History of psychology
Psychology is defined as "the scientific study of behavior and mental processes". Philosophical interest in the human mind and behavior dates back to the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Persia, Greece, China, and India.[1]
For the discipline, see History of Psychology (discipline). For the journal, see History of Psychology (journal).
Psychology as a field of experimental study began in 1854 in Leipzig, Germany when Gustav Fechner created the first theory of how judgments about sensory experiences are made and how to experiment on them. Fechner's theory, recognized today as Signal Detection Theory, foreshadowed the development of statistical theories of comparative judgment and thousands of experiments based on his ideas (Link, S. W. Psychological Science, 1995). In 1879, Wilhelm Wundt founded the first psychological laboratory dedicated exclusively to psychological research in Leipzig, Germany. Wundt was also the first person to refer to himself as a psychologist. A notable precursor to Wundt was Ferdinand Ueberwasser (1752–1812), who designated himself Professor of Empirical Psychology and Logic in 1783 and gave lectures on empirical psychology at the Old University of Münster, Germany.[2] 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, Sigmund Freud independently developed an approach to the study of the mind called psychoanalysis, which became a highly influential theory in psychology.[3]
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 through operant conditioning. Behaviorism proposed emphasizing the study of overt behavior, due to the fact that it could be quantified and easily measured. Early behaviorists considered the study of the mind too vague for productive scientific study. However, Skinner and his colleagues did study thinking as a form of covert behavior to which they could apply the same principles as overt behavior.
The final decades of the 20th century saw 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 cognitive 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.
There are conceptual divisions of psychology in "forces" or "waves," based on its schools and historical trends. This terminology was popularized among the psychologists to differentiate a growing humanism in therapeutic practice from the 1930s onwards, called the "third force," in response to the deterministic tendencies of Watson's behaviourism and Freud's psychoanalysis.[4] Proponents of Humanistic psychology included Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Gordon Allport, Erich Fromm, and Rollo May. Their humanistic concepts are also related to existential psychology, Viktor Frankl's logotherapy, positive psychology (which has Martin Seligman as one of the leading proponents), C. R. Cloninger's approach to well-being and character development,[5] as well as to transpersonal psychology, incorporating such concepts as spirituality, self-transcendence, self-realization, self-actualization, and mindfulness.[6] In cognitive behavioral psychotherapy, similar terms have also been incorporated, by which "first wave" is considered the initial behavioral therapy; a "second wave", Albert Ellis's cognitive therapy; and a "third wave", with the acceptance and commitment therapy, which emphasizes one's pursuit of values, methods of self-awareness, acceptance and psychological flexibility, instead of challenging negative thought schemes.[7] A "fourth wave" would be the one that incorporates transpersonal concepts and positive flourishing, in a way criticized by some researchers for its heterogeneity and theoretical direction dependent on the therapist's view.[8] A "fifth wave" has now been proposed by a group of researchers seeking to integrate earlier concepts into a unifying theory.[9][10]
Many cultures throughout history have speculated on the nature of the mind, heart, soul, spirit, brain, etc. For instance, in Ancient Egypt, the Edwin Smith Papyrus contains an early description of the brain, and some speculations on its functions (described in a medical/surgical context) and the descriptions could be related to Imhotep who was the first Egyptian physician who anatomized and discovered the body of the human being.[11] 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 two contain incantations to ward off evil.
