/lit/ - Literature

This book is good
https://archive.org/details/intellectualhist00robeho/page/6

Peter Gay also has a decent Freud Reader if you want a quick and dirty intro to Freud himself.

Psychology is one of those weird fields like economics, and to a lesser extent sociology, where it's splintered into so many fields and subfields and its practitioners are so disinclined to study its history that it's extremely difficult to get a good overview of it.

The key is to understand that psychology only emerged as a self-conscious discrete discipline in the 19th century, where previously there was simply "philosophy" or "philosophy of mind." What makes psychology distinct from epistemology, or from "psychophysics," or psychoanalysis, or even later phenomenology? These aren't questions with self-evident answers, they are questions people answered at particular times in particular ways (for instance, by saying "We need a field called psychology as distinct from philosophical considerations of mind"). If you understand the fundamental contingency of the emergence of scientific studies of the mind, and the fundamental fuzziness of "philosophical" or "metaphysical" vs. "scientific" or "empirical" approaches (who defines what is philosophical or not? is psychoanalysis? but psychoanalysis claimed to be empirical!), you can then get a decent overview of "psychology" in a general way by tracing its mutually disagreeing and diverging schools and figures.

The best way to do this is to start in the 19th century with a book like Robinson's, to understand the milieu that originally created the vague sense that something like "studying the mind empirically" could be considered a new field altogether. But most of the pioneers of psychology practiced methods, and held beliefs, that look nothing what the Psychology degree holder nowadays would recognise as his own field. The trick is to understand how we got from there to here, without presuming here is necessarily better - psychology nowadays is just as contingent as it was in the 1870s, arguably moreso since it's a disorganized specialist/technical discipline, with dozens of subdisciplines of dubious merit, and worse yet, it's intertwined with all kinds of medical and pharmacological industries with their own epistemological quagmires.

The history of psychology is a fascinating field of intellectual history that few people study sadly.

>>15108497
PSYCHOLOGY IS NOT REAL DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME

>>15108497
psychology is a lie
only psychoanalysis and chemical psychiatry have anything to offer

>>15108605
I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO BECAUSE OF THIS GODDAMN QUARANTINE I WANT TO WASTE MY TIME

>>15108497
Cognitive psych - what they thinking, neuropsych - what the brain circuit doing, evolutionary psych - joke field that has no solid data to support it's claims, behavioural psych - analysing psychology through behaviour only with no attempting to peer into the brain, psychoanalysis - good for a laugh, developmental psych - how babies and children think, industrial-organisational (IO) psych - how to design workplaces for optimum productivity. That's a few of the major fields from the past century, although I wouldn't really call evo-psych major. IO psych and neuropsych are all that matter now anyway. Thinking about thinking is no longer important, result oriented fields that can assist psychiatrists in quickly drugging up trouble makers and assist bosses in making you want to work more are the future.

>>15108582
Also this. History of psychology is best part of psychology, psychopathologies are determined by their culture so it's a real shame more people don't look into the history. The history of schizophrenia is an interesting one, psychosis has always existed but it turns out industrial society is prone to creating it's own peculiar blend of psychosis, and insane rates of depression. But ask a psychologist and many will struggle to give you a clear answer why depression exists, we have a great wealth of historical medical texts and information about their society, but the entire field of psychology refuses to connect the dots. Ted Kaczynski might unironically be one of the best thinkers in psychology, Thomas Szasz is groovy too but that's more psychiatry. tbdesu should've just stopped thinking about the brain after Berkely's immaterialism

>>15108619
psychoanalysis is the most pseudoscientific, unfounded discipline in psychology, if not science as a whole

>>15108746
cope
>>>/sci/ if you want bugman labcoat nonsense

>>15108755
The psyche is a myth suck a dick faggot

>>15108619
Psychoanalysis is psychology, you goddamned retard

>>15109689
t. retard who has never read Freud

>>15108497
>>15108723
Cognitive psych - what they thinking
neuropsych - what the brain circuit doing evolutionary psych - joke field that has no solid data to support it's claims
behavioural psych - analysing psychology through behaviour only with no attempting to peer into the brain
psychoanalysis - good for a laugh
developmental psych - how babies and children think
Industrial-organisational (IO) psych - how to design workplaces for optimum productivity

This is pretty accurate, though if you want non-value answers, evolutionary psych is how our psychology advanced from amphibian monkey creature to human, and psychoanalysis is the name of Freud's approach to therapy, which constituted 1. Noting clients' transference of past emotions onto the therapist and 2. Diving into their past to piece it together

I'm going to bed, but currently am in a graduate program and will be happy to talk more about different theories of psych and psychotherapy later.