History, historiographies, and traces of some forgotten social psychology.

This article, which is set in the historical-critical tradition, is divided into three parts. The first part deals with the different possible ways of making history, both in general terms – with a marked attention to Nietzsche and Foucault’s points of view analysed in relation to the traditional ones – and in the psychological field. The second part refers to some fundamental elements of the historiographical debate concerning social psychology, with a particular emphasis on the disputes arisen from Gordon Allport’s historical chapter on the background of modern social psychology which was published in 1954 in Lindzey’s Handbook of Social Psychology. The third part draws on the results of a survey aimed at exploring the role played by some key issues, provided by Allport’s chapter, in the international scientific communication conveyed by the ‘Psychological literature’ from 1887 to 1954. Some ‘founding myths’ of the discipline are brought into question by the analysis of the survey’s main results: in particular, the myth supporting the idea of an Anglophone and entirely individuocentric social psychology, or that of an entirely sociocentric European tradition, and that of social psychology’s limited applicative disposition.