I did post this as a quick friday free-for-all comment, last friday but didn't get a response so I thought I'd give this it's own thread for more visability.
As a Psychologist (as well as a Historian) recently, I've started to wonder why some of the most pioneering psychologists of the 19th & 20th Centuries are mainly German or American: Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, B.F. Skinner, Edward Thorndike, Philip Zimbardo, Stanley Milgram, Masters & Johnson, Alfred Kinsey & Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Just to name a few are all examples of this.
So it begs the question of what on the earth (if anything at all) caused this shift in certain circles within the German & English-speaking countries to go from viewing Psychology as a subsidiary of Philosophy as late as 1860 (upon the development of Gustav Fechner's "Psychophysics" to pioneering theories such as Freudian Psychosexual development, the psyche, Jung & Individuation, Operant Conditioning and The Kinsey Scale. And Is this shift in anyway linked to the occult movements in 19th & 20th Century Germany & America? If so, how?
Did the German & American intellectuals have any influence on each other?
Thank you to anyone who answers :)
Much of what I am about to say comes from work published in the following volume, so I suggest you read that:
Pfister, Joel and Nancy Schnog, eds.. Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.
I have less to say on the German end of things, since I'm primarily a specialist in American culture. However, according to both Schnog and Pfister, as well as an influential essay by John Demos from 1978 that is republished in that volume, Americans never contested the notion that Freud invented both psychoanalysis and the modern discipline of psychology. In fact, American intellectuals had long been influenced by Germans (the first Americans to earn PhDs largely did so in Germany - see Diehl, Americans and German Scholarship, Yale UP, 1978), so this is not surprising.
Demos in his essay notes that the American mania for Freud stems at least in part from the fact that Freud's theories were well-suited to the emergent bourgeoisie, and the United States was the ultimate bourgeois nation (this irked Freud - he wanted the respect of the European scientific community, not the hard-charging upstarts in America). Freud's work, along with Marx and Weber's, is often seen as the foremost explication of bourgeois society, so this also makes sense.
I hope that someone else can fill in the blanks about why the German-speaking world (Freud was an Austrian, after all) was so interested in psychology, as that's beyond my expertise. I could probably speculate, but that's not what this sub is for. But as far as Americans, basically the way I understand it is that Freud's work is all about the bourgeoisie, and America is as bourgeois as it gets.