Psychoanalytic ideas collapsed from near-universal to marginal in social psychology within fifty years

Evidence

Psychoanalytic accounts of behavior were quite popular among social psychologists at the time, even though they are almost invisible today. A comparison of the 1954 and 1998 editions of the Handbook of Social Psychology vividly illustrates this point. The earlier edition (Lindzey, 1954) – published during the same year as Allport’s book – includes the chapter “Psychoanalytical Theory and its Applications in the Social Sciences” (Hall & Lindzey, 1954). Even excluding that chapter, references to Sigmund Freud appear on 70 of the other 1,137 pages (excluding the index), or every 16 pages or so. The more recent handbook (Gilbert, Fiske, & Lindzey, 1998) does not include a chapter on psychoanalytic theory, and overall, references to Freud appear on only 17 of the book’s 1,853 pages, or every 109 pages. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 2343

Psychoanalytic accounts of behavior were quite popular among social psychologists at the time, even though they are almost invisible today. A comparison of the 1954 and 1998 editions of the Handbook of Social Psychology vividly illustrates this point. The earlier edition (Lindzey, 1954) – published during the same year as Allport’s book – includes the chapter “Psychoanalytical Theory and its Applications in the Social Sciences” (Hall & Lindzey, 1954). Even excluding that chapter, references to Sigmund Freud appear on 70 of the other 1,137 pages (excluding the index), or every 16 pages or so. The more recent handbook (Gilbert, Fiske, & Lindzey, 1998) does not include a chapter on psychoanalytic theory, and overall, references to Freud appear on only 17 of the book’s 1,853 pages, or every 109 pages. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 2343

Categorization

• XREF: Documents the same mid-century-then-collapse arc of psychoanalytic prestige visible in other fields like literary criticism and psychiatry.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 2343