"A disease of our time": The Catholic Church's condemnation and absolution of psychoanalysis (1924-1975).

The present paper is focused on the evolution of the position of the Catholic Church toward psychoanalysis. Even before Freud's The Future of an Illusion (1927), psychoanalysis was criticized by Catholic theologians. Psychoanalysis was viewed with either contempt or with indifference, but nonpsychoanalytic psychotherapy was accepted, especially for pastoral use. Freudian theory remained for most Catholics a delicate and dangerous subject for a long time. From the center to the periphery of the Vatican, Catholic positions against psychoanalysis have varied in the way that theological stances have varied. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, some Catholics changed their attitudes and even practiced psychoanalysis, challenging the interdict of the Holy Office, which prohibited psychoanalytic practice until 1961. During the Cold War, psychoanalysis progressively became more and more relevant within Catholic culture for two main reasons: changes in psychoanalytic doctrine (which began to stress sexuality to a lesser degree) and the increasing number of Catholic psychoanalysts, even among priests. Between the 1960s and the 1970s, psychoanalysis was eventually accepted and became the main topic of a famous speech by Pope Paul VI. This paper illustrates how this acceptance was a sort of unofficial endorsement of a movement that had already won acceptance within the Church. The situation was fostered by people like Maryse Choisy or Leonardo Ancona, who had advocated within the Church for a sui generis use of psychoanalysis (e.g., proposing a desexualized version of Freudian theories), despite warnings and prohibitions from the hierarchies of the Church.

Northerners versus southerners: Italian anthropology and psychology faced with the "southern question".

Following the Unification of Italy (1861), when confronted with the underdevelopment problems of the south that had given rise to the so-called "southern question," some Italian anthropologists and psychologists began to study the populations of the south from the psycho-anthropological point of view. These scientists, at times subject to preconceived ideas toward the southerners, conveyed observations and descriptions of the southern character traits that, in general, were considered different, in a negative sense, with respect to those of the northern peoples. To explain such diversity in the "psychological" characteristics between the north and south of the country (presumed cause also of the south's backwardness), various hypotheses were advanced related to the kind of heredity theory adopted, which could be of, more or less, an "innatist" or "transformist" or "environmentalist" kind. The distinction proposed in this article between at least 2 different "hereditarian" theories formulated by the Italian scientists, and the confrontation of these theories with the hypotheses expressed by the "southernist" sociologists, contrary to the idea of "racial varieties" present in the Italian population, allows one to understand in what way and in what sense, at the threshold of the 20th century, there arose the ideology of "Nordicism" and the roots of racism were planted.

Making up intelligence scales: De Sanctis's and Binet's tests, 1905 and after.

Sante De Sanctis (1862-1935) and Alfred Binet (1857-1911), the latter in collaboration with Théodore Simon (1873-1960), introduced their intelligence tests to the scientific community at the Fifth International Congress of Psychology, held in Rome in 1905 on April 26-30. The cultural and political contexts within which De Sanctis and Binet developed their respective intelligence tests showed certain similarities. Nevertheless, De Sanctis's intelligence test and Binet's test did differ in certain respects. The objective of this article is to understand the differences and similarities between the Parisian and the Roman contexts in relation to mental testing, and to investigate the theoretical-methodological contributions of each. In addition, the article analyzes the "diversity" of De Sanctis's context and test, which did not influence the international psychology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).

Italian psychology under protection: Agostino Gemelli between Catholicism and fascism.

Between the 1930s and 1940s, Agostino Gemelli (1878-1959) was the main Italian psychologist; he accepted and promoted an empirical conception of psychology influenced by neo-Thomism. The views of Gemelli were a landmark for many psychologists and psychological models in Catholic universities. Gemelli, moreover, throughout his scientific activity, continued ongoing work of expertise in matters concerning science, morality, and psychology. He was a Franciscan monk but also an officer of the Italian air force, a psychologist, and a rector. During the period of fascist rule in Italy, Gemelli sought compromise solutions to foster the survival of psychological institutions. Around his story, contrasting interpretations have emerged. The aim of this article is to look at Agostino Gemelli as an important historical subject to understand the ways in which scientific enterprises and institutions are likely to be influenced by political regimes and by the dogmatic and intolerant milieu. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).

Psychological reality and psychoanalysis at the Padua Laboratory of Psychology.

