The Historical Formation of Selves

Abstract

Abstract The topic of the self is different from many other psychological topics in that psychology has to share it with a number of other disciplines, sociology and psychiatry, to mention only the most obvious ones. In that way “self’ differs from “intelligence,” for example, which became an almost uncontested psychological category many years ago. That had a lot to do with psychologists’ early production of a specific technology that they very successfully marketed as a socially useful way of measuring intelligence. Having no rivals in the scientific study of intelligence, psychologists rapidly became the recognized experts. They could get away with saying that intelligence was what intelligence tests measured because they controlled the only viable technology in the area. Similar things happened in connection with other categories, such as perception and learning, where psychologists were able to decide among themselves what these terms referred to because they had the field pretty much to themselves.

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 — 53 citations exist upstream.