Psychology History a Brief History of Psychology

Psychology History

A Brief History of Psychology

The study of psychology is now deeply entrenched in our society's understand as to how a human, and specifically the human mind, functions. Understanding one's psychological needs is necessary in daily life in order to understand how to cope with various stresses and emotions. However, many decades ago, such ideas were truly visionary, as psychology was not considered a true scientific subject, and many who had mental problems were thrown in institutions where they were shunned by society and often forgotten by families. This paper will examine progress in the field of psychology, and will do so by outlining the roots of early philosophy that influenced the development of modern psychology and by identifying those individuals who began this study and who established psychology as a discipline in the 19th century.

The roots of modern psychology, through they begin in the 1800's, truly lie in the ancient philosophers of Greece, and flow through history in various fields, including the political, the scientific, and the continuation of philosophy in various other mediums. Though psychology truly originates with the writings of Aristotle and his wise counterparts, and moves through history through figures such as Descartes and Locke, it modernizes in the late 1800's with the establishment of the first psychological lab by Wilhelm Wundt in Germany. Through modernization the field achieves a transition from purely philosophical to much more practical.

The study of the mind, as mentioned above, began in antiquity, as far back as Egypt and Greece. To expand upon this idea, one must note the writings of Aristotle, for instance, who believed that "the heart was the seat of the mind and that the brain was merely a radiator for the blood to dissipate the heat generated by the heart."

Hippocrates (who is said to be the father of Western medicine) also proposed that "the brain was the seat of the sensations (being the site of the eyes, ears, nose and tongue) as well as the center of the intellect, based in part on the accumulated knowledge acquired from dissections and battlefield injuries. For instance, the eyes, being necessary for visual experience of the world, are not connected to the heart but send a nerve to the brain."

As time progressed and Europe entered the Renaissance, scientists began to see more and more that the brain controls the body, and this study became very scientific. A fantastic discovery came with Johannes Muller, who studied the nervous system in the 1800's and who eventually led this study to examine the relationship of intensity between a physical stimulus and the subjective psychological perception of that stimulus. It was Muller who stated that "the sensation following the stimulation of a sensory nerve does not depend on the nature of the stimulation, but upon the nature of the sense organ. For instance, the firing of the optic due to mechanical pressure would not be perceived as the sensation of touch but as some sort of visual stimulus like spots or flashes of light," and it was in his laboratory that he mentored many of the most successful psychophysicists, who eventually developed the birth of psychology "as a separate discipline in 1879 with the establishment of Wilhelm Wundt's first laboratory of psychology at the University of Leipzig."

It was due to these historical, gargantuan efforts that psychology developed, and developed quickly, once it started. The remainder of the paper will focus upon these developments in Wundt's Germany. Other scientists can be attributed to the German beginnings of psychology and they include: Hermann von Helmholtz, Ernst Heinrich Weber, and Gustav Theodor Fechner. These individuals developed both the theory and practice of psychology in order to enable it to be a true science. At Leipzig, where the first laboratory was established as mentioned above, "Wundt found fertile ground for his studies on topics such as attention, sensation, perception, and reaction time -- the split-second needed for mental processing between the time when an event occurs and the time when the muscles start responding to it."

According to further historical data, Wundt was trained in medicine, as any scientist of his time would be, but he also studied physiology and philosophy. Due to the fact that Wundt established his now famous laboratory, it is safe to say he expanded on these important interests and eventually utilized them to create a new science: psychology. Research further states, "in addition to actively pursuing research in his lab, [Wundt] founded a journal and trained a steady stream of graduate students."