Dark ages and renaissance

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What sort of psychological questions are deemed appropriate in terms of a dark age and a renassance?

-- Tonya (tooreal2002@hotmail.com), October 23, 2002

Answers

If you consult a philosophically oriented history of psychology text, you'll see that there were sophisticated psychological theories long before the Dark Ages. If you're asking what was the state of psychology during those periods, consult Robert I. Watson's The Great Psychologists: From Aristotle to Freud, or D. B. Klein's History of Scientific Psychology, Dan Roinson's An Intellectual History of Psychology. Other authors such as Thomas Leahey also include philosophical histories. If you're asking what kind of psychological questions can we ask about people who lived during those times, you're raising the question faced regularly by psychohistorians: does a contemporary personality theory, for example, have relevance back in time, or is its use anachronistic? You can ask about a book such as Erik Erikson's Young Man Luther whether his use of psychoanalytic theory "fits".

-- Hendrika Vande Kemp (hendrika@earthlink.net), October 23, 2002.

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