proach to organizational behavior greatly in order for it to take root in Europe. It is therefore most surprising that behaviorism and behavior therapy have been expanding in Italy for some forty years.

Abstract

At the end of the 1 800s and in the first quarter of this century, Italian psychology was strongly influenced by, and under the aegis of, philosophy. Various authors emphasized that the rapid eclipse of positivism and the triumph of idealism in Italy [would] not allow the seeds of pragmatism to develop and that subjectivist tendencies would lead the way [3]. Hence, a scientifically independent behavioral psychology with materialist overtones was certainly not appreciated. Obstacles to acquiring knowledge about behaviorism included our traditional culture, which was akin to German culture in terms of philosophy; the fact that psychology was under the aegis of philosophy and therefore not oriented toward empirical research; and our great predilection for antimaterialist theses that tended to extol the role of consciousness and introspection [4]. In the second quarter of this century, during the Fascist era, the hegemony of idealism, especially that of the philosopher Giovanni Gentile, influenced psychiatry (independent teaching of which was removed from universities) and psychology even more negatively, even though important figures were not lacking. Among them was Padre Gemelli, who was a proponent of Catholic thought and interpreted the role of experimental psychology in a personal way consistent with his Thomist ideas [3]. Watson and behaviorism were studied very little in Italy before World War II. The first Italian scholar who supported behaviorism, in a paper in 1942 [5], was Professor Lazzeroni, who can be considered a founding father and, later, a continuous point of reference for us. His voice remained rather isolated, however, even when psychology and psychiatry regained force on a university level after the war [6]. Let me now try briefly to outline the development of cognitive behavioral therapies in Italy from the 1950s on, obviously in an incomplete fashion. My presentation is based on historical sources, on a survey conducted among the most famous Italian and European researchers on this subject, and on my own personal experience. There were four main factors in the development of behaviorism in Italy after World War II. The first was the Pavlovian approach to studies on higher nervous activity that prevailed among neurologists and psy

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 0 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.