Handbook of Psychology, History of Psychology

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• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780470619018
• eBook ISBN: 9781118337417
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Psychology is of interest to academics from many fields, as well as to the thousands of academic and clinical psychologists and general public who can't help but be interested in learning more about why humans think and behave as they do. This award-winning twelve-volume reference covers every aspect of the ever-fascinating discipline of psychology and represents the most current knowledge in the field. This ten-year revision now covers discoveries based in neuroscience, clinical psychology's new interest in evidence-based practice and mindfulness, and new findings in social, developmental, and forensic psychology.

Chapter 1

Psychology as a Science

Alfred H. Fuchs and Rand B. Evans

The Origins of Scientific Psychology

Psychology's First Laboratory

Beyond the First Laboratory: Evolution of the Discipline

The Psychological Laboratory and the Psychological Experiment

Competing Perspectives, Developing Research

References

The emergence of psychology as an experimental discipline is often dated from 1879. That date marks Wilhelm Wundt's opening of his research laboratory for the use of graduate students for doctoral research in Wundt's Institute of Experimental Psychology at the University of Leipzig (Wundt, 1909, pp. 118–133). Other significant events in the 1870s also presaged the emergence of an experimental, scientific psychology.

In 1873–1874, Wundt published his Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie (Wundt, 1873–1874), the first edition of his major treatise on experimental psychology. Also, in 1874, Franz Brentano published his Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (Psychology from the Empirical Standpoint; Brentano, 1874) in which he argued for an experimental psychology. In 1879, Hermann Ebbinghaus began the series of experiments on memory and association that he published as Ueber das Gedaechtnis (On Memory) in 1885 (Ebbinghaus, 1885/1913). Ebbinghaus's experiments brought into the laboratory the questions of association disputed by generations of philosophers. In America in the 1870s, William James published several articles and reviews pertaining to psychology, including one of his most important, “Are We Automata?” (James, 1879, pp. 1–22). In it, he presented his stream of thought metaphor and his views on the selective character of mind, including the role of interest, all of which would become important components of his Principles of Psychology (James, 1890).

Many of today's experimental academic psychologists can trace their intellectual lines in terms of doctoral major professors back to one of these men (Boring & Boring, 1948). Each of the seminal first generation experimental psychologists represented a somewhat different approach to scientific experimental psychology, perhaps reflecting the differences among their progenitors. Wilhelm Wundt, however, is generally credited with founding modern scientific, experimental psychology; it was his students who founded most of the early laboratories of psychology. But the science of psychology emerged in the nineteenth century only after the term “psychology” had been adopted for a field of study that was amenable to a scientific approach, as methods of science began to be applied to many areas of study traditionally encompassed within philosophy.

The Origins of Scientific Psychology

Hermann Ebbinghaus is well known for his statement that “psychology has a long past but only a short history” (Ebbinghaus, 1908, p. 1). This statement was interpreted to suggest that the nonexperimental but empirical psychologies that existed prior to the 1870s were not scientific but “merely” philosophical, an interpretation promoted by positivistic psychologists, such as E. B. Titchener, who wanted to separate the new, experimental psychology entirely from philosophy (Titchener, 1899, pp. 302–303). However, several historians of psychology and of science have shown that a scientific psychology emerged during the 18th century period of the Enlightenment (Hatfield, 1994; Moravia, 1980; Vidal, 1993, 2000) and termed by Vidal the “century of psychology” (Vidal, 2000).

The Enlightenment, usually dated between the end of the English Civil War in 1688 and the beginning of the French Revolution in 1790, was not just one movement but several that took place at different times and different places, but all with roots in the 16th century in which reformists broke with the authority of the Scholastics and their interpretations of Aristotle.

Psychology

The use of the term psychology predates both the experimental and the systematic empirical psychologies of the 18th century. The word comes from the combination of two Greek words, ψυχ

, psuche or psyche, and λóγoς, logos. The term psychologia or psichologia was a rendering of these Greek words directly into Latin, rather than employing the Latin equivalent, anima. Psychologia continued in use in Italian and Spanish and was the source of the English word psychology, and the German, Dutch, and French psychologie.

