HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY: ORIGIN-20TH CENTURY - HISTORY - 2024

The history of psychology begins with the scholastic philosopher Rudolf Göckel, who proposed the first use of the word "psychology" in a manuscript that was published in 1590. Otto Casmann, a German humanist, also made early use of the term.

Among his many works in the areas of philosophy, theology, and the natural sciences, there is one that includes the word "psychology" in its title: Psychologia anthropologica, printed in 1594.

The use of the term did not become popular until the German idealist philosopher Christian Wolff used it in his Psychologia empirica and Psychologia rationalis in 1734. In England, psychology did not cease to be seen as a branch of philosophy until the middle of the 19th century. with the work of William Hamilton. Until then, it was known as the "philosophy of mind."

The first psychological theories

However, long before this, ancient cultures were already speculating on the nature of the human mind, soul, and spirit. These ancient theories cannot be considered psychology as such due to the current definition of the term, but they were a beginning.

In Ancient Egypt, the Edwin Smith papyrus (1550 BC) contains an early description of the brain. This papyrus is a preserved medical document, part of a much older treatise. In it, there was speculation about the functions of the brain (even in a medical context).

Smith papyrus

Other ancient medical documents were full of spells to cast out demons they believed to be the cause of their illnesses and other superstitions, but the Edwin Smith papyrus provides remedies for at least fifty conditions, only one of which includes incantations.

Ancient Greek philosophers (550 BC) developed an elaborate theory about what they called psuchẽ (a word from which the first part of the word “psychology” derives), as well as other “psychological” terms (nous, thumos, logistikon). Of these, the most influential were the postulates of Plato and Aristotle.

In the Manual of Discipline of the Dead Sea Scrolls, written in Hebrew (21 BC - 61 AD), the division of human nature into two temperaments is described.

In Asia, China had a long history of administering tests as part of its educational system. In the 6th century AD, Lin Xie conducted an early psychological experiment in which he asked participants to draw a square with one hand and, at the same time, draw a circle with the other hand, to test vulnerability to distraction from persons.

During the Golden Age of Islam (9th-13th centuries), Islamic scholars were strongly influenced by Greek and Indian philosophers. In their writings, they developed the term Nafs (the soul or the self), used to describe the individual personality of each one.

They also addressed a wide variety of faculties including the qalb (heart), the aql (intellect), and the irada (will). The study of mental illness was a specialty in itself, known as al-'ilaj al-nafs, the rough translation of which is the "cure or treatment of ideas / soul."

The beginnings of Western psychology: René Descartes

Discards

Early Western psychology was viewed as the study of the soul, in the Christian sense of the term. Until the middle of the 19th century, psychology was considered a branch of philosophy, strongly influenced by René Descartes.

The ideas of the philosopher Descartes were important for science but, above all, for psychology. He lived from 1596 to 1650 and worked to answer the question "Are mind and body different, or the same?"

His answer was known as Cartesian dualism, which consists of the idea that the body and the mind are different, but the mind can influence the body and the body can influence the mind.

This idea allowed the emerging scientists of the Renaissance to coexist with the church. The church could continue to work to influence the minds of individuals, and scientists could study the body, so each group had its own area.

Descartes suggested that while the mind was the source of ideas and thoughts (which were correctly located in the brain), the body was a machine-like structure that had to be studied and understood.

Nativism and rationalism

Descartes believed in both nativism and rationalism. A nativist believes that all knowledge is innate, while a rationalist believes that, to gain knowledge, individuals rationalize or discover truth through experience and the operations of the mind.

Descartes strove to rationalize his own existence, trying to show that he was real (in a philosophical way). His answer to the problem was "Cogito, ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am").

The philosophers of the British schools of empiricism and associationism had a profound impact on the later course of experimental psychology. The treatises of John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume were particularly influential. Also notable was the work of some continental rationalist philosophers, especially Baruch Spinoza.

Mesmerism and phrenology

Franz mesmer

Debates about the efficacy of mesmerism (hypnosis) and the value of phrenology also influenced the emerging discipline that was psychology.

Mesmerism was developed in the 1770s by the Austrian physician Franz Mesmer, who claimed that it could use the power of gravity and "animal magnetism" to cure various physical and mental illnesses.

As Mesmer and his treatments became fashionable in Vienna and Paris, he also began to be criticized. Despite this, the tradition continued among Mesmer's students and others, resurfacing in England in the 19th century in the works of physicians John Elliotson, James Esdaile, and James Braid, who renamed mesmerism "hypnotism."

