Psychology involves the systematic study of mind and behavior. This extremely broad domain includes questions of motivation and information processing, normal and abnormal behavior, mental health and mental illness, the individual and the group, and people functioning in the context of their lives.
Psychology relates to every part of everyday life. The questions of psychology relate to how and why we love and suffer and desire, how we raise our children, how and why we succeed or fail at work. Psychology also relates to why we are so fascinated with celebrities and why their marriages so often fail. While the science of psychology may seem abstract at times, the implications touch every arena in which people think, feel or act.
The human mind does not function in isolation. It exists within both a biological and a social context. Therefore psychology serves as an interface between biology, specifically the biology of the brain, and sociology, the study of the behavior of groups.
Psychology is a remarkably varied field, involving both the performance of scientific research and the application of its findings. Psychologists work as scientists, clinicians, teachers, authors, consultants, and evaluators. They perform empirical research, provide therapy and assessment, and evaluate mental status or disability in numerous settings, such as the government, schools and the judicial system. Psychologists also consult on wide-ranging problems for businesses, schools, the military, the police force, sports teams and even rock bands. As the study of human behavior, psychology is can potentially apply to any field of human endeavor.
The American Psychological Association (APA) was founded in 1892 and has 150,000 members. There are 53 Divisions covering the wide range of activities within the field. The APA is the oldest and largest psychological association in the world.
The responsibilities of psychologists and psychiatrists often overlap; both psychologists and psychiatrists can diagnose and evaluate mental illness, provide psychotherapy, and conduct research. Nonetheless, their background and training differ considerably. In general, psychologists are students of the mind and behavior while psychiatrists are experts in mental illness. Psychologists are trained in academia and their highest degree is the doctorate (Ph.D. or Psy.D.) in psychology. They do not prescribe medicine, unless they are certified by the few states that have prescription privileges for psychologists. Moreover, not all psychologists are involved with clinical work. In contrast, psychiatrists are trained in the medical field. They are all physicians, having completed medical school and having obtained an M.D. (or D.O.). Their training is almost entirely clinical and focuses on the evaluation and pharmacological treatment (i.e., medication) of severe mental illness.
The APA is divided into the following interest groups, known as divisions.
The study of mental processes as a science is relatively new as it is dependent on the scientific revolution. Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) is credited with first establishing psychology as an independent science. He opened the first scientific laboratory to study psychology in 1879 at the University of Leipzig. Wundt was interested in investigating human consciousness through systematic introspection; collaborators would be trained to report their own sensory experience in response to physical stimulation.
Modern psychology is a child of the scientific revolution. Without the systematic application of reason and observation that forms the foundation of the scientific method, there would be no modern psychology. Nonetheless, contemporary psychology is not without precedents, and within Western history there are many precursors, ancestors so to speak, of psychology as we know it today. Ancient Greek philosophy, medieval Christianity, and post-Renaissance philosophers of the past several centuries all addressed the core questions of psychology in ways that both differed from and anticipated much of what we know today.
What did the ancient Greeks have to say about psychology?
Twenty-five hundred years ago, ancient Greek philosophers turned their remarkably sophisticated inquiries away from the whims of the gods and toward questions of the natural world. Questions about humanity’s place in the world naturally followed. What is knowledge and how do we gain it? What is our relationship with emotions? While some of their answers to these questions appear bizarre by modern standards, much of it remains strikingly current.
The word psychology derives from the Greek words psyche, meaning soul, and logos, meaning a reasoned account in words. It is important to note, though, that the Greeks’ conception of the mind was quite different from ours. In general, the Greeks understood the mind in more concrete ways with less emphasis on the complexity of subjective experience.
Homer’s legendary epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, date back to the eighth century B.C.E. Although Homer’s epics are timeless stories of passion and drama, his understanding of human psychology is radically different from our view today. There is no real concept of consciousness in Homer, no sense of the characters’ behaviors being motivated by their own internal feelings or thoughts. Instead characters’ motivations are imposed on them through the whims of the gods. Athena makes Odysseus do whatever he does. Abstract ideas of mental life, of consciousness, do not exist and awareness is understood in concrete, bodily terms. For example, the Greek word noos (later spelled nous), which later came to mean consciousness, was more concretely understood as vision or sight. The word psyche, which in later years referred to the soul or the mind, in Homer’s day meant only blood or breath, the physical markers of life.
The pre-Socratic philosophers—i.e., those who predated Socrates—lived in the early fifth century and sixth centuries B.C.E. Philosophers such as Alcmaeon, Protagoras, Democritus, and Hippocrates introduced concepts remarkably pertinent to modern ideas. Shifting focus from the gods to the natural world, they attributed mental activity to nous (the later spelling of noos), which some even located in the brain. Several of these philosophers believed that our knowledge of the world is only learned through the sense organs. As we can only know what we see, hear, smell or touch, all human knowledge is necessarily subjective and will differ from individual to individual. This belief in the relativism of human knowledge is a radical idea that remains pertinent to modern psychology.
Not all of the ancient Greeks’ ideas make sense from a contemporary point of view. Hippocrates, for example, believed that mental illness is caused by imbalances between bile, phlegm, and blood and Alcmaeon believed that perceptions reached the brain through channels of air. Nonetheless, the attempt to find biological explanations of psychological processes is extraordinarily similar to modern views.
