Abstract

The article critically analyzes the process through which different conceptions of psychology have produced during the 20th century different application functions of this discipline in Italian society. It is highlighted how, especially in Rome, the discipline of psychology underwent different transformations within the university depending on the dominant political-cultural context. In particular, it is emphasized how from an initial naturalistic matrix of positivist derivation, psychology underwent its own crisis, starting in the second half of the 1920s, with the assumption of an applicative approach useful to the totalitarian order of the fascist regime. Thus, the discontinuity that the Marxist culture about the human sciences produced in the postwar revival of psychology is analyzed. Simultaneously with the economic-social transformations of that period, psychology found a new space in the university beginning in the second half of the 1960s. In our reconstruction, this revival was in fact sustained by the discontinuity operated by Ernesto Valentini in creating at the University of Rome in 1963, next to the already existing one in the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery, a second Institute of Psychology in the Faculty of Magisterium at which, in 1971, the first undergraduate course in psychology was born in parallel to the one inaugurated at the University of Padua. The discontinuist hypothesis supported in the conclusions is further confirmed by the heated debates recorded between the 1970s and 1980s that would give rise to the five-year reform of psychological studies in the second half of the 1980s.