THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYlargely unimpressed, but psychoanalysis would capture the imagination
of the public, especially in the US, and proved particularly influential
in psychiatry and clinical psychology. Freud also inspired a small army
of followers, including Carl Jung and Alfred Adler, who developed their
own influential versions of psychoanalysis. To this day, many people
confuse psychology with psychoanalysis and you’re likely to discover
Freudian literature in the psychology section of many a bookshop.
As the early twentieth century progressed, the techniques and focus of
the early scientific psychologists gave way to a new, powerful movement
in psychology known as behaviourism. Inspired by ground-breaking
animal research into learning and conditioning by Ivan Pavlov, Edward
Thorndike and others, behaviourism turned the focus of psychology
to that which is outwardly observable. Consciousness and mental
states were no longer seen as valid topics of inquiry and all links with
philosophy were broken. Initially championed by John Watson, of Little
Albert fame (see p.110), behaviourism would come to dominate American
psychology for nearly fifty years, reaching its zenith in the teachings of
B.F. Skinner (see p.14).
However, it is important to note that during a similar period, Germany
saw the rise of Gestalt psychology, which was specifically concerned
with the holistic contents of consciousness. Gestalt psychologists, like
Max Wertheimer, focused on understanding mental experiences in their
entirety, as they occurred – recognizing that mental experience is often
distinct from, or more than, the sum of its parts. A good example is
the well-known image that
can be perceived either as
two faces looking at each
other in profile or as a
vase, depending on which
elements are seen as the
foreground and which as
the background. Gestalt
psychologists would go
on to make early break-
throughs in memory,
learning and perception,
in many ways anticipating
the cognitive movement
that was to emerge in
psychology from the 1950s.
Two heads facing each other in profile or a
vase? This famous illusion was devised by the
Danish psychologist Edgar John Rubin in 1915.