Friday 16 September 2011

History of Psychology






The history of psychology as a scholarly study of the mind and behavior dates back to the Ancient Greeks. There is also evidence of psychological thought in ancient Egypt. Psychology was a branch of philosophy until the 1870s, when psychology developed as an independent scientific discipline in Germany and the United States. Psychology borders on various other fields including physiology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, sociology, anthropology, as well as philosophy and other components of the humanities.

Overview

Philosophical interest in the mind and behavior dates back to the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece, China and India. Predating Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung by nearly 1000 years, psychotherapy was performed by Islamic physicians on those with mental illness in psychiatric hospitals built as early as the 8th century in Fez, Morocco.[citation needed]
Psychology as a self-conscious field of experimental study began in 1879, when Wilhelm Wundt founded the first laboratory dedicated exclusively to psychological research in Leipzig. Other important early contributors to the field include Hermann Ebbinghaus (a pioneer in the study of memory), William James (the American father of pragmatism), and Ivan Pavlov (who developed the procedures associated with classical conditioning).
Soon after the development of experimental psychology, various kinds of applied psychology appeared. G. Stanley Hall brought scientific pedagogy to the United States from Germany in the early 1880s. John Dewey's educational theory of the 1890s was another example. Also in the 1890s, Hugo Münsterberg began writing about the application of psychology to industry, law, and other fields. Lightner Witmer established the first psychological clinic in the 1890s. James McKeen Cattell adapted Francis Galton's anthropometric methods to generate the first program of mental testing in the 1890s. In Vienna, meanwhile, the psychiatrist Sigmund Freud developed an independent approach to the study of the mind called psychoanalysis, which has been widely influential.
The 20th century saw a reaction to Edward Titchener's critique of Wundt's empiricism. This contributed to the formulation of behaviorism by John B. Watson, which was popularized by B. F. Skinner. Behaviorism proposed limiting psychological study to that of overt behavior, because that could be quantified and easily measured. Behaviorists considered knowledge of the "mind" too metaphysical to achieve scientifically. The final decades of the 20th century saw the decline of behaviorism and the rise of cognitive science, an interdisciplinary approach to studying the human mind. Cognitive science again considers the "mind" as a subject for investigation, using the tools of evolutionary psychology, linguistics, computer science, philosophy, behaviorism, and neurobiology. This form of investigation has proposed that a wide understanding of the human mind is possible, and that such an understanding may be applied to other research domains, such as artificial intelligence.

Early psychological thought

Many cultures throughout history have speculated on the nature of the mind, soul, spirit, etc. For instance, in Ancient Egypt, the Edwin Smith Papyrus contains an early description of the brain, and some speculations on its functions (though in a medical/surgical context). Though other medical documents of ancient times were full of incantations and applications meant to turn away disease-causing demons and other superstition, the Edwin Smith Papyrus gives remedies to almost 50 conditions and only 1 contains incantations to ward off evil. It has been praised as being similar to what is today considered common knowledge, but must be recognized as having originated in a very different context.
Ancient Greek philosophers, from Thales (fl. 550 bc) through even to the Roman period, developed an elaborate theory of what they termed the psuchẽ (from which the first half of "psychology" is derived), as well as other "psychological" terms – nous, thumos, logistikon, etc. (see e.g., Everson, 1991; Green & Groff, 2003). The most influential of these are the accounts of Plato (especially in the Republic – see, e.g., Robinson, 1995), Pythagoras and of Aristotle (esp. Peri Psyches, better known under its Latin title, De Anima – see, e.g., Durrant, 1993; Nussbaum & Rorty, 1992). Hellenistic philosophers (viz., the Stoics and Epicurians) diverged from the Classical Greek tradition in several important ways, especially in their concern with questions of the physiological basis of the mind (see e.g., Annas, 1992). The Roman physician Galen addressed these issues most elaborately and influentially of all. The Greek tradition influenced some Christian and Islamic thought on the topic.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Manual of Discipline (from the Dead Sea Scrolls, ca. 21 BC–61 AD) notes the division of human nature into two temperaments.
In Asia, China had a long history of administering tests of ability as part of its education system. In the 6th century AD, Lin Xie carried out an early experiment, in which he asked people to draw a square with one hand and at the same time draw a circle with the other (ostensibly to test people's vulnerability to distraction). Some have claimed that this is the first psychology experiment, and, therefore, the beginnings of psychology as an experimental science.
India, too, had an elaborate theory of "the self" in its Vedanta philosophical writings (see e.g., Paranjpe, 1998).
Medieval Muslim physicians also developed practices to treat patients suffering from a variety of "diseases of the mind".[1]
Ahmed ibn Sahl al-Balkhi (850–934) was among the first, in this tradition, to discuss disorders related to both the body and the mind, arguing that "if the nafs [psyche] gets sick, the body may also find no joy in life and may eventually develop a physical illness."[2] Al-Balkhi recognized that the body and the soul can be healthy or sick, or "balanced or imbalanced." He wrote that imbalance of the body can result in fever, headaches and other bodily illnesses, while imbalance of the soul can result in anger, anxiety, sadness and other nafs-related symptoms. He recognized two types of what we now call depression: one caused by known reasons such as loss or failure, which can be treated psychologically; and the other caused by unknown reasons possibly caused by physiological reasons, which can be treated through physical medicine.[2] In the 1010s, the scientist, Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) began to carry out experiments in areas related to body and the nafs. In his Book of Optics, for example, he examined visual perception and what we now call sensation, including variations in sensitivity, sensation of touch, perception of colors, perception of darkness, the psychological explanation of the moon illusion, and binocular vision.[3][4] Al-Biruni also employed such experimental methods in examining reaction time.[5]
Avicenna, similarly, did early work in the treatment of nafs-related illnesses, and developed a system for associating changes in the pulse rate with inner feelings. Avicenna also described phenomena we now recognize as neuropsychiatric conditions, including hallucination, insomnia, mania, nightmare, melancholia, dementia, epilepsy, paralysis, stroke, vertigo and tremor.[6]
Other medieval thinkers who discussed issues related to psychology included:
Ibn Zuhr (Avenzoar) described disorders similar to meningitis, intracranial thrombophlebitis, and mediastinal germ cell tumors; Averroes attributed photoreceptor properties to the retina; and Maimonides described rabies and belladonna intoxication.[10]
Witelo is considered a precursor of perception psychology. His Perspectiva contains much material in psychology, outlining views that are close to modern notions on the association of ideas and on the subconscious.

