PSYCHOLOGY

History of Psychology

History of Psychology

Introduction

In earliest times, rudimentary types of psychology were practiced by clerics, shamans, wizards, seers, medicine men, sorcerers, and enchanters, all of who suggested some combine of illusion, belief, and herbal remedies to alleviate the physical and mental pain of their patients. These early efforts developed into the present areas of medicine, belief, and psychology, with a residual overlap of leverage amidst the three. Psychology continued its gradual evolution until the 19th century, one that glimpsed important alterations in this field. (Coburn 2002)

Discussion

The exact aim of this section will be on five types of American psychology throughout this period, with some treatment of their European roots. The first is popular psychology, or what might be called the psychology of the people, or public psychology (Strozier 2007). This is the psychology that emerged from thousands of years of human annals, manifesting itself in the 19th century in some types of pseudoscientific psychological practice for example phrenology, physiognomy, mesmerism, spiritualism, and mental healing.

A second psychology, sometimes marked medico psychology or psychiatry, was practiced by physicians and other caretakers in treating the mentally ill who were housed in what were initially called lunatic asylums or insane asylums (Coburn 2000). These mental asylums were the principal entails of look after America's mentally ill for nearly two centuries, and they were the birthplace of the occupation of psychiatry. Twentieth-century assaults with psychiatry, particularly over the right to consign psychotherapy services, would play an important role in the development of the occupation of clinical psychology.

A third psychology of the 19th century lived inside schools and universities and was renowned as mental philosophy. This learned psychology was obliged much to the beliefs of the British empiricists and the Scottish realists, whose concepts conceived an empirical psychology that concentrated on topics of human consciousness for example sensation and perception, learning, recollection, reasoning, attention, and emotion (Strozier 2007).

In the second half of the 19th century, work in mental philosophy and in sensory physiology and neurophysiology culminated in the development of an experimental set about to the study of brain, an set about that searched to make the questions of brain investigable by experimental methods. This was the fourth pattern, scientific psychology, which drew very powerfully on the work in physiology and psychophysics in Germany, eventuating in Wilhelm Wundt's 1879 psychology lab at the University of Leipzig.

Finally, the fifth psychology to be considered is applied psychology. In the United States, this directed psychology started in the last ten years of the 19th century and was manifested initially in the areas of educational psychology, school psychology, clinical psychology, and developed psychology. In the 20th century this psychology would accomplish its utmost development, forming a new occupation of psychology, overridden by the specialty of clinical psychology, whose practitioners became the principal providers of psychotherapy in the last some decades of the 20th century? These five distinct but interrelated psychologies are the key to comprehending contemporary psychology as a science and as an occupation, as well as comprehending the ...