As it spread across Italy, psychoanalysis captured the interest of Italian psychologists, namely Vittorio Benussi (1878-1927) and Cesare Musatti (1897-1989). Benussi, who was trained as an experimental psychologist according to the Gegenstandstheorie School of Graz in 1919, came to Italy and became a full professor of experimental psychology in Padua. He undertook a program of study called "psychological reality" that comprised hypnosuggestion and psychoanalysis. This article shows that Benussi's hypnosuggestion experiments and Musatti's theorization of the reality of fantasy were attempts to upgrade the study of psychological phenomena to the level of physical phenomena in a theoretical context in which psychoanalysis was considered part of a general psychology.

Rewriting Wundtian psychology: Luigi Credaro and the psychology in Rome.

After Rome became the capital of Italy in 1871, prestigious scientists arrived at the University of Rome. One of these scholars was the pedagogical philosopher Luigi Credaro (1860-1939). He was one of the rare Italian students of Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) when he went to Leipzig and attended the Institute for Experimental Psychology in the academic year 1887-1888. There he also followed the pedagogical seminars and considered the usefulness of establishing sections of practical pedagogy in Italian magisterium schools, which were teacher-training institutions. In 1904, he founded in Rome the Scuola Pedagogica (Pedagogical School). Through the school, Credaro proposed the concept of a scientific pedagogy based on the application of the results of experimental sciences in the educational field. We can suppose that this approach influenced the first generation of Italian scholars interested in experimental psychology in Rome, in particular Sante De Sanctis (1862-1935) and Maria Montessori (1870-1952). The article thus considers the hypothesis of the formation of a so-called Roman school of psychology, which created in the field of pedagogy a ground on which to develop its research and applications. It should be noted that Credaro devoted himself to the potential applications of experimental psychology in the context of the modernization of the liberal states of the 20th century. Specifically, scientific pedagogy constituted a field of application and development for Roman psychology. At the end, the foundation of psychology in Rome was influenced by a particular version of the Wundtian psychology promoted by his pupil Credaro. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Ten years of Italian historiography of psychology: a field in progress.

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.

Between sacred and profane: Possession, psychopathology, and the Catholic church.

In Catholic culture, and especially within the Italian Catholic environment, there has recently been a significant revival of the practice of exorcism. This is a fact noted by historians such as Levack (2013) and Young (2016). The article intends to show how this phenomenon is related to a series of important historical turning points, the most important of which is the recent collaboration between exorcists and Catholic psychologists and psychiatrists to establish a differential diagnosis between real possession and mere psychopathology. The recent revival of exorcism in Italy is particularly noteworthy because it reverses a slow but clear trend in the Catholic Church, in the course of the 20th century, that increasingly considered possessions either as delusional or very rare. The reality of the devil has never been denied by the Catholic Church, but until the Second Vatican Council, the tendency was to de-escalate the denunciations of its direct and personal presence in the world. The article describes this evolution up to the most recent developments, highlighting the historiographical entanglements related to the coexistence, within the scientific realm, of demonological and psychological themes and beliefs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Science and culture around the Montessori's first "Children's Houses" in Rome (1907-1915).

Between 1907 and 1908, Maria Montessori's (1870-1952) educational method was elaborated at the Children's Houses of the San Lorenzo district in Rome. This pioneering experience was the basis for the international fame that came to Montessori after the publication of her 1909 volume dedicated to her "Method." The "Montessori Method" was considered by some to be scientific, liberal, and revolutionary. The present article focuses upon the complex contexts of the method's elaboration. It shows how the Children's Houses developed in relation to a particular scientific and cultural eclecticism. It describes the factors that both favored and hindered the method's elaboration, by paying attention to the complex network of social, institutional, and scientific relationships revolving around the figure of Maria Montessori. A number of "contradictory" dimensions of Montessori's experience are also examined with a view to helping to revise her myth and offering the image of a scholar who was a real early-twentieth-century prototype of a "multiple" behavioral scientist.

Magic and loss: Hidden sources in the history of human sciences.

This article summarizes the book "The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences" by Jason A. Josephson-Storm (University of Chicago Press, 2017) is a volume that attempts to stimulate discussion on domains considered different: esotericism, spiritism, occultism, idealism, and positivism. (PsycINFO Database Record

The Intolerance of Uncertainty Inventory: Validity and Comparison of Scoring Methods to Assess Individuals Screening Positive for Anxiety and Depression.

