A BRIEF HISTORY OF MODERN PSYCHOLOGY As with many other large and complex fields of study, psychology has developed

i ntensely over the past 200 years, progressing through various movements and scho ols of thought, many of which fractured or grew out of direct opposition to prev ious movements. The following is a general overview of some of these major devel opments within the discipline and the famous people and events responsible for t hat progress, and it is meant to be a brief description of the history of modern psychology. Birth of the New Psychology The New Psychology originated in the scientific laboratory ofWilhelm Wundt(1832-19 20), the German philosopher and psychologist responsible for establishing experi mental psychology, which was quite a different approach to understanding the min d than the previously philosophical attitudes of earlier times. By creating a re search laboratory at the University of Leipzig in 1879, Wundt helped European ph ilosophers and scientists reconcile their different approaches to figuring out h ow the human mind works. Wundt, known as the father of experimental psychology, is most famous for his applied use of introspection, a method of gathering informa tion from research subjects regarding how their mind works under controlled test environments. Structuralism Perhaps the first organized movement of the New Psychology,structuralismhas origin s in Wundt s laboratory though it wasn t untilEdward B. Titchener(1867-1923) traveled to the United States and coined the term structuralism that the school of thought gained significant followers. Structuralism as a psychological approach required psychologists to break down mental processes into their primary components. The belief here was that by breaking down these processes, psychologists could bett er understand how the mind works, much like a scientists creates a taxonomy of b asic elements. Structuralist psychologists used introspection as their primary m ethod of ascertaining how a research subject s mind worked. Functionalism Functionalismgrew as a kind of reaction to the project of structuralism; rather t han consider the parts of the mind, functionalist psychologists focused on the f unction or processes of the mind and how they operated based on a person s environ ment. Popularized by such thinkers asWilliam James(1842-1910), as well as scholarsJ ohn Dewey(1859-1952),James Rowland Angell(1869-1949), and others at the University of Chicago, functionalism required psychologists to focus their work on how cons cious experience functioned in the individual as an ever-changing process, one t hat rejected the subjectivity of introspection as a research method. Although fu nctionalism never gained prominence as a formal school, despite being based in C hicago, it did lead to the founding of the behaviorist school of thought. Behaviorism Growing out of both a rejection of structuralist psychology and a complaint abou t the lack of scientific rigor in functionalist psychology,behaviorismlargely post ulates that everything an organism does should be thought of as a behavior. Beha viorists, such asB. F. Skinner(1904-1990), believed that in order to understand be havior, there must be some observable process, whether that process is public, s uch as speaking aloud, or private, such as thinking. Behaviorists rejected the i dea that theories such drive psychological study, and instead sought to look for objective and observable correlatives to psychological processes. Behaviorists sought to inject a new sort of scientific rigor into the study of the mind. Gestalt Created byMax Wertheimer(1880-1943),Gestalt psychology, German for essence or shape of an entity s complete form, an approach of the Berlin School of experiment psycho logy, headed by Wertheimer s mentorCarl Stumpf(1848-1936), essentially shifted the a pproach of psychology to holistically consider the human mind as an entire form, rather than a product of a series of parts or processes or behaviors, as consid ered by previously schools. Gestalt methodology required that research consider overall phenomena rather than sensory qualities, and it also shifted research aw ay from laboratories and into natural situations. However, Gestalt psychology wa s largely criticized as being merely a descriptive approach, rather than explana

tory in nature. Psychoanalysis Psychoanalysis, popularized by the work ofSigmund Freud(1856-1939) and his student s, originated as a way to explain human behavior and treat abnormal behavior. Fr eud posited that the much of human behavior consisted of a delicate balancing ac t between repressing unconscious desires and allowing those desires to surface. First developed by Freud in Vienna in the 1890s, psychoanalysis essentially work s from a set of theories about human behavior and sought to find causes of this behavior, and to treat them if necessary. For this reason, critics of psychoanal ysis often say that it is highly unreliable.Freud s psychoanalytic workwas continued by his students and colleagues, among themCarl Jung(1875-1961) andOtto Rank(1884-19 39). Psychoanalysis persists today as a legitimate school of psychology. Humanistic Psychology Founded as a movement in the late 1950s by psychologistsAbraham Maslow(1908-1970),C arl Rogers(1902-1987), andClark Moustakas,humanistic psychologygrew out of a desire to create a holistic and useful psychology that could help humans deal with the natures of their existences, as opposed to previous forms, such as psychoanalys is and behaviorism, which sought to explain certain behaviors and to understand them as strictly scientific processes. As such, humanistic psychology largely re lies upon counseling and therapy, in which the psychologist lets his or her meth ods meet the patient s needs as opposed to deriving an explanation from a theory o f behavior or how the mind works. Humanistic psychologists are concerned with is sues such as love, self-actualization, health and hope, creativity, becoming an individual, and other highly abstract concepts of the human experience, while do wnplaying the more scientific and objective view of the patient as apatient, or a s pathological. Cognitive Psychology Cognitive psychology, originally coined byUlric Neisser(b. 1928) in 1967, is a for m of psychology that returns to the extremely scientific and empirical approach to understanding the human mind. It characterizes people as dynamic information-p rocessing systems whose brains can be thought of in computational terms. Cognitio n, according to Neisser, refers to all processes by which the sensory input is tr ansformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used. This school of thoug ht also grew out ofNoam Chomsky s critique of behaviorist thinker B.F. Skinner sVerbal Behavior.Cognitive psychologists also place a lot of importance on language in t heir approaches to the mind, as that offers them the most basic method of unders tanding how human represent knowledge, emotions, and other mental processes.