The
history of
psychology as a scholarly study of the mind and behavior dates back to the
Ancient Greeks. There is also evidence of psychological thought in ancient Egypt. Psychology was a branch of
philosophy until 1879, when psychology developed as an independent scientific discipline in
Germany and the
United States. Psychology borders on various other fields including
physiology,
neuroscience,
artificial intelligence,
sociology,
anthropology, as well as philosophy and other components of the
humanities.
Philosophical interest in the mind and behavior dates back to the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece, China and India. These earlier forms of inquiry began adopting a more clinical[1] and experimental[2] approach under medieval Greek and Muslim psychologists and physicians, whose practitioners built the first psychiatric hospitals.[3]
Psychology as a self-conscious field of experimental study began in 1879, when Wilhelm Wundt founded the first laboratory dedicated exclusively to psychological research in Leipzig. Other important early contributors to the field include Hermann Ebbinghaus (a pioneer in the study of memory), William James (the American father of pragmatism), and Ivan Pavlov (who developed the procedures associated with classical conditioning).
Soon after the development of experimental psychology, various kinds of applied psychology appeared. G. Stanley Hall brought scientific pedagogy to the United States from Germany in the early 1880s. John Dewey's educational theory of the 1890s was another example. Also in the 1890s, Hugo Münsterberg began writing about the application of psychology to industry, law, and other fields. Lightner Witmer established the first psychological clinic in the 1890s. James McKeen Cattell adapted Francis Galton's anthropometric methods to generate the first program of mental testing in the 1890s. In Vienna, meanwhile, the psychiatrist Sigmund Freud developed an independent approach to the study of the mind called psychoanalysis, which has been widely influential.
