early history of psychology

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how long has psychology been around and what did they use to do to treat there patients.?

-- lauren williams (lauren1785@aol.com), April 18, 2001

Answers

A very complicated question to answer. The presocratic philosophers made many mentions of the psyche, and speculated on its composition. Plato wrote several books containing long discussions of the psyche. See esp. Phaedo, Republic book IV, and Timaeus sec. 4-14. The first book specifically about the psyche (that we still have) was Aristotle's Peri Psyches (better known by its Latin title, De Anima, or in English, On the Soul). Note that the Aristotle's idea of the psyche, however, was very different from ours, having as much to do with how life arises in a body, as with those functions we today think of as "psychological." There continued to be lots of work on the psyche, and its Latin successor, anima, through the ancient era and into the Middle Ages.

The first use of the term "psychology" is a matter of some controversy. The first use we know of appears to have been by a Croatian humanist named Marco Marulic around 1506. It is commonly claimed that the first use was by the German protestant reformer Phillip Melanchthon in the late 1530s, but this turns out to be incorrect, having been based on a translation from the middle third of the 19th century. There are a few other mentions of the term, but it didn't really gain any currency until the 18th century, when the Leibnizian philosopher Christian Wolff used it to distinguish what he called rational from empircial psychology in the 1730s. This distinction was the basis of the article on "psichologie" that appeared in Denis Diderot's famous Encyclopedia (1751-1781). See G.A. Ungerer & W.G. Bringmann's on the topic in W.G. Bringmann et al.'s _A Pictorial History of Psychology_ (Chicago: Quintessence, 1997, pp. 13-18).

Until the 19th century, it was rarely thought possible that psychology could be a scientific discipline. Kant specifically excluded psychology from the realm of possible science. Nevertheless, Fechner began developing his psychophysics in the mid-19th century. Wundt put the topic on the academic map, so to speak, when he christened his empirical studies of consciousness "physiological psychology" (by which he meant the study of psychology by the methods used in physiology, viz., experimental methods). University departments and professorships specifically in psychology did not begin to appear until last few years of the 19th century, and were not numerous until the 20th century.

So you see why Ebbinghaus said about psychology, that it has a long past, but a short history.

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), April 18, 2001.


Hi Lauren, a semi good book that gives you an inside view point on some early "psychology" is a book written by Edwin Guthrie, it is a translation of a book by Pierre Janet, and so the title may be Pierre Janet. And this will give you a picture of patients and cures. Then if you want to see earlier patients and treatments look into Dorothea Dix, I think that's how you spell her name. You can find a brief outline of her in Hergenhahn's, An Introduction to the History of Psychology. And look at the life and times of Benjamin Rush and Philippe Pinel, also in Hergenhahn. All those folks where doing business in 1800s I believe. Treatments were diverse, up until George the 1st, maybe it was assumed patients were under the influence of the devil, and treatments in that case where usually painful if not fatal. But when the Kind of England was upon hard times no one was going to openly suggested he was possessed by the Devil. If by psychology you mean a more scientific view point then a doctor would prescribe meds, rest cures, bleedings and such; if anxious, you might be on a weak tincture of opiates, see Samuel Johnson for around late 1700s. They had their stuff about the same as we do today, in our beta-blockers and such. Remember that there is a tradition of medician that is a kind which is learned by the seat of your pants in apprentiships back then. It is not like you needed a license to treat the sick, and the most part of the folks didn't have any money to pay for medical care outside of showing their gratitude to the doctor by giving him or her a shot of booze. But if you were delusional or low functioning or violent, you could equally find yourself chained to a wall in a very dark dank place or hanged. Look into Lord Shaftsbury, the Shaftsbury of Charles Dickens' time. He did an early report for Parliment on the conditions for the housing of insane people in London, it is very illustrative of how the insane were treated; it wasn't pretty. Charles Darwin's grandfather was a famous doctor, and there are some amussing stories of how he treated patients that may have had psychological disorders. But psychology, as you seem to be using it probably comes into being with Freud, or Janet in France, and those people where doctors, and they had all of the resourses of a doctor in their bag of tricks, and so if they thought it approapriate, they could hospitalize their patients and prescribe drugs. Psychologists as a professional group who treat people come into the picture with Lightner Witmer at the University of Penn. They help children with what we would think of as developmental problems and children who are having trouble in school. Psychology as a clinical profession that helps adults, comes into being during World War II when the first clinical group is trained at the University of Iowa for the U.S. Army by Charles Strother. Hope somewhere in all of the above there is something you can go on. Best. David

In London, in the late 1700s, when Samuel Johnson was suffering from anxiety and depression and he thought he was on the verge of losing his mind, he went out and bought himself a pad lock and a heavy chain, and he kept them in his bedroom for the eventuality that if the worst happened, the treatment was at hand.

-- david clark (doclark@yorku.ca), April 19, 2001.


Best source for this would be Gregory Zilboorg's History of Medical Psychology (Norton 1969 edition with George W. Henry).

-- Hendrika Vande Kemp (hendrika@fuller.edu), April 21, 2001.

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