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Naturally acquired immunity to Plasmodium pitheci in Bornean orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus)
- Karmele Llano Sánchez, John Kevin Baird, Aileen Nielsen, Andini Nurillah, Fitria Agustina, Komara, Fina Fadilah, Wendi Prameswari, Raden Taufiq Purna Nugraha, Sugiyono Saputra, Arif Nurkanto, Anik Budhi Dharmayanthi, Rahadian Pratama, Indra Exploitasia, Alex D. Greenwood
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- Parasitology / Volume 151 / Issue 4 / April 2024
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- 16 February 2024, pp. 380-389
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Naturally acquired immunity to the different types of malaria in humans occurs in areas of endemic transmission and results in asymptomatic infection of peripheral blood. The current study examined the possibility of naturally acquired immunity in Bornean orangutans, Pongo pygmaeus, exposed to endemic Plasmodium pitheci malaria. A total of 2140 peripheral blood samples were collected between January 2017 and December 2022 from a cohort of 135 orangutans housed at a natural forested Rescue and Rehabilitation Centre in West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Each individual was observed for an average of 4.3 years during the study period. Blood samples were examined by microscopy and polymerase chain reaction for the presence of plasmodial parasites. Infection rates and parasitaemia levels were measured among age groups and all 20 documented clinical malaria cases were reviewed to estimate the incidence of illness and risk ratios among age groups. A case group of all 17 individuals that had experienced clinical malaria and a control group of 34 individuals having an event of >2000 parasites μL−1 blood but with no outward or clinical sign of illness were studied. Immature orangutans had higher-grade and more frequent parasitaemia events, but mature individuals were more likely to suffer from clinical malaria than juveniles. The case orangutans having patent clinical malaria were 256 times more likely to have had no parasitaemia event in the prior year relative to asymptomatic control orangutans. The findings are consistent with rapidly acquired immunity to P. pitheci illness among orangutans that wanes without re-exposure to the pathogen.
9 - Psychology in America: the early years
- John D. Greenwood, City University of New York
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- A Conceptual History of Psychology
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- 05 September 2015
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- 25 August 2015, pp 289-343
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Psychology first became an academic scientific discipline in Germany because Germany developed the modern university system that enabled Wundt and his colleagues to create an experimental psychology grounded upon the earlier success of experimental physiology. However, psychology developed faster institutionally in America than it did in Germany (Ash, 1980; Danziger, 1979). By the end of the nineteenth century, American psychology had an active professional organization, the American Psychological Association (APA), founded in 1892; journals devoted to general, experimental, and applied psychology, such as the American Journal of Psychology, Pedagogical Seminary, Psychological Review, Psychological Index, and Psychological Monographs; and a substantial academic presence within the American university system. By 1892, America had more and better laboratories than did Germany. Formal research laboratories were established at the University of Chicago, and Clark, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Yale Universities; and demonstration facilities for teaching and training were available at Brown University, Catholic University of America, and Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Nebraska, Illinois, Iowa, and Wellesley Universities (Hale, 1980; O'Donnell, 1985). By 1904, there were forty-nine laboratories, 169 members of the APA, and sixty-two institutions offering three or more courses in psychology; in addition, psychology ranked fourth in the sciences with respect to the number of PhD degrees awarded (Camfield, 1973; Miner, 1904). By 1913, the year that Watson published his behaviorist manifesto Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It, America had surpassed Germany in research publications (Cattell, 1917).
Much the same was true of the academic institutionalization of other social sciences in the early twentieth century. Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) introduced sociology in France at the end of the nineteenth century, but it made slow progress, and by 1930 there were only three chairs in sociology. Yet by 1910, there were about fifty full-time professors of sociology in America, and the subject was taught at around 400 colleges (Smith, 1997).
3 - Rome and the medieval period
- John D. Greenwood, City University of New York
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- A Conceptual History of Psychology
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- 05 September 2015
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- 25 August 2015, pp 41-63
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With the defeat of Athens by Sparta in the Peloponnesian war (431–404 BCE), the Greek city–states began to disintegrate. By the time Aristotle died in 322 BCE, they had become part of the short-lived Macedonian Empire, founded by Alexander the Great. Republican Rome invaded shortly afterward, and they were eventually incorporated into the Roman Empire. The center of learning shifted from Athens to Alexandria in Egypt.
