[Gen Psy] Why Psychology is such a Complex Field
An Analysis of Psychology’s Origins, Insights & Inspirations
Context
Every year, thousands of students graduate to become psychologists, entering a discipline that is both new (just under 150 years-old) but with ancient roots that run back thousands of years. As memory expert Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909) put it:
“Psychology has a long past, yet its real history is short.”
Psychology is certainly a strange field, one that has grown at a rate that few comprehend, let alone appreciate. In order to grasp psychology’s rate of expansion — and maybe even hypothesize what psychology might grow to become — we should take a moment to examine from whence it came.
Consider this: Every major contributor to psychology prior to Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920)[1] officiating the field in 1879 — setting up the first psychology lab in Leipzig, Germany — could barely pursue psychology as an academic field for the simple reason that it hadn’t formally existed yet. [2] The proto-behaviorist, Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936), preferred to be called a ‘physiologist’ and purportedly threatened to fire anyone who considered using psychological terms around him. Such was the attitude towards psychology at the time.
Going back further, centuries before psychology became an institutionalized field or was even coined as a word, [3] there were MASSIVE leaps in our understanding of what would become psychological topics like mind states, communication, perception, and mental illness. For example,
- 1600 BC: The Edwin Smith Papyrus detailed the physiological and psychological symptoms of brain and spinal damage. [4]
- 1500 BC: The Hindu Vedas texts explored levels of consciousness and perceptions.
- 650 BC: King Psamtik I was testing if Egyptian was the ‘innate’ language of mankind by having infants sequestered in a private cottage and having servants await their first words.
- 400 BC: Democritus was distinguishing intellect from knowledge gained through the senses.
- 900 AD: Ahmed ibn Sahl al-Balki was writing about the physical and psychological causes of mental illness.
And that’s only to name a few. Eric Chudler, a neuroscience professor at the University of Washington, listed over 270 major contributions to psychology before Wundt’s laboratory officiated the field. [i]
Psychology’s Origins
Psychology has its origins in philosophy, [5] physiology, religion, and our unceasing interest in why we do what we do. And psychology is still evolving — chasing after the technologic and social evolutions in our global society, often attempting to test and explain our reactions to these perpetual developments. While religion’s influence has diminished (partially replaced by spirituality and mindfulness), psychology has expanded to include fields like sociology (most aptly in the form of social psychology), linguistics (in the form of psycholinguistics), and even computing (through the information-processing theory). Today, psychology has broadened into at least sixty subfields. It has made its way into education, sports, engineering, advertising, warfare, law, and design — all with the intended purpose of enhancing each field.
Major Schools of Psychology
Psychology’s elastic and increasingly monolithic nature is both the cause and effect of the various schools of thought it has seen over time. For example, there have been at least eight major schools:
1. Structuralism: Psychology officially began in 1879 through the process of studying the structures of the mind via varying stimuli and attempts at objective introspections.
2. Functionalism: Psychology evolved around 1890 with Functionalism which studied the functions of the mind, such as memory, perception, and thinking itself.
3. Psychoanalysis: The field then plunged deeper inwards in 1896 with the rise of the psychoanalysts, who studied the unconscious mind — especially dreams and subconscious drives — for the initial purpose of understanding and treating neuroses.
4. Gestalt Psychology: Psychology then broadened outward in 1910 with the European practice of Gestalt Psychology, which studied the ‘bigger picture’ of our perceived world, as opposed to individual components or the individual sum of parts.
5. Behaviorism: Entering a strictly quantifiable realm by, psychology re-formalized throughout the 20th century (beginning officially in 1924) by measuring how the study of external/environmental factors like punishment and reward — as opposed to unseeable internal processes — shaped behavior. Studies involving introspection and subjectivity were largely abandoned, as they were seen as subjective and thus unempirical.
6. Humanism: By the 1950s, psychology rehumanized and aimed to look at individuals not just as a ‘bag of symptoms’ or a series of environmental influences, but rather as living and loving organisms with natural drives for fulfilling our potentials.
7. Cognitivism: With leaps in technology in the late 1960s — especially in computing and brain mapping — psychology began to quantifiably measure previously inexact mental processes pertaining to memory, perception, and learning.
8. Neuroscience: With the development of modern brain scanning technologies — most importantly Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) developed in 1990 — psychology has, beyond the dreams of the most empirical behaviorists, evolved into a quantitative science.
