Chapter 4: Between History and Psychology: Steps Towards Interdisciplinarity

Lately, psychology has become characterized by a peculiar paradox: there is such an increase in the academic activities that go by the name “psychology” that even the best informed among the psychologists are no longer able to oversee and to integrate the booming business this scholarly discipline has developed into.¹ Approaches within psychology range from philosophical to neurological, from clinical to evolutionary, each of them being divided in ever increasing and often warring factions. Topics psychologists occupy themselves include advertising through teaching and orgasms to bereavement and fundamentalism. And there seems no end to the diversity psychology has grown into. If I take as an example one of the subfields I have been involved in myself (“psychology of religion”), I have often witnessed prominent colleagues in psychology not even being aware of the existence of this subfield, today booming as so many other parts of psychology (e.g., Miller, 2012; Paloutzian & Park, 2013; Pargament, 2013). Psychology has become an enormous enterprise, in which more researchers, practitioners, publishers, and organizations are busy than ever before. But has this expansion in fact provided answers to questions at the heart of our discipline about what it means to be human? Are we today in a better position to answer Sophocles’ poetically phrased question: