Category: Mental Health History

On This Day … 02 December

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People (Deaths)

  • 1957 – Manfred Sakel, Ukrainian-American neurophysiologist and psychiatrist (b. 1902).
  • 1986 – John Curtis Gowan, American psychologist and academic (b. 1912).

Manfred Sakel

Manfred Joshua Sakel (06 June 1900 to 02 December 1957) was an Austrian-Jewish (later Austrian-American) neurophysiologist and psychiatrist, credited with developing insulin shock therapy in 1927.

Sakel was born on 06 June 1900, in Nadvirna (Nadwórna), in the former Austria-Hungary Empire (now Ukraine), which was part of Poland between the world wars. Sakel studied Medicine at the University of Vienna from 1919 to 1925, specialising in neurology and neuropsychiatry. From 1927 until 1933 Sakel worked in hospitals in Berlin. In 1933 he became a researcher at the University of Vienna’s Neuropsychiatric Clinic. In 1936, after receiving an invitation from Frederick Parsons, the state commissioner of mental hygiene, he chose to emigrate from Austria to the United States of America. In the USA, he became an attending physician and researcher at the Harlem Valley State Hospital.

Dr. Sakel was the developer of insulin shock therapy from 1927 while a young doctor in Vienna, starting to practice it in 1933. It would become widely used on individuals with schizophrenia and other mental patients. He noted that insulin-induced coma and convulsions, due to the low level of glucose attained in the blood (hypoglycaemic crisis), had a short-term appearance of changing the mental state of drug addicts and psychotics, sometimes dramatically so. He reported that up to 88% of his patients improved with insulin shock therapy, but most other people reported more mixed results and it was eventually shown that patient selection had been biased and that it didn’t really have any specific benefits and had many risks, adverse effects and fatalities. However, his method became widely applied for many years in mental institutions worldwide. In the USA and other countries it was gradually dropped after the introduction of the electroconvulsive therapy in the 1940s and the first neuroleptics in the 1950s.

Dr. Sakel died from a heart attack on 02 December 1957, in New York City, NY, USA.

John Curtis Gowan

John Curtis Gowan (21 May 1912 to 02 December 1986) was a psychologist who studied, along with E. Paul Torrance, the development of creative capabilities in children and gifted populations.

John Curtis Gowan was born 21 May 1912 in Boston, Massachusetts. Graduating from Thayer Academy, Braintree, Massachusetts, in 1929, John Gowan was only 17 when he entered Harvard University, earning his undergraduate degree four years later. A master’s degree in mathematics followed; he then moved to Culver, Indiana, where he was employed as a counsellor and mathematics teacher at Culver Military Academy from 1941 to 1952. Earning a doctorate from UCLA, he became a member of the founding faculty at the California State University at Northridge, where he taught as a professor of Educational Psychology from 1953 until 1975, when he retired with emeritus status.

Dr. Gowan became interested in gifted children after the Russians gained superiority in space with the 1957 launch of Sputnik. He formed the National Association for Gifted Children the following year. He was the group’s executive director and president from 1975 to 1979 and over the years wrote more than 100 articles and fourteen books on gifted children, teacher evaluation, child development, and creativity.

While at Northridge, he developed a programme to train campus counsellors, was nominated in 1973 as outstanding professor, and had been a counsellor, researcher, Fulbright lecturer, and visiting professor at various schools including the University of Singapore, the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, the University of Hawaii, and Connecticut State College. He was a fellow of the American Psychological Association and was also a colleague of the Creative Education Foundation.

Besides his work in Educational Psychology as specifically related to gifted children, he also had an interest in psychic (or psychedelic) phenomena as it relates to human creativity. His work in this area was inspired by the writings of Aldous Huxley and Carl Jung. Based on his work in creativity and with gifted children, Dr. Gowan developed a model of mental development that derived from the work of Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson, but also included adult development beyond the ordinary adult successes of career and family building, extending into the emergence and stabilization of extraordinary development and mystical states of consciousness. He described the entire spectrum of available states in his classic Trance, Art, & Creativity (1975), with its different modalities of spiritual and aesthetic expression. He also devised a test for self-actualisation, (as defined by Abraham Maslow), called the Northridge Developmental Scale.

