Psychology As Literature

We analyzed the titles of articles of two psychological journals, L'Annee Psychologique and Psychological Review, from 1894 until 1988 and compared the official history of psychology with the new history arrived at through content-analytic procedures applied to primary sources of psychology. We assessed meaning and themes, the first through dictionaries of primordial and conceptual thinking and of evaluation, the second through the analysis of the relationships existing between the most associationally rich words in each journal. Over the years, both journals showed a significant decrease in primordial thinking, with an increase in conceptual thinking oriented toward symbols and rules. Pleasantness unfolded along a U-shaped curve, of which the lowest part lay between the two World Wars for L'Annee Psychologique and around 1960 for Psychological Review. Factors identified in the journals possess historical significance, though they do not lead to the conclusion that psychology is a unitary science.