The Shaping of Modern Psychology

An Historical Introduction

L.S. Hearnshaw

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000767377
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría en psicología

Originally published in 1987, The Shaping of Modern Psychology presents a systematic survey of the development of psychology from the dawn of civilization to the late 1980s. Psychology as we find it today has been shaped by many influences, philosophical, theological, scientific, medical and sociological. It has deep roots in the whole history of human thought, and its significance cannot be properly appreciated without an understanding of the way it has developed.

This book covers the history of modern psychology from its animistic beginnings, through the Greek philosophers and the Christian theologians, and developments such as the Scientific Revolution, to the time of first publication. The author drew on many years' teaching experience in the subject and on a lifetime's interest in psychology.

The growth of psychology had been particularly impressive during the twentieth century and Professor Hearnshaw also looked to the future of the discipline. He showed that the new vistas opening out in fields such as neuropsychology, information theory and artificial intelligence, for example, were hopeful indications for the future, provided the lessons of the past were not forgotten. With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that he was right!

Chapter 1

Introduction

I

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the term ‘psychology’ was almost unknown in the English-speaking world. It was described by the philosopher-poet Coleridge as an ‘insolens verbum’ (an outlandish word), but nevertheless ‘one of which our language stands in great need’.¹ Today it is commonplace. Nearly every university in the developed world provides instruction in psychology; psychologists are widely employed in many areas of public service, particularly health and education; and considerable sums of money are devoted to psychological research. At international gatherings of psychologists thousands of psychologists from sixty or more countries meet periodically to discuss a vast range of problems, both theoretical and applied. How has this rapid growth come about? Upon what foundations does it rest? What is the present state of psychology, and what are its prospects? It is to these questions that this book is addressed. It sets out to explore how modern psychology has been shaped by its history.

The relevance of history to a subject which professes to be scientific has often been questioned. The scientific revolution, which began in the sixteenth century and inaugurated the modern age, involved a widespread rejection of the classical and medieval past. According to Francis Bacon, ‘science is to be sought from the light of nature, not from the darkness of antiquity. It matters not what has been done, our business is to see what can be done.’² The right road for the scientist is, in other words, not the study of history, but the active prosecution of research. His job is to create the future, not to cling to the past. Many psychologists from the time of Hobbes and Descartes onwards have echoed this sentiment. Wundt, the father of modern experimental psychology, proclaimed his intention of establishing psychology on new foundations, and in his massive textbook made few references to anyone prior to the nineteenth century.³ The behaviourists, from their pioneer Watson to the contemporary Skinner have made it clear that they totally reject the historical past of psychology.⁴ Prescientific views of human behaviour can, according to them, provide no help towards the creation of scientific psychology. Indeed for many psychologists their past history has come to seem irrelevant: the case for studying it must, therefore, be explicitly established.

It may first be worth observing that these rejections by psychologists of the views of their predecessors have never so far, in fact, been effective. Past concepts and past theories have persistently recrudesced; they have obstinately refused to die. Leibniz revived the ‘philosophia perennis’ that had earlier been cast aside; Brentano, a contemporary of Wundt, based his empirical psychology largely upon Aristotle; consciousness and the ‘nner world’, which the behaviourists banished, have once again crept back into psychology; and the faculties of the mind, whose death knell was sounded by Herbart at the beginning of the nineteenth century, have been restored to life by a leading philosopher of psychology of our own day.⁵ So it would seem that there was more of value in the prescientific musings of the past than scientific purists have been prepared to admit, and perhaps it is still worth paying some attention to them.

But such recrudescences are not decisive. They may simply imply that psychology has imperfectly emerged from the prescientific to the scientific stage, that it is what Kuhn, the philosophic historian of science, has termed a ‘proto-science’⁶ The question involves deeper issues in the philosophy and history of science – issues which have been widely debated in the period since the Second World War. Is science a progressive enterprise, as Popper has proposed, slowly but surely building an edifice of truth, all the time approaching more closely to the real nature of things?⁷ Or is it, according to Kuhn, subject to fashions and revolutions, one stage succeeding another without any continuity between them, and without logical development or convergence towards verisimilitude?⁸ Or again is science, in Feyerabend’s words, merely a ‘fairy tale’, with ‘no greater authority than any other form of life’, and no nearer the nature of things, in fact, than religion, myth, magic and witchcraft, which may indeed show greater insight than ‘the most enlightened scientific doctrines’?⁹ In any case, where does psychology stand in the scientific league? These are profound questions, which cannot be treated adequately in a short introductory chapter; but it is clearly necessary, before embarking on a historical study of psychology, to adopt some sort of standpoint towards them, as the meaning and relevance of the past is dependent on the answers given.

