Topics in the History of Psychology

Volume II

G. A. Kimble, K. Schlesinger

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317769125
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

First published in 1985. At one end of historical time scale, speculations about psychological processes go back to classical Greek philosophy and beyond. For centuries thereafter, the treatment of psychological subject matter remained largely in the domain of other disciplines, especially philosophy, where it became inextricably interwoven with epistemology. The chapters of this book glance only briefly at these philosophical antecedents, to review the basic concepts and principles that early investigators were to take for granted. They tend then to move to the end of the last century when the systematic study of psychological processes began.

Contents of Volume 1

1.  A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO A HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY

Kurt Schlesinger

2.  CONDITIONING AND LEARNING

Gregory A. Kimble

3.  HUMAN LEARNING AND MEMORY

Leo Postman

4.  COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY AND ETHOLOGY

Joseph B. Cooper

5.  SENSORY PROCESSES: VISION

Lorrin A. Riggs

6.  TASTE AND OLFACTION

L. M. Bartoshuk, W. S. Cain, and C. Pfaffmann

7.  A HISTORY OF PERCEPTION

William N. Dember and Marjorie Bagwell

8.  A HISTORY OF THE STUDY OF THE CORTEX:
CHANGES IN THE CONCEPT OF THE SENSORY PATHWAY

I. T. Diamond

Preface

In writing the history of any field of inquiry, there are two important decisions to make: where in time to begin and where to end. At one end of the time scale, speculations about psychological processes go back to classical Greek philosophy and beyond. For centuries thereafter, the treatment of psychological subject matter remained largely in the domain of other disciplines, especially philosophy, where it became inextricably interwoven with epistemology. The chapters of this book tend to glance only briefly at these philosophical antecedents, to review the basic concepts and principles that early investigators were to take for granted. They tend then to move to the end of the last century when the systematic study of psychological processes began.

At the other end of the time scale, every subfield of psychology has been undergoing extremely rapid growth and change, especially during the last two decades. Before that, there had been a fairly gradual evolution of experimental methods, theoretical concepts, and empirical issues. More recently, however, the dominant trends in the field have changed significantly as new approaches gained ascendency. These developments were accompanied by an explosive spurt in new research. Even when the substantive problems remained the same, they were often reformulated, described in a new language, and attacked by new methods. How the old concepts and methods relate to the new is a topic of continuing debate, and sometimes controversy.

A great deal of what has been happening in the most recent years is still too new and controversial to be placed in historical perspective. As Boring wrote, “It is a nice question as to when the past becomes history, as to how old it needs to be before a first stable perspective of it can be limned” (1942, p. iii). The editors invited the contributors to these volumes to end their coverage at a point in time when their respective fields seemed to have been characterized by coherence and closure. For most of them this meant a point in time during the third quarter of this century, which brings us to the threshold of the current era and avoids the controversies of today.

Even within this truncated temporal span, many of the contributors of these volumes describe the work of the earliest years in greater detail than that of the later years. Inevitably, the questions that were asked first and the methods that were developed first set the agenda for a long time to come. Of course, the treatment has been highly selective throughout, with the selection of earlier work guided as much as possible by later developments. To quote Boring again, “Strange as it may seem, the present changes the past” (1950, p. ix).

The volumes of this work consist of nineteen chapters. Seventeen were written by psychologists expert in a particular branch of our field. For this reason, the book as a whole is not organized chronologically, as reflected in our title Topics in the History of Psychology. The first chapter in each of the volumes are the editors’ attempts to remedy this deficiency. The first volume covers the areas of conditioning and learning, human learning and memory, sensory and perceptual processes, comparative psychology, and physiological psychology. Volume 2 covers the history of behavioral genetics, psychological testing, developmental psychology, drives and motives, sleep and dreaming, psychotherapy, psycho-pathology, personality theory and social psychology.

In developing this work, the editors had a particular concept in mind which we hoped would make these volumes appropriate as a textbook for a particular course. Psychology is a vast and incoherent field. In spite of this, it is our experience that students and teachers alike yearn for some type of capstone course that will put psychology in perspective. Historical perspective is the obvious candidate. The chapters in this book provide it for most of the important topics in our field.

