Psy310 - History of Psychology

The History of Psychology

The history of psychology is absolutely amazing. It has been said that psychology did not emerge as a separate discipline until the late 1800s. The Catholic Church began creating philosophies, which many philosophers began to question. These questions were the birth of Psychology. Psychology's history can be traced back to the time of the early Greeks. Early psychology was considered as the study of the soul and heavily influenced by the works of many philosophers. Psychology as a self-conscious field or experimental study began in 1879, when William Wundt founded the first laboratory in Leipzig; however, prior to this many early philosophers brought speculation on the nature of the mind, soul, and spirit (Cherry, 2011).

Rene Descartes was a famous French mathematician, scientist, and philosopher. Descartes lived from 1596-1650 and brought many ideas to psychology. He suggested that the body works like a machine. The mind or soul was said to be a non-material entity that lacks extension and motion, unlike the body. Descartes argued that only humans have minds and the mind interacts with the body at the pineal gland. This was said to be dualism, which proposes that the mind controls the body. Descartes thought that animals could not feel pain because they did not have minds. This thought began the dissection of live animals, which became widely used throughout Europe until the Enlightment. Descartes also explained in his Discourse on Method that he would only accept the truth if something could not be doubted. He believed the way to truth was through human capacity to reason. In the Discourse on Method, he described four basic rules to arrive at the truth (Goodwin, 2008).

John Locke was an Oxford scholar, medical researcher, and great philosopher of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Locke wrote an Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which aimed to determine the limits of human understanding. Many early writers argued that human understanding had limits and Locke tried to determine those limits. Locke thought we knew without a doubt that God existed. He also argued about morality, because we were the creators of moral and political ideas. Locke believed individuals grew based on his or her experiences in life (Goodwin, 2008).

Francis Bacon was a leading figure in natural philosophy. Bacon was a lawyer and wrote on questions of law, state, religion, and contemporary politics. Bacon is well known for his treatises on empiricist natural philosophy. According to Bacon, the mind is not a tabula rasa, but rather an ideal plane for receiving an image on an account of implicit distortions (Cherry, 2011).

Thomas Hobbes rejected the dualism suggested by Descartes. Hobbes believed in the mortality of the soul. Hobbes also rejected free will in favor of determinism, meaning to be able to do what one desires.