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René Descartes
The Greek idea of the mind controling the body was popular for almost 2000 years until their theory was disproved by the French philosopher René Descartes. In his theory, Descartes agreed that mind and body are two separate things, however, he states that the mind and body come into contact through the pineal gland. He also argued that the body could affect the mind and vice versa. -
Psychology as a science
The starting date of psychology as a science is considered to be 1879, the year which the first psychology research laboratory was established by Wilhelm Wundt -
Structuralism - Wilhelm Wundt
Wilhelm Wundt, a German physiologist trained in medicine and was really interested in the study of human consciousness. His research led to the making of the school of thought called structurallism. Structualism focused on the structure of consciousness, the small pieces of puzzle which make up consciousness . He build his own laboratory where he and his students conducted many experiment. His researchs were successful and widely popular around the world -
Hermann von Helmholtz
All the philosopher up until this day has no concrete evidence to prove their theory about the mind and body. However a physiologists call Hermann von Helmholtz changed all that. He did experiments on frogs and humans to develope a method to calculate how long it took a nerve impulse to travel to the brain. He provided evidence that mental processes weren't instantaneous and help to make a useful way to study the brain. -
William James - Functionalism
William James graduated from university as a medical doctor but became interested in the science of psychology. He disagreed with Wundt's opinion about separating consciousness into different elements. He believed that consciousness is influenced by the environment around us that are changing constantly. -
Sigmund Freud - Psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud focuses on the unconscious mind instead of the conscious. He believed that the unconscious contained instinctive sexual and aggressive needs. The needs are motivators that influence the way we act. However, if we are to act to our instinctive aggressive needs it would be socially unacceptable. He also believed that past experience in childhood would shape our personality and behaviour. -
John B. Watson
Watson rejected the idea of consciousness promoted by Wundt and James. Also he disapproved of the emphasis on the unconscious promoted by Freud. He presented that psychology would be the study of observable behaviour that could ne objectively measured and be used in data, Watson had a huge impact on the science world of psychology. His theories and work are studied even to this day. -
Carl Rogers - Humanism
Carl Rogers was one of the founder and leader of Humanism. Humanism is an approach to understand and explaining behaviour and mental processes that focus on the uniqueness of people and the positive qualities and potential of human kind. Throughout his career, he disliked to conduct experiments on people. Because of this, he regretted that he didn't conduct a wider range of research studies. -
Greek Philosopher - 2000 years ago (BC)
Greek philospher Socrates and his followers asked questions about the human minds. They wrote theories about memory, sleep, dreams, the senses, pleasure and pain, imagination, etc. They believed that the mind and body were two separated things and only the mind could control the body.
