MODULE 4: MAJOR SYSTEMS

SCHOOLS OF PSYCHOLOGY

 Voluntarism and Structuralism,

 Functionalism

 Behaviourism

 Gestalt psychology

 Psychoanalysis

 Humanistic Psychology

THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN PSYCHOLOGY

 The answer depends on how we define psychology. The origins of the field we call
psychology can be traced to two different time periods, some 2000 years apart. Thus,
psychology is among the oldest of all scholarly disciplines as well as one of the
newest. A History of Modern Psychology, we are dealing with two disciplines, history
and psychology, using the methods of history to describe and understand the
development of psychology. Historiography: The principles, methods, and
philosophical issues of historical research.
  While psychology did not emerge as a separate discipline until the late 1800s, its
earliest history can be traced back to the time of the early Greeks. During the 17th-
century, the French philosopher Rene Descartes introduced the idea of dualism, which
asserted that the mind and body were two entities that interact to form the human
experience.

 Many other issues still debated by psychologists today, such as the relative
contributions of nature vs. nurture, are rooted in these early philosophical traditions.

 So what makes psychology different from philosophy? While early philosophers

relied on methods such as observation and logic, today’s psychologists utilize
scientific methodologies to study and draw conclusions about human thought and
behavior.

 Physiology also contributed to psychology’s eventual emergence as a scientific

discipline. Early physiological research on the brain and behavior had a dramatic
impact on psychology, ultimately contributing to applying scientific methodologies to
the study of human thought and behavior.

PSYCHOLOGY EMERGES AS A SEPARATE DISCIPLINE

The story of psychology has no clear beginning. The word psychology is derived from two
Greek roots: psyche, meaning “mind,” and logos, meaning “study” or “knowledge.” So it is
not surprising that serious inquiries into psychology can be traced back to ancient Greece,
when philosophers began to record their thoughts about the nature of mind and behavior.

In ancient Greece, the philosopher-teacher Socrates (469–399 b.c.e.) and his student Plato
(428–348 b.c.e.) concluded that mind is separable from body and continues after the body
dies, and that knowledge is innate—born within us. Unlike Socrates and Plato, who derived
principles by logic, Plato’s student Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.) had a love of data.
An intellectual ancestor of today’s scientists, Aristotle derived principles from careful
observations. Moreover, he said knowledge is not pre-existing instead it grows from the
experiences stored in our memories. The next 2000 years brought few enduring new insights
into human nature, but that changed in the 1600s, when modern science began to flourish.
With it came new theories of human behavior, and new versions of the ancient debates. A
frail but brilliant
Frenchman named René Descartes (1595–1650) agreed with Socrates and Plato about the
existence of innate ideas and mind’s being “entirely distinct from body” and able to survive
its death. Descartes’ concept of mind forced him to conjecture, as people have ever since,
how the immaterial mind and physical body communicate. A scientist as well as a
philosopher, Descartes dissected animals and concluded that the fluid in the brain’s cavities
contained “animal spirits.” These spirits, he surmised, flowed from the brain through what we
call the nerves (which he thought were hollow) to the muscles, provoking movement.
Memories formed as experiences opened pores in the brain into which the animal spirits also
flowed. Descartes was right that nerve paths are important and that they enable reflexes. Yet,
genius though he was, and standing upon the knowledge accumulated from 99+ percent of
our human history, he hardly had a clue of what today’s average 12-year-old knows. Indeed,
most of the scientific story of our self-exploration—the story told in this book—has been
written in but the last historical eye-blink of human time.
Meanwhile, across the English Channel in Britain, science was taking a more down to- earth
form, centered on experiment, experience, and common-sense judgment. Francis Bacon
(1561–1626) became one of the founders of modern science, and his influence lingers in the
experiments of today’s psychological science. Bacon also was fascinated by the human mind
and its failings. Thus Psychology remained largely an interest of philosophers, theologians,
and writers for several thousand years. It did not begin to emerge as a scientific discipline
until the late nineteenth century.

VOLUNTARISM

DEFINE:
Voluntarism, a term he derived from the word volition, defined as the act or power of
willing. Voluntarism refers to the power of the will to organize the mind’s contents into
higher-level thought processes

THE FOUNDING FATHER of Modern Psychology- Wilhelm Wundt (proposed the 1st
school in psychology)

HISTORY and TIMELINE:

Wilhelm Wundt spent his early years in small towns near Mannheim, Germany. His
childhood was lonely (his older brother was at boarding school), and his sole diversion
seemed to be the fantasy of becoming a famous writer. His grades in school were poor.
Although he always disliked school, he worked to develop his intellectual interests and
abilities. By the time he graduated at the age of 19, he was prepared for university studies.
Wundt decided to become a physician, to pursue the twin goals of working in science and
earning a living. He undertook medical training at the University of Tübingen and the
University of Heidelberg; at the latter he studied anatomy, physiology, physics, medicine, and
chemistry. He came to realize that the practice of medicine would not be to his liking, and he
changed his major to physiology. While engrossed in his research in physiology, Wundt
began to conceive of the study of psychology as an independent experimental scientific
discipline. He first outlined his ideas in a book entitled Contributions to the Theory of
Sensory Perception, published in sections between 1858 and 1862. He described his own
original experiments, conducted in a makeshift laboratory built in his house, and he described
the methods he considered appropriate for the new psychology, using the term “experimental
psychology” for the first time. Along with Fechner’s Elements of Psychophysics (1860),
Wundt’s Contributions book is considered to mark the literary birth of the new science. The
following year, Wundt published Lectures on the Minds of Men and Animals (1863). During
the years from 1880 to 1891, he wrote on ethics, logic, and systematic philosophy. He
published the second edition of Principles of Physiological Psychology in 1880 and the third
edition in 1887, and he continued to contribute articles to his journal.
Principles of Physiological Psychology, published in two parts in 1873 and 1874. Wundt
revised the book in six editions over 37 years, the last published in 1911. In 1906, Wundt
was able to retitle his journal Psychological Studies from physiological studies. Cultural
Psychology, published between 1900 and 1920. (The title is often translated inaccurately as
Folk Psychology.) Cultural psychology dealt with the various stages of human
mental development as manifested in language, art, myths, social customs, law, and morals.
The implications of this publication for psychology are of greater significance than the actual
content; it served to divide the new science of psychology into two major parts: the
experimental and the social. Analyses of his productivity showed that he wrote 54,000 pages
between 1853 and 1920, an output of 2.2 pages per day. Wundt continued with his systematic
research and theoretical work until his death in 1920.

CONTRIBUTIONS:
Psychology’s history as a science dates back only about 130 years to Leipzig, Germany.
There, Wilhelm Wundt (VILL-helm Voont), the “father of psychology,” set up a laboratory
in 1879 to study conscious experience.

 What happens, he wondered, when we experience sensations, images, and feelings?

To find out, Wundt systematically observed and measured stimuli of various kinds (lights,
sounds, weights). A stimulus is any physical energy that affects a person and evokes a
response (stimulus: singular; stimuli [STIM-you-lie]: plural). Wundt then used introspection,
or “looking inward,” to probe his reactions to various stimuli. (Stop reading, close your eyes,
carefully examine your thoughts, feelings, and sensations, and you will be introspecting.)

 The Method of Introspection

Wundt described his psychology as the science of conscious experience. Therefore, the
method of a scientific psychology must involve observations of conscious experience. But
only the person having such an experience can observe it. Wundt decided that the method of
observation must necessarily involve introspection—the examination of one’s own mental
state. Wundt referred to this method as internal perception. (The method of introspection did
not originate with Wundt; its use can be traced to Socrates.) Introspection: Examination of
one’s own mind to inspect and report on personal thoughts or feelings.

Introspection, or internal perception, as practiced in Wundt’s laboratory at the University of

Leipzig, was conducted under Wundt’s explicit rules and conditions:
• Observers must be able to determine when the process is to be introduced.
• Observers must be in a state of readiness or strained attention.
• It must be possible to repeat the observation several times.
•It must be possible to vary the experimental conditions in terms of the controlled
manipulation of the stimuli.
Wundt believed that his form of introspection—internal perception—would provide all the
raw data necessary for the problems of interest to psychology, just as external perception
provided data for sciences such as astronomy and chemistry. To achieve that goal, Wundt
insisted that his observers be carefully and rigorously trained to perform internal perceptions
properly. Observers were required to complete a staggering 10,000 individual introspective
observations before they were judged sufficiently prepared to supply meaningful data for
Wundt’s laboratory research. Wundt rarely accepted the kind of qualitative introspection in
which subjects simply described their inner experiences. Most of Wundt’s research involved
objective measurements provided by sophisticated laboratory equipment, and many of these
measurements were of reaction times recorded quantitatively. One historian investigated
Wundt’s use of qualitative versus quantitative data.

 Elements of Conscious Experience

Wundt outlined his goals:

• analyze conscious processes into their basic elements,
• discover how these elements are synthesized or organized, and
• determine the laws of connection governing the organization of the elements.

Sensations. Wundt suggested that sensations were one of two elementary forms of
experience. Sensations are aroused whenever a sense organ is stimulated and the resulting
impulses reach the brain. Sensations can be classified by intensity, duration, and sense
modality.

