History of Psychology
“Know thyself”- one of the briefest and most famous pieces of advice, inscribed on the
temple at Delphi
Psychology as a discipline of study has not been around for very long. In fact, the term
Psychology did not even exist until 1520, and most of the psychological research that
informs our current view of the subject has only been done in the last 150 years or so.
So, where does Psychology come from? It is generally agreed that psychology originally
came from the study of philosophy. You might then ask, what is philosophy and who
were the first philosophers? Well, philosophy is defined as 1. love of, or the search for
wisdom or knowledge 2. theory or logical analysis of the principles underlying conduct,
thought, knowledge, and the nature of the universe. As you may remember, there was
an intellectual outburst that appeared in the Greek city states of the fifth and fourth
centuries B.C. For various reasons, there was an absolute flowering of Greek thought,
science and art. One of the most notable aspects of this intellectual outburst was the
abrupt appearance and burgeoning of a new area of knowledge, philosophy. A small
number of reflective upper- class men, who had neither scientific equipment nor hard
data but were driven by a passion to understand the world and themselves, managed by
pure speculation and reasoning to conceive of, and offer answers to, many of the
enduring questions of cosmogony, cosmology, physics, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics,
and psychology. Thus, we could say that psychology is a direct descendant of philosophy.
The philosophers themselves did not use the term psychology or regard it as a distinct
area of knowledge, and they were less interested in the subject than in more fundamental
ones like the structure of matter and the nature of causality. Nonetheless, they identified
and offered hypotheses about nearly all the significant problems of psychology that have
concerned scholars and scientists ever since. Among them:
* Is there only one substance, or is “mind” something different from “matter”?
* Do we have souls? Do they exist after the body dies?
* How are mind and body connected? Is mind part of soul, and if so, can it exist apart
from the body?
* Is human nature the product of inborn tendencies or of experience and upbringing?
(This is referred to most commonly as the nature vs. nurture debate)
* How do we know what we know? Are our ideas built into our minds, or do we develop
them from our perceptions and experiences?
* How does perception work? Are our impressions of the world around us true
representations of what is out there? How can we know whether they are or not?
* Which is the right road to true knowledge-pure reasoning or data gathered by
observation?
* What are the principles of valid thinking?
* What are the causes of invalid thinking?
* Does the mind rule the emotions, or vice versa?
There is scarcely a major topic in today’s textbooks of introductory psychology that was
not anticipated, at least in rudimentary form, by the Greek philosophers. What is even
more impressive, their goal was the same as that of contemporary psychologists: to
discover the true causes of human behavior- those unseen processes of the mind which
take place in response to external events and other stimuli.
Some people believe that the explorations of the interior world are as important, or even
more important, than exploration of the external world. Historians are inclined to name
technological advances as the great milestones of culture, among them the development
of the plow, the discovery of smelting and metal working, the invention of the clock,
printing press, steam power, electric engine, light bulb, semiconductor, and computer.
But possibly even more transforming than any of these was the recognition by Greek
philosophers and their intellectual descendants that human beings could examine,
comprehend, and eventually even guide or control their own thought processes, emotions
and resulting behavior.
With that realization we became something new and different on earth: the only animal
that, by examining its own cerebration and behavior, could alter them. This, surely, was a
giant step in evolution.
Hippocrates
When the early philosopher-psychologists concluded that thought occurs in the mind, it
was only natural that they would also wonder why our thoughts are sometimes clear and
sometimes muddled, and why most of us are mentally healthy but others are mentally ill.
Unlike their ancestors, who had believed mental dysfunction to be the work of gods or
demons, they sought naturalistic answers. The most widely accepted of these was that of
Hippocrates (460-377), the Father of Medicine. His greatest contribution was to divorce
medicine from religion and superstition. He maintained that all diseases rather than being
the work of the gods, have natural causes. The idea of not attributing human behavior and
circumstances to the pleasure or displeasure of the gods was an important step in the
development of future psychology.
Socrates
“The unexamined life is not worth living” – Socrates
Socrates, although he lived in Athens over two thousand years ago, subtly affected the
development of psychology. To help his students attain knowledge, Socrates relied not on
lectures but on a wholly different educational method. He asked his students questions
that seemingly led them step by step to discover the truth for themselves (this will sound
familiar later in the year when we study humanistic psychotherapy). This technique is
known as dialectic or “the Socratic method.” According to that theory, knowledge is
recollection; we learn not from experience but from reasoning, which leads us to discover
knowledge that exists within us. In short, Socrates was basically saying that common
sense could be revealed by looking within ourselves, which you will soon learn is known
as introspection.