The Emergence of “Scientific” Psychology in Italy between Positivist Philosophy and Psychiatric Tradition

In Italy, the emergence of a psychology that can be considered ‘‘scientific’’ is not an event that can be easily ascribed to a precise date. It involves instead a general shift of ideas, gradual initiatives of a cultural and institutional nature, and new approaches to research, all of which together, in the course of the last thirty years of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century, form a ‘‘critical mass’’ that identifies psychology as an autonomous science, distinct from both philosophy and from neurophysiology and psychiatry. This event is embedded in – and favoured by – a matrix of positivist and evolutionist thought, which gives rise to the necessity and to the problem of confronting the study of mental phenomena with a ‘‘positive method,’’ and therefore of detaching such phenomena from their philosophical grounds in order to lead them within the sphere of science. Among the numerous elaborations upon this theme, the works that occupy a particularly prominent place are those of the positivist philosopher Roberto Ardigo` and of the anthropologist Giuseppe Sergi, who in view of their theoretical proposal of a ‘‘new’’ science of the mind are considered the precursors or pioneers of ‘‘scientific’’ psychology in Italy. The same positivist philosophical-cultural background simultaneously induced some psychiatrists to open their mental health centres to the first researches of a strictly psychological nature to be conducted with the experimental method. In this regard, a particularly important figure is that of Gabriele Buccola, who was especially dedicated to these investigations and was the first Italian scholar to approach in a systematic way experimental research on mental phenomena. Little by little, in the years bridging the two centuries, a second generation of scholars, for the most part psychiatrists by formation (among whom Ferrari, De Sanctis, Kiesow, and De Sarlo), began to hold lessons of experimental psychology in the universities, to open laboratories specifically dedicated to psychological research, to develop experimental investigations inspired by different models, and to draft the first applications of the discipline in the clinical, educational, labour, and judiciary fields. Considered as a whole, the numerous initiatives undertaken indicate clearly how in those years – and especially in 1905 when several very significant events took place simultaneously – a new psychological science was definitively born also in Italy.