Hippocrates (460–377 B.C.E.) was a brilliant physician who introduced the notion of the four bodily humors, a concept that would influence medical theories for almost 2,000 years. Hippocrates based his physiological theory on the ideas of another pre-Socratic philosopher, Empedocles (c. 492–c. 432 B.C.E.), who believed the entire world to be composed of earth, air, fire, and water. The bodily elements of black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm corresponded with each of Empedocles’s four elements. Although Hippocrates attributed all mental processes (such as joy, grief, etc.) to the brain, he believed that both mental and physical health rested on a harmonious balance of the four bodily humors. Over five centuries later, the Roman physician Galen (130–201 C.E.) expanded Hip-pocrates’s ideas to create a typology of personality. The melancholic personality (from black bile) tended toward the depressed; the choleric (from yellow bile) tended toward anger, the sanguine (from blood) tended toward the vigorous, courageous, and amorous, and the phlegmatic (from phlegm) tended to be calm and not easily perturbed. Each personality type resulted from an excess of its respective bodily humor. Although modern science has disproved this theory, Galen’s terms are still used to describe personality traits.
Plato (428–347 B.C.E.) and Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.), the two most famous Greek philosophers, have had far-reaching influence on Western thought. While neither is best known for his psychological ideas, both have had impact on Western conceptions of the mind. Plato believed that the truth lay in abstract concepts, or forms, that could be grasped through reason alone. The data we get from our senses is impermanent and therefore illusory. The notion of an inborn mental ability to grasp concepts and categories is consistent with modern cognitive psychology and neuroscience, although the dismissal of “sense data” is not. Aristotle was much more enamored of the natural world and believed knowledge to come from systematic logical reasoning about our observations of nature. He maintained that the capacity for logical reasoning is innate but the content of our knowledge can only be grasped through our senses. In this way, Aristotle anticipated the foundations of modern science.
Plato also had ideas about emotions and emotional control that anticipated Freud’s theories of the ego and the id. Plato’s three-part division of the soul into appetite, reason, and temper (also known as the spirited part of the soul) has been linked to Freud’s division of the mind into the id, ego, and superego. Plato also believed in controlling the bodily passions in order to turn one’s desire toward loftier goals, as described in his metaphor of the soul as a charioteer with a pair of winged steeds. One steed is immortal like the steeds of the gods and aspires toward contemplation of spiritual beauty. The other steed is mortal and plunges toward earth and toward animalistic passions and desire. The chariot must rein in the steed of animal appetites in order for the soul to gain true happiness. We can link the earthly steed to the id and the charioteer to the ego. More loosely, we could tie the immortal steed to the superego.
Aristotle believed that everything on Earth has a purpose, a telos. The acorn is intended to grow into an oak, a knife is intended to cut, a baker is intended to bake. As human beings are the only animals that reason, it is our telos to reason; it is our purpose. If we live according to our purpose, we will be living virtuously and will consequently be happy.
There are two types of telos: intrinsic telos and extrinsic telos. Intrinsic telos suggests that the aim of the organism is inherent in its nature, an acorn is innately programmed to grown into a tree. Extrinsic telos refers to a purpose imposed by an external force, such as a deity.
Not all modern views hold that life has a purpose, however. In the Darwinian view of natural selection, genetic variations happen by chance and persist only if they turn out to be adaptive, if they promote the survival of the species. We reason not because it is our telos but because we happen to have evolved that way. Our capacity to reason helped our species to survive.
The teleological view is more consistent with other modern views, though. Abraham Maslow (1908–1970), the humanistic psychologist, believed that we are predisposed to strive for a state of self-actualization, in which our personality is fully flowered and we reach our full emotional potential. It is, in effect, our telos.
Sigmund Freud, as well, may have been influenced by teleology. He studied with Franz Brentano, who was a scholar of Aristotle.
For Aristotle, everything has a purpose. The acorn is intended to grow into an oak tree, for example, and people are meant to think and reason (photo: iStock).
It was once common in Europe for people to believe that mental illnesses were the result of possession by devils and demons. In the Middle Ages, Satan was often blamed for most of the suffering in the world.
The Romans were better known for their practical accomplishments in the fields of law, engineering, and warfare than for their philosophical works but some contributions are worth noting. Cicero (106–42 B.C.E.), the famous Roman orator, gave a detailed description of the passions. He grouped the passions into four categories: discomfort, fear, pleasure or joy, and desire (libido in Latin). We can wonder whether Freud’s use of the term libido was influenced by Cicero.
The ideas of the Greek philosophers were disseminated throughout the Roman Empire and remained influential until its fall in the fourth century C.E. By then Christianity was the official religion of the Roman Empire, and following the fall of Rome, the Christian church was essentially the sole surviving institution. Although many aspects of pagan philosophical thought were integrated into church teaching (e.g., Plato’s idea of the immortal soul), anything that did not fit with Christian theology was considered heretical. In Christendom, meaning most of Europe, this state of affairs remained largely unchanged until the dawn of the modern era. Thus questions of psychology were addressed through medieval Christianity.
In general, medieval Christianity focused more on the next world than on our happiness within this one. True happiness would only be found in Heaven, not on earth, and entrance to Heaven could only be found through religious piety. Free will was emphasized by St. Augustine (354–430 C.E.), the most influential Christian theologian in the first millennium C.E. Every individual has the free will to choose whether or not to follow God. Sex and the passions of the body were considered sinful, unless performed within a marriage for the purpose of childbearing. Belief in the devil was also widespread and mental illness was often seen as a result of possession by the devil.
The idea of the devil was pervasive throughout the Middle Ages and pre-scientific Europe, and all manner of illness and misfortune was attributed to Satan or lesser devils and demons. Mental illness, in particular, was seen to be caused by demonic possession. It was believed that Jesus exorcised demons, a task that was performed by priests by the time of the Middle Ages. Even today some people believe in demonic possession.