Feelings. Feelings are the other elementary form of experience. Sensations and feelings are
simultaneous aspects of immediate experience. Feelings are the subjective complements of
sensations but do not arise directly from a sense organ. Sensations are accompanied by
certain feeling qualities; when sensations combine to form a more complex state, a feeling
quality will result.
Wundt proposed a tridimensional theory of feelings, based on his personal introspective
[Link]’s explanation for feeling states based on three dimensions:
 pleasure/displeasure,
 tension/relaxation, and
 excitement /depression.
Every elementary feeling could be effectively described by determining its location within
this three-dimensional space—that is, its position on each of the dimensions.

Method: Working with a metronome (a device that can be programmed to produce audible
clicks at regular intervals), he reported that after experiencing a series of clicks, he felt that
some rhythmic patterns were more pleasant or agreeable than others. He concluded that part
of the experience of any pattern of sound is a subjective feeling of pleasure or displeasure.
(Note that the subjective feeling occurred at the same time as the physical sensations
associated with the clicks.) Wundt then suggested that this feeling state could be located on a
continuum ranging from highly agreeable to highly disagreeable. Because Wundt considered
emotions to be complex compounds of elementary feelings, if one could pinpoint the
elementary feelings within the three-dimensional grid, then emotions could be reduced to
these mental elements .[Link]

 Organizing the Elements of Conscious Experience

Despite his emphasis on the elements of conscious experience, Wundt did recognize that
when we look at objects in the real world, our perceptions have a unity or wholeness. For
example, when we look out the window we see a tree, not individual sensations or conscious
experiences of brightness, colour, or shape that trained observers in a laboratory report as a
result of their introspections. Our visual experience in the real world comprehends the tree as
a whole, not as the elementary sensations and feelings that constitute the tree. How is this
unified conscious experience compounded from the elementary parts? Wundt explained the
phenomenon through his doctrine of apperception. The process of organizing mental
elements into a whole is a creative synthesis (also known as the law of psychic resultants),
which creates new properties from the building up or combining of the elements. Wundt
wrote: “Every psychic compound has characteristics which are by no means the mere sum of
the characteristics of the elements”
The difficulty was that Wundt’s psychology, with its focus on describing
and organizing the elements of consciousness, was not appropriate for solving real-world
problems. Perhaps that was one reason why Wundt’s psychology did not take root in the
pragmatic climate of the United States. Wundt approached psychology as a pure academic
science; he had no interest in applying his psychology to practical concern.

CRITICISMS OF WUNDTIAN PSYCHOLOGY

1. Method of introspection-Experiments using the introspection technique cannot always
yield agreement because introspective observation is self-observation—decidedly a
private experience
 2. Wundt’s personal opinions on political matters also offered a target for criticism and
may explain what one historian described as “the precipitous decline of Wundtian
psychology between the World Wars [1918–1939]. He blamed England for starting
the war, and he defended Germany’s invasion of Belgium as an act of self-defense.
These statements were self-serving and incorrect, and they turned many American
psychologists against Wundt and his psychology.
3. His political stance may also have cost him a Nobel Prize. Wundt had been nominated
twice before, in 1907 and 1909, and in 1915 was one of six finalists. Although he was
“the best known psychologist in the world at the time and a person of considerable
accomplishments” he did not win.
4. During Wundt’s later years, two other schools of thought arose in Europe to
overshadow his views: Gestalt psychology in Germany and psychoanalysis in Austria.
The prevailing economic and political contextual forces contributed to the
disappearance of the Wundtian system in Germany. Wundt’s laboratory, at which he
trained the first generation of psychologists, was destroyed during World War II in a
British and American bombing raid on December 4, 1943. Thus, the nature, content,
form, and even the home of Wundtian psychology have been lost.

PRECEDENT OF VOLUNTARISM
Early American psychologists, most of whom had studied under Wundt at Leipzig,
returned to the United States and made of Wundtian psychology something uniquely
American.
 Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909)

A German psychologist working alone, isolated from any academic center of psychology,
Began to experiment successfully on the higher mental processes. Hermann Ebbinghaus
became the first psychologist to investigate
learning and memory experimentally. Fechner’s mathematical approach to psychological
phenomena was an exciting revelation to Ebbinghaus, and he resolved to do for psychology
what Fechner had done for psychophysics, using rigid and systematic measurement. His goal
was nothing less than to apply the experimental method to the higher mental processes.
Research:
 On learning and forgetting
(Ebbinghaus’s focus was different; he began his study with the initial formation of the
associations. In this way he could control the conditions under which the chains of ideas were
formed and thus make the study of learning more objective.) For the basic measure of
learning Ebbinghaus adapted a technique from the associationists, who had proposed
frequency of associations as a condition of recall. Ebbinghaus reasoned that the difficulty of
learning material could be measured by this frequency, that is, by counting the number of
repetitions needed for one perfect reproduction of the material. Ebbinghaus approached the
problem of measuring memory similarly, by counting the number of trials or repetitions
required to learn the material. For the subject matter of his research—the material to be
learned— Ebbinghaus invented what are known today as nonsense syllables (Syllables
presented in a meaningless series to study memory processes)., which have revolutionized the
study of learning. Ebbinghaus designed several studies using his meaningless series of
syllables to determine the influence of various experimental conditions on human learning
and retention. One study investigated the difference between the speed of memorizing lists of
syllables versus the speed of memorizing material that had more apparent meaning.
Ebbinghaus studied other variables he expected would also influence learning and memory:
the effects of overlearning (repeating the lists more times than necessary for one perfect
reproduction), associations within lists, reviewing material, and the time elapsed between
learning and recall. His research on the effect of time yielded the famous Ebbinghaus
forgetting curve, which shows that material is forgotten rapidly in the first few hours after
learning and more slowly thereafter.
Contributions:
 1885- He published his research results in a book entitled On Memory: A
Contribution to Experimental Psychology , which may be the most brilliant single
investigation in the history of experimental psychology.
 1890- Journal called the Journal of Psychology and Physiology of the Sense Organs
 In 1902, Ebbinghaus wrote a successful textbook, The Principles of Psychology.

After Ebbinghaus’s death from pneumonia in 1909, the books were revised by other writers.
Ebbinghaus did not make theoretical contributions to psychology. He created no formal
system and had no disciples. But was known for his contributions in learning and memory.

 Franz Brentano (1838–1917)

Brentano is considered one of the more important early Psychologists because of his
diverse interests. We will see that he is an intellectual precursor of the Gestalt
psychology and humanistic psychology schools. Also, he shared with Wundt the goal
of making psychology a science. Whereas Wundt’s psychology was experimental,
Brentano’s was empirical. According to Brentano, the primary method for psychology
should be observation, not experimentation, although he did not totally reject the
experimental method.
 Contributions:
The Study of Mental Acts
Act psychology: Brentano’s system of psychology, which focused on mental activities (e.g.,
seeing) rather than on mental contents (e.g., that which is seen). He argued that a distinction
should be drawn between experience as a structure or content, and experience as an activity.
For example, in looking at a red flower, the sensory content of redness is different from the
act of experiencing or sensing redness. To Brentano, that act of experiencing redness is an
example of the true subject matter of psychology. He stated that color is a physical quality,
but the act of seeing the color is a mental quality or activity. The study of mental acts
required observation on a larger scale. Thus we see Brentano’s preference for more empirical
than experimental methods for his act psychology.
Brentano advanced two ways to study mental acts:
1. through memory (recalling the mental processes involved in a particular mental state),
2. through imagination (imagining a mental state and observing the accompanying mental
processes).
Although Brentano’s position attracted its share of followers, Wundtian psychology
maintained prominence.

 Carl Stumpf (1848–1936)

 As a student at the University of Würzburg, he became interested in Brentano’s work
and focused his attention on philosophy and science. At Brentano’s suggestion,
Stumpf attended the University of Göttingen, where he received his doctoral degree in
1868. Stumpf held a number of academic appointments over the following years
while he undertook his work in the new psychology.
 In 1894, Stumpf was awarded the most prized professorship in German psychology,
an appointment at the University of Berlin. His years there were extremely
productive.
 He developed his original laboratory of three small rooms into a large and important
institute.
 Although his research programs never equaled Wundt’s in scope, Stumpf has been
considered Wundt’s major rival. Stumpf trained two of the psychologists who later
founded Gestalt psychology.
 Lifelong interest in music, is Psychology of Tone, published in two volumes (1883,
1890).

Contribution:
Stumpf argued that the primary data for psychology are phenomena. Phenomenology, the
kind of introspection Stumpf favored, refers to the examination of unbiased experience, that
is, experience just as it occurs. He disagreed with Wundt about breaking experience down
into elements. Stumpf believed that to analyze experience by reducing it to mental contents or
elements is to make that experience artificial and abstract and thus no longer natural.
Stumpf initiated the debate on a theoretical level, but Wundt made it personal, spicing the
controversy with “scathing invectives” (Stumpf, 1930/1961, p. 441). Essentially, the question
was: Whose introspectionists’ reports are more credible? When reporting on experiencing
musical tones, should we accept the results of Wundt’s highly trained laboratory observers or
of Stumpf’s expert musicians? Stumpf simply refused to accept the results obtained at
Wundt’s Leipzig laboratory.
He founded the Berlin Association for Child Psychology. And he published a theory of
emotion that attempted to reduce feelings to sensations, an idea relevant to contemporary
cognitive theories of emotion. Thus, Stumpf was one of several German psychologists
working independently of Wundt to expand psychology’s boundaries.

