Psychology

• 1. Introduction

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  Psychology takes its name from psyche, the Greek word for spirit or soul. The Croatian humanist Marko Marulic first used the Latin form psychiologia in a book whose subtitle translated to Psychology, on the Nature of the Human Soul. He wrote it sometime between 1510 and 1520. In English, the word first surfaced in 1694, in a volume called The Physical Dictionary. That dictionary drew a neat boundary. Anatomy treats the body, it said, and psychology treats the soul.

  The Greek letter psi, the first letter of psyche, still stands as the symbol of the field today. In 1890, William James offered a definition that held for decades. He called psychology the science of mental life, both of its phenomena and their conditions. Within a generation another voice would reject that framing entirely. How did a word once tied to the soul become the scientific study of the mind and behavior? Who built the first laboratory, and who was pushed out of the room? And why has a discipline that crosses the boundary between the natural and social sciences spent so long defending itself against the charge of being soft?

• 2. From Soul To Laboratory

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  In 387 BCE, Plato suggested that the brain is where mental processes take place. Aristotle disagreed in 335 BC, placing them in the heart instead. Earlier still, the Greek physician Hippocrates had theorized in the 4th century BCE that mental disorders had physical rather than supernatural causes. The ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece, China, India, and Persia all engaged in the philosophical study of the mind. In Ancient Egypt, the Ebers Papyrus mentioned depression and thought disorders.

  In China, psychological thought grew from the works of Laozi and Confucius and the teachings of Buddhism. The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine named the brain the nexus of wisdom and sensation. It built theories of personality on yin-yang balance. During the Qing dynasty, Wang Qingren, who lived from 1768 to 1831, pressed further. He emphasized the brain as the center of the nervous system, linked mental disorders to brain diseases, and advanced a theory of hemispheric lateralization.

  Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, born in 1646, applied his principles of calculus to the mind. He argued that mental activity took place on an indivisible continuum, and that the gap between conscious and unconscious awareness was only a matter of degree. Christian Wolff treated psychology as its own science, writing Psychologia Empirica in 1732 and Psychologia Rationalis in 1734. Immanuel Kant went the other way. He explicitly rejected the idea of an experimental psychology, arguing that the manifold of inner observation could be separated only by division in thought, never held apart and recombined at will.

• 3. The First Laboratory

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  Gustav Fechner began conducting psychophysics research in Leipzig in the 1830s. He found that human perception of a stimulus varies logarithmically with its intensity, a finding now called the Weber-Fechner law. His 1860 book Elements of Psychophysics directly challenged Kant's verdict. Fechner showed that mental processes could be given numerical magnitudes and measured by experimental methods.

  Hermann von Helmholtz, working in Heidelberg on sensory perception, trained a physiologist named Wilhelm Wundt. Wundt went on to Leipzig University, where he established the laboratory that brought experimental psychology to the world. He set out to break mental processes into their most basic components, drawing an analogy to recent advances in chemistry and its study of the elements. Paul Flechsig and Emil Kraepelin soon built another influential Leipzig lab, this one focused on experimental psychiatry.

  G. Stanley Hall, an American who studied with Wundt, founded a psychology lab at Johns Hopkins University that became internationally influential. Hall trained Yujiro Motora, who carried experimental psychology to the Imperial University of Tokyo. Another of Wundt's assistants, Hugo Munsterberg, taught at Harvard. One of his students, Narendra Nath Sen Gupta, founded a psychology department and laboratory at the University of Calcutta in 1905. The Russian-Soviet physiologist Ivan Pavlov discovered in dogs a learning process later termed classical conditioning, then applied it to human beings.

• 4. Funding, War, And Ideology

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  The first meeting of the International Congress of Psychology took place in Paris in August 1889, amid the World's Fair marking the centennial of the French Revolution. William James was one of three Americans among the 400 attendees. The American Psychological Association followed in 1892. Its membership grew from 5,000 in 1945 to 100,000 today. By 1909, the Sixth Congress in Geneva featured presentations in Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and Esperanto.

  American psychology gained status when the United States entered World War I. A committee led by Robert Yerkes administered the Army Alpha and Army Beta mental tests to almost 1.8 million soldiers. The Rockefeller family then funded behavioral research through the Social Science Research Council. During World War II and the Cold War, the U.S. military and intelligence agencies became leading funders. University of Michigan psychologist Dorwin Cartwright noted that in the last months of the war, a social psychologist became chiefly responsible for the week-by-week propaganda policy of the United States Government.

  In Nazi Germany, the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute was renamed the Goring Institute after Hermann Goring's cousin Matthias Goring. Freudian psychoanalysts were expelled and persecuted, and all psychologists had to distance themselves from Freud and Adler, both Jewish. Johannes Heinrich Schultz, known for developing autogenic training, advocated the sterilization and euthanasia of men deemed genetically undesirable. After the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks promoted psychology to engineer the New Man of socialism, and Lev Vygotsky rose to prominence in child development.

• 5. The Women Who Built The Field

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  In 1923, Anna Freud, the daughter of Sigmund Freud, built on her father's work to psychoanalyze children. She believed a child should be recognized as an individual with their own rights, and that each session should be tailored to the child's needs. She encouraged drawing, moving freely, and self-expression in any form, helping build a strong therapeutic alliance.

  Leta Stetter Hollingworth set out to disprove the claim that women are mentally and physically impaired during menstruation. Over three months, she recorded both women's and men's performances on cognitive, perceptual, and motor tasks. She found no evidence of decreased performance tied to the menstrual cycle. In a second experiment with infants, untouched by social norms, she found no differences other than size. She argued that women do not reach positions of power because of the societal roles assigned to them.

