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INTRODUCTION
Many of the issues that are examined in modern psychology had been the subject of philosophical debate long before the development of science as we know it today. The very earliest philosophers of ancient Greece sought answers to questions about the world around us, and the way we think and behave. Since then we have wrestled with ideas of consciousness and self, mind and body, knowledge and perception, how to structure society, and how to live a “good life”.
The various branches of science evolved from philosophy, gaining momentum from the 16th century onwards, until finally exploding into a “scientific revolution”, which ushered in the Age of Reason in the 18th century. While these advances in scientific knowledge answered many of the questions about the world we live in, they were still not capable of explaining the workings of our minds. Science and technology did, however, provide models from which we could start asking the right questions, and begin to test theories through the collection of relevant data.
Separating mind and body
One of the key figures in the scientific revolution of the 17th century, the philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, outlined a distinction between mind and body that was to prove critical to the development of psychology. He claimed that all human beings have a dualistic existence – with a separate machine-like body and a non-material, thinking mind, or soul. Later psychological thinkers, among them Johann Friedrich Herbart, were to extend the machine analogy to include the brain as well, describing the processes of the mind as the working of the brain-machine.
The degree to which mind and body are separate became a topic for debate. Scientists wondered how much the mind is formed by physical factors, and how much is shaped by our environment. The “nature versus nurture” debate, fuelled by British naturalist Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory and taken up by Francis Galton, brought subjects such as free will, personality, development, and learning to the fore.
These areas had not yet been fully described by philosophical inquiry, and were now ripe for scientific study. Meanwhile, the mysterious nature of the mind was popularized by the discovery of hypnosis, prompting more serious scientists to consider that there was more to the mental life than immediately apparent conscious thought. These scientists set out to examine the nature of the “unconscious”, and its influence on our thinking and behavior.
The birth of psychology
Against this background, the modern science of psychology emerged. In 1879, Wilhelm Wundt founded the very first laboratory of experimental psychology at Leipzig University in Germany, and departments of psychology also began to appear in universities across Europe and the USA. Just as philosophy had taken on certain regional characteristics, psychology developed in distinct ways in the different centres: in Germany, psychologists such as Wundt, Hermann Ebbinghaus, and Emil Kraepelin took a strictly scientific and experimental approach to the subject; while in the USA, William James and his followers at Harvard adopted a more theoretical and philosophical approach.
Alongside these areas of study, an influential school of thought was growing in Paris around the work of neurologistJean-Martin Charcot, who had used hypnosis on sufferers of hysteria The school attracted psychologists such as Pierre Janet, whose ideas of the unconscious anticipated Freud’s psychoanalytic theories. The final two decades of the 19th century saw a rapid rise in the importance of the new science of psychology, as well as the establishment of a scientific methodology for studying the mind, in much the same way that physiology and related disciplines studied the body.
For the first time, the scientific method was applied to questions concerning perception, consciousness, memory, learning, and intelligence, and its practices of observation and experimentation produced a wealth of new theories. Although these ideas often came from the introspective study of the mind by the researcher, or from highly subjective accounts by the subjects of their studies, the foundations were laid for the next generation of psychologists at the turn of the century to develop a truly objective study of mind and behaviour, and to apply their own new theories to the treatment of mental disorders.
以下是我写的关于The Psychology Book的其他章节，欢迎各位前来观看 ^ ^