Beginnings of Western psychology

Many of the Ancients' writings would have been lost had it not been for the efforts of the Christian, Jewish and Persian translators in the House of Wisdom, the House of Knowledge, and other such institutions, whose glosses and commentaries were later translated into Latin in the 12th century. However, it is not clear how these sources first came to be used during the Renaissance, and their influence on what would later emerge as the discipline of psychology is a topic of scholarly debate.[13]

Etymology and early usage of word

The first use of the term "psychology" is often attributed to the German scholastic philosopher Rudolf Göckel (1547–1628, often known under the Latin form Rudolph Goclenius), who published the Psychologia hoc est de hominis perfectione, anima, ortu in Marburg in 1590. However, the term seems to have been 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 well not have been the very first usage, but it is the earliest documented use at present.
The term did not come 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 Denis Diderot's (1713–1780) Encyclopédie (1751–1784) and was popularized in France by Maine de Biran (1766–1824). In England, the term "psychology" overtook "mental philosophy" in the middle of the 19th century, especially in the work of William Hamilton (1788–1856) (see Danziger, 1997, chap. 3).

Enlightenment psychological thought

Early psychology was regarded as the study of the soul (in the Christian sense of the term).[citation needed] The modern philosophical form of psychology was heavily influenced by the works of René Descartes (1596–1650), and the debates that he generated, of which the most relevant were the objections to his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), published with the text. Also important to the later development of psychology were his Passions of the Soul (1649) and Treatise on Man (completed in 1632 but, along with the rest of The World, withheld from publication after Descartes heard of the Catholic Church's condemnation of Galileo; it was eventually published posthumously, in 1664).
Although not educated as a physician, Descartes did extensive anatomical studies of bulls' hearts and was considered important enough that William Harvey responded to him. Descartes was one of the first to endorse Harvey's model of the circulation of the blood, but disagreed with his metaphysical framework to explain it. Descartes dissected animals and human cadavers and as a result was familiar with the research on the flow of blood leading to the conclusion that the body is a complex device that is capable of moving without the soul, thus contradicting the "Doctrine of the Soul". The emergence of psychology as a medical discipline was given a major boost by Thomas Willis, not only in his reference to psychology (the "Doctrine of the Soul") in terms of brain function, but through his detailed 1672 anatomical work, and his treatise "De Anima Brutorum" ("Two Discourses on the Souls of Brutes"). However, Willis acknowledged the influence of Descartes's rival, Pierre Gassendi, as an inspiration for his work.
The philosophers of the British Empiricist and Associationist schools had a profound impact on the later course of experimental psychology. John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), George Berkeley's Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), and David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740) were particularly influential, as were David Hartley's Observations on Man (1749) and John Stuart Mill's A System of Logic. (1843). Also notable was the work of some Continental Rationalist philosophers, especially Baruch Spinoza's (1632–1677) On the Improvement of the Understanding (1662) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's (1646–1716) New Essays on Human Understanding (completed 1705, published 1765). Rauch, Frederick A. (1806–1841) Psychology, or a view of the human soul, including anthropology (1840).
The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard also influenced the humanistic, existential, and modern psychological schools with his works The Concept of Anxiety (1844) and The Sickness Unto Death (1849).

