The Degree Course in Psychology in Rome in the History of Italian Psychology

Abstract

Italian academic psychology found its first location in the Anthropological Museum of the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Rome, where in 1890 a Laboratory of Experimental Psychology was established. In 1905, the first three Chairs of Experimental Psychology at the Universities of Turin, Rome, and Naples were created. These were followed in the subsequent years by others, until 1930, in other academic institutions. After many years and a long period of crisis linked to the fascist regime, only after the World War II (WWII), with the rebirth of the country, did psychology gradually rebuild its status as a scientific discipline. Within this framework of the renewal of society and university studies, in 1971, two degree courses were instituted in Rome and Padua. Based on research in central and local academic archives and on an analysis of the secondary literature, the gestation phase of the 4-year degree course in Psychology, the progressive establishment of the Psychology Departments, and the 5-year reform of the courses up to the birth of the first Faculty of Psychology at an Italian university are reconstructed. The aim of this article is to propose a well-founded discontinuist historiographical reading of the process of sedimentation of psychological experimentation that, after being born in the Faculty of Sciences and later transferring to the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery, also led to important developments in the Faculty of Education, with the recognition of an autonomous academic space of scientific discipline with a degree course, departments and finally the Faculty of Psychology