A Brief History of Psychology PDF

i A Brief History of Psychology This brief, inexpensive text offers great flexibility in teaching the history of psych- ology. Used as a stand-​alone text or with readers, this engaging book is noted for its analysis of the scientific and philosophical emergence of the field as we...

i A Brief History of Psychology This brief, inexpensive text offers great flexibility in teaching the history of psych- ology. Used as a stand-​alone text or with readers, this engaging book is noted for its analysis of the scientific and philosophical emergence of the field as well as its coverage of contemporary psychology and emerging areas. Readers appre- ciate the book’s balanced coverage of experimental, applied, and clinical psych- ology, as well as the clear and succinct presentation of the field’s major events and schools of thought. The sixth edition features an expanded pedagogical program with bolded terms, a complete glossary, more illustrations, and web-​based instruc- tional materials including PowerPoints, a test bank, discussion questions, and more. Special emphasis has also been placed on the role of the American Psychological Association (APA) in the history of psychology. Extensively updated throughout, the sixth edition features: A revised final chapter with a current analysis of the state of the field, including the growth of the APA as well as specialized organizations that promote the science and profession of psychology, and the push to influence policies that address global challenges, such as environmental sustainability, intergroup conflict, health disparities, and the population explosion. A discussion of the growth in the number and role of women and ethnic minorities in psychology, and the promotion of diversity across both demo- graphic and intellectual perspectives. Recent developments in the growth of neuroscience, cognitive science, artifi- cial intelligence, and the diversification and internationalization of psychology. Portraits of some major figures in the history of psychology, including psychology’s first Nobel Prize winners. Recent and evolving changes in the practice of psychology, including more emphasis on “evidence-​based practice,” prescription privileges, and the emer- gence of the importance of psychological practice in health care. Recent changes in the APA, including new divisions and new elected officials and its emerging focus on advocacy. Used independently or as a supplement with readers, this brief text is intended for undergraduate and graduate courses on the history of psychology. Due to its brevity and engaging style, the book can be used in introductory courses to ii introduce students to the field.The enormous index and substantial glossary make this volume a useful desk reference for psychology and related disciplines. Michael Wertheimer has taught and published in the history of psychology for 70 years, including the first five editions of this book. Born in Germany to famed Gestalt theorist Max Wertheimer, he studied at Swarthmore, Johns Hopkins, and Harvard, and is now Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado, Boulder, USA. Antonio E. Puente has taught and published in the history of psychology and neuropsychology for over 40 years. Born in Cuba, he studied at the University of Florida and the University of Georgia, USA. He worked with Roger W. Sperry, a winner of the Nobel Prize, and was the 125th president of the American Psychological Association. iii A Brief History of Psychology Sixth edition Michael Wertheimer Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Neuroscience University of Colorado at Boulder Antonio E. Puente Professor of Psychology University of North Carolina Wilmington iv First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Michael Wertheimer and Antonio E. Puente The right of Michael Wertheimer and Antonio E. Puente to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Holt Rinehart Winston, New York, U.S.A., 1970 Fifth edition published by Routledge, 2011 British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-28473-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-28474-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-26930-6 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Newgen Publishing UK Visit the e-resources website at www.routledge.com/9781138284746 v Contents List of Figures  vii List of Tables  viii List of Chronological Charts  ix Preface  xi 1 Introduction  1 PART I Pre-​experimental Psychology  15 2 Early Developments  17 3 The Lines of Development from Science  27 4 The Lines of Development from Philosophy  37 Part I Summary  53 PART II The Rise of Experimental Psychology  55 5 Wundt’s Immediate Predecessors  57 6 Wilhelm Wundt  67 7 The Contemporary Scene in the Age of Wundt  77 8 William James and Psychology in the United States  91 Part II Summary  104 vi vi Contents PART III Psychology in the 20th Century  107 9 The Age of Schools  109 10 Structuralism and Functionalism  116 11 Behaviorism  127 12 Gestalt Psychology  139 13 Psychoanalysis  151 14 The Immediate Postschools Era  159 15 The Last Half of the 20th Century  171 Part III Summary  184 PART IV Psychology’s Promising Past and Enigmatic Future  185 16 An Evaluation  187 Glossary  194 References  214 Author Index  218 Subject Index  226 vi Figures 0.1 Karl F. Muenzinger (1885–​1958) xii 2.1 Plato (ca. 427–​347 BCE) and Aristotle (384–​323 BCE) 20 2.2 Muenzinger’s river analogy: the trends leading to experimental psychology 24 3.1 Charles Darwin (1809–​1882) 28 3.2 Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–​1894) 29 3.3 Gaussian (normal) distribution curve 35 4.1 René Descartes (1596–​1650) 39 4.2 John Locke (1632–​1704) 41 4.3 David Hume (1711–​1776) 44 4.4 Immanuel Kant (1724–​1804) 45 5.1 Ernst Heinrich Weber (1795–​1878) 60 5.2 Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–​1887) 63 6.1 Wilhelm Wundt (1832–​1920) 68 7.1 Carl Stumpf (1848–​1936) 79 7.2 Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–​1909) 83 7.3 Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve 84 7.4 Francis Galton (1822–​1911) 87 8.1 William James (1842–​1910) 92 8.2 G. Stanley Hall (1844–​1924) 96 10.1 Edward Bradford Titchener (1867–​1927) 117 10.2 John Dewey (1859–​1952) 120 10.3 Edward L. Thorndike (1874–​1949) 123 11.1 John Broadus Watson (1878–​1958) 130 11.2 Clark L. Hull (1884–​1952) 134 11.3 Edward C. Tolman (1886–​1959) 134 11.4 B. F. Skinner (1904–​1990) 136 12.1 Max Wertheimer (1880–​1943) 141 12.2 Kurt Koffka (1886–​1941) 143 12.3 Wolfgang Köhler (1887–​1967) 144 12.4 Kurt Lewin (1890–​1947) 147 13.1 Sigmund Freud (1856–​1939) 152 13.2 Carl Gustav Jung (1875–​1961) 156 13.3 Alfred Adler (1870–​1937) 156 vi Tables 8.1 The divisions of the APA as of 2020 102 9.1 The schools of psychology and what they stood for 111 9.2 How the schools of psychology exemplified the eight trends 112 ix Chronological Charts Chronological chart: to 1800 15 Chronological chart: 1800 to 1900 55 Chronological chart: beyond 1900 107 x xi Preface Karl F. Muenzinger (1885–​1958) believed that study of the history of psychology can help develop an overview of the discipline and integrate the perplexing, appar- ently unrelated variety of material encountered in diverse psychology courses. Muenzinger developed the idea of the emergence of the science of psychology late in the 19th century as the product of five major scientific and three signifi- cant philosophical trends (physiology, biology, atomism, quantification, and the founding of laboratories; and critical empiricism, associationism, and scientific materialism). That perspective serves as the foundation for this book. Wertheimer was privileged to interact with Muenzinger and many other talented scholars in the area of the history of psychology (including Puente’s undergraduate advisor, Donald Dewsbury), and the present book reflects their ideas, innovations, and contributions. The material in this book was class-​tested at several institutions with undergraduate and graduate students of the history of psychology. Student reactions and suggestions have been used in revisions of the manuscript, including the present edition. Some parts of the book have been presented as colloquia at various colleges and universities, as well as at several meetings including American Psychological Association (APA) conventions. Writing a history of something implies the identification of that something. Most histories of psychology, including the first five editions of this book, at least implicitly specify that “something” as the science of psychology, with science defined as the empirical, objective, observable study of an area and psychology defined as the domain concerned with behavior and mental life. But this defin- ition has evolved significantly. Starting with the advent of the cognitive revolu- tion in the 1960s, and certainly salient by the end of the 20th century, there has been increasing focus on the “mental” side of the science of psychology. The gen- eral public typically continues to identify psychology as a not very rigorous field concerned primarily with the clinical aspects of helping individuals overcome personal difficulties. Many students now majoring in psychology hope to under- stand and “help people.” Applications to graduate programs in clinical psychology programs outnumber those to graduate programs that concentrate on the more natural-​science aspects of psychology. As a consequence, some might argue that a history of psychology should now be written with much more attention to counseling and other “softer” aspects of psychology, rather than concentrating primarily on the “hard science” aspects xi xii Preface Figure 0.1 Karl F. Muenzinger (1885–​1958). Courtesy of the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Colorado at Boulder. of the domain. But almost all practitioners of applied or professional psychology firmly believe that their practice of psychology has deep roots in the rigorous empirical endeavors of science. Hence the emphasis on scientific findings remains foundational to psychology and its history, as well as to this book. One aim of this book is versatility. Because the presentation is relatively brief and condensed, it can be used as a supplement to a full-​length text for courses on the history of psychology. For instructors who prefer to teach from primary sources, this book can provide a context for other assigned readings. Further, the book offers a concise historical overview of the field for the general reader, and can function as a general introductory text to psychology as a whole.With its sub- stantial index and extensive glossary (when an item in the glossary occurs in the text, it appears boldface), it can also serve as a convenient general desk reference on psychology. A final chapter explores developments during the first two decades of the 