Marcus Aurelius (AD 121–180) was the renowned emperor of Imperial Rome from AD 161 until his death. However, his civic virtues and military victories will scarcely be mentioned in this chapter since Marcus Aurelius’ place in psychology comes from his only book, now known as the Meditations. The perspective on psychology described in the Meditations has long been influential in Western civilization and appears to be having a major resurgence at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The essence of Marcus Aurelius’ Stoic perspective on psychology is that if people adopt a few basic principles of living, they will have everything they need for coping with life’s travails with serenity, virtue, and a degree of happiness.

Much as Plato inspired philosophical movements in the ancient world called “Platonism” and later “Neoplatonism,” Marcus Aurelius became a leading figure in a philosophical movement called “Stoicism,” which had had a centuries-long history prior to his lifetime. By his time, the goals of “late Stoicism” had been narrowed down to a philosophy of life that laid out the rules for virtue and happiness (Hays’ Introduction in Aurelius, circa AD 170/2003, pp. xx–xxxv). Two other late Stoic writers still celebrated today are Seneca (circa AD 64/1969) and Epictetus (see Seddon, 2005). With the aid of Marcus Aurelius’ powerful and moving writing, late Stoicism was much more than just an academic philosophy; it became the philosophy of some of Rome’s great leaders, including some of its emperors. Late Stoicism:

The rationalist perspective on psychology is based on the belief that the most important aspect of human nature is the capacity for reason that sets human beings apart from other animals. Rationalist psychologists must be at least partly right in this belief. No extraterrestrial visitor could study our corner of the universe without finding amazing evidence of human reason and intelligence everywhere, even though it might appear a strangely self-destructive force at times.

The rationalist perspective on psychology is more than just a flattering self-description of the human species. It unfolds to a complete description of human nature that can address just about any question that a present day psychologist might raise, from the source of happiness to the nature of intelligence, to the cause of mental illness and alcoholism, to the origin of values, to the best methods for conducting research. In the broader, philosophical sense of the word, rationalism continues unfolding across the borders of psychology in every direction – to politics, education, science, mathematics, religion, and the ultimate nature of reality. Although the rationalist perspective does not dominate today’s psychology, it was powerfully influential in the psychological thinking of at least two eras – the classical Greco-Roman era and the Enlightenment of early modern Europe – and it remains influential today.

Two hundred years after Marcus Aurelius’ death, Christianity was no longer the religion of a persecuted minority. Roman Catholicism had become the official state religion of Rome and was rapidly replacing Stoicism as the dominant personal philosophy of Romans of all classes, from slaves to the very wealthy (Brown, 2012). Christianity changed the way that the ancient world thought about the fundamentals of life and has had an enormous impact on Western philosophy and psychology ever since.

As in previous chapters, the psychological perspective that was built into Christianity will be discussed as an outgrowth of the historical period in which it became widely accepted and in the words of a scholar who wrote one of its most enduring formulations. The historical period is the last decades of the collapsing Western Roman Empire. The scholar is Aurelius Augustinus (AD 354–430), a popular orator and teacher, later an influential bishop in North Africa, and now known as one of the great fathers of the Roman Catholic Church, St. Augustine of Hippo.

St. Augustine was born in Thagaste in the Roman North African colony of Numidia in AD 354. (Thagaste is now Souk Ahras, a city in northern Algeria.) St. Augustine was one of the privileged people of his era. His father was a Roman citizen and official, who was well enough connected to arrange a classical education for his son. Augustine was never enslaved, tortured, or caught up in war until the very last days of his life. Nonetheless, his life story is a saga of continuous dislocation and grief. The mission of the rulers of Numidia, puppets of the distant Roman state, was to exploit the local population in order to maximize grain shipments to Rome. In an age where people fought to the death over matters of religion, his mother and father were so fundamentally at odds in religious belief that he had to take sides, repudiating his father.

The idea that psychology and medicine are closely intertwined is anything but new. It can be traced back to the Greek physician Hippocrates and his colleagues around 400 BC. In the Middle Ages, the Persian physician and philosopher Avicenna completed the Canon of Medicine, which described several psychological disorders and elaborated the relationship of the four humors of ancient medicine to emotional, mental, moral, and behavioral aspects of life. The Canon of Medicine was a standard medical text in medieval Europe after the twelfth century and remained in use in a few universities until the seventeenth century, along with texts by Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen (Lutz, 2002, p. 60).

In the nineteenth century, European physicians, including Pierre Janet, Jean-Martin Charcot, and Josef Breuer, began modernizing the medical perspective on psychology. However, it was an Austrian doctor named Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) who succeeded in bringing it to the attention of the world. In the decades before World War I, Freud hitched his audacious ideas about unconscious sexuality and aggression to the rising stars of the modernizing medical perspective on psychology and of scientific medicine in general. This new constellation proved so dazzling that it captured the imaginations of psychologists, physicians, and the general public.

This book is meant to re-introduce scholarly psychology to an unscholarly age. We do not hope to replace today’s professional psychology with its scholarly counterpart, but to re-imagine today’s vast psychological undertaking with its scholarly component fully engaged and its professional component critically examined and improved.

The impetus for taking on this ambitious task comes from the disappointment that we have seen in many professional psychologists about their own work. Although professional psychology has expanded in every conceivable direction in the last century, it has not lived up to the great expectations of its founders and advocates. It serves many functions in the twenty-first century, but it does not serve them well enough. Critical analysis of professional psychology has come from every direction. A broad spectrum of critical ideas will be reviewed in this chapter.

However, this final chapter is ultimately about envisioning a better course for psychology in the future. The first step toward this goal is showing that scholarly psychology has great potential for dealing with today’s psychological problems, even though it has been largely passed over by a contemporary world that is in love with science and technology. The second is showing that scholarly psychology also has built-in limitations and hazards that make it insufficient to carry psychology into the future by itself. The third step is showing that professional psychology, in spite of its own hazards and limitations, has some strengths that remain essential for the future. The fourth is showing that it is not only possible, but now necessary to re-imagine psychology for the future. The necessity arises from the cascading environmental, military, and moral crises that face the world, all of which arise from the actions of human beings.