Transition to contemporary psychology

Also influential on the emerging discipline of psychology were debates surrounding the efficacy of Mesmerism (a precursor to hypnosis) and the value of phrenology. The former was developed in the 1770s by Austrian physician Anton Mesmer (1734–1815) who claimed to use the power of gravity, and later of "animal magnetism", to cure various physical and mental ills. As Mesmer and his treatment became increasingly fashionable in both Vienna and Paris, it also began to come under the scrutiny of suspicious officials. In 1784, an investigation was commissioned in Paris by King Louis XVI which included American ambassador Benjamin Franklin, chemist Antoine Lavoisier and physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin (later the popularizer of the guillotine). They concluded that Mesmer's method was useless. Abbé Faria, an Indo-Portuguese priest, revived public attention in animal magnetism. Unlike Mesmer, Faria claimed that the effect was 'generated from within the mind’ by the power of expectancy and cooperation of the patient. Although disputed, the "magnetic" tradition continued among Mesmer's students and others, resurfacing in England in the 19th century in the work of the physician John Elliotson (1791–1868), and the surgeons James Esdaile (1808–1859), and James Braid (1795–1860) (who reconceptualized it as property of the subject's mind rather than a "power" of the Mesmerist's, and relabeled it "hypnotism"). Mesmerism also continued to have a strong social (if not medical) following in England through the 19th century (see Winter, 1998). Faria's approach was significantly extended by the clinical and theoretical work of Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault and Hippolyte Bernheim of the Nancy School. Faria's theoretical position, and the subsequent experiences of those in the Nancy School made significant contributions to the later autosuggestion techniques of Émile Coué. It was adopted for the treatment of hysteria by the director of Paris's Salpêtrière Hospital, Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893).
Phrenology began as "organology", a theory of brain structure developed by the German physician, Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828). Gall argued that the brain is divided into a large number of functional "organs", each responsible for particular human mental abilities and dispositions – hope, love, spirituality, greed, language, the abilities to detect the size, form, and color of objects, etc. He argued that the larger each of these organs are, the greater the power of the corresponding mental trait. Further, he argued that one could detect the sizes of the organs in a given individual by feeling the surface of that person's skull. Gall's ultra-localizationist position with respect to the brain was soon attacked, most notably by French anatomist Pierre Flourens (1794–1867), who conducted ablation studies (on chickens) which purported to demonstrate little or no cerebral localization of function. Although Gall had been a serious (if misguided) researcher, his theory was taken by his assistant, Johann Gaspar Spurzheim (1776–1832), and developed into the profitable, popular enterprise of phrenology, which soon spawned, especially in Britain, a thriving industry of independent practitioners. In the hands of Scottish religious leader George Combe (1788–1858) (whose book The Constitution of Man was one of the best-sellers of the century), phrenology became strongly associated with political reform movements and egalitarian principles (see, e.g., Shapin, 1975; but also see van Wyhe, 2004). Phrenology soon spread to America as well, where itinerant practical phrenologists assessed the mental well-being of willing customers (see Sokal, 2001).

