A History of Modern Psychology

When my father, Per Saugstad, died at ninety years old, he left the manuscript for the present volume, the fruit of several decades of hard work. The book first appeared in Norwegian in 1998, and in 2009 in a second edition, which in fact was a completely revised text. During the revision he had prepared a parallel English manuscript, for which, however, he was unable to find a renowned international publisher before his demise in 2010.

A History of Modern Psychology is motivated by a concern to put psychology on a scientific footing. My father believed the schools of psychology have replaced one another without drawing sufficiently on what was good and useful, or mistaken, in the preceding school. His idea is that collaborators in the field should guide their work by greater familiarity with the attempts in modern time to establish psychology as a science. Lecturing on the history of psychology at the University of Oslo for twenty-five years, he studied these attempts in depth, and by seeking the experts in psychology and in adjacent fields, at home and abroad. The present publication reflects this broad and detailed scholarship in the treatment of the major schools of psychology in Germany, Britain, France, Russia, and the United States from about 1850 to the near present.

My father began his academic carrier in the humanities, achieving a master's degree in English, German, and Norwegian language and literature in 1945. He published a book on the Norwegian poets Henrik Wergeland and J. S. Welhaven, and an anthology of Norwegian poetry. In the late 1940s, the sociologists and social psychologists Paul F. Lazarsfeld and David Krech came to Norway to recruit students to study social science or psychology in the United States, and my father was encouraged to apply. Having become interested in psychological aspects of poetry, he applied to the psychology program at the University of Chicago, and went on to receive a PhD in psychology in 1952. Later, he often stressed how fortunate he was to have been taught and supervised at the University of Chicago by some of the leading figures in American psychology at the time – E. C. Toleman, L. L. Thurstone, W. Köhler, and A. A. Riesen.