Psychology

Psychology. The science of psychology was a late nineteenth‐century invention whose origins lay in several German universities, particularly the University of Leipzig laboratory begun in 1897 by Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), usually acknowledged as the founder of scientific psychology. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the new experimental psychology had replaced nineteenth‐century American mental philosophy, a form of Scottish faculty psychology that emphasized the empirical study of the intellect, emotions, and will.

The Beginnings of Experimental Psychology.

The demise of the old psychology proceeded rapidly as the new psychologists, many of them trained in Germany, returned to America to pursue experimental work. In the late nineteenth century, America was undergoing a great transformation spurred by industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and educational reform. The human problems caused by these changes created the need for an applied science of the mind. The stage was set for the rapid growth of psychology as a science and as a profession.

G. Stanley Hall established the first American psychology laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in 1883. Four years later he founded the American Journal of Psychology to publish the new experimental work. America boasted seven psychology laboratories by the end of the 1880s, and nearly forty by 1900. A national organization, the American Psychological Association (APA), founded by Hall in 1892, brought psychologists together for annual meetings to share research findings and to promote their science.

Harvard University's William James was the new discipline's most visible figure at the turn of the twentieth century, thanks to his Principles of Psychology (1890), arguably the most influential book in the history of American psychology. James's compendium of the latest experimental studies, his insightful analysis and integration of that research, his elegant prose and use of metaphor, and his optimistic predictions of psychology's importance as the science of the twentieth century assured his centrality in the new psychology in America.

Early psychologists sought to study the mind, or, more specifically, consciousness. They did so with experimental methods from Germany, the mental tests popularized by England's Francis Galton (1822–1911), questionnaires, and several varieties of introspection. At Cornell University, Edward Bradford Titchener (1867–1927) pursued a reductionistic analysis of consciousness that he would call structuralism. Relying almost exclusively on the method of introspection, Titchener sought to map the structure of consciousness by identifying its most basic elements, which he labeled sensations, emotions, and images.

The Functionalist Approach.

Other American psychologists, influenced by the writings of William James and Charles Darwin (1809–1882), focused instead on understanding the functions of consciousness, particularly how consciousness enables the organism to adapt to changing environments. More eclectic in their methods, these psychologists used nonhuman animals in their research and promoted the application of psychology outside the university laboratories. Whereas the structuralists focused their research principally on sensation and perception—processes by which information is acquired—the functionalists were more interested in learning and motivation. If consciousness had adaptive significance, they reasoned, then learning must be the mechanism by which adaptation operated.

In addition to James, the functionalist group included G. Stanley Hall, who, beginning in the 1890s at Clark University, involved psychologists and schoolteachers in a nationwide effort to gather information about the psychological nature of children. The child‐study movement, as it was known, used questionnaires in an attempt to learn everything there was to know about children: sensory capabilities, humor, play, religious ideas, memory, attention span, and so forth. In Hall's view, the field of education offered the most fertile possibilities for psychology's application. His child‐study program—the earliest application in America of the new psychology—was aimed at curricular reform and teacher training.

Another early functionalist, Columbia University's James McKeen Cattell (1860–1944), pioneered mental testing in America. He developed a battery of sensory, cognitive, and motor tests that he used in a research program focused on individual differences. Some of these tests, touted as measures of intelligence, proved to have little validity in that regard and were replaced in the first decade of the twentieth century by the Binet and Simon tests imported from France. Intelligence testing, which reached its zenith in America, was part of a broader program of mental testing, an activity that defined much of the first fifty years of American psychology.

Behaviorism.

While structuralists and functionalists debated the study of consciousness, other psychologists suggested shifting psychology's focus to behavior. Their champion was John B. Watson (1878–1958), who in 1913 published what has been called the “behaviorist manifesto.” Psychologists who thought that their science could study consciousness were deluding themselves, Watson argued. Instead, he believed that psychology would take its rightful place as a science by restricting its study to what could be observed and scientifically measured, namely behavior. Convinced that psychology could be a wholly objective science, Watson called for reform in its content and its methods and for the rejection of mentalistic terms such as “mind” and “consciousness.” Over the next twenty years American psychology was increasingly influenced by behaviorism, an approach that dominated the discipline's thought and research into the 1970s.

Behaviorism continued the functionalist emphasis on learning, primarily using animal subjects (mostly the albino rat), and fostering a number of competing learning theories. The best known of these was the operant conditioning work of B.F. Skinner (1904–1990). Skinner developed a behavioral psychology based on the use of reinforcers and punishers as behavioral contingencies in changing behavioral rates. His work was widely applied in business, education, and the field of mental‐health care.

