A Brief History of Psychology

Michael Wertheimer, Antonio E. Puente

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351978637
• Edition: 6
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This brief, inexpensive text offers great flexibility in teaching the history of psychology. Used as a stand-alone text or with readers, this engaging book is noted for its analysis of the scientific and philosophical emergence of the field as well as its coverage of contemporary psychology and emerging areas. Readers appreciate the book's balanced coverage of experimental, applied, and clinical psychology, as well as the clear and succinct presentation of the field's major events and schools of thought. The sixth edition features an expanded pedagogical program with bolded terms, a complete glossary, more illustrations, and web-based instructional materials including PowerPoints, a test bank, discussion questions, and more. Special emphasis has also been placed on the role of the American Psychological Association (APA) in the history of psychology.Extensively updated throughout, the sixth edition features:

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• A revised final chapter with a current analysis of the state of the field, including the growth of the APA as well as specialized organizations that promote the science and profession of psychology, and the push to influence policies that address global challenges, such as environmental sustainability, intergroup conflict, health disparities, and the population explosion.

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• A discussion of the growth in the number and role of women and ethnic minorities in psychology, and the promotion of diversity across both demographic and intellectual perspectives.

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• Recent developments in the growth of neuroscience, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and the diversification and internationalization of psychology.

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• Portraits of some major figures in the history of psychology, including psychology's first Nobel Prize winners.

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• Recent and evolving changes in the practice of psychology, including more emphasis on "evidence-based practice, " prescription privileges, and the emergence of the importance of psychological practice in health care.

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• Recent changes in the APA, including new divisions and new elected officials and its emerging focus on advocacy.

Used independently or as a supplement with readers, this brief text is intended for undergraduate and graduate courses on the history of psychology. Due to its brevity and engaging style, the book can be used in introductory courses to introduce students to the field. The enormous index and substantial glossary make this volume a useful desk reference for psychology and related disciplines.

1 Introduction

Before setting out on this brief tour through the history of psychology, consider some general background. The first section of this chapter will raise a few questions about the nature of history itself and about the problems that one will inevitably encounter when taking on the role of historian. The next section presents some thoughts about why one should bother contemplating psychology’s history in the first place. The final section explores the various ways the history of psychology has been organized, referring briefly to some of the better-known works in the field, and ends with a characterization of the approach taken in the present work.

Some Comments on History in General

The historian faces obstacles the scientist can avoid. Historical truth is more elusive than scientific truth, although the scientist has problems too. Paradoxically, historical “facts” can change, but an empirical statement of a relationship stays put in some sense: anybody can check it. Scientific knowledge is timeless; a scientific generalization can be tested any time, by anyone who cares to set up appropriate conditions for observation. But history is an all-or-nothing affair; something happened once, and that’s that—you cannot bring past events back into the present to study them and their determinants and effects at leisure, turning them this way and that, as you can examine some scientific statement in the laboratory. To be sure, there might be relics of the past event that you can use to try to pin it down—letters, canceled checks, diaries, monuments, official documents, email messages, sales slips, or the United States Congressional Record—but none of these is the event itself, and none is of unquestionable reliability or validity. Most important, none really tells you how to interpret the event. You can’t unequivocally determine the causes and effects of the event, can’t manipulate the independent variables responsible for it or measure the dependent variables it affects. In fact, you can never be sure that the presumed event actually happened at all. Perhaps it’s just the figment of someone’s fancy, dutifully perpetuated by those who came later. Chances are, it’s harder to break a fad in history than in science. Once an event has found its way into the historical record, especially for a prolonged period of time, that event sometimes becomes unthinkingly accepted, whether or not it actually happened.