The Romans were great technologists and administrators, but contributed little to the development of science. Mystical forms of Neoplatonism became popular and informed the emergence of Christianity in the early days of the Roman Empire. When Christianity was accepted as the state religion, the works of pagan scholars such as Pythagoras and Aristotle were denigrated and condemned. With the decline of the Roman Empire, western Europe entered what is known as the Dark Ages, a time when many of the classical Greek texts were destroyed or lost. Alexandrian scholars fled to Constantinople, then to Persia, where the classical texts were rediscovered by Islamic scholars and eventually by Christian scholars with the advent of the Crusades. During the middle and later medieval period, Aristotle's natural philosophy was integrated with Christian theology, effectively fossilizing his theories as church dogma.
Although science developed little during the medieval period, the medievals were not as hostile to it as is commonly supposed. They did not generally persecute practicing scientists and did not burn hundreds of thousands of neurotic and psychotic women whom they misdiagnosed as witches. What was distinctive about the medieval period was the general lack of interest in the empirical evaluation of scientific theories, including psychological theories. Most medieval scholars were content to develop their theories based upon classical and theological authorities.
The Roman age
The Roman age began with the 500 years of the Roman Republic prior to the time of Julius Caesar (100–44 BCE), during which the Senate governed Rome. After Caesar's assassination, Rome was governed by a series of emperors, beginning with Augustus (63 BCE–14 CE). The Roman Empire, which stretched from the British Isles to the Middle East at the height of its power, brought stability and order to the Mediterranean world for nearly 400 years, until it collapsed as a result of internal pressures and external invasions.
7 - Theories of evolution
- John D. Greenwood, City University of New York
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- A Conceptual History of Psychology
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- 05 September 2015
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- 25 August 2015, pp 185-235
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Theories of evolution dominated intellectual debate in Europe and America in the latter half of the nineteenth century, especially after the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). Although religious authorities resisted, natural scientists and the educated public generally embraced theories of evolution. Such theories often represented human progress – or, at least, white, male, and Western human progress – as a triumph of the “survival of the fittest.”
Early Greek thinkers such as Empedocles had advanced theories of the evolution of biological species. However, most scholars during the medieval period had accepted the Aristotelian account of an immutable and hierarchical natural order, or scala naturae. Such an account not only sustained the popular conception of a purposive natural order created by a benevolent God, but also conveniently supported the notion of an immutable social hierarchy governed by kings, bishops, and the aristocracy. This account was generally accepted until the late eighteenth century and – by a good many theorists – beyond. For example, Gall's phrenology presupposed a more or less fixed hierarchy of neurological function (Young, 1990).
Nineteenth-century evolutionary theorists abandoned the notion of an immutable “great chain of being” (Lovejoy, 1936) and developed explanations of the accepted fact of species change. They generally represented evolution as a process of progressive development toward a hierarchical natural order. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) and Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) advanced theories that replaced the extrinsic teleology of a divinely created natural order with the intrinsic teleology of progressive development toward a natural order. Charles Darwin (1809–1882) was the exception. His rigorously materialist theory of evolution by natural selection treated evolution as a purely mechanistic process with no extrinsic or intrinsic purpose.
Early evolutionary theories
Theories of organic evolution began to resurface in the late eighteenth century (earlier anticipations are to be found in Leibniz and Kant). The English physician Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), the grandfather of Charles Darwin, advanced a theory of the evolution of animal traits in Zoonomia (1794–1796), later popularized in his poem The Temple of Nature (1803). His theory was an extension of Hartley's associationist psychology. Darwin generalized traditional empiricist explanations of the development of individual psychology to the evolutionary development of species by claiming that learned associations and habits engender modifications of the nervous system that are passed on to future generations of a species.