The problem with a book that mainly provides perspective is that the liberalities of the twentieth-century university curriculum leave students unacquainted with the basic subject matter for which perspective is provided. This leads us, finally, to the description of a course which we believe should be required of all serious senior majors in psychology and would be very appropriate for beginning graduate students. This course would be based on this work supplemented by any of a dozen or so large encyclopedic introductory books that are currently available. These books are of a remarkably high quality; they present the current thinking which our volumes do not, and, most importantly, they change with changes in methods, concepts, data and interpretation. Exposure to the history of a topic, together with a picture of where that history has lead, strikes us as about as useful an integrating experience as we can provide our students.

Gregory A. Kimble
Kurt Schlesinger

1	Overview: The Chronology

Gregory A. Kimble

Duke University

There is an old fashioned view of learning, which treats the process as a passive and gradual accumulation of the potential for responding, moving steadily toward some physiological limit of effectiveness. Probably most of us think of the history of psychology in similar terms, as the passive record of events as they happened, moving cumulatively forward to the present moment, which represents the highest level of advancement reached so far. This view of history has to be abandoned for much the same reason as the outdated view of learning did. It neglects the constructive behavior of the historian just as the treatment of learning neglected the active involvement of the learner.

This point becomes particularly clear in an effort of the type represented by this chapter, in which I attempt to coordinate the materials developed by a dozen other authors. It takes no more than the first page written by any of them to show that the histories they have written are selective, constructive, and creative. Now, I impose my own perspective on these materials in order to extract common themes and to present a chronology. Surely the result is a history of a set of topics in our field, not the history of those topics. Now that my work is complete, I wonder if the history is even a defensible concept.

THE BEGINNINGS

Fragments of the history covered in this volume go back almost 5000 years, and to the Eastern as well as to the Western World. As early as 2200 B.C., the Chinese, recognizing the importance of individual differences, were using tests to select candidates for office in the imperial government. Even earlier—3000 B.C. or so—speculation had begun about other important topics in the volume. There was an interest in sleep and dreams, and the notion that dreams might give clues to effective therapy had been developed. The proposed treatments included treatment for mental disorder, indicating that the concept of madness was also achieved early.

Extrapolating backward from later records, there is reason to suspect that a theory of spirit possession may have been a dominant explanation for mental disorder. On similar bases, it seems likely that dreams were given much the same interpretation, that they were messages placed in the sleeping mind by dieties who wanted to communicate with the dreamer. These messages included messages about the future.

Vestiges of such prescientific thinking still exist today but, even before age of the classical Greek philosophers, spiritism had begun to decline and naturalistic accounts of a scattered set of phenomena had been offered. Early in the first millenium B.C., the theory of bodily fluids or humors elaborated later on by Hippocrates had been developed. Anticipating the concept of homeostasis, it had been proposed that disease results from imbalance among these fluids and that cures could be produced by restoring this balance. In separate developments, the brain had been mentioned as a possible locus for disorder. The concepts that psychosis developed from conflict and that catharsis provided by dance, music, and poetry might effect a cure had also been proposed.

The writings of the great Greek philosophers reveal that, even as early as the fifth century B.C., potentially opposing environmental and biological interpretations of psychological phenomena had begun to take recognizable form. Aristotle put forth the conception of the mind as a blank tablet and developed an account of associations, both of which were to become important in environmental interpretations of behavior. At the same time, however, he as well as Plato advocated programs of eugenics, which anticipated a more biological approach to psychology. Hippocrates’ theory of humors was in this biological tradition and it was also important in another way. It implied an analysis of behavior that involved the concept of traits of personality, an idea that has persisted to the present time in psychology. For example, Plato’s analysis of personality into components devoted to thinking, doing, and feeling presented a way of looking at human experience that reappeared 2000 years later in Sheldon’s cerebrotonic-somatotonic-viscerotonic typology. The sophisticated nature of this thinking raises questions as to why progress in psychology was so limited in the next 2000 years. A part of the answer is to be found in the acceptance of these self-same ideas as sacred dogma.

THROUGH THE MIDDLE AGES AND RENAISSANCE

From the point of view of science, the most important influence in the early centuries of the Christian era must have been the discouragement it brought to the development of empirical methods. The emphasis was on the wisdom of established authority and the truths that could be derived from such authority by the method of deductive reason. The scientific teachings of Aristotle became doctrine and Hippocrates’ theory of the humors was also accepted. The influence of authority was pervasive; its force was tyrannical; its methods of maintaining adherence to doctrine—the Spanish inquisition, for example—were draconian. The only positive feature of the situation was that the Christian virtue of charity was extended to madness and the treatment of mentally disordered people was more humane than might have been anticipated.

