Abstract

Taking as a starting point the works of two authors, Nicolai Kostyleff and Georges Politzer, who worked in the first decades of the twentieth century, I explored the issue of the crisis of psychology. I focused my attention on the main contents of their discourses and upon their reception within the field of French psychology, a profession at that time still in the making. My point is that the problem of the crisis must be examined critically. It has not to be taken for granted, inasmuch as it is rarely based upon facts that can be easily ascertained and unanimously accepted, even though it provides us with useful information regarding the conceptions of those who subscribed to this litany of the crisis. For this reason I singled out the context in which the debate took place, and the moment in which the theme of crisis was extended to other disciplines, such as to recompose the relation between philosophy and psychology.