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Publisher: Praeger, Westport, CT and London, 2007, £225/$400.
ISBN: 978 0 313 33122 0. 4 vols
Although its historians have tried to drag in anyone from Aristotle to Rousseau as early psychologists (rather in the way that the Mormons retrospectively convert their ancestors), psychology as a separate discipline is really a very late child of the enlightenment, only separating itself from philosophy towards the latter half of the nineteenth century. As G.S. Hall published The Content of Children's Minds in 1883 and set up a pedagogical seminary in Clark University four years later, it can be seen that education was one of the very first interests of psychologists.
This emphasis has continued to the present day. Though there are numerous subdisciplines (all those psychology graduates have to go somewhere, after all), the majority of the people employed as psychologists are either in the field of health - helping to treat the "mentally abnormal" or in the field of education - helping to develop the "normal child". The timing of its emergence was, perhaps, unfortunate. Psychology, as it escaped from the woollier side of philosophy, was very rapidly captured by crude mechanicians, from Binet to Watson. This meant that psychologists started measuring before they started to think about what it was that they were measuring. In spite of all the modern developments in genetics (and it is, perhaps, significant that Hall's journal The Pedagogical Seminary changed its name to the Journal of Genetic Psychology ) there is still a deep and confusing divide between the believers in...