Psychology

The Dawn of Scientific Psychology

Although were asked in antiquity (e.g., Aristotle's De Memoria et Reminiscentia, i.e., On Memory and Recollection) and the first person who used this word as a branch of science was Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560) in his work Commentarius de Anima, i.e., A Commentary on Aristotle's De Anima, the first person who used to call himself a psychologist was the German philosopher and physiologist Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), who founded the first psychological laboratory in Leipzig, Germany, in 1879. That year is commonly seen as the start of psychology as an independent field of study, because the laboratory conducted exclusively psychological research.

Psychology as Science, Arts, and Ideology

Today, psychology is defined as the science of behavior and mental processes. As a branch of science, psychology is an academic and applied field involving the study of behavior and its relationship to the mind and brain. Psychologists study an array of problems greater than that of any other scientific discipline. The scope of psychology is an extremely broad field: It encompasses many different approaches to the study of behavior and mind.

Important early contributors to the field include German scientist Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909), a pioneer in studies on memory, and Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936), who discovered the learning process of classical conditioning.

Although psychology has been largely concerned with humans, the behavior and mental processes of animals have also been part of psychological research, either as a subject in its own right (e.g., animal cognition) or as a way of gaining an insight into human psychology by means of comparison (Comparative Psychology).

As an art, psychology refers to the application of human knowledge to various spheres of human activity, including problems of people's daily lives (folk psychology) and the treatment of mental illnesses (clinical psychology, psychotherapy, psychiatry).

The Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud's (1856– 1939) influence on psychology has been enormous, although more as cultural icon than a force in scientific psychology. Freudian psychoanalysis is more arts than science. Freud's basic theories postulated the existence in humans of various unconscious and instinctive drives, and that the self existed as a perpetual battle between the desires and demands of the internal ego, superego, and id.

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