psychology

History

Early development

Rudolf Goclenius

The first use of the term psychology is often attributed to the "Yucologia hoc est de hominis perfectione, anima, ortu", written by the German scholastic philosopher Rudolf Goeckel (1547-1628), who often goes by the Latinized Rudolph Goclenius, and published in Marburg in 1590. However, the term was in fact used more than six decades earlier by the Croatian humanist Marko Marulić (1450-1524) in the title of his Latin treatise "Psichiologia de ratione animae humanae." Although the treatise itself has not been preserved, its title appears in a list of Marulic's works compiled by his younger contemporary, Franjo Bozicevic-Natalis in his "Vita Marci Maruli Spalatensis" (Krstić, 1964). This, of course, may not have been the very first usage, but it is the earliest documented use at present.

The term did not fall into popular usage until the German idealist philosopher, Christian Wolff (1679-1754) used it in his Psychologia empirica and Psychologia rationalis (1732-1734). This distinction between empirical and rational psychology was picked up in Diderot's Encyclodedie and was popularized in France by Maine de Biran.

The root of the word psychology (psyche) is very roughly equivalent to "soul" in Greek, and psychology came to be considered a study of the soul (in a religious sense of this term) much later, in Christian times. Psychology as a medical discipline can be seen in Thomas Willis' reference to psychology (the "Doctrine of the Soul") in terms of brain function, as part of his 1672 anatomical treatise "De Anima Brutorum" ("Two Discourses on the Souls of Brutes"). Until about the end of the 19th century, psychology was regarded as a branch of philosophy.

[edit] Early modern era

In 1879, Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), known as "the father of psychology", founded a laboratory for the study of psychology at Leipzig University in Germany. The American philosopher William James published his seminal book, Principles of Psychology, in 1890, laying the foundations for many of the questions that psychologists would focus on for years to come. Other important early contributors to the field include Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909), a pioneer in the experimental study of memory at the University of Berlin; and the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936), who investigated the learning process now referred to as classical conditioning.

Auguste Rodin's The Thinker, bronze cast by Alexis Rudier, Laeken Cemetery, Brussels, Belgium.

Meanwhile, during the 1890s, the Austrian physician Sigmund Freud, who was trained as a neurologist and had no formal training in experimental psychology, had developed a method of psychotherapy known as psychoanalysis. Freud's understanding of the mind was largely based on interpretive methods and introspection, and was focused in particular on resolving mental distress and psychopathology. Freud's theories became very well-known, largely because they tackled subjects such as sexuality and repression as general aspects of psychological development. These were largely considered taboo subjects at the time, and Freud provided a catalyst for them to be openly discussed in polite society. Although Freud's theories are only of limited interest in modern academic psychology departments, his application of psychology to clinical work has been very influential.

Partly in reaction to the subjective and introspective nature of Freudian psychology, and its focus on the recollection of childhood experiences, during the early decades of the 20th century behaviorism gained popularity as a guiding psychological theory. Championed by psychologists such as John B. Watson and Edward Thorndike (and later, B.F. Skinner), behaviorism was grounded in studies of animal behavior. Behaviorists argued that psychology should be a science of behavior, not the mind, and rejected the idea that internal mental states such as beliefs, desires, or goals could be studied scientifically. In his paper "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It" (1913), Watson argued that psychology "is a purely objective [emphasis added] experimental branch of natural science," that "introspection forms no essential part of its methods", and that "the behaviorist recognizes no dividing line between man and brute."

Behaviorism reigned as the dominant model in psychology through the first half of the 20th century, largely due to the creation of conditioning theories as scientific models of human behavior, and their successful application in the workplace and in fields such as advertising.

[edit] Modern era

However, it became increasingly clear that although behaviorism had made some important discoveries, it was deficient as a guiding theory of human behavior. Noam Chomsky's review of Skinner's book Verbal Behavior (that aimed to explain language acquisition in a behaviorist framework) is considered one of the major factors in the ending of behaviorism's reign. Chomsky demonstrated that language could not purely be learned from conditioning, as people could produce sentences unique in structure and meaning that couldn't possibly be generated solely through experience of natural language, implying that there must be internal states of mind that behaviorism rejected as illusory. Similarly, work by Albert Bandura showed that children could learn by social observation, without any change in overt behavior, and so must be accounted for by internal representations.

Humanistic psychology emerged in the 1950s and has continued as a reaction to positivist and scientific approaches to the mind. It stresses a phenomenological view of human experience and seeks to understand human beings and their behavior by conducting qualitative research. The humanistic approach has its roots in existentialist and phenomenological philosophy and many humanist psychologists completely reject a scientific approach, arguing that trying to turn human experience into measurements strips it of all meaning and relevance to lived existence.

Some of the founding theorists behind this school of thought were Abraham Maslow who formulated a hierarchy of human needs, Carl Rogers who created and developed Client-centred therapy, and Fritz Perls who helped create and develop Gestalt therapy.

The rise of computer technology also promoted the metaphor of mental function as information processing. This, combined with a scientific approach to studying the mind, as well as a belief in internal mental states, led to the rise of cognitivism as the dominant model of the mind.

Links between brain and nervous system function were also becoming common, partly due to the experimental work of people like Charles Sherrington and Donald Hebb, and partly due to studies of people with brain injury (see cognitive neuropsychology). With the development of technologies for accurately measuring brain function, neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience have become some of the most active areas in contemporary psychology.

With the increasing involvement of other disciplines (such as philosophy, computer science and neuroscience) in the quest to understand the mind, the umbrella discipline of cognitive science has been created as a means of focusing such efforts in a constructive way.

However, many psychologists have not been happy with what they perceive as 'mechanical' models of the mind and human nature. Coming full circle, Transpersonal psychology and the Analytical Psychology of Carl Jung seek to return psychology to its spiritual roots. Others, such as Serge Moscovici and Gerard Duveen, argue that behavior and thought are essentially social in nature and seek to embed psychology in a broader social scientific study that incorporates the social meaning of experience and behavior.

posted by wachjoe9 @ 2:54 PM