Music in an Emergent History of Psychology

Abstract

From a historical perspective, ‘psychology’ can be studied from an abundance of angels. Thus, a selected perspective requires some historiographical reflections, but also a conscious awareness of the actual chosen terms that are at stake. In this study, the historiographical perspective follows an emergent understanding of the history, which implies that the actual chosen terms are dynamically contributing to a web of terms, in which all of them may change in more or less unpredictable directions. In line with this, the aspect of music is consciously chosen, as it probably is one of the most ignored aspects of psychology in historical research. Thus, the findings in this study reveal that music as the ’direct factor’ played an overarching role in the nineteenth centuries experimental psychology, but also that the changes in the understanding of music in the early sixteenth century is comparable with the changes the understanding of the soul underwent along with the introduction of the neologism ‘psychology’. In the understanding of both music and the soul the sensational aspects replaced the mathematical.