Psychology can be traced back to the ancients: as long as men have been thinking, they have spent some time thinking about their minds. A variety of European philosophers wrote about the functions of the human psyche from what passed for a scientific viewpoint in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, quackery such as phrenology was gradually discredited. Phrenology was the study of protuberances in the skull, with the assumption that their pattern and shape revealed mental and character traits.
Modern Psychology
In 1890 William James published his Principles of Psychology, which proved to be a seminal work in the field. James wrote about conscious and unconscious states, about thought and what shapes it. While psychiatry had been around for a century, Freud brought it to the forefront with his experiments in psychoanalysis in the early part of the twentieth century.
Meanwhile, early behaviorists were studying and writing about the stimulus-response phenomenon. A couple of Russian scientists were active in the nineteenth century. The first behaviorist was Ivan M. Sechenov, who concluded that all behavior is caused by stimulation. In his book Reflexes of the Brain (1863) he concluded that there were not only excitatory processes in the brain, but inhibitors as well. Vladimir M. Bekhterev wrote the first version of his work Objective Psychology in 1904; he too was a strict behaviorist and would tolerate academic discussion only of environment and behavior. He called his work Reflexology.
Pavlov began his study on reflexive behavior in 1900, at the Military Medical Academy in St. Petersburg. He worked through unconditioned and conditioned response, adding research data to the developing behaviorist body of theory.
Gestalt Psychology
Gestalt, founded by German psychologist Max Wertheimer, is one of the principal schools of thought in psychology to develop in the twentieth century. Gestalt psychology is based on the observation that we often experience things that are not a part of our simple sensations. The original observation was Wertheimer’s, when he noted that we perceive motion where there is nothing more than a rapid sequence of individual sensory events. The effect is called the phi phenomenon, and it is actually the basic principle of motion pictures.
If we see what is not there, what is it that we are seeing? Wertheimer explained that you are seeing an effect of the whole event, not contained in the sum of the parts. Furthermore, say the Gestalt psychologists, we are built to experience the structured whole as well as the individual sensations. And not only do we have the ability to do so, we have a strong tendency to do so.
The Cognitive Movement
Cognitive psychology is the most recent major paradigm shift in psychology. Originating in the 1950s and articulated by Ulric Neisser in his 1967 work Cognitive Psychology, this theoretical structure proposes that sensory perception is the key to behavior. Cognitive psychological research covers the workings of memory, of attention, creativity, problem solving and knowledge representation. Neisser represents his proposal as a psychological science: a point of view that assumes the mind has a certain conceptual structure. He stresses that other schools of theory in psychology are equally necessary and valid. He defines cognitive psychology, when utilized as a theoretical structure, as another "point of view."
