This first volume contains discussions of the brain, methods for analyzing behavior, thought, consciousness, attention, association, time, and memory.

In 1879 G. H. Lewes described the state of current British mental science. There were, he maintained, three main ‘schools’ of psychology. The first of these Lewes called the ‘ontological’ school; its members traced their lineage to Thomas Reid and to the common sense philosophers of the early nineteenth century, especially Dugald Stewart and William Hamilton. The second school was the ‘empirical’, which stood in the tradition of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Condillac, Hartley, and James Mill. The ontologists and the empiricists (...) differed in their theories of knowledge: the former held that certain beliefs were native to the mind; the latter that all ideas originated, mediately or immediately, from experience. However, both schools agreed on the object of psychological enquiry. They ‘quietly ignore the complex conditions of the living organism, and treat mental facts simply as the manifestations of a Psychical Principle’. Further, the ontological and empiricist schools concurred on the means by which this principle should be studied; both made introspection the ‘exclusive method of research’. (shrink)

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ATTENTION. By Th. Ribot. (London Publishers: Longmans, Green, & Co.) Treating of the following topics. i. spontaneous or natural, attention. 2. Voluntary, or Artificial, Attention. 3. The Morhid States of Attention.

' But, although such a being (a purely intellectual being) might perhaps be conceived to exist, and although, in studying our internal frame, ...

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1868 Edition.

In everyday parlance, "inhibition" suggests repression, tight control, the opposite of freedom. In medicine and psychotherapy the term is commonplace, its definition understood. Relating how inhibition—the word and the concept—became a bridge between society at large and the natural sciences of mind and brain, Smith constructs an engagingly original history of our view of ourselves. Not until the late nineteenth century did the term "inhibition" become common in English, connoting the dependency of reason and of civilization itself on the repression (...) of "the beast within." This usage followed a century of Enlightenment thought about human nature and the nature of the human mind. Smith traces theories of inhibitory control from the moralistic psychologies of the early nineteenth century to the famous twentieth-century schools of Sherrington, Pavlov, and Freud. He finds that the meanings of "inhibition" cross disciplinary boundaries and outline the growth of our belief in the self-regulated person. (shrink)

This article describes the relations between academic psychology and psychical research in Britain during the inter-war period, in the context of the fluid boundaries between mainstream psychology and both psychical research and popular psychology. Specifically, the involvement with Harry Price of six senior academic psychologists: William McDougall, William Brown, J. C. Flugel, Cyril Burt, C. Alec Mace and Francis Aveling, is described. Personal, metaphysical and socio-historical factors in their collaboration are discussed. It is suggested that the main reason for their (...) mutual attraction was their common engagement in a delicate balancing act between courting popular appeal on the one hand and the assertion of scientific expertise and authority on the other. Their interaction is typical of the boundary work performed at this transitional stage in the development of psychology as a discipline. (shrink)

In everyday parlance, "inhibition" suggests repression, tight control, the opposite of freedom. In medicine and psychotherapy the term is commonplace, its definition understood. Relating how inhibition—the word and the concept—became a bridge between society at large and the natural sciences of mind and brain, Smith constructs an engagingly original history of our view of ourselves. Not until the late nineteenth century did the term "inhibition" become common in English, connoting the dependency of reason and of civilization itself on the repression (...) of "the beast within." This usage followed a century of Enlightenment thought about human nature and the nature of the human mind. Smith traces theories of inhibitory control from the moralistic psychologies of the early nineteenth century to the famous twentieth-century schools of Sherrington, Pavlov, and Freud. He finds that the meanings of "inhibition" cross disciplinary boundaries and outline the growth of our belief in the self-regulated person. (shrink)

This paper traces the manner in which the word ‘psychotherapy’ was invented and how it became taken up and disseminated in the English-, French- and German-speaking medical worlds at the end of the 19th century. It explores how it was used as an appellation for a variety of practices, and then increasingly became perceived as a distinct entity in its own right. Finally it shows how the fate of the word ‘psychotherapy’ enables Freud’s invention of ‘psychoanalysis’ to be located.

Beginning with a review of the role of placebos in the history of medicine, this book investigates the current surge of interest in placebos, and probes the methodological difficulties of saying scientifically just what placebos can and cannot do.

Today there is a thriving 'emotions industry' to which philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists are contributing. Yet until two centuries ago 'the emotions' did not exist. In this path-breaking study Thomas Dixon shows how, during the nineteenth century, the emotions came into being as a distinct psychological category, replacing existing categories such as appetites, passions, sentiments and affections. By examining medieval and eighteenth-century theological psychologies and placing Charles Darwin and William James within a broader and more complex nineteenth-century setting, Thomas Dixon (...) argues that this domination by one single descriptive category is not healthy. Overinclusivity of 'the emotions' hampers attempts to argue with any subtlety about the enormous range of mental states and stances of which humans are capable. This book is an important contribution to the debate about emotion and rationality which has preoccupied western thinkers throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and has implications for contemporary debates. (shrink)