Abstract

This article seeks to reconstruct, on the basis of an archival study, the academic career of Sante De Sanctis (1862-1935) by examining the faculty searches for which he was either a candidate or served as a member of the search committee; this analysis also provides a general framework for interpreting the history of Italian psychology of which De Sanctis was one of the most illustrious founders. This is one of the reasons for which the vertex constituted by his role as an academic is used to examine the position assumed by the discipline between the 1800 and 1900s in terms of its relationship with philosophical and scientific culture in Italy at that time. The various phases that psychology passed through were historiographically reconstructed on the basis of the data gathered through the archival study of the long period during which De Sanctis was involved in academic activities; the state of «crisis», in terms of psychology's academic position, emerges during the decade preceding the Second World War.