A History of Psychology: Ideas and Context (3rd Edition)

Rating:
Summary: A Thorough Evaluation of the History of Psychology
Review: As a student at the University of Colorado at Boulder, I had the priviledge to take classes taught by the authors of the text. Dr. Viney taught History of Psychology, while Dr. King taught Abnormal Psychology. This text was required reading for History of Psychology. At first, I thought, "oh great, he literally WROTE THE BOOK!" The text is thorough and easy to read. Drs. Viney and King lay out the subjects clearly. The subject matter is made "easy to swallow", as the History of Psychology isn't the most exciting subject in the matter of psychology.

Rating:
Summary: A Thorough Evaluation of the History of Psychology
Review: As a student at the University of Colorado at Boulder, I had the priviledge to take classes taught by the authors of the text. Dr. Viney taught History of Psychology, while Dr. King taught Abnormal Psychology. This text was required reading for History of Psychology. At first, I thought, "oh great, he literally WROTE THE BOOK!" The text is thorough and easy to read. Drs. Viney and King lay out the subjects clearly. The subject matter is made "easy to swallow", as the History of Psychology isn't the most exciting subject in the matter of psychology.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent tool for everything but modern psych history
Review: I used this text last semester in our department's History and Systems of Psychology course. I found it to be a terrific text for introducing the early roots of psychology to the college student. However, it may may not be appropriate for every psych history class for sevel reasons.

First many courses are designed to teach the more modern history of psychology (from the late 1890's on). This text will probably not fill that need very well. In fact, only a couple of chapters even cover this information in any way.

However, for those who are designing a course to introduce the ancient, early, medieval, and renaissance roots of psychology and science, this book should be invaluable. It presents history as a fluid set of conceptual shifts including patterns of thought and the revolving ways that people have established their truth.

Every shift in thought or epistemology is well documented with examples of how these shifts occurred and how the results were manifested.

For example, the Bubonic Plague in the mid 1300's had many ramifications, but one was to encourage a shift from 'Truth by Authority' to more empirical and scientific ideals. This shift had ramification for the pressures exerted by the church and states. These shifts are represented as gradual changes occuring over centuries and we can sit back and say, "I see how and why that happened."

The book brings us comfortably up to the early 1900's, but then falls short. This was fine with me. We teach specific modern history relevant to different topics in each of our other individual classes. This book just gves us a tool for the more 'shared' early history.

All this and it is an interestesting read, according to my students.

Viney gets an A+