Dr. Gowan died on 02 December 1986. He was survived by his adult twin children from his first marriage, John Gowan Jr. of Albany, NY and Ann Gowan Curry, of Anchorage, Alaska as well as seven grandchildren and his second wife Jane Thompson Gowan. His godson, Cameron Scott Matheson sang at his memorial service which was attended by friends and colleagues.

On This Day … 01 December

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People (Births)

  • 1930 – Marie Bashir, Australian psychiatrist, academic, and politician, 37th Governor of New South Wales.
  • 1937 – Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga, Latvian psychologist and politician, President of Latvia.

Marie Bashir

Dame Marie Roslyn Bashir AD CVO (born 01 December 1930) is the former and second longest-serving Governor of New South Wales. Born in Narrandera, New South Wales, Bashir graduated from the University of Sydney in 1956 and held various medical positions, with a particular emphasis in psychiatry. In 1993 Bashir was appointed the Clinical Director of Mental Health Services for the Central Sydney Area Health Service, a position she held until appointed governor on 01 March 2001. She has also served as the Chancellor of the University of Sydney (2007-2012).

Bashir retired on 1 October 2014 and was succeeded as governor by General David Hurley.

Vaira Vike-Freiberga

Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga (born 1 December 1937) is a Latvian politician who served as the sixth President of Latvia from 1999 to 2007. She is the first woman to hold the post. She was elected President of Latvia in 1999 and re-elected for the second term in 2003.

Dr. Vaira Freiberga is a professor and interdisciplinary scholar, having published eleven books and numerous articles, essays and book chapters in addition to her extensive speaking engagements. As President of the Republic of Latvia 1999-2007, she was instrumental in achieving membership in the European Union and NATO for her country. She is active in international politics, was named Special Envoy to the Secretary General on United Nations reform and was official candidate for UN Secretary General in 2006.

She remains active in the international arena and continues to speak in defence of liberty, equality and social justice, and for the need of Europe to acknowledge the whole of its history. She is a well-known pro-European, as such, in December 2007 she was named vice-chair of the Reflection group on the long-term future of the European Union. She is also known for her work in psycholinguistics, semiotics and analysis of the oral literature of her native country.

After her presidency Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga serving as Co-Chair Nizami Ganjavi International Centre, served as the President of Club of Madrid, the world’s largest forum of former Heads of State and Government, from 2014 to 2020. She is also a member of the International Programme Board of the Prague European Summit.

On This Day … 29 November

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People (Births)

  • 1825 – Jean-Martin Charcot, French neurologist and psychologist (d. 1893).
  • 1945 – Csaba Pléh, Hungarian psychologist and linguist.

Jean-Martin Charcot

Jean-Martin Charcot (29 November 1825 to 16 August 1893) was a French neurologist and professor of anatomical pathology. He is best known today for his work on hypnosis and hysteria, in particular his work with his hysteria patient Louise Augustine Gleizes. Charcot is known as “the founder of modern neurology”, and his name has been associated with at least 15 medical eponyms, including various conditions sometimes referred to as Charcot diseases.

Charcot has been referred to as “the father of French neurology and one of the world’s pioneers of neurology”. His work greatly influenced the developing fields of neurology and psychology; modern psychiatry owes much to the work of Charcot and his direct followers. He was the “foremost neurologist of late nineteenth-century France” and has been called “the Napoleon of the neuroses”.

Csaba Pleh

Csaba Pléh (born 29 November 1945) is a Hungarian psychologist and linguist, professor at the Department of Cognitive Science, Budapest University of Technology and Economics.

He graduated from the Eötvös Loránd University where he earned his degrees in psychology (1969) and linguistics (1973). In 1970 he received his PhD in psychology. He became Candidate of Psychological Science in 1984 and Doctor of Psychological Science in 1997. He obtained his habilitation in 1998. He became a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences is 1998, a full member in 2004.

