Aristotelian-Thomistic Teleological Behavioral Psychology Reconstruction

The article is based on Robert Kugelmann’s work, Psychology and Catholicism: Contested Boundaries. It examines the development of Catholic psychology as a history of defining boundaries within scientific empirical psychology from 1829 to the present. The author divides the historical period into three periods: One: Neoscholastic Rational Psychology (1829–1965); Two: After Vatican II Psychology (1965 to present); and Three: An Emerging Thomistic Rational Teleological Behavioral Psychology. The essay examines the development of Neoscholastic rational psychology as a response to modernist experimental psychology. The neoscholastic movement approached the new discipline of empirical, as opposed to rational, psychology with the firm conviction in the formulation of a meta-psychology, based on a Thomistic metaphysics that would allow for an eventual synthesis of rational and empirical psychology. However, a synthesis with empirical psychology never came to realization, mainly over the issue of the faculties of the soul as foundational for a science of human behavior. The author argues that, even to the present day, the best approach to entering into a trading zone (transitional genus) with the principles and methods of scientific psychology is by avoiding all expressions of past, present, and future introspective psychology and brain mentalism, and turning to a synthesis with teleological behavioral principles and Aristotelian-Thomistic faculties of the soul psychology.