The History of Psychology & Psychotherapy

This presentation is divided as follows:I. Introduction.II. Pre-history: Psychology in a time when “psyche” meant

“breath.”III. Socrates (470 – 399) used “psyche” to mean “soul.”IV. Antagonism between Socrates’ worldview and Aristotle’s.V. The meaning of “psychology” then and now.VI. An aside about The Oxford English Dictionary.VII. The first psychologist -- Wundt.VIII. The first psychotherapist - Freud.IX. Other approaches to counseling available from 1900 to 1960.X. 1960.XI. Today.

Outline

My Master’s thesis had two parts: 1. The history of the relationship between the

spiritual worldview and the scientific in psychotherapy; and

2. Suggestions for combing them in psychotherapy.

This Power Point discusses part 1 of my thesis. I will discuss part 2 in the final class.When I completed part 1, my advisor asked me

to summarize what I had learned.

I. Introduction

I had been exploring unexplored territory.I had found very little to guide me on this

journey.I asked my dreams for help.In a dream a voice said to me, “Try using the

images from Riverworld.”

I was stuck.

Has any one read Phillip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld?These slides summarize what I had learned.These thoughts came to me in a dream.They constitute one chapter of my thesis. The dream may have originated in the personal

unconscious, the collective unconscious, or what Assagioli called the spiritual unconscious, or all 3.

But one thing it demonstrates beyond contest: the unconscious is real and powerful; in a very different vein, I have also written an “A” paper in multivariate analysis in a dream when I was completely stuck, and a voice said, “Why not try . . .?”

When life was lived on a giant river with steep banks:

No separation between the individual’s psyche, religion, secular power, and culture.

Individual human beings felt as if they had been born floating on a small raft down a wide river. The current carried them. Sometimes the river was so wide that people could not see the sides. They thought that the river was all there was.

When people were born, their parents threw them on to the river, as their parents had thrown them, and from then on the river defined the meaning of their lives.

If one was a man whose father had been a tailor, that man would probably be a tailor until the end of his life. If one was a woman, one would bare children, send sons off to war, and often die in childbirth.

Government, religion, and culture powered the river’s current; they flowed in the same lineal direction.

No one climbed out onto the banks to look around. The current was too strong, the banks too steep, and life too short.

II. Time of Oral Traditions – When Life Was Lived on a Giant River

The Iliad was composed in approximately 900 BC, the Odyssey shortly thereafter.

They were repeated aloud by rote at important government holidays.

The Iliad taught courage in battle. The Odyssey taught the dangers of

climbing out of the river: if you wander far from home, monsters will eat you.

At that time “psyche” meant “breath.”

The Iliad & the Odyssey

When a tributary joined the main branch bringing strangers floating on different rafts, conflict arose.

People conceptualized that conflict either in terms of power (Aristotle’s student Alexander the Great) or in terms of understanding (Euripides in the remarkable Women of Troy).

People lived in small in-groups, and feared and fought members of out-groups; so they were more likely to think of conflict in terms of power.

Tributaries & Conflict

From 100,000 B.C.E. to 10,000 B.C.E., perhaps 15 percent of human deaths were accounted for by inter-group wars.

C. S. Lewis found that moral codes similar to The Ten Commandments have been envisioned by all cultures. (Lewis used this as an argument that there is an inborn moral voice that comes from God. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1947), Mere Christianity (1952).)

Lewis thought that painful experiences were like thorned buoys in the river guiding us back to the right and moral course. The Problem of Pain (1940)

In-group & Out-group Morality

What Lewis did not discuss was that until the 20th Century (The Nobel Peace Prize, 1901; The United Nations, 1947), moral treatment was, as a rule, extended only to members of our own group.

For example, 40 years after Moses received the Ten Commandments, his follower Joshua invaded and conquered Jericho, killing every man, woman, and child in the city, except the collaborationist Rahab. It did not occur to Joshua that he was violating any moral code in doing so.

Most of history’s villains and heroes have been war makers or the warriors who opposed them.

Only one other species makes wars against its own kind.What species is that?

What do humans have that ants do not? Self-critical awareness, flexibility, consciousness. Creativity. An ability to retreat or compromise. A conscience and empathy. An ability to evolve morally in the collective and spiritual

unconscious. Anything else? My sense is that, since 1900, humans have been evolving increased

empathy for each other within groups, e.g. men for women and vice versa, adults for children, and, for the first time, we have been evolving empathy for members of out-groups: people who do not look like us or pray like us, or do not pray at all.

We can all contribute to that evolution.

By multicultural awareness and sensitivity.Can you think of any other ways?There will be a presentation on multiculturally

sensitive counseling on March 5th .In The Genocidal Mentality: Nazi Holocaust and

Nuclear Threat (1990), Lifton and Markusen advocated a “species consciousness” which sees all humans as part of one species, not as members of subspecies and races. They wrote that everywhere they traveled in the world, they found people hungry and ready to share such a view .

What has been your experience?

How can we contribute to the evolution of empathy for strangers?

