Suchergebnisse

A little-known period in the life of Gonzalo Rodríguez Lafora consists of the time he spent in Valencia during the Spanish Civil War from 1936 until 1938. During the war, Valencia became the capital of the Republic, and many scientists and intellectuals found refuge there and could continue their work. Along with other evacuated intellectuals, Lafora participated in numerous scientific and academic activities organized by the Valencian House of Culture, where he had a dispute with Antonio Machado and other intellectuals due to its closing. We especially highlight his work as a psychiatrist in the Military War Hospital in Godella, where, under his direction, a neurological section was created, and where he would coincide with the psychiatrist José Sacristan and the neurologist Justo Gonzalo. The existing archived documentation about the hospital is scant, but thanks to publications from that time, especially the journals Madrid and Sanidad de Guerra, we were able to recover his work, which shows his interest in war psychiatry, especially war neuroses. His publications also reveal his concern about the future of psychiatry and university education in Spain. These academic interests and his relationship with the government of the Republic ¿collaborative, but disagreeing about some aspects¿ along with concern about his own personal future, would define his war experiences.

Therapeutic psycho-educational intervention marks the start of an important aspect of the psychotechnical work in Spain and places particular emphasis on attention to children. This attention has fostered the creation of institutions such as the National Council for Deaf-Mutes, the Blind, and Mentally Handicapped people, proposed as a model for the joint work of professionals in the medical, educational, and psychological fields. This paper addresses the historical trajectory of the first years of the Council, focusing on its objectives and ideology and, more specifically, on the creation, in 1914, of the Medical and Educational Psychology Laboratory and the work carried out there by authors closely involved in pedagogy and child psychiatry, such as Rodríguez Lafora. This laboratory, in spite of its 'short history', stood out for its use of evaluation methods such as the biographical, medical and psychological record book, which allowed the diagnosis, subsequent treatment, and protection of the children in this institution and was the precedent for the current multidisciplinary evaluation in this field. Based on these aims, several publications and regulations have been analyzed from that time, showing the difficulties involved in performing this work, conditioned by the political momentum of the time and controversies related to special education. All these aspects allow us to confirm that this National Council for the Handicapped marked an important milestone in the practice of educational psychology in Spain.

Since the university education of psychologists began in Spain in 1954, the history of psychology course has been included in the curriculum. In the first few years, only half of the curricula offered the course. From 1973 to 2007, the universities' organization and regulation underwent successive reforms that involved changes in the curricula, decreeing specific national guidelines for each degree and establishing a minimum set of common required courses, called core courses, including the history of psychology. In 2007, the European Higher Education Area was set up, transforming the 5-year bachelor's degrees into 4-year degrees and eliminating the required guidelines, with each university being able to define the content of their curricula. The Dean's Conference for Psychology agreed on some recommendations related to core courses, which continued to include the history of psychology and were adopted by the majority of the universities. In 2015, the government established a new national regulation that makes it possible for each university to voluntarily reduce the length of the bachelor's degree to 3 years. Some psychology historians believe that this hypothetical reduction in the length of the degree, along with the already existing general tendency to prioritize applied or practical courses over basic or fundamental ones, could produce an appropriate scenario for the disappearance of the history of psychology course in some universities