A history of ideas in American psychology

Keen traces the history of ideas in American psychology as he divides eleven decades into three periods, marked out by specific themes central to psychologists over the years. Initially, the legacy of mind-body dualism challenged scientists to make coherent a single universe of mental and physical phenomena, but these efforts were hampered by languages that embody mental and physical metaphysical commitments. The second period, from Freud to Skinner, shifted the focus from mind and body to experimental and clinical settings for the acquisition and application of psychological knowledge. Leading thinkers sought to create a psychology that could bridge these two settings, often in the process reducing one to the other, but also inventing ideas of psychology that vastly changed the earlier preoccupation with mind-body dualism. In the third period, feminists, phenomenologists, and post-modern thinkers have re centered psychology. The current cultural acceptance of psychology as a point of view on virtually any issue has fostered intellectual diversity even greater than in the second period. Psychology is now more diverse and less unified than ever.