The Waves of Psychology

Hello everyone and welcome back!

Today's post is a slightly different one.
While over the past 3 years, I've written about my views and personal experiences on teenage mental health. Today's post is for my history lovers, who'd like to learn in brief about the various phases in the evolution of the subject of Psychology.

Without further ado,
Let's get to it!

We've all heard the phrase, "Curiosity kills the mind".
Well, Stone Age humans took it literally.
They would trephine humans by carving holes in their skulls and "releasing evil spirits".

Psychology is a new science. Thus it shouldn't come as a surprise that proper laboratory studies started only about 150 years ago, in 1879 by Wilhelm Wundt. He trained his subjects by asking them to record accurately their cognitive reactions to simple stimuli in order to measure basic cognitive structures.

He eventually described his theory of

structuralism—the idea that the mind operates by combining subjective emotions and objective

sensations. He was succeeded by William James who believed in the idea of Functionalism and also authored the very first Psychology textbook, Principles of Psychology.

Introspective theories were important in establishing the science of

psychology, however, they don't significantly influence current psychological thinking to a large extent.

Gestalt psychology tried examining a person’s total experience because the way we experience the

world is more than just an accumulation of various perceptual experiences. Gestalt theorists

demonstrated that the whole experience is often more than just the sum of the parts of the experience, i.e. context is important.

Ever heard of Sigmund Freud?
(Trust me, you don't)
He believed there's a part of our mind that we're not aware of, which affects how we think and act. This hidden part develops because we repress thoughts and feelings. According to Freud, these hidden things build up over time and affect us. 

Freud believed that to understand human thought and behaviour truly, we must examine the unconscious mind through dream analysis, word association, and other psychoanalytic therapy techniques.
While many therapists still use some of Freud’s basic ideas in helping clients, Freud has been criticized for being unscientific and creating unverifiable theories (please don't search up the Oedipus complex or Electra Crisis)

Simply put: Psychology is what you can see. Literally- with your eyes; the 2 most prominent figures being John Watson and Ivan Pavlov.

Watson said that for psychology to be a science, it should only focus on things we can see happening, not things we can't see like the unconscious mind. 

Behaviourists believe that psychologists should only pay attention to actions and what causes those actions—things in the environment that happen and how we physically react to them.

Another behaviourist, B. F. Skinner, added the concept of reinforcement to the main ideas of behaviourism. This means things in the environment that make us more or less likely to do certain things. Skinner's ideas were really important for a long time and behaviorism was the main way people thought about psychology for several decades.

Everything Everywhere All at Once.
It's an amalgamation of all the above-discussed approaches and is adjusted in accordance with each individual. Nowadays, most therapists use this method and draw from multiple perspectives.

Alrighty! That was it for today! I've been meaning to write this post for quite some time now as I studied the same for my AP Psychology exam.

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Signing off,
Kuhu :)