Introduction to “Becoming a Science: A Historical Perspective on Pioneering Work in Psychology”

This Special Issue has two guest editors. They have known each other for a long time, as both of them started an academic career in psychology at the University of Marburg about 40 years ago. Also, they were both, although at different points in time, coworkers of the psychologist Theo Herrmann in Marburg and Mannheim, respectively.

Each of them has pursued a very individual career path. Werner Deutsch found his area of expertise in the development of children’s speech production, while Siegfried Hoppe-Graff looked very closely into cognitive development and the possibilities and boundaries of its advancement via pedagogical concepts. Their connection is probably mostly because they both have evolved a tendency to see not only psychology, in general, but also developmental psychology, in particular, as being linked to its history.

What kind of interfaces are there between capacious and smaller research projects, with or without financial support by government departments or research institutes, huge numbers of staff or large amounts of money, and the beginning of scientific developmental psychology of the 19th century, when, for instance, Charles and Emma Darwin started to observe and keep record via diaries of the early childhood of their son Willie?

How substantial, or essential, is the progress gained through growing standardization of data collection and analyses or a theoretical thinking based on generating and verifying hypotheses? Do projects with international linkages really enrich knowledge to the extent proclaimed?

Today’s societal changes are very deeply affected by globalization. As science is part of society, it is very unlikely that globalization has no impact on science. Quite the contrary! Is there any scientist who can, must, or even wants to, proclaim: “Hic Rhodos, hic salta” (Action is where I am)?

It is international presence and experience that count, ideally determined by means of the factors that impact publications and are used as reference values.

After the birth of their first daughter, Hilde, William and Clara Stern started a project that would keep them involved for 18 years, first when living in Breslau, then during William Stern’s professorship in Hamburg. During all that time they did not have a research assignment or any research accounts, let alone employed staff. Clara and William Stern not only initiated the giant project of documenting the development of their three children but also operated and published it all by themselves.

How About Today?

“Big Science” is something else. In most sectors of the natural sciences there are complex organizational structures combining very different technical and social skills so that, in the end, you can create something momentous like the world’s biggest particle accelerator seen in Geneva. Over 1,000 scientists from at least 28 different countries have put their knowledge into getting this construction to work. Should one of them (or even several) receive the Nobel Prize at Stockholm, one might get the impression that he or she is a pioneer. However, the truth is that there is a whole team behind the honored work and not just one scientist working exclusively by him or herself.

Is there still a point in looking back to psychological pioneers and their accomplishments, since the globalization of science is unstoppable? Yes, indeed. Pioneers represent foresight and vision: They detect the particular and create the extraordinary.

Will a visit to the past bring about melancholy? Or has the human being become, rather, a thing or a subject of scientifically well-justified manipulations when developmental psychologists transform a child’s bedroom into a “baby-lab” because of the standardization and technical advancement of psychological research?

Clara and William Stern’s idea of humankind did not distinguish between everyday life and a research setting. It took their children years to realize that their parents had not only been parents but also researchers. Nowadays, there is a huge variety of ideas of humankind that discriminate between the person who is the “subject” of an experiment and the person sitting right next to you in the cafeteria at lunch time.

Maybe a visit to our past will even bring about very different feelings, such as pity concerning the poor research conditions under which a factor analysis had to be carried out manually or a slide projector that just quit during a presentation. Looking back, while having in mind today’s standards and all we take for granted, one would call such pioneers antiquated or underdeveloped. Well, their accomplishments worked out in some ways and, at best, made history but there is hardly any impact or impulse left to direct the present’s views toward the future.

Could a visit to the past and to our psychological pioneers evoke any other feeling than melancholy or pity? Could it, perhaps, evoke respect for the courage to see that only persistence, consistency, and the ability to resist the worn-out mainstream paths lead to the discovery of new findings?

We were very excited and curious about the submissions when we were finally given the go-ahead for our Call for Papers on a special issue about pioneers and their achievements.

A colleague we talked to about our text doubted that there would be any contributions, justifying this skepticism by saying that looking back to the past would only become important when there was a commemoration day of an institute’s foundation, of a society, a journal, or an ancestor’s obit. The market for publications would still be crowded because of the extensive celebrations of the 100th jubilee of the Gesellschaft für Psychologie (Psychological Society) in 2004. We suppose that this point of view may be shared by several – in particular younger – scientists who are proud of not reading any publications older than 5 years, not to mention not quoting them.

Our Call for Papers worked – although not in the way that we expected. Unfortunately, we know of several drafts that were started but could not be finished because of the short time-frame. Much to our regret, we learned that among these were a few that would have perfectly fit our Call for Papers. Thus, apart from one exception, our Special Issue does not collectively echo the saying: You shall reap what you sow.

Understandably, the exception comes first in our Special Issue. Its author is James T. Lamiell from the Georgetown University of Washington, DC.

