Chapter Summary<\/summary>\nThis chapter investigates the idea that psychological categories, such as hysteria, intelligence, and personality, are not timeless features of human nature but historically contingent constructs. Drawing on Ian Hacking\u2019s concept of \u2018historical ontology\u2019, it introduces the idea of human kinds as \u2018moving targets\u2019: they emerge, shift, and sometimes disappear in response to specific social, scientific, and institutional conditions. Through the metaphor of the \u2018ecological niche\u2019, the chapter examines how certain psychological categories became thinkable, diagnosable, and real in particular moments, only to fade when the historical conditions change. It compares abandoned categories such as fugue, neurasthenia, and drapetomania with enduring ones such as emotion, motivation, and intelligence, whose meanings have been radically redefined over time. In doing so, it interrogates how ways of being and forms of suffering are brought into existence through classification systems, diagnostic practices, and expert discourse. The chapter also addresses epistemological, ontological, and power-related issues, arguing that psychological categories are produced through historically situated knowledge practices, not simply discovered. By the end, students are encouraged to rethink the stability of the categories they study, recognising that psychology\u2019s objects of knowledge are co-produced by culture, history, the human sciences, and the people who live through them.<\/p>\n<\/details>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Chapter 21 – Quiz<\/h2>\n\n\n\n