21st century and their possible implications for the future of psychology in general as well as its various specialties. While historians prudently caution against trying to obtain a broad perspective on very recent events, so much has happened in recent years that it seemed irresponsible to ignore it all. Major recent events in psych- ology and their impact on the field are explored in various places (mostly in the last few chapters) in this sixth edition. xi Preface xiii Extensively updated throughout, this edition has several new features. It: contains, as just mentioned, a final chapter with an updated analysis of the current state of the field, including the growth of specialized organizations that promote the science and profession of psychology, and the push for psychology to influence policies that address national and global challenges such as environmental sustainability, intergroup conflict, health disparities, immigration, violence, and the population explosion. discusses in several places the growth in the number and role of women in psychology and the promotion of diversity initiatives in psychology related to age, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and socio-​economic status. considers recent developments in the expansion of neuroscience, cognitive science, and the diversification of psychology. mentions individuals who have had a recent impact on the field, such as two of psychology’s Nobel Prize winners, Roger W. Sperry (brain function and con- sciousness) and Daniel Kahnemann (decision making), Rudolf Arnheim (the psychology of art), Jane Goodall (animal behavior), and Florence Denmark (international psychology and the psychology of women). includes discussion of recent changes in the practice of psychology, including prescription privileges, the increased emphasis on “evidence-​based practice,” the enhanced application of psychological principles to industrial and organ- izational settings, and psychology’s increasing focus on social justice. presents updates on recent and emerging changes in the APA, including its newer divisions, newly elected officials, and new strategic plan, and the growing emphasis on advocacy as a core aspect of the APA’s mission. again has a lengthy glossary and enormous index, which may contribute to the book’s value as a general desk reference on psychology and its history. is accompanied by revised web-​based teaching materials. For each chapter, there are Microsoft PowerPoint slides with chapter outlines, a list of key terms, and discussion questions. Lecture notes, along with chapter outlines, key terms, and discussion questions, are available as Microsoft Word documents as well. Instructors can also access a test bank of true/​false, multiple-​choice, short-​answer, and essay questions. And for students there are chapter outlines and lists of key words and phrases, suggested readings, and hotlinks to related websites. This book benefited from much-​appreciated suggestions made by unidentified reviewers, as well as by Edwin G. Boring of Harvard University, O. J. Harvey of the University of Colorado at Boulder, Barney Beins of Ithaca College, Harry Heft of Denison University, Dean Keith Simonton of the University of California, Davis, Ryan D. Tweney of Bowling Green State University, and Wade E. Pickren of Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. Their corrections and recommendations, and our own further reflection, have generated hundreds of (usually relatively minor) changes throughout the manuscript. As was true of the earlier editions, few if any pages escaped at least a bit of revision. Many stylistic changes are also the result of suggestions made by Wertheimer’s daughter K. W. Watkins (PhD in xvi newgenprepdf xiv Preface English from Yale), who, as in previous editions, also prepared the final manuscript and helped with the glossary and the index. The major change in this sixth edition is the addition of Antonio E. Puente, who specializes in the history of psychology and in clinical neuropsychology, as its co-​author. Wertheimer is deeply grateful to him for his willingness to share his wisdom and perspectives in the preparation of this edition even while Puente was swamped by myriad issues challenging the American Psychological Association, of which he became president-​elect, then president, and until recently past president. Michael Wertheimer Boulder, Colorado Antonio E. Puente Wilmington, North Carolina 1 1  Introduction Before setting out on this brief tour through the history of psychology, consider some general background.The first section of this chapter will raise a few questions about the nature of history itself and about the problems that one will inevitably encounter when taking on the role of historian. The next section presents some thoughts about why one should bother contemplating psychology’s history in the first place. The final section explores the various ways the history of psychology has been organized, referring briefly to some of the better-​known works in the field, and ends with a characterization of the approach taken in the present work. Some Comments on History in General The historian faces obstacles the scientist can avoid. Historical truth is more elu- sive than scientific truth, although the scientist has problems too. Paradoxically, historical “facts” can change, but an empirical statement of a relationship stays put in some sense: anybody can check it. Scientific knowledge is timeless; a scientific generalization can be tested any time, by anyone who cares to set up appropriate conditions for observation. But history is an all-​or-​nothing affair; something happened once, and that’s that—​you cannot bring past events back into the pre- sent to study them and their determinants and effects at leisure, turning them this way and that, as you can examine some scientific statement in the labora- tory. To be sure, there might be relics of the past event that you can use to try to pin it down—​letters, canceled checks, diaries, monuments, official documents, email messages, sales slips, or the United States Congressional Record—​but none of these is the event itself, and none is of unquestionable reliability or val- idity. Most important, none really tells you how to interpret the event.You can’t unequivocally determine the causes and effects of the event, can’t manipulate the independent variables responsible for it or measure the dependent variables it affects. In fact, you can never be sure that the presumed event actually happened at all. Perhaps it’s just the figment of someone’s fancy, dutifully perpetuated by those who came later. Chances are, it’s harder to break a fad in history than in science. Once an event has found its way into the historical record, especially for a prolonged period of time, that event sometimes becomes unthinkingly accepted, whether or not it actually happened. 2 2 Introduction Quite aside from questions such as whether Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492 (or whether it was Amerigo Vespucci, or a foolhardy Norseman, or, for that matter, the indigenous Americans, who were unaware that their land had to be discovered), there is the question of the importance of a presumed event. It is primarily this aspect of history that changes. How important was William the Conqueror in determining the events of about a thousand years ago? Just how significant is the Boston Tea Party really? Should everybody know how many soldiers went with Cyrus on the third march of the fifth month of his Anabasis or how many accompanied Caesar from one part of Gaul to another? It might be intriguing to hear that Hannibal managed to prod a herd of elephants over the Alps, that Henry VIII had goodness knows how many wives, that Demosthenes stuttered, or how many Americans were lost in the wars of the 20th century; but, ultimately, so what? Rather than recording that a man once stood at a graveyard and intoned, “Four score and seven years ago,” and so forth, why not record that an ant, at the same time and place, happened to be walking over the letter M on poor Private Pat Smith’s headstone? That’s an event too. History just isn’t impartial; it is highly and inevitably selective. History, then, deals with events about which one can’t be certain, the sig- nificance of which is debatable, and whose selection for attention is an idiosyn- cratic, subjective matter. No historian can be unbiased. Even if one had many lifetimes and infinite powers of observation and memory, it would still be an impossible chore to produce a complete, unbiased description of all of the events that occurred, say, between 4:01 a.m. and 4:03 a.m. on Thursday, May 30, 2019. What do you include? That the president of the United States sneezed? That this was the seven-​year anniversary of the day Gabriel Lanai Ellis was born on the porch of a cabin at 8,500 feet, 6 miles west of Boulder, Colorado, and that his cousin Cassidy Joy Wertheimer, sleeping in Windsor, Colorado, scratched her left knee? That in Rocky Mountain National Park a 13-​inch-​diameter, ragged piece of granite, loosened by the freezing and thawing of thousands of years, fell with a clatter from near the top of the east face of Longs Peak down onto Mills Glacier and then rolled all the way onto frozen Chasm Lake? And even if all of these items were to be included in your list of events, how much detail would you devote to each? In what order should you include them? How much would you emphasize each one? How far back before 4:01 and how far beyond 4:03 would you go to “make the event meaningful,” to “set it in its context,” to “show its significance”? No, history is not independent of the historian. It does not stay put. Which events to emphasize, which ones to include or exclude, how to interpret what you select—​all of this depends on the historian’s bias. Much of what the student of history has to wade through is the doings that somebody thought important, of people whom somebody thought important. Perhaps the easiest (and clearly the most usual) solution is to write about people considered significant by their contemporaries and events that at the time caused raised eyebrows, an increased heart rate, or untimely deaths. Kings, dictators, presidents, prime ministers, religious leaders and their wars, battles, murders, intrigues, and other shenanigans form the bulk of most history books. Some 3 Introduction 3 daring souls have also tried to compile histories of ideas, of cultural movements, of humans as thinking, creative, evolving creatures rather than purely political or economic ones—​a quite different orientation. Yet the basic problem remains the same: how do you select, what do you relate to what, how do you interpret what? Somebody else might see the same things very differently or might choose to look at very different things. One recurrent issue, insistently and insightfully