  Mary Ainsworth centered her work on attachment theory. Building on John Bowlby, she developed the Strange Situation Procedure, a laboratory method that repeatedly separated and reunited a child with their mother. Her work made her one of the most cited psychologists of all time. Mamie Phipps Clark, one of the first African-Americans to earn a doctoral degree in psychology from Columbia University, conducted the doll tests with her husband Kenneth. Young children, asked to choose between identical dolls differing only in race, mostly preferred the white dolls. In 1954, this research helped decide Brown v. Board of Education, leading to the end of legal segregation.

  Martha Bernal became the first Latina woman to earn a Ph.D. in psychology in 1962. In 1969, Marigold Linton, the first Native American woman to earn a psychology Ph.D., founded the National Indian Education Association. Today, estimates suggest women make up about 78% of undergraduate students and 71% of graduate students in psychology in the United States, even as gaps in pay and senior representation persist.

• 6. Behavior As Science

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  Edward Lee Thorndike trapped animals in puzzle boxes and rewarded them for escaping. He wrote in 1911 that there can be no moral warrant for studying man's nature unless the study will enable us to control his acts. Between 1910 and 1913, the American Psychological Association shifted away from mentalism toward behavioralism. In 1913, John B. Watson coined the term behaviorism, defining its theoretical goal as the prediction and control of behavior.

  Watson's Little Albert experiment in 1920 was first thought to show that repeated upsetting loud noises could instill phobias in an infant, though that conclusion was likely an exaggeration. Operant conditioning, first described by Miller and Kanorski, was popularized in the United States by B.F. Skinner, who became a leading intellectual of the movement. Noam Chomsky published a scathing critique of radical behaviorism, arguing it could not explain language acquisition, and his review did much to reduce behaviorism's status.

  Martin Seligman and his colleagues conditioned in dogs a state of learned helplessness, an outcome the behaviorist approach had not predicted. Edward C. Tolman offered a hybrid cognitive behavioral model, most notably in his 1948 work on the cognitive maps rats use to guess where food sits at the end of a maze. The Association for Behavior Analysis International, founded in 1974, had members from 42 countries by 2003.

• 7. Minds, Drives, And The Unseen

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  The Stroop effect shows that naming the color of one set of words is easier and quicker than naming another. Cognitive psychology, the study of perception, attention, language, memory, and problem solving, re-emerged in the 1950s as experimental work grew more cognitivist. Some called this the cognitive revolution because it rejected the anti-mentalist dogma of behaviorism and the strictures of psychoanalysis. Albert Bandura helped along the transition, advancing the idea of vicarious learning, that a child can learn by observing the social environment.

  Psychoanalysis originated in the 1890s, most prominently with Sigmund Freud, who pioneered free association and dream interpretation. His 1901 book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life catalogs hundreds of everyday events he explains through unconscious influence. Thinkers including Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, Erik Erikson, and Karen Horney diverged from Freud, splitting psychoanalysis into schools such as ego psychology and object relations. Karl Popper argued that psychoanalysis was not falsifiable and therefore not scientific, while Hans Eysenck held that experimental data contradicted its tenets.

  In one of the first psychology experiments in the United States, C.S. Peirce and Joseph Jastrow found in 1884 that subjects could choose the minutely heavier of two weights even when consciously uncertain. Pierre Janet advanced the idea of a subconscious mind holding autonomous mental elements outside direct awareness. John Bargh, Daniel Wegner, and Ellen Langer describe free will as an illusion. Some experimental data suggest the brain begins to consider an action before the mind becomes aware of it.

  Humanistic psychology emerged in the 1950s, stressing free will and self-actualization. Abraham Maslow formulated a hierarchy of human needs, and Carl Rogers created client-centered therapy. The Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, drew evidence of meaning's therapeutic power from his own internment. He created logotherapy, focused on a will to meaning, set against Adler's will to power and Freud's will to pleasure.

• 8. Measuring The Unmeasurable

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  Psychological testing dates back to 2200 BCE, in the examinations for the Chinese civil service. Written exams began during the Han dynasty, between 202 BCE and 220 CE. By 1370 the system required a stratified series of tests covering essay writing and diverse topics, and it ended in 1906. In Europe, character was judged by the face through physiognomy, described by Aristotle, and later by phrenology, the idea that mental traits map to bumps on the head.

  Francis Galton, measuring reaction time and sensation in Britain, is considered an inventor of modern mental testing. His student James McKeen Cattell brought the idea to the United States and coined the term mental test. Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon developed a new intelligence test between 1905 and 1911, introducing the concept of mental age. In 1916, Stanford professor Lewis M. Terman revised it into the Stanford-Binet scale and introduced the intelligence quotient as a score. Reflecting the racism of that era, Terman concluded that certain groups showed a dullness that seemed to be racial.

  The federally created National Intelligence Test was administered to 7 million children in the 1920s. In 1926, the College Entrance Examination Board created the Scholastic Aptitude Test to standardize college admissions. Eugenicists used mental testing to justify compulsory sterilization, and in the United States tens of thousands of men and women were sterilized. In the 1927 case Buck v. Bell, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of the practice, setting a precedent that has never been overturned.

  Thomas Kuhn's 1962 critique implied that psychology overall sat in a pre-paradigm state, lacking the overarching theory found in mature sciences like chemistry and physics. Because some areas rely on self-reports in surveys and questionnaires, critics argued the field is not objective. Experimental psychologists answered by devising indirect ways to measure these elusive phenomena, the same impulse that, in 1896, led Lightner Witmer to open what is usually credited as the first psychology clinic in the United States, in Philadelphia.