On This Day … 26 November

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People (Deaths)

  • 1987 – J.P. Guilford, American psychologist and academic (b. 1897).

J.P. Guilford

Joy Paul Guilford (07 March 1897 to 26 November 1987) was an American psychologist best remembered for his psychometric study of human intelligence, including the distinction between convergent and divergent production.

Developing the views of L.L. Thurstone, Guilford rejected Charles Spearman’s view that intelligence could be characterised in a single numerical parameter. He proposed that three dimensions were necessary for accurate description: operations, content, and products. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Guilford as the 27th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

Career

Guilford graduated from the University of Nebraska before studying under Edward Titchener at Cornell. Guilford was elected a member of the Society of Experimental Psychologists in 1937, and in 1938 he became the third president of the Psychometric Society, following in the footsteps of its founder Louis Leon Thurstone and of Edward Thorndike, who held the position in 1937. Guilford held a number of posts at Nebraska and briefly at the University of Southern California. In 1941 he entered the US Army as a Lieutenant Colonel and served as Director of Psychological Research Unit No. 3 at Santa Ana Army Air Base. There he worked on the selection and ranking of aircrew trainees as the Army Air Force investigated why a sizable proportion of trainees were not graduating.

Promoted to Chief of the Psychological Research Unit at the US Army Air Forces Training Command Headquarters in Fort Worth, Guilford oversaw the Stanine (Standard Nine) Project in 1943, which identified nine specific intellectual abilities crucial to flying a plane. (Stanines, now a common term in educational psychology, was coined during Guilford’s project). Over the course of World War II, Guilford’s use of these factors in the development of the two-day Classification Test Battery was significant in increasing graduation rates for aircrew trainees.

Discharged as a full colonel after the war, Guilford joined the Education faculty at the University of Southern California and continued to research the factors of intelligence. He published widely on what he ultimately named the Structure of Intellect theory, and his post-War research identified a total of 90 discrete intellectual abilities and 30 behavioural abilities.

Guilford’s 20 years of research at Southern California were funded by the National Science Foundation, the Office of Education of the former Health, Education and Welfare Department, and the Office of Naval Research. Although Guilford’s subjects were recruits at the Air Force Training Command at Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio, the Office of Naval Research managed this research.

Guilford’s post-war research led to the development of classification testing that, modified in different ways, entered into the various personnel assessments administered by all branches of the US Armed Services. So generally speaking, all US Military qualifying exams of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s descended from Guilford’s research.

Structure of Intellect Theory

According to Guilford’s Structure of Intellect (SI) theory (1955), an individual’s performance on intelligence tests can be traced back to the underlying mental abilities or factors of intelligence. SI theory comprises up to 180 different intellectual abilities organised along three dimensions: operations, content, and products.

The Structure of Intellect Theory advanced by Guilford was applied by Mary N. Meeker for educational purposes.

Operations Dimension

SI includes six operations or general intellectual processes:

  • Cognition – The ability to understand, comprehend, discover, and become aware of information.
  • Memory recording – The ability to encode information.
  • Memory retention – The ability to recall information.
  • Divergent production – The ability to generate multiple solutions to a problem; creativity.
  • Convergent production – The ability to deduce a single solution to a problem; rule-following or problem-solving.
  • Evaluation – The ability to judge whether or not information is accurate, consistent, or valid.

Content Dimension

SI includes four broad areas of information to which the human intellect applies the six operations:

  • Figural – Concrete, real world information, tangible objects, things in the environment – It includes A. visual: information perceived through sight, B. auditory: information perceived through hearing, and C. kinaesthetic: information perceived through one’s own physical actions.
  • Symbolic – Information perceived as symbols or signs that stand for something else, e.g. Arabic numerals, the letters of an alphabet, or musical and scientific notations.
  • Semantic – Concerned with verbal meaning and ideas – Generally considered to be abstract in nature.
  • Behavioural – Information perceived as acts of people (This dimension was not fully researched in Guilford’s project. It remains theoretical and is generally not included in the final model that he proposed for describing human intelligence).

