Origins: A Dangerous Science

Control, in any complete sense, is not an aim but a dangerous myth.

(Bannister & Fransella, 1971, p.201)

Origins

If we are to fully consider the central thesis of this book –that the nature of psychology as an academic discipline is inextricably bound up with the character of the socio-economic and political realm –we must of necessity examine the historical contexts within which it first arose and then subsequently developed. An inspection of any number of textbooks places the emergence of scientific psychology in the second half of the 19th century. This was when Wilhelm Wundt, working at Leipzig University, set up the first laboratory of experimental psychology. His aim was to establish a new domain of science fused from earlier philosophical studies of mind and an experimental tradition borrowed from physiology, which had investigated the body as a purely mechanical system. Wundt wished his experimental psychology to bridge the gap between the investigation of physiological processes and what could be revealed through intro-spection –the process of examining one's own conscious thoughts and feelings. In this Wundt was monumentally unsuccessful.

However, to begin the story from Wundt is already too late. Accounts of the history of experimental psychology which do so fall into the trap of uncritically accepting psychology's claims that its experimental tradition was a logical extension of Enlightenment thought. The Enlightenment was a cultural movement which swept across Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries aiming to not only revolutionise thought but change society through the force of reason, argument and evidence alone. What psychology claims in effect is that its growth and influence stem from the scientific and intellectual strength alone of its arguments, and not the touch nor the influence of politics, power, privileged interest, money or emotion. This was an account which American textbook writers at the end of the 19th century wished to promote, but it was far from the truth.

Psychology's real history began a good 300 years prior to Wundt's appearance on the scene. Before 1500 there was no mention in any literature of the word psychology; its first recorded use was by the Croatian humanist and Latinist Marko Marulic in his book, Psichiologia de ratione animae humanae in the late 15th or early 16th century. Its first use in the English language was by Steven Blankaart in 1694 in The Physical Dictionary which refers to "Anatomy, which treats of the Body, and Psychology, which treats of the Soul" (cited in Itten & Roberts, 2014, p.61). A real danger in linking early use of the term to its present application lies in assuming that the terms are addressing the same phenomenon. While Newton's treatment of gravity in the 17th century and Einstein's in the 20th century are clearly different, they are dealing with the same phenomenon –the actions of free-falling bodies in a gravitational field, and the nature of the attractive force between them. In psychology's case, however, we have to tread carefully. As can be seen from its early use, the word pertains to the soul, a non-material presumed entity whose existence few if any psychologists or psychotherapists of the 21st century would subscribe to. An even greater danger is to project contemporary psychological terms back in historical time and make presumptions about both the way people experienced the world and the value of contemporary hypothesised psychological constructs in explaining how they behaved in it.

In fact not long after psychology entered the lexicon, the noted philosopher Immanuel Kant dismissed the possibility of psychology as a natural science. The best it could hope for, he argued, given that psychology lacked any axiomatic basis (a system of undisputed a priori propositions from which to proceed), as well as the considerable problems associated with introspection, was to proceed empirically and produce a collection of facts which could be ordered and classified. As such it would at best comprise an historical doctrine of nature (Brysbaert & Rastle, 2013). This criticism finds echoes in Kenneth Gergen's (1973) argument, toward the end of the 20th century, that psychology is not a science and should be considered a branch of historical knowledge, capable only of statements whose truths are contingent on time and place (see Chapter 2). Kant queried the value of introspection –the attempt to systematically make observations of one's own mind –because not only does one alter, by observing, what is being observed, but what is doing the observing and what is being observed are one and the same. Karl Popper's view of science was that it needs "points of view and theoretical problems" (2002, p.88). Psychology, when it began, had neither. Arguably this is still the case.

Auguste Comte, the founder of sociology as well as the doctrine of positivism, made similar arguments. To him psychology's subject matter, the soul, was beyond the reach of the senses and immeasurable. It could never attain the status of a science. Notwithstanding these objections, psychology developed initially as a branch of philosophy (Intellectual philosophy) considering the various products of the mind –such as dreams, thoughts, ideas, emotions, imagination, will and moral reasoning. The first textbooks of psychology duly began to appear around the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The fledgling attempts to establish psychology as a coherent discipline were met with widespread scepticism as to its possible utility. The first steps to rebrand psychology as an experimental social science began in earnest with Wundt's aforementioned use of introspection in 1879. Wundt's work, though oft cited as the celebrated first use of the experimental method in the nascent discipline, actually yielded little by way of fruitful knowledge. For psychology to be given the kick start into respectability, developments outside the disciple were what came to have the greatest influence in both shaping what went on (and still goes on) within it and in determining its practical utility. It was Kant's suggestion that psychology could only usefully proceed through classification and ordering that proved the more prescient and led to psychology finding or inventing something which it could measure.

Historical, Political and Technological Influences

The key developments for psychology as a discipline were historical, political, cultural, social and technical. Christianity and the Protestant reformation in particular had paved the way for a form of individualism to develop. Stressing one's private relationship with God, Christianity's influence was multiplied by a series of technological developments. These included not only the mirror –which perforce encouraged and increased self-awareness –but also the printing press, which in turn led to more widespread literacy, letter-writing and the birth of the novel. On top of these the...