The Emergence of German Experimental Psychology

Until the middle of the 19th century, psychology was widely regarded as a branch of philosophy. For instance, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) declared in his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786) that psychology cannot be made into a "proper" science because its phenomena cannot be rendered in mathematical form, among other reasons. However, Kant proposed what looks to modern eyes very much like an empirical psychology in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798).
Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841) took issue with Kant's conclusion and attempted to develop a mathematical basis for a scientific psychology. Although he was unable to empirically realize the terms of his psychological theory, his efforts did lead scientists such as Ernst Heinrich Weber (1795–1878) and Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887) to attempt to measure the mathematical relationships between the physical magnitudes of external stimuli and the psychological intensities of the resulting sensations. Fechner (1860) is the originator of the term psychophysics.
Meanwhile, individual differences in reaction time had become a critical issue in the field of astronomy, under the name of the "personal equation". Early researches by Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel (1784–1846) in Königsberg and Adolf Hirsch led to the development of a highly precise chronoscope by Mathias Hipp that, in turn, was based on a design by Charles Wheatstone for a device that measured the speed of artillery shells (Edgell & Symes, 1906). Other timing instruments were borrowed from physiology (e.g., the kymograph) and adapted for use by the Utrecht ophthalmologist Franciscus Donders (1818–1899) and his student Johan Jacob de Jaager in measuring the duration of simple mental decisions.
The 19th century was also the period in which physiology, including neurophysiology, professionalized and saw some of its most significant discoveries. Among its leaders were Charles Bell (1774–1843) and François Magendie (1783–1855) who independently discovered the distinction between sensory and motor nerves in the spinal column, Johannes Müller (1801–1855) who proposed the doctrine of specific nerve energies, Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818–1896) who studied the electrical basis of muscle contraction, Pierre Paul Broca (1824–1880) and Carl Wernicke (1848–1905) who identified areas of the brain responsible for different aspects of language, as well as Gustav Fritsch (1837–1927), Eduard Hitzig (1839–1907), and David Ferrier (1843–1924) who localized sensory and motor areas of the brain. One of the principal founders of experimental physiology, Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894), conducted studies of a wide range of topics that would later be of interest to psychologists – the speed of neural transmission, the natures of sound and color, and of our perceptions of them, etc. In the 1860s, while he held a position in Heidelberg, Helmholtz engaged as an assistant a young M.D. named Wilhelm Wundt. Wundt employed the equipment of the physiology laboratory – chronoscope, kymograph, and various peripheral devices – to address more complicated psychological questions than had not, until then, been investigated experimentally. In particular he was interested in the nature of apperception – the point at which a perception occupies the central focus of conscious awareness.
In 1874 Wundt took up a professorship in Zürich, where he published his landmark textbook, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie (Principles of Physiological Psychology, 1874). Moving to a more prestigious professorship in Leipzig in 1875, Wundt founded a laboratory specifically dedicated to original research in experimental psychology in 1879, the first laboratory of its kind in the world. In 1883, he launched a journal in which to publish the results of his, and his students', research, Philosophische Studien (Philosophical Studies) (For more on Wundt, see, e.g., Bringmann & Tweney, 1980; Rieber & Robinson, 2001). Wundt attracted a large number of students not only from Germany, but also from abroad. Among his most influential American students were G. Stanley Hall (who had already obtained a PhD from Harvard under the supervision of William James), James McKeen Cattell (who was Wundt's first assistant), and Frank Angell. The most influential British student was Edward Bradford Titchener (who later became professor at Cornell).
Experimental psychology laboratories were soon also established at Berlin by Carl Stumpf (1848–1936) and at Göttingen by Georg Elias Müller (1850–1934). Another major German experimental psychologist of the era, though he did not direct his own research institute, was Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909).
Experimentation was not the only approach to psychology in the German-speaking world at this time. Starting in the 1890s, employing the case study technique, the Viennese physician Sigmund Freud developed and applied the methods of hypnosis, free association, and dream interpretation to reveal putatively unconscious beliefs and desires that he argued were the underlying causes of his patients' "hysteria." He dubbed this approach psychoanalysis. Freudian psychoanalysis is particularly notable for the emphasis it places on the course of an individual's sexual development in pathogenesis. Psychoanalytic concepts have had a strong and lasting influence on Western culture, particularly on the arts. Although its scientific contribution is still a matter of debate, both Freudian and Jungian psychology revealed the existence of compartmentalized thinking, in which some behavior and thoughts are hidden from consciousness – yet operative as part of the complete personality. Hidden agendas, a bad conscience, or a sense of guilt, are examples of the existence of mental processes in which the individual is not conscious, through choice or lack of understanding, of some aspects of their personality and subsequent behavior.
Psychoanalysis examines mental processes which affect the ego. An understanding of these theoretically allows the individual greater choice and consciousness with a healing effect in neurosis and occasionally in psychosis, both of which Richard von Krafft-Ebing defined as "diseases of the personality". Carl G. Jung was an associate of Freud's who later broke with him over Freud's emphasis on sexuality. Working with concepts of the unconscious first noted during the 1800s (by John Stuart Mill, Krafft-Ebing, Pierre Janet, Théodore Flournoy and others), Jung defined four mental functions which relate to and define the ego, the conscious self. Sensation (which tell consciousness that something is there), feelings (which consist of value judgments, and motivate our reaction to what we have sensed), intellect (an analytic function that compares this event to all known events and gives it a class and category, allowing us to understand a situation within a historical process, personal or public), and intuition (a mental function with access to deep behavioral patterns, intuition can suggest unexpected solutions or predict unforeseen consequences, "as if seeing around corners" as Jung put it). Jung insisted on an empirical psychology in which theories must be based on facts and not on the psychologist's projections or expectations.