 Oswald Külpe (1862–1915)

Stumpf’s introspective method that examined experience as it occurred and did not try
to reduce experience to elementary components. Also, an approach to knowledge
 based on an unbiased description o immediate experience as it occurs, not analyzed or
reduced to elements.

Contributions :

Külpe developed a method he called systematic experimental introspection, which

involved, first, performing a complex task (such as establishing logical connections between
concepts), then having the subjects provide a retrospective report about their cognitive
processes during the task. In other words, subjects undertook some mental process, such as
thinking or judging, after which they examined how they had thought or judged.
In summary, then, Külpe’s approach was aimed directly at investigating what was going on in
a subject’s mind during a conscious experience. His stated goals were to expand Wundt’s
conception of psychology’s subject matter to encompass the higher mental processes, and to
refine the introspective method

STRUCTURALISM

DEFINE:

 Structuralism is a theory of consciousness that seeks to analyze the elements of

mental experiences, such as sensations, mental images, and feelings, and how these
elements combine to form more complex experiences.

FOUNDER: Edward Bradford Titchener (1867–1927)

 Structuralism was further developed by Edward B. Titchener, Wundt's student

LIFE HISTORY:

Born in Chichester, England, into a family with impressive lineage but little money.
Titchener relied on his considerable intellectual abilities to win scholarships to college. He
attended Malvern College and later Oxford University, where he studied philosophy and the
classics and worked as a research assistant in physiology. He won many academic prizes
along the way and was seen as a brilliant student with a flair for languages, including Latin,
Greek, German, French, and Italian. Titchener became interested in Wundtian psychology
while at Oxford, he would have to journey to Leipzig—the mecca for scientific pilgrims—to
study under Wundt himself. Once Titchener received his doctorate, he hoped to become the
English pioneer of Wundt’s new experimental psychology. He left England for Cornell
University in the United States, to teach psychology and direct the laboratory. He was then 25
years old, and he remained at Cornell for the rest of his life. He died of a brain tumor at age
60.
TIMELINE 0f Tichener:
 Titchener spent the years from 1893 to 1900 establishing his laboratory, conducting
research, and writing scholarly articles; he eventually published more than 60.
 He supervised more than 50 doctoral candidates in psychology.
 Titchener translated Wundt’s books from German into English. By the time he had
completed work on the third edition of Wundt’s Principles of Physiological
Psychology, Wundt had already finished the fourth edition. Titchener translated the
fourth edition, only to learn that the tireless Wundt had published a fifth edition.
 Titchener’s own books include An Outline of Psychology (1896),
 Primer of Psychology (1898b),
 Four-volume Experimental Psychology: A Manual of Laboratory Practice (1901–
1905).
 Elected to the APA by the charter members in 1892
 More than one-third of the 56 doctorates Titchener awarded were to women though he
did not allow female students in his lab.
 The first woman to earn a doctoral degree in psychology was Margaret
FloyWashburn.
 In 1929, two years after Titchener’s death, the Experimentalist were reborn as the
Society of Experimental Psychologists, which is still active today.

CONTRIBUTIONS:

 Experiment
 Swallow the Rubber Tube—A College Prank?- FINDINGS-report sensations as
they were experiencing-
 The Content of Conscious Experience

 According to Titchener, the subject matter of psychology is conscious experience as

that experience is dependent on the person who is actually experiencing it. For
example, light and sound can be studied by physicists and by psychologists. Physicists
examine the phenomena from the standpoint of the physical processes involved,
whereas psychologists consider the light and sound in terms of how
humans observe and experience these phenomena.
 In studying conscious experience, Titchener warned against committing what he
called the stimulus error, which confuses the mental process with the object we are
observing. For example, observers who see an apple and then describe that object as
an apple—instead of reporting the elements of color, brightness, and shape they are
experiencing— are guilty of committing the stimulus error. The object of our
observation is not to be described in everyday language but rather in terms of the
elementary conscious content of the experience.
 Titchener defined consciousness as the sum of our experiences asthey exist at a given
time. Mind is the sum of our experiences accumulated over a lifetime. Consciousness
and mind are similar, except that consciousness involves mental processes occurring
at the moment whereas mind involves the total of these processes.
  Structural psychology as Titchener envisioned it was a pure science. He was not
concerned with applying psychological knowledge. Psychology, he said, was not in
the business of curing sick minds Of reforming society. Psychology’s only legitimate
purpose was to discover the facts of the structure of the mind. He believed scientists
should remain free of speculation about the practical worth of their work. For this
reason he opposed the development of child psychology, animal psychology, and all
other areas that did not fit with his introspective experimental psychology of the
content of conscious experience.
 Elementary states of consciousness: Sensations (sights, sounds, tastes), Images
(components of thoughts), and Affections (components of emotions).

 Structuralism looked to examine the adult mind in terms of analyzing the basic
elements of thoughts and sensations, and afterward to discover the manner by which
these segments fit together in complex structures.
 The Elements of Consciousness
Titchener posed three essential problems for psychology:
1. to reduce conscious processes to their simplest components,

2. to determine laws by which these elements of consciousness were associated, and

3. to connect the elements with their physiological conditions.

 Introspection

 Titchener’s form of introspection, or self-observation, relied on observers who were

rigorously trained to describe the elements of their conscious state rather than
reporting the observed or experience stimulus by a familiar name.
Subjects in Titchener’s laboratory introspected on a variety of stimuli and provided lengthy,
detailed observations of the elements of their experiences. For example, a chord would be
struck on a piano; the chord consisted of three individual notes sounded together. The
subjects would report on how many separate tones they could distinguish, the mental
characteristics of the sounds, and whatever other basic atoms or elements of consciousness
they could detect.

Thus, the aims of Titchener’s structural psychology coincide with those of the natural
sciences.

Titchener defined three elementary states of consciousness: sensations, images, and affective
states.
Sensations are the basic elements of perception and occur in the sounds, sights, smells, and
other experiences evoked by physical objects in our environment. Images are the elements of
ideas, and they are found in the process that reflects experiences that are not actually present
at the moment, such as a memory of a past experience. Affective states, or affections, are the
elements of emotion and are found in experiences such as love, hate, and sadness.
To the Wundtian attributes of quality and intensity, Titchener added duration and clearness.
He considered these four to be fundamental to all sensations in that they are present, to some
degree, in all experience.
• Quality is the characteristic—such as “cold” or “red”—that clearly distinguishes each
element from every other element.
• Intensity refers to a sensation’s strength, weakness, loudness, or brightness.
• Duration is the course of a sensation over time.
• Clearness refers to the role of attention in conscious experience; experience that is the focus
of our attention is clearer than experience toward which our attention is not directed.

Sensations and images possess all four of these attributes, but affective states have only three:
quality, intensity, and duration.
By the 1920s, Titchener was questioning the term “structural psychology,” and he took to
calling his approach an existential psychology. He was reconsidering his introspective
method in favor of a phenomenological
approach,
Criticisms of Structuralism
 Titchener believed he was establishing a foundation for psychology, but his efforts
proved to be only one phase in its history. When Titchener died, the era of structuralism
collapsed. That it was sustained for so long is an effective tribute to his commanding
personality.
 Titchener apparently had difficulty defining exactly what he meant by the
introspective method
 A second point of attack on Titchener’s methodology involves the question of
precisely what the structuralist introspectors were trained to do.

FUNCTIONALISM pls refer ppt also

Darwin’s Influence on Psychology

Darwin’s work in the latter part of the nineteenth century influenced contemporary
psychology in the following ways:
•a focus on animal psychology, which formed the basis of comparative psychology;
• an emphasis on the functions rather than the structure of consciousness;
• the acceptance of methodology and data from many fields; and
• a focus on the description and measurement of individual differences.

Psychologists realized that the study of animal behavior was vital to their understanding of
human behavior, and they focused their research on the mental functioning of animals, thus
introducing a new topic into the psychology laboratory.
 BEHAVIOURISM

Emerging in contrast to psychodynamic psychology, behaviourism focuses on observable

behaviour as a means to studying the human psyche. The primary tenet of behaviourism is
that psychology should concern itself with the observable behaviour of people and animals,
not with unobservable events that take place in their minds. The behaviourists criticized the
mentalists for their inability to demonstrate empirical evidence to support their claims. The
behaviourist school of thought maintains that behaviours can be described scientifically
without recourse either to internal physiological events or to hypothetical constructs such as
thoughts and beliefs, making behaviour a more productive area of focus for understanding
human or animal psychology.

The main influences of behaviourist psychology were Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936), who
investigated classical conditioning though often disagreeing with behaviourism or
behaviourists; Edward Lee Thorndike (1874-1949), who introduced the concept of
reinforcement and was the first to apply psychological principles to learning; John B. Watson
(1878-1958), who rejected introspective methods and sought to restrict psychology to
experimental methods; and B.F. Skinner (1904-1990), who conducted research on operant
conditioning.

The first of these, Ivan Pavlov, is known for his work on one important type of
learning, classical conditioning. As we learn, we alter the way we perceive our environment,
the way we interpret the incoming stimuli, and therefore the way we interact, or behave.
Pavlov, a Russian physiologist, actually discovered classical conditioning accidentally while
doing research on the digestive patterns in dogs. During his experiments, he would put meat
powder in the mouth of a dog who had tubes inserted into various organs to measure bodily
responses. Pavlov discovered that the dog began to salivate before the meat powder was
presented to it. Soon the dog began to salivate as soon as the person feeding it entered the
room. Pavlov quickly began to gain interest in this phenomenon and abandoned his digestion
research in favour of his now famous classical conditioning study.

