Life and Work: Biography, Autobiography, and Memoir in Psychology

Psychology is a vast subject, with levels of analysis that vary from neural to cultural. This course is designed as a historical introduction to the expansive subject matter of the discipline through consideration of the life and work of a few famous, and sometimes infamous, psychologists. Some of the themes of the course are the nature of autobiographical memory and the selective representations of self that result, the enduring intellectual questions that hold psychologists’ attention, how the wider social and cultural context impacts on the reception of psychological work, and what makes psychological experiments compelling to a wider audience. The individual psychologists in whose lives and works we will immerse ourselves include the foundational pragmatist William James, the original depth psychologist Sigmund Freud, the romantic Russian Lev Vygotsky and his compatriot Alexander Luria, the true believers in behaviorism B. F. Skinner and John Watson, the charming Gestalt social psychologist Kurt Lewin, the efficient engineer of family life Lillian Gilbreth, the complex investigator of mother love Harry Harlow, and the progressive child psychologist Lois Barclay Murphy. Conference work will focus on the life and work of an individual psychologist.