brought by Edwin G. Boring (1950a) to the attention of anyone interested in history, is that of the Zeitgeist versus the great individual view of events. Just what is the role of the “spirit of the time” (the Zeitgeist) or of the place (the Ortgeist) in determining what happens, as against the role of some unusual person who is strong enough to withstand the Zeitgeist or the Ortgeist and change the course of events? Would there have been no Holocaust if there hadn’t been an Adolf Hitler? Was Sigmund Freud just a passive agent of the climate of ideas in Vienna at about the turn of the 20th century? Would somebody else have come up with an emphasis on unconscious motivation, or was he, his unique existence, responsible—​in spite of the Zeitgeist—​for the creation of the psychoanalytic view? It is usually too simple to cast such questions into an either–​or form, but the relative contribution of the great individual and of the Zeitgeist still remains largely a matter of the intentional or unintentional raw preference of the historian. Even though there might be occasional circumstantial evidence, such as simultaneous independent yet similar discoveries or formulations, which suggest a Zeitgeist influence, there are no convincing objective guidelines. For that matter, until recently, the “great individual” has been synonymous with a “great man” since few women were recognized as part of psychology or of its leadership. Indeed this approach was also largely limited to white men. Again, not until recently, actually very recently, have individuals outside of this limited demographic group been visibly involved in the history of psychology. And then there is the question of the organization of what the historian chooses to pull out of the stream of events. Chronology seems the obvious outline. But it is not really as straightforward as that. If historians try to make some sense out of what is being talked about rather than record in an endless, dull list that this happened, then that happened, and then the other occurred, they must permit themselves to jump back and forth to some extent. While busy expounding the chain they have constructed for events q, r, s, and t, they must ignore the fact that u, v, w, and x happened to be going on at the same time—​according to their view, these belong in a different chain. So they run back again to u, v, w, and x after they have finished with q, r, s, and t. The extreme of a pure chronology, then, is just about impossible, even if one breaks the account down into arbitrary units such as the period 1740–​1749, then 1750–​1759, and so on. The other extreme is completely separate chains, as in one book about the his- tory of England and another about the history of France or one on philosophy and one on psychology. But this approach also has inherent problems. Most historians will want to refer to other concurrent chains occasionally, especially when they happen to have links in common—​as in the invasions of France by England or vice versa. Again, it seems a matter of sheer preference whether the historian 4 4 Introduction chooses to be closer to the chronology pole or the history-​of-​some-​particular-​ movement (or country, or discipline, or whatever) pole. One distinction that historians of science have pointed to is the difference between internal and external history. Most non-​historians who have written histories of their fields (such as physics, chemistry, biology—​or, for that matter, psychology) trace the sequence of major ideas, discoveries, theories, or other not- able events in their fields without paying much attention to what else was going on at the time. In this sense, they produce internal histories: histories that focus primarily (or even exclusively) on events in the discipline itself. People with sub- stantial training in history are more likely to place the evolution of a discipline into a much broader sociocultural, political, and economic context. They tend to write more external histories: what contemporaneous events in other fields, in international relations, in the intellectual and institutional and cultural milieu, explain why things happened as they did in a particular time and place? Clearly, some balance of internal and external is most illuminating, so long as the account doesn’t end up being exhaustingly exhaustive. To help indicate the external con- text, this book includes a few chronological charts that are intended to place various people and events in the history of psychology in temporal relation with various people and events in world history. A related distinction emphasized by historians contrasts presentism (looking at past events from today’s perspective) with historicism (placing past events into their actual social and intellectual context rather than viewing them purely from the point of view of today’s implicit assumptions). While it is humanly impossible to avoid any trace of presentism, the responsible writing of history requires rec- ognition of the cultural, social, and intellectual settings within which the events recounted occurred. These points are raised here partly because the present writers are not profes- sionally trained historians. But if history is at bottom a matter of idiosyncratic bias concerning what to include, how to include it, and how to interpret it, then even amateurs’ efforts might be permissible. To the extent that they differ from others’ efforts, they might help to loosen a possibly too tenacious tradition of what the best way to systematize the field might be or of what “the” history of the field is. There is no such thing as “the” history of anything. Anyone aspiring to write a history of any field comes with implicit assumptions that are inevitably biased by education, prejudices, and background. So to permit the reader to gauge the present authors’ perspectives, here is some information about where the authors are coming from. It has inevitably colored every aspect of this book. With inspiring exposure to humanities and social sciences as an undergraduate student at Swarthmore College, the senior author majored successively in French literature, then linguistics, then philosophy, and finally psychology. His father, Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer, had died before the author got to college. But a colleague of Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, a psychology professor at Swarthmore, sent the author off to graduate school at The Johns Hopkins University, hoping that the hard-​nosed science orientation there would coun- teract what he considered the author’s excessive exposure to tender-​ minded 5 Introduction 5 humanities at Swarthmore. At Swarthmore (and earlier at home) he had learned that Gestalt theory had the right approach to psychology and that behaviorism was wrong. But Hopkins, still a hotbed of behaviorism back in the late 1940s, taught that Gestalt was wrong, and that behaviorism was the answer. That was hard to swallow, so after a Hopkins MA he switched to Harvard University for his doctorate. But that change didn’t help: the spirit of Titchenerian structuralism, taught as wrong at both Swarthmore and Hopkins, still dominated the implicit assumptions at Harvard. Perhaps these bewildering experiences helped the author to start thinking for himself a bit more rather than just to accept the dogmas that illustrious, respected professors espoused. He did complete a dissertation—​on psychophysics—​at Harvard, but then took an internship in clinical psychology at Worcester State Hospital in Massachusetts for a year to try to find out what that perspective was all about. Back then, some seven decades ago, it was still possible to get a clinical internship, indeed one sponsored by the U.S. Public Health Service, without having to com- plete all sorts of seminars, course work, and practica beforehand. But Worcester produced another disconcerting experience that jaundiced his perspective on clinical psychology. He learned that the scientific empirical approach that all three then-​competing theoretical orientations (Gestalt, behav- iorism, and structuralism) took for granted, both explicitly and implicitly, was not equally shared by all clinical psychologists. His mentor at Worcester, kept nameless here, was convinced that “eye” content responses on the Rorschach test—​seeing eyes in those inkblots—​are an unmistakable pathognomonic sign of paranoid idea- tion, especially if the response is something intense like “those threatening eyes are staring out at me from the gloom.” Obeying the strong empirical orientation imprinted on him by all three schools, Gestalt, behaviorism, and structuralism, the author ransacked the copious department files of Rorschach protocols and diag- noses at Worcester State Hospital, hundreds of them, and did a simple double clas- sification: yes or no on eye content responses on the Rorschach, and yes or no on paranoia showing up in the diagnosis or case history. Even though the Rorschach protocols had often played a role in the diagnosis, there turned out to be literally no relation between the two variables. An early technical paper was actually published on this non-​finding. Soon after he told his supervisor about this finding (or lack of it), the author attended a dem- onstration the supervisor was giving to medical and psychology interns on how to interpret Rorschach protocols. “Ah,” he said, “here’s a strong eye content response. This is a sure sign…” and he looked at the senior author and added, “—​your opinion, Mike, to the contrary notwithstanding—​that the patient shows extreme suspiciousness, strong signs of paranoia.” The author’s opinion to the contrary? It wasn’t an opinion; it was a description of fact, based on hard data. Sheer opinions and repeatable empirical findings should by no means be considered equally com- pelling. This unfortunate experience is probably still tainting the senior author’s somewhat ambivalent perspective on clinical psychology. The senior author’s entire career since his 1952 PhD has been spent in aca- demia, and except for a few inevitable bumps and problems along the way he has enjoyed almost every day of it. Though of course it hasn’t made him fabulously 6 6 Introduction wealthy financially, to be paid to share his enthusiasm with eager young minds, to explore almost any question wherever it might lead, via lab or correlational investigations or thinking about it or by bouncing ideas off of bright, young, unprejudiced souls—​it has been a most exhilarating career. It was especially grati- fying to help sometimes self-​doubting students in an undergraduate psychology honors program that he directed for four decades to perform modest but original studies that convinced them that they were capable of generating good scholarly products and maybe were reasonably bright after all. And he has been graced by awards for teaching, for