Within one century after the death of the Islamic prophet Mohammed (570–632), Muslim armies had conquered almost all of the southern and eastern Mediterranean, encompassing essentially the southern half of the former Roman Empire. In contrast to northern Europe where the advanced culture of the Greco-Roman world was largely lost for a millennium, the literature of the ancient scholars was preserved in medieval Islam and several centers of learning were established across the Arab world. Avicenna (980–1031), who was known in Arabic as ibn Sina, was committed to the synthesis of classical literature with Islamic doctrine.
Despite a traumatically peripatetic life, Avicenna succeeded in writing one of the most influential texts in the history of medicine, known as the Canon of Medicine. As a physician, he was very familiar with psychological illness. He endorsed the doctrine of the four humors in the tradition of Hippocrates and Galen as well as the brain’s role in psychological disturbances. His theory about inner senses addressed the relationships between perception, memory, and imagination. He even speculated about what parts of the brain control different psychological functions.
After the European Renaissance (fifteenth to sixteenth centuries) brought a sea change of cultural and intellectual values, attention was drawn away from the world beyond and back to this world. Philosophers started to revisit the questions asked by the ancient Greeks and then built upon those ideas to create a new way of seeing the mind. While psychology per se did not exist yet, philosophy was beginning to lay the groundwork for what would later become psychology. Philosophers of note included René Descartes (1596–1650), Benedict de Spinoza (1632–1677), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), and John Locke (1632–1704).
Fundamentally, Descartes’s contribution to psychology was to make the concept of mind front and center of his philosophy. His famous phrase Cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am) links the mental function of thinking to the proof of his very existence. A naturalist who carefully observed the natural world and even dissected animals, he was extremely interested in the relationships between mental and bodily processes. In fact, Cartesian dualism, the notion that the mind and the body are separate entities, continues to inspire debate to this day.
Influenced both by his knowledge of physiology and the hydraulic (i.e., water-based) mechanics of the day, Descartes had a complex mechanical understanding of mental and physical processes that anticipated Freud’s own hydraulic model. Descartes wrote that impressions of the outside world are made on our sensory organs (i.e., eyes, ears, nose) causing animal spirits (a life giving fluid filled with purified blood) to press on our brain. The brain then sends the fluid down to our body through our nerves, causing muscles to expand and move. In this way critical functions like digestion, respiration, and even psychological processes such as sensation, the appetites and passions, take place. He also identified the pineal gland, which lies at the base of the brain, as the site where the non-physical mind and the physical body interact.
Benedict de Spinoza (1632–1677) was a sephardic Jew living in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. Now seen as one of the first modern philosophers, he was excommunicated in 1656 from the Jewish community for what was then considered heretical writings. Spinoza believed our primary psychological drive to be the promotion and protection of our own well-being and survival, an idea that anticipated evolutionary psychology. He also believed our three primary emotions to be pleasure, pain, and desire, all of which signal the state of our well-being. This anticipated Freud’s pleasure principle. Finally, Spinoza taught that our cognitive appraisal of any situation will determine our emotional response. In other words how we think about an event will shape how we feel about it. Therefore we can change our emotions by changing our thoughts. This is the basic principle behind cognitive therapy, pioneered in the mid- twentieth century by Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis.
It was not only the philosophers who grappled with the questions of psychology. As the issues of psychology are so relevant to everyday life, we would expect many people to come up with ideas about psychological principles. Folk psychology, often expressed in aphorisms or proverbs, captures some of these ideas as they were passed down through the generations. Below are just some of the common sense sayings that people have used over the years to communicate the wisdom of folk psychology.
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was most famous for his political philosophy and for his view of life in “the state of nature” as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” But he also had ideas about cognition and memory. Hobbes believed that all our knowledge comes from our sense impressions. Memories are the residues of the initial sense impressions, somewhat like waves that continue even after the wind ceases. He noted that ideas get linked together in memory when the sense impressions first occur close in time. This concept of associative memory became the basis of behaviorism, a psychological movement that arose in the twentieth century.
John Locke (1632–1704), who was also mostly known as a political philosopher, divided ideas into two classes: sensation, our initial sense impressions; and reflection, the mind’s actions on the initial sense impressions. Thus he distinguished between perception and cognition. Further, he considered our complex ideas (abstract concepts such as justice, love, whiteness) to derive from combinations of simple ideas. The notion that cognition develops from the simple to the complex anticipates Piaget and other twentieth- century cognitive psychologists.
Psychology addresses the basic human questions about life. Why do we act the way we do? Why do we feel what we do? Why do we suffer? Why do we love? Why do we desire what we desire? Modern psychology is unique in that it investigates these primordial questions through the lens of the scientific method. Nonetheless, throughout history and across cultures, people have grappled with these questions and come up with their own answers.
Shamans are individuals from traditional, pre-modern societies who mediate between their community and the world of the spirits. In order to travel to the domain of the spirits they enter a trance-like state, often by dancing, music, or a psycho-active plant. Shamanism is a widely spread practice, ranging from the Mongolian steppes to indigenous people of the Americas. While shamanistic practices will vary across cultures, in all shamanistic societies, it is presumed that the world is peopled by spirits and that proper ceremonial communion with these spirits will heal mental and physical illness, bring favorable weather conditions, regulate social harmony, etc. There is an emphasis on the ecstatic trance state as a condition of personal transformation. Moreover, an individual’s internal mental states are seen to be caused by—or at least subject to— outside forces, such as the spirits of ancestors, animals, or aspects of nature.
By Eastern religions, we generally are referring to the cultures of Asia. There are a number of religious traditions in Asia, many going back thousands of years. Buddhism and Hinduism are the largest and best known of the Eastern religions.
