Historical and Philosophical Foundations of Psychology

The Classical and Christian Foundations

Western civilization's intellectual and social aspects were long dominated by Christianity, as they had been throughout the Dark Ages. Christianity was chiefly concerned with the "why" — the question of why we exist. It held that we exist in order to do God's will, follow God's law, and eventually be judged by God for how we have lived. Christian theology, which held that God created the universe and was responsible for all things and occurrences within it, inhibited reason and free inquiry during the Dark Ages and Middle Ages. Ideas that contradicted Christian theology in any way were suppressed, and those who held them were persecuted.

In his Ethics, Aristotle is concerned with the question of what is good. He considered this question important because every choice and action humans take is aimed at some good. Aristotle defined happiness as the ultimate good. Thus, the question "what is the good life?" is essentially asking "how do we achieve happiness?" Aristotle believed that a person was what he did repeatedly — a product of his habits.

The Greek physician Hippocrates posited that the human body was, like everything else in the world, made from four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. He believed that these four elements were associated with the different "humors" of the human body — earth with black bile, air with yellow bile, fire with blood, and water with phlegm (p. 40). He believed that illness was caused by an imbalance among these humors.

Hippocrates' Theory of Humors gave rise to Western civilization's first attempt to explain human traits and behaviors. In the second century AD, the physician Galen created a rudimentary theory of personality based on the Theory of Humors (p. 41). In Galen's system, the phlegm humor was associated with the sluggish and emotional Phlegmatic temperament, the blood humor with the cheerful Sanguine temperament, the yellow bile humor with the fiery Choleric temperament, and the black bile humor with the sad Melancholic temperament.

Galen theorized that each individual's body is dominated by one of these humors, which bequeaths a particular temperament to the individual. His temperaments were defined by personal traits such as cheerfulness, sadness, or sluggishness. Thus, a person whom we would today diagnose as dysthymic might simply have been considered to be of Melancholic temperament — sad by nature. If that person was also experiencing physical illness, Galen would attempt to trace it to organic causes such as an excess of black bile.

Galen recognized that physical illnesses sometimes did not have organic roots and traced certain symptoms to what he called the "non-naturals," including the "passions or perturbations of the soul." Under his system, illnesses were therefore addressed through both the body and the mind. He believed that some illnesses were caused by "errors of the soul" — the failure to control one's passions or emotions. Echoing Plato, Galen recommended the control of the passions through the application of reason. This was achieved through moral self-examination: awareness of harmful emotions such as anger and lust, to which all people are prone. He also recommended a technique of conscious verbalization, in which the individual would ponder moral maxims, remind himself of his faults, and recite those maxims aloud.

Galen's Theory of Humors, Temperaments, and Diseases of Passion dominated Western medicine until the 17th century. Indeed, they continue to be influential in the realm of personality theory today. Although Galen's explanations of human behavior may appear primitive, they identified the psychosomatic elements of illness that were later neglected during the modern period. In this way, Galen's work anticipated the creation of modern psychosomatic medicine, which combines psychological, behavioral, and biomedical approaches to illness.

Galen's theories regarding the influence of emotions on illness remained a cornerstone of medical diagnosis until the 17th century. However, the primary epistemological basis for psychology during the Christian period was the Word of God — knowledge considered the Ultimate Truth, revealed through authoritative sources such as priests or holy books. These authoritative sources held that God created the universe and was responsible for all things and occurrences within it.

Because of the influence of Christian theology, new explanations for mental illnesses arose alongside Galen's theories. For certain instances of mental illness that did not respond to Galenic medicine, the cause was traced to the work of God. Some priests explained such illness as punishment for sin. In the most unfortunate cases, the afflicted person would be determined to be possessed by a demon and locked in an infirmary or burned at the stake.

Philosophical and Epistemological Roots of Modern Psychology

The Enlightenment — the age of reason — was a period of intellectual and cultural flowering in 17th- and 18th-century Western Europe. It promoted the use of reason, rather than revelation, for understanding the world. Isaac Newton exemplified this shift by providing mechanistic explanations for natural processes such as gravity, in place of the teleological explanations that had attributed those processes to God. This suggested that all physical processes had physical causes.

In the 1600s, René Descartes, considered the first modern philosopher, divided the world into mind and matter — mind represented by thoughts, and matter represented by physical substances. Descartes used this framework to classify human behavior, distinguishing humans from "automata" (machines) that acted through mechanistic, natural impulse. He believed that humans acted with a higher level of thought and classified them as "machines" with "minds."

Another Enlightenment philosopher, John Locke, held that people were born without innate ideas. This notion — that the human mind was a blank slate and that all of an individual's knowledge and character were determined by experience — was enormously influential for the study of human behavior. It implied that all behavior was learned, thereby laying the philosophical foundations for the school of Behaviorism.

The two dominant epistemological authorities in this period were empiricism and pure reason or logic. Empirical knowledge was obtained through the senses — through observation — and formed the basis of modern science. The second epistemological authority was reason or logic. Often, science and reason worked in conjunction, especially where empirical methods could not be fully applied to a question.

