Research report on a new volume on the crises in italian psychology

Storia e “crisi” della Psicologia scientifica in Italia [The History and “Crisis” of Scientific Psychology in Italy] (Milan: LED, 2014), edited by Giovanni Pietro Lombardo, Professor of the History of Psychology at the Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology, “Sapienza” University of Rome, offers a multidimensional analysis of the construct of “crisis” in the context of scientific psychology in Italy. The book is the first historical account of the “crisis” in Italian psychology to approach the subject from multiple perspectives: philosophical-epistemological, scientific, and institutional. This integrative approach is essential for the proper interpretation of a historiographical construct (Cimino, 2014). The idea for a book dedicated to the “crisis” in Italian psychology arose from the recognition that although there have been numerous meetings and events related to the crisis in psychology, both primary sources and secondary Italian sources are largely ignored in the international literature. The intention was to analyze the crisis from the historiographical perspective of continuity– discontinuity through investigation of internal and external history.