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The Roots of Psychology

© Isaac Ferguson

Many people date the inception of psychology to 1879, when Wilhelm Wundt founded the first experimental psychology lab in Germany. That makes the field a very young one indeed, particularly considering the importance of the psyche, or mind, to the human species. Biology, chemistry, and the more abstract disciplines of physics and mathematics have had considerably longer to mature into more exact sciences. Even then, most of the history and progress of all the sciences has occurred in the past century.

Despite this, many scholars agree that to accurately study the history of psychology, one must go back in time to the golden age of Greece. It was then that men began to philosophize about reality. Did the truth lie in materialism, the belief that matter is the only reality, or in idealism, the belief that it is impossible to separate reality from ideas? Parmenides (circa 504 B.C.) thought that reason was the basis for truth, while perceptions (from sensory input) could be deceptive. Later Aristotle stated that humans have a rational psyche, which is capable of learning and thinking. He also recognized the importance that catharsis has in allowing a person to purge negative feelings. However Aristotle, like many others after him, thought that the mind is located in the heart.

It was in this matter that philosophers, biologists, and other thinkers contributed inadvertently to the field of psychology throughout the ages. By arguing about how they perceived the world and what was reality, Descartes and other scholars were actually setting the stage for arguments that are still being questioned today. Are we born a tabula rasa, or blank slate, ready for the environment to form us? B.F. Skinner and other behavioralists thought so a few decades ago. Or is our personality predestined, due to our genetic imprint? Though evidence now seems to indicate that the truth lies somewhere in the middle-that we are molded by both environment and genetics-it is interesting to think that this and other speculations about perception, cognition, etc., started before the word psychology even existed!

Eventually, the need to answer many perplexing questions about ourselves led to an effort to study, and quantify, our behavior. Wundt not only started the first psychology lab, but he was also a prodigious writer, keeping immaculate records of all his findings. While he suggested that scientist also study folk, or social, psychology, he set the mood for a line of thinking that would prevail for nearly a century.