1 - History, science, and psychology
- John D. Greenwood, City University of New York
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- A Conceptual History of Psychology
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- 25 August 2015, pp 1-19
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In 1877, James Ward and John Venn petitioned the University of Cambridge in England to have experimental psychology introduced as an academic discipline. The University Senate refused to do so on the grounds that it would “insult religion by putting the soul on a pair of scales” (Hearnshaw, 1989, p. 125). In a 1907 paper published in American Medicine, Dr. Duncan Macdougall of Haverhill, Massachusetts, described his attempt to put the soul on a scale (Macdougall, 1907). He persuaded six dying patients to spend their last hours in a special bed that rested on a platform beam scale. By comparing the weight of the individual (plus bed) before and immediately after death, Macdougall estimated the weight of the human soul to be about “three-fourths of an ounce.” He repeated this experiment with fifteen dying dogs, who manifested no weight loss upon expiration, confirming the popular belief that animals have no soul (Roach, 2003).
From the dawn of recorded civilization, humans have not only speculated about the nature and causes of mind and behavior, but have also employed their ingenuity to test these speculations. In the seventh century BCE, the Egyptian king Psamtik I supposed that children with no opportunity to learn a language from other people would spontaneously develop the natural and universal language of humankind, which he presumed to be Egyptian (Hunt, 1994). He tested this hypothesis by having one of his subjects seclude a number of infants and observe which language they first spoke; he was disappointed to learn that they did not speak Egyptian. As the centuries progressed, critical thinkers continued to speculate about the nature and causes of mind and behavior and to subject their theories to empirical test. The process was accelerated by the scientific revolution in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and by the development of experimental physiology and evolutionary theory in the nineteenth century, which promoted the growth of the institutional science of psychology in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The story of this progression, development, and growth is the history of psychology.
Index
- John D. Greenwood, City University of New York
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- A Conceptual History of Psychology
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- 25 August 2015, pp 545-562
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12 - The cognitive revolution
- John D. Greenwood, City University of New York
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- A Conceptual History of Psychology
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- 25 August 2015, pp 454-494
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The “cognitive revolution” in psychology emerged from postwar developments in information theory and computer science. The development of the electronic computer created a new and technically proven model of the mind as a mechanical information processor, conceived of as operating on the same sorts of “rules and representations” employed by “intelligent” machines (Bechtel, 1988).
One of the peculiarities of the cognitive revolution was that many of its pioneers came to conceive of their own intellectual achievement in terms of Thomas Kuhn's (1970) analysis of the structure of scientific revolutions, according to which one general theoretical or methodological paradigm is replaced by a radically different paradigm, under the pressure of accumulating empirical anomalies (Lachman et al., 1979). Kuhn's influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was first published in 1962, as the new forms of cognitive psychology were being advanced and developed by Jerome Bruner (1915–), George Miller (1920–2012), Ulric Neisser (1928–2012), Allen Newell (1927–1992), and Herbert Simon (1915–2001). As James J. Jenkins (1923–2012) later remarked, during the early years of the cognitive revolution in psychology, “everyone toted around their little copy of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” (Jenkins, quoted in Baars, 1986, p. 249).
Although there was no revolution in the strict Kuhnian sense, the development of cognitive theories from the 1950s and 1960s onward did mark a genuine discontinuity with behaviorist theories, including later “liberalized” neobehaviorist theories in terms of internal “mediating” r–s sequences (Miller, 1959; Osgood, 1957). Although the primary stimulus for the cognitive revolution came from without, the empirical problems faced by neobehaviorism in the 1950s and 1960s created an intellectual climate that left many psychologists predisposed to theoretical and methodical change. As Jenkins put it, “things were boiling over…a new day was coming” (Jenkins, quoted in Baars, 1986, p. 249).
Information theory
The primary stimulus for the growth of cognitive psychology came from outside academic psychology, notably from developments in logic, mathematics, and computer science, which were a product of applied research on radar, message encoding, and missile guidance conducted during the Second World War.