Little record remains of what psychologically relevant ideas were like until the seventeenth century, although scraps of evidence suggest the existence of fairly modern ideas. Procedures for treating mental disorder that sound like behavior modification were occasionally employed. The possible effectiveness of drug therapy had been noted. There were occasional efforts to make formal assessments of personality. And, interestingly, questions about the legal significance of mental condition had been raised.

The printing press was invented late in the fifteenth century. This probably accounts as much as anything for the fact that our history becomes very much richer beginning about 1600 than it had been earlier. By then, three major forces were dominant on the intellectual scene.

The first of these major forces was dualistic thinking, the acceptance of a sharp distinction between mind and body. Christian theology favored this position and Descartes, having invented the concept of reflex, put forth the idea of an extended body interacting with the non-extended soul. The second major force was Newtonian mechanics. Descartes also contributed to developments in this area. He treated the body as an automaton, operated by vital spirits in much the same way as the elaborate statues in some royal gardens were operated by water. The third major force was British empiricism, which resurrected the Aristotelian concept of tabula rasa and accepted the doctrines of elementism and associationism. The primary source of knowledge became sensory experience, a view that made it possible for Francis Bacon to challenge deductivism, to advocate an empirical approach to truth and to recommend inductive reasoning as a basic method. These developments freed science from the shackles of established authority.

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The dualistic, mechanistic, elementistic, empirical approach which took definite form in the 1600s was to become the orthodox methodology; it dominates psychology even today. But there is and always has been opposition. In the eighteenth century, the opposition came from the scholars of the Scottish school of psychologists, founded by Thomas Reid. Without being very clear about exactly what he meant by the notion, Reid favored a “common sense” psychology. He had faith in the practical reliability of the senses and was suspicious of the treatments that claimed that bits of experience were fitted together by association. He preferred the term suggestion to refer to what others called association, possibly because suggestion implied an active power of the mind: One idea actively suggested another; having one idea called up by association implies a more mechanical operation of a passive mind. Reid was opposed to mechanistic interpretations, and indeed to anything that degraded the dignity of man. In that sense, he anticipated later humanistic developments.

Reid also contributed to the development of a faculty psychology by proposing the existence of some twenty fundamental powers of the mind. Toward the end of the century, these faculties were a part of what Gall included in his phrenology. The other part of phrenology was a much increased understanding of the nervous system, which included the concept of localized functions of the brain. The phrenological position was that human faculties are represented in restricted areas of the brain and that a highly developed faculty means a highly developed brain in the appropriate cerebral area. On the further assumption that the increase in brain tissue needs extra volume in the skull to accommodate it, it was suggested that the individual’s faculties could be assessed by examining the surface of the head, looking for tell-tale bumps that would reveal the person’s strongest faculties. The theory was nonsense, of course, but it was immensely influential. Gall published on the subject in 1790, Spurzheim in 1805. Volumes for the layman continued to appear even in the twentieth century.

The eighteenth century was the century of George III, King of England and one of the most famous cases of mental illness on record. According to most accounts, King George suffered from porphyria, a physiological disturbance, whose symptoms included mental disorder and blood red urine. As was characteristic in those times, the therapy received by George III was probably mostly physical therapy: Blistering, bleeding, purgation, and the like. Already, however, the methods of psychotherapy were becoming available. In 1785, Benjamin Rush (one of the signers of the American Declaration of Independence) published a paper in which he described a treatment for alcoholism that sounds remarkably like twentieth century aversive conditioning therapy. At about the same time, and more importantly for the nearer-term history of psychology, hypnosis, still being called animal magnetism, was becoming popular. It was to remain a topic of controversy well into the nineteenth century.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contents of Volume 1
• Preface
• 1. OVERVIEW: THE CHRONOLOGY
• 2. BEHAVIORAL GENETICS AND THE NATURE-NURTURE QUESTION
• 3. THE DEVELOPMENT OF PSYCHOLOGICAL TESTING
• 4. DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
• 5. DRIVES AND MOTIVES
• 6. SLEEP AND DREAMING
• 7. PSYCHOTHERAPY
• 8. PSYCHOPATHOLOGY: I. FROM ANCIENT TIMES TO THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
• 9. PSYCHOPATHOLOGY: II. FROM THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY TO MODERN TIMES
• 10. APPROACHES TO PERSONALITY THEORY
• 11. HISTORY OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
• AUTHOR INDEX
• SUBJECT INDEX