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Department of Psychology
Psychology 304 “History of modern psychology”
Final examination short-answer questions
Please answer two (2) of the following 13 questions taking no more than two pages for
each of your answers (35 points each). Note, in my view the questions are all of equal
difficulty so do not let the length of the question mislead you.
1. Briefly describe the intellectual influences that were efficacious in Wundt’s
establishment of the academic discipline of experimental psychology in Leipzig in
1870s.
2. “Introspection” has had various meanings before Wundt employed it as
“systematic introspection” in experimental psychology. Describe the various
activities involved in these different meanings of introspection (what might we do
when we introspect?) and focus on Wundt’s final formulation of introspection in
experimental psychology. (Remember that Wundt who was a mentalist would
have been horrified to be classed as an “introspectionist”.) What might
introspection mean and what is it we do when we introspect? Can introspection
ever be (part of) a method of a science of psychology. Why? Why not?
3. Wundt deemed his “physiological psychology” to be only a small part of a much
wider conception of Psychology as an academic endeavor. Describe this wider
Psychology and explain why it could not be experimental in nature. Was Wundt
justified in his view? Why? Why not?
4. I suggested (tediously some might add) that the methods of psychology were
forms of “social organization for producing consensus about facts”. What does
this conception of method as “social organization” imply about the nature of the
facts collected and the “object” about which the facts are collected?
5. I distinguished among three distinct methods that evolved in the course of the
establishment of psychology in the 20th c. Describe these three methods and argue
for the advantages of each.
6. I suggested that from the very beginning there was a tension between method and
subject matter (“object”) in psychological research (a tension that remains to the
present). Briefly describe various aspects of this tension and suggest how it might
be overcome, if at all.
7. One major problem that precluded Wundt from extending his newly “minted”
physiological psychology to “higher mental processes” was that there was no way
to control the “stimulus”. Describe the nature of this problem and also the
correlative problem of “language”.
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8.
I spoke of the “rhetoric of experimental identities” in referring to subject
identities in psychological research reports. This phrase has much to do with the
essential function of the human “data” source in Psychology as it does with the
kind of intellectual discipline Psychology deems itself to be. Comment and
elaborate.
9. I argued that experimental psychology was concerned to establish the kind of
knowledge about human beings that would be a-historical and universal. I also
suggested that in order to obtain this kind of knowledge psychologists had to
reply on historically defined human data sources using investigative contexts that
too were historical specific. How did Psychology deal with this paradox?
10. I have argued that the Galtonian method of mental testing which assumed that all
individuals possessed (psychological) characteristics, albeit in different quantities,
actually eliminated individual differences by reducing them to the abstraction of a
collection of points in a set of aggregates. So instead of being interested in how
individuals were different one from another this entire methodological movement
in 20th c Psychology was concerned with how well individuals conformed to
social standards of performance. Comment and elaborate.
11. I have argued that the “method” of experimental psychology is one that is ideally
suited for establishing knowledge claims about the relationships between abstract
external influences and equally abstract organisms. But I have also argued that
these kinds of knowledge claims are those of “scientific materialism” wherein
individuals are stripped of their social, cultural, and historical identities. What are
we to do?
12. Freud’s critique of religion was an effort to understand the restlessness and
discontent (desire) of the human heart (St Augustine) in scientific terms. To
accomplish this formulated an elaborate theory of desire as explanatory not only
of the individual (neurosis) but of (the neurosis of) human history. This tie-in of
history and psychology is what I admire in Freud and it is also what sets up
intellectual standards of what psychological science could be (if it gave up its
hegemony as a natural science). Comment and elaborate.
13. Freud was deeply pessimistic concerning the gap between the innocence
(polymorphous perversity) of childhood and our compulsive (repressed)
commitment to cultural progress. How can the ideal of cultural progress possibly
be the innocence of childhood? Never mind that, does the historical movement of
humanity have an “aim” and if so would it make a difference in how we do
psychology. If it does not have an aim (i.e., the course of human history is
aimless) what possibility is there of avoiding the (neurotic) implications of
endless and restless desire?
LPM/December 3, 2008