A History of Modern Psychology - Essay Example

Following the year 1870, college students in the United States increasingly became responsive to the innovative psychology: a professor at Harvard University, William James, initiated theories of intellect and displayed pragmatic results with a set of ‘brass devices’, taken from laboratories of physics and physiology. “Wundt, who is considered to be the originator of contemporary psychology” (Schultz, 2011), wrote extensively on psychology as an autonomous educational field and, during the year 1879, founded the earliest psychological laboratory.

Sigmund Freud developed his individual structure of psychology as well as psychiatric therapy, which he named as psychoanalysis. His structure was extended by means of an apprentice technique of “training analysis” (Schultz, 2011) earlier than the psychoanalyst started a private practice. Psychoanalysis within America turns out to be linked with the medicinal line of work, expanding independently from educational psychology. Early Western philosophy is identified largely by the three great thinkers: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.

They set the groundwork for Western philosophy by investigating and describing the “range, scope, method, terminology, and problematic of psychological investigation” (Goodwin, 2008). In the 19th century, the issue of the ‘relationship of mind to brain’ turns out to be ever more critical. In fact, the concern was so profound that it is complicated to discover a methodical text printed after 1860 that does not have a dialogue about this concern. Largely, this directly revealed two key advancements that united to make an impact on philosophers as well as psychologists with the ‘centrality of the mind/brain problem’.

The first of these deals with improvement in understanding the localization of intellectual job, founded on the thought that the brain serves as the part of mind. The second deals with a rising awareness with the opinion that mental occurrences - such as faiths, intellectual ideas, captivating trance states, and intuitive upsets - occasionally result in drastic modifications in the condition of the body. This alteration took place as advancement was made in knowing the nature of functional nervous disorders’.

During the year 1870, Shadworth Hodgson provided the earliest contemporary expression of a vision that he named as ‘epiphenomenalism’ (Benjamin, 2006). Descartes had envisioned the thought that animals were entirely “physical automata devoid of mental states, a notion that carries with it the implication that a completely self-sufficient neural mechanism can produce complicated and apparently intelligent acts” (Benjamin, 2006). Later this vision was broadened to include human beings, but moderated so that just the underlying usefulness and not the real existence of psychological conditions were rejected.

In addition, dominant in the rising discipline of psychology, were discussions surrounding the usefulness of Mesmerism in addition to the importance of phrenology. The earlier one was extended during the year 1770 by Anton Mesmer, who declared to apply the control of ‘gravity’ to heal a number of physical as well as psycho