The present article intends to provide support for an alternative to a historical understanding of animal magnetism, highlighting its importance in the construction of psychology. Accordingly, the article attempts to emphasize the role of social institutions and practices which have had a decisive influence on the denunciation of such proposals. Along the same line of thinking, it also aims to highlight some of the epistemiological incompatibilities that lie in the modern science project, which have also contributed significantly to the rejection of animal magnetism. Finally, the article ends by reconsidering the need for a review on the very notion of science existing in the main reference works on the history of psychology, which are generally limited to methodological and linear issues and therefore disregard the inter-subjective and social processes at work in the construction of psychology as a science.
Epistemology; History of psychology; Animal magnetism; Subjectivity