Schools of Psychology Notes

Schools of Psychology Notes

  November 01, 2019    Beema Saif

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Schools of Psychology

Structuralism ( Wilhelm Wundt, Edward Titchene )

Structuralism is a school of psychology whose goal was to identify the basic elements or “structures” of psychological experience. It focused on the nature of consciousness itself.

Wilhelm Wundt is the father of structuralism. Wundt began the first psychological laboratory in Leipzig, Germany in 1879. So he is also considered as the father of scientific/experimental psychology. He is also called the father of psychology.

Wundt believed that the mind or conscious experience could be measured. The structure of mental life could be disclosed. Hence it is called structuralism or structural psychology.

According to Wundt, psychology is the science of experience, the method of psychology must involve observation of experience. No one can observe an experience except the person having it, so the method must involve self-observation or introspection.

Therefore structuralists used the method of introspection to attempt to create a map of the elements of consciousness. Structuralists analysed the structure of mind through introspection. Introspection is a procedure in which individuals or subjects in psychological experiments are asked to describe their own mental processes or experiences in detail. Introspection involves asking research participants to describe exactly what they experience as they work on mental tasks.

According to them the main objective of psychology is to describe mental structure. “Elementism” was popular in 19^th century. It considered elements the basic parts of any complex phenomena.

It believed that it was possible to analyse the basic elements of the mind and to classify our conscious experiences scientifically. The idea is that conscious experience can be broken down into basic conscious element. The structuralists studied mental processes by analysing its elements, their properties and the way they combine with one another. The most important elements were sensations. Attention was also paid to ideas and feelings.

Structuralism made important contributions to psychology. Structuralism liberated psychology from Philosophy and metaphysics. A scientific attitude was introduced into psychological investigation.

Limitation- introspection is unsuitable for the study of science. The result of the study using introspection cannot be objective, reliable, and valid. So it is considered less scientific.

Functionalism ( William James)

Developed by William James ( father of American Psychology). James disagreed with Wundt’s psychology. Wundt asked ‘what is mind?’. James asked ‘what is mind for?’

John Dewey: human beings seek to function effectively by adapting to their environment. His article formed the corner stone of functionalism.

Functionalists were influenced by Charles Darwin’s (1809–1882) theory of natural selection, which proposed that the physical characteristics of animals and humans evolved because they were useful, or functional.

It emphasises the functions of mental life rather than the contents. Functionalists were more interested in what mental life does than in what it is.

It focuses on what the mind does and how behavior functions in making people deal with their environment. How behaviour enabled people to satisfy their needs.

The goal of the school of functionalism was to understand why animals and humans have developed the particular psychological aspects that they currently possess

They investigated mental experience and behavior from the stand point of their functional value in adapting the organism to its environment. The functionalist tried to discover “how” and “why” the brain works. The functionalists were the first psychologists to use non human animals in psychological experiments.

Although functionalism no longer exists as a school of psychology, its basic principles have been

absorbed into psychology and continue to influence it in many ways. Functionalism gave rise to a new trend in education. The importance of “learning by doing”, need based curriculum, dynamic method of teaching, scientific attitude in educaition, creation of appropriate environment in school etc., are stressed by functionalism.

Psychodynamic Psychology/ Psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung , Alfred Adler , Karen Horney, and Erik Erikson)

Psychodynamic psychology is an approach to understanding human behavior that focuses on the role of unconscious thoughts, feelings, and memories.

Freud founded psychoanalysis, a system to understand and cure psychological disorders. Freud is known as the father of psychoanalysis and the father of modern psychology.

Psychoanalysis did not arise as a protest to any other system. Freud believed that behavior can be influenced by past events which seemingly have been forgotten.

Freud viewed human behavior as a dynamic manifestation of unconscious desires and conflicts. Viewed human beings as motivated by unconscious desire for gratification of pleasure seeking (often sexual) desires.

Freud believed that many of the problems that his patients experienced, including anxiety, depression, and sexual dysfunction, were the result of the effects of painful childhood experiences that the person could no longer remember.

He believed that it is possible to help the patient if the unconscious drives can be remembered, particularly through a deep and thorough exploration of the person’s early sexual experiences and current sexual desires. These explorations are revealed through talk therapy and dream analysis, in a process called psychoanalysis.

It involves analysing the root causes of behavior and feelings by exploring the unconscious mind and conscious mind’s relation to it. It focuses on an individual’s deep-rooted thoughts that often stem from childhood.

Freud believed that id, ego and superego are three major parts of personality which represent desire, reason and conscience. Freud opinioned that the root cause of all mental disorders is repressed desire in the unconscious mind. This repression occurs due to non acceptance of id impulses to ego or superego.

Behaviorism (John B. Watson, B. F. Skinner)

It evolved as a reaction to structuralism. Both structuralism and functionalism were essentially studies of the mind. Behaviorism is a school of psychology that is based on the premise that it is not possible to objectively study the mind, and therefore that psychologists should limit their attention to the study of behavior itself. It theorizes that all behavior can be explained by environmental causes, rather than by internal forces.

