What is the history and origin of psychology?
Psychology’s Roots Psychology traces its roots back through recorded history to the writings of many scholars who spent their lives wondering about people—in India, China, the Middle East, and Europe. In their attempt to understand human nature, they looked carefully at how our minds work and how our bodies relate to our minds. Prescientific Psychology More than 2000 years ago, Buddha and Confucius focused on the powers and origin of ideas. In other parts of the world, the ancient Hebrews, Socrates, his student Plato, and Plato’s student Aristotle pondered whether mind and body are connected or distinct, and whether human ideas are innate or result from experience. In the 1700s, René Descartes and John Locke reengaged aspects of those ancient debates, and Locke coined his famous description of the mind as a “white paper.” Psychological Science Is Born Psychology as we know it today was born in a laboratory in Germany in the late 1800s, when Wilhelm Wundt ran the first true experiments
Before answering the history and origin of the term, the first question comes to mind as to what is Psychology. Literal meaning is that it is the scientific study of the human mind and its functions, especially, those affecting behaviour in a given context. Or it can be defined as the mental chracteristics or attitude of a person or group. So the history can be traced to the day when the human mind came into existence and it started functioning. Human mind is interactive in its nature, so it has to produce some behavior or it has to affect the behavior of the other person/group.Its origin as a discipline goes back to the 17th century. Credit goes to Freud and Jung to make it popular. Today in the 21st century when life has become global and the world has shrunk, human psychology has adoped new dimensions, so the functions, names, expectations, results of pshycholgy have also diversified.
If you are willing to “look”, then read on. First, just take a look at a point in history when a world view was changing. The first World War had just ended. It is the decade of the 1920’s with “modernism” [Flapper girls, Picasso, dadaism, Einstein and also Quantum physics, Art deco, Jazz] Mussolini, Hitler, Lenin then Stalin were swiftly coming to power. There was American fear of the “new negro” with race riots, the Ku Klux Klan had about 2 million members in 1924 (very big in the north and both coasts). The “Red Scare” resulting from the new USSR and fear of foreign born citizens led to incredible injustices. The majority of city workers at that time were foreign born. In the 20’s, these people were also popular: Madison Grant, Freud, Jung, and some other psychologists. Madison Grant Grant is most famously the author of the popular book The Passing of the Great Race in 1916, an elaborate work of racial hygiene detailing the “racial history” of the world. This early racialist work ex