Early American Psychology

Around 1875, the Harvard physiology instructor (as he then was), William James, opened a small experimental psychology demonstration laboratory for use with his courses. The laboratory was never used, in those days, for original research, and so controversy remains as to whether it is to be regarded as the "first" experimental psychology laboratory or not. In 1878, James gave a series of lectures at Johns Hopkins University entitled "The Senses and the Brain and their Relation to Thought" in which he argued, contra Thomas Henry Huxley, that consciousness is not epiphenomenal, but must have an evolutionary function, or it would not have been naturally selected in humans. The same year James was contracted by Henry Holt to write a textbook on the "new" experimental psychology. If he had written it quickly, it would have been the first English-language textbook on the topic. It was twelve years, however, before his two-volume Principles of Psychology would be published. In the meantime textbooks were published by George Trumbull Ladd of Yale (1887) and James Mark Baldwin then of Lake Forest College (1889).
In 1879 Charles Sanders Peirce was hired as a philosophy instructor at Johns Hopkins University. Although better known for his astronomical and philosophical work, Peirce also conducted what are perhaps the first American psychology experiments, on the subject of color vision, published in 1877 in the American Journal of Science (see Cadwallader, 1974). Peirce and his student Joseph Jastrow published "On Small Differences in Sensation" in the Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, in 1884. In 1882, Peirce was joined at Johns Hopkins by G. Stanley Hall, who opened the first American research laboratory devoted to experimental psychology in 1883. Peirce was forced out of his position by scandal and Hall was awarded the only professorship in philosophy at Johns Hopkins. In 1887 Hall founded the American Journal of Psychology, which published work primarily emanating from his own laboratory. In 1888 Hall left his Johns Hopkins professorship for the presidency of the newly founded Clark University, where he remained for the rest of his career.
Soon, experimental psychology laboratories were opened at the University of Pennsylvania (in 1887, by James McKeen Cattell), Indiana University (1888, William Lowe Bryan), the University of Wisconsin (1888, Joseph Jastrow), Clark University (1889, Edmund Sanford), the McLean Asylum (1889, William Noyes), and the University of Nebraska (1889, Harry Kirke Wolfe). However, it was Princeton University's Eno Hall, built in 1924, that became the first university building in the United States to be devoted entirely to experimental psychology when it became the home of the university's Department of Psychology.[14]
In 1890, William James' Principles of Psychology finally appeared, and rapidly became the most influential textbook in the history of American psychology. It laid many of the foundations for the sorts of questions that American psychologists would focus on for years to come. The book's chapters on consciousness, emotion, and habit were particularly agenda-setting.
One of those who felt the impact of James' Principles was John Dewey, then professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan. With his junior colleagues, James Hayden Tufts (who founded the psychology laboratory at Michigan) and George Herbert Mead, and his student James Rowland Angell, this group began to reformulate psychology, focusing more strongly on the social environment and on the activity of mind and behavior than the psychophysics-inspired physiological psychology of Wundt and his followers had heretofore. Tufts left Michigan for another junior position at the newly founded University of Chicago in 1892. A year later, the senior philosopher at Chicago resigned, and Tufts recommended to Chicago president William Rainey Harper that Dewey be offered the position. After initial reluctance, Dewey was hired in 1894. Dewey soon filled out the department with his Michigan companions Mead and Angell. These four formed the core of the Chicago School of psychology.
In 1892, G. Stanley Hall invited 30-some psychologists and philosophers to a meeting at Clark with the purpose of founding a new American Psychological Association (APA). (On the history of the APA, see Evans, Staudt Sexton, & Cadwallader, 1992.) The first annual meeting of the APA was held later that year, hosted by George Stuart Fullerton at the University of Pennsylvania. Almost immediately tension arose between the experimentally and philosophically inclined members of the APA. Edward Bradford Titchener and Lightner Witmer launched an attempt to either establish a separate "Section" for philosophical presentations, or to eject the philosophers altogether. After nearly a decade of debate a Western Philosophical Association was founded and held its first meeting in 1901 at the University of Nebraska. The following year (1902), an American Philosophical Association held its first meeting at Columbia University. These ultimately became the Central and Eastern Divisions of the modern American Philosophical Association.
In 1894, a number of psychologists, unhappy with the parochial editorial policies of the American Journal of Psychology approached Hall about appointing an editorial board and opening the journal out to more psychologists not within Hall's immediate circle. Hall refused, so James McKeen Cattell (then of Columbia) and James Mark Baldwin (then of Princeton) co-founded a new journal, Psychological Review, which rapidly grew to become a major outlet for American psychological researchers.
Beginning in 1895, James Mark Baldwin and Edward Bradford Titchener (Cornell) entered into an increasingly acrimonious dispute over the correct interpretation of some anomalous reaction time findings that had come from the Wundt laboratory (originally reported by Ludwig Lange and James McKeen Cattell). In 1896, James Rowland Angell and Addison W. Moore (Chicago) published a series of experiments in Psychological Review appearing to show that Baldwin was the more correct of the two. However, they interpreted their findings in light of John Dewey's new approach to psychology, which rejected the traditional stimulus-response understanding of the reflex arc in favor of a "circular" account in which what serves as "stimulus" and what as "response" depends on how one views the situation. The full position was laid out in Dewey's landmark article "The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology" which also appeared in Psychological Review in 1896.
Titchener responded in Philosophical Review (1898, 1899) by distinguishing his austere "structural" approach to psychology from what he termed the Chicago group's more applied "functional" approach, and thus began the first major theoretical rift in American psychology between Structuralism and Functionalism. The group at Columbia, led by James McKeen Cattell, Edward L. Thorndike, and Robert S. Woodworth, was often regarded as a second (after Chicago) "school" of American Functionalism (see, e.g., Heidbredder, 1933), although they never used that term themselves, because their research focused on the applied areas of mental testing, learning, and education. Dewey was elected president of the APA in 1899, while Titchener dropped his membership in the association. (In 1904, Titchener formed his own group, eventually known as the Society of Experimental Psychologists.) Jastrow promoted the functionalist approach in his APA presidential address of 1900, and Angell adopted Titchener's label explicitly in his influential textbook of 1904 and his APA presidential address of 1906. In reality, Structuralism was, more or less, confined to Titchener and his students. Functionalism, broadly speaking, with its more practical emphasis on action and application, better suited the American cultural "style" and, perhaps more important, was more popular among university trustees and private funding agencies.

