Wilhelm Wundt established the first psychology laboratory in 1879 at the University of Leipzig, marking the beginning of psychology as a distinct science. Wundt's structuralism approach used introspection to analyze the basic elements of consciousness. However, introspection proved unreliable. William James then proposed functionalism, studying how the mind functions in relation to behaviors and adaptation. Sigmund Freud introduced psychoanalysis, focusing on the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious mind. He believed unconscious drives and desires influence behaviors. Carl Jung expanded on this with his concepts of archetypes in the collective unconscious, including the persona, anima, animus and mother archetypes. These early founders laid the groundwork for modern psychology.

1. HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY:
A BRIEF OVERVIEW
Catina Feresin PhD
Department of Educational
Science
University of Pula
Croatia

2. INTRODUCTION
Historical roots 1

3. Although people have always
attempted to understand behaviour, the
study of psychology as a distinct
science is scarcely more than a century
old.
The most famous psychological schools
are:

4. 1-Structuralism
2-Functionalism
3-Psychoanalysis
4-Behaviourism
5-Gestalt school of psychology
6-Geneva school of psychology
7-Cognitivism
8-Cognitive sciences

5. -1-
STRUCTURALISM

6. Most historians date back the
founding of scientific psychology to
1879, the year when Wilhelm Wundt
established his psychology laboratory
at the University of Leipzig in
Germany.

7. Wilhelm Wundt

8. The new discipline represented a
convergence of two currents of thought
in philosophy and science. One was the
tradition of empiricism with its
emphasis on experience; the other was
the science of physiology.

9. Empiricism, introduced by the
philosopher John Locke in the
seventeenth century, focused on the
experience of the world as a source of
knowledge.

10. Since the world is communicated to
people through the sensory organs,
Wundt was interested in the
relationship between the activation of
these organs by physical events and the
resulting psychological experiences.

11. The other tradition was the science of
physiology. In the nineteenth century,
the brain and the nervous system were
analysed by many researchers. Wundt
was a physiologist himself.

12. The method used by Wundt was called
introspection and it may seem naive
now, but at least it was systematic. For
example he and his colleagues
attempted to test all the conscious
experiences that occurred while trained
observers were looking at visual images
or listening to the beat of a metronome.

15. This psychological current was later
named structuralism.
Through identification of the basic
elements of mental experience
(sensations, images and feelings),
Wundt and his followers tried to
understand the structure of mind.

16. Despite heroic attempts of the early
psychologists to ensure the accuracy
and reliability of their introspective
data, their effort failed, for these two
reasons:

17. 1-Many cognitive activities cannot be
introspected upon;
2-during the mentioned experiments,
there were several disagreements
among basic observations.
As a matter of fact, without reliable
observations, there can be no science as
well.

18. The failure of the introspective method
to provide reliable data had widespread
repercussions. It prepared the way for
Watson’s radical proposal that
psychology should study only man’s
behavior and reject introspection and
the study of the mind.

19. -2-
FUNCTIONALISM

20. William James published in 1890 a
book entitled Principles of Psychology.
There were no boundaries to James's
interest in psychological processes, and
no areas to which his mind would not
investigate.

21. William James

22. In his “Principles”, he devoted chapters
to habit, attention, perception, memory,
reasoning, instinct, emotion,
imagination, psychological methods,
and even hypnotism.

23. -3-
PSYCHOANALYSIS

24. Sigmund Freud was born on May 6th
1856 in a small town, Freiberg, in
Moravia. When he was a child, the
family moved to Vienna, where he then
lived most of his life.

25. Sigmund Freud

26. Freud’s couch

27. A brilliant child, a talented and skillful
student, he went to a medical school,
one of the few available options for a
bright Jewish boy in Vienna those days.
There, he became involved in research
under the direction of a physiology
professor named Ernst Brücke.

28. Brücke believed in what we now call
reductionism: "No other forces than the
common physical-chemical ones are
active within the organism.” Freud
would spend many years trying to
"reduce" personality to neurology, a
cause he later gave up on.