advising, for contributions to the history of psychology, and for insisting on nonsexist language in scholarly writing. He directed doctoral programs in experimental psychology and in socio- cultural psychology. And since early in his career he has been involved in some way or another with organized psychology, including the Psychonomic Society, Psi Chi, the Association for Psychological Science (APS), and the American Psychological Association (APA). He had some kind of official position in the APA continuously for more than half a century, having been a fellow of the division of experimental psychology and fellow, president, and a representative to the APA Council of Representatives for the divisions of general psychology, the teaching of psychology, the history of psychology, and theoret- ical and philosophical psychology. And he has been a member or chair of many different APA boards and committees over the years, culminating in three years (2007–​2009) on the APA board of directors. The junior author is similarly not a historian by training though his interest in history preceded his formal education in psychology. He was introduced to psych- ology at a community college before transferring to the University of Florida. There he began working with Donald Dewsbury, pursuing comparative psych- ology research but being introduced at the nearby medical school to the emerging specialty of neuroscience. He then became Dewsbury’s colleague, collaborating on several history of psychology projects with him. After taking a year working at a psychiatric hospital, he enrolled in a new biopsychology program at the University of Georgia. He earned his master’s degree in clinical psychophysiology there, using the paradigm of Evgeny Sokolov to study the cardiovascular stress response. He pursued his doctorate in the biopsychology program (now known as the Behavior and Brain program) studying the EEG patterns of different medi- tative states, including mindfulness. The brain, it seemed to him, is much more interesting than the peripheral nervous system. After completing his dissertation, he took a position teaching functional neuroanatomy and establishing the neuro- anatomy laboratory at St. George’s University School of Medicine in Grenada, West Indies. Due to the unexpected invasion of the island by Cuban Communists, he retreated back to the United States and considered himself fortunate to be able to accept a position as clinical psychologist at Northeast Florida State Hospital, a University of Florida teaching hospital. There he immersed himself entirely in a neuropsychological perspective on severe and persistent mental illness. Spending three years in this capacity he not only did extensive neuropsychological patient evaluations but began to change his research focus from EEG to neuropsycho- logical testing. In the evenings he taught a variety of courses at the University 7 Introduction 7 of North Florida. Realizing that he preferred the more academic perspective of discovery and sharing findings with students to providing primarily clinical ser- vices, he sought and found an academic job, a visiting position at the new depart- ment of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. With the growth of the department to include doctorate programs in psychology, he made clinical neuropsychology central to his teaching, research and clinical service. He taught general psychology, history of psychology, brain and behavior, and clin- ical neuropsychology, and founded a laboratory that included undergraduates and graduate students as well as postdoctoral fellows. Many of the latter have been from other countries, ranging from Russia and Spain to South Africa and Mexico. The focus of the laboratory has been heavily, though not exclusively, on the interface between culture and neuropsychology. The lab, which is now called the Roger W. Sperry Neuropsychology Laboratory, has been archiving Sperry’s work since his death in 1994. Sperry, one of psychology’s Nobel Prize winners, opened his laboratory to the junior author during the last decade of his life. An informal mentorship emerged, resulting in the junior author becoming Sperry’s archivist and biographer. The junior author has an active practice in clinical neuropsychology. His prac- tice started with several other psychologists, then merged with a large multi-​ disciplinary medical practice. He eventually developed a solo private practice, in which he focuses on both clinical and forensic neuropsychological assessments, including some limited psychotherapeutic interventions with neurologically comprised individuals. He is also highly involved in professional organizations, and in 2000 he founded a bilingual mental health clinic for indigents in his community, which he continues to direct. He has been president of the North Carolina Psychological Association, the North Carolina Psychological Foundation, the Hispanic Neuropsychological Society, the Society for Clinical Neuropsychology, the National Academy of Neuropsychology—​and the American Psychological Association. Some Comments on the History of Psychology According to the American Psychological Association, the history of psychology is as fundamental to the study of psychology as are introductory courses, statistics, and experimental design. Indeed, these four courses have been considered central to the undergraduate curriculum for over half a century, as evidenced by their inclusion by all of the APA’s Undergraduate Curriculum Meetings (the junior author participated in the last two of these meetings). The course is frequently taught in this spirit, especially at the undergraduate level. Reflecting its import- ance, there are more books about it in print now than ever before, and more have been published in the last few decades than in all the preceding time. Almost every introductory psychology text addresses the topic. There is a Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences and a Cummings Center for the History of Psychology at the University of Akron, Ohio (formerly known as the Archives of the History of American Psychology; the renaming of the Archives reflects a recent and signifi- cant gift in 2014 from former APA president Nicholas Cummings and his wife 8 8 Introduction Dorothy Cummings), and the American Psychological Association has a division on the history of psychology (which publishes the journal History of Psychology). All of these are still thriving. This continuing interest must have a reason. Psychologists are expected to know something about the history of their discipline and, as previously mentioned, a course in the history of psychology is part of the requirement structure for the undergraduate psychology major at many colleges and universities. Graduate programs preparing students who wish to qualify for state or provincial licensure or board certification for the practice of psychology have long been required to offer training in the history of psychology. Particularly when one considers that all too many people view history as a dull subject, a matter of memorizing undiffer- entiated concatenations of names and dates, why encourage—​or force—​exposure to such dry and deadly dull material, possibly running the risk of snuffing the student’s intrinsic interest in the subject matter of psychology? Why is it widely held to be a “good thing” for the student of psychology to have some acquaint- ance with the history of the discipline? First, there is Cicero’s rationalization, engraved in stone over the west portico of the University of Colorado’s Norlin Library, that those who know only their own generation always remain children. Humanity and human thought have evolved over the eons, and the incredible spurt of change in the last few centuries has doubtless been greatly helped, perhaps even made possible, by the practice of pre- serving one person’s idea in writing so that another, or many others, could ponder it even when the original author of the idea is not around.To grow up, we need to extend our horizons beyond our own limited sensory experiences. This does not imply that to achieve this goal, one must lose a child’s enthusiasm. The opposite is true: it is wise for a mature person to reflect both knowledge of the past and enthusiasm for the present and the future. Yet one could counter that there might be harm in smelling the gray musti- ness of bygone times. Perhaps this is the route to becoming a bubble, an empty Babbitt, to losing childhood’s saturated enthusiasm, to acquiring an unproductive, level-​headed, resigned, perspective-​filled maturity and the conviction that there is nothing new or worthwhile under the sun. Another reason sometimes given for studying the history of psychology is that it is traditional to do so. Even Aristotle’s De Anima has a section on past philosophers’ musings about the soul. One of America’s pioneer psychologists, Edward Titchener, inspired students and colleagues alike about the importance of psychology’s history, and almost all teachers of psychology had to take a course in the history of psychology at one time or another. So, the argument seems to go, let us twist the Golden Rule a bit and insist that we should do unto others as others have done unto us. Maybe some depth psychologists would point to the security-​ providing benefits of ritual, but just because something has been done in a par- ticular way for a long time doesn’t mean it is still reasonable to continue doing it. The teachings of today should fit the needs of today; maybe a saber-​toothed curriculum should be permitted to become extinct with the saber-​toothed tiger. Third, the study of history can provide perspective and humility. It is good to know that there are points of view different from that to which we are committed, 9 Introduction 9 and that others in the past have entertained notions both similar and dissimilar to ours. Wisdom is not limited to present writers nor to our perspectives. Great minds of the past have had great ideas that are worth pondering today and that can help us refocus on the broad, fundamental questions to which we should be devoting our efforts. Also, chances are that ideas placed in their context will be more forceful, fecund, and consequential than ideas developed in a vacuum. Other than pointing to the possible motivating power of blind fanaticism, it is hard to argue against the desirability of perspective and humility. Fourth, a study of history can occasionally illuminate past errors. Those who do not know their history may be doomed to repeat its mistakes. History can be profoundly liberating and might even help us become less subject to the influence of the particular sociocultural context within which we live and work. Awareness of some of the traps our ancestors have fallen into might make us tread more cau- tiously and make it less likely that we will be caught by the