Basically, Pavlov’s findings support the idea that we develop responses to certain stimuli that
are not naturally occurring. When we touch a hot stove, our reflex pulls our hand back. We
do this instinctively with no learning involved. The reflex is merely a survival instinct.
Pavlov discovered that we make associations that cause us to generalize our response to one
stimuli onto a neutral stimuli it is paired with. In other words, hot burner = ouch; stove =
burner; therefore, stove = ouch.

In his research with the dogs, Pavlov began pairing a bell sound with the meat powder and
found that even when the meat powder was not presented, a dog would eventually begin to
salivate after hearing the bell. In this case, since the meat powder naturally results in
salivation, these two variables are called the unconditioned stimulus (UCS) and
the unconditioned response (UCR), respectively. In the experiment, the bell and salivation
are not naturally occurring; the dog is conditioned to respond to the bell. Therefore, the bell is
considered the conditioned stimulus (CS), and the salivation to the bell, the conditioned
response (CR).

Many of our behaviours today are shaped by the pairing of stimuli. The smell of a cologne,
the sound of a certain song, or the occurrence of a specific day of the year can trigger distinct
memories, emotions, and associations. When we make these types of associations, we are
experiencing classical conditioning.

Operant conditioning is another type of learning that refers to how an organism operates on
the environment or how it responds to what is presented to it in the environment (Figure
2.12).

F
igure 2.12 Operant Conditioning.

Examples of operant conditioning include the following:

 Reinforcement means to strengthen, and is used in psychology to refer to any stimulus which
strengthens or increases the probability of a specific response. For example, if you want your
dog to sit on command, you may give him a treat every time he sits for you. The dog will
eventually come to understand that sitting when told to will result in a treat. This treat is
reinforcing the behaviour because the dog likes it and will result in him sitting when
instructed to do so. There are four types of reinforcement: positive, negative, punishment, and
extinction.
 Positive reinforcement involves adding something in order to increase a response.
For example, adding a treat will increase the response of sitting; adding praise will increase
the chances of your child cleaning his or her room. The most common types of positive
reinforcement are praise and reward, and most of us have experienced this as both the giver
and receiver.
 Negative reinforcement involves taking something negative away in order to
increase a response. Imagine a teenager who is nagged by his parents to take out the garbage
week after week. After complaining to his friends about the nagging, he finally one day
performs the task and, to his amazement, the nagging stops. The elimination of this negative
stimulus is reinforcing and will likely increase the chances that he will take out the garbage
next week.
 Punishment refers to adding something aversive in order to decrease a behaviour.
The most common example of this is disciplining (e.g., spanking) a child for misbehaving.
The child begins to associate being punished with the negative behaviour. The child does not
like the punishment and, therefore, to avoid it, he or she will stop behaving in that manner.
 Extinction involves removing something in order to decrease a behaviour. By having
something taken away, a response is decreased.

Research has found positive reinforcement is the most powerful of any of these types of
operant conditioning responses. Adding a positive to increase a response not only works
better, but allows both parties to focus on the positive aspects of the situation. Punishment,
when applied immediately following the negative behaviour, can be effective, but results in
extinction when it is not applied consistently. Punishment can also invoke other negative
responses such as anger and resentment.

Thorndike’s (1898) work with cats and puzzle boxes illustrates the concept of conditioning.
The puzzle boxes were approximately 50 cm long, 38 cm wide, and 30 cm tall (Figure 2.13).
Thorndike’s puzzle boxes were built so that the cat, placed inside the box, could escape only
if it pressed a bar or pulled a lever, which caused the string attached to the door to lift the
weight and open the door. Thorndike measured the time it took the cat to perform the
required response (e.g., pulling the lever). Once it had learned the response he gave the cat a
reward, usually food.
 Figure 2.13 Thorndike’s
Puzzle Box.

Thorndike found that once a cat accidentally stepped on the switch, it would then press the
switch faster in each succeeding trial inside the puzzle box. By observing and recording how
long it took a variety of animals to escape through several trials, Thorndike was able to graph
the learning curve (graphed as an S-shape). He observed that most animals had difficulty
escaping at first, then began to escape faster and faster with each successive puzzle box trial,
and eventually levelled off in their escape times. The learning curve also suggested that
different species learned in the same way but at different speeds. His finding was that cats,
for instance, consistently showed gradual learning.

From his research with puzzle boxes, Thorndike was able to create his own theory of learning
(1932):
1. Learning is incremental.
2. Learning occurs automatically.
3. All animals learn the same way.
4. Law of effect. If an association is followed by satisfaction, it will be strengthened,
and if it is followed by annoyance, it will be weakened.
5. Law of use. The more often an association is used, the stronger it becomes.
6. Law of disuse. The longer an association is unused, the weaker it becomes.
7. Law of recency. The most recent response is most likely to reoccur.
8. Multiple response. An animal will try multiple responses (trial and error) if the first
response does not lead to a specific state of affairs.
9. Set or attitude. Animals are predisposed to act in a specific way.
10. Prepotency of elements. A subject can filter out irrelevant aspects of a problem and
focus on and respond to significant elements of a problem.
11. Response by analogy. Responses from a related or similar context may be used in a
new context.
12. Identical elements theory of transfer. The more similar the situations are, the
greater the amount of information that will transfer. Similarly, if the situations have nothing
in common, information learned in one situation will not be of any value in the other
situation.
13. Associative shifting. It is possible to shift any response from occurring with one
stimulus to occurring with another stimulus. Associative shift maintains that a response is
first made to situation A, then to AB, and then finally to B, thus shifting a response from one
condition to another by associating it with that condition.
14. Law of readiness. A quality in responses and connections that results in readiness to
act. Behaviour and learning are influenced by the readiness or unreadiness of responses, as
well as by their strength.
15. Identifiability. Identification or placement of a situation is a first response of the
nervous system, which can recognize it. Then connections may be made to one another or to
another response, and these connections depend on the original identification. Therefore, a
large amount of learning is made up of changes in the identifiability of situations.
16. Availability. The ease of getting a specific response. For example, it would be easier
for a person to learn to touch his or her nose or mouth with closed eyes than it would be to
draw a line five inches long with closed eyes.

John B. Watson promoted a change in psychology through his address, Psychology as the
Behaviorist Views It (1913), delivered at Columbia University. Through his behaviourist
approach, Watson conducted research on animal behaviour, child rearing, and advertising
while gaining notoriety for the controversial “Little Albert” experiment. Immortalized in
introductory psychology textbooks, this experiment set out to show how the recently
discovered principles of classical conditioning could be applied to condition fear of a white
rat into Little Albert, an 11-month-old boy. Watson and Rayner (1920) first presented to the
boy a white rat and observed that the boy was not afraid. Next they presented him with a
white rat and then clanged an iron rod. Little Albert responded by crying. This second
presentation was repeated several times. Finally, Watson and Rayner presented the white rat
by itself and the boy showed fear. Later, in an attempt to see if the fear transferred to other
objects, Watson presented Little Albert with a rabbit, a dog, and a fur coat. He cried at the
sight of all of them. This study demonstrated how emotions could become conditioned
responses.

Burrhus Frederic Skinner called his particular brand of behaviourism radical

behaviourism (1974). Radical behaviourism is the philosophy of the science of behaviour. It
seeks to understand behaviour as a function of environmental histories of reinforcing
consequences. This applied behaviourism does not accept private events such as thinking,
perceptions, and unobservable emotions in a causal account of an organism’s behaviour.

While a researcher at Harvard, Skinner invented the operant conditioning chamber, popularly
referred to as the Skinner box (Figure 2.14), used to measure responses of organisms (most
often rats and pigeons) and their orderly interactions with the environment. The box had a
lever and a food tray, and a hungry rat inside the box could get food delivered to the tray by
pressing the lever. Skinner observed that when a rat was first put into the box, it would
wander around, sniffing and exploring, and would usually press the bar by accident, at which
point a food pellet would drop into the tray. After that happened, the rate of bar pressing
would increase dramatically and remain high until the rat was no longer hungry.

Figure 2.14 Skinner Box.

Negative reinforcement was also exemplified by Skinner placing rats into an electrified
chamber that delivered unpleasant shocks. Levers to cut the power were placed inside these
boxes. By running a current through the box, Skinner noticed that the rats, after accidentally
pressing the lever in a frantic bid to escape, quickly learned the effects of the lever and
consequently used this knowledge to stop the currents both during and prior to electrical
shock. These two learned responses are known as escape learning and avoidance
learning (Skinner, 1938). The operant chamber for pigeons involved a plastic disk in which
the pigeon pecked in order to open a drawer filled with grain. The Skinner box led to the
principle of reinforcement, which is the probability of something occurring based on the
consequences of a behaviour.
 GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY
This insight—that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts—became the basic
assumption of Gestalt psychology, an influential school of thought that emerged out of
Germany during the first half of the 20th century (Gestalt is a German word for “form” or
“shape”).