The word was used in English, both as psychologie and as psychology, by James De Back in 1653 in his treatise on the heart that accompanied the translation of William Harvey's treatise on the heart (De Back, 1653; Harvey, 1653) from Latin into English. But psychology, as a term, was slow to establish itself in England. Francis Bacon's new learning influenced the British empiricists from Thomas Hobbes through David Hume. Titles of their books contained the phrases “human understanding” (Locke, 1690), “human knowledge” (Berkeley, 1710), and “human nature” (Hobbes, 1640/1811; Hume, 1739–1740), all taken from phrases in Bacon's Novum Organum (1620) or his The Advancement of Learning (1605/1951). It was not until 1749, when David Hartley published his Observations on Man, that the term psychology was used in a British psychological treatise (Hartley, 1749).

The early appearance of the Latin psychologia and eventually its German, French, and English equivalents came as part of the philosophical shakeup in Europe as the result of the Protestant Reformation. What the Renaissance had done to free human reason, the enlightenment did for observation through the senses, the emphasis on the description of observable phenomenon and the use of induction to arrive at truth, rather than relying on the Scholastic tradition of deduction from fixed principles and immutable truths.

The term psichologia is said to have been used as early as 1520 by the Croatian humanist, Marco Marulec (1450–1524) (E. G. Boring, 1966; LaPointe, 1970, 1972). In Germany, Philipp Melanchton (1497–1560) used the term as the title of his Psichiologia de ratione animae (ca. 1524). In 1579, the word was used by Johannes Thomas Freigius in his book, Quaestiones Physicae, with a second edition in 1585 (Rosen, 1957, p. 177). Rudolf Goeckel, also known as Rudolphus Goclenius (1547–1628), published a collection of dissertations, Psychologia, hoc est, de hominis perfectione in 1590. Otto Casmann (1562–1607), a student of Goeckel, published the word in his Psychologia anthropologica, sive animae humanae doctrina in 1594 (see LaPointe, 1970, 1972). Casmann had made psychologia one of the two branches of anthropologia, the other being somatologia. This relationship of mind or soul and body as two parts of the more general discipline of anthropology continued in use until the late 18th century, when psychology became more established and separated from anthropology (Bell, 2002, pp. 11–15).

The German writers of psychologias, Melanchton, Goeckel, Casmann, and others, were all associated in one way or another with Ramism, the teachings of the French reformist Peter Ramus (1515–1572). Ramus, a professor at the University of Paris, attempted to revise the university's curriculum to break with Scholastic orthodoxy and democratize learning (Graves, 1912; Skalnik, 2002). Melanchton and the other Ramists went back to the original Aristotle in Greek and formulated a “neo-Aristotelianism” with Protestant interpretations (Tinsley, 2001, pp. 91–94). Aristotle's work was translated by the Scholastics as De Anima. The Greek title, however, was ΠερíΨυχ

ς, Perí Ps

chês. The term psychologia, denoting the study of the psyche, distinguished the views of these reformers from those found in the Scholastic's De Anima. This line of Ramist thought continued, along with other influences, in the ideas of Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716) (Blank, 2008) and to some degree in the thought of Christian Wolff (1679–1754) (Hegel, 2009). Christian Wolff, writing in Latin, continued the use of psychologia but used it to designate the study of mind. His writings popularized this meaning of psychologia; the term was later rendered into German as Psychologie and into English as psychology. Wolff divided the discipline between empirical and rational psychology. The data of mind that resulted from observing ourselves and others constituted empirical psychology; rational psychology referred to the interpretation of the data of empirical psychology through the use of reason and logic (Richards, 1980).

These psychologies were characterized as using knowledge acquired through experience (empirical psychology) or using knowledge that the mind possesses independent of experience (rational psychology) (Murray, 1988). Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) denied the validity of any rational psychology because, he argued, rational mental processes must be activated by mental content derived from experience; therefore, the study of mind must be confined to questions appropriate to an empirical psychology (Leary, 1978). An empirical psychology of mental content could not, Kant contended, become a proper natural science because mental events cannot be quantified (i.e., measured or weighed), and thus its data are neither capable of being described mathematically nor subject to experimental manipulation. Finally, Kant asserted, the method of observing the mind—introspection—distorts the events observed by observing them. However, Kant suggested, psychology might improve its status as an empirical science by adopting the methods of anthropology to observe the activities of human beings in realistic settings. This study (Leary, 1978), supplemented by drawing upon literature, history, and biography as sources of information about the manifestation of mind in human activity, would base psychology on objective observations of public events and avoid the limitations of an empirical psychology based solely on internal observation of private events.

