THE ORIGINS OF PSYCHOLOGY
Prof.Massimiliano Badiali
Man has a natural need for self-analysis: his ideas, his perceptions, his feelings and his
emotions have taken part in history, but only in modern times has this tendency found a
scientific method in psychology. Psychology is the study of behaviour and mental
processes. Its goals are:
- to study behaviour by observation;
- to understand the contributions of genetics and environment (social and cultural).
Psychology has become a autonomous science independent from philosophy (science of why),
physiology (science of how) astronomy (science of where) and biology (science of inside),
but it unifies and develops all these perspectives.
The term psychology was born between the sixteenth and seventeenth century, but it has
been used, in its modern meaning, from the eighteenth century by a rational philosopher,
Woll. It has its origins in the thoughts of ancient civilisations, where the relation
between the nervous system and mental activities has studied, as in Egyptian and Chinese
civilisation. In ancient Greek civilisation we can find a lot of hypothesis on heart and
brain reciprocal relation. Scientific revolution and Cartesian thought has favoured the
passage from the study of the mind to its processes, as it has been studied by English
empiricists Hume and Locke. Locke uses for the first time the term intellect with meaning
of a faculty and not of a substance: he studied the associations and the main processes of
it. A group of French philosophers, called Ideologists, as Condillac studied these
intellectual processes.
The true scientific psychology was born in Germany: two precursors of this birth are
Herbart and Fechner. Herbart was the first to affirm psychology as an autonomous science,
insubordinate to the other subjects. Fechner was the founder of psycho-physics and
sustained that spirit and matter are two different aspects of reality, which derived from
different ways of observation; so he creates conditions for unifying body and soul and for
making psychology more and more scientific.
The adaptation was studied in Anglo-Saxon countries by famous scientists as Darwin and
Galton. They studied individual psychological characteristics and its hereditary
transmission. The discovers of these studies, which developed until the middle of
nineteenth century, were important for Wundt. He created presuppositions through which
psychology became an autonomous subject, recognised in its specificity by all scientific
community. He defines psychology as the study of conscious experience.