Gestalt psychology was another product of psychologists working in Germany during the
early 20th century that was then imported and further developed in the United States. The
early roots of Gestalt psychology began outside of psychology in the disciplines of
philosophy and the natural sciences. Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) idea that
phenomenological experiences are not reducible to an elemental state, Edmund Husserl’s
(1838–1916) proposal of the existence of two new types of sensation, space form and time
form, and Christian von Ehrenfels’ (1859–1932) development of the concept of Gestalt
qualitaten (or form qualities), are described herein as providing the groundwork upon
which Gestalt psychology was built. The research of Max Wertheimer (1880–1943) is
discussed as the first evidence of research within psychology employing Gestalt concepts.
His research into the subject of apparent movement, a phenomenon Wertheimer called phi
phenomenon , is discussed.

Principles of Perceptual Organization.

Two psychologists, Kurt Koffka (1886–1941) and Wolfgang Köhler (1887–1967),
collaborated with Wertheimer in his initial research into the phi phenomenon and became,
along with Wertheimer, the premier researchers and theorists on Gestalt psychology. The
high degree of their influence on Gestalt psychology is evident from the nickname earned by
the threesome—the Gestalt Triumvirate.

Principles of Gestalt Psychology

Gestalt psychology helped introduce the idea that human perception is not just about seeing
what is actually present in the world around us. It is also heavily influenced by
our motivations and expectations.

Wertheimer created principles to explain how Gestalt perception functions. Some of the most
important principles of Gestalt theory are:

 Prägnanz: This foundational principle states that we naturally perceive things in their
simplest form or organization.
 Similarity: This Gestalt principle suggests that we naturally group similar items
together based on elements like color, size, and orientation. An example would be
grouping dogs based on whether they are small or large, or if they are big or small.

 Proximity: The principle of proximity states that objects near each other tend to be
viewed as a group.

 Continuity: According to this Gestalt principle, we perceive elements arranged on a

line or curve as related to each other, while elements that are not on the line or curve
are seen as separate.
  Closure: This suggests that elements that form a closed object will be perceived as a
group. We will even fill in missing information to create closure and make sense of an
object. An example of this Gestalt psychology principle is using negative space to
give the illusion that a particular shape exists when it doesn't.

 Common region: This Gestalt psychology principle states that we tend to group
objects together if they're located in the same bounded area. (For example, objects
inside a box tend to be considered a group.)

Uses for Gestalt Psychology

There are several uses for Gestalt psychology today, some of which include those related to
therapy, design, product development, and learning.

THE FOUNDING OF GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY

Gestalt psychologists emphasized the organization and unity of their data, defined in terms of
phenomena. The wholeness and unity of experience were examined in terms of forms. Gestalt
psychology was originated and nurtured by the writings of three persons: Max Wertheimer,
Wolfgang Köhler, and Kurt Koffka. All were educated in the exciting intellectual atmosphere
of early twentieth-century Germany, and all later fled Nazi persecution and immigrated to
America.

Max Wertheimer

Phi phenomenon: The illusion that two stationary flashing lights are moving from on place
to another.
The discovery of the phi phenomenon is attributed to Max Wertheimer, a German
psychologist who studied sensation and perception. To demonstrate how the phi phenomenon
works, researchers projected a line on the left side of a projector, and then a line on the right
side of the projector. They did this in rapid succession. When asked what they saw, people
observing indicated that they saw one line moving back and forth.
Basically, Wertheimer argued our brain filled in the space between the two lines, making it
seem like the line on the left was moving to the right, instead of the two stationary lines that
were shown. The faster these two lines are shown in succession, the more our brain tricks our
eyes into thinking it's one line moving back and forth.

The phi phenomenon is a perceptual illusion in which a disembodied perception of motion is

produced by a succession of still images. Confusingly, the term "phi phenomena" is used to
refer to both phi phenomenon and beta movement, a related illusion. This results in phi
phenomenon often being confused with beta movement. Computerized demonstrations of phi
phenomena often show a circular group of smaller circles, which switch on and off in quick
sequence. Phi is described as "pure movement" that always takes on the background color. In
beta movement, it appears that the circles (or other figures) are moving. With phi, the circles
appear stationary, but movement is perceived around them. The color phi phenomenon is a
more complex variation of beta movement, in which a perception of motion and color change
is produced by a sequence of still images of different colors. The discovery of phi phenomena
played a significant role in Gestalt psychology, as it changed the way perception was studied.
Illusions like the phi phenomenon continue to help scientists find new ways to study the way
the human brain and visual system perceive and interpret information.

Wolfgang köhler

Together with Wertheimer and Koffka, Köhler is one of the founders of Gestalt psychology.
His early work was as Wertheimer's subject in his foundational experiments. When World
War I interrupted their collaboration, Köhler spent his time studying problem solving in apes.
Later he returned to work with Wertheimer and Koffka on the development of Gestalt
theories.

Problem-solving

During his time at the Anthropoid Research Station in the Canary Islands, Köhler conducted
numerous experiments on chimpanzees. He was interested in how chimpanzees were able to
retrieve bananas suspended from the top of their enclosure. He observed them standing on
boxes, and even stacking boxes on top of each other, to get closer to the food.

Köhler's work with chimpanzees led him to believe that animals, like humans, are capable of
problem-solving. His studies revealed that apes are capable not only of trial-and-error
learning that Edward Thorndike had asserted was the basis of all animal learning, but are also
capable of what Köhler called "insight" learning—the "aha!" solution to problems. In this
extract from, The Mentality of Apes, he described the behavior of the chimpanzee Sultan
employing a stick that was too short to reach a piece of fruit as a tool to reach a longer stick,
which he then used to retrieve the fruit:

Sultan tries to reach the fruit with the smaller of the two sticks. Not succeeding, he tears at a
piece of wire that projects from the netting of his cage, but that too is in vain … He suddenly
picks up the little stick once more, goes up to the bars directly opposite the long stick,
scratches it towards him with the "auxiliary," seizes it, and goes with it to the point opposite
the objective (the fruit), which he secures. (Köhler 1917)

It has been pointed out, however, that Köhler did not control well for prior experience or the
possibility that the animals imitated each other's behavior. Thus, it is difficult to be sure that
some trial-and-error learning had not occurred before the apparent "insight" giving the
solution to the problem.

The key argument in Gestalt psychology is that the nature of the parts and the whole are
interdependent—the whole is not just the sum of its parts. For Köhler, the whole must be
examined to discover what its part are, rather than trying to abstract the whole from analyzing
the parts. For example, when one listens to music he hears the melody instead of separate
notes. We are directly aware of the configuration as a whole structure, its properties are
perceived subsequent and secondarily to the perception of the whole.

In this way Köhler, and the Gestalt movement, argued that complexities of perception and
cognition cannot be understood by an "atomistic" approach—analyzing components
separately and then combining them through some form of association. For Köhler, the
mental processes involved in bringing meaning are of a qualitatively different nature than the
individual responses to discrete stimuli. In fact, he believed that we interpret the parts based
on our understanding of what the whole means.

Köhler also attempted to derive a theory of values, including aesthetic value, on the basis of
the objective gestalt quality of "requiredness." This quality can be understood as the demand
that one portion of a perceptual field has for another. For example, a circle missing a small
segment tends to be perceived as a complete circle—the missing piece is "required" by the
whole. Köhler extended this notion to evaluation, arguing in his William James lectures
delivered at Harvard University in 1934 (The Place of Value in a World of Facts) that what is
right or ought to be is but a special case of this perceptual requiredness.

Kurt Koffka

Discoveries he made there were collected in the book by which he is best known: Principles of
Gestalt psychology .

Theory and other contributions

Human psychological development

The main contribution of Koffka to psychology was the application of the Gestalt theory to
research on human psychological [Link] main idea is that children perceive the
world holistically and respond to stimuli in the same way. Only with the years we acquire the
ability to distinguish the parts that make up each [Link] idea was then fundamental to the
advancement in the field of developmental psychology, as well as being the one that led him
to fame. However, Koffka also conducted research in other areas, such as learning,
perception, memory and thinking.

Foundation of the theory of Gestalt

On the other hand, Kurt Koffka was a key piece in the foundation of the Gestalt theory, one
of the first psychological currents of humanistic character. Together with Wertheimer and
Köhler, he created several specialized magazines, carried out research and disseminated his
ideas in a large number of articles and several books. Although Gestalt psychology has
changed a lot in recent decades, its foundations have remained intact since the time of
Koffka. Therefore, today is considered one of the most influential psychologists of all time.

Gestalt Therapy
Gestalt therapy is based on the idea that overall perception depends on the interaction
between many factors. Among these factors are our past experiences, current environment,
thoughts, feelings, and needs. Gestalt therapy involves key concepts such as awareness,
unfinished business, and personal responsibility.7

The main goal of Gestalt therapy is to help us focus on the present. While past context is
important for viewing yourself as a whole, a Gestalt therapist will encourage you to keep
your focus on your present experience.

Research suggests that Gestalt therapy is effective at treating symptoms

of depression and anxiety, and it may help people gain confidence and increase feelings
of self-efficacy and self-kindness.8 It is often a helpful way to structure group therapy.

The therapeutic process is reliant on the relationship between the client and therapist. As a
client, you must feel comfortable enough to develop a close partnership with your therapist,
and they must be able to create an unbiased environment where you can discuss your
thoughts and experiences.

What Is Therapeutic Rapport?

Design

Beginning in the 1920s, designers began incorporating Gestalt principles in their work.
Gestalt psychology led these designers to believe that we all share certain characteristics in
the way we perceive visual objects and that we all have a natural ability to see "good" design.

