Historical Roots of Modern Psychology

Historical Roots of Modern Psychology Throughout some twelve or so decades, psychology has led an active life, developing gradually into a true science. As part of evolution, it has produced a number of conceptual models, approaches, theories, interrelated ideas and concepts used to explain phenomena, that has guided the work being carried out.

Earlier views of the philosophies and concepts were important because they gave the outline with the help of which modern ideas were developed and further formulated. “Psychology has a long past, but only a short history.”(Hermann Ebbinghaus, 1908) Wilhelm Wundt set the foundations of modern psychology in 1879, by establishing the first psychology laboratory in Leipzig, Germany.

Man was always curious about human behavior, nature of consciousness, origin of “madness”, emotions and much more about other people’s nature. Control and desirable modification of behavior interested man; he always wanted to become powerful and be able to make others do what he wanted them to do.

Although psychology did not exist in its present form thousands of years ago, its application can be traced even at that stage of history. The following facts indicate that man was always interested in understanding and managing psyche and behavior, and was capable of controlling and modifying it: Domestication of dogs was practiced even 10,000 years ago. Babylonians made speculation about etiology of epilepsy and tried to cure it accordingly. Egyptians performed crude brain surgery thousands of years ago. Evidence is available through an examination of ancient human skeletons, that ‘epinephrin’ was performed even half a million years ago; epinephrin was a procedure whereby a hole was drilled into the skull of a mental patient. This was done in order to let the evil spirits or demons escape from the sufferer’s body. The basic assumption was that abnormal behavior was caused by supernatural beings. Such evidence suggests that man sought explanations of human behavior, and tried to control it according to the explanation he believed in. Ancient explanations centered on the supernatural: gods, evil spirits, demons etc