This piece examines the origins of psychology as a discipline shaped by enduring tensions rather than consensus. By tracing conflicts between explanation and understanding, mechanism and meaning, it reframes psychology’s history as an ongoing negotiation of foundational questions that continue to shape theory, method, and practice today.

This piece examines psychology’s unresolved relationship with philosophy, arguing that the discipline never escaped its philosophical foundations despite efforts to define itself as purely empirical. It analyzes how theoretical assumptions about mind, knowledge, explanation, and value remain embedded in psychological models, shaping debates, fragmentation, and the limits of integration across the field.

This piece examines psychology’s engagement with consciousness prior to the rise of neuroscience, tracing how early theorists treated awareness as foundational rather than peripheral. It analyzes how behaviorism and cognitive models displaced consciousness as a central problem, and argues that contemporary psychology has gained technical power while losing conceptual seriousness about lived experience and subjectivity.

This piece examines a neglected lineage in psychological theory that treats emotion as foundational rather than derivative of cognition. It traces how affective primacy was historically marginalized by methodological preferences and measurement constraints, and argues that emotion organizes attention, meaning, and behavior in ways that cognition refines but does not generate.

This piece explores psychology’s longstanding entanglement with measurement, tracing how quantification became a proxy for scientific legitimacy. It examines how measurement practices shape what counts as real, valuable, and publishable psychological knowledge, and argues for greater conceptual humility in distinguishing what is measurable from what is meaningful.

This piece reexamines the cognitive revolution in psychology, arguing that it reorganized rather than overturned the discipline’s foundational commitments. It analyzes how cognitive models preserved explanatory priorities inherited from behaviorism, reintroduced internal processes under computational constraints, and expanded psychology’s reach without resolving deeper questions about meaning, subjectivity, and interpretation.

This piece repositions Freud as a theorist of psychological meaning rather than a clinician, examining his account of symptoms, conflict, and symbolic coherence. It argues that Freud’s enduring contribution lies in his interpretive model of mind, which challenges psychology’s preference for mechanistic explanation and continues to illuminate how experience is organized through narrative and conflict.

This piece reframes behaviorism as more than a methodological corrective, arguing that it functioned as a moral project shaped by cultural ideals of control, efficiency, and predictability. It examines how behaviorist assumptions continue to influence psychological theory, research norms, and applied interventions long after behaviorism’s theoretical dominance declined.

This piece examines how psychology came to construct the idea of a normal mind through statistical practices, standardized measurement, and population-level reasoning. It traces how normality acquired normative force, shaping diagnosis, research priorities, and institutional judgments, while obscuring the historical and methodological choices embedded in what now appears psychologically self-evident.

This piece analyzes psychology’s historical shift from philosophical and moral inquiry toward system-level scientific explanation. It examines how the discipline’s pursuit of methodological legitimacy reshaped its language, priorities, and epistemic boundaries, and considers what was displaced when psychological phenomena were reframed as mechanisms rather than sites of meaning and human significance.

This piece examines psychology’s foundational epistemological tension between explanation and understanding, tracing its origins in nineteenth-century human science debates and its institutionalization within the discipline. It analyzes how this unresolved divide continues to shape theory, method, evidentiary standards, and the treatment of meaning, causality, and case material in contemporary psychological inquiry.