He might just as well have said psychologist.
It is important because, whether we know it or not, the ideas of psychologists hold great sway in our society, and are of the foremost practical importance for public policy, especially in areas like criminal justice and economics.Īs the great economist John Maynard Keynes famously said: Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist. After all, we humans cannot help being curious about ourselves-about what makes us tick - and these 50 individuals are acknowledged experts in precisely that topic.īut we believe the article has some value even beyond the inherent fascination of the subject of psychology itself. While many on our list have a foot in more than one disciplinary camp, to be included here their main academic position had to be located within either a psychology department or a psychiatry department (within a medical school).Ĭertainly, we hope and believe that the work of the individuals listed here will be widely appealing just for its own sake. For the purposes of this article, we have excluded persons whose primary academic affiliation lies in a philosophy department, or in one of the other humanities, or in some other social science. With the help of to get a base list of influencers, we have created the list below. Moreover, at every point along the spectrum, many of the most famous psychologists have often taken a step back to reflect upon the nature of the field as a whole-examining the tacit presuppositions that guide psychologists’ thought and practice, and thereby assuming the role of philosopher. The field comprises a spectrum which merges at one end with soft disciplines like ethnology, sociology, and the helping professions, and at the other end with hard disciplines like genetics, endocrinology, and neuroscience. The soul has fled from the cultural battlefield where modern science has carried the day, leaving behind, at best, an ineffable entity we call the mind-which is itself little more than a will-o-the-wisp hovering over the three pounds of pulpy gray matter inside the skull like a ghost lingering about a graveyard long after the funeral.įor these reasons, psychology as an academic discipline is exceptionally diverse. On the other hand, we moderns hardly believe in the soul that all those writers took for granted anymore. There is little that modern psychology can teach us about the deepest wellsprings of the human heart-or, to put it more scientifically, o the nature and causes of human motivation and action - that has not already been far better expressed by the poets, playwrights, and novelists down through the ages. On the one hand, as Sigmund Freud would have been the first to acknowledge, a wealth of psychological insight is contained in the myths and epic poetry of ancient peoples (think of Esau’s envy, Medea’s hatred, Dido’s despair), as well as in the literature of more recent times (Lady Macbeth’s ambition and Satan’s pride in Paradise Lost Madame Bovary’s boredom and Charles Swann’s jealousy). As such, it is an academic discipline that is unique in the way it straddles the sciences (natural and social) and the humanities. The word psychology literally means the study of the soul (from the Greek: ψῡ́χω, or psukhē).
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