Culture, history and psychology: Some historical reflections and research directions

Psychologists have typically narrated their discipline’s history so as to glorify an experimental method, which analyzes the mind independently of cultural and historical factors. In line with Jahoda’s sociocultural sensititivity to psychology, this article critically interrogates the plausibility for this vision of psychology as cut off from wider social processes, and offers a culturally sensitive approach in its place, based on an extension of Frederic Bartlett’s theory and methodology. This approach is illustrated with a study of how people remember history narratives on the basis of cultural resources taken over from social groups they belong to, and which thus embed them within a stream of history. Both psychologists’ narratives of their discipline and people’s everyday memory of history are shown to be motivated towards the justification of particular visions of social reality.