ORIGIN OF PSYCHOLOGY PHILOSOPHICAL ORIGIN - PowerPoint Presentation

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ORIGIN OF PSYCHOLOGY

PHILOSOPHICAL ORIGIN

GREEK ORIGIN

INDIAN THOUGHTS

Rene Descartes

John lock

BIOLOGICAL ORIGIN

DARWIN

GENETICS

HISTORY

OF MODERN PSYCHOLOGY

PHILOSOPHICAL ORIGIN

Philosophical interest in behavior and the mind dates back to the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece, China, and India. 

Psychology arose from the field of philosophy.

Psychology was largely a branch of philosophy until the mid-1800s, when it developed as an independent and scientific discipline in Germany and the United States.

Greek thoughts

Hippocrates

Plato

Aristotle

Hippocrates

He was an ancient

greek

physician

He rejected

the superstition of the priests and founded a medical school.

He believed that the brain is the basis of the mind and that all 

psychopathology

 arose in the brain 

Hippocrates theorized that personality traits and human behaviors are based on four separate temperaments associated with four fluids of the body (body humors)

choleric temperament (yellow bile from the liver),

Emotional, extravert,

melancholic temperament (black bile from the kidneys),

Emotional, introvert,

sanguine temperament (red blood from the heart), and

Stable, extravert,

phlegmatic temperament (white phlegm from the lungs)

Stable, introvert,  

Plato

The teacher of Aristotle, Plato (428/427 BC - 348/347 BC), provided some useful insights into the theoretical structure of the human mind

He used the idea of a psyche, a word used to describe both the mind and the soul

Plato proposed that the human psyche was the seat of all knowledge and that the human mind was imprinted with all of the knowledge it needed.

As a result, learning was a matter of unlocking and utilizing this inbuilt knowledge, a process he called

anamnesis

.

In his famous work, ”The Republic” Plato further developed this idea and first proposed the idea that the mind consisted of three interwoven parts, called the

Tripartite Mind

.

The

Logistikon

: This was the intellect, the seat of reasoning and logic.

The

Thumos

:

 This was the spiritual centre of the mind, and dictated emotions and feelings.

The

Epithumetikon

: This part governed desires and appetites.

According to Plato, the healthy mind discovered a balance between the three parts, and an over reliance upon these parts led to the expression of personality.

For example, gluttony and selfishness could be explained by a dominance of the

Epithumetikon

,

letting desires govern behavior.

In the Republic, a treatise aimed at theorizing the perfect society, Plato proposed that the rulers of such a society, those who determined course and policy, should be drawn from men where the

Logistikon

held sway.

Individuals with a strong

Epithumetikon

made excellent merchants and acquirers of wealth whilst the

Thumos

, which can loosely identified with will and courage, was the domain of the soldier.

Aristotle

Aristotle, wrote the first known text in the history of psychology, called Para Psyche, “About the Mind”

In the book, the definition of psyche, as was common at the time, used “mind” and “soul” interchangeably, with the Ancient Greek philosophers feeling no need to make no distinction between the two.

In Para Psyche, Aristotle’s psychology proposed that the mind was the primary reason for the existence and functioning of the body.

He proposed that there were three types of souls defining life;

the plant soul,

the animal soul and

the human soul,

Interestingly, this human soul was the ultimate link with the divine

Rene Descartes (1596-1650)

He was a French mathematician and philosopher,

Made major contributions to the emergence of modern science in general, and the later development of psychology.

Of particular importance for psychology was

Descarte’s

conception of 

mind-body interaction

.

He believed that the single function of mind was thought

All else, perception, feeling, emotion, movement, etc., were functions of the body.

This mind-body

dualism

 was well-accepted doctrine long before Descartes.

This was the centuries-old mind- body problem.

The accepted answer had long been the Socratic view that mind controls body, and never the other way around.

This idea constituted a philosophical dualism, with mind ascendant over body.

Descartes, however, had a new interpretation.

He agreed that the two domains--mind and body-- were separate entities, but he argued that they interacted with one another at Pineal Gland.

Each domain could influence the other.

Descartes’ concept of mind-body interaction--that mental events can influence the body and the body can influence mental events--was to replace dualism and become an influential concept in the development of psychology over two hundred years later..

Descartes’s

contributions to later psychology include the concepts of the physical body as a complex machine, reflex action, and the interaction of mind and body.

John Locke

He was a philosopher whose ideas were early precursors to many important psychological concepts.

John Locke introduced the concept of tabula rasa which is the belief that the mind is a “

blank slate

” at birth and we are formed and develop from our own experiences with the environment.

He was a devout believer in the “nurture” side of the “nature versus nurture” debate because of his belief that all behavior, inclinations, and thought patterns were learned, rather than inherent.

This was one of the earliest ideas that is used for the basis of behaviorism.

Locke believed that the experience that occurred in the early childhood years was the most important and influential on a person.

He stressed the importance of rewards and punishments in social learning.

Locke also introduced the concept of the social contract theory.