100% found this document useful (20 votes)
266 views16 pagesThe Story of Psychology Instant Download
The document is an introduction to 'The Story of Psychology' by Morton Hunt, detailing the historical development of psychological thought from ancient times to modern psychology. It discusses early psychological experiments, such as those conducted by King Psamtik I of Egypt, and the evolution of ideas about the mind and consciousness. The text outlines the contributions of various philosophers and psychologists throughout history, setting the stage for the exploration of psychology as a science.
Uploaded by
go.ongty.nhphuynhtachCopyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
100% found this document useful (20 votes)
266 views16 pagesThe Story of Psychology Instant Download
The document is an introduction to 'The Story of Psychology' by Morton Hunt, detailing the historical development of psychological thought from ancient times to modern psychology. It discusses early psychological experiments, such as those conducted by King Psamtik I of Egypt, and the evolution of ideas about the mind and consciousness. The text outlines the contributions of various philosophers and psychologists throughout history, setting the stage for the exploration of psychology as a science.
Uploaded by
go.ongty.nhphuynhtachCopyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
/ 16
The Story of Psychology
Visit the link below to download the full version of this book:
https://medipdf.com/product/the-story-of-psychology/
Click Download Now
ALSO BY MORTON HUNT
The Natural History of Love
Her Infinite Variety:
The American Woman as Lover, Mate and Rival
Mental Hospital
The Talking Cure
(with Rena Corman and Louis R. Ormont)
The Thinking Animal
The World of the Formerly Married
The Affair: A Portrait of Extra-Marital Love
in Contemporary America
The Mugging
Sexual Behavior in the 1970s
Prime Time: A Guide to the Pleasures and Opportunities
of the New Middle Age (with Bernice Hunt)
The Divorce Experience (with Bernice Hunt)
The Universe Within:
A New Science Explores the Human Mind
Profiles of Social Research:
The Scientific Study of Human Interactions
The Compassionate Beast: What Science Is Discovering
About the Humane Side of Humankind
How Science Takes Stock: The Story of Meta-Analysis
The New Know-Nothings: The Political Foes of the
Scientific Study of Human Nature
To Bernice,
for reasons beyond counting
READER
I here put into thy hands what has been the diversion of some of my
idle and heavy hours; if it has the good luck to prove so of any of
thine, and thou hast but half so much pleasure in reading as I had in
writing it, thou wilt as little think thy money, as I do my pains, ill
bestowed.
JOHN LOCKE, “The Epistle to the Reader,”
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
CONTENTS
Prologue: Exploring the Universe Within
A Psychological Experiment in the Seventh Century B.C. 1
Messages from the Gods
The Discovery of the Mind
PART ONE: PRESCIENTIFIC PSYCHOLOGY
1 The Conjecturers
The Glory That Was Greece
The Forerunners: Alcmaeon, Protagoras, Democritus, Hippocrates
The “Midwife of Thought”: Socrates
The Idealist: Plato
The Realist: Aristotle
2 The Scholars
The Long Sleep
The Commentators: Theophrastus, the Hellenists, the Epicureans,
the Skeptics, the Stoics
Roman Borrowers: Lucretius, Seneca, Epictetus, Galen, Plotinus
The Patrist Adapters: the Patrists, Tertullian, Saint Augustine
The Patrist Reconcilers: the Schoolmen, Saint Thomas Aquinas
The Darkness Before Dawn
3 The Protopsychologists
The Third Visitation
The Rationalists: Descartes, the Cartesians, Spinoza
The Empiricists: Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, the Empiricist-
Associationist School
German Nativism: Leibniz, Kant
PART TWO: FOUNDERS OF A NEW SCIENCE
4 The Physicalists
The Magician-Healer: Mesmer
The Skull Reader: Gall
The Mechanists
Specific Nerve Energy: Müller
Just Noticeable Differences: Weber
Neural Physiology: von Helmholtz
Psychophysics: Fechner
5 First Among Equals: Wundt
As Good a Birth Date as Any
The Making of the First Psychologist
The Curious Goings-on at Konvikt
Wundtian Psychology
Sic Transit
6 The Psychologist Malgré Lui: William James
“This Is No Science”
Adorable Genius
Founding Father
Ideas of the Pre-eminent Psychologizer
Jamesian Paradoxes
7 Explorer of the Depths: Sigmund Freud
The Truth About Freud
The Would-Be Neuroscientist
The Hypnotherapist
The Invention of Psychoanalysis
Dynamic Psychology: Early Formulations
Success
Dynamic Psychology: Extensions and Revisions
But Is It Scientific?
