Guide to Psychological Thinking

Critical and Historical Perspectives

Robert Ausch

An Advanced Guide to Psychological Thinking

Critical and Historical Perspectives

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