Historical and Contemporary Psychological Schools of Thought

Psychology has been through many changes since it began. We can trace the beginnings of psychology as far back to at least 300 BC, when Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, formed and taught theories related to learning, memory, motivation, emotion, perception, and personality (Myers, D., 1999). Of course, not all of his theories were correct. But, as Myers (1999) said “Credit Aristotle with asking the right questions.” Psychology as we know it today began with Wilhelm Wundt, who conducted the first psychological experiment and the first psychological institute. Psychology evolved through many different theories and schools of thoughts to become what we know as psychology today.

Structuralism

Edward Bradford Titchener was a professor at Cornell University in the early 1900s. He came to the United States from Germany. Though he claimed to follow Wundt’s system of psychology, his own approach was something completely different. Titchener called his system “Structuralism,” and insisted that it was the same as Wundt’s, though they were nothing alike.

Introspection was studied in depth by Titchener and his students and followers in order to understand the basic elements of consciousness. Titchener’s students were asked, and many agreed, to perform outrageous experiments on themselves, such as swallowing a rubber tube that would have hot then cold water poured down it. The point of these experiments was to record their “introspections”, or their own thoughts and feelings during the experiment. (Schultz & Schultz, 2012). The main focus of Structuralism was to break down mental processes into basic components in order to understand the basic elements of consciousness. (Cherry, 2014).

Functionalism

Charles Darwin and his theory of evol...

... middle of paper ...

...stated at the beginning, psychology could not be what we know as psychology today without all of the different theories and schools of thought throughout history. All of these schools of thoughts have contributed to psychology today, and we can see pieces of each of them in contemporary psychology.

Works Cited

Schultz, D.P. & Schultz, S.E. (2012). A History of Modern Psychology. Belmont, CA.:

Wadsworth, Cengage Learning

Myers, D. (1999). Exploring Psychology. New York, NY: Worth Publishers

Cherry, K. (2014). Origins of Psychology. Retrieved from psychology.about.com/od/historyofpsychology/a/psychistory.htm

Cherry, K. (2014). Structuralism and Functionalism. Retrieved from psychology.about.com/od/historyofpsychcology/a/structuralism.htm Cherry, K. (2014). What is Behaviorism?, Retrieved from

psychology.about.com/od/behavioralpsychology/f/behaviorism.htm