Arland Deyett Weeks (1871-1936) was an American educator and social reformer who published The Psychology of Citizenship in 1917 with the intention of compiling the psychological, psychobiological, and psychosocial knowledge needed for governing modern democratic Western industrialized societies, as well as offering suggestions for intervention and social reform in the educational, legal, and occupational domains. His point of view can be placed within the progressive social and intellectual movement that characterized the policies of the United States in the first decade of the 20th century. His sociopolitical ideas were fed by transcendental and pragmatic sources, especially with respect to the way of dealing with tension between the individual and the collective. Modern psychological techniques (occupational, educational, legal psychology, etc.) nourished his reform program. In this article, we contextualize Weeks's book within these ideas and show its historical significance in the sociocultural and intellectual context that gave it meaning.

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Our starting point is an article by Uchoa Angela Branco published in 2009 in Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Sciences (vol. 43, pp. 350-355) and titled "Why Dichotomies can be Misleading while Dualities Fit the Analysis of Complex Phenomena". She criticizes the dualist uses of the distinction between subject and object, or between subjectivist and objectivist perspectives. However we subscribe to the criticism, we argue that some kind of distinction between objectual and subjectual realities is neccesary. Our argument is grounded on the classic constructivist Psychology, especially that of James Mark Baldwin's genetic logic. We assess two theoretical perspectives -the systemic and the structuralist ones- that, in our view, are at risk of falling into objectivism because they tend to reduce subjectual activity to objectivistic or formalistic kinds of explanation. Based on a critical recovery of some ideas of the French philosopher Michel Serres, we propose that subjects and objects must be understood as interpenetrated realities in perpetual construction.

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This study focuses on the analysis of the early work of Howard W. Odum (1884-1954) and the examination of the psychological aspects that marked his reflection on African American music. This analysis reveals many of the aspects that were generically shared by the psychological agenda of the period when analyzing aesthetic experience and activity. Outstanding among these are the relationship of the musical phenomenon with very basic or primary affective-emotional dimensions, the conception of the musical phenomenon as an indicator of the cognitive-affective development of human groups, its expression in the form of cultural and complex intersubjective products, or its possible participation in the technoscientific design of social reform and progress. The simultaneous treatment of all of these aspects in Odum's work brings to light the interdisciplinary framework in which early psychology moved, while revealing the theoretical and ideological contradictions and controversies that enveloped the discipline, above all, at the point where it attempted to place itself at the service of the constitution of self-governed individuals. All in all, Odum's work also reflects the crucial role that early psychology attributed to art as a privileged medium to give meaning to experience and the human being's vital purposes. (PsycINFO Database Record