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We cannot understand contemporary psychology without first researching its history. Unlike other books on the history of psychology, which are chronologically ordered, this Handbook is organized topically. It covers the history of ideas in multiple areas of the field and reviews the intellectual history behind the major topics of investigation. The evolution of psychological ideas is described alongside an analysis of their surrounding context. Readers learn how eminent psychologists draw on the context of their time and place for ideas and practices, and also how innovation in psychology is an ongoing dialogue between past, present, and anticipated future.
Across time and place, there have been many intellectual and practical traditions regarding the relations among mind, body, and health. This chapter provides a brief overview of these rich traditions but focuses on their relevance to the emergence and subsequent development of the contemporary field of health psychology in the last third of the twentieth century in the United States. Over its relatively brief history as a field within psychology, health psychology quickly became clinically focused in the United States in order to succeed as part of biomedicine’s allied health professions, with all the attendant strengths and weaknesses that membership in such professions entail. The chapter also provides a brief account of three other contemporary expressions of health psychology – community, critical, and public health – that have made important contributions to our understanding of mind and health.