Frontmatter
- John D. Greenwood, City University of New York
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- A Conceptual History of Psychology
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11 - Neobehaviorism, radical behaviorism, and problems of behaviorism
- John D. Greenwood, City University of New York
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- A Conceptual History of Psychology
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- 25 August 2015, pp 410-453
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While many psychologists accepted Watson's rhetoric of prediction and control, few accepted the theoretical details of his behaviorist system, and in the 1930s and 1940s, the neobehaviorism of Clark L. Hull (1884–1952) and Edward C. Tolman (1866–1959) superseded Watson's positivist brand of behaviorism. Hull and Tolman followed Watson in maintaining that scientific psychology should be directed to the explanation, prediction, and control of observable behavior rather than introspected mental states, and they rejected the form of structural psychology championed by Titchener and his followers. Yet in contrast to Watson, they recognized the legitimacy of theoretical explanations of observable behavior in terms of the internal states of organisms, including their mental states, on a par with theoretical explanations of the observable properties of physical elements in terms of their internal composition and structure (such as the explanation of the properties of carbon in terms of its molecular composition and structure).
The neobehaviorist attempt to approximate the theoretical orientation of the natural sciences more closely marked an advance over Watson's restriction of behaviorist psychology to the description of observable stimulus–response sequences. However, in their attempt to model behaviorist psychology upon the natural sciences, neobehaviorists did not look to the actual practice of natural sciences such as physics and chemistry, but adopted the equally restrictive logical positivist account of theory advanced by philosophers of science in the early decades of the twentieth century. As Sigmund Koch put it:
In pursuit of these ends, psychology did not go directly to physics, but turned instead for its directives to middlemen. These were, for the most part, philosophers of science (especially logical positivists) and a number of physical scientists who had been codifying a synoptic view of the nature of science and who, by the early thirties, were actively exporting that view from their specialties in the scholarly community at large.(Koch, 1964, p. 10)
The logical positivist account of theory exercised a debilitating influence on the development of neobehaviorist theory. Burrhus F. Skinner 411(1904–1990) exploited the limitations of this account of theory and developed a radical behaviorism that eschewed theories about the internal states of organisms.
10 - Functionalism, behaviorism, and mental testing
- John D. Greenwood, City University of New York
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- A Conceptual History of Psychology
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- 25 August 2015, pp 344-409
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In the early decades of the twentieth century, Wundt's students and the indigenous pioneers of American psychology continued to promote and develop their varied conceptions of scientific psychology. Cattell claimed in his 1895 presidential address to the APA that the “wide range of individual interests” of American psychologists demonstrated their “adjustment in a complex environment” (1896, p. 134). Yet these different interests also proved to be forces of division in the following decades, sometimes characterized as the period of the competing “schools” of psychology (Murchison, 1930; Woodworth, 1931).
Titchener's form of structural psychology remained an intellectual force in the first two decades of the twentieth century, but became increasingly isolated at Cornell and was eventually displaced by functionalist and behaviorist psychology. As the twentieth century progressed, psychology in America distanced itself from its philosophical roots, including the notion that scientific psychology should be grounded in the introspective analysis of consciousness. Many psychologists had abandoned introspective methods by the time John B. Watson issued his behaviorist “manifesto” in 1913 (Watson, 1913a). This was partly because of the “imageless thought” debate, but also because they had little use for introspection in their applied educational, industrial, and clinical work. In addition, psychology in America distanced itself from its roots in German physiological psychology. Although courses and demonstration practicals in laboratory methods continued to be employed in the PhD certification of American psychologists as bona fide practitioners of scientific psychology, the “brass instruments” of the new psychology were increasingly appropriated and adapted by educational, industrial, and clinical psychologists as part of their battery of mental and physical aptitude tests.
Many psychologists who came to embrace Watson's (1913a) call for a behavioral science of prediction and control did so because it suited their already well developed applied interests, not because they were convinced by Watson's arguments or rhetoric. These interests were frequently a product of the various institutional and social pressures and opportunities that promoted the development of applied psychology in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Indeed, Watson's own goal of developing a behaviorist psychology had as much to do with his own professional career interests and institutional realities as his avowed arguments against introspection and in favor of a positivistic science of behavior.
