Mental machinery

by Graham Richards

Is it possible to write a "history of psychology" for the period immediately preceding its recognition as a separate discipline? How did the metaphorical construct we have come to call "the psychological" merge from the ideas of European thinkers from the 17th to the mid-19th centuries? In Mental Machinery, Graham Richards focuses on social constructionist and linguistic perspectives to record the diverse origins of what eventually became the field of psychology. Writing a history of something that "did not exist," Richards suggests, can be approached in one of two ways. One is to redefine the problem as writing a history of "reflexive discourse" rather than of psychology. A second way is to re-examine the canonical texts - of Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Hartley, Hume, Mill, and others - in an attempt to reveal what the authors themselves actually intended (and were understood by their contemporaries) to address. Mental Machinery employs both of these methods in a work that offers a radi