Being considered an art should be viewed as a compliment for any science, but it is
(usually) not. This is particularly true in the case of psychology, which was first a
casualty in the “science wars” in nineteenth-century Europe (Valsiner, 2012), followed
by the skirmishes between emerging psychologists and hardline philosophers
about the “dangers of psychologism” (Kusch, 1995) at the turn of the twentieth
century. What followed over the next century were two World Wars; the exodus of
psychology as a science from Europe to North America; and the establishment of
psychology as “an empirical science.” In that transition, it took on new social organizational
forms from US society, which had embraced the arrival of this refugee
science—the notion of “majority” (“mainstream” psychology) versus “minority”
(various “nonmainstream” trends) . To speak about “mainstream” psychology in the
year 1900 would have made no sense. Even if Wilhelm Wundt’s laboratory in
Leipzig drew hordes of international visitors, who carried its handicrafts of laboratory
plans and design of experimental equipment all over the world, that laboratory
was in no way the “mainstream” of psychology in Germany. One hundred years
later, in 2000 and beyond, we are well-versed in referencing “mainstream psychology”—
usually to contrast what we do ourselves positively against its dull intellectual
modus operandi.