Psychology History: Methodology and Methods
On the example of several delusions, widespread in modern psychology history, it is shown that the scientific and historical reality is more difficult, than it is presented in lectures and literature making an impression of continuous and logical development of psychology as a scientific area. Most often mistakes are connected with the fact that there is the return extrapolation of a modern situation in the past, without taking into account, that development doesn't happen rectilinearly at all. So, psychology isn't an especial experimental science, it always has an «arguing», philosophical part. Scientific psychology in Germany during national socialism lost the level and inclusiveness in the international professional community, however at the same time there was a high-quality development of psychology, its institutionalization as profession. Psychoanalysis isn't an Austrian-German phenomenon which after voluntary or expatriation of prominent psychoanalysts was enthusiastically accepted in the USA, its blossoming could be observed in Eastern Europe and Russia after the October Revolution. There are various models of writing psychology history: description of significant events and deposits of outstanding persons; the history of the ideas representing development of concepts, theories and paradigms in science; the history of problems consisting in systematization of fundamental questions; the social history of science concentrated on the analysis of different schools and institutes of psychology; contextual history. The idea of the main tools of the historian of psychology is given: work with sources; hermeneutical interpretation of texts; bibliometric analysis; «oral history». The role of the archives and museums containing materials, important for historians of psychology, is emphasized.