Product Dimension

As the name suggests, this dimension contains results of applying particular operations to specific contents. The SI model includes six products in increasing complexity:

  • Units – Single items of knowledge.
  • Classes – Sets of units sharing common attributes.
  • Relations – Units linked as opposites or in associations, sequences, or analogies.
  • Systems – Multiple relations interrelated to comprise structures or networks.
  • Transformations – Changes, perspectives, conversions, or mutations to knowledge.
  • Implications – Predictions, inferences, consequences, or anticipations of knowledge.

Therefore, according to Guilford there are 5 x 6 x 6 = 180 intellectual abilities or factors (his research only confirmed about three behavioural abilities, so it is generally not included in the model). Each ability stands for a particular operation in a particular content area and results in a specific product, such as Comprehension of Figural Units or Evaluation of Semantic Implications.

Guilford’s original model was composed of 120 components (when the behavioural component is included) because he had not separated Figural Content into separate Auditory and Visual contents, nor had he separated Memory into Memory Recording and Memory Retention. When he separated Figural into Auditory and Visual contents, his model increased to 5 x 5 x 6 = 150 categories. When Guilford separated the memory functions, his model finally increased to 180 factors.

Criticism

Various researchers have criticized the statistical techniques used by Guilford. According to Jensen (1998), Guilford’s contention that a g-factor was untenable was influenced by his observation that cognitive tests of US Air Force personnel did not show correlations significantly different from zero. According to one reanalysis, this resulted from artefacts and methodological errors. Applying more robust methodologies, the correlations in Guilford’s data sets are positive.[6] In another reanalysis, randomly generated models were found to be as well supported as Guilford’s own theory.

Guilford’s Structure of Intellect model of human abilities has few supporters today. Carroll (1993) summarized the view of later researchers:

“Guilford’s SOI model must, therefore, be marked down as a somewhat eccentric aberration in the history of intelligence models. The fact that so much attention has been paid to it is disturbing to the extent that textbooks and other treatments of it have given the impression that the model is valid and widely accepted, when clearly it is not.”

On This Day … 25 November

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People (Births)

  • 1938 – Erol Güngör, Turkish sociologist and psychologist (d. 1983).

Erol Gungor

Erol Güngör (25 November 1938 to 24 April 1983) was a Turkish sociologist, psychologist, and writer.

After spending a period in the Faculty of Law, Güngör graduated from the Faculty of Literature and Social Sciences of Istanbul University in 1961. He received his Ph.D. in 1965 with a thesis titled “Kelâmî (Verbal) Yapılarda Estetik Organizasyon”. Kenneth Hammond invited him to visit the University of Colorado. He became an associate professor with his thesis titled “Şahıslar arası Ihtilafların Çözümünde Lisanın Rolü” in 1970. He became an academic in the Faculty of Literature and Social Sciences of Istanbul University in 1975. He eventually became the president of Selçuk University in 1982.

He mostly studied culture, personality, customs, people and religion. He focused on the identity and cultural problems which Turkish people have faced in the last 150 years.

On This Day … 24 November

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People (Births)

Claudio Naranjo

Claudio Benjamín Naranjo Cohen (24 November 1932 to 12 July 2019) was a Chilean-born psychiatrist of Arabic/Moorish, Spanish and Jewish descent who is considered a pioneer in integrating psychotherapy and the spiritual traditions.

He was one of the three successors named by Fritz Perls (founder of Gestalt Therapy), a principal developer of Enneagram of Personality theories and a founder of the Seekers After Truth Institute. He was also an elder statesman of the US and global human potential movement and the spiritual renaissance of the late 20th century. He was the author of various books.

Margaret Wetherell

Margaret Wetherell (born 24 November 1954), is a prominent academic in the area of discourse analysis.

Career

Wetherell worked for 23 years at the Open University, UK from which she retired as Emeritus Professor in 2011. She then took up a part-time post of Professor in Psychology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Work

Wetherell has promoted a discursive approach to psychology. Her 1987 book, Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour, cowritten with Jonathan Potter, was very influential, particularly in social psychology, though also in other fields (e.g. Wood & Kroger, 2000). While discourse analysis has many different meanings, Wetherell’s approach has been quite catholic in line with other anglophone discourse analysts like Gilbert & Mulkay (1984).

