Surely one of the most critical aspects of our ability to understand the human mind is to understand the words that we use to describe it.

Traditionally psychology has done a magnificent job of turning reasonably functioning human beings into research subjects and patients but has had little inclination to lay on the couch and try to understand itself. The discipline has sailed along, blown by the reassuring wind that it is a pure science, disembodied, transcendent, and insulated from the confusing realities of people and the words they use to communicate.

This book is a masterful account of the history of the words central to psychology, words such as "behavior," "motivation" and "emotion." We use these words as though they are objective categories of brain function, however Danziger explains that they are products of academic fashion and pop psychology and as such they are ever-changing.

This book is clearly written, scholarly but not weighty. It covers an aspect of psychology that is not mainstream - nonetheless it is a seminal book because it is written by an insider and adds momentum to the revolution in thinking that is overturning the prevailing dogma that the brain works like a computer manipulating symbols. The brain is instead an emergent system and words are created through social interaction - therefore words and their meanings are ever-living and not scientifically "pure."

This book confirms that you can understand psychology only be understanding the words that psychologists themselves use.

This is a critical book about the development of psychology. It is not a pink description of a development from primitive thinking to present glory, as most books on the subject are. It is almost the opposite. It can be compared with Stephen Jay Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man" because it is very critical of main-stream psychology's view of man, its methodology, language and so on. (In an earlier book from 1990 he described the statistical methods in psychology as "methodolatry"). There is no doubt that Danziger is an authority in the history of psychology, and his researchs has influenced many books in this field. The basic idea in the present book is that the language of psychology developed as a soft kind of behaviorism using dependent and independent variables. From a broader variety of approaches, this "variable psychology" came to dominate international psychology almost totally, and only in the 1990's signs of weakenings in this hegemonistic approach seems to appear. The development of this dominant approach in psychology is explained from using a kind of social-constructivistic methodology. Psychology developed the way it did because psychologist allied themselves with school administrators, the Army, and similar groups. A psychology serving the students, the mental health patients, and other (end)users would have looked very differently. This book deserves to be read and discussed widely. I myself have used it in a paper about "the classification of psychology" in the journal Knowledge Organization, 1998, 25(4), 162-201.

This text should be on the reading lists for history of psychology courses for years to come. Danziger explores the development of experimental research paradigms in psychology in a broad historical context. Danziger reveals the politics of psychological discourse by emphasizing the role of social context in determining how psychological knowledge claims become legitimate. Although I have a general aversion towards "social constructionism," I was utterly impressed by both the scholarship and authority of this book.