HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY:A BRIEF OVERVIEW

Catina Feresin PhD

Department of EducationalScience

University of PulaCroatia

INTRODUCTION

Historical roots 1

Although people have always attempted to understand behaviour, the study of psychology as a distinct science is scarcely more than a century old.The most famous psychological schools are:

1-Structuralism2-Functionalism3-Psychoanalysis4-Behaviourism5-Gestalt school of psychology6-Geneva school of psychology 7-Cognitivism8-Cognitive sciences

-1-STRUCTURALISM

Most historians date back the founding of scientific psychology to 1879, the year when Wilhelm Wundt established his psychology laboratory at the University of Leipzig in Germany.

Wilhelm Wundt

The new discipline represented a convergence of two currents of thought in philosophy and science. One was the tradition of empiricism with its emphasis on experience; the other was the science of physiology.

Empiricism, introduced by the philosopher John Locke in the seventeenth century, focused on the experience of the world as a source of knowledge.

Since the world is communicated to people through the sensory organs, Wundt was interested in the relationship between the activation of these organs by physical events and the resulting psychological experiences.

The other tradition was the science of physiology. In the nineteenth century, the brain and the nervous system were analysed by many researchers. Wundt was a physiologist himself.

The method used by Wundt was called introspection and it may seem naive now, but at least it was systematic. For example he and his colleagues attempted to test all the conscious experiences that occurred while trained observers were looking at visual images or listening to the beat of a metronome.

This psychological current was later named structuralism.

Through identification of the basic elements of mental experience (sensations, images and feelings), Wundt and his followers tried to understand the structure of mind.

Despite heroic attempts of the early psychologists to ensure the accuracy and reliability of their introspective data, their effort failed, for these two reasons:

1-Many cognitive activities cannot be introspected upon;

2-during the mentioned experiments, there were several disagreements among basic observations.As a matter of fact, without reliable observations, there can be no science as well.

The failure of the introspective method to provide reliable data had widespread repercussions. It prepared the way for Watson’s radical proposal that psychology should study only man’s behavior and reject introspection and the study of the mind.

-2-FUNCTIONALISM

William James published in 1890 a book entitled Principles of Psychology. There were no boundaries to James's interest in psychological processes, and no areas to which his mind would not investigate.

William James

In his “Principles”, he devoted chapters to habit, attention, perception, memory, reasoning, instinct, emotion, imagination, psychological methods, and even hypnotism.

-3-PSYCHOANALYSIS

Sigmund Freud was born on May 6th 1856 in a small town, Freiberg, in Moravia. When he was a child, the family moved to Vienna, where he then lived most of his life.

Sigmund Freud

Freud’s couch

A brilliant child, a talented and skillful student, he went to a medical school, one of the few available options for a bright Jewish boy in Vienna those days.

There, he became involved in research under the direction of a physiology professor named Ernst Brücke.

Brücke believed in what we now call reductionism: "No other forces than the common physical-chemical ones are active within the organism.” Freud would spend many years trying to "reduce" personality to neurology, a cause he later gave up on.

Freud was very good at doing research, concentrating mainly on neurophysiology, but only a limited number of positions at the University were available, and there were others ahead of him.

Brücke helped him to get a grant to study, first with the great psychiatrist Charcot in Paris, then with his rival Bernheim in Nancy. Both these researchers were investigating the use of hypnosis with hysterics.

After spending a short time as a resident in neurology and director of a children's ward in Berlin, he came back to Vienna, married his fiancée of many years and set up a practice in neuropsychiatry, with the help of J. Breuer.

Freud emigrated to England just before World War II when Vienna became an increasing dangerous place for Jews, especially the ones as famous as Freud.

Not long afterwards, he died of a cancer of his mouth and jaw he had suffered from for the last 20 years of his life.

Freud's books and lectures brought him both fame and ostracism from the mainstream of the medical community.

He drew around him a number of very bright sympathisers who became the very core of the psychoanalytic movement (Jung, Adler, Anna Freud).

Freud did not exactly invent the idea of the conscious versus unconscious mind, but he certainly was responsible for making it popular. The conscious mind is what you are aware of at any particular moment, your present perceptions, memories, thoughts, fantasies and feelings.

Freud’s idea of mind:

Working closely with the conscious mind is what Freud called the preconscious, what we might call today "available memory:" anything that can easily be made conscious, the memories you are not thinking about at the moment but can readily brought to your mind. Freud suggested that conscious and preconscious are the smallest parts of our whole mind.

The largest part by far is the unconscious. It includes all the things that are not easily available to awareness, such as our instincts, and things that are to be found there since we are not able to look at them, such as the memories and the emotions associated with trauma.

According to Freud, the unconscious is the source of our motivations, whether they be simple desires for food or sex, neurotic compulsions, or the ideals of an artist or scientist. And yet, we are often driven to deny or resist becoming conscious of these motivations, and they are often available to us only in a disguised form (i.e. during a night dream).

Some of Freud's most interesting works are:-A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis;-The Interpretation of Dreams;-The Psychopathology of Everyday Life;-Totem and Taboo;-Civilisation and Its Discontentsand many others.

Unfortunately, Freud had a penchant for rejecting people who did not totally agree with him. Some left him on friendly terms; others did not, and went on to found competing schools of thought (i.e. Carl Jung).

Carl Jung

Carl Jung's theory divides the psyche into three parts. The first is the ego, which Jung identifies with the conscious mind. Closely related to it is the personal unconscious, which includes anything which is not presently conscious, but it can be.

But then Jung adds the part of the psyche that makes his theory stand out from all the others: the collective unconscious.

The collective unconscious is our "psychic inheritance." It is the “reservoir” of our experiences as a species, a kind of innate knowledge we are all born with, and yet we can never be directly conscious of it.

The contents of the collective unconscious are called archetypes. Jung also called them dominants, mythological or primordial images.

An archetype is an unlearned tendency to experience things in a certain way.

The mother archetype is a particularly good example. It is symbolised by the primordial mother or "earth mother" of mythology, by Eve and Mary in western traditions.

The persona archetype represents your public image. The word is, obviously, related to the word person and personality, and comes from a Latin word for mask. As a consequence, the persona is the mask you put on before you show yourself to the outside world.

Anima and animus archetype A part of our person is the role of male or female we must play. For most people that role is determined by their physical gender. But Jung, Freud, Adler and others felt that we are all really bisexual in nature.

If you are looking for something among Jung’s work, you might read:

-Analytic Psychology: Its Theory and Practice;-Man and His Symbols.