This list is in no way exhaustive. Not only are there many more major schools of thought, but there are sub-schools within each. Behaviorism, for example, has at least five distinct sub-schools and offshoots. [6] To really drive the point home: there are at least three distinct theoretical schools of psychoanalysis arising from Vienna alone. [7]
But why? Why is psychology so elastic that it eludes a unifying sense of cogency that every other science seems to maintain?
I can offer two potential answers.
Reason One: Insight
The first is the fact that psychological insight can be gained from so many varying sources. For example:
- Ivan Pavlov’s insights — which became the foundation for Behaviorism — stemmed from his observations of dogs anticipating food, E. L. Thorndike’s (1874–1949) came from cats escaping puzzles, Wolfgang Köhler’s (1887–1967) from chickens (and later, chimpanzees trying to reach distant bananas), B. F. Skinner’s (1904–1990) from rats and ping-pong playing pigeons (which were, believe it or not, being trained to support the U.S. military), and Harry Harlow’s (1905–1981) from working with rhesus monkeys to evaluate the significance of physical contact for an infant’s development.
- John B. Watson (1878–1958) — who leveraged Pavlov’s insights to officially establish Behaviorism in 1913 — learned from rats (and a weeee bit of child abuse), while Melanie Klein (1882–1960), Jean Piaget (1896—1980), and Anna Freud (1859–1982) learned from decades of studying youngsters at play (with no accounts of child abuse, though Anna might have analyzed one to death).
- Howard Liddell (1895–1967) from electrocuting a variety of unfortunate farm animals, Zing-Yang Kuo (1898–1970) from raising kittens and rats to bond with one another, Konrad Lorenz (1903–1989) from convincing goslings and ducklings to imprint — or form familial attachments — to his Wellington boots, while José Delgado’s (1915–2011) came from a charging bull with an electrode implanted in its hypothalamus. [8]
- Sigmund Freud spent a decade plunging into his own mind in order to better psychoanalyze the minds of others, while Robert Cialdini (1945 — Present) spent years ‘undercover’ among car dealerships and telemarketing firms to gather real-world information about the nature of persuasion, while Susan Cain (1968 — Present) refined our understanding of the power of introverts not through any formal academic training in psychology but rather in perhaps the least introverted environment outside of Hollywood: Wall Street. Compare this to Rolling Stones writer, gonzo journalist, and self-proclaimed geek, Neill Straus (1978 — Present) who dismantled his shyness around women by penetrating a society of ‘pick-up artists’ who apply their understanding of evolutionary psychology to courtships.
There is the potential for psychological insight anywhere we look — if we truly examine life around us. It’s in the horrors of war, the peculiarities of social media, or the way people behave getting into a crowded elevator. In September 1848, we learned about the brain’s capacities when a railroad construction worker, Phineas P. Gage (1823–1860) had a large iron rod jammed through his cranium, puncturing through his brain’s frontal lobe, somehow not killing him but changing his personality. [9]
B.F. Skinner discovered the critically important idea of schedules of reinforcement because he was running low on his supply of food pellets to reward his lab mice.
We learn about anticipation by watching our tired friend’s pupils dilate when they see the barista bring out their coffee on a cold winter morning, we learn about relationships from how an elderly couple hold hands when turning a street corner, we learn about identity when we watch children extend the movies they just watched by acting out as the heroes and villains, and we learn about our feelings when we somehow find a way to diffuse an anger welling up inside us.
Reason Two: Inspiration
The second answer to psychology’s broad reach is that we can also be inspired by almost anything. For example:
- Max Wertheimer (1880–1943) — one of the founders of Gestalt psychology[10] — was inspired by an optical illusion while sitting in a train car on his way to vacation in Rhineland, Germany.
- Herbert Simon (1916–2001) and his graduate student and computer science researcher, Allen Newell (1927–1992), revolutionized the behaviorist-confined field of psychology with their nerdy excitement over computer science and AI. [11]
- Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828) — the founder of the now discredited phrenology (the study of how skull shapes determine personality) — was inspired as a teenager by the varying craniums between his sophisticated friends and his aggravating bullies.
If we combine the facts that psychological insight can be gained from almost anywhere and that anything can inspire us to learn about the mind, we largely explain just why psychology’s reach is so broad.
Martin Seligman (1942 — Present) — the founder of Positive Psychology — was motivated to research ‘learned helplessness’ after witnessing his father become debilitated after suffering several strokes, acquired his research first through shocking canines, and later changed the topic of his research from pessimistic forces to optimistic ones after a conversation with a chatty stablemaster aboard a flight from San Francisco to Philadelphia in 1982.