Designers embraced Gestalt concepts, using our perception of contrast, color, symmetry,
repetition, and proportion to create their work. Gestalt psychology influenced other design
concepts, such as:

 Figure-ground relationship: This describes the contrast between a focal object (like
a word, phrase, or image) and the negative space around it. Designers often use this to
create impact.
 Visual hierarchy: Designers use the way we perceive and group visual objects to
establish a visual hierarchy, ensuring that the most important word or image attracts
our attention first.

 Associativity: This concept involves the principle of proximity. Designers often use
this to determine where to place important objects, including text elements such as
headlines, captions, and lists.

Characteristics of Gestalt Theory

1. Holistic Approach: For analyzing the mental health, the Gestalt psychologists
adopted a holistic approach, instead of analyzing various dimensions in isolation.
2. Perceiving realities and structuring information based on past experiences: We
perceive realities differently and perceive information differently by being under the
influence of our previous experiences. We can adapt our mental processes or perceptions
as and when the new situation arises.
3. Opposed the then most prevalent schools of thought: Gestalt psychologists
opposed the then predominant schools of thought behaviourism and psychoanalytic
theory. Behaviourism was viewed to be quite narrowly focused by laying undue
emphasis on stimulus and responses. According to them, the behavioural school of
thought ignored the importance of mental processes or human intelligence. They equally
criticized psychoanalytic theory for being too passive and giving undue importance to
subconscious state of mind for influencing human behaviour.
4. Focus on Perception: The Gestalt psychologist’s main focus was on explaining the
laws of perception. According to them, with the help of perception we are able to acquire
worldly knowledge, learn to interact and establish connections with others.
Gestalt Laws of Perceptual Organization
The Gestalt psychologists have attempted to explain various laws of perception like laws of
Pragnanz, Similarity, Proximity, Closure and Continuity. Their belief that the whole is
greater than the sum of the parts has resulted in the discovery of various processes or
phenomena that take place during perception.

 The Law of similarity stresses on the fact that objects which appear to be similar are
usually grouped together and perceived in a holistic sense. This grouping can be done
on both auditory and visual stimuli.
 The Law of Proximity stresses on the fact that the objects which maintain physical
proximity or are near to each other are usually considered as members of the same
group.
 The Law of Pragnanz says that we tend to perceive the objects in the simplest
possible forms as our brain responds well to harmony instead of dissimilarities or
complexities.
 The Law of Closure highlights that we tend to close the open contours for providing
meaning to our interpretations in a holistic form. Our minds tend to fill the missing
information for creating meaningful shapes or making sense of the environment.
 Law of Continuity in Psychology refers to tendency of human minds to perceive
objects which maintain a uniform continuity or are engaged in either straight or curved
lines to form a smooth path.
The Gestalt psychology equally stressed on the fact that perception is not all about how we
interpret the worldly events by seeing the realities, but what we actually perceive is under the
influence of our expectations and motivation.

Applications of Gestalt Theory

1. Research of key psychological processes like perception and attention: The
Gestalt thinkers have incredible contributions in explaining the fundamental
 psychological processes like perception and attention. Their findings have laid that
foundation for further research and discoveries in this area for other thinkers. For
example, research work and advances made in this field, has helped the researchers and
people from various disciplines in carrying out various programmes more efficiently and
treat various perceptual problems with the help of therapies.
2. Problem Solving: Gestalt psychologists insisted on productive thinking attaining
newer insights or reaching the moment of eureka. Productive thinking according to
Wertheimer means using the creative insights or reorganizing the problems creatively for
finding out the solutions to those problems. Reproductive thinking on the other hand,
relies on the mechanical approach of applying the previously acquired knowledge in the
present to tackle the issues. Productive thinking is a proactive approach and reproductive
thinking is regarded to be reactive or mechanical.
3. Application of Gestalt Psychology in Education: Gestalt psychologists viewed
students’ more than just mere data recording entities and stressed on the fact that they
should learn to find out creative solutions on their own for dealing with various
difficulties. Practically, the Gestalt approach can be integrated in the area of education
for deeper research insights and solutions.
4. Communication and Gestalt Theory: Gestalt approach can be beneficial for those
who are engaged in the field of creative communication like artists, speakers, publicists,
designers, etc. By applying the perceptual laws they can win the attention of the
audience and be able to communicate the desired message effectively by appealing to the
senses or perception of the ultimate audience.

Kurt Lewin
Lewin was influenced by early Gestalt psychologists Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Kohler.
The Gestalt emphasis on holism appealed to Lewin and would later find expression in
his field theory. Unlike other Gestalt psychologists, however, Lewin was primarily concerned
with the practical applications of psychological theory. He conducted an impressive series of
studies on learning, behavior, and motivation, for which he received international
recognition. Lewin’s work first began to receive attention in the United States in 1929, when
an American student who had studied with him in Berlin published an English-language
paper on his ideas and research. That same year, Lewin was invited to give a lecture to the
International Congress of Psychology at Yale University. The following year, he was invited
to spend six-months at Stanford University as a visiting professor. When Hitler became
chancellor of Germany in January 1933, Lewin recognized that he and his family were at risk
because of their Jewish heritage. He resigned from his position at the University of Berlin and
emigrated with his family to the United States in August 1933. He obtained a two-year
position as acting professor of education in the School of Home Economics at Cornell
University.

Lewin’s Field Theory

Lewin incorporated Gestalt principles, physics, and mathematics in his development of field
theory. He believed that in order to get a clear understanding of human psychology, a human
being should be studied as a whole individual rather than a collection of parts. Lewin also
suggested that human behavior was the result of interactions between the individual’s
perception of self and his perception of his environment.

Lewin summarized his views on human behavior with the formula B=f(P,E). This formula
suggests that Behavior (B) is a Function (f) of the Person (P) and the Environment (E). It
should be noted that the environment (E) does not refer to the physical environment, but
rather, the psychological environment (that is, the environment as it is perceived by the
individual). Lewin also claimed that the environment and the person are interdependent. This
means that the person is considered to be a function of the environment or P=f(E), and the
environment is considered to be a function of the person or E=f(P). As the field of interaction
between the person and the environment is complex and dynamic, Lewin believed that in
order to study an individual thoroughly, the researcher has to take into account the
individual’s perception of the wider social, physical, economic, and political world in which
he lives.

Lewin is also known for developing the concept of “life space.” Life space refers to a
combination of all of the forces that are acting on an individual at a particular moment in time
to influence his behavior. Therefore, behavior can be expressed as a function of life space.
This additional formula for behavior is B=f(LS).

As B=f(P,E) and B=f(LS)

It is clear that (P,E) = (LS)

This expression shows that the interaction of the person with his environment produces his
life space.

Lewin claimed that psychic forces operate within the life space and are comparable to the
forces of physics. These forces come from both the inner personal environment as well as the
outer environment. For example, an individual may have a drive to avoid threats and
overcome barriers to reach his goals. According to Lewin, each object within an individual’s
life space exists in relation to the other objects, with boundaries and areas of tension between
them. Therefore, a person’s behavior or path of action is seen as the end result of all his
psychic tensions at that moment in time.

Force Field Analysis

Lewin developed force field analysis as a way to examine the factors that influence a
particular situation. Some forces may encourage movement toward a specific goal while
other forces may hinder movement towards that goal. People typically use force field analysis
when they have tough decisions to make as it improves the quality of their choices and
increases their chances of success. A few of the benefits of force field analysis are listed
below:

 It is fair as it takes into account all the pros and cons of a particular choice
 It offers a clear analysis for a choice to be made
 Negative factors that need to be removed are identified. This increases the likelihood
that the proposed change will be successfully implemented.
 It can be used by an individual or a group
 Force field analysis has been used in a variety of fields and contexts, such as the
social sciences, process management, change management, and organizational
development.

Action Research

Lewin coined the term “action research” in the mid 1940s. The approach involves using
research to improve the quality of a practice. Action research involves action, evaluation, and
critical reflection. Based on the results of the research, changes in the practice are
implemented. The cycle then continues with the next round of action, evaluation, critical
reflection, implementation of changes, and so on. Over time, the overall quality of the
practice is increased.

A few advantages of action research are listed below:

 It encourages people with a common purpose to participate and work together

 It is situation-based and context specific
 It encourages participants to reflect on findings
 It increases knowledge about a topic through action and application
 It encourages problem-solving
Action research is used by individuals, social groups, institutions, and organizations to
improve their practices, strategies, and knowledge of the environment in which they practice.

Group Dynamics

In Lewin’s day, many researchers believed that groups could not be studied scientifically.
They also argued that groups merely reflected the wishes and actions of their individual
members. However, Lewin believed that a group should be viewed as a unified whole that is
more than just the sum of its parts (or members). He also believed that groups could be
studied scientifically and applied his formula B=f(P,E) to group settings.
In 1947, Lewin coined the term “group dynamics.” Group dynamics refers to how groups and
individual people act and react to changes in their circumstances. Lewin founded the
Research Center on Group Dynamics at MIT to better understand the issues listed below:

Productivity: Why do groups tend to be ineffective at getting things done?

Communication: How is influence spread within a group?

Social perception: How does a group affect the way a member perceives social events?

Intergroup relations: How do groups interact with each other?

Training leaders: How can you improve the functioning of groups?

Lewin’s group dynamic studies were conducted in real life situations and were geared
towards eliminating prejudice. His concepts quickly gained support among social scientists
who understood the significance of his work. Lewin’s theories on group dynamics and group
communication are used extensively in a number of professions today.

