History of Psychology

The roots of western psychology can be traced to Greek philosophy. The word psychology itself is derived from the Greek words ‘psyche’ which means soul and ‘logos’ which means study. Psychology thus started as a part of philosophy and became an independent discipline much later.

Plato and Aristotle where among the first philosophers who thought about the mind. Plato believed that body and mind are two separate entities and mind could exist even after death. But he was positive in that education can bring change to the basic nature of the mind. Aristotle, who was the disciple ofPlato, followed the feet of his teacher and believed in the body-mind duality. But he thought that of each of these is the manifestation of the other. He, but, was pessimistic about the role of education in changing the fundamental nature of humans.

Rene Descartes, the French philosopher and mathematician, who originated the Cartesian system of coordinates or the coordinate geometry, also believed in the body-mind duality. But he was open enough to consider that there is an uninterrupted transaction between the body and the mind.

In the eighteenth century AD, John Locke, a British national, proposed that knowledge depends upon the experience based on the sense organ and that thinking is not innate. He also considered that the mind of a newly-born child is like a clean-slate on which anything can be written. Locke believed that knowledge occurs only when the sense organs interact with the outer world.

These two ideas – the body-mind duality and the ‘clean-slate’ mind - have been the strong roots of the western psychology for many decades. Only in the twentieth century western psychologists, especially Jung, Maslow and others, were able to break free from this limiting concepts.

In the twentieth century AD, German scientist E.H.Weber attempted a scientific approach in the study of the mind by his finding of the quantitative relation between stimulus intensity and the resultant sensory experience. This was later known as the Weber’s law.

Almost in the same period, G.T.Fechner, who is called the father of quantitative psychology, coined psycho-physics which is the quantitative study of external structures and sensory experience.

Then came Darwin with his revolutionary ‘origin of species’ which influenced psychology and human thought.

In 1879, Wilhelm Wundt, a German scientist, established the world’s first psychological lab at Leipzig, Germany. His aim was to prove that there is a physical activity for every mental activity. He opined that psychologists should study sensation, perception, and emotions.

In the first decade of the 20^th Century AD, the Russian psychologist Ivan P. Pavlov made a path breaking finding when he was studying the digestion process in dogs. Before the experimental dog was given food, a bell was sounded. When this was repeated several times, the dog started salivating the very moment it heard the bell sound. Pavlov called this the conditioned reflex. This was one of the greatest findings that made radical changes in the field of psychology.

Source; http://www.psychology4all.com/historyw.htm

Categories: Define Psychology