Substitutes for the soul included the self, personality, and the brain. “Self” kept the older issues alive without metaphysical baggage. Calkins’ “self-psychology” held that the self was the basal concept in psychology, and that soul was unnecessary. Allport found that “personality” enabled psychology to address topics vital to soul. The brain is the most significant substitute for the soul. Lashley sought to translate introspective findings into a physicalist language. Lashley retained terms such as meaning and self-consciousness, but articulated them in terms of stimuli and responses of the nervous system. Hebb dismissed introspection altogether. His “cell assembly” theory proposed neural networks as organized patterns of responses to stimuli. Thought is the organized activity of the nervous system. Given the emphasis on organization of neural firing, therein is the brain a substitute for the soul, since in the older psychologies, soul was a principle of form or organization.

This chapter addresses the rise of psychology without a soul. There were scientific conceptions of psychology with a soul in the eighteenth century. Psychologies without soul followed from David Hume’s treatment of mental life. Lange coined the phrase, “psychology without a soul,” promoting a scientific psychology free of metaphysics. Soulless psychology emerged with psychology as a natural science in Newtonian terms. It also reflected debates over the distinction between the mental and the physical and the status of the “knower” in consciousness. The chapter includes debates over “psychology without a soul," and the development of an objective psychology in behaviorism. The new psychology without a soul triumphed by 1910, when Angell declared that the funeral for the soul had been held.

Despite psychology having no place for the soul, there are reasons to reconsider the soul. Soul has a place outside of psychology in many cultures. So we look at formulations of the soul from a variety of cultures. Then we turn to developmental cognitive studies of contemporary folk psychology. These studies explore intuitions in children about the existence of the soul. A final example of experiential dualism comes from studies of people dealing with severe pain and illness, who can experience that their bodies are something that they have and feel at a distance, albeit an oppressive distance. The soul addresses the “phenomenological experience” that people are not simply objects in the physical world. These studies suggest that psychology “with a soul” is the suppressed double of psychology without a soul. The former has not disappeared, it has been marginalized.