Introduction

Abstract

Psychology as a science is a product of the second half of the last century, and it is probably right to say that it is imbued with the qualities as well as the flaws of the thinking of that time: The conviction that the rigorous application of the methods at use in the natural sciences would constitute the via regia for solving all riddles in our world; the belief that painstaking experimentation, therefore, had only to be applied systematically and with sufficient patience in order to submit also the human psyche to rational insight. I was certainly “reared” in this spirit by my teachers in Geneva, although at that time psychoanalysis and some of Gestaltpsychology (particularly Lewin) had already made some inroads into that venerable ideology.