Ancient Greek philosophers, from Thales (fl. 550 BC) through even to the Roman period, developed an elaborate theory of what they termed the psuchẽ (psyche) (from which the first half of "psychology" is derived), as well as other "psychological" terms – nous, thumos, logistikon, etc.[12] Classical Greece (fifth century BCE), philosophers taught "naturalism", the belief that laws of nature shape our world, as opposed to gods and demons determining human fate. Alcmaeon, for example, believed the brain, not the heart, was the "organ of thought."He tracked the ascending sensory nerves from the body to the brain, theorizing that mental activity originated in the region where the central nervous system is located and that the cause of mental illness resided within the brain. He applied this understanding to classify mental diseases and treatments. One of the most influential Ancient Greek influences on psychology came from the accounts of Plato, (especially in the Republic),[13] Pythagoras and of Aristotle (esp. Peri Psyches, also known by its Latin title, De Anima).[14]
Plato's tripartite theory of the soul, Chariot Allegory and concepts such as eros defined the subsequent Western Philosophy views of the psyche and anticipated modern psychological proposals. For example, concepts such as id, ego, super-ego and libido were interpreted by psychoanalysts as having been anticipated by Plato, to the extent that "in 1920, Freud decided to present Plato as the precursor of his own theory, as part of a strategy directed to define the scientific and cultural collocation of psychoanalysis".[15]
Other Hellenistic philosophers, namely 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.[16] 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, c. 21 BC–61 AD) notes the division of human nature into two temperaments or opposing spirits of either veracity or perversity [17]
Walter M. Freeman proposes that Thomism is the philosophical system explaining cognition that is most compatible with neurodynamics, in a 2008 article in the journal Mind and Matter entitled "Nonlinear Brain Dynamics and Intention According to Aquinas".[18]
In Asia, China had a long history of administering tests of ability as part of its education system. Chinese texts from 2500 years ago mention neuropsychiatric illness, including descriptions of mania and psychosis with or without epilepsy. "Imbalance" was the mechanism of psychosis. Other conditions described include confusion, visual illusions, intoxication, stress, and even malingering. Psychological theories about stages of human development can be traced to the time of Confucius, about 2500 years ago.[19]
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). It has been cited that this was the first psychology experiment.[20][21]
India had a theory of "the self" in its Vedanta philosophical writings. Additionally, Indians thought about the individual's self as being enclosed by different levels known as koshas.[22] Additionally, the Sankya philosophy said that the mind has 5 components, including manas (lower mind), ahankara (sense of I-ness), chitta (memory bank of mind), buddhi (intellect), and atman (self/soul). Patanjali was one of the founders of the yoga tradition, sometime between 200 and 400 BC (pre-dating Buddhist psychology) and a student of the Vedas. He developed the science of breath and mind and wrote his knowledge in the form of between 194 and 196 aphorisms called the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. He developed modern Yoga for psychological resilience and balance . He is reputed to have used yoga therapeutically for anxiety, depression and mental disorders as common then as now.[23][24] Buddhist philosophies have developed several psychological theories (see Buddhism and psychology), formulating interpretations of the mind and concepts such as aggregates (skandhas), emptiness (sunyata), non-self (anatta), mindfulness and Buddha-nature, which are addressed today by theorists of humanistic and transpersonal psychology.[25][26] Several Buddhist lineages have developed notions analogous to those of modern Western psychology, such as the unconscious, personal development and character improvement,[27][28] the latter being part of the Noble Eightfold Path and expressed, for example, in the Tathagatagarbha Sutra.[29] Hinayana traditions, such as the Theravada, focus more on individual meditation, while Mahayana traditions also emphasize the attainment of a Buddha nature of wisdom (prajña) and compassion (karuṇā) in the realization of the boddhisattva ideal, but affirming it more metaphysically, in which charity and helping sentient beings is cosmically fundamental. Buddhist monk and scholar D. T. Suzuki describes the importance of the individual's inner enlightenment and the self-realization of the mind. Researcher David Germano, in his thesis on Longchenpa, also shows the importance of self-actualization in the dzogchen teaching lineage.[28]
Medieval Muslim physicians also developed practices to treat patients with a variety of "diseases of the mind".[30]
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.[31] 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.[31]
Avicenna, similarly, did early work in the treatment of nafs-related illnesses, and developed a system for associating changes in the mind with inner feelings. Avicenna also described phenomena we now recognize as neuropsychiatric conditions, including hallucination, mania, nightmare, melancholia, dementia, epilepsy and tremor.[32]
Ancient and medieval thinkers who discussed issues related to psychology included:
Maimonides described rabies and belladonna intoxication.[34]
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 idea and on the subconscious.
