As a child of modernist culture, psychological science has treated historical inquiry with little more than tolerant civility. Psychology has been an enterprise struggling to develop a compelling rationale, seeking to establish productive paradigms, and desirous of the respect of more established sciences. From its vantage point, the discipline had no history worthy of extensive attention. Further, because of its newly fashioned commitment to empiricism, preceding scholarship of the mind was necessarily impaired. In an important sense the past was a shroud to be cast away. Psychologists might scan the preceding centuries in search of interesting hypotheses, but the results would most likely confirm the widely shared suspicion that contemporary research was far superior in its conclusions. To be sure, there were reasons for sustaining a small cadre of historians, but their task was ancillary to the scientific project itself. Theirs was primarily to chronicle the progress of the science, along with the deeds that would secure for posterity the contributions of the visionaries and achievers.

Although psychology as a discipline has remained robustly committed to 1930s conceptions of its nature as science, historically oriented psychologists have ceased to be content with their role as company scribes. Rather, as the conceptions of science and of history have evolved more generally in academic culture, historical psychologists – joined by psychologically oriented historians – have vitally transformed the view of their mission.