One of the primary tenets in Buddhism is that suffering comes from the illusion that our selves are separate, individual, and complete. People who are emotionally attached to what Westerners might call the ego, or to the idea of the self as a self-contained, isolated entity, are bound to suffer. Happiness or bliss can only be found by relinquishing attachment to the limited and mortal self in favor of the infinite reality of which we are all a part. Meditation and other contemplative practices are the best ways to access the spiritual knowledge that lies within all of us.
A mask from Papua New Guinea similar to the kind used by shamans. Shamanism is common in many cultures where people believe that the world is filled with spirits.
Hinduism is an ancient religion whose beginnings date back 6,000 years. Although there is tremendous variation in Hinduism, there are some consistent strains. As with Buddhism, which originally derived from Hinduism, there is an emphasis on an all-encompassing, multi-dimensional spiritual unity to which we all belong. The many deities in Hinduism are simply manifestations of this cosmic divinity. Suffering comes from ignorance and enlightenment comes from knowledge of the oneness of all reality and of the illusory nature of separateness and individuality. Contemplative practices are also important in the Hindu religion.
Eastern ideas about the self and self-transcendence have been embraced by many Western psychologists. These ideas are consistent with Western psychological theories about narcissism, which involves an excessive attachment to the ego. Contemplative practices have also been explicitly integrated into contemporary psychotherapies, such as Mindfulness Training and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy.
While there are major differences between the three monotheistic religions—Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—they all believe in a single God who is the source of all truth, morality, and happiness. Thus in all three religions, human psychology is defined and shaped by the relationship to God. Happiness is found by getting close to God, by submitting to or obeying Him and living according to His dictates. Likewise, suffering comes from distance from God. Christianity has a well-developed concept of sin, which reflects a rejection of God’s path. Christianity also speaks of the devil, to whom much destructive and socially unacceptable behavior is attributed. Finally, truth is revealed by God, either through the central religious texts or through prayer. There may be variation in the interpretation of God’s truth, but His truth is absolute; there is no truth outside of it.
By the time psychology came into its own as an independent discipline, the scientific revolution was two centuries old. Much more was known about the nervous system, the brain and the chemical and electrical processes in the body than could have been dreamed of by the earlier philosophers. The scientific method had continued to evolve and technology allowed for sophisticated instruments of measurement. Thus when psychology burst on the scene in the late 1800s, its proponents were eager to prove this new field as worthy a science as any other discipline.
Although Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) was not the first to address psychological questions with scientific means, he was the first to establish a scientific laboratory devoted specifically to psychology. This was done in 1879 at the University of Leipzig. Ernst Weber (1795–1878), Hermann Helmholtz (1821–1894), and Gustav Fechner (1801–1887) had all made important contributions to our understanding of sensation and perception prior to this, but none of them considered himself a psychologist per se. Wundt, in contrast, was specifically focused upon establishing psychology as a science.
Not all of the early forays into psychology were based on solid science. Phrenology was started by Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828) in the beginning of the nineteenth century. Gall believed that specific psychological traits could be localized to specific parts of the brain. When any of these individual traits were prominent, that part of the brain would grow larger relative to the rest of the brain and would push outward against the skull. These enlarged brain areas would then cause bumps in the skull. Consequently, careful examination of the shape of the skull could reveal the person’s psychological profile.
Gall based his conclusions on empirical techniques (i.e., he measured the skulls of hundreds of people), but his biased methods allowed him to pick and choose his findings to fit his theories. Phrenology became very popular over the next century, and phrenology busts were quite common. Phrenology only fell out of favor in the twentieth century after modern science advanced enough to prove it wrong. As with eugenics, it was sometimes used to justify racist and socially prejudiced theories. Similarly, it was adopted by the Nazis to prove Aryan supremacy. On a more positive note, it challenged neuroscientists to study the important question of localization of function to ask which parts of the brain support different psychological functions.
Phrenologists busts became very popular in the nineteenth century. (istock)
Interested in the nature of sensation, he combined objective measures with rigorously trained introspection. Researchers were taught to carefully monitor their own perceptual and sensory experience. Wundt’s focus was on mapping the mechanics of sensation with mathematical precision. He also taught hundreds of students and was responsible for training many of the major figures in the first few decades of the field. His focus on identifying the components of the mind was termed structuralism. 1
James (1842–1910) was among the first professors of psychology in the United States. Hired by Harvard in 1872 as a professor of physiology, he took on the new title of professor of psychology in 1889. Like Wundt, he was an avid promoter of the new field of psychology. Just as Wundt did, James taught many students who would disseminate his ideas into the wider world. Although his interests eventually took him far beyond psychology, his publication Principles of Psychology had a long and powerful influence on the development of the field.
In general, James had a hard time with the atomistic approach to studying psychology exemplified by Wundt’s lab. Although he ran his own lab using similar methodology, he felt that the psychophysiology practiced by Wundt and others focused only on the smallest and ultimately least interesting of mental phenomena. He believed that treating moments of consciousness as discrete isolated units was at odds with the real nature of experience, which is continuous. He believed in the flow of consciousness. He was also more interested in holistic concerns, such as the meaning and continuity of the self. How do I know that I am me? What gives me the continuous sense of self across time?
This conflict between a holistic vs. atomistic approach marks a theme that persists throughout the history of psychology as well as the natural sciences in general. Do we study something by breaking it down into its smallest parts or do we try to grasp it as an organic whole? Like Wundt, however, James was an advocate of introspection as a method of studying consciousness, something the behaviorists would later reject vigorously.
James was particularly interested in how the mind affects behavior, how it helps us function in the world. He was less interested in simply identifying the components of the mind, which was more in keeping with Wundt’s structuralism. In fact, later in his career, James abandoned psychology for a school of philosophy called pragmatism. Pragmatists maintained that the value of a belief was less in its accuracy than in its effectiveness, the degree to which it helped people function in their environment.