Emergence of German experimental psychology[edit]
Until the middle of the 19th century, psychology was widely regarded as a branch of philosophy. Whether it could become an independent scientific discipline was questioned already earlier on: Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) declared in his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786) that psychology might perhaps never become a "proper" natural science because its phenomena cannot be quantified, among other reasons.[57] Kant proposed an alternative conception of an empirical investigation of human thought, feeling, desire, and action, and lectured on these topics for over twenty years (1772/73–1795/96). His Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), which resulted from these lectures, looks like an empirical psychology in many respects.[58]
Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841) took issue with what he viewed as 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 Matthäus 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., Carl Ludwig's 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 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 physician 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, 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 1864 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 (who founded laboratories at both Cornell and Stanford). 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).
Early American[edit]
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, at that time, 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 The 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).
William James was one of the founders of the American Society for Psychical Research in 1885, which studied psychic phenomena (parapsychology), before the creation of the American Psychological Association in 1892. James was also president of the British society that inspired the United States' one, the Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882, which investigated psychology and the paranormal on topics such as mediumship, dissociation, telepathy and hypnosis, and it innovated research in psychology, by which, according to science historian Andreas Sommer, were "devised methodological innovations such as randomized study designs" and conducted "the first experiments investigating the psychology of eyewitness testimony (Hodgson and Davey, 1887), [and] empirical and conceptual studies illuminating mechanisms of dissociation and hypnotism"; Its members also initiated and organised the International Congresses of Physiological/Experimental psychology.[61]
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.[62]
In 1890, William James' The 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, Charles Strong, 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.[63][64]
Beginning in 1895, James Mark Baldwin (Princeton, Hopkins) 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. (It was Titchener's former student E. G. Boring, writing A History of Experimental Psychology [1929/1950, the most influential textbook of the 20th century about the discipline], who launched the common idea that the structuralism/functionalism debate was the primary fault line in American psychology at the turn of the 20th century.) Functionalism, broadly speaking, with its more practical emphasis on action and application, better suited the American cultural "style" and, perhaps more important, was more appealing to pragmatic university trustees and private funding agencies.
Early French[edit]
Jules Baillarger founded the Société Médico-Psychologique in 1847, one of the first associations of its kind and which published the Annales Medico-Psychologiques.[33] France already had a pioneering tradition in psychological study, and it was relevant the publication of Précis d'un cours de psychologie ("Summary of a Psychology Course") in 1831 by Adolphe Garnier, who also published the Traité des facultés de l'âme, comprenant l'histoire des principales théories psychologiques ("Treatise of the Faculties of the Soul, comprising the history of major psychological theories") in 1852.[65] Garnier was called "the best monument of psychological science of our time" by Revue des Deux Mondes in 1864.[66][54]
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), Thédodore 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 hypnosis 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 into English 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 neurological 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[edit]
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.
Early Russian[edit]
Insofar as psychology was regarded as the science of the soul and institutionally part of philosophy courses in theology schools, psychology was present in Russia from the second half of the 18th century. By contrast, if by psychology we mean a separate discipline, with university chairs and people employed as psychologists, then it appeared only after the October Revolution. All the same, by the end of the 19th century, many different kinds of activities called psychology had spread in philosophy, natural science, literature, medicine, education, legal practice, and even military science. Psychology was as much a cultural resource as it was a defined area of scholarship.[67]
The question, "Who Is to Develop Psychology and How?", was of such importance that Ivan Sechenov, a physiologist and doctor by training and a teacher in institutions of higher education, chose it as the title for an essay in 1873. His question was rhetorical, for he was already convinced that physiology was the scientific basis on which to build psychology. The response to Sechenov's popular essay included one, in 1872–1873, from a liberal professor of law, Konstantin Kavelin. He supported a psychology drawing on ethnographic materials about national character, a program that had existed since 1847, when the ethnographic division of the recently founded Russian Geographical Society circulated a request for information on the people's way of life, including "intellectual and moral abilities." This was part of a larger debate about national character, national resources, and national development, in the context of which a prominent linguist, Alexander Potebnja, began, in 1862, to publish studies of the relation between mentality and language.
