This book is meant to re-introduce scholarly psychology to an unscholarly age. We do not hope to replace today’s professional psychology with its scholarly counterpart, but to re-imagine today’s vast psychological undertaking with its scholarly component fully engaged and its professional component critically examined and improved.

The impetus for taking on this ambitious task comes from the disappointment that we have seen in many professional psychologists about their own work. Although professional psychology has expanded in every conceivable direction in the last century, it has not lived up to the great expectations of its founders and advocates. It serves many functions in the twenty-first century, but it does not serve them well enough. Critical analysis of professional psychology has come from every direction. A broad spectrum of critical ideas will be reviewed in this chapter.

However, this final chapter is ultimately about envisioning a better course for psychology in the future. The first step toward this goal is showing that scholarly psychology has great potential for dealing with today’s psychological problems, even though it has been largely passed over by a contemporary world that is in love with science and technology. The second is showing that scholarly psychology also has built-in limitations and hazards that make it insufficient to carry psychology into the future by itself. The third step is showing that professional psychology, in spite of its own hazards and limitations, has some strengths that remain essential for the future. The fourth is showing that it is not only possible, but now necessary to re-imagine psychology for the future. The necessity arises from the cascading environmental, military, and moral crises that face the world, all of which arise from the actions of human beings.