8 - Psychology in Germany
- John D. Greenwood, City University of New York
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- A Conceptual History of Psychology
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- 25 August 2015, pp 236-288
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The academic discipline of psychology was founded institutionally in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century. It was a natural outgrowth of the progressive German university system, which was hospitable to the development of new disciplines such as linguistics and psychology. Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), who founded scientific psychology in Germany in 1879, the year he set up his experimental laboratory at the University of Leipzig, characterized the new discipline as physiological psychology. This was not because he believed that psychological states and processes must be reductively explained in terms of physiological states and processes, but because he believed that scientific psychology should appropriate the experimental methods that had proved so successful in the development of nineteenth-century German physiology.
Wundt's new experimental program attracted many foreign students, including many Americans, who sought to attain professional qualifications in the new discipline. Having mastered the elements of the new psychology and the structure of the German university system, they returned home to create their own laboratories and PhD programs in psychology.
Wundt's distinctive form of scientific psychology was eventually displaced within Germany as rival programs were created at other German universities. As the twentieth century advanced, German psychology, which faced increasing opposition from the philosophical community, developed into precisely the type of applied discipline that Wundt feared it would become. In a sense, Wundt's fate was like that of the sorcerer's apprentice. In creating a form of scientific psychology based upon laboratory science, he unleashed powerful forces that he was unable to control – forces that, over a few generations, radically transformed the discipline (Danziger, 1990, p. 34).
Psychology in Germany before Wundt
Psychology had been recognized as a distinctive field of inquiry long before the creation of Wundt's laboratory, and academic philosophers in various countries had offered courses in the subject. For example, psychology was offered as a course at Marischal College, Aberdeen, in 1755 under the title Pneumology (Robinson, 1986). Christian Wolff (1679–1754), professor of mathematics at the University of Halle, popularized the use of the term psychology in Europe in the eighteenth century.
Preface
- John D. Greenwood, City University of New York
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- A Conceptual History of Psychology
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Nearly twenty years ago I agreed to team-teach a course in the history of psychology with a female colleague who was pregnant at the time and was not be able to complete the course alone. At the end of the course she confided that she did not really enjoy teaching history of psychology, and I told her that I had fallen in love with it. By mutual agreement I took over the course, and have been hooked on the subject ever since. Shortly after, I gave my first conference paper in the history of psychology, published the first of a series of papers on the history of psychology, and finally a book (for this press) on the history of social psychology. Having a professional background in philosophy and psychology, I felt like a graduate student again. Then I set myself the most daunting task of all, to write a complete history of psychology from the time of the ancient Greeks to the “cognitive revolution” in psychology. The present work is the product of many years of scholarly labor and multiple transformations of the original draft.
This work advances a conceptual history of psychology, which traces the continuities and discontinuities in our theoretical conceptions of human psychology and behavior from the speculations of the ancient Greeks to the institutionalized scientific psychology of the twentieth century. I highlight some of the remarkable continuities that reach across centuries and millennia, such as those between Aristotle's psychology and contemporary cognitive psychology, as well as fundamental discontinuities between superficially similar theoretical positions, such as those between Darwinism and the forms of functionalist and behaviorist psychology commonly supposed to be based upon it. I also try to tease apart historically associated positions that have no essential connection, such as the common association between materialism and the view that human psychology is continuous with animal psychology.
I have made a serious attempt to illustrate the contingency of many of the conceptual principles and associations that have informed the historical development of psychology and that today continue to shape our conception of the contemporary discipline.
13 - Abnormal and clinical psychology
- John D. Greenwood, City University of New York
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- A Conceptual History of Psychology
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- 25 August 2015, pp 495-539
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Histories of abnormal and clinical psychology tend to be decidedly presentist and generally represent the history of psychological theory and therapy as a progression from superstitious theories of spirit possession and brutal persecution to contemporary scientific theories and humane treatments (Sedgewick, 1982). Often this is based upon little more than condescending assumptions about earlier peoples. For example, when Neolithic skulls were discovered with holes in them, the French neurophysiologist Paul Broca opined that they must have been made “in order to liberate evil spirits” (Ackerknecht, 1982, pp. 8–9), a representation still repeated in some histories of psychology. Yet it is just as likely that such holes were the product of early forms of trepanning, the removal of part of the skull to reduce swelling of the brain caused by injury through war or hunting.
