History Perspectives of Abnormal Psychology

History perspectives of Abnormal Psychology

Introduction

Abnormal psychology, in particular, grew under the auspices of mesmerism: William Benjamin Carpenter and his school of physiological psychology in Britain tried to calm the hectic enthusiasm through balanced and lucid writings on the physiological origins of spiritual effects. The boundaries between psychology and spiritualism and psychic research were in fact ill defined. For much of the nineteenth century, in scientific literature, the “psychical” was often used interchangeably with the term “psychological” to describe mental phenomena. “Psychical” began to acquire its association with mental telepathy, clairvoyance, and other spiritualist phenomena only after the Society for Psychical Research was founded in Britain in 1882.

To add to the confusion, the term “psychological” was also used to refer to spiritual phenomena, as in the British journal Psychological Review, which described itself as a “journal of spiritualism.” For much of the nineteenth century psychology was still in the process of establishing itself as a clearly defined natural science (Aidman, 2002). The progress of psychology during the nineteenth century was shaped and accelerated by advances in science, particularly physiology and evolutionary biology. The professionalization of British physiology grew rapidly in the nineteenth century and helped to establish the place of scientific method and experimental analysis in British education. Developments were especially significant in the study of brain structure and function, the understanding of the nervous system, the experimental investigation of sensation, and the elucidation of abnormal psychology.

Discussion

The scientific study of the nature and origins of psychologically abnormal states many constituents of psychology within itself. In contrast to clinical psychology and psychiatry, where the emphasis is on the assessment and treatment of individuals, abnormal psychology seeks more general theories about disorders, in such areas as personality, intelligence, and social behavior.

Abnormal, clinical and health psychology are fields that share a common general purpose, namely, the application of psychological theories to the understanding and treatment of clinical phenomena. However, in other ways they are quite different. In the case of abnormal psychology, the older of these fields, the clinical phenomena of interest - abnormal mental states - are primarily psychological in nature, and despite more than a century of scientific investigation, serious disputes remain about how these phenomena are best construed. In the case of the relative newcomer, health psychology, the clinical phenomena of interest are mainly bodily diseases, as conventionally understood by physical medicine; there is very little dispute about how these phenomena are to be construed and the psychologist's interest is mainly in how they are influenced by social and psychological factors (Beyerstein, 2001).

It has always been difficult to draw a clear line between abnormal psychology and the medical specialty of psychiatry. Indeed, much of the research which has been published in abnormal psychology (or psychopathology, as it is sometimes known) has been carried out by psychiatrists. It would be tempting to distinguish between the two disciplines on the basis of the kinds of models employed. For example, it is commonly assumed that psychologists favour dimensional models of mental ...