History of Psychology

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Explain the reasons for the development of psychology as an academic discipline in the 19th and 20th centuries, making explicit the important turning points and breakthroughs.

In this essay I am looking at where Psychology as a discipline has come from and what affects these early ideas have had on psychology today, Psychology as a whole has stemmed from a number of different areas of study from Physics to Biology,
But the first Psychological foundations are rooted in philosophy, which to this day propels psychological inquiry in areas such as language acquisition, consciousness, and even vision among many others.
While the great philosophical distinction between mind and body in western thought can be traced to the Greeks, it is to …show more content…

Humanistic psychologists emphasize the uniqueness of human beings and their freedom to choose their own destiny and they regard scientific methods as inappropriate for the study of humans. The main aim of psychology they believe is to help people to maximise their potential psychological growth. Maslow gave the humanistic approach his theory of self-actualisation as illustrated by his hierarchy of needs. Rogers extended Maslow's work into the field of humanistic person-centred psychotherapy. This approach has been criticized, like psychoanalysis, because it is based mainly on case studies and interviews, which unlike experiments are not very scientific.

There is not one leading psychologist when it comes to the cognitive approach, founded in 1956, like the others. One thing that the cognitive psychologists have in common is an approach that stresses the importance of studying the mental processes. The cognitive approach studies our information processes of perception, attention, language, memory, and thinking, and how they influence our thoughts, feelings and behaviours. It considers each, and their contribution to our ability to operate successfully in our world. The cognitive approach views us as active processors of information from our outside world, and we are not just passive learners, as behaviourists would have us believe. An early application of the cognitive approach was George A. Miller's 1956 article "The Magical Number Seven, Plus

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