Università Roma Tre

The course aims to provide a critical understanding of the historical development of the main themes, problems and models of scientific explanation of behavior and psychological processes, from the earliest naturalized conceptualizations of mind and behavior to experimental psychology and contemporary neuroscience. The evolution of the sciences of behavior, mind, and neuroscience will be discussed in its relationship to the history of philosophical ideas and other human sciences such as sociology and anthropology, in its close intertwining with the natural and biological sciences, and situated in the context of concrete historical transformations of material, economic, and technological kinds.
The course will also examine the history of the cultural and moral impact of developments in the behavioral sciences and neurosciences with special emphasis on the applications of neuroscience in the social and economic spheres, and neuropsychopharmacological and neurotechnological applications in the 20th century.
Within the framework of this course, teaching aims to provide:
1) an organic knowledge of the main research programs, concepts and problems of the mind sciences, experimental psychology and cognitive sciences;
2) the ability to contextualize, analyze, and critically interpret the ideas and models of explanation of the mind sciences also in relation to other research disciplines, material history, culture, ethics, and technological evolution;
3) the historical and theoretical tools for understanding the transformations of psychological and scientific models of cognitive and communication processes.
4) the lexical and conceptual tools necessary for the study of the history of the sciences of the mind and useful for acquiring good analytical and argumentative skills in written and oral form.

Part 1) General history of the mind sciences:
I) History of science and history of psychology 1. Why study the history of the mind sciences 2. Historiography of science: continuism and scientific revolutions 3. Normal science and paradigms 4. Historiography of psychology and neuroscience.
II) The long philosophical past 1. Early psychological problems 2. The problem of the soul in classical thought 3. Psychology from classical thought to Christianity 4. From the Arabs to the Renaissance 5. The change in the conception of man with Humanism and Renaissance 6. Descartes 7. Rationalism and empiricism 8. From Descartes to the “idéologues” 9. Kantian interdiction
III) The birth of experimental psychology: from Helmholtz to Wundt 1. The birth of experimental psychology 2. Helmholtz: specific nervous energy and unconscious inference 3. Ewald Hering's phenomenological hymnatism 4. Wilhelm Wundt and physiological psychology 5. Titchener and North American structuralism
IV) The reaction to Wundt in Europe and America 1. Brentano and the Brentanians 5. American functionalism, between evolutionism and pragmatism
V) Gestalt psychology 1. The beginnings 2. The laws of Gestalt 3. The isomorphism 4. The field model 5. Rise and diaspora
VI) The psychodynamic perspective and psychoanalysis 1. Introduction 2. From organicistic to psychodynamic conception of mental illness 3. Janet's theory 4. Psychoanalysis from Freud to the 1950s 5. Jung's theory 6. Adler's theory 7. Psychoanalysis themes of the second twentieth century and new themes 8. Phenomenological psychiatry 9. Theories of personality 10. Integrated models between health and pathology of the mind
VII) The behaviorist perspective I. Introduction 2. American psychology at the beginning of the century: structuralism and functionalism 3. Behaviorism from Watson to the 1950s 4. Skinner and the behaviorist utopia 5. Operationism in psychology 6. Personality, psychopathology and social learning in the behaviorist perspective
VIII) The cognitivist perspective 1. Introduction 2. The study of cognitive processes: from the Würzburg school to Bartlett 3. Theories of intelligence 4. Theories of psychic development 5. Piaget's theory 6. The probabilistic and ecological theories of mental processes 7. Cognitivism 8. Cognitive science
IX) The cultural-historical perspective 1. Introduction 3. The cultural-historical theory of mind from Vygotsky to the 1960s 4. Activity theory 5. Social constructionism. Cultural psychology
X) The biological and neuroscientific perspective 1. Introduction 2. Animal and comparative psychology. Ethology 3. Research on brain function in the early twentieth century 4. Bechterev's reflexology 5. Pavlov's theory of higher nervous activity 6. Holistic theories of mind and brain functioning in the early twentieth century 7. Hebb's neuroconnectionism 8. Research on brain function and behavior: 1950-70 9. Lurija's theory of functional brain systems 10. Cognitive, affective and social neuroscience.
XI) The contemporary debate 1. Crisis of theories or crisis of psychology 2. Empirical verification in psychology 3. Common sense psychology and alternative psychologies 4. The primacy of neuroscience 5. The discomfort of psychotherapy 6. Psychology and contemporary society.

Part 2) Monograph
This part of the program aims to critically illustrate the history of the biomedical concept of drug addiction/addiction as a disease/pathology of the brain

Luccio R. (2013). Storia della psicologia: un’introduzione. Roma- Bari: Laterza (capitoli: 1; 2; 3; 4; 5 paragrafi 5.1 e 5.5; 6).
Mecacci L. (2019). Storia della psicologia dal Novecento a oggi. Roma- Bari: Laterza (capitoli: 3; 4; 5; 6 paragrafi 1,3,4,5; 7; 8).
Stefano Canali, Cosa sono le dipendenze, Carocci, in corso di stampa