Quite aside from questions such as whether Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492 (or whether it was Amerigo Vespucci, or a foolhardy Norseman, or, for that matter, the indigenous Americans, who were unaware that their land had to be discovered), there is the question of the importance of a presumed event. It is primarily this aspect of history that changes. How important was William the Conqueror in determining the events of about a thousand years ago? Just how significant is the Boston Tea Party really? Should everybody know how many soldiers went with Cyrus on the third march of the fifth month of his Anabasis or how many accompanied Caesar from one part of Gaul to another? It might be intriguing to hear that Hannibal managed to prod a herd of elephants over the Alps, that Henry VIII had goodness knows how many wives, that Demosthenes stuttered, or how many Americans were lost in the wars of the 20th century; but, ultimately, so what? Rather than recording that a man once stood at a graveyard and intoned, “Four score and seven years ago,” and so forth, why not record that an ant, at the same time and place, happened to be walking over the letter M on poor Private Pat Smith’s headstone? That’s an event too. History just isn’t impartial; it is highly and inevitably selective.

History, then, deals with events about which one can’t be certain, the significance of which is debatable, and whose selection for attention is an idiosyncratic, subjective matter. No historian can be unbiased. Even if one had many lifetimes and infinite powers of observation and memory, it would still be an impossible chore to produce a complete, unbiased description of all of the events that occurred, say, between 4:01 a.m. and 4:03 a.m. on Thursday, May 30, 2019. What do you include? That the president of the United States sneezed? That this was the seven-year anniversary of the day Gabriel Lanai Ellis was born on the porch of a cabin at 8,500 feet, 6 miles west of Boulder, Colorado, and that his cousin Cassidy Joy Wertheimer, sleeping in Windsor, Colorado, scratched her left knee? That in Rocky Mountain National Park a 13-inch-diameter, ragged piece of granite, loosened by the freezing and thawing of thousands of years, fell with a clatter from near the top of the east face of Longs Peak down onto Mills Glacier and then rolled all the way onto frozen Chasm Lake? And even if all of these items were to be included in your list of events, how much detail would you devote to each? In what order should you include them? How much would you emphasize each one? How far back before 4:01 and how far beyond 4:03 would you go to “make the event meaningful,” to “set it in its context,” to “show its significance”?

No, history is not independent of the historian. It does not stay put. Which events to emphasize, which ones to include or exclude, how to interpret what you select—all of this depends on the historian’s bias.

Much of what the student of history has to wade through is the doings that somebody thought important, of people whom somebody thought important. Perhaps the easiest (and clearly the most usual) solution is to write about people considered significant by their contemporaries and events that at the time caused raised eyebrows, an increased heart rate, or untimely deaths. Kings, dictators, presidents, prime ministers, religious leaders and their wars, battles, murders, intrigues, and other shenanigans form the bulk of most history books. Some daring souls have also tried to compile histories of ideas, of cultural movements, of humans as thinking, creative, evolving creatures rather than purely political or economic ones—a quite different orientation. Yet the basic problem remains the same: how do you select, what do you relate to what, how do you interpret what? Somebody else might see the same things very differently or might choose to look at very different things.

One recurrent issue, insistently and insightfully brought by Edwin G. Boring (1950a) to the attention of anyone interested in history, is that of the Zeitgeist versus the great individual view of events. Just what is the role of the “spirit of the time” (the Zeitgeist) or of the place (the Ortgeist) in determining what happens, as against the role of some unusual person who is strong enough to withstand the Zeitgeist or the Ortgeist and change the course of events? Would there have been no Holocaust if there hadn’t been an Adolf Hitler? Was Sigmund Freud just a passive agent of the climate of ideas in Vienna at about the turn of the 20th century? Would somebody else have come up with an emphasis on unconscious motivation, or was he, his unique existence, responsible—in spite of the Zeitgeist—for the creation of the psychoanalytic view? It is usually too simple to cast such questions into an either–or form, but the relative contribution of the great individual and of the Zeitgeist still remains largely a matter of the intentional or unintentional raw preference of the historian. Even though there might be occasional circumstantial evidence, such as simultaneous independent yet similar discoveries or formulations, which suggest a Zeitgeist influence, there are no convincing objective guidelines. For that matter, until recently, the “great individual” has been synonymous with a “great man” since few women were recognized as part of psychology or of its leadership. Indeed this approach was also largely limited to white men. Again, not until recently, actually very recently, have individuals outside of this limited demographic group been visibly involved in the history of psychology.