Insight and inspiration — key ingredients to start anything worthwhile — can be found almost anywhere when we’re speaking of psychology. Peak into the biography of any notable psychologist, and you’ll find the resonations.
Would Virginia Satir (1916–1988) have become a pioneer of family therapy if her own parents didn’t argue about whether or not her worsening appendicitis necessitated a doctor visit? Would she be as observant of behavior if she hadn’t lost her hearing at age five?
If we narrow our scope to psychologists directly impacted by the horrors of the Holocaust, we can ask the following:
- Would Boris Cyrulnik (1937 — Present) have been so driven to study trauma and resilience in children if he hadn’t been placed into a foster home by his parents (who were forced into Auschwitz), then given up by that foster family for a small reward, sent to a concentration camp only to escape at a transfer station, and grow up in France without a family?
- It’s likely that Henri Tajfel (1919–1982) might never have examined the mechanisms of prejudice — including the least amount it takes to develop discriminatory behavior — if he hadn’t been captured by Nazis while volunteering for the French Army, had to decide whether to lie, tell the truth or say nothing about his Jewish identity (choosing the latter), and returning home to discover that all his friends and family had been killed in concentration camps.
- Viktor Frankl (1905–1997) was already studying depression treatments and suicide prevention before he was captured by Nazis. Would he have formulated logotherapy — the restorative power of man’s will for meaning — if he wasn’t separated from his wife and forced into a concentration camp for three years?
And so on and so forth, and so on and so forth…
Addendum: There are two highly probable circumstances for psychology’s future — a topic for an upcoming post — that can occur simultaneously if need be.
The first is a wide-scale synthesis of fields, where broadly interdisciplinary fields like evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive behavioral therapy (each of which are syntheses themselves) will begin to fuse into one monolithic lens.
The second, which needn’t offset the first, is a cleanse in which the realm of ‘pop psychology’ explodes, and soon the average person’s psychosocial literacy will skyrocket. This means that the average high schooler will be knowledgeable in topics ranging from transference (psychoanalysis), conformity (social psychology), habit-formation (neuroscience), anxiety (cognitive behavioral therapy), and our ineluctable traits (evolutionary psychology) — armed with the tools to optimize themselves and those around them.
My pending book — Acceptance: An Adventure into Psychology’s Many Faces — aims to facilitate both of these hopeful scenarios.
NOTES
[1] If not Wundt, then William James (1824–1910) — the founder of American psychology. If not James, then Herman von Helmholtz (1821–1894), or Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) or Ivan Pavlov (1849 -1936). It depends on whom you ask.
[2] Yes, there were some, like G. Stanley Hall (1846–1924) — who was the first American to earn a Ph.D. in Psychology — who studied the field shortly before Wundt’s laboratory was opened.
[3] Etymologically, ‘psychology’ referred to the ‘study of the soul’ in the mid-17th Century. It was in the mid-18th century that it first referred specifically to the study of the mind.
[4] Believed to be transcribed from works between 3000–2500 BC.
[5] Donald O. Hebb (1904–1985), Canadian psychologist and father of neuropsychology (whose ideas we’ll discuss in Chapter seven), wrote in his 1980 manuscript, Essays on the Mind that, “Psychology and philosophy were divorced some time ago, but like other divorced couples they still have problems in common.”
[6] John B. Watson’s Methodological Behaviorism, Clark Hull’s Neobehaviorism, Edward C. Tolman’s Purposive Behaviorism / Cognitive Behaviorism, Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory, and B. F. Skinner’s Radical Behaviorism.
[7] This Austrian city of never more than 2.5 million has been the home of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis which believed that the root of human motivation was a will to pleasure, Alfred Adler’s individual psychology which believed the root of human motivation was a will to power, and Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy which believed that the root of human motivation was a will to meaning.
[8] We’re referring to José Manuel Rodríguez Delgado the Spanish-American neuroscientist and professor at Yale, not José Miguel Arroyo Delgado, the actual bullfighter. Though both are impressive.
[9] This became known as “The American Crowbar Case.”
[10] Along with the aforementioned Köhler and Koffka.
[11] Neurons firing or not firing, for example, is all too analogous to the on-off binary of digital computing.
Works Cited
[i] Chudler, E. H. (2021, January 9). Neuroscience For Kids. Retrieved January 10, 2021, from https://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/neurok.html
