An Advanced Guide to Psychological Thinking: Critical and Historical Perspectives

by Robert Ausch

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Author: Robert Ausch

Publisher: Lexington Books

Paperback:
ISBN 10: 0739195433
ISBN 13: 978-0739195437

Hardcover:
ISBN 10: 0739195425
ISBN 13: 978-0739195420

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.

Review

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)

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)

About the 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.

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An Advanced Guide to Psychological Thinking: Critical and Historical Perspectives