same ones. Fifth, a rather compelling rationale for the study of the history of psychology has to do with the vastness and complexity of the field of psychology today. The typical student of psychology, graduate or undergraduate, is bewildered by the var- iety of materials encountered in lectures, seminars, books and journals, all of them presumably somehow relevant to that apparently senselessly conglomerate area known as psychology.The American Psychological Association, while attempting to unify the field, has over 50 divisions, ranging from psychoanalysis to aesthetics, comparative psychology, and clinical neuropsychology. How are the various ideas, subfields, and specialties related? How do they tie in with other psychological perspectives and other disciplines? A historical examination of the field might help integrate, might show how psychology developed out of a rather limited number of fundamental philosophical and scientific concerns, and might help one to see that the seemingly infinite diversity of the disparate things that go under the name of psychology might not be quite as much of an accidental hodgepodge of unre- lated facts and theories as it first appears. Today’s psychology is the child of yesterday’s psychology; today’s psychology makes more sense if one understands how it got to be the way it is. The historical context determines to some extent the problems that are studied and how they are studied—​and even the language to be used in talking about the problems. Acquaintance with what happened before can help one realize that current concerns may well be consequences of decisions made by people long ago rather than necessarily inherent in the subject matter itself. Study of the history of psychology, then, can provide perspective, can point out lines of development, can indicate the origin of ideas, can help one avoid mistakes others have made before, can show how various things fit together, and might help free us from blind, irrational adherence to today’s unspoken, implicit assumptions and biases. But ultimately, history, like art, needs no defense. The best reason for bothering with it might well be sheer curiosity or a desire of the finite bit of flesh to find some meaning in its labors, indeed, in its existence, to transcend its here and now, to discover its place in the vast scheme of things. Just what pleasure and consolation the historian and the consumer of history get out of the enterprise might be lost in some Freudian impulse, Adlerian complex, Jungian archetype, 10 10 Introduction or Rogerian feeling. Is it a feeling of power, of identification, of being less the victim of one’s past if the past is not so shadowy and awesome, like an amorphous apparition, all-​powerful in a nightmare? Perhaps knowledge of the past, having a structure for what has gone before, will free us from nameless childish fears and “fake news,” and enable us to stride forth on our own, in our own direction. Some psychoanalysts say that an understanding of our early experience will help us to discover ourselves and free us for productive endeavor. Maybe an understanding of the early experience of one’s discipline—​especially if that discipline is concerned with the study of humanity and human mental life—​will have a similar effect. One need not, though, rummage around in a speculative unconscious to defend the study of the history of psychology. Everybody enjoys a good story. And the history of psychology has fascinating people, events, and ideas in it, enough for dozens of gripping movies, television shows, or historical novels, as well as innu- merable tweets, Facebook comments, Pinterest boards, and Instagram posts. The history of psychology can be and is very interesting in itself. It’s fun. The study of history, in the last analysis, needs no defense. Approaches to the History of Psychology1 So there are good reasons for looking at the history of psychology. But how should one organize and present it? Several different strategies have been used. Most popular is perhaps the internal chronological account, exemplified by Boring (1950b), Murray (1988), Murphy and Kovach (1972), and Schultz and Schultz (2016).To be sure, these are really quasi-​chronologies, following one trend for a while and then backtracking to take up a different trend, yet time is the prime basis for the organization of these books (although Murphy and Kovach did append a set of chapters on recent research developments). Goodwin combined a book of readings (2010) with a chronological account (2015) that focuses on the last century and a half, and Benjamin wrote a brief history of psychology that examines both the science and the practice of psychology (2018) and edited companion volumes of readings (2008) and of letters by prominent psychologists (2009). Shiraev (2014) wrote a lengthy chronological account from a more global perspective. Second is a strategy that emphasizes the great schools of psychology that flourished during the first half of the 20th century.Woodworth (1931), Heidbreder (1933) as well as Woodworth and Sheehan (1964) represent this strategy, and it is also noticeable in the books by Wolman (1968), Hillner (1984), Marx and Cronan-​ Hillix (1987), Brennan (2009), and Sternberg and Pickren (2019). In a sense, it is also the organizing principle behind several surveys of theories, in particular subareas of psychology such as Bower and Hilgard’s (1981) Theories of Learning or Hall, Lindzey, and Campbell’s (1997) Theories of Personality. A third strategy has been to ask prominent older psychologists to write personal or professional autobiographies; this was the basis for the volumes titled A History of Psychology in Autobiography, originally edited by Carl Murchison and later by Lindzey (1930–​2007), for Krawiec’s (1974) The Psychologists, and for a volume edited by Mos (2009). Dewsbury (1985) and Drickamer and Dewsbury (2009) 1 Introduction 11 published a series of autobiographical chapters by pioneering individuals who studied animal behavior. A similar organization, although less concerned with the personal and centered more on the professional contributions of distinguished psychologists, is used in the classic volumes of Koch’s (1959–​1963) Psychology: A Study of a Science. Related to this strategy is the “great individual” approach, which summarizes the contributions of major figures in the history of psychology. George A. Miller (1991) wrote a delightful introductory textbook in psychology that made exten- sive use of this approach, and it is the focus of works by Sargent and Stafford (1984),Watson and Evans (1991), Hothersall (2004), and Benjamin (2018). Fancher (2016) used this approach perhaps most successfully of all. There even have been partly fictional accounts of significant pioneers of psychology, such as in a series of volumes edited by Kimble and Wertheimer (1991–​2011). Still a fifth strategy concentrates on the external history of the field, showing in particular how the history of psychology fits with other developments in the history of ideas. The volume by MacLeod (1975) is an admirable, if incomplete, attempt of this kind; Lowry, Shapiro, and Walsh (2017), Robinson (1995), Kardas (2013), Brennan and Houde (2018), and Leahey (2018) made similar attempts. King,Viney, and Woody (2016) combined this strategy with emphasis on psycho- logical writings before the modern era and with substantial material on psycho- pathology, social psychology, motivation, and personality. And Pickren and Rutherford (2010) do an admirable job of placing events in the history of psych- ology in their social, intellectual, and political contexts. An earlier contribution of this kind is Guthrie’s book (1997) Even the Rat Was White, which describes the implicit bias that has affected how the history of psychology is portrayed. Then there are the implicit histories, the books of readings in the history of psychology, anthologies that compile excerpts from great writers of long ago and not so long ago. Dennis published a compendium in 1948, and more recently Shipley (1961), Herrnstein and Boring (1965), Diamond (1974), Watson (1979), Sahakian (1981), Munger (2003), Benjamin (2008), and Goodwin (2010) have produced additional ones. Each of the more than 100 selections in Herrnstein and Boring’s work is preceded by a brief introduction that places it in its historical context. Diamond, Goodwin, and Watson did the same. Robinson (1977–​1978) reprinted significant works in the history of psychology in a massive multivolume edition that contains substantial commentaries. Another strategy focuses on the history of organizations. Evans, Sexton, and Cadwallader (1992), for example, edited a history of the American Psychological Association, and Dewsbury (1996–​ 2000) edited books consisting of separate chapters on the various divisions of that association. Williams (2008) provided a history of the Association of Black Psychologists by prominent members of that association. Pate and Wertheimer (1993) edited a volume that details the his- tories of regional psychological associations in the United States, and Davis and Wertheimer (2000) put together an oral history of Psi Chi, the national honor society in psychology. Baker and Pickren (2007) published a volume on psych- ology in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and Pickren and Schneider (2005) edited one on psychology and the National Institute of Mental Health 12 12 Introduction (NIMH); Mangelsdorff (2006) edited a book on psychology in the service of national security. To commemorate the 125th anniversary of the APA (during which time the junior author was president), Pickren and Rutherford (2018) edited a comprehensive treatise on the evolution of the association from 26 members to 120,000 members of the present day. Still another strategy begins with decisions about which research fields are significant on the contemporary scene and then proceeds to an examination of the histories of these. Chaplin and Krawiec (1979) did this for each of several major subfields of psychology, such as sensation, perception, learning, quantitative psychology, and personality, whereas Postman (1968) chose somewhat narrower issues, such as cortical localization of function, repression, hypnosis, the nature and measurement of intelligence, or nativism and empiricism in perception, and asked experts in these problems to write histories of them. Hearst (1979) edited a similar work, as did Kimble and Schlesinger (2014) and Sarris and Parducci (1983). Norcross, VandenBos, and Freedheim (2011) edited a volume on the his- tory of psychotherapy. Frank Dumont (2010) wrote a thorough, scholarly his- tory of personality psychology. Koch (2012) identified 40 major experiments that he argued shaped the history of psychology. Popplestone and McPherson (1999) contributed an illustrated history of psychology, which provides a fine