Early French Psychology

In no small measure because of the conservatism of the reign of Louis Napoléon (president, 1848–1852; emperor as "Napoléon III", 1852–1870), academic philosophy in France through the middle part of the 19th century was controlled by members of the eclectic and spiritualist schools, led by figures such as Victor Cousin (1792–1867), Théodore Jouffroy (1796–1842), and Paul Janet (1823–1899). These were traditional metaphysical schools, opposed to regarding psychology as a natural science. With the ouster of Napoléon III after the débacle of the Franco-Prussian war, new paths, both political and intellectual, became possible. From the 1870 forward, a steadily increasing interest in positivist, materialist, evolutionary, and deterministic approaches to psychology developed, influenced by, among others, the work of Hyppolyte Taine (1828–1893) (e.g., De L'Intelligence, 1870) and Théodule Ribot (1839–1916) (e.g., La Psychologie Anglaise Contemporaine, 1870).
In 1876, Ribot founded Revue Philosophique (the same year as Mind was founded in Britain), which for the next generation would be virtually the only French outlet for the "new" psychology (Plas, 1997). Although not a working experimentalist himself, Ribot's many books were to have profound influence on the next generation of psychologists. These included especially his L'Hérédité Psychologique (1873) and La Psychologie Allemande Contemporaine (1879). In the 1880s, Ribot's interests turned to psychopathology, writing books on disorders of memory (1881), will (1883), and personality (1885), and where he attempted to bring to these topics the insights of general psychology. Although in 1881 he lost a Sorbonne professorship in the History of Psychological Doctrines to traditionalist Jules Soury (1842–1915), from 1885 to 1889 he taught experimental psychology at the Sorbonne. In 1889 he was awarded a chair at the Collège de France in Experimental and Comparative Psychology, which he held until 1896 (Nicolas, 2002).
France's primary psychological strength lay in the field of psychopathology. The chief neurologist at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893), had been using the recently revivied and renamed (see above) practice of hypnoisis to "experimentally" produce hysterical symptoms in some of his patients. Two of his students, Alfred Binet (1857–1911) and Pierre Janet (1859–1947), adopted and expanded this practice in their own work.
In 1889, Binet and his colleague Henri Beaunis (1830–1921) co-founded, at the Sorbonne, the first experimental psychology laboratory in France. Just five years later, in 1894, Beaunis, Binet, and a third colleague, Victor Henri (1872–1940), co-founded the first French journal dedicated to experimental psychology, L'Année Psychologique. In the first years of the 20th century, Binet was requested by the French government to develop a method for the newly founded universal public education system to identify students who would require extra assistance to master the standardized curriculum. In response, with his collaborator Théodore Simon (1873–1961), he developed the Binet-Simon Intelligence Test, first published in 1905 (revised in 1908 and 1911). Although the test was used to effect in France, it would find its greatest success (and controversy) in the United States, where it was translated in by Henry H. Goddard (1866–1957), the director of the Training School for the Feebleminded in Vineland, New Jersey, and his assistant, Elizabeth Kite (a translation of the 1905 edition appeared in the Vineland Bulletin in 1908, but much better known was Kite's 1916 translation of the 1908 edition, which appeared in book form). The translated test was used by Goddard to advance his eugenics agenda with respect to those he deemed congenitally feeble-minded, especially immigrants from non-Western European countries. Binet's test was revised by Stanford professor Lewis M. Terman (1877–1956) into the Stanford-Binet IQ test in 1916. With Binet's death in 1911, the Sorbonne laboratory and L'Année Psychologique fell to Henri Piéron (1881–1964). Piéron's orientation was more physiological that Binet's had been.
Pierre Janet became the leading psychiatrist in France, being appointed to the Salpêtrière (1890–1894), the Sorbonne (1895–1920), and the Collège de France (1902–1936). In 1904, he co-founded the Journale de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique with fellow Sorbonne professor Georges Dumas (1866–1946), a student and faithful follower of Ribot. Whereas Janet's teacher, Charcot, had focused on the neurologial bases of hysteria, Janet was concerned to develop a scientific approach to psychopathology as a mental disorder. His theory that mental pathology results from conflict between unconscious and conscious parts of the mind, and that unconscious mental contents may emerge as symptoms with symbolic meanings led to a public priority dispute with Sigmund Freud.

