Investigative practice therefore constitutes an area of considerable anxiety within the discipline of psychology. Concern with questions of methodolo… - Kurt Danziger

The term “introspective psychology” is misleading in that it covers a variety of diverging positions on the theory and practice of introspection. From the beginning there was a basic discrepancy between the British and the German philosophic tradition, the former relying more exclusively on introspection than the latter. Wilhelm Wundt’s advocacy and use of introspection was extremely circumscribed and essentially limited to simple judgments tied to external stimulation. During the first decade of the twentieth century some experimental psychologists, notably E. B. Titchener and the , greatly enlarged the scope of introspection, ushering in the brief vogue of “systematic introspection.” The latter never gained wide support in North America and was supplanted in Germany by developments that do not constitute “introspective psychology” in any precise sense.

Where the insider's engagement with the discipline's concepts and practices is combined with the moral distance maintained by the outsider one has reason to look for the emergence of a historiography that is both critical and effective.

Here we are more likely to come across fields that are structured in an agonistic manner, fields which are characterized by deep divisions between alternative schools of thought rather than by the achievement of a general working consensus.