History of Psychology

Psychology has a long past, but only a short history.

This statement, expressed by German experimentalist Hermann Ebbinghaus, suggests a key idea about the history of psychology: though psychology is relatively new as a formal academic discipline, scholars have pondered the questions that psychologists ask for thousands of years. According to psychology historian Morton Hunt, an experiment performed by the King of Egypt, as far back as the seventh century B.C., can be considered the first psychology experiment (Hunt, 1993, p. 1). The king wanted to test whether or not Egyptian was the oldest civilization on earth. His idea was that, if children were raised in isolation from infancy and were given no instruction in language of any kind, then the language they spontaneously spoke would be of the original civilization of man -- hopefully, Egyptian. The experiment, itself, was flawed, but the king deserves credit for his idea that thoughts and language come from the mind and his ambition to test such an idea.

Typically, historians point to the writings of ancient Greek philosophers, such Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, as the first significant work to be rich in psychology-related thought. They considered important questions like what is free will, how does the mind work, and what is the relationship of people to their society. For hundreds of years, philosophers continued to wrestle with these and related questions, and psychology eventually sprouted from the roots of philosophy. Psychology also derived its origins from physiology, another subject that had been studied for thousands of years. In fact, the father of psychology, William Wundt, was originally a professor of physiology.

Wundt wanted to apply the methodical, experimental methods of science to the study of human consciousness. To this end, he founded the first-ever psychology laboratory at University of Leipzig in Germany, earning him the monumental distinction of psychology's founder (1897). At his laboratory, Wundt spent hours exposing individuals to audio and visual stimuli and asking them to report what they perceived. In this way, he studied one component of consciousness, perception. Around this time, other German scientists began doing similar work. Herman Von Helmholtz investigated color vision, hearing, and rate of nerve conduction and Gustav Fechner studied and quantified sensory experience (Raphael & Halpert, 1994, p. 54). The school of thought that arose from the work of Wundt and his colleagues is called structuralism. The basic goal of structualists was to study consciousness by breaking it down into it components -- mainly perception, sensation, and affection. Their basic method was to train their subjects in introspection, which was careful, systematic observation of one's own conscious experience (Weiten, 1992, p. 5).

A student of Wundt's, E.B. Titchener was a strong advocate for structualism in the United States, but he had competition from an opposing school of thought, called functionalism. This movement was led by William James and John Dewey. While structuralists essentially wanted to determine "what is consciousness?", functionalists wanted to determine "what is consciousness used for?" -- in other words, they wanted to study the purpose, or function, of consciousness and basic mental processes.

The two camps debated passionately over which approach to psychology was best, each hoping to shape the direction of their fledging academic subject. Though neither side emerged as a clear winner, their energy led to the rapid spread of psychology, especially in the United States. In 1883,G. Stanley Hall established the first psychology laboratory in the US at Johns Hopkins University, and by 1900, there were dozens of laboratories, and three psychology journals and the American Psychology Association had been founded. Ultimately, psychology's first two movements subsided and were replaced by subsequent schools of thought, but both made significant contributions to the field, as psychologists today study both structure and function.

Around 1913, American psychologist John B. Watson founded a new movement that changed the focus of psychology. He believed that in their study of consciousness, both structuralists and functionalits diverged too much from objective science. Internal mental processes should not be studied, because they cannot be observed; instead, Watson advocated that psychology focus on the study of behavior and thus, his movement became known as behaviorism. As Watson saw it, behavior was not the result of internal mental processes, but rather the result of automatic response to stimuli from the environment. Behaviorism became focused on how conditions of the environment affect behavior and specifically, how humans learn new behavior from the environment. This movement took a strong hold in America and was the dominant school of thought for about forty years. Watson's successor, as the leader of behaviorism was B.F. Skinner, who developed an influential view that operant conditioning was the mechanism for learning.

While behaviorism was becoming dominant in the US, two other schools gained influence in Europe around the same time. The Gestalt movement arose from Max Wertheimer's research into an illusion of movement, called the phi phenomenon (Raphael & Halpert, 1994, p. 56). The phi phenomenon is the illusion of motion created when single visual stimuli are presented in rapid succession. A good example is a movie you watch at the movie theatre. Continuous motion on the screen is created by rapidly flashing individual frames of light, one after another. Gestalt theorists' basic belief was that the any psychological phenomenon, from perceptual processes to human personality, should be studied holistically; that is, they should not be broken down into components, but rather studied as a whole.

The second major movement in Europe at this time was psychoanalytic theory. This theory, developed by Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud, revolutionized psychology and other aspects of modern thought. Very much the opposite of behaviorism, it focused on humans' internal workings and proposed a whole new way of explaining them. The theory developed by Freud was quite extensive and intricate, but the main principle is that the unconscious is responsible for most thought and behavior in all people and the disorders of the mentally ill. This powerful force, called the unconscious, was a revolutionary, new idea -- it was the concept that a great deal activity within the human psyche resides completely outside of consciousness. This idea and many of Freud others were extremely controversial, at the time. People considered them unpleasant, and especially behaviorists considered them objectionable, since they were at the opposite extreme of studying only what you could observe -- the ideas dealt with something that, by definition, you could not even be aware of. Still, Freud's psychoanalytic theory gained a wide following and many of his ideas are commonly believed by psychologists and the public today.

By the 1950's, a new movement began as an alternative to behaviorism and psychoanalytic theory. The followers of this movement considered behaviorism and psychoanalytic theory dehumanizing and they took the name, humanism, for their movement. Instead of behaving as pawns of the environment or the powerful unconscious, humanists believed humans were inherently good and that their own mental processes played an active role in their behavior. Free will, emotions, and a subjective view of experience were important in the humanism movement.

The most recent major school of thought to arise has been the cognitive perspective, which began in the 1970's. This movement is much more objective and calculating than humanism, yet it is very different than behaviorism, as it focuses extensively on mental processes. The main idea of this movement is that humans take in information from their environment through their senses and then process the information mentally. The processing of information involves organizing it, manipulating it, storing it in memory, and relating it to previously stored information. Cognitive theorists apply their ideas to language, memory, learning, dreams, perceptual systems, and mental disorders.

At the current time of this writing, the year 2000, psychology as a formal discipline is over one hundred years old. Instead of one or two dominant movements, parts of many past movements -- behaviorism, psychoanalytic theory, humanism, and cognitive perspective -- are studied and expanded by psychologists today. Also, psychologists have recently been trying to understand psychological phenomena in the context of evolution or in the context of different cultures. Given pscyhology's history, it should come as no surprise to you that there is currently no singe, dominant approach used. Psychology always has been a subject that branches into many issues and approaches. And, for now, it appears poised to continue that way.

structuralism^early school of thought, begun by Wilhelm Wundt, with the main goal of describing the structure of consciousness by carefully observing conscious experience