Early British Psychology

Although the British had the first scholarly journal dedicated to the topic of psychology – Mind, founded in 1876 by Alexander Bain and edited by George Croom Robertson – it was quite a long while before experimental psychology developed there to challenge the strong tradition of "mental philosophy." The experimental reports that appeared in Mind in the first two decades of its existence were almost entirely authored by Americans, especially G. Stanley Hall and his students (notably Henry Herbert Donaldson) and James McKeen Cattell.
Francis Galton's (1822–1911) anthropometric laboratory opened in 1884. There people were tested on a wide variety of physical (e.g., strength of blow) and perceptual (e.g., visual acuity) attributes. In 1886 Galton was visited by James McKeen Cattell who would later adapt Galton's techniques in developing his own mental testing research program in the United States. Galton was not primarily a psychologist, however. The data he accumulated in the anthropometric laboratory primarily went toward supporting his case for eugenics. To help interpret the mounds of data he accumulated, Galton developed a number of important statistical techniques, including the precursors to the scatterplot and the product-moment correlation coefficient (later perfected by Karl Pearson, 1857–1936).
Soon after, Charles Spearman (1863–1945) developed the correlation-based statistical procedure of factor analysis in the process of building a case for his two-factor theory of intelligence, published in 1901. Spearman believed that people have an inborn level of general intelligence or g which can be crystallized into a specific skill in any of a number of narrow content area (s, or specific intelligence).
Laboratory psychology of the kind practiced in Germany and the United States was slow in coming to Britain. Although the philosopher James Ward (1843–1925) urged Cambridge University to establish a psychophysics laboratory from the mid-1870s forward, it was not until the 1891 that they put so much as £50 toward some basic apparatus (Bartlett, 1937). A laboratory was established through the assistance of the physiology department in 1897 and a lectureship in psychology was established which first went to W. H. R. Rivers (1864–1922). Soon Rivers was joined by C. S. Myers (1873–1946) and William McDougall (1871–1938). This group showed as much interest in anthropology as psychology, going with Alfred Cort Haddon (1855–1940) on the famed Torres Straits expedition of 1898.
In 1901 the Psychological Society was established (which renamed itself the British Psychological Society in 1906), and in 1904 Ward and Rivers co-founded the British Journal of Psychology.

