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In this book, British psychologist Graham Richards thoughtfully surveys the broad field of modern psychology from the viewpoint of “critical history.” This approach deliberately avoids the hero-worshipping and “presentist” tendencies characteristic of many traditional histories of psychology, attempts to understand the failed movements of the past as well as the successes, emphasizes the social and historical contexts that supported or hindered those psychological developments, and takes into account the nature and psychological consequences of the historian's own activity. Richards notes that many critical historians of psychology, despite their avoidance of presentism (the tendency to interpret the past in terms of the concepts and values of the present), nonetheless identify themselves primarily as psychologists, whose work bears directly on present issues in the fields they address. In Richards's words, they see themselves as “a self-reflecting facet of psychology, as the discipline's introspectors” (p. 1). One prime result of such introspection, according to Richards, is an appreciation that psychology differs sharply from other sciences because of a distinctive, “reflexive” character: “Doing Psychology is the human activity of studying human activity; it is human psychology examining itself.” Accordingly, every new psychological idea or theory becomes part of the increased body of data that future psychology must ultimately attempt to explain: “Psychology is produced by, produces, and is an instance of, its own subject matter” (p. 5).
From this general perspective, Richards surveys the diverse areas of psychology. The book as a whole consists of 5 introductory chapters