History of psychology

The study of how psychology developed through changing theories, research methods, institutions, and practitioners.

Wilhelm Wundt: A German psychologist who established an experimental psychology laboratory in Leipzig in 1879. His laboratory became a landmark in psychology’s emergence as an independent experimental discipline.
Introspection: The examination and reporting of one’s own conscious thoughts and experiences. Early laboratories used trained introspection to study the contents of consciousness.
Sigmund Freud: An Austrian neurologist who founded psychoanalysis, emphasizing unconscious conflict and early experience. Psychoanalysis made unconscious motives a major topic in psychology’s history.
Behaviorism: A psychological approach that explains behavior through observable actions and their relations to the environment. Behaviorism rejected consciousness as psychology’s primary subject, challenging earlier introspective schools.
Clinical psychology: The field that assesses and treats mental, emotional, and behavioral difficulties. Its growth turned psychological theories and assessment methods into professional services.
Structuralism: An early school of psychology that analyzed conscious experience into basic elements. Wundt’s experimental program helped inspire this early approach to studying consciousness.
Psychophysics: The study of quantitative relations between physical stimuli and sensory experience. It supplied early experimental methods for connecting measurable stimuli with reported experience.
John B. Watson: An American psychologist who advocated behaviorism and the study of observable behavior. His program challenged psychology’s reliance on consciousness and introspective reports.
Psychoanalysis: A theory and therapy tradition that emphasizes unconscious processes and psychological conflict. Its interpretive clinical method differed sharply from laboratory-centered experimental psychology.
Intelligence testing: The use of tests to estimate cognitive abilities and related performance. Testing shaped schools, military selection, and debates about the measurement of human differences.

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MesmerismNarrower topic: Mesmerism prompted lasting disputes about suggestion, consciousness, and evidence.