Giovanni Pietro Lombardo

The concept of personality in 19th-century French and 20th-century American psychology.

Since the 1920s, the road to the acknowledgement of personality psychology as a field of scientific psychology that has individuality as its object began with the founding of the discipline by Gordon W. Allport. Historians of psychology have made serious attempts to reconstruct the cultural, political, institutional, and chronological beginnings of this field in America in the 20th century. In this literature, however, an important European tradition of psychological studies of personality that developed in France in the 2nd half of the 19th century has been overlooked. The aim of this article is to cast some light on this unexplored tradition of psychological personality studies and to discuss its influence on the development of the scientific study of personality in the United States.

The European Origins of Personality Psychology

The year 1937 is remembered by historians of psychology as the year of the birth of personality psychology. This discipline emerged in the United States thanks to the work of several psychologists who came to organize its methodology and fundamental notions. Gordon Allport is the most important representative of this change within scientific psychology. This paper analyzes the continuity between “before” and “after” the foundation of the discipline and locates several important points of reference for the initial scientific research on personality. The aim of this essay is to reconstruct historically the contribution of some important lines of “European” psychological research that have had a remarkable influence both from the theoretical and methodological points of view on the scientific foundation of personality psychology studies in its modern developments.

The origins of psychology in Italy: Themes and authors that emerge through a content analysis of the Rivista di Filosofia Scientifica [Journal of Scientific Philosophy].

This article examines the scientific-cultural context of the second half of the 1800s, during which psychological science emerged in Italy. The article explores the contribution made by the emergence of the primary research traditions of that period, namely, physiological anthropology and phreniatry, by means of a methodology that combines content analysis with a classical historiographical study of the period. Themes and authors deriving from the various disciplines in the human and natural sciences were identified through a content analysis of the Rivista di Filosofia Scientifica [Journal of Scientific Philosophy], a periodical that is representative of Italian positivism. The analysis highlights the epistemological perspective held by scholars who, distancing themselves from the mechanistic reductionism of the proponents of positivism, integrated a naturalistic and evolutionary conceptualization with the neo-Kantian critique. A clearly delineated naturalistic and differential perspective of scientific research that brought about the birth of psychology as an experimental discipline in Italy in the 1900s emerges from the analysis, including psychology and psychopathology as studied by the phreniatrists Gabriele Buccola, Enrico Morselli, and Eugenio Tanzi; Tito Vignoli and Giuseppe Sergis work in comparative anthropology; Giulio Fanos approach and contribution to physiology; and Enrico Ferris contribution to criminology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

The Pioneering Work of Enrico Morselli (1852–1929) in Light of Modern Scientific Research on Hypnosis and Suggestion

Abstract This article examines research on hypnosis and suggestion, starting with the nineteenth-century model proposed by Enrico Morselli (1852–1929), an illustrious Italian psychiatrist and psychologist. The authors conducted an original psychophysiological analysis of hypnosis, distancing the work from the neuropathological concept of the time and proposing a model based on a naturalistic approach to investigating mental processes. The issues investigated by Morselli, including the definition of hypnosis and analysis of specific mental processes such as attention and memory, are reviewed in light of modern research. From the view of modern neuroscientific concepts, some problems that originated in the nineteenth century still appear to be present and pose still-open questions.

Localizationism, antilocalizationism, and the emergence of the unitary construct of consciousness in Luigi Luciani (1840–1919).

This article aims to present the construct of unitary consciousness as it emerged in the work of the Italian physiologist Luigi Luciani (1840–1919). We highlight how Luciani’s work, conducted during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, integrated experimental research with the clinical observation of patients, enabling him to develop elaborate theoretical conceptions. From our historical analysis of Luciani’s main works, an innovative model of unitary consciousness emerges with respect to his contemporary context. We also propose Luciani’s model as a contribution to the modern debate on consciousness. An analysis of his work, not considered up to now, leads us to reevaluate the assumption of an ancient opposition between localization and antilocalization in the history of cerebral localization.

Empirical research and literature review of the experimental and systematic study of dreams in the late 19th and early 20th century: The important role of general psychology.

The aim of this work is to bring out the historiographical categorization and periodization of the studies on dreams between the late 19th and early 20th century. The study is divided into different stages: bibliographic research, content analysis, and statistical analysis. For bibliographic research, we selected 315 studies written between 1872 and 1940 and published in PsycInfo, the database of the American Psychological Association. We assigned each work to specific categories (psychological and physical disorders, general psychology, psychoanalytical theory, physiological psychology, and other categories). Each of these works underwent content analysis, whereby we highlighted the main model used by the different authors in the dreaming studies. Statistical analysis examined the relation between model and category. The methodology used integrated quantitative and qualitative perspectives for a better interpretation of the data. This historical research gives a new contribution to contemporary studies that have neglected the study of dreams in past decades. In fact, the conclusion of this study highlights the attention of general psychology to the study of dreams, the important role of psychological models as the main research approach in this field, and the premature attention to the dream with the physiological and psychological model, in an integrated perspective.

The “crisis” of psychology between fragmentation and integration: The Italian case

Crisis, as a construct, recurs in the history of psychology and has attracted the attention of psychological historians and philosophers in recent years, who have given life not only to a debate about psychological historiography, but also to a philosophical-epistemological reflection about the foundations of scientific psychology. These scholars, however, ignore the Italian literature on the theme, which is rich with useful details for both areas. After an analysis of the different meanings historically applied to the term crisis, this article examines the history of Italian psychology with a description of the origins and developments and with special attention paid to the construct of crisis. The analysis covers both the output of early 20th-century Italian psychologists on the theme, and how this has been treated in historians’ reconstruction of the theme. The article provides new historiographical elements within the framework of international research on the crisis.

The concept of personality in 19th-century French and 20th-century American psychology: Correction to Lombardo and Foschi (2003).

Since the 1920s, the road to the acknowledgement of personality psychology as a field of scientific psychology that has individuality as its object began with the founding of the discipline by Gordon W. Allport. Historians of psychology have made serious attempts to reconstruct the cultural, political, institutional, and chronological beginnings of this field in America in the 20th century. In this literature, however, an important European tradition of psychological studies of personality that developed in France in the 2nd half of the 19th century has been overlooked. The aim of this article is to cast some light on this unexplored tradition of psychological personality studies and to discuss its influence on the development of the scientific study of personality in the United States.