We explain the history of psychology, its antecedents, modern psychology and its various currents.
What is the history of psychology?
The psychology is a social science concerned with studying and understanding the mind and conduct human. Despite its formal origins in the 19th century, it is seen as the modern continuation of a long philosophical tradition of questioning the origins of life. awareness and what, exactly, that distinguishes us from animals.
The antecedents of psychology date back to classical antiquity, especially Greco-Roman, since many of the great thinkers of the West emerged within that Mediterranean society.
Philosophers like Socrates and Plato, in the 5th and 4th century BC. C., important questions were asked about what is human being, and they came to the conclusion that there should be a "soul" to oppose the body, and that in the first resided the mental, intellectual and moral aspects of the individual, while the second was the seat of passions and the most " animals ”of the human being.
This opposition between body and soul, or rather body and mind, was fundamental to Western culture and many religions, As the Christianity, they took it at face value. It also allowed the appearance of medical studies of the body, many of which also had ancient beginnings, distinguishing as the centuries passed more and more what was a bodily ailment from what was a "spirit" ailment.
For this, of course, it was necessary to overcome the paradigm religious of medieval Christianity, which attributed any disease that was not strictly corporeal, to demonic possession or other mystical explanations.
Prayer and exorcism were the most common method of dealing with ailments. However, numerous ancient treatises on the matter had survived, such as the famous theory of the four humors, which assumed diseases as a product of an imbalance of the four fundamental fluids of the human body: blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile.
The term "psychology" emerged during the Renaissance western, taking up the pagan Greco-Roman heritage. It was formed, precisely, by the Greek words psyche, "Soul", and logos, "speech".
Thanks to this reunion of the West with itself, and to the work of philosophers such as René Descartes (1596-1650), Baruch Espinoza (1632-1677) or John Locke (1632-1704), who deepened and questioned the body / soul dichotomy, the modern panorama was ready for the first steps towards the formalization of the Sciences, and among them, psychology.
Other important precursors in the matter were the Croatian Marko Marulic (1450-1524), and the Germans Rodolfo Goclenio (1547-1628) and Christian Wolff (1679-1754). Also noteworthy are the previous forms of psychiatry, which from the mid-eighteenth to the nineteenth century were practiced under the name "alienism."
"Scientific" psychology, that is, modern psychology, was born in the nineteenth century, hand in hand with the increase in medical and biological knowledge, especially neurological and psychophysiological. The studies of scientists such as Gustav Fechner (1801-1887), Paul Pierre Broca (1824-1880) and Carl Wernicke (1848-1905) were key in this regard.
The revolution caused by the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin (1809-1882), whose theories about the origin of species they were soon applied to their own society human, often with disastrous political results. In any case, it is important to understand how new scientific perspectives turned to the study of the human mind itself, among many other things.
The first experimental psychology laboratory was founded in 1879, at the German University of Leipzig, and was the work of the philosopher and psychologist Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920). This event is considered the founding milestone of modern psychology, that is, its definitive separation from the philosophy, embarking on a properly scientific path.
The positivism of Auguste Comte (1798-1857), who valued the experimental sciences above any other approach to science, had an immense influence on this. reality.
Thus arose the first two currents of psychology:
- The structuralism defended by Wundt.
- The functionalism proposed in the United States by William James (1842-1910).
During the first decades of the existence of psychology, three new aspects would be added:
- Psychoanalysis, developed by the famous Sigmund Freud (1856-1939).
- Gestalt psychology, proposed by Max Wertheimer (1880-1943) and Wolfgang Köhler (1887-1967), among others
- The behaviorism, whose highest representative was the American John B. Watson (1878-1958).
From this initial scenario, new proposals and considerations arose regarding the human mind and what the ideal approaches should be for its rigorous and scientific study. Advances in medicine also allowed the modernization and formalization of psychiatry, and a new horizon of experimentation was opened for the study of consciousness.