The ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece, China, India, and Persia all engaged in

the philosophical study of psychology. Historians note that Greek philosophers,

including Thales, Plato, and Aristotle (especially in his De Animatreatise),[14] addressed the workings
of the mind.[15] As early as the 4th century BC, Greek physician Hippocrates theorized that mental
disorders had physical rather than supernatural causes.[16]
In China, psychological understanding grew from the philosophical works of Laozi and Confucius,
and later from the doctrines of Buddhism. This body of knowledge involves insights drawn from
introspection and observation, as well as techniques for focused thinking and acting. It frames the
universe as a division of, and interaction between, physical reality and mental reality, with an
emphasis on purifying the mind in order to increase virtue and power. An ancient text known as The
Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine identifies the brain as the nexus of wisdom and
sensation, includes theories of personality based on yin–yang balance, and analyzes mental
disorder in terms of physiological and social disequilibria. Chinese scholarship focused on the brain
advanced in the Qing Dynasty with the work of Western-educated Fang Yizhi (1611–1671), Liu Zhi
(1660–1730), and Wang Qingren (1768–1831). Wang Qingren emphasized the importance of the
brain as the center of the nervous system, linked mental disorder with brain diseases, investigated
the causes of dreams and insomnia, and advanced a theory of hemispheric lateralization in brain
function.[17]
Distinctions in types of awareness appear in the ancient thought of India, influenced by Hinduism. A
central idea of the Upanishads is the distinction between a person's transient mundane self and
their eternal unchanging soul. Divergent Hindu doctrines, and Buddhism, have challenged this
hierarchy of selves, but have all emphasized the importance of reaching higher awareness. Yoga is
a range of techniques used in pursuit of this goal. Much of the Sanskrit corpus was suppressed
under the British East India Company followed by the British Raj in the 1800s. However, Indian
doctrines influenced Western thinking via the Theosophical Society, a New Age group which
became popular among Euro-American intellectuals.[18]
Psychology was a popular topic in Enlightenment Europe. In Germany, Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz (1646–1716) applied his principles of calculus to the mind, arguing that mental activity took
place on an indivisible continuum—most notably, that among an infinity of human perceptions and
desires, the difference between conscious and unconscious awareness is only a matter of
degree. Christian Wolff identified psychology as its own science, writing Psychologia empirica in
1732 and Psychologia rationalis in 1734. This notion advanced further under Immanuel Kant, who
established the idea of anthropology, with psychology as an important subdivision. However, Kant
explicitly and notoriously rejected the idea of experimental psychology, writing that "the empirical
doctrine of the soul can also never approach chemistry even as a systematic art of analysis or
experimental doctrine, for in it the manifold of inner observation can be separated only by mere
division in thought, and cannot then be held separate and recombined at will (but still less does
another thinking subject suffer himself to be experimented upon to suit our purpose), and even
observation by itself already changes and displaces the state of the observed object." Having
consulted philosophers Hegel and Herbart, in 1825 the Prussian state established psychology as a
mandatory discipline in its rapidly expanding and highly influential educational system. However, this
discipline did not yet embrace experimentation.[19] In England, early psychology
involved phrenology and the response to social problems including alcoholism, violence, and the
country's well-populated mental asylums.[20]
Beginning of experimental psychology

Wilhelm Wundt (seated) with colleagues in his psychological laboratory, the first of its kind.

Gustav Fechner began conducting psychophysics research in Leipzig in the 1830s, articulating the
principle that human perception of a stimulus varies logarithmically according to its
intensity.[21] Fechner's 1860 Elements of Psychophysics challenged Kant's stricture against
quantitative study of the mind.[19] In Heidelberg, Hermann von Helmholtz conducted parallel research
on sensory perception, and trained physiologist Wilhelm Wundt. Wundt, in turn, came to Leipzig
University, establishing the psychological laboratory which brought experimental psychology to the
world. Wundt focused on breaking down mental processes into the most basic components,
motivated in part by an analogy to recent advances in chemistry, and its successful investigation of
the elements and structure of material.[22] Paul Flechsig and Emil Kraepelin soon created another
influential psychology laboratory at Leipzig, this one focused on more on experimental psychiatry.[19]
Psychologists in Germany, Denmark, Austria, England, and the United States soon followed Wundt
in setting up laboratories.[23] G. Stanley Hall who studied with Wundt, formed a psychology lab
at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, which became internationally influential. Hall, in turn,
trained Yujiro Motora, who brought experimental psychology, emphasizing psychophysics, to
the Imperial University of Tokyo.[24] Wundt assistant Hugo Münsterberg taught psychology at Harvard
to students such as Narendra Nath Sen Gupta—who, in 1905, founded a psychology department
and laboratory at the University of Calcutta.[18] Wundt students Walter Dill Scott, Lightner Witmer,
and James McKeen Cattell worked on developing tests for mental ability. Catell, who also studied
with eugenicist Francis Galton, went on to found the Psychological Corporation. Wittmer focused on
mental testing of children; Scott, on selection of employees.[25]
Another student of Wundt, Edward Titchener, created the psychology program at Cornell
University and advanced a doctrine of "structuralist" psychology. Structuralism sought to analyze and
classify different aspects of the mind, primarily through the method of introspection.[26] William
James, John Dewey and Harvey Carr advanced a more expansive doctrine called functionalism,
attuned more to human–environment actions. In 1890 James wrote an influential book, The
Principles of Psychology, which expanded on the realm of structuralism, memorably described the
human "stream of consciousness", and interested many American students in the emerging
discipline.[26][27][28] Dewey integrated psychology with social issues, most notably by promoting the
cause progressive education to assimilate immigrants and inculcate moral values in children.[29]
One of the dogs used in Pavlov's experiment with a surgically implanted cannula to
measure salivation, preserved in the Pavlov Museum in Ryazan, Russia

