Psychologists on Psychology

This is a Classic Edition of David Cohen's unique collection of interviews with eminent psychologists, first published in 1977. The book presents conversations with thirteen of the world's great psychologists, who dominated the subject from 1950 to 1980, and who shaped psychology as we know it today. Those interviewed include Burrhus Skinner, Donald Broadbent, Hans Eysenck and also R.D Laing, Noam Chomsky, and Niko Tinbergen. This classic edition contains a newly written introduction which contextualises the interviews as a critique and diagnosis of the problems of contemporary psychology in the mid 1970's. Together, the interviews cover a broad range of approaches, and the lively debates about theory, practice and what it means to be human which were occurring at that time. The book shows the different approaches each psychologist has to the subject and why, in terms of background, education, experimental research and personal preference, they came to the positions they hold. The classic edition of Psychologists on Psychology provides an astute, critical snapshot of psychology at that time.It will be of great interest to anyone with an interest in psychology, the history of psychology, and the history of ideas.

David Cohen is a prolific writer and film-maker, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine. He trained as a psychologist and set up Psychology News as a magazine which has since become a film and TV production company.

'This reissue of Cohen's classic 1976 collection of interviews is welcome, timely and useful on several counts. It actually raises serious theoretical questions about how far Psychology has travelled - if at all - over the past four decades. Were the topics being so heatedly contested ever really resolved? Have we come any closer to the genuine profundity which it is surely the discipline's deeper aspiration to provide - and which one indeed sometimes finds in the allegedly defunct grand theories of the 70s? Cohen's new Introduction is an entertaining, insightful, and in parts quite critical, retrospective of developments since then. While demographically dated - no women, non-whites or gays among the interviewees - there is also a passion and ambition about the contributors which would nowadays be hard to find. I heartily recommend this highly readable and accessible collection to all psychology students especially, as well as the profession in general. In its overview of what psychology was it enables the r