Intolerance of Uncertainty is a fundamental transdiagnostic personality construct hierarchically organized with a core general factor underlying diverse clinical manifestations. The current study evaluated the construct validity of the Intolerance of Uncertainty Inventory, a two-part scale separately assessing a unitary Intolerance of Uncertainty disposition to consider uncertainties to be unacceptable and threatening (Part A) and the consequences of such disposition, regarding experiential avoidance, chronic doubt, overestimation of threat, worrying, control of uncertain situations, and seeking reassurance (Part B). Community members (N = 1046; Mean age = 36.69 ± 12.31 years; 61% females) completed the Intolerance of Uncertainty Inventory with the Beck Depression Inventory-II and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. Part A demonstrated a robust unidimensional structure and an excellent convergent validity with Part B. A bifactor model was the best fitting model for Part B. Based on these results, we compared the hierarchical factor scores with summated ratings clinical proxy groups reporting anxiety and depression symptoms. Summated rating scores were associated with both depression and anxiety and proportionally increased with the co-occurrence of depressive and anxious symptoms. By contrast, hierarchical scores were useful to detect which facets mostly separated between for depression and anxiety groups. In sum, Part A was a reliable and valid transdiagnostic measure of Intolerance of Uncertainty. The Part B was arguably more useful for assessing clinical manifestations of Intolerance of Uncertainty for specific disorders, provided that hierarchical scores are used. Overall, our study suggest that clinical assessments might need to shift toward hierarchical factor scores.

Psychological reality and psychoanalysis at the Padua Laboratory of Psychology / Realidad psicológica y psicoanálisis en el Laboratorio de Psicología de Padua

Abstract As it spread across Italy, psychoanalysis captured the interest of Italian psychologists, namely Vittorio Benussi (1878-1927) and Cesare Musatti (1897-1989). Benussi, who was trained as an experimental psychologist according to the Gegenstandstheorie School of Graz in 1919, came to Italy and became a full professor of experimental psychology in Padua. He undertook a program of study called "psychological reality" that comprised hypnosuggestion and psychoanalysis. This article shows that Benussi's hypnosuggestion experiments and Musatti's theorization of the reality of fantasy were attempts to upgrade the study of psychological phenomena to the level of physical phenomena in a theoretical context in which psychoanalysis was considered part of a general psychology.

Resumen A medida que se extendía por Italia, el psicoanálisis captó el interés de los psicólogos italianos Vittorio Benussi (1878-1927) y Cesare Musatti (1897-1989). Benussi, se formó como psicólogo experimental según la Escuela Gegenstandstheorie de Graz en 1919, llegó a Italia y se convirtió en profesor titular de psicología experimental en Padua. Realizó un programa de estudio llamado "realidad psicológica" que comprendía hipnosugestión y psicoanálisis. Este artículo muestra que los experimentos de hipnosugestión de Benussi y la teorización de la realidad de la fantasía de Musatti fueron intentos de elevar el estudio de los fenómenos psicológicos al nivel de los fenómenos físicos en un contexto teórico en el que se consideraba el psicoanálisis parte de una psicología general.

Politics and naturalism in the 20th century psychology of Alfred Binet.

Alfred Binet is internationally recognized as the "father" of the first intelligence test as well as the most faithful French representative of laboratory experimentalism. A historical analysis of his work is therefore necessary to get to a thorough comprehension of 20th century psychology. The present article, starting from Binet's intellectual path and from the suggestions of the previous historical literature, aims at providing fresh insights into Binet's work by trying to capture the intersections between Binet, his naturalistic culture and the political context in which he worked in the early 20th century, when he actively tried to apply experimental psychology to the pedagogical area. In fact, it is possible to underline, with reference to those years, an evident turn towards applications in Binet's psychological production. The article reconstructs the political and institutional background of Binet's research and shows how the naturalism and experimentalism he promoted were complementary to the solidarist conceptions that were particularly prevalent among those who supported his work during the Third Republic.

Attitude Toward Ambiguity: Empirically Robust Factors in Self-Report Personality Scales.