Psychology & Alchemy

The earliest recorded practices of alchemy come from Ancient China. These specifically take the form of Taoist writings that detail alchemical practices. The goal of this Chinese alchemy was to purify the Mind, Body, and Soul through medicine and knowledge of the body.[16] Much like Western alchemy the goal of Chinese alchemy was to gain immortality through the consumption of particular elixirs. These practices would eventually evolve into a system of energy practices where the goal was to open the body up to Qi and balance the five elements (Chinese philosophy) within the body. The view that a person's well-being was based on having their inner elements balanced would later be adopted by Hippocrates who would greatly influence the philosophy of Galen which would dominate Western psychological thought for centuries.[17]
The history of Western Alchemy allegedly begins in Egypt with the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus.[18] Occult history states that Hermes was the greatest teacher of all-time and that he is the one that brought the gift of writing to Man. He is also believed to have ascended to godhood in the form of Thoth and would go on to be the Greek god Hermes. At the core of Hermes’ teachings was that the entire Universe was created by the Mind.[18] This theory would eventually emerge in the philosophy of Plato.[19] Two other teachings credited to Hermes appear even earlier in the philosophy of Heraclitus.[20] Both of these thinkers proposed that the world is in constant motion and that opposites are not separate entities, but the same thing in different degrees. Hermes took these ideas further and applied them to the Mind. He claimed that a person's Mind was constantly changing between different degrees, but by exerting willpower one could stop this motion and eventually master it.[18]
In Western history the most important of Hermes’ teachings were those regarding alchemy. It is claimed that Hermes not only gave writing to the Earth, but also the art of alchemy. The most basic teachings of which are said to have been given in the form of the Emerald Tablet. In the Western school of thought, alchemy was often portrayed with having the ultimate goal of creating the Philosopher's Stone, a substance that allegedly able to turn any mineral into gold as well as create an elixir that granted immortality.[21] In the 13th century, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas contributed to laying the groundwork for the scientific method.[22]
After Magnus and Aquinas, the first true alchemist of the Middle Ages was Roger Bacon. Bacon, a Franciscan believed that knowledge could come from authority, reasoning, and experience.[22] It was his firm belief however that knowledge was only effective if it came through experience. It is also believed that Bacon is one of the main perpetuators of the Philosopher's Stone story.[23]
At this point alchemy was widely accepted by the Church as a way to learn more about theology. It was believed that if a process could turn minerals into gold, then a similar process could be applied to Man to purify its mind, body, and soul. After the writings of William of Ockham alchemy began to fall into disfavor with the Church and the clergy was banned from studying it. This led to a long period where most of the philosophy of alchemy was neglected and instead it became more occult in nature.[23]
Alchemy remained in this state until the Renaissance with the work of Paracelsus. Paracelsus believed that through observation and experimentation there was much to be learned about the human body. While accepting most of the neo-Platonic, Pythagorean, and Hermetical philosophies, Paracelsus rejected most of the magical writings that had been incorporated into alchemy. Through his research Paracelsus would go on to become the first major proponent for medicine. He believed that the human body grew sick because of an imbalance in chemicals and that balance was restored through various tinctures and elixirs.[23]
Following Paracelsus’ work alchemy quickly faded away in favor of modern scientific practices. While alchemy had helped create many of the principles science would follow it was discarded as an esoteric pseudoscience. Beginning in the 19th century and continuing throughout the 20th century alchemical writings would lose much of the jargon and esoterica that had shrouded them for centuries. The writings now reflected a more personal form of alchemy. The goal of alchemy was no longer to create the Philosopher's Stone, but to transform one's self into a perfect being. The belief was that one could change their Mind and by extension their Body and Soul through meditation and willpower.[24]
Carl Jung would pick up on this belief and apply it to psychology in 1944 with the release of his book Psychology and Alchemy. Jung argued that the symbols used by the alchemists of the Renaissance and Medieval Europe were not merely esoterica, but were in fact manifestations of the psyche. Jung would then go on to show how the Great Work of the alchemists was a symbol for the reintegration of the psyche in a person. This would lead Jung to conclude that spirituality was key in a person's mental well being.[25]
Following Jung's research into alchemy it started gaining followers once more. One of the most important Hermeticists of the 20th century was Franz Bardon. Bardon wrote three books on his view of the Universe and how one could learn to actualize their true potential as well as contact with beings from different planes of existence. Of these books the foundation of his entire metaphysics is Initiation Into Hermetics. In this book Bardon takes the concept originally proposed by the Chinese and Hippocrates that the body is composed of elements and that these elements must be in harmony. More so than alchemists before him, Bardon placed a great emphasis on a person's Will. He claimed that not only could one learn to control the flow of their thoughts through willpower, but they could eventually change their personality and the world around them using willpower alone.[26]
Currently alchemy relies heavily on the writings that Jung laid down, while there are still a few that follow the older traditions. Within the field of psychology there are findings that have begun to mirror those claims of the alchemists of the early 20th century, including Bardon. Throughout most of the 20th century it was believed that physical objects could not be changed through willpower. This belief is changing with research done by Jeffrey M. Schwartz. In the late 80s and 90s Schwartz ran studies on patients suffering from OCD and found that by employing meditation and using great amounts of willpower these patients were able to change the way their brains were organized.[27]

The Invisibility of Women in Psychology

At the turn of the 19th century Americans women were force to conform to what society called “the feminine role.” This role starts at birth when little girls were raised to become caretakers of the home. The path to motherhood consisted of developing and perfecting domestic skills early on in life to marriage and finally motherhood. While women were left doing domestic work, men were out attending college and working outside of the home. The path to motherhood was not prescribed to every American woman it was only guaranteed to “northern white women of the middle and upper classes.” [28]
The role of women did not change until the Civil War when men were fighting in the front line and women were back home taking jobs that were left by men. The war opened a world of opportunity for women, from working in factories and farms to becoming nurses and doctors. Women were also able to become teachers in schools and colleges, which allowed them to gain experience.[28] Once society saw women as more than mothers and domestic help, they were able to enhance their education by going to college. With the ever increasing amount of women in college studies showed a decline in marriage rates and motherhood which lead people to fear that the survival of the white Protestant middle class was in jeopardy.[29] These fears lead to psychologist G. Stanley Hall’s observation that education was castrating women. Although there was a never ending growing fear and protest this did not stop the amount of women who pursued higher education.[30]
When it comes to psychology the names that are often recognized are Sigmund Freud, B.F. Skinner, and Jean Piaget but very few recognize the works that women such as Mary Whiton Calkins, Christine Ladd-Franklin, Virginia Staudt Sexton, Jacqueline Jarrett Goodnow, Clara Mayo, and others have contributed to the development of psychology. Many psychology textbooks are dedicated to the contribution that men have had on psychology while neglecting the essence of women in psychology.
When taking a history of psychology course one learns about the persons behind the various theories of color vision. One classical theory of color vision is that of Ladd-Franklin, at first glance someone would assume that the theory was contributed by Mr. Ladd and Mr. Franklin but in fact it is a theory that was contributed by a Mrs. Christine Ladd-Franklin, a woman that hyphenated her surname after marriage.[31] This is one of the many examples of how women are overlooked when studying the history of psychology.(sumber:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_psychology)
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