Criticisms of Lewin’s Theories

Some critics have claimed that Lewin’s incorporation of mathematics and physics into his
theories is “off-putting.” Other researchers have criticized Lewin for his focus on how current
circumstances affect behavior and his seeming dismissal of historical explanations. American
psychologist Gardner Murphy claimed that Lewin was not persuasive in explaining his
reasons for taking a holistic approach to studying human behavior rather than a reductionist
approach. Other critics have claimed that Lewin was more interested in his social agenda and
viewed him as more of a propagandist than a social scientist.

Kurt Lewin’s Books, Awards, and Accomplishments

Lewin authored eight books and more than eighty articles on his psychological theories and
research. Some of his works are listed below:

 A Dynamic Theory of Personality, 1935

 Principles of Topological Psychology, 1936
 The Conceptual Representation and Measurement of Psychological Forces, 1938
 Resolving social conflicts: selected papers on group dynamics (1935–1946), 1948
 Resolving social conflicts & Field theory in social science, 1997

Strengths and Limitations of Gestalt Approach

One of the greatest strengths of this approach is its applicability in the day to day life and
simplicity of its ideas. The theory provides us a better understanding on how we interpret and
perceive the realities or make sense of the world around us in the light of perception.
Moreover, their suggestions on creative problem solving and productive thinking and the
inputs shared by them in Gestalt therapies related to promoting personal growth are true value
additions.

However, the Gestalt theory is also not free from various criticisms. The theory has been
criticized for being too individualistic, which may encourage selfish behaviour on the part of
the individuals. They give more importance to understanding oneself first before
understanding others. Secondly, some of the critics considered the laws of perceptual
organization to be unscientific, ambiguous and vague lacking practical relevance

PSYCHOANALYTIC APPROACH

Sigmund Freud’s theory:

Levels of consciousness, Structure of personality, Defense mechanisms
with descriptions and examples, early experience, Psychosexual stages of
development.
Neo Freudian Approaches- Jung, Adler, Horney

Psychoanalytic approach

 FIRST FORMAL THEORY OF PERSONALITY

Sigmund Freud, (born May 6, 1856, Freiberg, Moravia, Austrian Empire [now
Příbor, Czech Republic]—died September 23, 1939, London, England), Austrian
neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis.

 Life history
Born 1865 in Freiberg, Moravia to Jacob, his wool-merchant father. Mother was
Jacob’s third wife. Moved to Vienna in 1860 until 1938. Vienna exciting place of
opportunity and optimism. In 1867, Jews granted political rights and accepted into
[Link] assimilated, identifying as a [Link] the time he was 15, liberal
political atmosphere evaporated and anti-Semitism became virulent, shattering
assimilation Graduated from University of Vienna medical school with strong interest
in research but quickly married and realized only private practice would provide needed
financial support. Published well received scholarly papers on neurological disorders.
Outbreak of WW II forced him to flee to London, where he died a year later in 1939.

Personality Theory
  Personality is defined as follows:
◦ Our characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting.

Freud’s psychoanalytic perspective proposed that childhood sexuality and

unconscious motivations influence personality. Freud called his
theory and associated techniques psychoanalysis.

His theory is more comprehensive than must since it has a number of aspects.
For example, he gives us:
 A theory of motivation
 A theory of thinking (which includes dreaming, etc.)
 A theory of personality development (psychosexual theory)
 A theory of mental structures (id, ego, superego)
 A theory of psychopathology and symptom formation
 A theory of psychotherapy
 Freud developed a technique that he called psychoanalysis and used it
to treat mental disorders.

 He formed his theory of psychoanalysis by observing his patients.

 According to psychoanalytic theory, personality development takes place
as a result of the attempts to resolve conflicts between unconscious sexual
and aggressive impulses and societal demands to restrain these impulses

Freud’s theory of development has two primary ideas:

 1) Everything you become is determined by your first few years – indeed, the adult is
exclusively determined by the child’s experiences, because whatever actions occur in
adulthood are based on a blueprint laid down in the earliest years of life (childhood
solutions to problems are perpetuated)

 2) The story of development is the story of how to handle anti-social impulses in

socially acceptable ways.

Basic elements of the Personality

 Freud wrote that instincts were the basic elements of the personality, the
motivating forces that drive behaviour and determine its direction

Instincts : Propelling forces of Personality

 INSTINCTS: In Freud’s system, mental representations of internal stimuli,
such as hunger, that drive a person to take certain actions.
  Freud’s German term for this concept is Trieb, which is a driving force or
impulse (Bettelheim, 1984).

 Instincts are a form of energy—transformed physiological energy—that connects

the needs of the body with the wishes of the mind.

Types of Instincts

1. Life instincts (eros): The drive for ensuring survival of the individual and the
species by satisfying the needs for food, water, air, and sex.

 The life instincts are oriented toward growth and development. The psychic
energy manifested by the life instincts is the libido. The libido can be attached
to or invested in objects, a concept Freud called cathexis
 LIBIDO To Freud, the form of psychic energy, manifested by the life
instincts, that drives a person toward pleasurable behaviors and thoughts.
 CATHEXIS: An investment of psychic energy in an object or person
2. The Death Instincts (thanatos): In opposition to the life instincts, Freud
postulated the destructive or death instincts.

 Death instincts The unconscious drive toward decay, destruction, and

aggression
 Drawing from biology, he stated the obvious fact that all living things decay
and die, returning to their original inanimate state, and he believed that
people have an unconscious wish to die.
 One component of the death instincts is the aggressive drive (The compulsion
to destroy, conquer, and kill), which he saw as the wish to die turned against
objects other than the self.

Freud considered the conscious to be a limited aspect of personality because only a small
portion of our thoughts, sensations, and memories exists in conscious awareness at any one
time. He likened the mind to an iceberg. The conscious is that part above the surface of the
water—the tip of the iceberg. More important, according to Freud,is the unconscious, that
larger, invisible portion below the surface. This is the focus of psychoanalytic theory. Its vast,
dark depths are the home of the instincts, those wishes and desires that direct our behavior.
The unconscious contains the major driving power behind all behaviors and is the repository
of forces we cannot see or control.
The Freudian Slip Manju calls up her mother on Mother’s Day and says, “You’re the
beast, Mom,” when she consciously intended to say, “You’re the best, Mom.”

 According to psychoanalytic theory, this slip of the tongue, known as a Freudian

slip, reveals her unconscious anger toward her mother.
Structure of Personality

 Three basic structure in the anatomy of the personality: the id, the ego, and
the superego

1. The id corresponds to Freud’s earlier notion of the unconscious (although the

ego and superego have unconscious aspects as well). The id is the reservoir
for the instincts and libido (the psychic energy manifested by the instincts).

Hence operates in accordance with what Freud called the pleasure principle. Through its
concern with tension reduction, the id functions to increase pleasure and avoid pain.
1. The id

 The id has no awareness of reality. We might compare the id to a newborn baby who cries
and frantically waves its legs and arms when its needs are not met but who has no
knowledge of how to bring about satisfaction. Hungry infants cannot find food on their
own. The only ways the id can attempt to satisfy its needs are through reflex action and
wish-fulfilling hallucinatory or fantasy experience, which Freud labelled primary-process
thought

2. The Ego

 EGO is the rational aspect of the personality, responsible for directing and
controlling the instincts according to the reality principle.
  The ego, which is the rational master of the personality. Its purpose is not to
thwart the impulses of the id but to help the id obtain the tension reduction it
craves. Because the ego is aware of reality, however, it decides when and how
the id instincts can best be satisfied. It determines appropriate and socially
acceptable times, places, and objects that will satisfy the id impulses.
 The ego does not prevent id satisfaction.

 Rather, it tries to postpone, delay, or redirect it in order to meet the demands of

reality.

 It perceives and manipulates the environment in a practical and realistic manner

and so is said to operate in accordance with the reality principle. (The reality
principle stands in opposition to the pleasure principle, by which the id
operates.)
The ego thus exerts control over the id impulses. Freud compared the relationship of
the ego and the id to that of a rider on a horse. The raw, brute power of the
horse must be guided, checked, and reined in by the rider; otherwise the horse
could bolt and run, throwing the rider to the ground.
The ego is never independent of the id. It is always responsive to the id’s demands
and derives its power and energy from the id.
It is the ego, the rational master, which keeps you working at a job you may not like,
It is the ego that forces you to get along with people you dislike because reality
demands such behavior from you as an appropriate way of satisfying id
demands.

 This controlling and postponing function of the ego must be exercised constantly.

 If not, the id impulses might come to dominate and overthrow the rational ego.

 A person controlled by the id can easily become a danger to society, and might end up in
treatment or in prison. Freud argued that we must protect ourselves from being
controlled by the id and proposed various unconscious mechanisms with which to
defend the ego

3. The Superego

There is also a third set of forces—a powerful and largely unconscious set of
dictates or beliefs — that we acquire in childhood: our ideas of right and
wrong. In everyday language we call this internal morality a conscience.
Freud called it the superego.

Two parts of superego

  Those behaviors for which children are punished form the
conscience, one part of the superego.
 The second part of the superego is the ego-ideal (A component of
the superego that contains the moral or ideal behaviors for which a
person should strive), which consists of good, or correct, behaviors
for which children have been praised.
 As the ultimate arbiter of morality, the superego is relentless, even
cruel, in its constant quest for moral perfection. It never lets up. In
terms of intensity, irrationality, and insistence on obedience, it is not
unlike the id. Its purpose is not merely to postpone the pleasure-
seeking demands of the id, as the ego does, but to inhibit them
completely, particularly those demands concerned with sex and
aggression.
 The superego strives neither for pleasure (as the id does) nor for attainment of realistic
goals (as the ego does). It strives solely for moral perfection.