The Major Schools of Modern Psychology

Structuralism was the first school of modern psychology. It was concerned with understanding the structure of the mind through the examination of mental processes such as sensations, impressions, and affections. The school's founder, Edward Titchener, sought to understand mental processes through the observation of conscious events (pp. 276–77). Structuralism, however, was concerned with mental processes in general rather than in the particular. It therefore ignored issues such as psychological development, abnormal behavior, personality, and individual differences (p. 289).

Structuralism was greatly influenced by Newton's mechanical explanations of physical processes and sought to understand the mind's mechanisms in the same manner. Its founder, Titchener, considered his methods perfectly scientific. Although Structuralists employed empirical methods, those methods could not easily obtain information about internal mental processes. Structuralism therefore relied heavily on introspection — the observation of conscious events — to determine the contents of the mind. It never overcame this epistemological challenge, and the method of introspection was considered unreliable by many, especially Behaviorists like Skinner.

Related to Structuralism was Voluntarism, which rested on the same philosophical and epistemological foundations. Voluntarist William Wundt, the founder of experimental psychology, was concerned with both voluntary and involuntary mental processes (p. 289). He believed that the mind was capable of voluntary processes such as attention, but he did not believe that volitional activities of this kind constituted free will, making him a Determinist. Wundt held that all volitional acts operated according to mental laws that acted on the contents of consciousness (p. 271).

Functionalism, unlike Structuralism, sought to understand the functions of the mind rather than merely describing its contents. It envisioned practical applications for its findings, including improvements in personal life, education, and industry (pp. 337–38). Functionalists were also interested in understanding individual differences and therefore studied issues such as personality, abnormal behavior, and motivation (p. 338). Because the various functions of the mind are numerous, Functionalism was highly diverse in its subjects of study.

Functionalists were heavily influenced by Darwin's theory of evolution and believed that every mental process had a particular purpose or function. Unlike Structuralists and Behaviorists, they sought to understand both mental processes and behavior — specifically why they occur, or for what function. Although they used empirical observation and introspection as well, Functionalist methods were more sound because they did not seek to explain the mechanism of mental processes, only their functions.

Functionalism did not fade because its findings were rejected, but because they were so widely accepted. The school's findings, research interests, and methodologies were adopted and absorbed by many subsequent schools and are still present in the study of psychology today.

Behaviorism sought to understand observable behavior rather than the workings or functions of the mind. Some psychologists went so far as to insist that psychology was the science of behavior. John Watson denied the existence of a separate realm of conscious events. The purpose of Behaviorism, according to Watson, was to predict and control behavior by understanding the effect of the environment on an individual's actions. Watson was also influenced by Locke's blank slate theory and believed that an individual's character and behavior were determined solely by experience.

Because Behaviorism was not concerned with the mind or its inner workings, its practitioners had no need for introspection and rejected it entirely. Instead, they relied exclusively on methodical, observable, and scientific observation of behavior. Their dominant method was the stimulus-response paradigm, in which scientists presented a subject with a stimulus and observed its responses.

Behaviorism produced many findings, frameworks, and research questions that are still employed today. Pavlov believed that all actions were reflexive and developed the concept of conditioning, which posited that behavior was shaped by particular prior experiences — stimuli. Later Behaviorists, such as Skinner, argued that behavior was also controlled by the consequences that followed it, in that it was designed to produce a certain response from the environment. Skinner called this operant behavior and proposed the concept of operant conditioning (p. 445).

Because of the Behaviorist position that behavior can be controlled by altering the environment, Behaviorism found wide practical application and strong institutional support. Behaviorist theories and methodologies remain influential today, particularly in the fields of learning, motivation, and developmental psychology. However, the Behaviorist position that environment alone controls behavior has lost favor — especially among evolutionary psychologists — because of discoveries regarding the role of genetics in behavior and predispositions (Workman and Reader, 2004, p. 1).

The German school of Gestalt psychology, unlike the Behaviorists, sought to understand consciousness. The Gestaltists distinguished the geographical (physical) environment from the behavioral (subjective) environment. They believed that the behavioral environment governed behavior — meaning that the stimuli perceived by an individual were a product of that individual's own subjective experience and perception of the event. For this reason, Gestalt psychology emphasized the importance of an individual's subjective experience and perception of his environment in explaining behavior.

The Gestaltists were heavily influenced by Immanuel Kant's ideas on sensory experience. Kant believed that "the mind adds something to our conscious experience that sensory stimulation does not contain" (Prolegomena). The Gestaltists held that the brain modifies sensory experience, making it more structured and organized in order to render it meaningful. Thus, there is a crucial difference between raw sensory experience and one's perception of that experience. Kurt Lewin was an early Gestaltist who believed that psychology should not categorize people into types or emphasize inner essences (p. 482).

The Gestaltists used introspection to study the dynamics of consciousness. They were not as preoccupied as the Behaviorists and Structuralists with making psychology a hard science, believing those schools were more concerned with methodological validity than with genuine insight into the human mind. In this way, they resembled the Functionalists. Gestalt psychology had significant implications for modern psychology because it implied that an individual's mind and behavior can be altered by changing that individual's perception. Although the Gestalt school is no longer active, many of its insights have been incorporated into modern psychology. It created a new focus on the holistic aspects of behavior and consciousness rather than attempting to explain psychology through narrow elemental terms. It has been particularly influential in Humanistic psychology and cognitive psychology.