This article is an attempt to reconstruct the psychological achievements of the representatives of the Lvov-Warsaw School of historical psychology, virtually forgotten and unknown in the world's psychological literature. Kazimierz Twardowski (1866-1938), founder of the school, developed a philosophical and psychological program on the basis of (among other things) the theory of actions and products, including the research program that is now included in the thread of historical psychology. His student, Wladyslaw Witwicki (1878-1948), developed the cratism theory (the theory of power) on the basis Twardowski's assumptions, providing an alternative to Alfred Adler's theory of striving for superiority while also declaring it a few years before Adler. The consequence of Witwicki's theory and the methodological assumptions was the creation of psychobiography: the first nonpsychoanalytical psychobiography of Socrates (Witwicki, 1909, 1922) and the psychobiography of Jesus Christ (Witwicki, 1958). The school's activities weakened for political reasons, particularly the outbreak of the First World War. The members of the school dispersed after 1918, and they lost international connections with the world of science. Their significant achievements in the field of psychology remained unknown to psychologists for nearly a century. In this article, I would like to present the school's unique but unfinished program of reconstructing mental life through the psychological interpretation of cultural products (literature, arts, diaries), and its value for the practice of research in historical psychology. This program required additional development, but because of the war this never happened. Some of the school's theoretical findings and the first attempts to apply them have still significant value and show us the originality of Lvov-Warsaw School psychology.
This article presents the basic achievements of the psychology of religion in the Lvov-Warsaw School of K. Twardowski, their developments and significance for the contemporary psychology of religion. Twardowski’s School existed parallel to other European psychological schools: the Würzburg School, founded by Oswald Külpe, and the Dorpat School of the Psychology of Religion, founded by Karl Girgensohn (unfortunately without mutual scientific relations). The article presents two research trends in the psychology of religion resulting from Twardowski’s works, specifically research on mental acts and religious beliefs with use of introspection and research in the field of cultural-historical psychology. The theory of acts and products, and the theory of cratism/power (similar to the theory of Alfred Adler) played crucial roles here. Psychological investigations into religious beliefs were also dominated by the psychological principle of contradiction, and the obtained results also seem to be important today.
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