History & Future
...they have ways of appearing to be part of one simultaneous thrust of coordinated progress. Perhaps as part of one view of evolution, individuals are inclined to regard those developments and occurrences which transpire during their lives as somehow interrelated, interdependent, and principally part of the same body of human thought and ideology. This is likely the philosophy which causes us to regard the current state of psychology as a diffuse but centrally originated discipline of science. By working from the perceptions of those who existed simultaneous to some of our biggest intellectual and neurological leaps, we seem to be grounded in the idea that there is a Diaspora, in effect, of the fundamental underpinnings in the science and that our changing views have simply drawn certain strands in widely contrary directions. This, the field of clinical psychology would contend, is a misunderstanding of the diverse and distinctively partitioned psychological discipline.
Psychology practice in America is now an endlessly multiplicative spectrum of forms and forums, but its history is most often told by those at the academic round tables, whose interest in the pervasion of specific scientific, religious or social standards in the field sometimes sparks a narrowness of retrospective. This is to say that there is no single history of psychology, which has experienced both collective variation points in special moments, theories, and individuals, but which has also largely been forged upon the diffuseness of events and progressive patterns in human history. To this end, “it is now generally recognized that there is more than one interpretation of the history of American psychology... one step further... there is, in fact, more than one definition of psychology in common currency.” (Taylor, X)
As such, there is an automatic difficulty in reconciling the claims of...
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