Francis Galton (1822–1911) was never formally trained as a psychologist but, an extremely innovative and creative man, he made enormous and long-lasting contributions to the methods of psychological research. In mid-life, after a wide range of endeavors, which included explorations in Africa and new discoveries in meteorology, he became preoccupied with the question of the heritability of intelligence. Is intelligence passed on in families, much like height or hair color? That his own family tree was filled with gifted intellectuals is probably relevant to his choice of study. He was a child prodigy and was the grandson of Erasmus Darwin (a noted physician and botanist) and a first cousin of Charles Darwin.
In his search to prove the heritability of intelligence, he made several astounding methodological innovations that are still in wide use today. These included the statistical technique of correlation (a mathematical test to see how much two traits increase or decrease together), the comparison of identical and fraternal twins, the use of self-report questionnaires and word association tests, the phrase “nature and nurture” and the concept of “regression towards the mean.” This last idea derives from Galton’s observation that when measurements are repeated over time, the extreme values tend to move toward the middle. For example, very tall parents will often have less tall children. His less illustrious contribution was the field of eugenics.
Francis Galton (1822–1911), a former child prodigy and cousin of Charles Darwin, made long-lasting contributions to the methods of psychological research. Less commendable were his contributions to the theory of eugenics. (Mary Evans Picture Library)
Galton’s interest in the heritability of intelligence was not only academic. He wanted to apply it to social policy so that only families with high intelligence would breed and the less fortunate would be discouraged from reproducing. These ideas were expressed in several books and later spread to numerous academic departments and international societies. The fact that he greatly discounted the impact of environment on intellectual development, specifically the effect of social class, racial discrimination and access to education, inevitably set the stage for prejudicial and racist applications of this theory. Moral questions regarding the civil rights of the genetically “less fit” were also neglected. Eugenics had significant impact on American immigration policies in the 1920s, justifying the restriction of Eastern and Southern European immigrants. Eugenics fell out of favor after the Nazis championed it in support of their genocidal policies.
Even though both Kraepelin and Bleuler were psychiatrists rather than psychologists, their contributions to psychiatric diagnosis have profoundly impacted the entire mental health field. Psychiatry came into its own as a distinct medical field in the early nineteenth century. Concerned with severe mental illness, early psychiatry had little overlap with early psychology, which focused more on normal mental processes. With the later development of clinical psychology, however, psychiatry and psychology became more intertwined.
The early history of psychological and the social sciences in general is littered with examples of gross social prejudice. In the early nineteenth century, Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828) introduced the study of phrenology, which mapped various personality traits onto different parts of the brain. Although Gall tried to ground his theories in the scientific measurement of skulls, he let his preconceptions shape his collection and analysis of the data.
Later proponents of phrenology tried to use it to justify ethnic and class discrimination. Likewise, Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), a proponent of Social Darwinism, interpreted Darwin’s theory of natural selection as a justification for social inequality. The studies of Francis Galton (1822–1911) on the heritability of intellectual giftedness led to the theory of eugenics, which promoted selective breeding of the social elite and discouraged childbearing within socially disadvantaged groups.
Not surprisingly, when psychological tests were first developed, they also fell prey to the confusion between scientific objectivity and social prejudice. The first intelligence tests were full of socially biased items that unfairly favored affluent, American-born English speakers over poor, uneducated immigrants and non-white minorities. While psychological science has developed more sophisticated methodology to minimize the effect of experimenter bias of any kind, it is important to realize that as long as science is conducted by human beings, it is subject to human error. The beauty of science, however, lies in its ability to correct its own mistakes through further research.
The German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926) first distinguished between manic depressive illness and dementia praecox, or what was later called schizophrenia. He saw manic depression as a milder form of illness with a more optimistic prognosis. In contrast, dementia praecox was seen as a progressively deteriorating illness with little hope of cure. Of course, there were no medicines available in the nineteenth century to effectively treat these conditions.
The Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler (1857–1939) was the director of the renowned Burgholzli psychiatric hospital. Bleuler coined the term schizophrenia from the Greek words for “split mind.” He believed schizophrenia encompassed a group of diseases, which he subdivided into hebephrenic, catatonic, and paranoid subtypes. He also introduced the term autism to describe the schizophrenic’s withdrawal from the outer world.
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was a Viennese neurologist who became one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century. As the inventor of psychoanalysis, he introduced concepts of the unconscious, the impact of childhood, repressed emotions, and even the entire field of psychotherapy to the wider world. While aspects of his theories remain controversial, much of his work has become such an integral part of our culture that it is taken for granted.
Unlike the other pioneers of psychology, Freud was more interested in the abnormal than the normal. As a physician, he tended to the sick; thus, he developed his theories of the mind through investigations of psychopathology. Although it is difficult to neatly summarize his ideas because they changed and evolved over more than four decades of work, there are several key concepts. These include the dynamic unconscious, the instincts of libido and aggression (or Thanatos), and the importance of childhood conflicts on adult psychopathology and even personality.
Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, was one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century (Library of Congress).
Unlike the early psychologists, who were almost entirely concerned with conscious thought, Freud was fascinated by the idea that our emotions, wishes, and thoughts could operate wholly outside of consciousness. Moreover, unacceptable wishes and impulses would be pushed back into the unconscious to protect the person from anxiety. However, these repressed desires would rarely sit calmly out of awareness, but rather come back to do mischief, generally in disguised form. These partially expressed impulses formed the symptoms that psychoanalysis was designed to cure.
Freud believed in two primary drives or motivations in life: libido and aggression. Libido, defined as sexuality although more accurately thought of as broad sensual pleasure, was his primary focus. He added the death instinct, Thanatos, after living through the carnage of World War I. In later years, Thanatos was frequently interpreted as the aggressive drive. Freud asserted that an instinct functions like an electrical charge that needs to be expressed through behavior.
