Historical psychologies of the soul kept soul in circulation in psychology. Hall’s genetic psychology was a history grounded in the theory of evolution. Müller-Freienfels read the history of psychology as an exploration of the soul. Neumann conceptualized this history in terms of archetypes, and Rank gave an account of soul-beliefs. These histories presupposed a soulless psychology. For genetic psychology, images of the soul appealed to the imaginations of children to encourage character development. Neumann saved the soul and its immortality by interpreting them to mean the individuation process. For Rank, belief in the soul is inevitable, because our deepest desire is for immortality. “Noble lie” (Hall), myth (Neumann), and illusion (Rank) are ways of describing the nature of the soul. Soulless psychology was at the foundation of these historical studies, which reaffirmed the necessity of the soul in soulless psychology.

This chapter introduces the book’s basic themes: the importance of examples in psychological writing; the tension between the abstraction of theories and the concreteness of examples; how examples overspill theories; and the need to argue for these themes concretely with examples, rather than abstractly with theories. This is why the book has a dual vision. It looks back historically to examples of past psychologists and their ways of writing, and it does this to find examples of writers that psychologists of today might follow. In this introductory chapter, the later chapters of past writers are summarised. There are obvious candidates of great psychological writers, such as William James and Sigmund Freud, but the book also includes forgotten figures, such as the third Earl of Shaftesbury and one of the heroes of this book - the neglected eighteenth-century advocate of examples, Abraham Tucker.