This book is a cross-sec­tion­al his­to­ry of psy­chol­o­gy. It ba­si­cal­ly cov­ers the is­sues how the image of man was formed in mod­ern psy­chol­o­gy. How is this re­lat­ed to our folk psy­cho­log­i­cal image, the way we in­ter­pret other hu­mans as feel­ing and know­ing be­ings.

This slight­ly un­ortho­dox his­to­ry of psy­chol­o­gy is un­ortho­dox in two ways. Its start­ing pint is the naive image of man, and treats sci­en­tif­ic psy­chol­o­gy as a con­stant di­a­logue be­tween our ev­ery­day con­cep­tion and the sci­en­tif­ic con­cep­tion. On the other hand, rather than tak­ing a lon­gi­tu­di­nal his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive, it is or­ga­nized in a cross-sec­tion­al man­ner. It takes the dif­fer­ent key top­ics and sur­veys them over the his­to­ry of mod­ern psy­chol­o­gy.

A re­turn­ing issue of the is an­thro­po­mor­phism and the tele­o­log­i­cal way of talk about human ac­tions, and their re­la­tion­ship to causal ex­pla­na­tions. The book pre­sents psy­chol­o­gy as a cen­tral human sci­ence

Re­la­tion­ships be­tween naive and sci­en­tif­ic psy­chol­o­gy are treat­ed in the fareme of char­ac­ter­is­tic pairs. Such pairs as body and mind, man and beast, na­ture and nur­ture, parts and wholes, know­ing and feel­ing, in­di­vid­u­al and so­ci­ety, con­scious and un­con­scuo,s nor­mal ana patho­log­i­cal.

The his­tor­i­cal and con­cep­tu­al in­tro­duc­tion also high­lights the cru­cial is­sues of pre­sent day psy­chol­o­gy. It is an in­tro­duc­to­ry text­book for those tak­ing a psy­chol­o­gy intro class.

The au­thor is a his­to­ri­an of psy­chol­o­gy with 4 decades of teach­ing ex­pe­ri­ence.