Who is the founder of psychology? Who is the second one who examined psychology? Who is the third?

-- sisi (sisiapple@hotmail.com), June 04, 2002

Answers

No one can definitively answer that question. You might search for answers in a history of psychology textbook. Each of the following will probably leave you with slightly different answers.

George Sydney Brett. (1912-21). A History of Psychology. Three volumes. London: George Allen & Unwin. Edited and abridged version by R. S. Peters. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1953.

Edwin G. Boring. (1929). A History of Experimental Psychology. The Century Company. 2nd edition, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1950.

Jacob Robert Kantor. (1963). History of Scientific Psychology. Two volumes. Chicago: Principia Press.

Robert Irving Watson. (1963). The Great Psychologists: Aristotle to Freud. Philadelphia: Lippincott.

L. S. Hearnshaw. (1987). The Shaping of Modern Psychology. Routledge & Kegan Paul/Methuen.

D. B. Klein. (1970). A History of Scientific Psychology: Its Origins and Philosophical Background. New York: Basic Books.

Daniel R. Robinson. (1976). An Intellectual History of Psychology. New York: Macmillan.

Lots of other texts are available.

-- Hendrika Vande Kemp (hendrika@earthlink.net), June 04, 2002.

normally, the title of father of psychology is attributed to Wilhelm Wundt, German scholar from University of Leipzig who founded the first psychological laboratory (1879). William James, student of Wundt, brought psychology as an academic discipline to US in 1890, to JOhn Hopkins University. This was to be the first PSychology course offered in the US. NOw, if you are talking about founder of a specific type of psychology (clinical, humanistic, etc): Humanistic psychology--> Carl Rogers + Abraham Maslow structuralism--> Titchener behaviorism -->(actually, behaviorism is attributed to Watson, Skinner being the most radical of the two, came later. Watson and B.F. Skinner gestalt psychology--> Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka cognitive psychology-->Jerome Bruner

-- alejandra Maciel (alejmave@yahoo.de), June 04, 2002.

Unfortunately, a number of points in Alejandra's account are incorrect. James was not a student of Wundt's, and he was not at Johns Hopkins, but rather at Harvard (where, I believe, the psychology building is named for him). I think Alejandra may be confusing James with G. Stanley Hall, who took his doctorate under James at Harvard, and then went to serve as an assistant in Wundt's lab in Leipzig. Upon returning to the U.S., Hall set up a lab at Johns Hopkins where he remained for a few years before taking up the Presidency of the newly-created Clark University. James actually set up a demonstration lab at Harvard in about 1875, a few years before Wundt's. Still, Wundt's lab is often given credit for being the first because it was the first lab explicitly for psychology at which original research was conducted. On the other hand, Wundt conducted his earliest experimental psychological research in Zurich, before he was called to Leipzig in 1875. Titchener called himself a "structuralist" to distinguish himself from the American "functionalists" (Dewey, Angell, Baldwin, Cattell, Thorndike, among others), which was really the first major American "school" of psychology. As for Watson, he is often given credit for being the "father" of behaviorism, but it has been shown that many people were conducting behavioristic research before his famous 1913 paper. (Consider, e.g., Pavlov who regarded himself as a physiologist). Skinner was rather a latecomer to the field. Other "neo-behaviorists" (as members of the post-Watson group are often called) who were prominent before Skinner include Clark Hull, E. C. Tolman, and E. R. Guthrie.

Of course, others conducted experimental research that we now recognize as having been psychological before Wundt: Weber, Fechner, and Helmholtz, to name but a few. I think the question that Hendrika, above, was alluding to, however, is that the founding of *experimental* psychology is not the same as the founding of *psychology*, per se. Speculation about the nature of the mind (loosely speaking) dates back to ancient times. The term "psychology" was used as early as the later 15th century by Marko Marulic (see http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Krstic/marulic.htm). It came into more or less common usage after the writings of Christian Wolff in the 18th century. Psychology was widely considered to be a branch of metaphysics, however, until the 19th century.

-- Christopher Green (cgreen@utoronto.ca), June 05, 2002.