And then there is the question of the organization of what the historian chooses to pull out of the stream of events. Chronology seems the obvious outline. But it is not really as straightforward as that. If historians try to make some sense out of what is being talked about rather than record in an endless, dull list that this happened, then that happened, and then the other occurred, they must permit themselves to jump back and forth to some extent. While busy expounding the chain they have constructed for events q, r, s, and t, they must ignore the fact that u, v, w, and x happened to be going on at the same time—according to their view, these belong in a different chain. So they run back again to u, v, w, and x after they have finished with q, r, s, and t. The extreme of a pure chronology, then, is just about impossible, even if one breaks the account down into arbitrary units such as the period 1740–1749, then 1750–1759, and so on.

The other extreme is completely separate chains, as in one book about the history of England and another about the history of France or one on philosophy and one on psychology. But this approach also has inherent problems. Most historians will want to refer to other concurrent chains occasionally, especially when they happen to have links in common—as in the invasions of France by England or vice versa. Again, it seems a matter of sheer preference whether the historian chooses to be closer to the chronology pole or the history-of-some-particular-movement (or country, or discipline, or whatever) pole.

One distinction that historians of science have pointed to is the difference between internal and external history. Most non-historians who have written histories of their fields (such as physics, chemistry, biology—or, for that matter, psychology) trace the sequence of major ideas, discoveries, theories, or other notable events in their fields without paying much attention to what else was going on at the time. In this sense, they produce internal histories: histories that focus primarily (or even exclusively) on events in the discipline itself. People with substantial training in history are more likely to place the evolution of a discipline into a much broader sociocultural, political, and economic context. They tend to write more external histories: what contemporaneous events in other fields, in international relations, in the intellectual and institutional and cultural milieu, explain why things happened as they did in a particular time and place? Clearly, some balance of internal and external is most illuminating, so long as the account doesn’t end up being exhaustingly exhaustive. To help indicate the external context, this book includes a few chronological charts that are intended to place various people and events in the history of psychology in temporal relation with various people and events in world history.

A related distinction emphasized by historians contrasts presentism (looking at past events from today’s perspective) with historicism (placing past events into their actual social and intellectual context rather than viewing them purely from the point of view of today’s implicit assumptions). While it is humanly impossible to avoid any trace of presentism, the responsible writing of history requires recognition of the cultural, social, and intellectual settings within which the events recounted occurred.

These points are raised here partly because the present writers are not professionally trained historians. But if history is at bottom a matter of idiosyncratic bias concerning what to include, how to include it, and how to interpret it, then even amateurs’ efforts might be permissible. To the extent that they differ from others’ efforts, they might help to loosen a possibly too tenacious tradition of what the best way to systematize the field might be or of what “the” history of the field is. There is no such thing as “the” history of anything.

Anyone aspiring to write a history of any field comes with implicit assumptions that are inevitably biased by education, prejudices, and background. So to permit the reader to gauge the present authors’ perspectives, here is some information about where the authors are coming from. It has inevitably colored every aspect of this book.

With inspiring exposure to humanities and social sciences as an undergraduate student at Swarthmore College, the senior author majored successively in French literature, then linguistics, then philosophy, and finally psychology. His father, Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer, had died before the author got to college. But a colleague of Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, a psychology professor at Swarthmore, sent the author off to graduate school at The Johns Hopkins University, hoping that the hard-nosed science orientation there would counteract what he considered the author’s excessive exposure to tender-minded humanities at Swarthmore. At Swarthmore (and earlier at home) he had learned that Gestalt theory had the right approach to psychology and that behaviorism was wrong. But Hopkins, still a hotbed of behaviorism back in the late 1940s, taught that Gestalt was wrong, and that behaviorism was the answer. That was hard to swallow, so after a Hopkins MA he switched to Harvard University for his doctorate. But that change didn’t help: the spirit of Titchenerian structuralism, taught as wrong at both Swarthmore and Hopkins, still dominated the implicit assumptions at Harvard. Perhaps these bewildering experiences helped the author to start thinking for himself a bit more rather than just to accept the dogmas that illustrious, respected professors espoused.

