What are the schools of psychology? What is the history of modern psychology and what are the goals of psychology?

-- Aimee P. Ricafrente (Miechie_17@Yahoo.com), June 27, 2002

Answers

You'll find the answers to these questions in any standard history of psychology textbook. Check one of the following:

Michael Wertheimer, A Brief History of Psychology, 4th edition. Harcourt, 1999.

C. James Goodwin, A History of Modern Psychology, Wiley, 1999.

Wayne Viney & D. Brett King, A History of Psychology: Ideas and Context, 2nd ed. Allyn & Bacon, 1998

Thomas Leahey, A History of Psychology, Prentice-Hall, 2000

Duane Schultz & Syndey Ellen Schultz, A History of Modern Psychology, Harcourt, 2000

B. R. Hergenhahn, An Introduction to the History of Psychology Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Thomson Learning, 2001

B. Michael Thorne & Tracy Henley, Connections in the History and Systems of Psychology, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001

-- Hendrika Vande Kemp (hendrika@earthlink.net), June 27, 2002.

Hendrika's list of textbooks is a good one. You'll find, however, that there aren't really any "schools," so to speak, today. The traditional schools were structuralism (which was really just Titchener alone, and a few of his students), functionalism (Angell, Dewey, Baldiwn, J.M. Cattell, Thorndike, among others), gestalt (Wertheimer, Koffka, Koehler), behaviorism, (Watson, Guthrie, Hull, Tolman, Skinner, etc.), and possibly psychoanalysis (depending on whether you consider it to be part of psychology proper, or not). People sometimes talk of humanistic psych as having been a "school" as well, but by the 1960s most people didn't adhere so closely to a single approach -- in some ways they were much more ecclectic, in others they were much narrower, focusing on a particular topic (cognitive, social, etc.) rather than looking for a general view that would capture the whole discipine of psychology.

-- Christopher Green (cgreen@chass.utoronto.ca), June 27, 2002.