PORTFOLIO

Portfolio

Portfolio



Introduction

Psychology is “the science of mental life”. Many of the schools of psychology throughout history incorporated the finding of their predecessors and their compatriots into the development of their own theories. The ideals of the schools evolved over the years as new factors developed which influenced the findings of its predecessor or compatriot (Richards 2010). If you ask people what is psychology for them, then often covered such statements such as "doctrine of the soul", "life support", "psychoanalysis", "theory of the unconscious," deals with the depth of the human spirit "and "tries to understand people." If you ask further, how to achieve their goals of psychology tries, then one often hears, "with talks," by telling people their dreams, "" People should associate freely, "" empathy ".

In Britain, the most notable psychological advances were those of the mid-nineteenth-century movement of “New Psychology,” a scientific and physiological approach to the mind. Spearheaded by such figures as William Benjamin Carpenter (1813-1885), Thomas Laycock (1812- 1876), and George Henry Lewes (1817-1878), New Psychology flourished from about 1850 to 1875. This British movement crossed the Atlantic and laid the foundation for much of what has come to be thought unique about the US approach to psychology, influencing such figures as William James (1842-1920), George Trumbull Ladd (1842-1921), and James Mark Baldwin (1861-1934). Strangely, at the same time as the British texts were being read in the United States, they were being discarded in Britain. Late nineteenth-century Britain was swept up in German idealist thought and began to disown its own mental science. The relative insignificance of British psychology in the twentieth century, compared with US and European advances, has made it easy to neglect its former importance, especially for the rise of US psychology.

Psychology, the scientific study of the mind, is often assumed to be a late nineteenth-century Continental (German perhaps) import to Britain and the United States; after the waning of Freudian psychoanalysis, however, the importance of the much neglected British-US contribution to the field of psychology has become clear. British and US thinkers had already made significant advances in the science of the mind even before the rise of experimental psychology and psychoanalysis on the Continent (Brysbaert & Rastle 2009). By the mid-nineteenth century, they had established a strong transatlantic tradition of mental science that has retained a distinctly empirical and pragmatic orientation: in Britain and the United States, psychologists have aimed at developing not just a system of knowledge but also a social instrument with moral interests and practical applications (Harper 2007).

The “new” psychology in Britain was to be a scientific psychology in contradistinction to the “old” philosophical psychology of previous generations. As a deliberately planned innovation, the new science applied experimental methods to some of the classic problems of metaphysics, in the hope of answering questions that had bedeviled philosophers for centuries. The British Victorian physiological psychologists tried to throw a scientific bridge across the impassable gulf that had hitherto appeared to separate the physical and the mental ...