Decline and Fall—and Revival
8 The Measurers
“Whenever You Can, Count”: Francis Galton
Galtonian Paradoxes
The Mental Age Approach: Alfred Binet
The Testing Mania
The IQ Controversy
9 The Behaviorists
A New Answer to Old Questions
Two Discoverers of the Laws of Behaviorism: Thorndike and
Pavlov
Mr. Behaviorism: John B. Watson
The Triumph of Behaviorism
Two Great Neobehaviorists: Hull and Skinner
The Impending Paradigm Shift
10 The Gestaltists
A Visual Illusion Gives Rise to a New Psychology
The Rediscovery of the Mind
The Laws of Gestalten
Out-of-Reach Bananas and Other Problems
Learning
Failure and Success
PART THREE: SPECIALIZATION AND SYNTHESIS
Introduction: The Fissioning of Psychology— and the Fusion
of the Psychological Sciences
11 The Personality Psychologists
“The Secrets of the Hearts of Other Men”
The Fundamental Units of Personality
Measuring Personality
Making Order out of Chaos
Learned Personality
Body, Genes, and Personality
Late Word from the Personality Front
12 The Developmentalists
“Great Oaks from Little Acorns Grow”
Grand Theory and Nontheory
A Giant, and a Giant Theory
Cognitive Development
Maturation
Personality Development
Social Development
Development from A to Z
13 The Social Psychologists
No Man’s Land
A Case of Multiple Fatherhood
Closed Cases: Cognitive Dissonance, the Psychology of
Imprisonment, Obedience, the Bystander Effect
Ongoing Inquiries: Conflict Resolution, Attribution, Others
The Value of Social Psychology
14 The Perception Psychologists
Interesting Questions
Styles of Looking at Looking
Seeing Form
Seeing Movement
Seeing Depth
Two Ways of Looking at Vision
15 The Emotion and Motivation Psychologists
Fundamental Question
Somatic Theory
ANS and CNS Theory
Cognitive Theory
Patchwork Quilt
16 The Cognitivists
Revolution
Revolution No. 2
Memory
Language
Reasoning
Is the Mind a Computer? Is a Computer a Mind?
New Model
And the Winner Is—
17 The Psychotherapists
Growth Industry
Freud’s Offspring: The Dynamic Psychotherapists
The Patient as Laboratory Animal: Behavior Therapy
All in the Mind: Cognitive Therapy
A Miscellany of Therapies
But Does It Really Work?
18 Users and Misusers of Psychology
Knowledge Is Power
Improving the Human Use of the Human Equipment
Improving the Fit Between Humans and Their Jobs
The Use and Misuse of Testing
Covert Persuasion: Advertising and Propaganda
Psychology in the Courtroom
Beyond the Fringe
19 Psychology Today
Portrait of a Psychologist
Portrait of a Science
Schism
Psychology and Politics
Status Report
Notes
Notes
References
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE:
Exploring the Universe Within
A Psychological Experiment in the Seventh Century B.C.
A most unusual man, Psamtik I, King of Egypt. During his long
reign, in the latter half of the seventh century B.C., he not only
drove out the Assyrians, revived Egyptian art and architecture, and
brought about general prosperity, but found time to conceive of and
conduct history’s first recorded experiment in psychology.
The Egyptians had long believed that they were the most ancient
race on earth, and Psamtik, driven by intellectual curiosity, wanted
to prove that flattering belief. Like a good psychologist, he began
with a hypothesis: If children had no opportunity to learn a
language from older people around them, they would spontaneously
speak the primal, inborn language of humankind—the natural
language of its most ancient people—which, he expected to show,
was Egyptian.
To test his hypothesis, Psamtik commandeered two infants of a
lower-class mother and turned them over to a herdsman to bring up
in a remote area. They were to be kept in a sequestered cottage,
properly fed and cared for, but were never to hear anyone speak so
much as a word. The Greek historian Herodotus, who tracked the
story down and learned what he calls “the real facts” from priests of
Hephaestus in Memphis, says that Psamtik’s goal “was to know,
after the indistinct babblings of infancy were over, what word they
would first articulate.”
The experiment, he tells us, worked. One day, when the children
were two years old, they ran up to the herdsman as he opened the
door of their cottage and cried out “Becos!” Since this meant nothing
to him, he paid no attention, but when it happened repeatedly, he
sent word to Psamtik, who at once ordered the children brought to
him. When he too heard them say it, Psamtik made inquiries and
learned that becos was the Phrygian word for bread. He concluded
that, disappointingly, the Phrygians were an older race than the
Egyptians.1
We today may smile condescendingly; we know from modern
studies of children brought up under conditions of isolation that
there is no innate language and that children who hear no speech
never speak. Psamtik’s hypothesis rested on an invalid assumption,
and he apparently mistook a babbled sound for an actual word. Yet
we must admire him for trying to prove his hypothesis and for
having had the highly original notion that thoughts arise in the
mind through internal processes that can be investigated.
