David C. Devonis

• Graceland University

To add to the system of classes already present in the recent historiography of psychology, a new and broader class is proposed, the psychologesque. This class includes, along with a central core of master's- and PhD-level psychologists, surrounding belts of cognate professionals in other fields who are, to a greater or lesser degree, tinged with p...

The Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) took place at a time when the sources of authoritarianism and evil were a focal concern in psychology. It emerged from a tradition of activist social psychological research beginning with Solomon Asch in the 1940s and extending through Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments in the early 1960s. The SPE was a pro...

In 1968, Karl Menninger, a highly visible and vocal U.S. psychiatrist, published a call to action on prison reform, The Crime of Punishment (Menninger, 1966/1968). This widely circulated book’s central idea is that punishment as practiced in penal settings is an injustice amounting to a crime. At the outset, The Crime of Punishment quickly achieved...

Herman Witkin was born in 1916 in New York City and remained in and near it all his life. He took his B.A. in biology at New York University in 1935 and the Ph.D. in psychology there in 1939 with the comparative psychologist T. C. Schneirla. After a brief postgraduate stay at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, he took an academic position at Brook...

Alexander Thomas, best known as the husband and intimate intellectual collaborator of Stella Chess, and who together with Chess developed the theory of infant temperament, was born in New York City in 1914. He earned the M.D. degree from New York University in 1936, and after service as a neuropsychiatrist with the U.S. Army Air Forces in World War...

Jan Deregowski was born in Pinsk, which was then in Poland, in 1933. Between 1960 and 1969 he spent considerable time in Africa, including four years as a fellow at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Zambia in Lusaka. Keywords: cross-cultural psychology; perception

Stella Chess, daughter of Russian immigrants, was born in New York City in 1914. Her parents set an example of intellect and independence and encouraged her to take on challenges. She entered medical school at New York University in 1935 and, after an encounter with Lauretta Bender, the pioneering child psychiatrist and head of the child psychiatri...

At its inception as a specialty within psychology in the first decades of the 20th century, the history of psychology was usually conceived as an extension of the history of philosophy, with perhaps some special attention given to the development of modern science. Within the last thirty years, the history of psychology has come of age and has beco...

The psychologist Timothy Leary (1920–1996), an iconic cultural figure in the United States in the 1960s and afterward, has received comparatively scant attention in the history of psychology. This may be due to perceptions that, after a major career shift centering around his experimentation with psychedelic substances and his subsequent dismissal...

Our commentators (especially Bechtel & Abrahamsen) reinforce what we ourselves suspect, that - though theories of change are available, none will be found that are sufficiently general and flexible to incorporate all the nuances in the history of psychology. Undoubtedly we are working at multiple levels when confronting the data of the history of p...

We would first like to say that we are extremely gratified as much by the vigor and vitality of our commentators’ responses as by their material contributions to the theoretical basis of two disciplines, the history of psychology and psychology as a whole. Before replying to individuals, we feel that some clarification of our position in this dialo...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of New Hampshire, 1989. Includes bibliographical references.