compilation of photographs of psychology’s history. Then there are reference books focused on the history of psychology, such as Watson (1974, 1976) and Viney,Wertheimer, and Wertheimer (1979), in which the history is largely implicit. Some have provided histories of special fields or groups in psychology, such as Stevens and Gardner (1982) and O’Connell and Russo (1983–​2001) on women psychologists, Eckardt, Bringmann, and Sprung (1985) on developmental psychology, Puente, Matthews, and Brewer (1992) on the history of teaching in psychology, Guthrie (1997) on African-​American psychologists, Mandler (2007) on experimental psychology, Koopes (2014) on industrial psych- ology, and Baker and Benjamin (2016) on professional psychology. Hilgard (1978) based a fine book on presidential addresses to the American Psychological Association. There are also accounts of emerging specialties, such as the one on clinical neuropsychology by Benton (2000). A few biographies of major figures in the history of psychology have been published as well, such as those by Wolf (1973) on Binet, Jones (1993) on Freud, Bjork on James (1997b) and on Skinner (1997a), McReynolds (1997) on Witmer, and King and Wertheimer (2007) on Wertheimer. The present book tries to combine the first two strategies with the fourth and concentrates more on experimental psychology than on other fields. The organization is primarily chronological, but with emphasis on the great indi- viduals and ideas in psychology’s history and on the schools of psychology. Part I looks at the intellectual background that culminated in the establishment of experimental psychology as an independent discipline, glancing briefly at Greek and Renaissance thought and then developing in greater detail the eight major trends that can be seen as the backbone of the new discipline. Part II centers on Wilhelm Wundt, who has been widely viewed as the major exemplar of the new psychology, and explores the intellectual climate of his day; it ends with a glance at 13 Introduction 13 psychology in the United States both before and after the world center of psych- ology moved from east to west across the Atlantic Ocean. Part III presents the major schools of psychology2 that flourished in the first half of the 20th century, glances at developments in the immediate postschools era, and attempts an over- view of the psychological scene of the last four or five decades. Part IV evaluates the fate of psychology early in the 21st century. Summary There is no such thing as a definitive or unchanging history of anything. What is fished out of the stream of events as worth paying attention to, and how what is selected is to be interpreted, depends ultimately on the idiosyncratic, sub- jective biases of the historian. Nevertheless, a historical overview of a discipline can provide background, integration, and perspective and can be absorbing in its own right. Interest in the history of psychology, while it might have waned a bit, appeared to increase during the second half of the 20th century and is continuing into the 21st century. Most histories have been written with a chronological internal orientation, but there have also been books based on significant schools, important individuals, significant concurrent social and political events, influential works, or major research areas.The present work combines attention to the contributions of important people with discussions of major schools in a condensed chronological account of the evolution of psychology as an empirical discipline. Notes 1 Many books are referred to in this section. Many of them provide a quite different, and in most cases a more complete, account of the details of the history of psychology than the present text. See the list of references at the end of this book, which also includes significant contributions to the history of psychology that are not mentioned in this text: Buxton (1985), Greenwood (2015), Hunt (2007), Koch and Leary (1985), Lundin (1996), Murphy (1968), O’Boyle (2011), Roback (1969), Sahakian (1975), Thorne and Henley (2005), Wolman (1981), and Walsh, Teo, and Baydala (2014). 2 Structuralism tried to identify the contents of the mind and break that down into its elements; functionalism examined the functions that mental processes achieve for the organism; behaviorism attempted to make psychology an objective science by concen- trating only on observable behavior and eliminating everything “mental” from psych- ology; Gestalt theory emphasized that natural wholes are fundamentally different from a mere sum of their constituent parts and that properties of wholes determine the nature of their parts; and psychoanalysis endeavored to identify the hidden unconscious processes that affect conscious events and that generate psychopathology. 14 15 Part I Pre-​experimental Psychology Chronological chart: to 1800 Some landmarks and people in world history Approximate Some landmarks and people date in psychology’s history Ten Commandments 1300 BCE Confucius 500 BCE Heraclitus Buddha Anaxagoras Persian Empire Democritus Plato Alexander the Great Aristotle Great Wall of China begins Hannibal crosses the Alps 200 BCE Caesar conquers Gaul Cleopatra 50 BCE Roman Empire begins Jesus Christ Galen Byzantine Empire begins 400 CE Augustine of Hippo Roman Empire falls Arabs rediscover Aristotle Charlemagne Holy Roman Empire 1000 CE Norman conquest of England First Crusade Genghis Khan Magna Carta 1200 CE Inquisition established Roger Bacon Universities founded at Paris and Oxford Thomas Aquinas Marco Polo travels to China Bubonic plague arrives in Europe Renaissance begins 1400 CE Joan of Arc Byzantine Empire falls Gutenberg printing press Malleus Maleficarum Leonardo da Vinci Machiavelli Columbus lands in America 1500 CE Harvey Magellan’s expedition circumnavigates the Hobbes earth Martin Luther Gilbert Elizabeth I of England 1600 CE Descartes 16 16 Pre-experimental Psychology Some landmarks and people in world history Approximate Some landmarks and people date in psychology’s history Shakespeare Francis Bacon Galileo Spinoza Locke Louis XIV of France 1700 CE Leibniz Newton Berkeley Bach Hume Mozart La Mettrie U.S. Declaration of Independence Hartley Rousseau Steam engine invented Kant French Revolution Pinel 17 2  Early Developments The history of psychology could, as we said in Chapter 1, be broken down in any of a large number of ways. Here it is separated into three major divisions, using the dates of 1860 and 1900 as the dividers. It was in the year 1860 that Gustav Theodor Fechner published his Elements of Psychophysics,1 which for the first time demonstrated how to make precise measurements of mental quantities and how psychical quantities are related to physical ones. Hence, 1860 could be seen as the year of birth of experimental psychology. Other historians have considered 1879 as psychology’s birth year, because that is when Wilhelm Wundt, according to archival records, made a formal request of the University of Leipzig admin- istration for funds to support its institute of experimental psychology, a request often reinterpreted as “the founding of the world’s first experimental psychology laboratory.” Still another candidate is 1875, since Wundt was given space for demonstra- tional experimentation at Leipzig in that year (so, as it happens, was William James at Harvard). As for the other dividing date, it was at about the turn into the 20th century that psychology emigrated from Europe to make the United States its major residence. Eight great scientific and philosophical trends led to the new experimental psychology of the latter half of the 19th century and continued to characterize experimental psychology in the 20th. The present chapter, after a brief glance at psychological thought in antiquity, will survey these trends, the five scientific ones (physiology, biology, atomism, quantification, and the founding of labora- tories) and the three philosophical ones (critical empiricism, associationism, and scientific materialism).2 The last two chapters in this part will examine several of the scientific and philosophical trends in somewhat greater detail. Psychological Thought in Antiquity The Greeks, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance The eight lines of development from science and philosophy did not really become clearly discernible until the 16th or 17th century or even later. Yet hints of them can be found in Greek and Middle Ages philosopher-​psychologists; 18 18 Pre-experimental Psychology the controversies and cogitations of the ancients contained several of them in embryonic form. At about the same time as the earliest classic Greek philosophers, Buddha was also promulgating a coherent psychological theory that discussed sen- sation and perception, motivation and attention, the nature of mind, development, action, and health. This section touches on some of the great pre-​Renaissance people and ideas to provide a background and to set the stage for the subsequent consideration of Renaissance and post-​Renaissance developments. Elementism and Anti-​elementism Among the important early concerns was the question of elementism in con- trast with anti-​elementism. What are the ultimate components of reality? One of the best-​known early atomists was Democritus, who lived about 400 BCE; he argued that everything is composed of indivisible, unitary material atoms in con- stant motion. People, for example, are constituted of mind (or soul) atoms and of body atoms, the latter qualitatively the same as the former but in slower motion. In his elementism, then, Democritus exemplified some tendencies toward reduc- tionism (by reducing all existence to a common denominator, the atoms) and toward a mind–​body distinction. Another aspect of his philosophy emphasized the role of external stimuli in determining the individual’s behavior, raising the question of determinism versus free will: if our behavior is controlled by out- side forces impinging on us, are we really in control of our own actions? Among the antireductionists, who held views opposed to those of Democritus, were Thales, Heraclitus, and Anaxagoras. Thales, who lived in the 6th century BCE, considered water the basic substance, the common fabric of most things in the universe. Heraclitus (ca. 540–​475 BCE) held that everything is constituted of fire. There is nothing permanent or fixed; fire is the agent of change. This con- ception has a peculiarly modern quality, especially if one were to translate fire as “energy.” He also argued that things tend to evolve into their opposites—​an idea similar to one developed much later by Hegel. Heraclitus emphasized pro- cess rather than status, dynamics rather than statics. He taught that the stream you waded in yesterday is different when you step into it today. William James, in much later times, made a similar statement, to the effect that the