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Dostoyevsky: Psychology and the Novelist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

İlham Dilman
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Extract

In a lecture on ‘Science and Psychology’ Dr Drury distinguishes between ‘a psychology which has insight into individual characters’ and ‘a psychology which is concerned with the scientific study of universal types’, one which comprises ‘those subjects that are studied in a university faculty of psychology’. The former, and not the latter, he says, is psychology in ‘the original meaning of the word’. ‘We might say of a great novelist such as Tolstoy or George Eliot (he goes on) that they show profound psychological insight into the characters they depict … In general, it is the great novelists, dramatists, biographers, historians, that are the real psychologists.’

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 16: Philosophy and Literature , September 1983 , pp. 95 - 114
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1983

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References

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