History of Psychology: An Overview of the Field

What began as an exploration of sensory and perceptual processes quickly broadened to include studies of learning, then more complicated aspects of behavior related to developmental psychology, clinical psychology and therapy, and social and cultural issues, among many other topics. Along the way a bifurcation emerged, with one path involving basic, theoretical work and a second path focusing on application. Naturally, such a simplistic description does not do justice to the fact that the two paths have often crossed and fed one another.

Historical depictions have generally traced the discipline from its inception in Germany to its exponential expansion in the United States, such that American psychology eventually supplanted its European roots and came to dominate psychological thought. Subsequently, the discipline broadened its scope, embracing behavioral, psychoanalytic, and humanistic perspectives over time. The subspecialities number too many to detail, although Robert Sternberg and Wade Pickren present discussions of major domains within psychology in their coedited volume The Cambridge Handbook of the Intellectual History of Psychology. The collection Evolving Perspectives on the History of Psychology, coedited by Pickren and Donald Dewsbury, also provides rich context for understanding the emergence of psychology as it unfolded in Germany and the United States. Psychological ideas always reflect the culture in which they appear, and the importance of this societal influence is readily apparent in Between Mind and Nature: A History of Psychology by Roger Smith, who outlines the reciprocal forces at play regarding psychological theory and social norms and mores.

Within the past several decades, another layer of psychological complexity has emerged with the rise of new neuroscientific approaches to explain behavior. This realm has a relatively short history, as Lori Schmied explains in The Advance of Neuroscience: Twelve Topics from the Victorian Era to Today. Scientists’ examination of the role of neuroscience in varied areas of human life, including personality, addiction, and thinking, have led to areas such as social neuroscience, and the domains it involves only continue to grow. A cousin to neuroscientific examination of thought and behavior is that of embodied cognition, which posits that thought is intimately connected to bodily action and sensory simulation of ideas, as laid out by Rebecca Fincher-Kiefer in How the Body Shapes Knowledge: Empirical Support for Embodied Cognition.

Psychological science arose from the confluence of diverse ideas and their interplay. Along the way, prescientific and pseudoscientific ideas were used to explain behavior. Ultimately, however, scientists were able to separate the wheat from the chaff and discard pseudoscience in favor of science. Ludy Benjamin and David Baker detail how scientists examined prescientific ideas and eventually created the different professions of psychology in From Séance to Science: A History of the Profession of Psychology in America.

Similarly drawing connections across disciplines, editors Christopher D. Green, Marlene Shore, and Thomas Teo lay out the intellectual path of psychology from a philosophical discipline to a scientific enterprise in The Transformation of Psychology: Influences of 19th-Century Philosophy, Technology, and Natural Science. Given that psychology is a human science, its emergence was influenced by the culture of the psychologists who advanced its ideas and, at the same time, changed the culture with their ideas. Green lays out these reciprocal influences in Psychology and Its Cities: A New History of Early American Psychology. Such dynamics continue today as ideas are reconceptualized with a new cultural lens. In The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts, Ellen Herman details how psychology has grown in importance since World War II.

Because American psychology became the face of psychology in the West, most historical accounts posed narrow, West-ern perspectives. In the past few decades, however, psychological discussion has broadened to include more international ideas. A good example is Sumaya Laher’s edited volume International Histories of Psychological Assessment, which presents varied approaches to measuring personality. As the volume makes clear, measurements are grounded in political, social, and scientific contexts. Editor David Baker and contributors take a broader international approach in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Psychology: Global Perspectives.

Another lacuna that has been addressed in recent decades is the role of women in psychology. Elizabeth Scarborough and Laurel Furumoto shed light on the importance of women in early psychology in their study Untold Lives: The First Generation of American Women Psychologists. Ann Klein details Leta Stetter Hollingworth’s significant work with gifted children and her difficult path within the profession in A Forgotten Voice: The Biography of Leta Stetter Hollingworth. Psychological historian Alexandra Rutherford and her colleagues expand this growing consideration of women in their Handbook of International Feminisms: Perspectives on Psychology, Women, Culture, and Rights.