 The id presses for satisfaction, the ego tries to delay it, and the superego urges
morality above all. Like the id, the superego admits no compromise with its demands
 The ego is caught in the middle, pressured by these insistent and opposing forces.
Thus, the ego has a third master, the superego. To paraphrase Freud, the poor ego has
a hard time of it, pressured on three sides, threatened by three dangers: the id, reality,
and the superego. The inevitable result of this friction, when the ego is too severely
strained, is the development of anxiety.


To sum
 Id: It is the unconscious, irrational part of personality. It is the primitive part immune
to morality and demands of the external world. It operates on the pleasure principle. It
seeks immediate satisfaction.

 Ego: It is involved with the workings of the real world. It operates on the reality
principle. It is the conscious, and rational part of personality that regulates thoughts
and behaviors. It teaches the person to balance demands of external world and needs
of the person.

 Super Ego: It is the internal representation of parental and societal values. It works as
the voice of conscience, that compels the ego to consider not only the real but also the
ideal. It judges one’s behaviors as right or wrong, good or bad. Failing up to moral
ideals bring about the shame, guilt, inferiority and anxiety in the person.

 ID- unconconscious part of the mind (this part of the mind seeks to bring us pleasure)

 -primitive parts of our personality including aggression and sexual drives

 EGO-conscious part of the mind (Rational Self). Decides what action to take for
positive means and what to do based on what is believed is the right thing to do.
Aware of reality.

 SUPEREGO- unconscious part of the mind that acts as our conscience. Reminds us
of what we should do.

 The ID and the SUPEREGO are in constant conflict. Your DRIVE tells you to do
one thing , while SOCIETY tells you to do something else. HENCE results in
anxiety..

 Anxiety To Freud, a feeling of fear and dread without an obvious cause; reality
anxiety is a fear of tangible dangers; neurotic anxiety involves a conflict between id
and ego; moral anxiety involves a conflict between id and superego.

 Anxiety serves as a warning to the person that something is amiss within the
personality.

 Anxiety induces tension in the organism and thus becomes a drive (much like hunger
or thirst) that the individual is motivated to satisfy. The tension must be reduced.

 Anxiety alerts the individual that the ego is being threatened and that unless action is
taken, the ego might be overthrown. How can the ego protect or defend itself?

 There are a number of options: running away from the threatening situation, inhibiting
the impulsive need that is the source of the danger, or obeying the dictates of the
conscience. If none of these rational techniques works, the person may resort to
defense mechanisms—the non-rational strategies designed to defend the ego.

Defense mechanisms
 Strategies the ego uses to defend itself against the anxiety provoked by conflicts of
everyday life.

 Defense mechanisms involve denials or distortions of reality.

 There are different types of DM

 Although defense mechanisms vary in their specifics, they share two characteristics in
common: (1) they are all denials or distortions of reality—necessary ones, but
distortions nonetheless, and (2) they all operate unconsciously.

 We are unaware of them, which means that on the conscious level we hold distorted
or unreal images of our world and ourselves.

 Defence mechanisms are unrealistic and operate at the unconscious level. While one
uses such a mechanism one is unaware of it.

 Defence mechanisms are not healthy methods to cope with anxiety and stress as they
are an unrealistic approach to problems.

 If defence mechanisms are used frequently, they lead to, serious psychological
disorders.
PSYCHOSEXUAL STAGES

ASSESSMENT OF FREUD’S THEORY

Freud developed two methods of assessment: free association and dream analysis.

 Free Association: A technique in which the patient says whatever comes to mind. In
other words, it is a kind of daydreaming out loud.

 Dream Analysis :Freud believed that dreams represent, in symbolic form, repressed
desires, fears, and conflicts.

REFLECTIONS/CRITICISM

1)The theory is focused almost entirely on male development with little mention of female
psychosexual development.

2) The theory is difficult to test scientifically. Concepts such as the libido are impossible
to measure, and therefore cannot be tested. In this regard, whatever research has been
conducted tends to discredit Freud’s theory.
 3) Future predictions are too vague. How can we know that a current behaviour was
caused specifically by a childhood experience? The length of time between the cause and
the effect is too long to assume that there is a relationship between the two variables.

4) Freud’s theory is based upon case studies and not empirical research. Also, Freud
based his theory on the recollections of his adult patients, not on actual observation and
study of children

HUMANISTIC PSYCHOLOGY

The third force movement in psychology was also derived from the traditions of the human
science model of mental activity. The term third force is actually a general categorization for
several orientations and emphases within psychology. If psychoanalysis is considered the
“first force” and behaviorism the “second force” within twentieth-century psychology, then
the “third force” may be any movements that are not psychoanalytic or behavioristic. Other
labels describe various expressions of the third force movement: Existential psychology
indicates the applications of existential philosophy to psychological issues. The term
phenomenological psychology is sometimes used to express characteristic ways of studying
psychological events without resorting to reductionism. Finally, humanistic psychology
describes the approach of a group of psychologists, mainly American personality theorists,
who held a view of individuals as seeking the full development of their capacity or potential
and who rejected any mechanical or materialistic explanations of psychological processes.
The core of existential philosophy holds that the individual is free to define life’s direction
through a continued succession of choices, but that this freedom also gives the individual
responsibility for the outcomes of personal decisions, so that freedom is a source of anguish
and dread.

Gordon Allport
The personality theory of Gordon Allport (1897–1967) may be classified under several
systems of psychology, but it is presented here as humanistic psychology because Allport,
especially later in his career, proposed a framework that was essentially consistent with the
existential basis of the third force movement. In his study of personality, Allport
distinguished between an idiographic approach, emphasizing the individual and associated
variability or uniqueness, and a nomothetic view, stressing groups and minimizing individual
differences. Advocating the idiographic approach, Allport continually stressed the uniqueness
and complexity of the individual and suggested an underlying unity in personality that
ultimately determines consciousness. He emphasized the self, or ego-function, in
consciousness,which must be understood as present manifestations of integrated goals with
an individual sense of future directions. Reflecting the eclecticism of American humanism,
Allport described personality in terms of traits, or predispositions to respond, in a manner
similar to Freud’s instincts and Horney’s needs. As the product of genetic inheritance and
acquired learning, Allport’s traits are mental structures that account for the consistency of a
person’s behavior. Allport’s notion of intentions in personality best shows his agreement with
the existential–phenomenological position. This construct consists of present and future
aspirations and hopes that are individually defined. In Allport’s personality theory, intentions
account for the continual growth process of becoming. Moreover, intentions provide the ego
with unity that results in the development of personal strivings, the sense of individuality, and
the attainment of self-knowledge.

Abraham Maslow
Another major figure in American humanistic psychology was Abraham Maslow (1908–
1970), who is sometimes called the primary mover in the popularization of this approach. He
evolved a view of personality that was greatly influenced by European existentialism.
Maslow’s position was based on a motivational framework consisting of a hierarchy of needs,
from primitive biological levels to truly human experience. For example, the physiological
needs of thirst and hunger must be met before the needs of safety and security are considered.
When those needs are met, individuals proceed to satisfy their need for love and
belongingness, then their need for self-esteem, their need for knowledge, and finally their
need for beauty. The lifelong process of personal growth through progressive needs
satisfaction was termed “selfactualization” by Maslow. The proper result of self-actualization
is the harmonized personality, fully utilizing individual talents, intellectual capabilities, and
self-awareness.

Rollo May
After obtaining his PhD from Columbia University in 1949, Rollo May (1909–1994) worked
in private practice in New York City. Existence: A New Dimension in Psychology and
Psychiatry, a book May edited in 1958, provided one of the first introductions to the potential
for existential principles applied to psychotherapy and personality theory. In the first two
chapters of Existence, May wrote a detailed argument supporting the notion that existential
interpretations of human activity provide a needed direction for psychological inquiry; that is,
psychology requires a complete understanding of human experience as experienced in terms
of uniquely human issues of willing, choosing, and developing.

Carl Rogers
Perhaps the most popular of the humanistic psychologists, Carl Rogers’ (1902–1987)
writings on clinical applications are much admired. His “client-centered therapy” holds that
the therapist must enter into an intensely personal and subjective relationship with the client,
acting not as a scientist or a physician, but as a person interacting with another person. For
the client, counseling represents an exploration of strange, unknown, and dangerous feelings,
which is possible only if the client is accepted unconditionally by the therapist. Thus the
therapist must attempt to sense what the client feels as he or she moves toward self
acceptance. The result of this empathic relationship is that the client becomes increasingly
aware of authentic feelings and experiences, and her or his self-concept becomes congruent
with the totality of existence. Rogers’ views of personality are basically phenomenological in
that he focuses on the experiencing self. The person is seen as existing initially as part of the
phenomenal field of experience, and the conceptual structure of the self must become
differentiated from the overall field by the acquisition of self-knowledge. The self, then,
consists of organized and consistent concepts based on perceptions of the characteristics of
the “I” or “me” and perceptions of the relationships of the “I” to others. Once the conceptual
structure of the self is known and accepted, the person is truly free from internal tensions and
anxieties.