The Rise of Subspecialities.

As American psychology developed in the twentieth century, its divisions were marked not only by philosophical and methodological differences—structuralism, functionalism, behaviorism, and so forth—but also by the growth of specialty areas. Applied specialties, such as school and industrial psychology, began in the late 1890s, as psychologists used their science to help children overcome learning problems and businesses to evaluate advertising effectiveness. Concern with personnel selection and the vocational guidance of youth gave rise to counseling psychology, whereas clinical psychology emerged initially in the mental testing used in clinical assessment and diagnosis. All of the applied fields grew rapidly after World War II, especially clinical psychology, which was stimulated by a joint program among the APA, the Veterans Administration, and university graduate programs interested in training psychologists to be psychotherapists and clinical researchers. As psychology's role evolved in the mental‐health field from the late 1940s through the 1970s, psychologists worked with state legislatures to establish licensing laws to protect consumers and ensure quality in the growing fields of clinical and counseling psychology.

In addition to their various specialties defined by practical application, psychologists increasingly differentiated themselves by the subject matter of their studies, for example, social psychology, biopsychology, developmental psychology, and cognitive psychology. Cognitive psychology—which focused on many of the topics that behaviorism had expunged, such as thinking, memory, language, and consciousness—appeared in the 1960s with the use of computers in psychology, the emergence of new methods for researching internal states, and a growing dissatisfaction in psychology with the narrowness of behaviorism. By the 1970s behaviorism shared center stage with cognitive approaches.

Psychoanalytic and Humanistic Psychology.

Other influences on American psychology were psychoanalysis and humanistic psychology. Psychoanalytic theory spread in America in the decades following the 1909 U.S. visit of the Austrian Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), who came at the invitation of G. Stanley Hall. Freud's ideas, emphasizing the role of early childhood experiences and of the unconscious as the primary determinants of behavior, soon won an American following. America's first journal of Freudian psychology, the Psychoanalytic Review, was founded by William Alanson White and Smith Ely Jelliffe in 1913. The rise of fascism in the 1930s brought a number of Freudian psychoanalysts to the United States as refugees, including Erich Fromm (1900–1980) and Karen Horney (1885–1952). By the mid‐twentieth century, the United States had became a major center of psychoanalytic practice. But American‐based psychoanalysts and psychiatrists influenced by Freud, including Fromm, Horney, and Harry Stack Sullivan (1892–1949), first editor of the journal Psychiatry, were among the sharpest critics of Freudian orthodoxy. These American neo‐Freudians stressed the role of sociocultural factors in psychological development; the power of the individual to address and overcome psychological problems; and, in the case of Horney, the psychosexual experience of women, downplayed by Freud. Fromm's Escape from Freedom (1941) and Horney's Our Inner Conflicts (1945) were particularly influential books. While Freud loomed large in the arts and the humanities, and in mid‐twentieth‐century popular culture, his influence in psychology was largely limited to therapeutic practice. By the end of the twentieth century, Freudian theory had come under heavy challenge for a variety of reasons, and declined even as a therapeutic technique.

Humanistic psychology emerged in the 1960s, principally based on the ideas of Carl Rogers (1902–1987) and Abraham Maslow (1908–1970). It opposed the determinism implicit in behaviorism and psychoanalysis and proposed instead that individuals could choose how they behaved. Humanistic psychology led to some alternative psychotherapies but had little influence on the science of psychology.

By the beginning of the twenty‐first century, the American Psychological Association had more than 159,000 members and affiliates who belonged to at least one of the APA's more than fifty divisions reflecting the diversity of interests in psychology (e.g., sports psychology, media psychology, psychology and law, and addictions). One of the newer divisions, health psychology, promised considerable growth in the twenty‐first century because of the significant number of illnesses and deaths caused by behavioral variables such as smoking, overeating, stress, violence, and lack of exercise. Beginning as a laboratory science in the universities of the 1880s, psychology a century later was one of the larger professions in the United States. By the 1990s, more than half of the world's psychologists resided in the United States. Of that number, a majority were involved directly in the practice of psychology in diverse applied specialties.
See also The Education: The Rise of the University; Intelligence, Concepts of; Mental Illness; Professionalization; Psychotherapy.

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Ludy T. Benjamin Jr.