History of psychology.
Title:
History of psychology.
Authors:
Delahanty, Everett J., Jr.
Source:
Salem Press Encyclopedia of Health, 2019. 8p.
Article
Subject
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History of psychology
Type of psychology: Origin and definition of psychology
Psychological inquiry and psychology as a field have a varied history going back thousands of years.
Introduction
Psychology can be assessed from points of view that regard it as a folk, cultural, or religious process; as a philosophical approach; as a scientific method; as an academic discipline; or as a set of postmodern assumptions.
93872026-21615.jpgA gathering of psychologists at Clark University around the beginning of the twentieth century. From left to right, bottom row, Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall, and Carl Jung; top row, left to right, A. A. Brill, Ernest Jones, and Sandor Ferenczi. (Library of Congress)
From the folk process point of view, peoples have formed their own cultures and religions from the beginning of human history. These different cultures and religions have unique values and norms within which the person is considered and evaluated. Out of these norms come the everyday beliefs and expectations that members of the group will hold about themselves, other people, and the world. Thus, in every culture there is an implicit theory of psychology. Since this process is always operative, it has always been a factor in how specific thinkers such as philosophers, scientists, and psychologists, as well as laypeople, have been able to think about the human person. The folk process remains an especially important factor in some areas of psychology, such as humanistic psychology and clinical psychology.
Philosophy began to emerge about the year 600 BCE. At that time, Thales, a Greek thinker, began to consider systematically the nature of the world. His view that the world’s basic element is water demanded that the philosopher give up the folk process, or “common sense,” and argue for a conclusion based on rational premises. This new way of thinking led to a much broader set of possibilities in the understanding of the world and the human being. In terms of psychology, philosophers would concentrate on topics such as the relationship between the mind and the body and the process of acquiring knowledge, especially about what is outside the body. This influence has gone in and out of fashion throughout the history of psychology. In the last decade of the twentieth century, cognitive psychology was strongly influenced by philosophic thinking, for example.
By the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance, another way of thinking and solving problems began to emerge. As a result of dissatisfaction with both religious and philosophic answers to understanding the world and its place in the cosmos, as well as knowledge about the nature of the human being, a process of systematic and repeated observation and rigorous thinking began to emerge. This new process, which has been labeled a part of modern thinking, has become the scientific method, requiring another separation from the folk process. For instance, when the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus and the Italian mathematician and astronomer Galileo Galilei argued from their observations that the earth revolved around the sun rather than the opposite, “common-sense” view, they offended both religious authorities and philosophers, but they opened the door to a new way of solving problems and understanding the world and human beings. This new way was named science.
Thanks to both philosophy and science, by the middle to end of the nineteenth century various scholarly areas had emerged, each with a unique use of methodology and subject matter. One of these disciplines was psychology. In 1879, Wilhelm Wundt, a German philosopher and physiologist, set up what is generally considered the first laboratory in experimental psychology. From that point, psychology began to be recognized as a discipline by scholars in the Western world.
Through an interaction with disciplines such as anthropology and linguistics, which were thriving on relativistic assumptions, and a philosophy of language that limited meaning to the particular and situational case, a psychological point of view developed in the mid- to late twentieth century called social constructionism. Although promoted by those who identify with the discipline of psychology, social constructionism is at odds with the assumptions of the modern period, including many of those that go with science, and is, therefore, labeled postmodern. Such an approach seeks only to describe and interpret rather than to explain, as is the aim in science. Parallel developments such as deconstruction in the field of literary criticism were taking place at the same time.
The Philosophers
Over the years, philosophers asked questions about the world and how humans come to have knowledge of it, provided assumptions that would limit or promote certain kinds of explanations, and attempted to summarize the knowledge that was available to an educated person.
Those thinkers who considered the nature of reality and the world between the years ca. 624 to 370 BCE were called pre-Socratics. One of them, Heraclitus, opposed Thales’s idea of water as the basic element with his idea that fire was the basic element, and therefore the world and everything in it was in a state of flux and constant change. Empedocles went a step further to propose that there were four basic elements: earth, air, fire, and water. This scheme, when applied by physicians such as the Greek Hippocrates and the Greco-Roman Galen led to the notion of the four humors and a prototheory of personality that has been influential for almost two thousand years.
From his understanding of the thinking of Socrates and Pythagoras, Plato constructed a systematic view of the human as a dualistic creature having a body that is material and a soul that is spiritual. This doctrine had significant consequences for religion, for philosophy, and for psychology. Plato also saw knowledge as acquired by the soul through the process of recollection of the form, which exists in an ideal and abstract state. Plato’s student Aristotle systematized the study of logic, promoted the use of observation as a means of acquiring knowledge, and presented a different view of the human as one whose senses were reliable sources of information and whose soul, while capable of reasoning, was the form that kept the body (and the person) in existence.
The philosophers who came during the medieval period generally split into two camps: those who followed Plato and those who followed Aristotle. Just prior to the medieval period, Saint Augustine, bishop of Hippo (now part of Algeria), had combined Neoplatonism, Christianity, and Stoicism (to the extent of believing that following the natural law was virtuous). The Neoaristotelian tradition was typified by Thomas Aquinas, an Italian Dominican priest, who integrated Aristotelian thought with Christianity and who promoted the use of reason in the obtaining of knowledge. Although not anticipated by Aquinas, this point of view would ease the way for what would become scientific thinking.
René Descartes, a French Renaissance philosopher, created a dualistic system called interactionism, where the soul, which was spiritual, interacted with the body, which was material. Both the notion of interaction and its proposed site, the pineal gland, were so open to debate that the theory led to two different traditions: a rationalist tradition and an empiricist tradition. The rationalist tradition was led by German thinkers such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who was also an inventor of the calculus; Immanuel Kant, who taught that the mind had an innate categorizing ability; and Johann Friedrich Herbart, who held that, if expressed in mathematical terms, psychology could become a science. All the rationalists opted for the notion of “an active mind,” and Herbart’s thinking was very influential for those, such as Wundt, who would view psychology as a scientific discipline. The empiricist tradition was stronger in France and England. Several decisive representatives of empiricism were Englishmen John Locke, David Hume, and John Stuart Mill. Empiricism postulated that all knowledge came through the senses and that the ideas that made up the mind were structured on the percepts of the senses. Eventually, in Mill’s thinking, the ideas of the mind were held together through the laws of association.
Another tradition developed past the midpoint of this period was positivism. Positivism, as developed by Frenchman August Compte, argued that the only knowledge that one can be sure of is information that is publicly observable. This would strongly influence both the subject matter and the methodology of science in general and psychology in particular.
In the beginning of the twentieth century, Englishman Bertrand Russell introduced symbolic logic, and his student Ludwig Wittgenstein created a philosophy of language. Both of these developments were necessary precursors of the late twentieth century interest in the nature of mind, in which many disciplines came together to form cognitive science. Wittgenstein’s work would open the door for social constructionism.
The Scientists
The development of the scientific method was only one of the factors that was associated with the change from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Developments in anatomy, physiology, astronomy, and other fields from the middle of the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century have had a major impact on the understanding of science and have paved the way for psychology as a science. The work of Copernicus and Galileo, in freeing astronomy from folk and religious belief, was a start. In the field of anatomy Flemish scientist Andreas Vesalius published in 1543 the first accurate woodcuts showing the anatomy of the…