A different strain of experimentalism, with more connection to physiology, emerged in South

America, under the leadership of Horacio G. Piñero at the University of Buenos Aires.[30] Russia, too,
placed greater emphasis on the biological basis for psychology, beginning with Ivan Sechenov's
1873 essay, "Who Is to Develop Psychology and How?" Sechenov advanced the idea of
brain reflexes and aggressively promoted a deterministicviewpoint on human behavior.[31]
Wolfgang Kohler, Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka co-founded the school of Gestalt psychology (not
to be confused with the Gestalt therapy of Fritz Perls). This approach is based upon the idea that
individuals experience things as unified wholes. Rather than breaking down thoughts and behavior
into smaller elements, as in structuralism, the Gestaltists maintained that whole of experience is
important, and differs from the sum of its parts. Other 19th-century contributors to the field include
the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, a pioneer in the experimental study of memory, who
developed quantitative models of learning and forgetting at the University of Berlin,[32] and the
Russian-Soviet physiologist Ivan Pavlov, who discovered in dogs a learning process that was later
termed "classical conditioning" and applied to human beings.[33]

Consolidation and funding

One of the earliest psychology societies was La Société de Psychologie Physiologique in France,
which lasted 1885–1893. The first meeting of the International Congress of Psychology took place in
Paris, in August 1889, amidst the World's Fair celebrating the centennial of the French Revolution.
William James was one of three Americans among the four hundred attendees. The American
Psychological Association was founded soon after, in 1892. The International Congress continued to
be held, at different locations in Europe, with wider international participation. The Sixth Congress,
Geneva 1909, included presentations in Russian, Chinese, and Japanese, as well as Esperanto.
After a hiatus for World War I, the Seventh Congress met in Oxford, with substantially greater
participation from the war-victorious Anglo-Americans. In 1929, the Congress took place at Yale
University in New Haven, Connecticut, attended by hundreds of members of the American
Psychological Association[23] Tokyo Imperial University led the way in bringing the new psychology to
the East, and from Japan these ideas diffused into China.[17][24]
American psychology gained status during World War I, during which a standing committee headed
by Robert Yerkes administered mental tests ("Army Alpha" and "Army Beta") to almost 1.8 million
GIs.[34] Subsequent funding for behavioral research came in large part from the Rockefeller family,
via the Social Science Research Council.[35][36] Rockefeller charities funded the National Committee
on Mental Hygiene, which promoted the concept of mental illness and lobbied for psychological
supervision of child development.[34][37]Through the Bureau of Social Hygiene and later funding
of Alfred Kinsey, Rockefeller foundations established sex research as a viable discipline in the
U.S.[38] Under the influence of the Carnegie-funded Eugenics Record Office, the Draper-
funded Pioneer Fund, and other institutions, the eugenics movement also had a significant impact on
American psychology; in the 1910s and 1920s, eugenics became a standard topic in psychology
classes.[39]
During World War II and the Cold War, the U.S. military and intelligence agencies established
themselves as leading funders of psychology—through the armed forces and in the new Office of
Strategic Services intelligence agency. University of Michigan psychologist Dorwin Cartwright
reported that university researchers began large-scale propaganda research in 1939–1941, and "the
last few months of the war saw a social psychologist become chiefly responsible for determining the
week-by-week-propaganda policy for the United States Government." Cartwright also wrote that
psychologists had significant roles in managing the domestic economy.[40] The Army rolled out its
new General Classification Test and engaged in massive studies of troop morale. In the 1950s,
the Rockefeller Foundationand Ford Foundation collaborated with the Central Intelligence Agency to
fund research on psychological warfare.[41] In 1965, public controversy called attention to the
Army's Project Camelot—the "Manhattan Project" of social science—an effort which enlisted
psychologists and anthropologists to analyze foreign countries for strategic purposes.[42][43]
In Germany after World War I, psychology held institutional power through the military, and
subsequently expanded along with the rest of the military under the Third Reich.[19] Under the
direction of Hermann Göring's cousin Matthias Göring, the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute was
renamed the Göring Institute. Freudian psychoanalysts were expelled and persecuted under the
anti-Jewish policies of the Nazi Party, and all psychologists had to distance themselves from Freud