Two studies were conducted to examine the factor structure of attitude toward ambiguity, a broad personality construct that refers to personal reactions to perceived ambiguous stimuli in a variety of context and situations. Using samples from two countries, Study 1 mapped the hierarchical structure of 133 items from seven tolerance-intolerance of ambiguity scales (N = 360, Italy; N = 306, United States). Three major factors-Discomfort with Ambiguity, Moral Absolutism/Splitting, and Need for Complexity and Novelty-were recovered in each country with high replicability coefficients across samples. In Study 2 (N = 405, Italian community sample; N =366, English native speakers sample), we carried out a confirmatory analysis on selected factor markers. A bifactor model had an acceptable fit for each sample and reached the construct-level invariance for general and group factors. Convergent validity with related traits was assessed in both studies. We conclude that attitude toward ambiguity can be best represented a multidimensional construct involving affective (Discomfort with Ambiguity), cognitive (Moral Absolutism/Splitting), and epistemic (Need for Complexity and Novelty) components.

Sante De Sanctis (1862-1935), a forerunner of the 20th century research on sleep and dreaming.

This article aims to reconstruct the elements of continuity and/or discontinuity in Sante De Sanctis' (1862-1935) contributions in the scientific understanding of sleep and dreaming as compared to the scientific research of his time. An Italian psychologist and psychiatrist, De Sanctis, in his work conducted between the 19th and 20th centuries, has framed the study of dreams using multi-methodology. In addition, De Sanctis experimentally established the correspondence between the deep and desynchronization phases of sleep with respect to dreaming. In this context, De Sanctis' subjects described the periodicity of sleep and consciousness, influencing the explanations of the themes that modern sleep research has, after decades, systematically studied. We demonstrate that De Sanctis' work has been underestimated, and in our opinion, deserves to be reconsidered as a source of the psychophysiological explanation of dreams and sleep. Finally, we present a graphical representation of De Sanctis' psycho- and neurophysiological model of dreaming.

The concept of personality in 19th-century French and 20th-century American psychology.

Since the 1920s, the road to the acknowledgement of personality psychology as a field of scientific psychology that has individuality as its object began with the founding of the discipline by Gordon W. Allport. Historians of psychology have made serious attempts to reconstruct the cultural, political, institutional, and chronological beginnings of this field in America in the 20th century. In this literature, however, an important European tradition of psychological studies of personality that developed in France in the 2nd half of the 19th century has been overlooked. The aim of this article is to cast some light on this unexplored tradition of psychological personality studies and to discuss its influence on the development of the scientific study of personality in the United States.

Does sociability predict civic involvement and political participation?

In contemporary history as well as in political science, a strong associational life known as sociability is thought to explain the roots of modern democracy by establishing a link between the increasing availability of free time to the middle classes, increasing willingness to gather with others in circles or associations, and increasing social capital. In personality psychology, sociability is related to prosocial behavior (i.e., the need for affiliation, agreeableness, openness, and extraversion), whose importance in different political behaviors is increasingly recognized. In the present article, we carried out 5 studies (N = 1,429) that showed that political and associative sociability (a) can be reliably assessed, can have cross-cultural validity, and are properly associated with general social interest measures and personality domains and facets in the five-factor model; (b) do not overlap with similar concepts used in political psychology to account for political participation (political expertise, political interest, political self-efficacy); and (c) predicted political and nonpolitical group membership as well as observable choices in decision-making tasks with political and nonpolitical outcomes. The results are discussed, taking into consideration the extent to which specific facets of sociability can mediate between general personality traits and measures of civic involvement and political participation in a holistic model of political behavior.

Galileo, measurement of the velocity of light, and the reaction times.

According to the commonly accepted view, Galileo Galilei devised in 1638 an experiment that seemed able to show that the velocity of light is finite. An analysis of archival material shows that two decades later members of the Florence scientific society Accademia del Cimento followed Galileo guidelines by actually attempting to measure the velocity of light and suggesting improvements. This analysis also reveals a fundamental difference between Galileo's and Florence academy's methodologies and that Galileo's experiment was, in some respects, a pioneering work affecting also the history of the psychology of perception.

[The Sante De Sanctis' psychophysiology of dreams]. / La psicofisiologia dei sogni di Sante De Sanctis.

Sante De Sanctis (1862-1935), a pioneer of psychology in Rome at the end of the 19th century, applied methods from the expanding field of experimental psychology to the study of dreams, which was considered one of the leading ways to gain an understanding of normal and pathological psychic life. The multi-faceted methodology that he adopted for the study of an, until then, marginal phenomenon of the 'new' psychology, represented an element of originality that also included the elaboration of a psychophysiological theory of dreams. Although the Italian psychologist's work on dreams was characterized by these important methodological changes, it disappeared from the references of those who contributed to the foundation of modern dreaming psychology after the Second World War.