However, he felt society forbids the free expression of sexuality and aggression. Psychopathology, or what he termed neurosis, involves the conflict between our instinctual drives and our need to inhibit them. Because the instinct still presses for expression, much like water rushing downhill, it will be displaced into another channel of expression, resulting in a symptom, such as an obsession, compulsion, or a hysterical complaint (a physical symptom without any true physical cause). His fluid-like conception of the instincts was later referred to as the hydraulic model.
While this theory may appear odd from today’s point of view, it is easy to see that he was attempting to fit his observations of his patients’ behavior into the scientific models of his day.
Freud believed that the primary areas of instinctual gratification, the erogenous zones, moved across childhood in predictable stages. His theory of the psychosexual stages included the oral, anal, phallic, and genital stages. Each psychosexual stage had specific psychological characteristics to it. For example, the anal stage was characterized by stinginess, concern with money, and/or wish for control. If the child was either undergratified or overgratified in any stage, the child could fixate at that stage, becoming, in effect, psychologically stuck.
Neurotic symptoms would reflect the person’s characteristic psychosexual stage. For example, obsessions and compulsions reflected regression to the anal stage. While Freud’s instinctual theory has been much criticized, the notion that developmental problems at any point in childhood can hinder later development and result in adult psychopathology must be seen as one of Freud’s greatest contributions.
Freud was revolutionary for several reasons. For one, he brought to light the way unconscious passions can rule our lives-the battle between animalistic passions and the constraints of civilization. His particular emphasis on sexuality opened discussion on a formerly taboo subject. Secondly, he drew attention to the effect of childhood experiences and trauma on adult emotional adjustment. Thirdly, his invention of the method of psychoanalysis spearheaded the entire discipline of psychotherapy.
While psychoanalysis per se is no longer the preferred method of psychotherapy, many forms of psychotherapy can be seen as the direct descendants of Freud’s couch. Finally, he brought the emotional and the irrational into the realm of science. While poets, artists and philosophers had addressed the concerns of psychoanalysis before, few people had considered these questions in scientific terms.
Alfred Hitchcock’s classic suspense film Psycho, which came out in 1960, provides an excellent example of how Sigmund Freud’s theories have permeated popular culture. In the famous shower scene, Marion Crane (played by Janet Leigh) is stabbed to death by a knife wielding Norman Bates (played by Tony Perkins). At the end of the movie we learn that Bates’s excessive attachment to his mother has lead him to murder her in a fit of jealous rage, following his discovery of her romantic involvement with another man. Attempting to keep his mother alive, however, he preserves her body in the basement. At the same time, he takes on her identity as his own alter ego. Finally, while dressed up as his dead mother, he murders Marion Crane to eliminate any possible rival for his attentions. Such unmistakably Oedipal themes are clearly indebted to Sigmund Freud and psychoanalytic theory.
Freud did not operate in a vacuum. Many of his ideas came out of earlier philosophical works. For example, the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) wrote about the primacy of unconscious sexual instincts as early as 1819. Moreover, Freud was not the first clinician to practice psychotherapy. By 1909, Freud’s approach to psychotherapy was just one among many competing forms of psychotherapy. Contemporary psychotherapy in the early twentieth century was very crude, however, and still focused largely on hypnotism and suggestion. Ultimately it was psychoanalysis that had the widest impact on the later development of psychotherapy.
Freud was famous (or infamous) for his fights with detractors and is still a somewhat controversial figure. From the beginning Freudian theory tended toward the dogmatic. Although Freud was flexible in his own thinking, and he reworked his own theories multiple times, he was less tolerant of the divergent views of his followers. He rejected both Carl Jung and Alfred Adler, who questioned the primacy of libido as the motivating force.
In Freud’s time, his theories were particularly controversial for their emphasis on sexuality, which was rarely discussed openly in Victorian times. His emphasis on child sexuality was thought frankly perverted. By the mid-twentieth century, however, Freudian theory was criticized mainly for its lack of scientific data. Although he aspired to make psychoanalysis a science, he never tested his theories with the methods of empirical research, preferring instead to rely on his clinical observations.
Freud has had enormous influence on contemporary culture, so much so that we often barely notice. Any attention to the unconscious meaning of slips of the tongue, jokes, or dreams can be traced directly to Freud. Awareness of the impact of childhood experiences on adult emotional adjustment, the importance of sexuality, and the value of talking out our feelings, let alone the now international industry of psychotherapy, all owe their debt to Freud. Freudian ideas also captured the imagination of a wide range of famous artists and writers throughout the twentieth century, such as the surrealists, Virginia Woolf, and Alfred Hitchcock.
John Watson (1878–1958) spearheaded the triumph of behaviorism in American psychology. Reacting against the emphasis on introspection promoted by both Wundt and James, he believed that the only object of psychological study should be observable behavior. He criticized the introspective approach as imprecise and dependent on unverifiable, and therefore unreliable, subjective judgments. Influenced by the Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov’s work on associative conditioning, he reduced all of psychology to stimulus-response chains.
Having also spent the beginning of his career studying rats in mazes, Watson further broke down the division between animal and human research, stating that stimulus-response behavioral chains in animals did not meaningfully differ from those in humans. In other words, the only worthwhile subject of study in psychology was how animals or people behaved in response to carefully observed stimuli. Moreover, he felt, the purpose of such study was the prediction and control of behavior.
This viewpoint was articulated in a 1913 publication entitled “Psychology as the Behaviorist Sees It.” While behaviorism became less restrictive in later years, this celebration of observable behavior and disdain for subjective experience dominated American academic psychology until the middle of the twentieth century.