Messages from the Gods
For it had not occurred to anyone until then, nor would it for
another several generations, that human beings could study,
understand, and predict how their thoughts and feelings arose.
Many other complex natural phenomena had long engaged the
interest of both primitive and civilized peoples, who had come more
or less to understand and master them. For nearly 800,000 years
human beings had known how to make and control fire;2 for
100,000 years they had been devising and using tools of many
kinds; for eight thousand years some of them had understood how
to plant and raise crops; and for over a thousand years, at least in
Egypt, they had known some of the elements of human anatomy and
possessed hundreds of remedies—some of which may even have
worked—for a variety of diseases. But until a century after Psamtik’s
time neither the Egyptians nor anyone else thought about or sought
to understand—let alone influence—how their own minds
functioned.
And no wonder. They took their thoughts and emotions to be the
work of spirits and gods. We have direct and conclusive evidence of
this in the form of the testimony of ancient peoples themselves.
Mesopotamian cuneiform texts from about 2000 B.C., for instance,
refer repeatedly to the “commands” of the gods—literally heard as
utterances by the rulers of society—dictating where and how to
plant crops, to whom to delegate authority, on whom to make war,
and so on. A typical clay cone reads, in part:
Mesilin King of Kish at the command of his deity Kadi concerning the plantation of that
field set up a stele [an inscribed stone column] in that place… Ningirsu, the hero of Enlil
[another god], by his righteous command, upon Umma war made.3
A far more detailed portrait of how early people supposed their
thoughts and feelings arose can be found in the Iliad, which records
the beliefs of Homer in the ninth century B.C., and to some extent
those of the eleventh-century Greeks and Trojans he wrote about.
Professor Julian Jaynes of Princeton, who exhaustively analyzed the
language of the Iliad that refers to mental and emotional functions,
summed up his findings as follows:
There is in general no consciousness in the Iliad… and in general, therefore, no words for
consciousness or mental acts. The words in the Iliad that in a later age come to mean
mental things have different meanings, all of them more concrete. The word psyche, which
later means soul or conscious mind, [signifies] in most instances life-substances, such as
blood or breath: a dying warrior bleeds out his psyche onto the ground or breathes it out in
his last gasp …Perhaps most important is the word noos which, spelled as nous in later
Greek, comes to mean conscious mind. Its proper translation in the Iliad would be
something like perception or recognition or field of vision. Zeus “holds Odysseus in his
noos.” He keeps watch over him.4
The thoughts and feelings of the people in the Iliad are put
directly into their minds by the gods. The opening lines of the epic
make that plain. It begins when, after nine years of besieging Troy,
the Greek army is being decimated by plague, and the thought
occurs to the great Achilles that they should withdraw from those
shores:
Achilles called the men to gather together, this having been put into his mind by the
goddess of the white arms, Hera, who had pity on the Greeks when she saw them dying…
and he said to them, “I believe that backwards we must make our way home if we are to
escape death through fighting and the plague.”
Such explanations of both thought and emotion occur time and
again, said Professor Jaynes.
When Agamemnon, king of men, robs Achilles of his mistress, it is a god that grasps
Achilles by his yellow hair and warns him not to strike Agamemnon. It is a god… who
leads the armies into battle, who speaks to each soldier at the turning points, who debates
and teaches Hector what he must do.5
Other ancient peoples, even centuries later, similarly believed that
their thoughts, visions, and dreams were messages from the gods.
Herodotus tells us that Cyrus the Great, founder of the Persian
Empire, crossed into the land of the hostile Massagetae in 529 B.C.
and during his first night there dreamed that he saw Darius, the son
of his follower Hystaspes, with wings on his shoulders, one
shadowing Asia, the other Europe. When Cyrus awoke, he
summoned Hystaspes and said, “Your son is discovered to be
plotting against me and my crown. I will tell you how I know it so
certainly. The gods watch over my safety, and warn me beforehand
of every danger.” He recounted the dream and ordered Hystaspes to
return to Persia and have the son ready to answer to Cyrus when he
came back from defeating the Massagetae.6 (Cyrus, however, was
killed by the Massagetae. Darius did later become king, but not by
having plotted against him.)