Over time the number of groups has decreased as groups have increased in size.

Thus, today, it might be said that Europe and the Americas constitute one group; Africa another group; the Near East another; etc.

Simultaneously, the consequences of intergroup conflict have increased drastically, so that today a war involving atomic bombs could destroy all living creatures on earth.

Groups Decreasing & Increasing

Siddhartha Gautama had a species conscious view.

In 560 BC one man climbed out of the river alone in northern India.

Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, the “awakened one.” His concerns were mainly spiritual. His principle dispute was with the river: he objected to

the Hindu caste system and taught that each individual man or woman can be her or his own spiritual guide.

He did not articulate a position on whether the spiritual or scientific view of life was superior. The scientific world-view had not yet developed.

Although the 14th Dalai Lama speaks of “Buddha science,” so I wonder.

The Buddha: 1st person I know of to climb out of the river

Buddha conceived of conflict in terms of compassion.

Small group conflict was so wide spread that Buddha could not return to his own home town at the end of his life, because it had been invaded and conquered.

We will return to the Buddha in the class on Meditation and Mindfulness.

The Buddha, part 2

III. Socrates

(470 – 399 BCE)

Socrates (470 – 399 BC)Socrates thought independently, not as the

government and state religion had taught him to think. As a result, he was found guilty of both treason and atheism, and condemned to die.

He encouraged others to join him in climbing out of the river, including Plato and Aristotle.

Socrates used the word “psyche” to mean “soul:” an eternal part of him, which he intuited had pre-existed him and hoped would continue to exist after his death.

Socrates: 2nd person I know of to climb out of the river.

Aristotle (384 – 322 BC)Aristotle climbed out on

the other side of the river.

Aristotle began to develop the scientific world-view of nature and of human beings.

For example, he collected and catalogued shells along the river’s bank and coined the term mollusca, meaning soft-bodied.

IV. Antagonism between Worldviews

of Socrates and Aristotle

Socrates and his student Plato were of a metaphysical temperament.

They climbed out on the spiritual side of the river. They sat by the river’s bank and wondered about

the true, underlying nature of reality; they wondered about morality and virtue, about the soul and the meaning of life, and about death.

They gained knowledge by inner contemplation and Socratic dialogue, demonstrating the human ability to think for one’s self and to defend the value and truth of one’s thoughts.

Worldview of Socrates

Aristotle climbed out on the materialistic, naturalistic side of the river.

He valued gaining knowledge by careful observation of external reality,

And by logical deductions based on those observations.

Aristotle defended his views by syllogism.

Worldview of Aristotle

Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were contemporaries. They could have built a bridge across the river. They did not. After Plato’s death, Aristotle was twice denied appointment as

head of Plato’s Academy. So Aristotle opened his own Lyceum. Plato thought that Aristotle’s view did not take account of the true nature of human beings, and Aristotle thought Plato was a misguided mystic.

Socrates, Plato and Aristotle represent two distinct acts of divergence. (1) All three diverged from the river. They stepped out onto the banks, saw

the world with independent eyes, and described what they saw for others. (2) Then they diverged from each other: Socrates and Plato described the

world symbolically and metaphysically; Aristotle described it literally and physically.

Instead of seeing themselves as supplementing each other’s world-view, they took the attitude that one view was correct and the other view was incorrect.

This antagonism has existed from their time to ours. Very few thinkers and writers have attempted to bridge it. In suggested reading, posted on D2L, I name a few who have.

2 Separate Acts of Divergence

Hippocrates (460 – 377).Represents a separate stream of thought from either

Socrates or Aristotle. Is considered the father of modern medicine and

thus of modern psychiatry.Took the view that all illnesses, including mental

illnesses, can be accounted for by natural causes, not by spirits or gods.

Prayers and sacrifices did not hold the central place in his theories.

He is the grandfather of the medical model of mental illness and psychotherapy,.

Hippocrates

V. The Meaning of “Psychology” Then and

Now

At the time of Socrates and Aristotle, there was no word for psychology and no need for it.

Most people did not think of themselves as having any questions which the culture did not answer.

The river, however, did have an undercurrent: the collective unconscious, which carried human capacities in symbolic form. This accounts for similarities in the myths of different parts of the ancient world.

As we will see, “psychology” came to mean first the study of the soul, and then the scientific study of human thinking and behavior.

“Psychology” then and now:

When was the word “psychology” first used in English?

What did it mean?

“Psychology,” part 2

The term “psychologia” was first used by a Serbo-Croatian writer named Marulic in 1520. The same term was used by the German writer Rudolf Goeckel in 1590.

The word “psychology” was first used in English in 1653. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (2006) it originally meant “the study or consideration of the soul or spirit.”

It was at that time a part of philosophy.

What does “psychology” mean now, according to the Oxford English Dictionary?

Psychology, part 3

“The scientific study of the nature, functioning, and development of the human mind, including the faculties of reason, emotion, perception, communication, etc.; the branch of science that deals with the human or animal mind as an entity and in its relationship to the body and to the environment or social context, based on observation of the behavior of individuals or groups of individuals in particular, ordinary, or experimentally controlled circumstances.”