In France, the practice of hypnotism gained a following after it was adopted for the treatment of hysteria by Jean-Martin Charcot, director of a hospital.

Phrenology

Phrenology began as "organology", a theory of the structure of the brain developed by the German physician Franz Joseph Gall. Gall argued that the brain was divided into a large number of functional organs, each of them responsible for one of the abilities or mental dispositions of humans (hope, love, language, detection of color, shape…).

He claimed that the larger these structures, the better their corresponding abilities. He also wrote that the size of organs could be detected by feeling the surface of a person's skull. Gall's theory of organology was taken up by his assistant Spurzheim, who developed it into phrenology.

Phrenology ran its course and was eventually dismissed by skeptics, but not without making important contributions to psychology. In the first place, phrenology emphasized that the brain is the organ of the mind and that if we want to understand the human mind and behavior, the brain is the central area that we have to study.

Second, the idea of ​​the location of functions (different parts of the brain have certain specialties) is an idea that is still with us. The brain is not as easy to understand as some popular writers believe, but there are structures in the brain that specialize in performing certain functions.

Although the methods of phrenology did not last, some of the assumptions were of great value to psychology.

Beginnings of experimental psychology

Hermann von Helmholtz

In Germany, Hermann von Helmholtz conducted a series of studies in the 1860s that dealt with many topics that would later be of interest to psychologists: the speed of neuronal transmission, our perception of sounds and colors…

Helmholtz hired a young doctor as his assistant, Wilhelm Wundt, who later used equipment from Helmholtz's laboratory to tackle more complex psychological questions than had hitherto been considered experimentally.

Wilhelm Wundt

Wundt founded the first psychology laboratory in 1879. One of his students, Titchener, began promoting his own variant of Wundtian psychology, called "structuralism." Structuralism studied the anatomy of the mind to understand its functioning and, when Titchener died, it led to an alternative approach to psychology: functionalism.

William James was a German psychologist and philosopher who popularized functional psychology. Functionalism focuses more on the functions of the mind, rather than its structure, and opted for introspection to objectively relate conscious experience in the process of picking up and judging stimuli.

William James

James opposed Freud's division of consciousness into structures and supported experimental procedures and comparative studies. Stanley Hall also contributed to the founding of functionalism and was interested in the development of children, creating developmental and educational psychology.

Charles Darwin, for his part, was the first to conduct a systematic study in the area of ​​evolutionary psychology, based on observations about his son.

This transition from structuralism to functionalism reflects the rapid changes in psychology in those days. In just twenty years (1880-1900), the main focal point of psychology shifted from Germany to America.

The beginnings of behaviorism

Chomsky

Cognitivism developed as a separate area of ​​the discipline in the late 1950s and early 1960s, following the "cognitive revolution" started by Noam Chomsky's critique of behaviorism and empiricism in general.

Chomsky, contrary to behaviorism, concluded that there must be internal mental structures, mental states that behaviorism had rejected as illusory.

In 1967, Ulric Neisser coined the term "cognitive psychology" in his book of the same name, in which he characterized people as dynamic information processing systems, whose mental operations could be described in computational terms.

The rise of computer technology and artificial intelligence promoted the metaphor of mental functions as information processing. All this led to cognitivism being the dominant mental model of the time.

Links between the brain and the nervous system also became common, due to studies of brain damage and the experimental work of Donald Hebb.

With the development of technologies to measure brain functions, neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience became some of the most active areas of psychology.

Humanistic psychology

Abraham Maslow

However, not all psychologists were satisfied with what they perceived as mechanical models of the mind, considered as a computer that only processed information. They were also unhappy with the areas they had derived from Freud's psychoanalytic work, related to the unconscious realm of the human psyche.

Humanistic psychology emerged in the late 1950s with two meetings in Detroit, Michigan, of psychologists interested in founding a professional association dedicated to a new vision of human development: a comprehensive description of what it is to be a human being, especially the uniquely human aspects, such as hope and love.

The humanist approach emphasizes a phenomenological view of the human experience and seeks to understand humans and their behaviors by conducting qualitative research.

Some of the theorists who founded this school are Abraham Maslow, known for his hierarchy of human needs; and Carl Rogers, who created client-centered therapy.

Finally, in the early 21st century, positive psychology emerged, originally a development of humanists' research on happiness and their idea of ​​treating mental health rather than mental illness. The term "positive psychology" is original from Maslow in his book Motivation and Personality (1970).

It is Martin Seligman, however, who is considered the father of the modern positive psychology movement.