Although it was the history and philology departments that traditionally taught courses in psychology, it was the medical schools that first introduced psychological laboratories and courses on experimental psychology. As early as the 1860s and 1870s, I. M. Balinskii (1827–1902) at the Military-Surgical Academy (which changed its name in the 1880s to the Military Medical Academy) in St. Petersburg and Sergey Korsakov, a psychiatrist at Moscow university, began to purchase psychometric apparatus. Vladimir Bekhterev created the first laboratory—a special space for psychological experiments—in Kazan' in 1885. At a meeting of the Moscow Psychological Society in 1887, the psychiatrists Grigory Rossolimo and Ardalion Tokarskii (1859–1901) demonstrated both Wundt's experiments and hypnosis. In 1895, Tokarskii set up a psychological laboratory in the psychiatric clinic of Moscow university with the support of its head, Korsakov, to teach future psychiatrists about what he promoted as new and necessary techniques.
in January 1884, the philosophers Matvei Troitskii and Iakov Grot founded the Moscow Psychological Society. They wished to discuss philosophical issues, but because anything called "philosophical" could attract official disapproval, they used "psychological" as a euphemism. In 1907, Georgy Chelpanov announced a 3-year course in psychology based on laboratory work and a well-structured teaching seminar. In the following years, Chelpanov traveled in Europe and the United States to see existing institutes; the result was a luxurious four-story building for the Psychological Institute of Moscow with well-equipped laboratories, opening formally on March 23, 1914.
Second generation German[edit]
Würzburg School[edit]
In 1896, one of Wilhelm Wundt's former Leipzig laboratory assistants, Oswald Külpe (1862–1915), founded a new laboratory in Würzburg. Külpe soon surrounded himself with a number of younger psychologists, the so-called Würzburg School, most notably Narziß Ach (1871–1946), Karl Bühler (1879–1963), Ernst Dürr (1878–1913), Karl Marbe (1869–1953), and Henry Jackson Watt (1879–1925). Collectively, they developed a new approach to psychological experimentation that flew in the face of many of Wundt's restrictions. Wundt had drawn a distinction between the old philosophical style of self-observation (Selbstbeobachtung) in which one introspected for extended durations on higher thought processes, and inner perception (innere Wahrnehmung) in which one could be immediately aware of a momentary sensation, feeling, or image (Vorstellung). The former was declared to be impossible by Wundt, who argued that higher thought could not be studied experimentally through extended introspection, but only humanistically through Völkerpsychologie (folk psychology). Only the latter was a proper subject for experimentation.
The Würzburgers, by contrast, designed experiments in which the experimental subject was presented with a complex stimulus (for example a Nietzschean aphorism or a logical problem) and after processing it for a time (for example interpreting the aphorism or solving the problem), retrospectively reported to the experimenter all that had passed through his consciousness during the interval. In the process, the Würzburgers claimed to have discovered a number of new elements of consciousness (over and above Wundt's sensations, feelings, and images) including Bewußtseinslagen (conscious sets), Bewußtheiten (awarenesses), and Gedanken (thoughts). In the English-language literature, these are often collectively termed "imageless thoughts", and the debate between Wundt and the Würzburgers, the "imageless thought controversy".
