Description
This book is intended to round out the picture of American psychology’s past, adding the history of psychological practice to the story of psychological science. Written by two well-recognized authorities in the field, this book covers the profession and practice of psychology in America from the late nineteenth century to the present. From Séance to Science tells the story of psychologists who sought and seek to apply the knowledge of their science to the practical problems of the world, whether those problems lay in businesses, schools, families, or in the thoughts, emotions, and behaviors of individuals. Engagingly written and full of interesting examples, this book includes figures and photos from the Archives of the History of American Psychology. This is the story of individuals, trained in psychology, who function as school psychologists, counseling psychologists, clinical psychologists, and industrial psychologists. These are psychology’s practitioners, meaning that they take the knowledge base of psychology and use it for practical purposes outside of the classroom and outside of the laboratory.
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About the authors
Ludy T. Benjamin Jr. is Professor Emeritus of Texas A&M University, where he served as a faculty member for the last thirty-two years of his career. An experimental psychologist by training, he began his academic career at Nebraska Wesleyan University and served two years as Director of Education for the American Psychological Association before joining the faculty at Texas A&M. Benjamin has received numerous teaching awards from Texas A&M University, from the American Psychological Foundation, and the American Psychological Association. In 2007, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Psychological Association’s Society for the History of Psychology.
Benjamin’s scholarly work is on the history of psychology and includes twenty-five books and more than 150 articles and book chapters, which focus on the origins of applied psychology–especially clinical and industrial/organizational psychology–and on the popularization of psychology in North America and Great Britain. His recent books include A History of Psychology in Letters, A Brief History of Modern Psychology, A History of Psychology: Original Sources and Contemporary Research, and Psychology Gets in the Game: Sport, Mind, and Behavior, 1880–1960.
