The Development of Modern Psychology 511wished to contribute to the national war effort. The ICP be-
came an international organization in 1946 and evolved to
its current status in 1958, when it agreed to accept male
members. The International Union of Psychological Sci-
ence (IUPsyS) was founded in 1951 (then named the Inter-
national Union of Scientific Psychology) at the Thirteenth
International Congress of Psychology in Stockholm. In
1982, the IUPsyS, which has national organizations as its
members, was admitted to represent psychology at the In-
ternational Council of Scientific Unions.
James McKeen Cattell (1930), the first U.S. scholar to ob-
tain a doctorate with Wundt in 1886, noted in his presidential
address to the 1929 International Congress of Psychology at
Yale University that our psychological ancestors were mainly
concerned with themselves, with their mates and their off-
spring, and with the behavior of their fellows and their ene-
mies. Satisfaction of desires, escape from danger and pain,
and efforts to foresee and control the conduct of others were
among their earliest interests. Commenting on the world of
psychology at the time of the Congress, Cattell asserted the
U.S. view when he told his international audience (1930):
It is not an accident that laboratory research in psychology is of
German origin, that pathological psychology has been cultivated
in France, that psychoanalysis has spread from Vienna, that
Darwin and Galton were English, that objective psychology and
the measurement of individual differences have had their chief
development in the United States. Germany may keep its Gestalt
psychology, France its hysterics, Austria its libido, England
its “g”; we shall continue to bear the burden of our meta-
behaviorism.” (p. 18)Russian psychology developed along its own isolated
lines and independently produced surprising parallels to de-
velopments in the United States during the same time period
(Berlyne, 1968). Pavlov presented a paper at the 1929 con-
gress while claiming to be a physiologist, not a psychologist.
As acknowledged by Lomov (1982), Soviet dialectical psy-
chology was oriented to Marxist-Leninist principles and
dominated by political influences oriented to the building of
a communist society.
In the People’s Republic of China, too, the heads of
national planning expected psychologists to lend their knowl-
edge and skills to achieving the goals of the “four modern-
izations.” To do so, a culturally specific psychology had to be
created to “meet the demands of our own national condi-
tions” (Ching, 1984, p. 63).
A similar situation could be observed in Nazi Germany
and later in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), where
psychology was dependent on central-planning authorities.
The situation in Hitler’s Germany is reflected in Henle’s
(1978) recollections of the (non-Jewish) Wolfgang Köhler’s
courageous struggle against the Nazis and the destruction of
the Psychological Institute of the University of Berlin in- In the GDR, the Scientific Council of Psychology, a
government agency working through the GDR Society of
Psychology, decided who could do what where with which
funds (Kossakowski, 1980; Schmidt, 1980).
As noted by Russell (1984), psychology in Japan provides
an example of the blending of Western psychology with the
concepts and needs of a non-Western country. Azuma (1984)
analyzed the stages through which the development of psy-
chology passed in coming to grips with non-Western cultural
phenomena without forcing them into a Western mold. The
final stage was the “integration period,” when psychology is
freed to a certain extent from the rigid but otherwise un-
noticed mold of traditionally Western concepts and logic
(Azuma, 1984, p. 54).
Kagitcibasi (as cited by Sunar, 1996) observed that psy-
chology in the 1990s was a Western, primarily U.S. product.
She held that U.S. psychology was largely self-contained,
serving as its own reference group. While not very open to
knowledge created elsewhere, it is exported to the world on the
assumption that theories and findings originating in Western
research have universal validity. Her own cross-cultural stud-
ies in Turkey demonstrated otherwise, reflecting the strong in-
fluence of cultural determinants of human behavior.
The unreflective exportation of Western psychology in the
1900s often disregarded alternate cultural traditions. Citing
experience from India, from the Maoris of New Zealand, and
from Turkey, Gergen, Gukrce, Lock, and Misra (1996) pre-
sented a persuasive case for a multicultural psychology. Such
efforts counteracted the ethnocentricity of much of European
and American psychology (Berry, Poortinga, Segall, & Dasen,
1992).
A special issue of the International Journal of Psychology,
edited by Sinha and Holtzman (1984), offers a range of
analyses of the impact of psychology on national develop-
ment. There is repeated emphasis that, to be accepted, psy-
chology needs to demonstrate “relevance” to the prevailing
sociocultural conditions and policies in the country or region.
Of particular interest are the comments by Melikian (1984)
on psychology in Arab Gulf oil-producing states, Mehryar
(1984) on Iran, Salazar (1984) on Venezuela, Serpell (1984)
on Zambia, and Ching (1984) on China.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the conflict with U.S. views of
psychology was particularly acute on the European conti-
nent. Many distinguished German professors continued to
endorse theoretical orientations then prevailing primarily in
central Europe (e.g., David & von Bracken, 1957; Gielen &
Bredenkamp, 1997; Graumann, 1997). Internationalization in