II

The rapid growth of psychology during the past hundred years together with its widespread application has rested on the assumption that psychology in the last half of the nineteenth century underwent a metamorphosis from speculative philosophy to scientific discipline. When this transition took place, science, and in particular the physical sciences, seemed to rest on solid foundations, and to constitute a continuously progressive enterprise converging towards an ever closer approximation to an understanding of the real nature of things. In the twentieth century, and particularly in the last few decades, there has been an erosion of this confidence. Not only has there been concern about the social effects of science, but doubts as to its objectivity. Even Popper, the champion of objective knowledge, has admitted that ‘science does not rest upon solid bedrock. The bold structure of its theories rises, as it were, above a swamp. It is like a building erected on piles.’¹⁰ The sociologists of knowledge go much further and maintain that all theories, even those of fundamental physics, are socially and historically relative, and based on nothing more than the consensus of the community of scientists. Such doubts, not surprisingly, have begun to undermine the confidence of at least some psychologists. If psychology is to progress they need answering.

One fact seems indisputable: scientific knowledge is extremely effective knowledge. As Bacon foresaw more than three centuries ago, it is capable of producing ‘fruits’.¹¹ It cannot plausibly be maintained, as several contemporary philosophers of science have argued, that it rests on no more than ‘the consensus of the scientific community’,¹² which is something that might change when scientific and social fashions change. The consensus of the scientific community, however complete, could not on its own produce ‘fruits’ of the sort that science is capable of producing. Such ‘fruits’ can only spring from real insight, even if only partial insight, into the nature of things. Nuclear fission could not have been achieved unless the theories of the physicists had arrived at some measure of correspondence with the realities of atomic structure. Nor would genetic engineering have become a practical possibility without the cracking of the genetic code by Watson and Crick and their successors. Far from Feyerabend’s contention that ‘anything goes’,¹³ it rather appears that only that which is dead right ‘goes’. No doubt science is dependent on social support and is coloured by social influences; no doubt there are subjective and personal elements in all knowledge, as Polanyi has maintained;¹⁴ but the essential feature of science is that it rests upon methodological principles which enable it in the end to transcend the relative, the subjective and the conditioned, and to arrive at what Popper terms ‘objective knowledge’.¹⁵ The corpus of objective knowledge is a developing one, not perhaps in the simple nineteenth century sense, but as the outcome of ‘the repeated overthrow of scientific theories and their replacement by better and more satisfactory ones’.¹⁶ This does not imply, in Popper’s view, scientific revolutions of the Kuhnian type, in which the past is expunged following a sort of ‘conversion experience’,¹⁷ but a continuous critical examination of traditional views. Tradition is the necessary basis for future discovery; it constitutes the piles in the swamp. ‘If you have nothing to alter and to change you can never get anywhere…. Human thought in general, and science in particular, are all products of human history.’¹⁸ To discard the past is, therefore, to destroy the possibility of progress. No scientific revolution has, in fact, done this. There is always a continuity of development beneath the paradigmatic changes of scientific revolutions. As Hooykaas, the Dutch historian of science has pointed out, ‘whatever the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may have rejected of the ancient scientific heritage, they continued to use parts of it – logic, mathematics and experimentation’.¹⁹ All ideas have their ancestry. That briefly is the justification for the study of the history of science. The special problems of psychology make the study of its history all the more pertinent.

III

It can hardly be denied that psychology is still in some ways a problematic science. It has not been as successful as was at one time hoped at disentangling itself from the swaddling clothes of philosophy. Problems relating to topics such as subjectivity, consciousness, intentionality, representation and voluntary activity obstinately refuse to disappear. Philosophical critiques of psychology from Kantian times onwards, instead of diminishing as psychologists attempted to establish their independence, have gathered in number and force.²⁰ Though the tougher-minded psychologists tend to dismiss them as irrelevant and to immerse themselves in their experimental investigations, it would be unwise not to take seriously the reasoned comments of able and often profound thinkers, particularly as a growing number of psychologists have come to have misgivings as to the road psychology has taken, and its adherence to a methodological orthodoxy derived from the physical sciences. The American psychologist, K.J. Gergen, recently wrote of ‘the pervasive discontent with the outcome of traditional research pursuits’, noted ‘the generalized ferment in psychology’, and listed a string of eminent psychologists bemoaning the state of their subject.²¹

