Da una storia delle crisi ad una storiografia della crisi: il caso della psicologia italiana

At the end of the nineteenth century, when psychology emerged as an autonomous science, some thinkers started to declare its crisis. Ever since then the topic of crisis has continuously been present in history and historiography of psychology. In fact, recently some historians have actualized the theme of crisis without, however, considering the Italian contribution. This study therefore focuses on the theme of crisis and considers Italy as a case study. Starting with the comparison between international and national secondary literature on the topic, I propose to consider crisis as a multidimensional category. Accordingly, I suggest three different levels, and related indicators, indispensable for the analysis of crisis. The first level is investigated through the primary literature on the theme which, subsequently, helps us to understand how 'historical actors' perceived the crisis at their time. Combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, the second level of my analysis focuses on the external history and looks at the transformation of academic positions in psychology. Scrutinizing changes in the number of academic positions helps us to find out whether or not there was a decline in the evolution of psychology; the denominations of positions help us to understand how psychology was co-shaped by larger course of socio-political events. The third level of my investigation explores the internal changes and shifts in the structure of psychology. Starting from four hermeneutical categories (general psychology, applied psychology, experimental psychology and psychotechnic), the multidimensional scaling (MDS) method is applied to the journal article titles which appeared from 1905 to 1969 in Rivista di psicologia are investigated. The combination of the three levels of analysis helps us to individuate significant features of crisis. Moreover this approach underlines the importance of the uses of crisis as historiographical category enabling historians to categorically analyze the complexity of history.