PSYCHOLOGY

A History of Modern Psychology



A History of Modern Psychology

History of Modern Psychology

In an important sense, questions about the social origins of modern psychology are fundamental to any consideration of social context of specific psychological ideas during the present century. In effect, a period during which the creation and dissemination of psychological ideas is strongly influenced by the existence of a professional group-academic "psychologists", increasingly powerful, which claims a monopoly on knowledge production and reproduction of validated psychological aspects. Psychological ideas, of course, had been in existence long before the present, what has changed is the immediate social context in which these are developed and exchanged. The presence of the professional group, which is organized, facilitates the background against ideas; methods as well as systems that are designed as figures.

But there is another reason to examine the origins of modern psychology in the context of the sociology of psychological knowledge. And this problem is one of very little, in the history of psychology, which in fact has been analyzed from a sociological standpoint (Ben-David and Collins, 1966). That analysis and continued controversy that illustrates many of the difficulties you may encounter a sociological approach to the history of science. Alternative sociological approaches can be applied to the question of the origins of modern psychology; the problem is to find a perspective that is proportionate to the problem (Rachlin, 1994).

One approach, very representative in the literature of the sociology of science, it's called, appropriately, a positivist approach. It has many features that merit examination. First, his conception of a scientific discipline is based on the notion of incremental progress. This progress distinguishes the pre-science of science, and can be "measured" by the number of research publications. No consideration is given to the so-called "scientific revolutions" by Kuhn, or the significance of rival schools of thought. Applied to the history of modern psychology is the way of thinking leads to the conclusion that traditional modern psychology began in Germany and later moved its center to the United States. The figures on the relative numbers of publications seem to show this clearly enough. It should be noted here is the tacit assumption that the psychology that came to flourish in the United States around 1915 was essentially the same as appeared in Germany in 1880. The possibility of a fundamental qualitative discontinuity is not even considered in this approach, since, if psychology is a science, its development is, by definition, linear, cumulative and continuous.

An important feature of the positivist sociology of science is profoundly ahistorical nature of his explanatory categories. The rules governing scientific activity have always been the same, and have always existed as ideas. What changes are the social roles of the media of these idea's. When scientific ideas are made by individuals who occupy the social role of professional scientist to lead a research tradition continued and cumulative (Ben-David, 1971). Therefore, the birth of new disciplines of psychology is also dependent upon the invention of a newly formed ...