Hans Driesch and the problems of “normal psychology”. Rereading his Crisis in Psychology (1925)

In 1925, the German biologist and philosopher Hans Driesch published a booklet entitled The Crisis in Psychology. It was originally published in English and was based on lectures given at various universities in China, Japan and the USA. The “crisis” in psychology of that time, in Driesch’s opinion, lies in the necessity to decide about “the road which psychology is to follow in the future”. This necessity refers to five “critical points”, namely (1) to develop the theory of psychic elements to a theory of meaning by phenomenological analysis, (2) the overcoming of association theory, (3) to acknowledge that the unconscious is a fact and a “normal” aspect of mental life, (4) to reject “psychomechanical parallelism” or any other epiphenomenalistic solution of the mind-body problem, and (5) the extension of psychical research to new facts as described by parapsychology, for instance. Driesch saw close parallels between the development of modern psychology and that of biology, namely in a theoretical shift from “sum-concepts” like association and mechanics, to “totality-concepts” like soul and entelechy. The German translation of 1926 was entitled Grundprobleme der Psychologie (Fundamental Problems of Psychology) while “the crisis in psychology” forms just the subtitle of this book. This underlines that Driesch’s argumentation—in contrast to that of Buehler—dealt with ontological questions rather than with paradigms.