stream of con- sciousness is never the same again; you can never experience the same thing in the same way more than once. Anaxagoras (ca. 500–​428 BCE) considered neither water nor fire the basic substance; he believed that the irreducible, the smallest unit of anything, is a relationship. There is no such thing as permanence or fixity; everything is undergoing constant relational change. In this idea he anticipated Aristotle; his notions, and many of those of Heraclitus and Aristotle, can also be seen as distant forerunners of some of the emphases of the Gestalt psychologists of the 20th century. The Greeks engaged intensively in epistemological inquiry. Originally, the issue was, how do we know anything? Later, it became how can we know—​that is, how can we know we are right? It was particularly the Sophists of the 5th to the 2nd century BCE and Socrates who concerned themselves with this question. Among their arguments was the rather disconcerting one that we can never be 19 Early Developments 19 sure that we really know anything. After all, what are the criteria for the validity of any statement, of right and wrong, of true and false, of good and bad? There are no absolute ones, independent of certain arbitrary points of reference, assumptions, or premises. And one can never be certain that one’s arbitrary points of reference, assumptions, premises, or ends are actually valid. Plato A number of these concerns culminated in the philosophy of Socrates and of his disciple and interpreter, Plato (ca. 427–​347 BCE). Popular in early philosophy was a kind of animism, in the form that we become aware of the souls, the essences of things, but Socrates taught that our knowledge of the environment is necessarily imperfect, since it comes via the imperfect avenue of our sense organs, which are subject to illusions. We learn about external objects because they emit faint copies of themselves (eidola), which enter our receptor organs. Although the Sophists generally doubted the certainty of the existence of objects in the external world, Socrates and Plato believed in a realm of ideas, which are permanent and perfect. The experienced world, they held, is but an imperfect copy of this ideal world, about which we can learn only through matter and the material senses—​which are subject to all kinds of illusions. The ideal exists outside of us, independently of us, and is immutable and perfect; our perceptions are only imperfect material copies of “genuine reality.” It is therefore foolhardy to consider sensory experience as a reliable source of knowledge. Far more trustworthy, according to Plato, are rational reflection, medi- tation, and introspection; by these means, one can discern truth and can get to know one’s self. Indeed, the self is the only object that one can learn about with any degree of assurance, but the process of gaining self-​knowledge is a difficult one and is never complete. Socrates’ recommendation, “know thyself,” for that matter, continues to be reflected in recent years in the goals of some psychotherapeutic methods, including those based on psychoanalysis and perhaps especially those based on phenomenological personality theories, such as the client-​centered counseling of Carl Rogers or the humanistic approach of Rollo May. Plato’s analysis of social phenomena (which differed from the prevalent social theories of his contemporaries) was based on a classification of people into three categories. Those who should have the lowest status in an ideal society, according to Plato, are people concerned with bodily functions and the satisfaction of organic needs: the servants or slaves. Next come those of emotion, of “heart,” of courage: the soldiers.The highest positions, those of the rulers, are reserved for the contemplators, the thinkers, the individuals of intellect and ideas. Plato taught that people benefit profoundly from one another; that, as John Donne put it two millennia later, none of us are islands unto ourselves. We are social creatures, much influenced by those around us. Here one can also discern the seeds of an environmentalism, already touched on by Democritus, which was to grow in the European philosophy of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries and to reach its zenith in the formulations of the 20th-​century behaviorists John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner. 20 20 Pre-experimental Psychology Another of Plato’s contributions was his clear statement of the mind–​body distinc- tion, already in the Zeitgeist and suggested, among others, by Democritus; the problem of the difference between mind and body, and of the relation between the two, has continued to engage Western philosophers and psychologists to the present day. Aristotle Aristotle (384–​323 BCE) was a pupil of Plato’s (see Figure 2.1) and became a rival of his. He was apparently the first person to write systematic psychological treatises. His works included, among others, Peri Psyches, or About the Soul (perhaps more accurately About the Mind or, literally, About the Psyche), sometimes known by its Latin title De Anima, as well as works on senses and sensing, on memory, on sleep and sleeplessness, on geriatrics (the length and brevity of life), on youth and old age, on life and death, and on respiration. About the Soul has an outline that, with minor modifications, persists in intro- ductory texts to the present: It begins with consideration of the history of psych- ology and prior systematic formulations concerning the mind and behavior. It summarizes the thought of such preceding Greek philosophers as Thales, Plato, Anaxagoras, and Empedocles. Next is a section on the nature of the soul, or what we might today call personality, followed by analysis of the abilities of the soul, in which are discussed the senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling. Figure 2.1 Plato (ca. 427–​347 BCE) and Aristotle (384–​323 BCE). From The School of Athens, 1510–​1511, Raphael. 21 Early Developments 21 The account also considers a common sense, superordinate to the five, which serves to synthesize the information from the other senses and which includes awareness of form, number, and duration that are not specific to any of the other five senses. Next there are discussions of thinking and imagination, intelligence, knowledge, needs and motives, willing, and feeling and emotion. Aristotle’s ana- lysis of memory includes three primary laws of association, which were to have a significant place in the history of thought ever since: contiguity, similarity, and contrast. That is, one idea calls forth another if (1) when previously experienced they were contiguous in space or time, or if (2) they are similar, or if (3) they con- trast with each other. Aristotle was a general theoretician about nature and taught that behavior is sub- ject to the same kinds of naturalistic principles as all other natural phenomena—​a kind of objectivism more than two millennia before the formal establishment of the “behaviorist school.” A thoroughgoing relativist, he considered the world as constituted of successive levels of matter and form that are defined in relation to each other. There is no fixed form or matter, but matter is the constituents, the elements, making up the form, while form is the inclusive totality whose subparts are matter. Thus, marble is matter relative to the form of the pillar, whereas, in relation to the marble, the pillar is the form. At the same time, however, the pillar is matter to the building, the building is matter to the city, and so on. The higher level is thus always the form; the lower level the matter. (A theory of perception to be developed early in the 20th century by people such as Christian von Ehrenfels and Alexius Meinong of the Graz school in Austria and by other antecedents of Gestalt psychology bears a distant resemblance to this formulation.) Aristotle thus argued that every object is both form and matter: form to the lower, matter to the higher. He considered the highest form to be God; God is form to all things, matter to none, and thus provides meaning, structure, and organization to the matter of all the world. Aristotle, by considering everything to be infinitely reducible via successive, ever finer analysis of form and matter, continued the reductionistic trend (although his version was not as elementistic as some earlier ones or as some in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries). Aristotle’s formulation can also be seen as an early statement of the molecularist position in the 20th-​century molar–​molecular controversy, that is, the controversy concerning the size of the unit of analysis or the conceptual level at which explanation is to be sought. Aristotle is also known for his doctrine that all knowledge comes from experi- ence. At birth the mind is like a blank wax tablet (a tabula rasa, literally, “a shaved tablet”); experience writes on this tablet. Much later, John Locke was to elab- orate on this idea. This position has been called empirism (discussed later in this chapter). Altogether, Aristotle was a major influential scholar, one of the giants of Western intellectual history. The Greek Decline and the Middle Ages Aristotle was a teacher of Alexander the Great, after whose reign the Greek civ- ilization began to deteriorate. In reaction to this time of crisis, of ambiguity, and 2 22 Pre-experimental Psychology of anxiety, two opposite philosophical movements sprang up, Epicureanism and stoicism. To oversimplify somewhat, the Epicureans were in a sense the “hippies” of their time, whereas the stoics were more like classical reactionaries; the former seemed at least in part to espouse living in the moment and to have an icono- clastic devil-​may-​care attitude, whereas the latter, more soberly ascetic, wished to preserve the order of things as they were and subscribed to a rather puritanical acceptance of their fate. As the Greek culture began to disintegrate, major new religions arose and flourished. People were dissatisfied with their everyday lives; several of the great religions, notable among them some versions of Buddhism and Christianity, tended to concentrate on the future and held out hope that tomorrow would bring a better, more pleasant life, perhaps after bodily death. In the first 500 years after the birth of Christ, Aristotle was forgotten, and religious teachings held the center of the intellectual stage. It was not until about 700 CE that Aristotle was rediscovered by the Arabs, and it took several centuries for his thought to influence the writings of the Church Fathers. The European Zeitgeist, as it had been for several hundred years already, continued from then until the Renaissance to be strongly anti-​empirical and pro-​ authority as a source of truth, with the authority vested almost exclusively in the Church. The rediscovery of Aristotle put