History of Psychology: authors and main theories
From the beginning of its history the human being has elaborated hypotheses and theories about psychological functioning and mental disorders. In spite of the predominance of the scientific method, today very old conceptions, such as the attribution of diseases to the action of spirits or the separation between the body and the soul, continue to have some influence.
To talk about the history of psychology it is necessary to go back to the classical philosophers; However, the discipline we know today did not develop as such until the works of authors like Emil Kraepelin, Wilhelm Wundt, Ivan Pavlov or Sigmund Freud were popularized in the 19th and 20th centuries.
- Related article: "The 7 main streams of Psychology"
Ancient Age: beginning of the history of Psychology
The term psychology comes from the Greek words "psyche" and "logos", which can be translated as "study of the soul". During the Ancient Age it was believed that mental disorders were a consequence of possession by spirits and demons, and the treatments consisted of spells and enchantments to which were attributed curative effects.
Between the 5th century and the 4th a.C. Philosophers such as Socrates and Plato made contributions that would be key to the development of psychology, in addition to that of philosophy. While Socrates laid the foundations of the scientific method, Plato conceived the body as the vehicle of the soul, truly responsible for human behavior.
At the same time, the physician Hippocrates studied physical and psychic diseases by the inductive method and attributed them to imbalances in humors or body fluids . This tradition would be picked up by Rome: the work of Galen, which developed that of Hippocrates, is one of the best examples of Greek influence in Roman thought.
- Maybe you're interested: "The theory of the four humors, Hippocrates"
Middle Ages: developments and setbacks
In the Middle Ages European thought was dominated by Christianity; this caused clear setbacks in scientific progress. Although the Greco-Roman theories of the humors were still valid, they were combined again with the magical and the diabolic: Mental disorders were attributed to the commission of sins and they were "treated" by prayers and exorcisms.
On the other hand, in the Arab world, immersed in its golden age, medicine and psychology continued to advance during the Middle Ages. "Diseases of the mind" were described As depression, anxiety, dementia or hallucinations, humanitarian treatments were applied to those who suffered them and began to study the basic psychological processes.
There were also relevant developments in Asian psychology. Hindu philosophy analyzed the concept of the self, while in China tests were already applied in the educational field and it was carried out the first psychological experiment of which there is evidence : draw a circle with one hand and a square with the other to assess the resistance to distraction.
Renaissance and Illustration
Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, in the western world lived the demonological conception of mental illness and humanitarianism . The recovery of the influence of classical Greek and Roman authors had a fundamental role in this second aspect, which related psychological disorders with physical, and not moral, alterations.
The word "psychology" began to popularize during this historical period. In this sense, the works of the philosophers Marko Marulic, Rudolf Göckel and Christian Wolff were especially important.
Note the influence of philosophers like René Descartes, who contributed to the dualistic conception that separated body and soul, Baruch Spinoza, who questioned it, or John Locke, who affirmed that the mind depends on environmental influences. Also the doctor Thomas Willis attributed the mental disorders to alterations in the nervous system.
At the end of the 18th century, too they were very influential Franz Joseph Gall and Franz Mesmer ; the first introduced phrenology, according to which mental functions depend on the size of specific areas of the brain, while mesmerism attributed the physical and psychological alterations to the action of magnetic energies on bodily fluids.
Psychiatry was preceded by alienism, represented mainly by Philippe Pinel and his disciple Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol. Pinel promoted the moral treatment of the mentally ill and the diagnostic classifications, while Esquirol encouraged the use of statistics to analyze the effectiveness of psychological interventions.
- Maybe you're interested: "Franz Joseph Gall: biography of the creator of phrenology"
19th century: the "Scientific Psychology" is born
From the second half of the 19th century the increase in knowledge about brain anatomy they made mental processes to be understood to a greater extent as consequences of biology. We highlight the contributions of the psychophysiology of Gustav Theodor Fechner and those of Pierre Paul Broca and Carl Wernicke in the field of neuropsychology.
