what ways has the societal context shaped the development of psychology up to 1020

-- (royster666@yahoo.co.uk), April 14, 2002

Answers

I'm not sure I understand the question. There was no such discipline as "psychology" in 1020 or before, so in a sense there was nothing to be shaped by the societal context. What thought there was about the nature of the mind and soul(in Europe), however, was shaped almost entirely by Christian theology (and a few remnants of ancient medicine -- such as the "inner senses" being thought to be housed in the cerebral ventricles).

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), April 14, 2002.

You'll find treatment of early psychologies in the following histories, which may be in your college/university library:

George Sydney Brett. (1912-21). A History of Psychology. Three volumes. London: George Allen & Unwin. Edited and abridged version by R. S. Peters. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1953.

Robert Irving Watson. (1963). The Great Psychologists: Aristotle to Freud. Philadelphia: Lippincott. (the most recent edition of this text is by Watson and Rand Evans)

D. B. Klein. (1970). A History of Scientific Psychology: Its Origins and Philosophical Background. New York: Basic Books.

David J. Murray. (1983). A History of Western Psychology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Daniel R. Robinson. (1976). An Intellectual History of Psychology. New York: Macmillan.

Dessoir, Max. (1912). Outlines of the History of Psychology (Trans. Donald Fisher). New York: Macmillan

-- Hendrika Vande Kemp (hendrika@earthlink.net), April 16, 2002.

This sounds very much like an essay question I set recently, with a typo. The essay question was: Critically discuss the ways in which societal context shaped the development of Psychology up to 1920. I hope the question makes more sense with the typo corrected!

-- Dai Jones (djones@glos.ac.uk), June 15, 2002.