Creators of the Vocabulary of Anglophone Psychology and Their Relationships

Abstract

The vocabulary of anglophone psychology largely developed during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The creators of this vocabulary include such well-known names as William James, Joan Riviere, E. L. Thorndike, and James Strachey. Along with others, they invented many new words and word meanings for psychology. The more a psychologist responded to the need for new vocabulary the more likely were they to be mentioned in publications. Moreover, linguistically creative psychologists occurred together in publications to a greater extent than less linguistically creative psychologists, with William James having the most co-occurrences. A network is presented that links each member of a sample of 59 linguistically creative psychologists to the other member of the sample with whom they most frequently co-occur (e.g., E. L. Thorndike co-occurs most frequently with William James). For each pair, we provide brief descriptions of their similarities and/or differences. There is also a cluster of translators who created new English words and word meanings in order to capture the meanings of words in other languages that had no satisfactory equivalents in English. Generally speaking, the more success psychologists have had in filling the lacunae in psychology’s vocabulary, the more they have been recognized by others.