He did complete a dissertation—on psychophysics—at Harvard, but then took an internship in clinical psychology at Worcester State Hospital in Massachusetts for a year to try to find out what that perspective was all about. Back then, some seven decades ago, it was still possible to get a clinical internship, indeed one sponsored by the U.S. Public Health Service, without having to complete all sorts of seminars, course work, and practica beforehand.

But Worcester produced another disconcerting experience that jaundiced his perspective on clinical psychology. He learned that the scientific empirical approach that all three then-competing theoretical orientations (Gestalt, behaviorism, and structuralism) took for granted, both explicitly and implicitly, was not equally shared by all clinical psychologists. His mentor at Worcester, kept nameless here, was convinced that “eye” content responses on the Rorschach test—seeing eyes in those inkblots—are an unmistakable pathognomonic sign of paranoid ideation, especially if the response is something intense like “those threatening eyes are staring out at me from the gloom.” Obeying the strong empirical orientation imprinted on him by all three schools, Gestalt, behaviorism, and structuralism, the author ransacked the copious department files of Rorschach protocols and diagnoses at Worcester State Hospital, hundreds of them, and did a simple double classification: yes or no on eye content responses on the Rorschach, and yes or no on paranoia showing up in the diagnosis or case history. Even though the Rorschach protocols had often played a role in the diagnosis, there turned out to be literally no relation between the two variables.

An early technical paper was actually published on this non-finding. Soon after he told his supervisor about this finding (or lack of it), the author attended a demonstration the supervisor was giving to medical and psychology interns on how to interpret Rorschach protocols. “Ah,” he said, “here’s a strong eye content response. This is a sure sign…” and he looked at the senior author and added, “—your opinion, Mike, to the contrary notwithstanding—that the patient shows extreme suspiciousness, strong signs of paranoia.” The author’s opinion to the contrary? It wasn’t an opinion; it was a description of fact, based on hard data. Sheer opinions and repeatable empirical findings should by no means be considered equally compelling. This unfortunate experience is probably still tainting the senior author’s somewhat ambivalent perspective on clinical psychology.

The senior author’s entire career since his 1952 PhD has been spent in academia, and except for a few inevitable bumps and problems along the way he has enjoyed almost every day of it. Though of course it hasn’t made him fabulously wealthy financially, to be paid to share his enthusiasm with eager young minds, to explore almost any question wherever it might lead, via lab or correlational investigations or thinking about it or by bouncing ideas off of bright, young, unprejudiced souls—it has been a most exhilarating career. It was especially gratifying to help sometimes self-doubting students in an undergraduate psychology honors program that he directed for four decades to perform modest but original studies that convinced them that they were capable of generating good scholarly products and maybe were reasonably bright after all. And he has been graced by awards for teaching, for advising, for contributions to the history of psychology, and for insisting on nonsexist language in scholarly writing.

He directed doctoral programs in experimental psychology and in sociocultural psychology. And since early in his career he has been involved in some way or another with organized psychology, including the Psychonomic Society, Psi Chi, the Association for Psychological Science (APS), and the American Psychological Association (APA). He had some kind of official position in the APA continuously for more than half a century, having been a fellow of the division of experimental psychology and fellow, president, and a representative to the APA Council of Representatives for the divisions of general psychology, the teaching of psychology, the history of psychology, and theoretical and philosophical psychology. And he has been a member or chair of many different APA boards and committees over the years, culminating in three years (2007–2009) on the APA board of directors.

The junior author is similarly not a historian by training though his interest in history preceded his formal education in psychology. He was introduced to psychology at a community college before transferring to the University of Florida. There he began working with Donald Dewsbury, pursuing comparative psychology research but being introduced at the nearby medical school to the emerging specialty of neuroscience. He then became Dewsbury’s colleague, collaborating on several history of psychology projects with him. After taking a year working at a psychiatric hospital, he enrolled in a new biopsychology program at the University of Georgia. He earned his master’s degree in clinical psychophysiology there, using the p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Chronological Charts
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Pre-experimental Psychology
• Part II The Rise of Experimental Psychology
• Part III Psychology in the 20th Century
• Part IV Psychology’s Promising Past and Enigmatic Future
• Glossary
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index