Patrizia Guarnieri. Italian Psychology and Jewish Emigration under Fascism: From Florence to Jerusalem and New York. (Italian and American Studies.) xv + 275 pp., figs., bibl., index. Houndmills, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. $95 (cloth). ISBN 9781137306555

Italian Psychology and Jewish Emigration under Fascism is two books at once. Each is exquisite.
The first tells the story of Italian psychology, from its early efflorescence, through a period of struggle, to its decline under fascism, tracking especially the shifting relations between philosophy and experimental psychology. Here Patrizia Guarnieri, a renowned historian of Italian psychology, criminology, and anthropology, focuses on Francesco De Sarlo (1864–1937), a scholar who held a chair in theoretical philosophy at the Royal Institute for Advanced Studies in Florence and, in 1903, established the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology there. It was the first of its kind in Italy. De Sarlo was a committed experimentalist and positivist, although under the influence of Franz Brentano (1838–1917), who was then living in Florence (and to whom De Sarlo dedicated a book), he embraced “introspective method” as well. Combining observation and introspection offered a “third way” for empirical psychology to develop, which some have called “phenomenological experimental psychology.”