Watson had an unusually dramatic and difficult life. Born into poverty with an alcoholic, womanizing, and violent father who abandoned the family when Watson was only twelve, Watson seemed more likely to enter a life of crime than to become a pioneer in the field of psychology. He was, in fact, arrested twice before he managed to convince the president of a South Carolina college to admit him as a freshman at the age of sixteen.
The brash confidence displayed by his appeal to the college president was characteristic of the ambition and audacity that would later propel his career. He excelled academically and quickly progressed from student to graduate student to assistantship to professor at the University of Chicago and then, by age thirty, to chairman of the psychology department at Johns Hopkins University. At age thirty-seven he was made president of the American Psychological Association.
Unfortunately, he remained a compulsive womanizer and during a particularly indiscreet extramarital affair, his wife found evidence of his dalliance and showed it to the president of the university, who promptly demanded his resignation. In 1920 such scandal could ruin one’s reputation and it ended Watson’s career as an academic psychologist. Ever resilient, however, he eventually obtained a position at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, applying his psychological expertise to advertising campaigns on a wealth of household products. He married the woman with whom he had been having an affair and had two children with her. Unfortunately, she died quite young, which was, by many accounts, a devastating loss for him.
We can speculate about the relationship between Watson’s painful childhood and his choice of psychological theories. Is it entirely a coincidence that an emotionally troubled child would grow up to shun exploration of the mind? Nonetheless, whatever personal appeal behaviorism might have had for Watson, its dominance in American academic psychology cannot be attributed to the psychological conflicts of a single individual.
Burrhus Frederick (B.F.) Skinner (1904–1990) was a famous champion of behaviorism. He wrote several books, including Walden Two and About Behaviorism, in which he spelled out his views on psychology, in particular the view that observable behavior was the only valid object of scientific study. Like John Watson before him, he had a flair for public relations and knew how to get his ideas into the public eye.
Skinner made numerous long-lasting contributions to behaviorism. He was interested both in the theory of behaviorism and its application to everyday problems. His two most important contributions include the principles of operant conditioning and the techniques of behavioral modification. He was also interested in educational methods and in techniques of animal training. Although Skinner’s radical behaviorism has been out of fashion for several decades, many of his core ideas survive. While they cannot explain all of human psychology, they do offer important insights into a broad range of behavior. Moreover, the techniques he proposed are still fundamental tools in a dramatically broad range of disciplines.
Building on Edward Thorndike’s earlier Law of Effect, Skinner elaborated the way animals and humans learn from rewards and punishments. If a behavior is followed by a reward, it is likely to be repeated. If it is followed by a punishment, it is less likely to be repeated. Through research on rats and other animals, Skinner explored in great detail how the timing, frequency, and predictability of rewards and punishments affect behavioral change. These basic concepts of operant conditioning were viewed as the foundation of all learned behavior in both humans and animals. While we now know that there are many complex forms of thought that operant conditioning cannot explain, these principles do tell us a tremendous amount about basic forms of learning and memory.
Another critical contribution that Skinner made was to translate his laboratory research on rats and other animals into a new form of psychotherapy termed behavioral modification. Although John Watson had declared the purpose of behaviorism to be the prediction and control of behavior, he did not have much success in formulating specific techniques to be applied to everyday life.
B.F. Skinner (1904–1990) was famous for his work in behaviorism.
In contrast to Watson, Skinner worked out rules about how to change human behavior through the manipulation of reinforcement contingencies, in other words, the manipulation of rewards and punishments. Skinner favored the use of rewards over punishment to modify behavior, as he felt a reliance on punishment created more problems than it solved. He initially developed his behavior modification techniques for use with psychotic psychiatric patients, but variations of his techniques have been applied to work with juvenile delinquents and emotionally disturbed children. Similar techniques have been adapted for use with animal training, child rearing, and many other disciplines.
Skinner also developed a form of crib/playpen that he termed an “air crib” (also called a “baby-tender” or an “heir conditioner”). This was a large, well-lit and temperature-controlled chamber for a small child. He raised his second daughter Deborah in this chamber for the first few years of her life. Contrary to popular thought, this was not a classic Skinner box, where rats have to press levers to obtain food; it was more like a roomy bassinet. Although critics assumed his daughter had been damaged by a bizarrely technical approach to child rearing, Skinner always maintained that his daughter had not suffered and had, in fact, grown up to be a well-adjusted, college-educated artist.
Another innovation created by B.F. Skinner is called the Skinner box. This was an adaptation of Thorndike’s puzzle box, used by scientists to observe how an animal learns to escape the box. Skinner’s innovation was to connect the animal’s behavior (e.g., a rat pressing a bar) to a counting mechanism so that the number of times the behavior was performed would be automatically recorded. This way the frequency of the behavior could be compared across different reinforcement conditions. For example the number of times a rat presses a bar when each bar press is rewarded with a food pellet can be compared with the frequency of bar pressing when the rat is not rewarded with food pellets.
Skinner was also interested in applying operant conditioning principles to education. He introduced the concept of programmed learning, in which the material to be taught is presented in a sequence of small steps. Thus learning progresses step by step, with positive reinforcement given after each step is mastered. Although this approach has been criticized for its restricted focus on parts rather than the whole and for failing to foster creative thinking, it still serves as the basis for most forms of computerized training.