As noted earlier, the ancient and medieval peoples were rather more sophisticated and humane, at least relative to their times, than they usually are given credit for. They recognized depression, mania, and hysteria and attributed most psychological disorders to neural causes. Their psychological treatments, which were usually based upon holistic principles derived from Hippocrates and Galen, included fresh air, relaxation, dieting, and music, as well as bloodletting and purgation.
From early Roman times, laws governed the treatment of the psychologically disturbed and provided for family or community guardianship of persons designated as “insane” or “mad” (Neaman, 1975). These laws recognized that such persons were not legally responsible for their actions, because of their diminished or defective powers of reasoning (Maher and Maher, 1985a; Neugebauer, 1978). Institutions devoted to the treatment of the psychologically disturbed were set up in medieval cities such as Baghdad, Valencia, and London, and the common law of many medieval European states included protections for them (Schoeneman, 1977).
Those deemed insane were generally cared for by their families or legally appointed guardians. They were occasionally beaten – the common law of England allowed people to beat their mad relatives (Allderidge, 1979) – and those deemed dangerous were restrained or imprisoned. Although, no doubt many were persecuted and exploited, their treatment was not especially cruel relative to the conditions of the time.
Epilogue: the past and future of scientific psychology
- John D. Greenwood, City University of New York
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- A Conceptual History of Psychology
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- 25 August 2015, pp 540-544
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The last chapter demonstrates an important feature of the historical development of clinical psychology and other subdisciplines such as social and developmental psychology in relation to the general development of psychology in America in the twentieth century. The development of many of these subdisciplines did not simply parallel the general development of psychology in terms of the historical progression from structural to functional psychology, and from behaviorism to cognitive psychology. While theories and therapies based upon behaviorist learning theory and cognitive processing were developed in clinical psychology, they were developed together in the postwar period, which marked the end of the behaviorist hegemony in general psychology. While some early social psychologists called themselves behaviorists, they remained committed to the study of social attitudes and public opinion from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century. Moreover, developmental psychologists never embraced the general commitment by psychologists (including social psychologists) to experimentation as the essence of scientific psychology.
This illustrates the contingency of the development of American psychology. Although one may trace the conceptual continuities and discontinuities between the development of structural and functional psychology, and behaviorism and cognitive psychology, it is well to remember that the development of American psychology depended upon the particularities and peculiarities of the social, cultural, political, and institutional context in which it developed, and the vagaries of the careers of individual psychologists.
This contingency becomes especially apparent when one compares the twentieth-century development of American psychology with the development of psychology in other countries (Baker, 2012; Sexton and Hogan, 1992; Sexton and Misiak, 1976). To take a few illustrative examples, Italian psychology embraced cognitive psychology in the early 1920s and never looked back (Mecacci, 1992). When George Miller critiqued the behaviorist position at a talk he gave in London in the 5411960s, his host pointed out that there were only two behaviorists in Britain, and apologized for the fact that neither was in attendance (Miller, 1989). Henri Pieron (1881–1964) articulated the behaviorist position in France in 1908 (Pieron, 1908), but considered cognitive psychology to be an essential component of experimental psychology (Pieron, 1929).
2 - Ancient Greek science and psychology
- John D. Greenwood, City University of New York
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- A Conceptual History of Psychology
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The origins of psychological knowledge may be said to be as old as humankind. From as early as recorded time, men and women have speculated about the nature of psychological states and processes and their relationship to human behavior. Theoretical reflections on sensation, memory, and dreaming, for example, are to be found in many ancient works, such as the Hindu sacred texts known as the Vedas (which precede the first millennium BCE) and the Assyrian “dream books” (from around the fifth millennium BCE).