According to Watson the goal of psychology is the prediction and control of behavior. According to him behavior is the product of learning. Watson defines psychology as a study of behaviour or responses (to stimuli) which can be measured and studied objectively. It says mind is not observable and introspection is subjective because it cannot be verified by another observer. Scientific psychology must focus on what is observable and verifiable. It rejects the idea of mind and consciousness as subject matters of psychology.

Main points of behaviourism is that overt behaviour is the only suitable topic for psycholoogy. Focus should be on objectively observable phenomena. The study of consciousness is inappropriate because of its subjectivity. It suggests to study human beings as an object in nature. A behaviouristic psychologist thus was restricted to observing a stimulus and a response. Stimulus is any event that arouses behaviour and response is the organism’s reaction to a stimulus. This psychology is referred to as stimulus-response psychology and also S-R Psychology.

Behaviorists believe that the human mind is a “black box” into which stimuli are sent and from which responses are received. They argue that there is no point in trying to determine what happens in the box because we can successfully predict behavior without knowing what happens inside the mind. Furthermore, behaviorists believe that it is possible to develop laws of learning that can explain all behaviors.

JB Watson was influenced by the work of Ivan Pavlov, who had discovered that dogs would salivate at the sound of a tone that had previously been associated with the presentation of food. Watson and the other behaviorists began to use these ideas to explain how events that people and other organisms experienced in their environment (stimuli) could produce specific behaviors (responses).

BF Skinner stressed the ways in which behavior is developed and sustained by external events, such as smile, food, freedom, and other environmental circumstances. These events are called reinforcement because they reinforce or support the behaviour that precedes them, increasing the likelihood that it will reappear. Skinner used the ideas of stimulus and response, along with the application of rewards or reinforcements, to train pigeons and other animals. And he used the general principles of behaviorism to develop theories about how best to teach children and how to create societies that were peaceful and productive.

The behaviorists made substantial contributions to psychology by identifying the principles

of learning. The behaviourists have contributed much to the psychology of learning and motivation. The importance of individual instruction , repetition in learning, influence of the environment, etc., some of the major contributions of the behaviorists.

The Cognitive Approach (Hermann Ebbinghaus, Frederic Bartlett, John Dewey, Bruner, Vyogotsky )

Cognitive psychology is a field of psychology that studies mental processes, including how people think, perceive, remember and learn. (perception, thinking, memory, and judgement.)

The word cognition is derived from cognito which means to ‘think’. Cognition is all the process by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used.

In its argument that our thinking has a powerful influence on behavior, the cognitive approach

provided a distinct alternative to behaviorism.

According to cognitive psychologists, ignoring the mind itself will never be sufficient because people interpret the stimuli that they experience. when we take into consideration how stimuli are evaluated and interpreted, we understand behavior more deeply.

According to cognitive psychology, the interaction between the organism and its environment produces mental constructs. This results in learning. Since learning is explained as the formation of mental constructs, they are also known as constructivists.

The cognitive psychologists maintained that in the interaction of the organism and its environment there is change in both its overt behavior and in its knowledge of the environment. According to them learning is a process of interaction as a result of which the learner attains fresh insights and modifies old ones. The function of the teachers is to assist the students to enrich their insight.

Compared to humanistic psychology, cognitive psychology is more scientific and less philosophical. Cognitive psychology remains enormously influential today, and it has guided research in such varied fields as language, problem solving, memory, intelligence, education, human development, social psychology, and psychotherapy.

Gestalt psychology (Wolfgang Kohler, Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka )

Wolfgang Kohler, Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka co-founded the school of gestalt psychology.

It evolved as a reaction to the structuralism by wundt.

This approach is based upon the idea that we experience things as unified wholes.

Focus on the organisation of perceptual experiences.

What we experienced is more than the inputs received from our environment. Our perceptual experience is more than the sum of the components of the perception.

Rather than breaking down thoughts and behavior to their smallest element, the gestalt position maintains that the whole of experience is important, and the whole is different than the sum of its parts.

Gestalitists tend to present both animals and human beings as creatures who by their nature, perceive the world in significant patterns and learn by “insight” rather than mechanical stimulus-response processing. The learning is according to them a cognitive process.

Humanistic Perspective ( Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow)

It developed in reaction to both behaviourism and psychoanalysis. It argues behaviourism takes a mechanic view of human nature as it says behaviour is determined by environmental conditions and undermines human freedom and dignity.

Free will and choice is the important concern in humanistic psychology.

The emphasis is upon conscious experience not the unconscious as in psychoanalysis.

To understand a person’s responds one must understand how that individual perceive the situation.

According to them education would lead to the self-realization of students. Education has the task of helping each student to become the best of he is able to become.

The basic concern in humanistic psychology is that the other two models ignore humanity’s complexity and uniqueness. Human beings do not blindly follow the reinforcement principle in their daily behavior, and they are not exclusively controlled by deep inner forces dating to bygone years. They are instead an extraordinary species with capacities and awareness not found in other animals, especially the capacity for growth and choice.

According to humanists psychology must be studies as a unique development on the evolutionary scene, emphasising the human capacity for self-direction. Choice is at the very centre of human existence, responsive for humanity’s greatest achievements and its most penetrating moments of anxiety.

It emphasises the free will of human beings and their natural striving to grow and unfold their inner potential. The emphasis upon choice and free will constitutes a challenge against the influences postulated in behaviourism and psychoanalysis.