As well the influence of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was very important . Evolutionism served as an excuse for eugenicists like Francis Galton and Bénédict Morel, who defended the inferiority of lower-class people and those with mental disorders through the overvaluation of the weight of inheritance.
In 1879 Wilhelm Wundt founded the first laboratory of Experimental Psychology , where the knowledge of different branches of science would be combined; this is why Wundt is often called "the father of scientific psychology", although before Wundt psychophysics researchers such as Gustav Theodor Fechner had already paved the way for the emergence of this discipline. Granville Stanley Hall was the creator of a similar laboratory in the United States and founded the American Psychological Association.
Psychiatry developed to a large extent thanks to the work of Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum, who studied alterations such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and Emil Kraepelin, pioneer of the current diagnostic classifications based on symptoms and signs, as well as on their course.
Among the antecedents of current psychology it is also necessary to mention functionalism and structuralism, two very influential schools during the last years of the XIX century and the first stage of the XX. While the functionalism of William James studied mental functions, Edward Titchener's structuralism focused on its contents , like sensations or thoughts.
On the other hand, in this century Jean-Martin Charcot and Josef Breuer studied hypnosis and hysteria, developing research and ideas that inspired Sigmund Freud during the last years of this century. Meanwhile, in Russia appeared the reflexology of the hand Ivan Pavlov and Vladimir Bekhterev. With these contributions the foundations of psychoanalysis and behaviorism were established , the two orientations that would dominate the psychology of the first half of the 20th century.
The development in the 20th century
During the twentieth century, the main theoretical currents of current psychology were established. Sigmund Freud, disciple of Charcot and Breuer, created psychoanalysis and popularized verbal therapy and the concept of the unconscious under the psychoanalytic prism, while authors such as John Watson and Burrhus F. Skinner developed behavioral therapies focused on observable behavior.
The scientific research promoted by behaviorism would eventually lead to the emergence of cognitive psychology , which recovered the study of both elementary and complex mental processes and became popular from the 60s. Cognitivism encompasses treatments developed by authors such as George Kelly, Alfred Ellis and Aaron Beck.
Another relevant theoretical orientation is humanistic psychology , represented by Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, among others. Humanism emerged as a reaction to the predominance of psychoanalysis and behaviorism and defended the conception of people as free, unique beings, tending to self-realization and with the right to dignity.
Likewise, knowledge about biology, medicine and pharmacology increased enormously during the 20th century, which facilitated the predominance of these sciences over psychology and influenced the development of interdisciplinary fields such as psychobiology, neuropsychology and psychopharmacology.
The last decades
The development of behavioral science and mental processes has been marked by the development of the neurosciences and the constant dialogue with cognitive sciences in general, and with behavioral economics. In the same way, the schools of the current linked to psychoanalysis have lost much of their presence and their hegemony, although they remain in good health in Argentina and France.
This has caused that at the moment a conception of psychology prevails in which neurosciences and cognitivist psychology (with many contributions from behaviorism) they exchange tools and knowledge between them in both research and interventions.
However, the criticisms that behaviorism made against the mentalistic and subjectivist conceptions of psychology (which are those that treat "the mind" as something separate from the context of a person and those that start from the opinions of the person about what it goes through his head, respectively), are still valid.
This means that both cognitivism and psychoanalysis and all the perspects belonging to humanistic psychology are strongly criticized, among other things, for working from very abstract and ill-defined concepts under which very different and unrelated meanings can be placed. .
Anyway, Behaviorism remains a minority philosophy in psychology , while cognitivism enjoys very good health. Of course, the vast majority of research in cognitive psychology of experimental type are made from the methodological behaviorism, which leads to some contradictions: on the one hand mental phenomena are treated as elements located "within the brain" of the person (mentalism) and on the other it is about studying this element creating stimuli and measuring objective responses.