Responses to Kant were not long in coming. Jakob Friederich Fries (1773–1843) raised the status of introspection by arguing that it was not inherently more problematic than observing external phenomena; if introspection was unreliable, at least it was not any more so than any other kind of observation. At the same time, Johann Friederich Herbart (1776–1841) offered a system of psychology that was both empirical and mathematical. If psychology needed to be mathematical to be a true science, Herbart proposed that numbers could be assigned to mental events of different intensities and a mathematical description of the relationship among them could be formulated. Herbart could assign numbers to describe experiences of different intensities, but he could not actually measure the subjective intensities in accord with an objective standard. Eduard Friederich Beneke (1798–1854) argued that it was premature to apply mathematics to relationships among mental events absent more accurate empirical observations and reliable means of measurement; psychology could hope to become an experimental discipline by testing “empirical results and theoretical hypotheses under controlled conditions and with the systematic variation of variables” (Leary, 1978, p. 119).

Kant's suggestion that psychology should utilize observations of human beings in their social environment, the rescue by Fries of introspection as a method for observing internal events, Herbart's suggestion that psychological phenomena could, in principle, be described mathematically, and Beneke's suggestion that psychological experiments were possible contributions to the inception of scientific psychology. By suggesting that a science of psychology was not possible, Kant stimulated both counterarguments and the search for the means to make psychology a scientific discipline of equal rank with the natural sciences. It remained for others to attempt to establish introspection as a scientific method, to devise the conditions and methods of an experiment in psychology, and to quantify psychological phenomena and formulate theoretical and mathematical descriptions of the relationships among them.

The Scientific Context in the 19th Century

The emerging natural sciences of the 18th and 19th centuries became increasingly specialized as knowledge increased and as opportunities for specialized teaching and research came into being in the German universities (Ben-David, 1971). The study of physiology emerged as a discipline separate from anatomy as the 19th century began. Studying intact physiological systems, in vivo or in vitro, accelerated the understanding of the functional characteristics of those systems and built on the knowledge gained from the study of anatomy via dissection. The methods and subject matter of physiology, especially sensory physiology, helped to provide the scientific basis for psychology.

Sensory Physiology

Johannes Müller (1801–1858), sometimes called the “father of physiology,” produced the classic systematic handbook (Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen, 1833–1840) that set forth what was then known about human physiology and offered observations and hypotheses for further research. Among the formulations that Müller provided in the Handbuch was the law of specific nerve energies, which stated that we are not directly aware of objects as such but can only be aware of the state of our sensory nerves. The resulting perceived qualities depend on the sense organ stimulated, the nerve that carries the excitation from the sense organ, and the part of the brain that receives the stimulation.

Müller's pupil, Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894), extended the law of specific nerve energies by theorizing that qualities of stimuli within a sensory modality are encoded in the same way that they are encoded among modalities....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Editorial Board
• Foreword to the First Edition
• Foreword to the Second Edition
• Handbook of Psychology Preface
• Volume Preface
• Contributors
• Chapter 1: Psychology as a Science
• Chapter 2: Psychology as a Profession
• Chapter 3: Biological Psychology
• Chapter 4: Comparative Psychology in Historical Perspective
• Chapter 5: Sensation and Perception
• Chapter 6: Cognition and Learning
• Chapter 7: Intelligence
• Chapter 8: Emotion
• Chapter 9: Personality
• Chapter 10: Developmental Psychology
• Chapter 11: Social Psychology
• Chapter 12: Psychology of Women and Gender
• Chapter 13: Educational Psychology
• Chapter 14: Assessment Psychology
• Chapter 15: Abnormal Psychology
• Chapter 16: Clinical Psychology
• Chapter 17: Counseling Psychology
• Chapter 18: Industrial–Organizational Psychology
• Chapter 19: Forensic Psychology
• Chapter 20: School Psychology
• Chapter 21: Community Psychology
• Chapter 22: Health Psychology
• Chapter 23: Undergraduate Education in Psychology
• Chapter 24: Ethnic Minority Psychology
• Chapter 25: International Psychology
• Chapter 26: A History of Professional Organizations
• Author Index
• Subject Index