A lot of people think psychology started with
this guy.
Sigmund Freud.
But that’s just wrong!
So, let’s begin at the beginning.
Where did psychology come from?
The first inklings of psychology
came out of philosophy.
So let’s go back to its heyday,
back in Ancient Greece.
Socrates developed the dialectic method,
which was a way of breaking down
really big questions into
smaller and smaller questions
in a way to pursue some sort of truth.
It’s a huge basis for the
scientific method today.
Plato, Socrates’ student,
said humans have a psyche,
which is Greek for soul.
He said the psyche was comprised of
three different parts:
reason, emotion, and desire.
Or, logos, thymos, and eros.
Plato’s student, Aristotle,
also explored the psyche, or soul.
Be wanted to know what made
humans different from plants or animals.
He concluded that humans have “intellect”.
But he didn’t mean intellect in the
modern sense, as in
solving problems or being smart,
but more like what today we’d call “consciousness”.
At the same time as these philosophers
doing their thing,
the Greek physician Hippocrates was studying
individuals with mental illnesses
and he concluded that these disorders resulted
from physical issues with the body
rather than possession, curses,
or other supernatural causes.
Over in China, Buddhist and Confucian teachings
talked about the differences between
physical and mental realities.
This was an early concept of dualism,
but it didn’t get expanded beyond that.
They also thought that mental disorders were
an imbalance of the mind with the body.
In the first century AD, Galen, a Greek physician,
philosopher, jack-of-all-trades type,
made some incredible discoveries.
Through dissection of human bodies,
he found that the brain and nervous system
are connected to the muscles,
and that’s how they’re controlled.
He also hypothesized that the brain was
the source of
emotions and thoughts and even suggested that
talk therapy for psychological problems
would be a good thing.
I mean, talk about a guy ahead of his time.
...a HEAD of his time?
Ah, whatever.
Ahmed ibn Sahl al-Balkhi,
a Muslim, Persian scientist
developed the idea of “mental health”
in the 9th century.
He said that sicknesses in the mind
could affect the body and vice versa.
He also seemed to have developed
the first definition of depression,
which is pretty amazing.
In the 13th century,
the Polish theologian and scientist Witelo
wrote a surprisingly accurate
concept of the subconscious.
It’s pretty much in line with our
modern idea of the subconscious today.
In the 17th century, Rene Descartes said
“Cogito Ergo Sum”.
I think, therefore I am.
It’s simple phrase, but it showed
the importance of cognition on the human experience.
In an unplanned left turn away from science,
Franz Joseph Gall and
Johann Gaspar Spurzheim developed phrenology,
a pseudoscience that says that
different parts of the brain
corresponded to mental traits such as
hope, love, spirituality, greed,
and a whole lot of other stuff.
Phrenologists thought that they could
read a person’s skull
to detect the sizes of these brain parts
and diagnose issues.
That….was not true.
Whoops!
All right, back on track.
The actual term psychology
became popular in the 18th century
when philosopher Christian Wolff
wrote two books.
Empirical Psychology and Rational Psychology.
However, psychology was still considered
part of philosophy
and it wasn’t its own thing.
And for a while there, people thought that
maybe it would never become it’s own thing.
Including Immanuel Kant.
He never thought that it would be a “proper”
natural science
because its phenomena could not be quantified,
or at least not back then.
Dang Kant.
I Kant believe he said that.
However, the 19th century saw a burst of interest
and new discoveries that marked
the beginning of psychology
as its own scientific discipline.
This including Paul Broca and Carl Wernicke
identifying areas of the brain
responsible for language functions.
This led the way for Wilhelm Wundt,
who started the first experimental psychology lab,
the first university department of psychology,
and the first professional journal
dedicated to psychology
in 1874 in Zurich, Germany.
A year later, William James, an American physician,
brought psychology to the U.S. and offered
the first psychology course at Harvard.
More than anyone else, William James is responsible
for the modern field of psychology.
He viewed psychology as a triad.
Or a triangle.
Or a...um.
A triforce, consisting of three parts.
The clinical practice, laboratory research,
and theoretical formulations.
And finally we get to Freud!
In Vienna, Austria in 1890,
Sigmund Freud developed psychoanalysis
and starts using it on errebody.
This new therapy made waves and spread quickly
through Austria, Germany, France, Britain,
and even America.
The American Psychological Association,
or APA, which is still running today,
was founded soon after in 1892.
But psychology was still facing
an identity crisis.
Traditionalists wanted to focus on
introspection and human consciousness.
But newcomers like behaviorist John B. Watson
wanted psychology to reject
the study of consciousness and
only study behavior.
In the end, both sides won.
Today, psychology is defined as
the study of the mind and behavior.
And that is how psychology was born.
Today, psychology is a multifaceted,
diverse discipline that encompasses everything
from animal research to clinical therapy.
After thousands of years of study,
we’re still trying to understand the mind.
Modern psychology is only a little over
100 years old.
So...who knows
what we’ll discover in the next 100?
Thanks for watching this episode of Micah
Psych.
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Until next time, I’m Micah.
Think about it.
