The Art and Science of Psychology

Posted by queenmadison

A reseach I made for my cousin. I was so amazed with what I did so I put my work here at my blog. Here's a few facts you must know about psychology. How it begun and understanding the facts about it.


How did psychology begin?

"Psychology", a scholar observed, "has a long past, but only a short history." As a science it can be said to have begun about 100 years ago, when Wilhelm Wundt opened a psychological laboratory in Germany. Yet an interest in mind and behavior is at least as old as human records.



Most of the great themes of modern psychology can be traced to ancient Greece. Almost three thousand years ago, the poet Homer marveled at the range of human personality and credited the gods: "To one man a god has given deeds of war, and to another the dance, the lyre and song, and in another wide-sounding Zeus puts a good mind."



Aristotle's concept of catharsis was partly a theory of psychotherapy. In watching tragic dramas, he said, people felt terror and pity, and this purged their minds of negative emotions. In the same vein the dramatist Aeschylus wrote; "Words are physicians of a mind disease." Over two millenia later, Sigmund Freud not only turned to Greek drama to illustrate his theories of unconcious but also used words - talk of a patient in psychoanalysis- as the basis of therapy for mental disorders.
Hippocrates, called the father of medicine, was very modern in his views that mental illness had natural causes and the brain was the seat of emotion and thought. And many of today's findings about the brain and behavior simply amplify Aristotle's assertions that the human psyche(or mind) is a part of the body and that our capacity for reason and moral choice develops as the brain processes more and more data from the senses


Is psychology really a science?

Scientist in other fields, such as physics and chemistry, often critisize psychology as "soft". Many jokes jokes reflects doubts about its validity as a science. British psychologist such as Hans Eysenck cites the cartoons in which ones laboratory rat says to another."I sure got my human well conditioned, whenever I pressed this pedal he drops pellet into the chute"

Some doubts are reasonable. It is really valid to apply the results of animal experiments of human behavior, just because the animals'nervous systems are somewhat like our own?Can rats in a maze reveal anything significant about how humans think, or for that matter about rats?

Although most scientist do not deny that talk therapy on the Freudian model has helped many people, it bothers the scientist that nobody can say for sure how or why it works, after almost a century of use.

One philosopher, Patricia Churchland of the University of California at San Diego, has pointed out that the portion of the brain reachable by talk- our concious thinking, introperpective self- is "only little bubble on the froth."beneath which the huge prepondence of brain activity proceeds,in effect, on its own.

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