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In 1879, Wilhelm Wundt, who is often referred to as “the father of psychology,” set up a laboratory in Leipzig, Germany, where he set out to understand the behaviors and mental processes underlying the human experience.
Wundt was considered a structuralist. Structuralism is a psychological theory that tries to determine the basic elements, or building blocks, of behavior and mental processes. To compare it to the studies in another field of science, structuralism is like trying to find the atoms that make up different molecules.
Structuralism is an important philosophy because it helped to advance many of the key concepts in the field of psychology, such as the understanding of the brain’s structure, how neurons make up the entire brain and nervous system, and the basic personality types.
All of these concepts will be discussed more in-depth in later lessons.
William James was a student of Wundt; he was also the first American to study psychology and bring it to the United States as a major area of study. James was a functionalist. As opposed to structuralism, which tries to break down behavior and mental processes into their parts, functionalism views the mental experience as more a stream, or a flow, of consciousness that can’t be broken down any further.
This system of belief led to the use of animals in psychological studies as a way of studying and understanding behavior.
Functionalism also informed the current areas of study in educational and industrial psychology, both of which will be discussed in greater detail as we move further through the course.
You have probably heard the term “Freudian slip” that refers to saying something that you did not mean to say, but that you might have been thinking about. That term is derived from the name Sigmund Freud, who was an Austrian neurologist. In 1873, he began working in a hospital treating patients for what at the time was called “hysteria”, a type of disease that doctors neither knew much about nor had a cure. From there, Freud started his own form of therapy. In 1885, he set up a private practice where he treated people for nervous disorders and brain disorders.
Freud developed psychodynamic theory, which states that internal motives and unconscious forces can affect our behaviors and mental processes in daily life. In a sense, Freud's theory was created backward because he started with the clinical or treatment aspect, and then began developing the theory based on what he was seeing in his patients.
Freud described our mental life as a sort of iceberg with all of the things we’re aware of at the top, above the water. However, the amount of things we perceive is very small when compared to the part of the iceberg that's under the water, or outside of our awareness. This underlying part of our mental life is unconscious.
According to psychodynamic theory, these unconscious thoughts, impulses, or desires, can influence our behaviors.
Self and Social Awareness: Skill Tip |
You have probably seen the famous picture of Freud talking to a person who is laying down on a couch. This image is a reference to the therapy that was developed as a result of psychodynamic theory. This therapy is called psychoanalysis, and its goal is to uncover the unconscious forces that are influencing and affecting us in adverse ways.
Psychoanalysis does this using a variety of methods:
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