In 2010/11 she led a collaboration on identity funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

On This Day … 23 November

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People (Births)

Keith Ablow

Keith Russell Ablow (born 23 November 1961) is an American author, television personality, and former psychiatrist. He is a former contributor for Fox News Channel and TheBlaze.

Formerly an assistant clinical professor at Tufts University School of Medicine, Ablow resigned as a member of the American Psychiatric Association in 2011. Ablow’s medical license was suspended in May 2019 by the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine. The board concluded he posed an “immediate and serious threat to the public health, safety and welfare,” alleging that he had engaged in sexual and unethical misconduct towards patients.

According to the Associated Press, Ablow “freely mixes psychiatric assessments with political criticism, a unique twist in the realm of cable news commentary that some medical colleagues find unethical.”

Education

He graduated from Brown University in 1983, magna cum laude, with a Bachelor of Science degree in neurosciences. He received his Doctor of Medicine degree from Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1987 and completed his psychiatry residency at the Tufts-New England Medical Centre. He was Board Certified by the American Board of Psychiatry & Neurology in psychiatry in 1993 and forensic psychiatry in 1999.

While a medical student, he worked as a reporter for Newsweek and a freelancer for the Washington Post and Baltimore Sun and USA Today. After his residency, Ablow served as medical director of the Tri-City Mental Health Centres and then became medical director of Heritage Health Systems and Associate Medical Director of Boston Regional Medical Centre.

On This Day … 22 November

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People (Births)

  • 1927 – Robert E. Valett, American psychologist, teacher, and author (d. 2008).

Robert E. Valett

Robert E. Valett (22 November 1927 to 14 November 2008) was an American psychology professor who wrote more than 20 books primarily focused on educational psychology. He earned the distinguished psychologist award from the San Joaquin Psychological Association and was a president of the California Association of School Psychologists.

Early Life and Education

Robert Edward Valett was born in Clinton, Iowa on 22 November 1927. His father, Edward John Valett, worked for the railroad as a pipe fitter and his mother, Myrtle (née Peterson), was a saleswoman. Valett attended Clinton High School while also achieving the rank of Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America. During World War II, he served in the US Navy Medical Corps. He then did his undergraduate work at the University of Iowa and George Williams College. Valett went on to earn an MA from the University of Chicago (1951) and an (Ed.D.) in educational psychology from the University of California in Los Angeles.

Career

Valett was a professor of psychology at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, Ca., and the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and taught psychology from 1970 to 1992 at California State University, Fresno where he was named Professor Emeritus. He authored several books on learning disabilities, child development, dyslexia and attention disorders/hyperactivity. He received the distinguished psychologist award from the San Joaquin Psychological Association in 1982 and served as president of the California Association of School Psychologists from 1971 to 1972.

Personal Life

In 1950, Valett married Shirley Bellman with whom he had 5 children. He died on 14 November 2008, in Fresno, California.

On This Day … 20 November

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People (Births)

  • 1916 – Charles E. Osgood, American psychologist (d. 1991).
  • 1920 – Douglas Dick, American actor and psychologist (d. 2015).

Charles E. Osgood

Charles Egerton Osgood (20 November 1916 to 15 September 1991) was an American psychologist and professor at the University of Illinois. He was known for his research on behaviourism versus cognitivism, semantics (he introduced the term “semantic differential), cross-culturalism, psycholinguistic theory, and peace studies. He is credited with helping in the early development of psycholinguistics. Charles Osgood was recognised, distinguished and highly honoured psychologist throughout his career.

Career

Osgood attended Dartmouth College where he intended to graduate and work as a writer for newspapers. During his second year, he enrolled in a class taught by Theodore Karwoski, thus inspiring him to switch his major in order to pursue a degree in psychology.

