The Clinical-differential approach of Sante De Sanctis in Italian scientific psychology

Sante De Sanctis, a psychiatrist and psychologist, is one of the most representative figures of Italian scientific psychology. He is considered one of the founders of the discipline as well as one of its main protagonists in the years between the two World Wars. Both with his extensive scientific productions (which include more than three hundred works) and with his uninterrupted institutional activity, he has left his significant mark on the history of Italian psychology. He was the first professor of Experimental Psychology and is internationally known as the most famous Italian psychologist: some of his works have been published in French, Swiss, American, German, Scandinavian, and English journals, and some of his volumes have been translated into English and German. Together with the other psychologists of the second generation (Binet, Ku¨ lpe, Mu¨ nsterberg, Stern, Clapare`de, Ebbinghaus), he was the only Italian psychologist who decided to enrich the classical paradigm of Wundt’s physiological psychology, by developing during the twentieth century the program of methodological and epistemological enlargement of the discipline. In his fundamental treatise Psicologia Sperimentale, written in 1929-30, a clear modern conception of psychology emerged: it jointly included both the generalist aspect (with some studies on psychophysical proportionality, thought mimicry, dreams, attention, emotions, etc.) and the applicative one, which included psychopathology, labor psychology, educational psychology, and criminal psychology, all seen in a general experimental framework. The present paper aims precisely to highlight the originality of De Sanctis’ experimentalism that applied the differential clinical approach to the discipline of psychology, causing it for the first time in Italy to be seen in a unitary way as both general and applied psychology.