EVOLUTION OF PSYCHOLOGY

Psychology as a modern discipline, which is influenced to a large extent by Western developments, has a short history. It grew out of ancient philosophy concerned with questions of psychological significance. We mentioned earlier that the formal beginning of modern psychology is traced back to 1879 when the first experimental laboratory was established in Leipzig, Germany by Wilhelm Wundt. Wundt was interested in the study of conscious experience and wanted to analyse the constituents or the building blocks of the mind. Psychologists during Wundt’s time
analysed the structure of the mind through introspection and therefore were called
structuralists. Introspection was a procedure in which individuals or subjects in
psychological experiments were asked to describe in detail, their own mental processes
or experiences. However, introspection as a method did not satisfy many other psychologists. It was considered less scientific because the introspective reports could not be verified by outside observers. This led to the development of new perspectives in psychology.

An American psychologist, William James, who had set up a psychological laboratory in
Cambridge, Massachusetts soon after the setting up of the Leipzig laboratory, developed what was called a functionalist approach to the study of the human mind. William James believed that instead of focusing on the structure of the mind, psychology should instead study what the mind does and how behaviour functions in making people deal with their environment. For example, functionalists focused on how behaviour enabled people to satisfy their needs.

According to William James, consciousness as an ongoing stream of mental process
interacting with the environment formed the core of psychology. A very influential
educational thinker of the time, John Dewey, used functionalism to argue that human
beings seek to function effectively by adapting to their environment.

In the early 20th century, a new perspective called Gestalt psychology emerged in
Germany as a reaction to the structuralism of Wundt. It focused on the organisation of
perceptual experiences. Instead of looking at the components of the mind, the Gestalt
psychologists argued that when we look at the world our perceptual experience is more than the sum of the components of the perception.

In other words, what we experience is more than the inputs received from our nvironment.

When, for example, light from a series of flashing bulbs falls on our retina, we actually experience movement of light. When we see a movie, we actually have a series of rapidly moving images of still pictures falling on our retina. Thus, our perceptual experience is more than the elements. Experience is holistic; it is
a Gestalt. We will learn more about the Gestalt psychology when we discuss about the nature of perception in Chapter 5.

Yet another reaction to structuralism came in the form of behaviourism. Around 1910,
John Watson rejected the ideas of mind and consciousness as subject matters of
psychology. He was greatly influenced by the work of physiologists like Ivan Pavlov on
classical conditioning. For Watson, mind is not observable and introspection is subjective because it cannot be verified by another observer. According to him, scientific psychology must focus on what is observable and verifiable. He defined psychology as a study of behaviour or responses (to stimuli) which can be measured and studied objectively.

Behaviourism of Watson was further developed by many influential psychologists who are
known as behaviourists. Most prominent among them was Skinner who applied behaviourism to a wide range of situations and popularised the approach. We will discuss Skinner’s work later in this textbook.

Although behaviourists dominated the field of psychology for several decades after Watson, a number of other approaches and views about psychology and its subject matter were developing around the same time. One person who shook the world with his radical view of human nature was Sigmund Freud. Freud viewed human behaviour as a dynamic manifestation of unconscious desires and conflicts. He founded psychoanalysis as a system to understand and cure psychological disorders. While Freudian sychoanalysis viewed human beings as motivated by unconscious desire for gratification of pleasure seeking (and often, sexual) desires, the humanistic perspective in psychology took a more positive view of human nature.

Humanists, such as Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, emphasised the free will of human
beings and their natural striving to grow and unfold their inner potential. They argued that behaviourism with its emphasis on behaviour as determined by environmental conditions undermines human freedom and dignity and takes a mechanistic view of human nature.

These different approaches filled the history of modern psychology and provided multiple perspectives to its development. Each of these perspectives has its own focus and draws our attention to the complexity of psychological processes. There are strengths as well as weaknesses in each approach. Some of these approaches have led to further developments in the discipline. Aspects of Gestalt approach and structuralism were combined and led to the development of the cognitive perspective which focuses on how we know about the world. Cognition is the process of knowing. It involves thinking,understanding, perceiving, memorising, problem solving and a host of other mental processes by which our knowledge of the world develops, making us able to deal with the environment in specific ways. Some cognitive psychologists view the human mind as an information processing system like the computer. Mind, according to this view is like a computer and it receives, processes, transforms, stores and retrieves information. Modern cognitive psychology views human beings as actively constructing their minds through their exploration into the physical and
the social world. This view is sometimes called constructivism. Piaget’s view of child
development which will be discussed later is considered a constructivist theory of
development of the mind. Another Russian psychologist Vygotsky went even further to
suggest that the human mind develops through social and cultural processes in which
the mind is viewed as culturally constructed through joint interaction between adults and children. In other words, while for Piaget children actively construct their own minds, Vygotsky took a view that mind is a joint cultural construction and emerges as a result of interaction between children and adults.