William Stern is first and foremost known as a psychologist whose achievements cover various disciplines of psychology. His posthumous fame is primarily associated with a formula he invented along the way, but does not apply to what he thought was crucial for psychology. His definition of intelligence as a quotient of intelligence age, and age itself, which is multiplied by 100, is what is left concerning Stern’s posthumous fame. Nevertheless, he did not only see himself as a psychologist but also as a philosopher and, therefore, developed and published his philosophical convictions parallel to his psychological occupation.

There is neither a psychologist nor a philosopher we know that has read Stern’s philosophical writings, apart from one exception – James T. Lamiell. Not only has he learned German by the aid of cassettes but he also used his German skills, which are by now brought to perfection, in order to first understand and then translate several excerpts of Stern’s work into good, comprehensive English.

In the article at hand, Lamiell succeeds in showing that psychology and philosophy can be two sides of one coin, if developmental psychology is run the way Clara and William Stern did with their diaries. James T. Lamiell’s article is written in such a stringent and clear manner that it convinced the Guest Editors to withdraw their own contributions about Stern in order to avoid this Special Issue turning into a “Special Stern Issue.”

The second article by Daniel O’Connell and Sabine Kowal is also about psychologists that the two authors think of as pioneers. At first glance, we hesitate to call Ragnar Rommetveit, Carl-Friedrich Graumann, and Hans Hörmann pioneers of psychological history for all three of them have, in one way or another – during the second half of the last century – carried on research into already existing areas that, because of the mainstream in psychological research, were threatened with extinction.

The structurally oriented psycholinguistics was in search of algorithms linking linguistic structures and meaning without perpetuating particularities emerging from the usage. Rommetveit, Graumann, and Hörmann made use of every accessible medium in order to proclaim that an analysis of meaning that had not been generated from the social situation was a blind alley. Furthermore, they suggested alternative ways of inspecting linguistic usage through which the dialogical analysis becomes a fixed center against the background of the hermeneutic philosophy of Gadamer.

We would assign Rommetveit, Graumann, and Hörmann to a category that has not been used. Each one of them – in his own individual way – is a member of the resistance to a controlling predominant scientific Zeitgeist.

To the authors of this article, these three scientists are more, that is to say, they are pioneers who enabled the authors’ work in research on speech melody.

In line with her dissertation, Susanne Guski-Leinwand examined the frequently quoted, but seldom read, other side of Wilhelm Wundt in which he cultivated his experimental (physiological) psychology named Völkerpsychologie (cultural psychology). This side of Wundt deals with human development of culture and the mechanisms of its changes, which, however, Wundt adopted from Lazarus and Steinthal.

The article at hand treats the question of how scientific concepts were ideologically exploited and filled with unidirectional biological contents. Who adjusted and in what way? How neutral has science actually been? Did science allow itself to be politically pressured or did it compromise with politics? Was there any chance for a scientist to keep a clean record? Where is the turning point at which heroes of the history of science become antiheroes?

Those who have a degree – a Bachelor’s or Master’s of psychology – or those who plan to have one, will be astonished by the next article. Psychology of religion? Is there anything like that at all? How can religion, being a matter concerning faith, become the subject of scientific analysis?

Jacob van Belzen is neither a psychologist nor a theologian nor a religion scholar but a historian. He argues that religion is as essential a part of cultures and societies as is language, music, and dance. Psychology of religion can list several pioneers such as Wundt, James, Hall, Freud, Bühler, and Stern. However, following the 1930s psychology of religion faded. Efforts to reanimate it have not shown any success so far, unlike in our neighboring country, the Netherlands. Will this discipline of psychology continue to be an academic taboo within the German boundaries? Or is there a pioneer to appear?

Our Special Issue closes with a contribution by our mutual tutor Theo Herrmann who, more than any other, has applied the essential thinking of the philosophy of science to psychology, furnishing it with properties and, thus, inducing it to become its own science. Furthermore, Theo Herrmann has always tried to link the possibilities and limits of psychology to the context of its ever-changing history. He never avoided referring to discoveries nobody would have wanted to quote or would have been able to quote. How will Theo Herrmann, being a clear devotee to the nomothetic philosophy of science, cope with a topic that leads into another world? How is a history of psychology formed? Are there any aspects in this history where nomothetic theories dealing with generating and verifying causal relations fit in or even help? Theo Herrmann completed the task he had been charged with brilliantly. However, the question of what we can expect next from the neuroscientific paradigm of psychology stays – for comprehensive reasons – unanswered.

Although it is not characteristic for this journal to publish lectures, we urged an exception regarding Theo Herrmann as his work is very unique and should be disseminated among Anglo-American communities, particularly. We are pleased with the output of our Special Issue dealing with the history of psychology. For after all, the history of psychology – which has often been said to be dead – is not lost at all, but alive.

We would like to thank the Editor of this journal for his encouragement to become guest editors of a special issue on this topic. Thanks are also due to seven reviewers for their excellent cooperation. Finally, this special issue would not have been possible without the help of outstanding translators, namely Christiane Börgers (article by van Belzen), James T. Lamiell and Melina Andrea del Pozo (article by Herrmann), and Charlotte Stoffregen (Introduction).