Since the beginning of its history, human beings have developed hypotheses and theories about psychological functioning and mental disorders. Despite the predominance of the scientific method, today very old conceptions, such as the attribution of illnesses to the action of spirits or the separation between the body and the soul, continue to have a certain 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 such as Emil Kraepelin, Wilhelm Wundt, Ivan Pavlov or Sigmund Freud became popular in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Ancient Age: beginning of the history of Psychology
The term psychology comes from the Greek words “psyché” and “logos”, and can be translated as “study of the soul”. During ancient times, 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 curative effects were attributed. Thus, in Europe thousands of years ago, the mind was considered an almost magical element, something that animated the body through invisible forces and that human beings were not able to fully understand.
Between the 5th and 4th centuries BC, philosophers such as Socrates and Plato made contributions that would be key to the development of psychology, in addition to 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 that same time, the doctor Hippocrates studied physical and mental illnesses using 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, who developed that of Hippocrates, is one of the best examples of Greek influence on Roman thought.
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 diabolical: mental disorders were attributed to the commission of sins and they were “treated” through 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 such as depression, anxiety, dementia or hallucinations, humane treatments were applied to those who suffered from them and basic psychological processes began to be studied.
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 the first known psychological experiment: draw a circle with one hand and a square with the other to assess resistance to distraction.
Renaissance and Enlightenment
Between the 16th and 18th centuries, in the Western world the demonological conception of mental illness and humanitarianism coexisted The recovery of the influence of classical Greek and Roman authors played a fundamental role in this second aspect, which related psychological disorders to physical, and not moral, alterations.
The word “psychology” began to become popular during this historical period. In this sense, the works of the philosophers Marko Marulic, Rudolf Göckel and Christian Wolff were especially important.
It is worth highlighting the influence of philosophers such as René Descartes, who contributed to the dualistic conception that separated the body and the soul, Baruch Spinoza, who questioned it, or John Locke, who stated that the mind depends on environmental influences. Likewise, the doctor Thomas Willis attributed mental disorders to alterations in the nervous system.
At the end of the 18th century also Franz Joseph Gall and Franz Mesmer were very influential ; The first introduced phrenology, according to which mental functions depend on the size of specific areas of the brain, while mesmerism attributed physical and psychological alterations to the action of magnetic energies on body 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 diagnostic classifications, while Esquirol promoted the use of statistics to analyze the effectiveness of psychological interventions.
19th century: “Scientific psychology” is born
From the second half of the 19th century increasing knowledge about brain anatomy they made mental processes more understood as consequences of biology. We highlight the contributions of Gustav Theodor Fechner’s psychophysiology and those of Pierre Paul Broca and Carl Wernicke in the field of neuropsychology.
Also The influence of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was very important In turn, Darwin did not limit himself to describing forms of life and hypothesizing about their kinship, but he also wrote about topics that emotions address today. This is especially evident in his work. The expression of emotions in man and animalswritten in 1872. In said book, the author points out that forms of emotional expression are also resources for adaptation to the environment, especially in the most social animals.
Evolutionism served as an excuse for eugenicists such as 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 heredity.
In 1879 Wilhelm Wundt founded the first experimental psychology laboratory, where knowledge from different branches of science would be combined; This is why Wundt is often called “the father of scientific psychology.”
This researcher went to great lengths to try to objectively isolate variables that were relevant when studying mental processes that, until then, were considered totally subjective. Thus, his focus of study was what is known today as Basic Psychology, although this meant not studying psychological phenomena in their “natural habitat” but in an artificial laboratory context.
Now, before Wundt, psychophysics researchers such as Gustav Theodor Fechner had already prepared 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, although he did not take this methodology to the extremes of Wundt.
Psychiatry developed largely thanks to the work of Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum, who studied disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and that of Emil Kraepelin, pioneer of current diagnostic classifications based on symptoms and signs, as well as their course.
Among the background of current psychology it is also necessary to mention functionalism and structuralism, two very influential schools during the last years of the 19th century and the first stage of the 20th. While William James’ functionalism 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, reflexology appeared in Russia thanks to 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.
Development in the 20th century
During the 20th 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 end up leading to the emergence of cognitive psychology which recovered the study of both elementary and complex mental processes and became popular in the 1960s. Cognitivism includes the treatments developed by authors such as George Kelly, Albert Ellis or 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 toward 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 the science of behavior and mental processes has been marked by the development of 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 a good part of their presence and their hegemony, although they remain in good health in Argentina and France.
This has meant that a conception of psychology currently prevails in which neurosciences and cognitive psychology (with many contributions from behaviorism) they exchange tools and knowledge among themselves both in research and in interventions.
However, the criticisms that behaviorism made against the mentalist and subjectivist conceptions of psychology (which are those that treat “the mind” as something separate from a person’s context and those that start from the person’s opinions about what passes through your head, respectively), are still valid.
This means that both cognitivism and psychoanalysis and all perspectives belonging to humanistic psychology are harshly criticized, among other things, for working from very abstract and poorly defined concepts under which very diverse and poorly related meanings can be placed..
Anyway, behaviorism remains a minority philosophy in psychology, while cognitivism is in very good health. Of course, the vast majority of experimental research in cognitive psychology is carried out based on 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 hand it is about studying this element by creating stimuli and measuring objective responses.