Jean Piaget (1896–1980) was a Swiss psychologist who pioneered the study of cognitive development. Ironically, Piaget never received formal training in psychology. In fact, he received his doctorate in the natural sciences. Along with Freud and B.F. Skinner, however, Piaget is one of the most influential figures in all of psychology. Piaget showed a talent for scientific research from a very early age. He published his first scientific paper on the albino sparrow at age ten, although the publisher had no idea of his extraordinary youth. For four years in his early teens, he classified mollusks in the Neuchåtel Natural History Museum in Switzerland. He published several more scholarly papers from ages fifteen to eighteen. Around the same time, Piaget visited his godfather, Samuel Cornut, who felt that Piaget’s education was weighted toward the natural sciences. Cornut introduced him to philosophy, sparking Piaget’s interest in epistemology, the philosophical study of knowledge. Questions such as “What is knowledge?” and “Where does knowledge come from?” would form the foundation of his later work.
Jean Piaget (1896–1980) made fundamental contributions to our understanding of children’s intellectual development ) (AP/WideWorld).
Early in his career, Piaget went to work for Theodore Simon in Paris. Simon, along with Alfred Binet, was the author of the Binet-Simon intelligence test, the first successful test of its kind. Piaget’s job was to record the answers of five- to eight-year-old children in order to determine expected scores for each age group. Although he was hired to record the correct answers, he became far more interested in the children’s mistakes, in the typical patterns of error at each age. This sparked his interest in the development of children’s intellectual understanding of the world around them. He had found his life’s work. For the next sixty years, Piaget studied children’s behavior in great detail. From this data, he generated a voluminous body of writings on the subject and changed the way we look at intellectual development.
Piaget’s greatest contribution was to change psychologists’ focus from what we know to how we know. He studied how the mind organizes and transforms information— how it shapes information. The mind is not a blank screen; it is not a camera or a mirror that simply reflects what it sees. It is an active participant in knowledge. The mind takes in information and actively organizes it. As such, it constructs a view of reality through this shaping and transforming of information. This concept is referred to as Piaget’s constructivist view of knowledge. Moreover, the way that the mind organizes information changes across child development. So younger children do not simply know less than older children or adults; they know differently.
Freud told us about desire, the behaviorists told us about behavior, and Piaget told us about the way we think and how that develops across childhood. Perhaps more than anyone else, he has told us about how we make sense of our environment, the processes by which we interpret it. His work has been profoundly influential to many branches of psychology: developmental, cognitive, educational, and even clinical.
There is an age-old debate, dating back to the earliest Greek philosophers, of whether knowledge is innate—that is we are born with it—or whether it is learned through experience. Piaget’s solution to this ancient dilemma was to propose that knowledge is both innate and learned. What we know is learned and how we know is based on innate capacities.
Although other forms of information may be important, Piaget believed the initial and fundamental way that children learn about the world is through action. Through action, children explore and encounter their environment. The memories of these encounters are encoded in their minds as knowledge. These memories then shape their interpretation of later experiences, which in turn modifies their knowledge about the world. For example a child is given a rattle. By chance the child shakes it and it makes noise. Interested, the child shakes it again. Later, another rattle is produced, which the child immediately shakes, now having a rudimentary concept of rattles as something to shake.
A schema is a representation or a map of a pattern of events. It is essentially the building block of knowledge. Infants’ initial knowledge of the world is through action schemas or sensory-motor schemas. This means the child can only know the world through immediate sensation or direct action, such as bringing the thumb into the mouth or seeing bicycle wheels go round and round. Around nine months of age, these action schemas begin to exist in the mind alone. In other words, the child can think about the event when it is not actually occurring. The mental life of the child has begun. A mental representation of an event is called a conceptual schema. One sign of this is called object permanence, which occurs around nine months of age when an infant will look for an object after it is hidden from view, such as searching for a rattle after it is hidden behind a pillow.
Jean Piaget’s notion of object permanence refers to the ability to hold an image of an object in the mind even when it is not concretely present. Piaget developed this concept while studying the behavior of his own children. He noticed that before the age of eight or nine months, if he removed an object of interest from his child (e.g., a rattle), the child would not search for it. Once it was out of sight, it was out of mind. After the development of object permanence, however, the child displayed searching behavior. For example, if Piaget removed the toy from the child and hid it behind a pillow, the child would move the pillow to find the object. This searching behavior shows that the child can think about the object even when it is not present.
Assimilation and accommodation are the two ways that children gain new knowledge. In assimilation, the new is fitted into the old; in accommodation, the old is adapted to the new. This is the way that schemas develop. Accomodation means that a schema will become modified by new information. For example, an infant is handed a rattle that is shaped differently than any previously encountered rattles. Because of the different shape, the infant has to grasp it in a different way. Thus the schema of grasping the rattle has just accommodated to the new action.
Assimilation is the complement of accommodation and refers to the way new information is adapted to previously existing schemas. For example, when presented with the new rattle, the infant tries to grasp it and shake it. This reflects an attempt to assimilate the new action with the pre-existing rattle schema. Throughout development, both processes occur simultaneously.
Piaget has been criticized for relying almost exclusively on the intellectual content of knowledge. Piaget paid little attention to the impact of culture, emotion, observational learning, and verbal instruction on cognitive development. Indeed, later research has shown that children’s (and adults’) knowledge of the world is greatly impacted by all of the above factors. Nonetheless, this does not invalidate Piaget’s contributions; it simply shows that his work is limited in scope. He cannot explain all of children’s mental life, but he did tell us a tremendous amount about early cognitive development.
Much of the fundamental ideas of Piaget’s work were based on his intense, methodical observations of his own three children, Jacqueline, Laurent, and Lucienne. Their mother was a trained psychologist herself and helped in these studies. In fact, she had been one of Piaget’s students. Although we can question what emotional impact this intense attention may have had on these children, Piaget’s investigations were never invasive or even particularly experimental. Relying on a naturalistic approach, for the most part he observed their natural behavior, questioned them about their understanding of natural events, or minimally modified their environment, for example by manipulating toys.