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Foundations of Psychology |
PSY/300 |
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Misty Whitehead |
9/3/2012 | Psychology was founded by the “father of Psychology” Wilhelm Wundt in the 1870’s in Leipzig Germany. The four schools of thought, or perspectives, include the psychodynamic perspective, the behaviorist perspective, the cognitive perspective, and the evolutionary perspective. | Psychology was derived from philosophy in the 1870’s, and has since become a science in itself. Wilhelm Wundt, among others, is known to be considered the “father of psychology” because he founded the first psychology lab in 1879 at the University of Leipzig in Germany. Psychology has four main schools of thought, also known as perspectives. These main schools of thought are the psychodynamic perspective, the behaviorist perspective, the cognitive perspective, and the evolutionary perspective. Each perspective has a different set of major assumptions.
The psychodynamic perspective was introduced as a theory of mental life and behavior and an approach to treating psychological disorders, known as psychoanalysis, by Sigmund Freud. Freud’s perspective on psychology assumes that an individual’s actions depend on how his or her thoughts, feeling, and wishes are connected within his or her mind. It is also assumed that the mental processes take place outside of the individual’s conscious awareness. The processes, at times, conflict with one another. These conflicts lead the individual to compromise with compelling motives. Therefore, the individual will most likely not know the psychological reasons for his or her conscious thought, intentions, feelings, or behaviors.
The behaviorist, or behavioral, perspective is one of the more broad perspectives that was developed in the early twentieth century. It was established by one Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist. Pavlov was experimenting on the digestion of dogs when he discovered the automatic response from the dogs when they…