Wundt referred to the Würzburgers' studies as "sham" experiments and criticized them vigorously. Wundt's most significant English student, Edward Bradford Titchener, then working at Cornell, intervened in the dispute, claiming to have conducted extended introspective studies in which he was able to resolve the Würzburgers' imageless thoughts into sensations, feelings, and images. He thus, paradoxically, used a method of which Wundt did not approve in order to affirm Wundt's view of the situation.[68]
The imageless thought debate is often said to have been instrumental in undermining the legitimacy of all introspective methods in experimental psychology and, ultimately, in bringing about the behaviorist revolution in American psychology. It was not without its own delayed legacy, however. Herbert A. Simon (1981) cites the work of one Würzburg psychologist in particular, Otto Selz (1881–1943), for having inspired him to develop his famous problem-solving computer algorithms (such as Logic Theorist and General Problem Solver) and his "thinking out loud" method for protocol analysis. In addition, Karl Popper studied psychology under Bühler and Selz in the 1920s, and appears to have brought some of their influence, unattributed, to his philosophy of science.[69]
Second generation francophone[edit]
Genevan School[edit]
In 1918, Jean Piaget (1896–1980) turned away from his early training in natural history and began post-doctoral work in psychoanalysis in Zurich. Later Piaget rejected psychoanalysis, as he thought it was insufficiently empirical.[73] In 1919, he moved to Paris to work at the Binet-Simon Lab. However, Binet had died in 1911 and Simon lived and worked in Rouen. His supervision therefore came (indirectly) from Pierre Janet, Binet's old rival and a professor at the Collège de France.
The job in Paris was relatively simple: to use the statistical techniques he had learned as a natural historian, studying molluscs, to standardize Cyril Burt's intelligence test for use with French children. Yet without direct supervision, he soon found a remedy to this boring work: exploring why children made the mistakes they did. Applying his early training in psychoanalytic interviewing, Piaget began to intervene directly with the children: "Why did you do that?" (etc.) It was from this that the ideas formalized in his later stage theory first emerged.
In 1921, Piaget moved to Geneva to work with Édouard Claparède at the Rousseau Institute. They formed what is now known as the Genevan School.
In 1936, Piaget received his first honorary doctorate from Harvard. In 1955, the International Center for Genetic Epistemology was founded: an interdisciplinary collaboration of theoreticians and scientists, devoted to the study of topics related to Piaget's theory.
In 1969, Piaget received the "distinguished scientific contributions" award from the American Psychological Association.
Soviet Marxist Psychology[edit]
In the early twentieth century, Ivan Pavlov's behavioral and conditioning experiments became the most internationally recognized Russian achievements. With the creation of the Soviet Union in 1922, Marxism was introduced as an overall philosophical and methodological framework in scientific research. In 1920s, state ideology promoted a tendency to the psychology of Bekhterev's reflexologist reductionism in its Marxist interpretation and to historical materialism, while idealistic philosophers and psychologists were harshly criticized. Another variation of Marxist version of psychology that got popularity mostly in Moscow and centered in the local Institute of Psychology was Konstantin Kornilov's (the Director of this Institute) reactology that became the main view, besides a small group of the members of the Vygotsky-Luria Circle that, besides its namesakes Lev Vygotsky, and Alexander Luria, included Bluma Zeigarnik, Alexei Leontiev and others, and in 1920s embraced a deterministic "instrumental psychology" version of Cultural-historical psychology. Many works by Vygotsky were not published chronologically because of Soviet censorship but primarily because of Vygotsky's failure to build a consistent psychological theory of consciousness,
A few attempts were made in 1920s at formulating the core of theoretical framework of the "genuinely Marxist" psychology, but all these failed and were characterized in early 1930s as either right- or left-wing deviations of reductionist "mechanicism" or "menshevising idealism". It was Sergei Rubinstein in mid 1930s, who formulated the key principles, on which the entire Soviet variation of Marxist psychology would be based, and, thus become the genuine pioneer and the founder of this psychological discipline in the Marxist disguise in the Soviet Union.
In late 1940s-early 1950s, Lysenkoism somewhat affected Russian psychology, yet gave it a considerable impulse for a reaction and unification that resulted in institutional and disciplinary integration of psychological community in the postwar Soviet Union.
There are three "primary journals" where specialist histories of psychology are published:
In addition, there are a large number of "friendly journals" where historical material can often be found.Burman, J. T. (2018). "What Is History of Psychology? Network Analysis of Journal Citation Reports, 2009-2015". SAGE Open. 8 (1): 215824401876300. doi:10.1177/2158244018763005. These are discussed in History of Psychology (discipline).