and Adler.[44] The Göring Institute was well-financed throughout the war with a mandate to create a
"New German Psychotherapy". This psychotherapy aimed to align suitable Germans with the overall
goals of the Reich; as described by one physician: "Despite the importance of analysis, spiritual
guidance and the active cooperation of the patient represent the best way to overcome individual
mental problems and to subordinate them to the requirements of the Volk and the Gemeinschaft."
Psychologists were to provide Seelenführung, leadership of the mind, to integrate people into the
new vision of a German community.[45] Harald Schultz-Hencke melded psychology with the Nazi
theory of biology and racial origins, criticizing psychoanalysis as a study of the weak and
deformed.[46] Johannes Heinrich Schultz, a German psychologist recognized for developing the
technique of autogenic training, prominently advocated sterilization and euthanasia of men
considered genetically undesirable, and devised techniques for facilitating this process.[47] After the
war, some new institutions were created and some psychologists were discredited due to Nazi
affiliation. Alexander Mitscherlich founded a prominent applied psychoanalysis journal
called Psyche and with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation established the first clinical
psychosomatic medicine division at Heidelberg University. In 1970, psychology was integrated into
the required studies of medical students.[48]
After the Russian Revolution, psychology was heavily promoted by the Bolsheviks as a way to
engineer the "New Man" of socialism. Thus, university psychology departments trained large
numbers of students, for whom positions were made available at schools, workplaces, cultural
institutions, and in the military. An especial focus was pedology, the study of child development,
regarding which Lev Vygotsky became a prominent writer.[31] The Bolsheviks also promoted free
love and embranced the doctrine of psychoanalysis as an antidote to sexual repression.[49] Although
pedology and intelligence testing fell out of favor in 1936, psychology maintained its privileged
position as an instrument of the Soviet state.[31] Stalinist purges took a heavy toll and instilled a
climate of fear in the profession, as elsewhere in Soviet society.[50] Following World War II, Jewish
psychologists past and present (including Vygotsky, A. R. Luria, and Aron Zalkind) were denounced;
Ivan Pavlov (posthumously) and Stalin himself were aggrandized as heroes of Soviet
psychology.[51] Soviet academics was speedily liberalized during the Khrushchev Thaw, and
cybernetics, linguistics, genetics, and other topics became acceptable again. There emerged a new
field called "engineering psychology" which studied mental aspects of complex jobs (such as pilot
and cosmonaut). Interdisciplinary studies became popular and scholars such as Georgy
Shchedrovitsky developed systems theory approaches to human behavior.[52]
Twentieth-century Chinese psychology originally modeled the United States, with translations from
American authors like William James, the establishment of university psychology departments and
journals, and the establishment of groups including the Chinese Association of Psychological
Testing (1930) and the Chinese Psychological Society (1937). Chinese psychologists were
encouraged to focus on education and language learning, with the aspiration that education would
enable modernization and nationalization. John Dewey, who lectured to Chinese audiences in 1918–
1920, had a significant influence on this doctrine. Chancellor T'sai Yuan-p'ei introduced him
at Peking University as a greater thinker than Confucius. Kuo Zing-yang who received a PhD at the
University of California, Berkeley, became President of Zhejiang University and popularized
behaviorism.[53] After the Chinese Communist Party gained control of the country, the Stalinist USSR
became the leading influence, with Marxism–Leninism the leading social doctrine and Pavlovian
conditioning the approved concept of behavior change. Chinese psychologists elaborated on Lenin's
model of a "reflective" consciousness, envisioning an "active consciousness" (tzu-chueh neng-tung-
li) able to transcend material conditions through hard work and ideological struggle. They developed
a concept of "recognition" (jen-shih) which referred the interface between individual perceptions and
the socially accepted worldview. (Failure to correspond with party doctrine was "incorrect
recognition".)[54] Psychology education was centralized under the Chinese Academy of Sciences,
supervised by the State Council. In 1951 the Academy created a Psychology Research Office, which
in 1956 became the Institute of Psychology. Most leading psychologists were educated in the United
States, and the first concern of the Academy was re-education of these psychologists in the Soviet
doctrines. Child psychology and pedagogy for nationally cohesive education remained a central goal
of the discipline.[55]