History of Psychology: main authors and theories

Since the beginning of its history the human being has elaborated hypotheses and theories about psychological functioning and mental disorders. Despite the predominance of the scientific method, today very old conceptions, such as the attribution of diseases to the action of spirits or the separation between body and soul, still have a certain influence.

To talk about the history of psychology it is necessary to go back to the classical philosophers; However, the discipline that we know today did not develop as such until the works by authors such as Emil Kraepelin, Wilhelm Wundt, Ivan Pavlov or Sigmund Freud, in the 19th and XX.

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Ancient Age: beginning of the history of Psychology

The term psychology comes from the Greek words "psyche" and "logos", which can be translated as "study of the soul". During the Ancient Ages it was believed that mental disorders were the consequence of possession by spirits and demons, and the treatments consisted of spells and incantations to which curative effects were attributed.

Between the 5th and 4th century BC. C. philosophers like Socrates and Plato made contributions that would be key to the development of psychology, in addition to that of philosophy. While Socrates laid the foundations of the scientific method, Plato conceived the body as the vehicle of the soul, truly responsible for human behavior.

At the same time, the physician Hippocrates studied physical and mental illnesses through the inductive method and attributed them to imbalances in body fluids or fluids. This tradition would be picked up by Rome: the work of Galen, who developed that of Hippocrates, is one of the best examples of the Greek influence on Roman thought.

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Middle Ages: developments and setbacks

In the Middle Ages European thought was dominated by Christianity; this caused clear setbacks in scientific progress. Although the Greco-Roman theories of humors were still valid, they were again combined with the magical and the diabolical: mental disorders were attributed to committing sins and they were "treated" through prayers and exorcisms.

On the other hand, in the Arab world, immersed in its golden age, medicine and psychology continued to advance during the Middle Ages. "Diseases of the mind" were described such as depression, anxiety, dementia or hallucinations, humane treatments were applied to those who suffered them and basic psychological processes began to be studied.

There were also relevant developments in Asian psychology. Hindu philosophy analyzed the concept of the self, while in China tests were already applied in the educational field and carried out the first known psychological experiment: draw a circle with one hand and a square with the other to assess resistance to distraction.

Renaissance and Enlightenment

Between the 16th and 18th centuries, in the western world the demonological conception of mental illness and humanitarianism coexisted. The recovery of the influence of the classical Greek and Roman authors played a fundamental role in this second aspect, which related psychological disorders with physical alterations, and not morals.

The word "psychology" became popular during this historical period. In this sense, the works of the philosophers Marko Marulic, Rudolf Göckel and Christian Wolff were especially important.

It is worth noting the influence of philosophers What Rene Descartes, which contributed to the dualistic conception that separated the body and the soul, Baruch Spinoza, who questioned it, or John Locke, who affirmed that the mind depends on environmental influences. Likewise, the physician Thomas Willis attributed mental disorders to alterations in the nervous system.

At the end of the 18th century also Franz Joseph Gall and Franz Mesmer were very influential; the first introduced phrenology, according to which mental functions depend on the size of specific areas of the brain, while mesmerism attributed physical and psychological alterations to the action of magnetic energies on fluids bodily

Psychiatry was preceded by alienism, represented mainly by Philippe Pinel and his disciple Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol. Pinel promoted the moral treatment of the mentally ill and diagnostic classifications, while Esquirol encouraged the use of statistics to analyze the efficacy of psychological interventions.

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XIX century: "Scientific Psychology" is born

From the second half of the 19th century increasing knowledge about brain anatomy they made mental processes more widely understood as consequences of biology. We highlight the contributions of the psychophysiology of Gustav Theodor Fechner and those of Pierre Paul Broca and Carl Wernicke in the field of neuropsychology.

Also the influence of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was very important. Evolutionism served as an excuse for eugenicists such as Francis Galton and Bénédict Morel, who defended the inferiority of lower class people and those with mental disorders through overvaluation of the weight of the inheritance.

In 1879 Wilhelm Wundt founded the first Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, where the knowledge of different branches of science would be combined; that is why Wundt is often called "the father of scientific psychology", although prior to Wundt psychophysical researchers such as Gustav Theodor Fechner they had already prepared the way for the emergence of this discipline. Granville Stanley Hall was the creator of a similar laboratory in the United States and founded the American Psychological Association.

Psychiatry developed largely through the work of Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum, who studied disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and the work of Emil Kraepelin, pioneer ofcurrent diagnostic classifications based on symptoms and signs, as well as its course.

Among the antecedents of current psychology it is also necessary to mention functionalism and structuralism, two very influential schools during the last years of the 19th century and the first stage of the XX. While the functionalism of William James he studied mental functions, Edward Titchener's structuralism focused on its contents, like feelings or thoughts.

On the other hand, in this century Jean-Martin Charcot and Josef Breuer studied hypnosis and hysteria, developing research and ideas that inspired Sigmund Freud during the last years of this century. Meanwhile, hand reflexology appeared in Russia Ivan Pavlov and Vladimir Bekhterev. With these contributions the foundations of psychoanalysis and behaviorism were established, the two orientations that would dominate the psychology of the first half of the 20th century.

Development in the 20th century

During the twentieth century the main theoretical currents of current psychology were established. Sigmund Freud, a disciple of Charcot and Breuer, created psychoanalysis and popularized verbal therapy and the concept of the unconscious from a psychoanalytic perspective, while authors such as John Watson and Burrhus F. Skinner developed behavioral therapies focused on observable behavior.

Scientific research promoted by behaviorism would eventually lead to the emergence of cognitive psychology, which recovered the study of both elemental and complex mental processes and became popular from the 60s. Within cognitivism, treatments developed by authors such as George Kelly, Albert Ellis or Aaron Beck are included.

Another relevant theoretical orientation is humanistic psychology, represented by Carl rogers Y Abraham Maslow, among others. Humanism emerged as a reaction to the dominance of psychoanalysis and behaviorism and defended the conception of people as free, unique beings, tending to self-realization and with the right to dignity.

Likewise, knowledge about biology, medicine and pharmacology increased enormously during the 20th century, which facilitated the predominance of these sciences above psychology and influenced the development of interdisciplinary fields such as psychobiology, neuropsychology and psychopharmacology.

The last decades

The development of the science of behavior and mental processes has been marked by the development of neurosciences and constant dialogue with cognitive science in general, and with behavioral economics. In the same way, the schools of the current linked to psychoanalysis have lost a good part of their presence and their hegemony, although they remain in good health in Argentina and France.

This has led to the prevalence of a conception of psychology in which neurosciences and cognitive psychology (with many contributions from behaviorism) exchange tools and knowledge among themselves both in research and in interventions.

However, the criticisms that behaviorism made against the conceptions mentalists and subjectivists of psychology (which are those that treat "the mind" as something separate from the context of a person and the that start from the opinions of the person about what goes through his head, respectively), are still valid.

This means that both cognitivism and psychoanalysis and all the perspectives belonging to humanistic psychology are harshly criticized, among others. things, for working from very abstract and poorly defined concepts under which very different and little related meanings can be placed.

Anyway, behaviorism remains a minority philosophy in psychology, while cognitivism is in very good health. Of course, the vast majority of research in cognitive psychology of an experimental type is carried out based on methodological behaviorism, which leads to some contradictions: on the one hand, they treat mental phenomena as elements located "inside the brain" of the person (mentalism) and, on the other hand, they try to study this element by creating stimuli and measuring responses objective.