The 19th century is a decisive time for the development of contemporary psychology. The assumption of a mechanical worldview, the secularization of society, the emergence of the modern urban metropolis, and the rise of Darwinian teleology of nature are tendencies that, though characteristic of the 20th century, have their origins in the 19th century. During this century, natural sciences expanded outside their traditional limits, colonized the human and moral sciences, and shaped the modern social sciences. During this long transformation, deep and intense debates arose on free will, the moral dimension of human action, and the possibility of a science of the soul. Unlike the standard reading about the history of psychology, according to which the discipline emerged univocally from physiology in the second half of the 19th century, the attentive consideration of this century shows a multifarious landscape.

This book aims to identify the hidden romantic, idealist, vitalist, and hermeneutical roots of psychology, showing that Wundt's experimental psychology was only the best promoted final phase of a long debate, many aspects of which remain still today open and undecided. To achieve this goal, we gather key figures of the 19th century whose contributions to the development of modern psychology have been broadly forgotten and are nowadays altogether ignored. Each chapter approaches one forgotten psychologist's life and work and is written by a prominent scholar specialized in the respective author. By recovering the germinal and dynamic insights of key authors at the dawn of modern psychology and situating them in cultural history, we discover a colorful view of the discipline and a better understanding of the varieties and limitations of contemporary psychology.

Autorentext

Carlos Cornejo is a Full Professor at the Pontificia Universidad Catölica de Chile. He obtained his PhD at the University of Cologne and had postdoctoral training at the University of Heidelberg. He works on speech and human interaction, making use of both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. He also researches and teaches on history and philosophy of psychology. His last published books are the co-editions I Activate You to Affect Me (2018, Information Age Publishing, Charlotte, NC.) and Intimacy: The Shared Part of Me (2022, Information Age Publishing, Charlotte, NC). He is co-editor of the SpringerBriefs in Theoretical Advances in Psychology series (Springer). He is founder and director of the Laboratory of Language, Interaction and Phenomenology.

Cristián Hernández Maturana studied Psychology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (2011) and completed a Master of Arts in Philosophy at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena (2014). He received his PhD in 2020 from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and the Universität Hildesheim in the framework of a cotutelle agreement. After the completion of his PhD, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (2021-2024). Since 2024, he has been Adjunct Professor at the Institute of Philosophy of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He is the author of Substantialität, Individualität, Präexistenz und Fortdauer der Menschenseele. Grundzüge von Immanuel Hermann Fichtes philosophischer Anthropologie, published in 2022 at Verlag Karl Alber.