A characteristic feature of recent years has been the search for alternative approaches to psychology, and a revival of views asserting the differing foundations, and consequently the differing methodologies, of the natural and the human sciences. These views can be traced back into the nineteenth century and indeed earlier, but were generally until comparatively recently resisted by psychologists, particularly those within the Anglo-Saxon tradition. Now they are beginning to capture an audience. Take, for instance, two contemporary examples: Gergen in America and Harré in England. Gergen claims that human beings show ‘unlimited potential for variation. … So there appears little justification for the immense effort devoted to empirical substantiation of fundamental laws of human conduct…. The sociobehavioral sciences are essentially non-empirical.’ And he concludes by proposing ‘a metatheoretic basis for a unified alternative’.²² In England Harré has somewhat similarly put forward an ‘ethogenic alternative’ to conventional psychology, based largely on ordinary language philosophy, the expressive aspect of human conduct, and the ability of human beings to follow rules and plans.²³

These critiques and proposals cannot be dismissed offhand. They undoubtedly point to certain weaknesses in orthodox systems of psychology, particularly those of a behaviouristic kind. It must, moreover, be admitted that, judged by strictly pragmatic criteria, the success of psychology in practice has been a limited one. Confronted by the acid test of its power to change human behaviour, and to foretell outcomes, it has not got far, and before many obstinate problems, such as delinquency, drug addiction, obsessional behaviour, and violence, it remains largely impotent. That being so it would be unwise to preclude new initiatives, and to decry the value of unorthodox speculation. Nevertheless doubts arise as to the soundness of the initiatives of the Gergen-Harré school of thought. They have provided little hard evidence that their proposals are capable of producing ‘fruits’; they are prone to undue verbalism and reliance on linguistic analysis; they have not demonstrated sufficiently cogently that there must be a methodological dichotomy between the natural and the human sciences; and finally their disillusionment with more orthodox approaches to psychology is unnecessarily severe. In spite of the problems with which it is confronted, psychology, as we shall see, has produced some ‘fruits’, and it has considerably clarified its subject matter.

At the heart of the difficulties relating to psychology lies the fact that psychology is an unusual science, in that in part it is unavoidably reflexive, that is to say that in psychologizing the mind is turning back upon itself. This inevitably creates special problems. There are two ways of dealing with this peculiarity, this element of uniqueness: it can be argued, on the one hand, that the subject matter of psychology is so special that the methods of the natural sciences are wholly inappropriate, and that entirely different approaches are needed; or, alternatively, it can be argued that scientific methodology has been conceived too narrowly, that it can be expanded, without abandoning the Popperian schema of conjecture and refutation, to cope with the special features of psychology. In line with this second view psychology requires what the French social psychologist, Moscovici, has termed a ‘polythéisme méthodologique’, that is an adherence to a diversity of methodological practices.²⁴ Perhaps the answer to the contemporary problems of psychology lies in boldness of imagination within the context of science, rather than in revolutionary despair in the garments of philosophy.

In this scenario the history of psychology has a threefold value. It is, firstly, a rich store of material, of problems and ideas. The past cannot usually provide answers; it cannot, as some historians have supposed, predict the future, nor does it contain a ‘prophetic element’;²⁵ but it is one source of questions and problems, and it is from questions and problems that scientific research derives its momentum. Secondly, history provides a sense of direction. It is easy for the working scientist to get bogged down with detail and routine, and to lose the larger perspective. History can enlarge the vision, enable him to stand back from his immediate task, and act as a safeguard against one-sidedness. Psychology, because it remains less surely founded than more advanced sciences, is still unduly subject to fads, fashions and extravagances. These are time-consuming and damaging. Speculation certainly must not be constrained, but to be valuable it needs grounding in tradition; and history is a storehouse of tradition. Finally a study of the history of psychology refutes the contention that the subject has not progressed. Half a century ago the eminent German psychologist William Stern made the claim that the picture of the human mind drawn by contemporary psychologists was incomparably richer than that of earlier age...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Animistic beginnings
• Chapter 3 Greek philosophers
• Chapter 4 Christian theologians
• Chapter 5 The scientific revolution
• Chapter 6 The philosophical renaissance
• Chapter 7 Eighteenth century developments
• Chapter 8 The impact of the life sciences on psychology
• Chapter 9 The beginnings of scientific psychology
• Chapter 10 Medical influences
• Chapter 11 The social dimension
• Chapter 12 Application, specialization and fragmentation
• Chapter 13 Philosophical critiques
• Chapter 14 New vistas I
• Chapter 15 New vistas II
• Chapter 16 Metapsychology
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Subject index