Charles Osgood earned his B.A. in 1939 from Dartmouth, and in the same year, married Cynthia Luella Thornton. Osgood then went on to study at Yale University where he completed his Ph.D. in 1945. During his time at Yale, he worked as an assistant for Robert Sears, and collaborated with the likes of Arnold Gesell, Walter Miles, Charles Morris, and Irvin Child. However, the person with the greatest influence on his career and future work was Clark Hull. Though Osgood was heavily influenced through working alongside Hull; he stated the experience was one of the determining reasons for him pursuing a career as a researcher, rather than a clinician.

Osgood was a social psychologist interested in psycholinguistics, and research. He was an instructor at Yale from 1942 to 1946, where he earned his doctorate degree. He worked for the US Office of Scientific Research and Development 1946 to 1947, serving as a research associate that worked on training of B-29 gunners. During this period, Osgood also worked as an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut from 1946 to 1949. Osgood then went on to become an associate professor at the University of Connecticut from 1949 to 1952, and eventually as professor of psychology and communications from 1952 onward. He completed a majority of his work during his time at the University of Illinois, Urbana, which, along with the Institute of Communications, funded many of his works. Osgood would often submit himself to his own experiments get a better grasp of what his subjects may experience. At Illinois, Osgood was active in aiding in the hiring processes, and even arranged interviews for women at the university during times when women were facing sexism in the field of psychology. From 1957 to 1965, Osgood served as the Director of the Institute of Communications Research, and starting in 1965, he became the Director of the Centre for Advanced Study. He was also elected as the director of the Centre of Comparative Psycholinguistics at the university from 1963 to 1982.

In addition to this, Osgood completed a fellowship at the Centre for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences at Stanford University from 1958 to 1959; and was given an honorary doctorate from the Dartmouth College in 1962. Osgood also acted as a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii from 1964 to 1965.

Douglas Dick

Douglas Harvey Dick (20 November 1920 to 19 December 2015) was an American actor and occasional screenwriter. His most famous role came in the 1948 film Rope. In 1971, Dick left the entertainment industry to work as a psychologist.

Early Years

Dick was born in Charleston, West Virginia, and raised in Versailles, Kentucky. He was the son of Mr. and Mrs. Gamble C. Dick, and he had a brother, Gamble C. Dick Jr. He attended the University of Arizona and the University of Kentucky.

Before he began working in films, Dick appeared in several shows in New York and was a model for the Conover agency. One issue of Look magazine featured his picture on the cover.

Military Service

Dick did patrol duty with the United States Coast Guard and served as an aviator in the United States Navy, receiving a medical discharge from the latter.

Film

Dick’s film debut was in The Searching Wind (1946). Producer Hal B. Wallis met Dick in a Broadway agent’s office as Dick was waiting for an interview. Wallis had Dick make a screen test in New York City. The test, along with those of five other prospects, was shown to 300 women employees of Wallis’ studio. Dick was the clear favourite when the women were polled, and his role in The Searching Wind was the result. His best known film role is Kenneth Lawrence in the Alfred Hitchcock film classic Rope (1948). Among his other notable films are The Red Badge of Courage (1951) and Something to Live For (1952).

Television

On television, Douglas Dick is best known for his role as Carl Herrick in the television series, Waterfront (1954-1955).

Dick appeared once on Jim Davis’ syndicated adventure series, Rescue 8. Additionally, he made two appearances on Lloyd Bridges’ syndicated adventure series, Sea Hunt. He made seven guest appearances on Perry Mason throughout the duration of the CBS series from 1957 to 1966. In 1959, he played Fred Bushmiller in the title role in “The Case of the Watery Witness.” In the 1962 episode, “The Case of the Glamorous Ghost,” he played Walter Richey, a hotel clerk and the murder suspect. He played murder suspect Ned Chase in the 1963 episode, “The Case of the Elusive Element.” He made his final appearance in 1965 as Ted Harberson in “The Case of the Wrathful Wraith.”

Personal Life

Dick married twice: first to Ronnie Cowan until their 1960 divorce, and second to television screenwriter Peggy Chantler from 1963 until her death in 2001.

