TEN YEARS OF ITALIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY
OF PSYCHOLOGY:
A Field in Progress
Glauco Ceccarelli
University of Urbino
Guido Cimino and Renato Foschi
“Sapienza” University of Rome
This article briefly outlines a picture of the activities and research conducted in Italy
on the history of psychology during the last 10 years, focusing its attention on
institutions, scholars, conferences, archives, journals, and so forth. At the dawn of
the 21st century, the tradition of historical-psychological studies that developed in
the last quarter of the 20th century has led to a renewed situation in teaching
organization and research, with the emergence of several groups, especially at the
universities of Rome “Sapienza,” Bari, Milan-Bicocca, and Urbino, and of a second
generation of young historians increasingly engaged on an international level. After
a general survey conducted with historiometric method on the principal areas of
research cultivated and on the themes dealt with, we mention a change that has
occurred in the historiographical approach, a transition from a historiography
addressed prevalently to the “history of ideas” to one that, pursuing the approach of
a new and critical “multifactorial” history, proves to be more attentive to the social
and institutional history, in correspondence with established international trends.
Keywords: Italian historiography of psychology, historiometry, old history, new
history, multifactorial history
An article published in this same journal in 2003 traced the itinerary of the
historiography of psychology in Italy from the 1970s up to the threshold of the
21st century (Cimino & Dazzi, 2003). In that essay the authors demonstrated how
the Italian studies on the history of psychology had in the 1970s acquired a
definite consistency along with a certain autonomy and continuity, impelled by the
incipient degree courses in psychology activated in the universities of Rome and
Padua, and thanks to the initiatives of the Domus Galilaeana of Pisa and to the
contributions of several “pioneers” such as Paolo Bozzi (1930 –2003), Vincenzo
Cappelletti, Nino Dazzi, Paolo Legrenzi, and Dario Romano.
In the 1980s then—as the authors reconstruct—the historical research in-
creased and became particularly prominent at the University of Bologna through
the activity of Giuseppe Mucciarelli (1939 –2001), who organized various con-
ferences, published volumes on the history of psychology, and founded the
Glauco Ceccarelli, Institute of Psychology “Luigi Meschieri,” University of Urbino (Italy);
Guido Cimino, Department of Developmental and Social Psychology, “Sapienza” University of
Rome (Italy); and Renato Foschi, Department of Clinical and Dynamic Psychology, “Sapienza”
University of Rome (Italy).
This text has been translated in collaboration with Barbara A. Olson. The authors are listed in
alphabetical order. We list in the References only some of the more significant works on the history
of psychology written in the last ten years.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Guido Cimino, Dipartimento di
Psicologia dei Processi di Sviluppo e Socializzazione, Via dei Marsi 78, 00185 Roma (Italy).
E-mail: guido.cimino@uniroma1.it
History of Psychology
2010, Vol. 13, No. 3, 215–249
© 2010 American Psychological Association
1093-4510/10/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0020093
215