Many early cultures, such as the Egyptian and Babylonian, tried to understand human psychology and behavior in terms of the activity of some immaterial “spirit” or “soul,” usually intimately associated with breath and the action of the heart and lungs. The Greek term psyche, from which the term psychology is derived, is etymologically tied to words signifying breath (pneuma) or wind. There is nothing especially remarkable about this, for at a basic level of observation, it is obvious that whatever enables the human organism to act in a purposive fashion is intimately associated with the action of the heart and lungs. When activity in these organs ceases, so also does the activity of the human organism.
Many early theories that postulated immaterial spirits or souls also maintained that such entities could enjoy a life after death in some spiritual realm. However, not all early theories were committed to the notion of an afterlife, and for those that were, it was often an impoverished and literally shady sort of thing. In Greek mythology, for example, the dead survived as shadows of their former selves, which could only be temporarily revived via blood sacrifice.
Beliefs in immaterial spirits or souls are often characterized as animistic and are associated with so-called primitive cultures today. However, we should guard against the condescending assumption that all earlier cultures explained mind and behavior in terms of immaterial spirits or souls and that humans came to a proper understanding of these matters only with the development of psychological science, as such assumptions can seriously prejudice our approach to the history of psychology. Although many ancient thinkers did embrace theories about immaterial spirits or souls, their psychological understanding was far more sophisticated – and materialistic – than is usually acknowledged.
A Conceptual History of Psychology
- Exploring the Tangled Web
- 2nd edition
- John D. Greenwood
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In the new edition of this original and penetrating book, John D. Greenwood provides an in-depth analysis of the subtle conceptual continuities and discontinuities that inform the history of psychology from the speculations of the Ancient Greeks to contemporary cognitive psychology. He also demonstrates the fashion in which different conceptions of human and animal psychology and behavior have become associated and disassociated over the centuries. Moving easily among psychology, history of science, physiology, and philosophy, Greenwood provides a critically challenging account of the development of psychology as a science. He relates the remarkable stories of the intellectual pioneers of modern psychology, while exploring the social and political milieu in which they operated, and dispels many of the myths of the history of psychology, based upon the best historical scholarship of recent decades. This is an impressive overview that will appeal to scholars and graduate students of the history of psychology.
5 - The Newtonian psychologists
- John D. Greenwood, City University of New York
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- A Conceptual History of Psychology
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The achievements of the scientific revolution represented the vanguard of the Enlightenment, that period in European thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when confidence in human reason and experience gradually came to supersede faith in religion and traditional authority. One central feature of Enlightenment thought, which flourished in France, Scotland, England, and Germany, was a commitment to human progress and an optimistic belief in the applicability of scientific knowledge, including social and psychological knowledge, to the improvement of the human condition. The Enlightenment saw the emergence of more liberal, secular, and utilitarian concepts of humanity and the development of more democratic societies, such as the United States. Although not universally embraced, these Enlightenment ideals continue to inform contemporary confidence in the theoretical progress and social utility of the sciences, including social and psychological science.
The rejection of the Aristotelian tradition was good news for the natural sciences. The rejection of Aristotle's geocentric theory and final causal explanations of motion led to advances in astronomy and physics. However, it was not so obviously good news for psychology. One of the casualties of the scientific revolution was Aristotle's biologically grounded functional psychology, which came to be replaced by a variety of mechanistic psychological theories. Ironically, this was not the intent of the pioneers of the new science, such as Galileo, Bacon, and Newton. Although they maintained that final causal explanation has no place in physical science, most recognized that final causal explanation is entirely appropriate in the realm of human and animal behavior. Yet this qualification was generally ignored by the protopsychologists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who tried to create a science of psychology based upon the mechanistic forms of efficient causal explanation characteristic of the new science, for which Newton's physics came to serve as a paradigm.
Newton's theory of universal gravitation was hugely influential, not only in physical science, where it continued to reign supreme throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but also with respect to the forms of psychological theory that developed during these centuries. These were either attempts to model psychological theory upon Newtonian science, such as associationist psychology, or reactions to them, such as “common sense” psychology, and rationalist and humanist alternatives.