We can trace the history of the meaning of any English word because of the OED.

L'Académie Française was established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister to King Louis XIII. It has 40 members, whose task is to act as an official authority on the language. It is charged with publishing an official dictionary of the language.

In 1755, Samuel Johnson published an English Dictionary, boasting that one Englishman could do in 3 years what had taken 40 Frenchmen 40 years.

It took him 9 years.He and the English literati decided not to form an

English Academy.

VI. The Oxford English Dictionary

English wo/men of letters thought is was best to allow new words to join the language and old words to change meaning without any official standard.

Thus we have the OED: begun in 1858, first completed in 1884, with the help of many volunteer readers, and under constant review ever since.

It gives the definition of every word ever used in English, and every change of meaning of that word, with the date of each and examples.

The OED is available as on on-line resource at the PSU and Multnomah County Library.

The Oxford English Dictionary, pt 2

There is a hilarious installment in Black Adder the Third, starring Rowan Atkinson and Hugh Laurie (now “House”) as the incredibly stupid prince of Wales.

Samuel Johnson brings the completed Dictionary to show the Prince of Wales.

They come to think that Baldric, Black Adder’s servant, has inadvertently burned the dictionary for firewood.

Black Adder must reconstruct the dictionary (nine year’s work) in one night, before Dr. Johnson returns.

OED, part 3

VII. The 19th Century: The First Psychologists

The first social science was sociology.Who was the first “sociologist?” What did he believe?

Sociology and Positivism

Founder of sociology and positivism.Our sense perceptions and logical inferences

based thereon are the only admissible basis of human knowledge.

If the scientific attitude could be applied to all aspects of life, this would lead to a complete and beneficial restructuring of the social order.

Sociology would discover the laws of social dynamics that would lead to these advances.

Carl Rogers wrote that positivism “is settled dogma” in psychology (Rogers, 1989a, p. 232).

Auguste Comte (1798 -- 1857)

Who was the first person to describe himself as a scientist and as a psychologist?

Wilhelm Wundt.Conducted the first

psychology experiment in a lab at the University of Leipzig in 1879.

It involved a stimulus followed by a mechanical measurement of the subject’s response time combined with a recording of the subject’s conscious sensations and feelings.

One objection to having a science of psychology had been that the most psychologists can hope to measure is correlation.

That remains a weakness of psychology today.That is why one must take a statistics class if

one is to study psychology -- andWhat is one o f the first things we learn in a

statistics class?“Correlation does not equate to cause and

effect.”

Correlation

Who was the first person to call himself a psychologist in the United States?

United States of America

William James.

What was James’s most famous book?

The Varieties of Religious Experience.

It has never been out of print since it was first published in 1902.

I found it a beautiful and moving book – but if it is taught in college today, it will probably not be in a psychology class.

Wundt was a monist.James was a pluralist. He thought that monism is a

hypothesis.He believed that there is no system of rules that works

in every situation or at all times. He believed that this incompleteability characterizes all reality: material and subjective.

James was not a therapist, but if he had been, he might have taken a constructivist approach, with an openness to the importance of the spiritual world view for some clients.

We will study the constructivist approach on March 12th.

Who was the first psychotherapist?

VIII. Psychotherapy

Sigmund Freud.

Who were Freud’s first and most famous followers?

Carl Jung & Alfred Adler

Jung was the president of the Guild of Pastoral Psychology, which was “committed to building bridges between psychology and theology”

He believed in the soul.Freud did not.Freud believed that religion was

composed of false and unhealthy beliefs and a threat to science.

One interesting question Jung asked was, Where was the psyche before the mid 19th Century?

Did it not exist?What do you think? Why did its interest and treatment

suddenly come to public awareness around 1900?

Jung said that until the late 19th century, the psyche had been “external.”

What does that mean?My sense is that the psyche is still

largely external in some cultures.

External

What was one thing that Freud, Jung, and Adler all had in common?

They were all medical doctors.Therefore, they are prone to the

disease model of mental health counseling.

As you will learn in this class, there are alternatives to the disease model.

Freudian psychotherapy was the main approach to counseling available until the 1960s.

Freudians believed it was the only valid “scientific” approach.

What are some other sorts of counseling that came into existence between 1900 to 1960?

X. Other Forms of Counseling

Available: 1900 to 1960

Career counseling offered in Boston schools around 1900 and then extended to the military.

Pastoral counseling in churches.Person-centered counseling began

with Rogers in the 1950s. He was accused by Freudians of committing malpractice.

Family counseling – Satir and others in the 1950s.

What career tracks were available to “counselors” in the 1960s?

X. 1960s

Psychiatrist, MD, almost all Freudian.

PhD in psychology.

What additional tracks are available to persons who want to be counselors today?

XI. Today

Many different Master’s degrees including Masters in mental health counseling, family counseling, “rehab,” social work, community counseling, school counseling.

PsyD.Can anyone think of any other

tracks?

Today

The End