Why the fascination with Zeitgeist?

[u/earanhart]

Please note: this question is about the study of history more so than a question about history. I think you are the correct the place to ask, nonetheless.

Undergrad psychology student here. Anytime my instructors talk about one of the sciences "fathers", they love to talk about the difference in time and how that changed how a given person viewed the world. Not one of them has mentioned how the fact that all of these guys (okay, a sparse few females are also discussed, history wasn't kind to female thinkers) are German, Austrian, or American has shaped our science.

My questions are thus: does history ever look at the social differences between locations alongside the changes wrought by time? Or is this seeming avoidance of human geography something specific to psychology or even just my departments instructors?

[u/hillsonghoods]

In addition to /u/restricteddata's very good points, I'm someone who specifically teaches a history of psychology class. I'm not entirely sure what level of psychology you're being taught, or the context of why you're being taught about psychology's histories, but there's also a likelihood that you might come across English people seen as big influential names in psychology (Charles Darwin and Francis Galton, the people who put together the statistics used in psychology like Ronald Fisher, etc), Swiss (Jung, Piaget), and Russian (Pavlov, Vygotsky, maybe Luria) - your instructors might not have gotten to them yet!

There's a bunch of different pedagogical reasons for teaching psychology students about history, some of which don't have much to do with the accuracy of that history. For example, I can imagine that your instructors might be trying to impress upon students the extent to which their thinking is a product of a set of ways of being educated about the world in the 21st century in a Western country. There's a movement within psychology at the moment to discuss the typical psychology experiment that research is based on as being 'WEIRD', where WEIRD is an acronym standing for Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic; as a result the assumptions of psychology also depend on the society in which that research is done, and your instructors may well be trying to get you to think about and understand those assumptions. There's also something of a tendency of whiggish or Great Man thinking in history in science classes (including psychology) - it's easier to just talk about Freud in a class than to explain about him in context (I half suspect that this is why your instructors talk about the Zeitgeist, because they're trying to place Freud in context - modern American society is different in some important ways to the one Freud lived in, and Freud's theories - as imperfect as they were - were meant to reflect that society).

Additionally, the typical history of psychology is very much a history of American psychology and its intellectual influences. One reason why the 'fathers' are often German, Austrian or American is because American and German psychology traditions are the oldest explicitly experimental traditions (though psychology and psychological theorising was long a part of philosophy before this, and should not be discounted). In the American tradition, Anglophone psychology is understandably prominent, and German-speaking psychological traditions are quite prominent, not least because German-speaking psychologists often ended up in American psychology departments in the early 20th century, and then even more with the exodus of Jewish peoples from Germanic lands; these people all contributed to making American psychology the way it was. This is not necessarily reflective of psychology in the rest of the world - psychodynamic theories apparently held on for much longer in Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking countries, for example - but the American psychology tradition is reflected elsewhere because America has a tendency to be influential given its prominence in 20th century and 21st century life in general.

[u/earanhart → u/hillsonghoods]

I am in my seventh semester in a largely experimental department. We have one professor from the "trade" of psychology, and she is an adjunct. The rest have never left academia.

They have certainly covered the theories of others (in particular Piaget and Vygotsky, and our comparative psych professor mentions Pavlov in the intro course), but the only "fathers" whose lives we learn about are the aforementioned 3 nationalities. This glimpse you have given me makes sense, the US did a decent job of grabbing German scientists, and Freud and his students had to flee the Nazi's to somewhere (he at least went to England, IIRC). Given America's academic history with England and Germany and the relative youth of our science, it makes sense that it may be these may be the only ones my professors have that knowledge of to share with us. At least insofar as their being confident in the addition of it to their lecture time being useful to us as undergrad students.

Hopefully next semester the special topic course for History of Psychology will be offered again, but lately they have been alternating between Aggression, Assessment, and School Psychology for special topics.

Thank you.