4 - The scientific revolution
- John D. Greenwood, City University of New York
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- A Conceptual History of Psychology
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Summary
By the fourteenth century, the social, political, and intellectual order of the medieval world had begun to break down. Increased urbanization and the return to a money economy eroded the structure of the feudal system, and the rise of nation–states undermined the political authority of the papacy. Intermittent wars between the emerging nation–states led to a severe economic depression. This was followed by the plague of 1348–1350, later known as the “Black Death,” which decimated the European population and bred doubt and resentment against the medieval Church, the dominant authority. Although the Church embraced Aristotle's philosophy, the threat posed by its naturalism and rationalism generated dissent and division, initially leading to attempts to divorce the separate realms of faith and reason and then to the autonomous emergence of naturalistic empirical science.
Various developments contributed to the transformation of the intellectual landscape. Marco Polo's (1254–1324) exploration of China, Christopher Columbus’ (1451–1506) discovery of America in 1492, and Magellan's (1480–1521) circumnavigation of the globe expanded the horizons of the known world. Perhaps the most significant development was the invention of printing and the consequent transformation of communication. In the city of Mainz in southern Germany, Johann Gutenberg (c. 1397–1468) created movable type and published an edition of the Bible in 1450. The consequent explosion in printed works expanded intellectual horizons by broadening access to the Bible and classical works. By 1500, about eight million volumes had been printed (Pyenson and Sheets-Pyenson, 1999); by 1600, about twenty million, with over a dozen presses established in European cities (Foote, 1991). The critical interpretation of these works by humanist scholars encouraged a more secular – and more skeptical – approach to the classical tradition and scriptural authority, and the reliable reproduction of works in physics, astronomy, and medicine transformed science into a public enterprise. In earlier centuries, the works of Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Galen had been transcribed by hand by monastic clerics, with errors compounded over generations, and read only by the educated elite. From the mid-fifteenth century onward multiple copies of scientific works were critically scrutinized by the scientific community and educated members of the lay public.
6 - Physiology and psychology
- John D. Greenwood, City University of New York
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- Book:
- A Conceptual History of Psychology
- Published online:
- 05 September 2015
- Print publication:
- 25 August 2015, pp 139-184
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Summary
The nineteenth century was a time of great change in Europe and America. Agricultural reforms ensured a steady food supply, and improvements in public hygiene decreased fatalities from contagious diseases such as cholera. The population of Europe increased from about 140 to 420 million people between 1750 and 1900, with many congregated in the new urban centers. The dramatic expansion of industry led to a general increase in wealth, although the insecurities of the capitalist state (with periods of boom followed by periods of economic downturn) led some to question a system in which most of the wealth was owned by a privileged few and to look to alternative political systems such as socialism and communism. New developments in transportation and communication saw the spread of modern road networks, railways, canals, ocean lines, and telegraph and postal systems (Jansz, 2004).
The nineteenth century witnessed the growth and increasing political strength of the middle class, whose long struggle to attain voting rights eventually bore fruit, although throughout most of the nineteenth century real political control remained in the hands of the conservative aristocracy. In the reactionary period following the Napoleonic wars in Europe, which ended with Napoleon's defeat at the battle of Waterloo in 1815, naturalistic approaches to psychology were repressed through censorship and the secret police. Nobody who promoted such views could hold a professorship in Europe and America in the early half of the century, and in the years immediately following 1815, advocacy of such views was punishable by imprisonment in some parts of Europe (Reed, 1997).
As noted earlier, Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) was hounded out of Britain for his promotion of Hartley's associationist psychology as materialist psychology. Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), the grandfather of Charles Darwin (1809–1882), who developed an early naturalistic evolutionary theory in Zoonomia (1794–1796), found his work suppressed. One of Darwin's followers, the British surgeon William Lawrence (1783–1867), published his theory that insanity is a neurophysiological disorder in Lectures on Physiology, Zoology and the Natural History of Man (1819). The medical establishment forced him to withdraw his book, and he lost his lectureship at the Royal College of Surgeons (Reed, 1997).
Contents
- John D. Greenwood, City University of New York
-
- Book:
- A Conceptual History of Psychology
- Published online:
- 05 September 2015
- Print publication:
- 25 August 2015, pp v-vi
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- Export citation