History and Schools of Psychology

Read the history of the field as a sequence of arguments about what counts as data. Wundt and Titchener said the data are reports of conscious experience. James said that is the wrong question — ask what consciousness is for. Freud said the important material is not conscious at all. The Gestalt psychologists said the data cannot be broken into elements without destroying what you were studying. Watson said none of the above is data, because none of it can be observed from outside. Humanists said the resulting picture leaves out choice and growth. Cognitive psychologists said mental processes can be studied rigorously by inferring them from behavior rather than by asking people to report them. Any item that describes a commitment is asking you to locate it in that argument.

Structuralism versus functionalism is a chemistry-versus-biology contrast. Structuralism wanted the periodic table of the mind: what are consciousness's elements? Functionalism wanted the evolutionary account: what is this process for, and how does it help the organism survive? Both studied consciousness, which is why behaviorism rejected them together.

Behaviorism and psychoanalysis look like opposites and are often paired in items about humanism, because humanism objected to both for the same reason: each made the person a passive product of forces — reinforcement history in one case, unconscious conflict in the other — leaving no room for free choice or growth.

Psychology's separation from philosophy and physiology is conventionally dated to 1879, when Wilhelm Wundt opened a laboratory in Leipzig dedicated to studying conscious experience under controlled conditions. His method, introspection, asked trained observers to report the contents of their experience in response to controlled stimuli. Edward Titchener carried the approach to the United States as structuralism, aiming to identify the elemental components of conscious experience. The approach declined because introspective reports are private and cannot be independently checked, an objection that anticipates the behaviorist critique.

William James proposed a different question. Influenced by Darwin, functionalism asked what mental processes accomplish for the organism — what consciousness is for rather than what it is made of — and this emphasis on adaptation and purpose shaped applied psychology, education, and later the study of individual differences. In roughly the same period Sigmund Freud built psychoanalytic theory from clinical case material, locating the causes of behavior in unconscious conflict and early experience. Freud's influence on clinical practice and on personality theory was enormous, and the exam expects you to know both that influence and the standard methodological objection: case studies of a small, unrepresentative set of patients cannot support the general claims drawn from them.

Gestalt psychology, developed in Germany by Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, and Wolfgang Kohler, insisted that perception is organized into wholes that cannot be recovered by summing elements — a direct attack on the structuralist project. Its principles of perceptual organization remain part of the sensation and perception material tested on this exam. Behaviorism, meanwhile, made the sharpest break: building on Pavlov's conditioning work, John B. Watson argued that psychology should abandon consciousness entirely and study only what can be observed and measured, and B. F. Skinner extended the program with operant conditioning and the analysis of reinforcement. Behaviorism dominated American experimental psychology for decades.

Two reactions followed. Humanistic psychology, led by Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, objected that both behaviorism and psychoanalysis reduced people to the product of forces outside their control, and it centered free will, self-concept, and the drive toward self-actualization; Rogers's client-centered therapy is its clinical expression. The cognitive revolution, gathering force through the 1950s and 1960s, argued that mental processes such as memory, attention, and language could be modeled and tested experimentally by inferring internal processes from behavioral data — Noam Chomsky's critique of Skinner's account of language acquisition is the standard marker — and it reestablished cognition as central to the discipline.

The field that resulted is plural rather than unified. Contemporary psychology spans biopsychology, evolutionary psychology, sensation and perception, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, personality, social psychology, industrial-organizational psychology, health psychology, sport and exercise psychology, clinical and counseling psychology, and forensic psychology. History items sometimes ask which subfield would study a given question, and the answer is read from the level of explanation the question is pitched at. Finally, know the figures whose place in the record the exam treats as part of history: Mary Whiton Calkins, who completed the Harvard doctoral requirements but was denied the degree and became the first female president of the American Psychological Association; Margaret Floy Washburn, the first woman awarded a psychology doctorate; Francis Sumner, the first African American to earn a psychology doctorate; and Kenneth and Mamie Clark, whose research on children and racial identity was cited in Brown v. Board of Education.