Motivated historiography: Comments on Wolfgang Schönpflug's reappraisal of German critical psychology.

Introducing the concept of motivated historiography, we seek to answer the question of what constitutes a good history of psychology and of German Critical Psychology (CP) in particular. It is suggested that one needs to include questions about the purpose of historiography, the background and horizon of the historiographer, the quality and originality of the thesis, the quality of the material, selected and omitted, and the quality of interpretations. We submit that the article by Schönpflug (2021) does not accomplish a realistic account of CP. We conclude that the two original main theses in the article on links of CP to communism and Nazism reflect motivated historiography and are remnants of political and cultural struggles in Germany in the 1970s. We suggest that more important than just denouncing an innovative program is to do justice to the sociopolitical, academic, and theoretical entanglements, the historical contributions and the intellectual legacies of CP, while also accounting for shortcomings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

The Neo-Kantian Paul Natorp and the Role of Subjectivity in Psychology.

In this paper I want to draw attention to the works of the German neo-Kantian philosopher Paul Natorp, who, in his writings about psychology, developed a unique understanding of the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity. Despite the many decades that have passed since the original publication of Natorp's work, I want to show that his ideas can still be influential today, if we want to re-orient psychology as a discipline and examine the higher psychological functions.

The beyond must also be useful: the burden of alternative approaches.

Advocates of many different approaches have, for years, attempted to usurp cognitive psychology's dominance in the field of psychology. Unfortunately, none of these approaches have yet made a convincing case that they could take cognitive psychology's place. Because of its explicit use of the mind-as-computer model, cognitivism gains a false sense of concreteness, and becomes pragmatically useful. Because their models are implicit, alternatives, such as phenomenology, gain a false sense of ambiguity and lose their pragmatic potential. In addition, alternative theories often alienate potential sympathizers through unnecessarily harsh criticism. This leads to a professional attitude in which one must take sides, rather than an attitude that appreciates the benefits of diversity, and may lead to the emergence of other beneficial models. If alternative approaches, such as Dr. Flores-González's (Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Sciences, 2008), could push through to the point of immediate usefulness, and present themselves in a less adversarial way, they would be much better placed make meaningful contributions.