29. Freud was very good at doing research,
concentrating mainly on
neurophysiology, but only a limited
number of positions at the University
were available, and there were others
ahead of him.

30. Brücke helped him to get a grant to
study, first with the great psychiatrist
Charcot in Paris, then with his rival
Bernheim in Nancy. Both these
researchers were investigating the use
of hypnosis with hysterics.

31. After spending a short time as a
resident in neurology and director of a
children's ward in Berlin, he came back
to Vienna, married his fiancée of many
years and set up a practice in
neuropsychiatry, with the help of J.
Breuer.

32. Freud emigrated to England just before
World War II when Vienna became an
increasing dangerous place for Jews,
especially the ones as famous as Freud.
Not long afterwards, he died of a cancer
of his mouth and jaw he had suffered
from for the last 20 years of his life.

33. Freud's books and lectures brought him
both fame and ostracism from the
mainstream of the medical community.
He drew around him a number of very
bright sympathisers who became the
very core of the psychoanalytic
movement (Jung, Adler, Anna Freud).

34. Freud did not exactly invent the idea of
the conscious versus unconscious mind,
but he certainly was responsible for
making it popular. The conscious mind
is what you are aware of at any
particular moment, your present
perceptions, memories, thoughts,
fantasies and feelings.

35. Freud’s idea of mind:

36. Working closely with the conscious
mind is what Freud called the
preconscious, what we might call today
"available memory:" anything that can
easily be made conscious, the
memories you are not thinking about at
the moment but can readily brought to
your mind. Freud suggested that
conscious and preconscious are the
smallest parts of our whole mind.

37. The largest part by far is the
unconscious. It includes all the things
that are not easily available to
awareness, such as our instincts, and
things that are to be found there since
we are not able to look at them, such as
the memories and the emotions
associated with trauma.

38. According to Freud, the unconscious is
the source of our motivations, whether
they be simple desires for food or sex,
neurotic compulsions, or the ideals of
an artist or scientist. And yet, we are
often driven to deny or resist becoming
conscious of these motivations, and
they are often available to us only in a
disguised form (i.e. during a night
dream).

39. Some of Freud's most interesting works
are:
-A General Introduction to
Psychoanalysis;
-The Interpretation of Dreams;
-The Psychopathology of Everyday
Life;
-Totem and Taboo;
-Civilisation and Its Discontents
and many others.

40. Unfortunately, Freud had a penchant for
rejecting people who did not totally
agree with him. Some left him on
friendly terms; others did not, and went
on to found competing schools of
thought (i.e. Carl Jung).

41. Carl Jung

42. Carl Jung's theory divides the psyche
into three parts. The first is the ego,
which Jung identifies with the
conscious mind. Closely related to it is
the personal unconscious, which
includes anything which is not
presently conscious, but it can be.

43. But then Jung adds the part of the
psyche that makes his theory stand out
from all the others: the collective
unconscious.

44. The collective unconscious is our
"psychic inheritance." It is the
“reservoir” of our experiences as a
species, a kind of innate knowledge we
are all born with, and yet we can never
be directly conscious of it.

45. The contents of the collective
unconscious are called archetypes.
Jung also called them dominants,
mythological or primordial images.
An archetype is an unlearned tendency
to experience things in a certain way.

46. The mother archetype is a particularly
good example. It is symbolised by the
primordial mother or "earth mother" of
mythology, by Eve and Mary in
western traditions.

48. The persona archetype represents your
public image. The word is, obviously,
related to the word person and
personality, and comes from a Latin
word for mask. As a consequence, the
persona is the mask you put on before
you show yourself to the outside world.

50. Anima and animus archetype
A part of our person is the role of male
or female we must play. For most
people that role is determined by their
physical gender. But Jung, Freud, Adler
and others felt that we are all really
bisexual in nature.

51. If you are looking for something among
Jung’s work, you might read:
-Analytic Psychology: Its Theory and
Practice;
-Man and His Symbols.