thinkers into a somewhat difficult spot, because many of Aristotle’s beliefs were inconsistent with religious teachings. For example, Aristotle considered humanity part of the natural world, whereas reli- gion taught that humans are separate and above the animals. It is partly because he managed to come close to accomplishing the difficult feat of reconciling Aristotle’s ideas with religious dogma that Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–​1274) stands out as an important figure in the history of ideas. The period from about the 5th to about the 15th century in European history has sometimes been called the Dark Ages, largely because of its dominance by authority rather than by rationalism and empiricism, but a more appropriately neutral term for it is the Middle Ages. The Renaissance The Renaissance, from about 1400 to about 1600, saw a gradual, subtle, but radical change in Europeans’ attitudes toward knowledge and toward sources of know- ledge. The authoritarianism of the interpreters of Aristotle and of the religious writers slowly gave way to empiricism and anti-​authoritarianism. Old, established ways of doing things and of thinking about things began to be questioned. It was also a period of major geographical exploration, of change in the economic system toward a trading economy, and of breakdown of the feudal manorial system, under which individuals had had their particular positions carved out for them by destiny and did not question the order of things. They had previously accepted as foreordained the particular social, economic, and political niche to which fate had relegated them. Political units became larger and more powerful, and competition—​in the economic, intellectual, political, and military realms—​ flourished as individualism arose. Knowledge and a person’s status were no longer fixed but became fluid. Gradually there arose an awareness that one need not 23 Early Developments 23 accept one’s lot fatalistically but that it might be possible to progress toward a better life and a better understanding of the world. The Renaissance was an era of ferment in virtually every area of human endeavor. From about 1500 on, a general spirit of expansion pervaded many different spheres. New geographical horizons were opened by Spain and Portugal, and England was in a period of major expansion of its empire. The expansion was not only geographic but also cultural: it was late in the 16th century that Shakespeare began writing. The new dynamic culture flourished in France too, particularly in the French empire under Louis XIV; this was the period of the great French writers Molière, La Fontaine, Racine, and Corneille. Russia pushed its borders all the way to the shores of the Baltic, Charles XII of Sweden explored extensively and built his empire, and Prussia expanded toward the east. The expansionist tendency was not only territorial and physical, spiritual and literary, but also scientific—​as exemplified by the figures of Galileo and Newton. There was also a widening of philosophical horizons, and certain psychological concepts came into being. It is no accident that psychology, like so many other fields, had its major rebirth during the Renaissance, after more than a thousand years of relative neglect. To be sure, psychology during this time was primarily philosophical, but many of the trends that had had their origins in Greek thought and that were to join to produce the experimental psychology of the late 19th century could already be identified in this period. Survey of Scientific and Philosophical Trends That Culminated in Experimental Psychology During and shortly after the Renaissance there developed as distinct entities the eight movements that were to have a profound effect on the shaping of the science of psychology. The new experimental psychology arose from the confluence of two great rivers—​one a river of science and the other of philosophy. The tributaries of the river of science were physiology, biology, an atom- istic approach, an emphasis on quantification, and the establishment of research and training laboratories; the tributaries of the river of philosophy were critical empiricism, associationism, and scientific materialism. The Scientific Trends Within physiology, there was much work on sense organs, and there were studies that later would have been called neurophysiological or neuroscientific. Fascination with the human body led to a detailed study of structures and their functions, and the functional units making up the body were studied in the reflexes of both animals and people. Reaction time was a topic of great interest among astron- omers, then physiologists, and later yet psychologists. The controversy concerning the localization of functions in various brain structures, which is still raging today, was already joined in the first half of the 19th century. The most important biological concept, in terms of its influence on the devel- opment of psychology, was evolution. It was there in the writings of Georges 24 24 Pre-experimental Psychology Figure 2.2 Muenzinger’s river analogy: the trends leading to experimental psychology. Buffon and J. B. P. A. Lamarck, and it was just one year before 1860 that Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species.This influence continued with Spencer, and Darwin himself contributed a volume on the expression of emotions in humans and animals. The atomistic approach was robust and successful in several different disciplines, so it was only natural that the young psychology too would try to adopt it. Physics was becoming atomic. Chemistry served as the prime example, with John Dalton’s ingenious atomic theory and his classification of the elements. Incidentally, Dalton also made an important contribution to psychology in his observations on color blindness: he happened to be color-​blind and provided the first description of the phenomenon, which was called Daltonism for a while. His description was motivated by his embarrassment at having bought bright-​red clothes and worn them to a Quaker Meeting, since he was unable to distinguish their color from black. In neurophysiology, there was Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s neuron theory, and for 2,000 years some people have repeatedly viewed mental events atomistically, including also an interest in how associations are formed among mental elements or atoms. Associationism, a kind of mental atomism, has been a major movement in the history of both philosophy and psychology. Quantitative thinking in psychology received a substantial boost in the first half of the 19th century. It was then that the discipline of statistics arose, and doubtless the quantitative emphasis of the Zeitgeist—​especially in physics, the science that the young scientific psychology tried so hard to emulate—​helped spread the acceptance of psychophysics and of mental testing. Analytical geometry and cal- culus were invented long before, and Galileo had quite naturally stated his law of falling bodies in mathematical form. Finally, the first half of the 19th century saw the formal foundation of a number of research and training laboratories, most of them involving the cooperative work of at least several people. Although there were laboratories in other fields as well, the movement was particularly characteristic of chemistry. Thus, in central 25 Early Developments 25 Germany, by 1824, Justus von Liebig, who studied the chemistry of fertilizers and agronomy, formally opened a chemistry laboratory at the university in Giessen; in 1828, Friedrich Wöhler, at his newly established Göttingen laboratory, synthesized the first organic product, urea. This synthesis, incidentally, had the far-​reaching implication—​which fitted into the mechanistic spirit of the time—​that organic products can be produced outside the human or animal body: there is no need for a “vital force” or some other mystical entelechy. In 1840 Robert Wilhelm von Bunsen (of burner fame) established a laboratory at Marburg, and in 1843 another chemistry and physics laboratory was founded at Leipzig. The 1840s saw the establishment of a chemistry laboratory at London as the movement crossed the English Channel and also one at Yale University as it crossed the Atlantic. These five scientific trends converged in the new experimental psychology, making it physiological, evolutionary, and atomistic, with an emphasis on quanti- fication, and generating the establishment of several laboratories of experimental psychology in the last decades of the 19th century. But, to repeat, philosophy also had its marked effect on the new psychology, with three main developments con- tributing to this impact. The Philosophical Trends The critical empiricism movement, begun by the Greeks, was concerned with the logical critique of all experience. Among the important later writers in this trad- ition are Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. All were deeply concerned with the question of how knowledge is acquired. A related question was whether there are any innate ideas or whether all ideas come from experience—​the issue of nativism versus empirism. The word empirism was used at the conclusion of the section on Aristotle. It is prudent to distinguish between empiricism and empirism as, among others, Hermann von Helmholtz did. Empiricism is a methodological prescription: it says we should rely on observation, on experience, on measurement to obtain reliable knowledge, and contrasts with rationalism, which holds that reason is the best route to know- ledge (cf. Plato). Empirism is a philosophical assumption: it says that all human knowledge comes from experience and that no knowledge is innate; it contrasts with nativism. Clearly the two are not totally unrelated, since experience is central to both, yet they are obviously not identical. One can, for example, be an empirical nonempirist (by doing, say, experiments on inborn propensities) or a nonempirical empirist (by maintaining deductively or by assumption that all human behavior is learned, as, for instance, in Aristotle’s doctrine of the tabula rasa). The associationist tradition concentrated on the question of what makes ideas hang together, how ideas bring forth others, and how ideas congeal. There was much concern with how one idea makes one think of another, how things are learned, how long a once-​formed association will last, and what conditions during learning will affect the durability of the connections between ideas. Scientific materialism consists of the attempt to describe living organisms and their processes strictly as machines undergoing physical and chemical events. French materialism, as exemplified by Julien de La Mettrie in his work L’Homme 26 26 Pre-experimental Psychology Machine, presented a compelling account of the human being as a machine, both physically and mentally. (La Mettrie?