Psychology figures heavily in most games set in the Lovecraftian universe, partially because most of these games are, to some extent, descended from Chaosium's "Call of Cthulhu," which has a system for 'Sanity Loss." The merits of this system in accurately reflecting the work of HP Lovecraft could be debated ad infinitum. The upshot is that most games introduce "psychology" as a sort of nebulous way to regain "sanity."

This is distinctly ahistorical. Psychology in the 1920s did not deal with handling "mentally ill" patients in the way that it does today, though certainly efforts were being made in that direction. The principal thrust of psychology was analysis, and analysis was predominantly Freudian. The idea of a psychologist giving "battlefield triage" to a patient who has "lost sanity" to a horrible monster is bizarre. A Priest or peer would probably be better able to manage such a task.

As for the suggestion that the Psychologist "explains away" the horrors, that is nothing more than a low crack at a very decent and humanitarian profession. The 1920s produced J.B. Rhine, the Duke University Psychologist who was among the first to apply scientific methods to the study of the paranormal. The idea that the psychologists of the day would simply ignore such strong experiences is ludicrous - it might be more workable with the strict behaviorist school of B.F. Skinner, but we are still several decades away from Behaviorism.

For a good examination of psychology in the mid-twenties, I suggest F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel Tender is the Night.

For the record, the schools of Freud, Adler, and Jung all existed by the 1920s. Maslow and Skinner were still far in the future.

The psychoanalytic framework of C. G. Jung is extremely well suited to the explanation of Lovecraftian phenomena, and Jung links are among the first that will appear on this page.

Carl Gustav Jung WWW Index

Jung resources on the web

Carl Jung: Anthology

Various writings by Jung, available online

C.G. Jung Glossary

Glossary of Jungian terms