Dick retired from acting and became a psychologist in 1971.

On This Day … 19 November

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People (Births)

  • 1833 – Wilhelm Dilthey, German psychologist, sociologist, and historian (d. 1911).
  • 1937 – Penelope Leach, English psychologist and author.

Wilhelm Dilthey

Wilhelm Dilthey (19 November 1833 to 01 October 1911) was a German historian, psychologist, sociologist, and hermeneutic philosopher, who held G.W.F. Hegel’s Chair in Philosophy at the University of Berlin.

As a polymathic philosopher, working in a modern research university, Dilthey’s research interests revolved around questions of scientific methodology, historical evidence and history’s status as a science. He could be considered an empiricist, in contrast to the idealism prevalent in Germany at the time, but his account of what constitutes the empirical and experiential differs from British empiricism and positivism in its central epistemological and ontological assumptions, which are drawn from German literary and philosophical traditions.

Psychology

Dilthey was interested in psychology. In his work Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology (Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie, 1894), he introduced a distinction between explanatory psychology (erklärende Psychologie; also explanative psychology) and descriptive psychology (beschreibende Psychologie; also analytic psychology, zergliedernde Psychologie): in his terminology, explanatory psychology is the study of psychological phenomena from a third-person point of view, which involves their subordination to a system of causality, while descriptive psychology is a discipline that attempts to explicate how different mental processes converge in the “structural nexus of consciousness.”

The distinction is based on the more general distinction between explanatory/explanative sciences (erklärende Wissenschaften), on the one hand, and interpretive sciences (beschreibende Wissenschaften or verstehende Wissenschaften, that is, the sciences which are based on the Verstehen method), on the other.

In his later work (Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften, 1910), he used the alternative term structural psychology (Strukturpsychologie) for descriptive psychology.

Penelope Leach

Penelope Jane Leach (née Balchin; born 19 November 1937), is a British psychologist who researches and writes extensively on parenting issues from a child development perspective.

Leach is best known for her book Your Baby and Child: From Birth to Age Five, published in 1977, which has sold over two million copies to date and won the BMA award for “best medical book for general audiences” in 1998. Leach notes in the introduction to that book: “Whatever you are doing, however you are coping, if you listen to your child and to your own feelings, there will be something you can actually do to put things right or make the best of those that are wrong.”

Career

Her first research positions included a year in the Home Office Research Unit studying juvenile crime and six years at the Medical Research Council Developmental Research Unit. Leach is a fellow of the British Psychological Society (1988), was Vice-President of the Health Visitors’ Association (1988-1999), and President of the National Childminding Association (1999-2006). She was a founding member of AIMH (The Association of Infant Mental Health) (1998-2002) and is now an adviser. She also worked for the Pre-school Parents’ Association and with organisations concerned with children’s rights, including the NSPCC (Trustee, 1996-1999) and its sister organisations in Ireland, the US, and Canada, and the Children’s Rights Development Unit (1996-2001). As a founder and parent educator of EPOCH (End Physical Punishment of Children) (1988-2004), now CAU (Children are Unbeatable), she has written pamphlets and booklets campaigning against physical punishment and in favour of positive discipline. Since 2009 she has been a Director of the Mindful Policy group which seeks to link psychological research and political policy. Recently she has contributed to work on the Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum, writing the lead chapter to the book Too Much Too Soon?: Early Learning and the erosion of childhood, Hawthorne Press 2011. Between 1997 and 2005, Leach co-directed the largest ever English study of childcare.

Her current research, writing and teaching focuses on contemporary infant neuroscience which in some areas is producing evidence where formerly there were only ideas and opinions. In 2013 she published a chapter entitled “Infant Rearing in the Context of Contemporary Neuroscience” in the Handbook of Child Wellbeing, eds. Korbin and Asher, published by Springer. She is a senior research fellow of the Institute for the Study of Children, Families and Social Issues, Birkbeck, University of London, and of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust (1997-). She is a visiting professor at the Faculty of Education, University of Winchester (2013-).