Psychology and History Interdisciplinary Explorations

As disciplines, psychology and history share a primary concern with the human condition. Yet historically, the relationship between the two fields has been uneasy, marked by a long-standing climate of mutual suspicion. This book engages with the history of this relationship and possibilities for its future intellectual and empirical development. Bringing together internationally renowned psychologists and historians, it explores the ways in which the two disciplines could benefit from a closer dialogue. Thirteen chapters span a broad range of topics, including social memory, prejudice, stereotyping, affect and emotion, cognition, personality, gender and the self. Contributors draw on examples from different cultural contexts - from eighteenth-century Britain, to apartheid South Africa, to conflict-torn Yugoslavia - to offer fresh impetus to interdisciplinary scholarship. Generating new ideas, research questions and problems, this book encourages researchers to engage in genuine dialogue and place their own explorations in new intellectual contexts.

Foreword Kenneth J. Gergen; Introduction: psychology and history - themes, debates, overlaps, and borrowings Cristian Tileagă and Jovan Byford; Part I. Theoretical Dialogues: 1. History, psychology and social memory Geoffrey Cubitt; 2. The incommensurability of psychoanalysis and history Joan Wallach Scott; 3. Bringing the brain into history: behind Hunt's and Smail's appeals to neurohistory Jeremy Burman; 4. The successes and obstacles to the interdisciplinary marriage of psychology and history Paul Elovitz; 5. Questioning interdisciplinarity: history, social psychology and the theory of social representations Ivana Marková; Part II. Empirical Dialogues: Cognition, Affect and the Self: 6. Redefining historical identities: sexuality, gender, and the self Carolyn Dean; 7. The affective turn: historicising the emotions Rob Boddice; 8. The role of cognitive orientation in the foreign policies and interpersonal understandings of Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1937–41 Mark E. Blum; 9. Self esteem before William James: phrenology's forgotten faculty George Turner, Susan Condor and Alan Collins; Part III. Empirical Dialogues: Prejudice, Ideology, Stereotypes and National Character: 10. Two histories of prejudice Kevin Durrheim; 11. Henri Tajfel, Peretz Bernstein and the history of Der Antisemitismus Michael Billig; 12. Historical stereotypes and histories of stereotypes Mark Knights; 13. Psychology, the Viennese legacy and the construction of identity in Yugoslavia Cathie Carmichael; Conclusion: barriers to and promises of the interdisciplinary dialogue between psychology and history Cristian Tileagă and Jovan Byford.

Cristian Tileagă is Senior Lecturer in Social Psychology and a member of the Discourse and Rhetoric Group at Loughborough University. His research centres on developing critical frameworks for researching social and political behaviour. His interests include the discursive analysis of political discourse, collective memory, the critical psychology of racism, and social representations of history. He is author of Discourse Analysis and Reconciliation with the Recent Past (2012, in Romanian) and Political Psychology: Critical Perspectives (Cambridge, 2013).
Jovan Byford is Senior Lecturer in Psychology at The Open University. His research interests include conspiracy theories, Holocaust survivor testimonies and antisemitism. He is the author of four books: Conspiracy Theories: A Critical Introduction (2011), Denial and Repression of Antisemitism: Post-Communist Remembrance of the Serbian Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović (2008), Conspiracy Theory: Serbia vs. the New World Order (2006, in Serbian) and Staro sajmište: a site remembered, forgotten, contested (2011, in Serbian).