Roots Of Psychology

Early roots of psychology

Before discussing the American functionalist school of psychology it is important to analyse the early roots of psychology . From approximately 600 to 300 BC in the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Greece there has been philosophical interest in the mind and behaviour. The Egyptians, despite their experience believed that the heart was the seat of consciousness however Greek philosophers such as Aristotle believed that the heart was the seat of the mind and that the brain did not have a role in sensation and movement, he argued that “the brain is not responsible for any of the sensations at all. The correct view is that the seat and sources of sensation is the region of the heart” (Gross, C. G., 1995). Greek philosophers such as Socrates and Plato speculated on issues seen in modern psychology such as pleasure, pain, knowledge and mental illness.

In the 1600's French philosopher Rene Descartes theorised that the mind and body are distinct, a concept now known as dualism. He believed that man was composed of two fundamentally different components – the mind (thinking, non extended thing) and the body (extended, non thinking thing) and proposed that the two interacted through the pineal gland. He also proposed that all knowledge is innate or derived.

British physician and philosopher John Locke disagreed with Descartes view on the sould and innate ideas. As the founder of empiricism he believed that we are born a “tabula rosa”, a blank state, and the only source of real knowledge and experience was gained from the senses.

Psychology as a self conscious field was believed to have been founded in 1879 when German physiologist and philosopher Wilhelm Wundt established the first psychology laboratory at...

... middle of paper ...

...d five distinctive qualities of existence – the self that remains the same, the self that is changed, the self that is unique, the self that is a unity of memories, perceptions, thoughts and feelings and the self that is related to larger and physical social environments in which it resides.

Calkins defined personalistic introspective psychology as the study of conscious, functioning, experiencing selves that exist in relationship to others and applied this to her self psychology but argued that the introspectionist psychology of Wundt and Titchener was impersonalistic.

Calkins described the self as being “related in a distinctive fashion both to itself and its experiences and to environing objects, personal and impersonal” (Calkins,1930, p45). This characteristic of self psychology is aligned with other popular systems of psychology such as functionalism.