Remarkable Psychologists
There is no shortage of well-known psychologists on the subject. From Sigmund Freud to Albert Ellis, these psychologists have left their mark on the study of human behavior. Wilhelm Wundt created the first textbook on experimental psychology in 1874, Principles of Physiological Psychology. According to him, psychology is the objective analysis of human awareness.
After working at the Vienna General Hospital, Freud traveled to Paris to study with neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. His experience was transformative for him and sparked his interest in the mind-body relationship.
He returned to Vienna and set up shop there, where he began treating patients for neurological conditions. He discovered that hypnosis was ineffective, so he developed a new method of treatment where he would ask patients to talk freely and record their responses.
The youngest of Sigmund Freud's six children, Anna followed in her father's footsteps and contributed to the field. She helped create child psychoanalysis and elaborated on her father's views on the ego's defensive mechanisms in her book The Ego and Its Mechanisms of Defensive.
For the benefit of educators, parents, nurses, pediatricians, and lawyers, she also penned Normality and Pathology in Childhood. She emphasized the importance of creating attachments with children.
In 1896, Lev Semionovich Vygotsky (later spelled Vygotskii) was born in the city of Orsha, in what is now the country of Belarus. He comes from a middle-class, secular Jewish family.
After finishing college, he moved back to Gomel and participated in the Bolshevik government's efforts to transform the city's social fabric. In London, he also went to a symposium about teaching the deaf.
When the director of the Moscow Institute of Experimental Psychology saw him, he invited him to join the institute. Prior to his death from tuberculosis, he had spent the previous nine years working as a researcher. The concept of the "zone of proximal development," central to his sociocultural theory of cognitive development, is his brainchild.
Born in Pittsburgh in 1913, Ellis earned a bachelor's degree in business and worked as a marriage and family counselor before earning a master's in clinical psychology. Later in life, he became a prolific writer on controversial subjects, including human sexuality, and established what is now known as the Albert Ellis Institute (formerly known as The Institute for Rational Living).
One of the most important subfields of CBT, which he pioneered, is called rational emotive behavior therapy. In a survey conducted among clinical psychologists in 1982, he was voted as having more of an impact than Freud.
Mary Whiton Calkins was the first female president of the American Psychological Association and a groundbreaking researcher in the field of psychology. Her contributions helped shape the egocentric paradigm of contemporary psychology.
Her research focuses on human memory, perception, and cognitive development. Her work also helped lessen the focus on behaviorism in psychology. Calkins arranged to study with Harvard academics William James and Josiah Royce and, at the same time, studied experimental psychology with Edmund Sanford of Clark University.
Clark's parents in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where she was born in 1917, strongly backed her pursuit of further education. She got scholarships to attend Howard University, where she studied math and physics. However, due to her teachers' lack of encouragement, she changed her major to psychology.
She and her husband, Kenneth Clark, decided to write a joint doctoral dissertation after she wrote her master's thesis on racial preference and identification in Black children. In a classic experiment, they asked kids to choose between a White doll and a Black doll. Their investigation played a critical role in the Supreme Court's decision to overturn the "separate but equal" policy in schools.
Raymond Cattell was one of the 20th century's most significant psychology scientists. He pioneered innovative statistical methods that provided finer-grained empirical assessments of mental capacity.
After World War I broke out, he switched his academic focus from chemistry and physics to psychology. In 1929, he completed his doctorate studies at the University of London.
He is primarily famous for his views on fluid and crystallized intellect but also researched many other psychological problems, such as the emergence of maturity. He was a controversial figure, though, due to his support of eugenics and his racial views.
Experimental psychology, developed by Wilhelm Wundt, was introduced to the United States by Edward Bradford Titchener. He also published a seminal textbook on the subject and established the first psychology lab in the country. Also, under his tutelage, many students, including Margaret Floy Washburn (the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in psychology), earned their doctorates.
The goal of structuralist theory was to break down mental processes like chemical reactions. Titchener played a vital role in establishing psychology as a rigorous scientific discipline.
After contracting polio as a child, Hull chose to change his major from engineering to psychology. He was influenced by the pioneers of behaviorism, including Edward Thorndike and John B. Watson, who emphasized the objective study of behavior.
Hull overcame personal and financial obstacles to acquire his doctorate in psychology and become a respected professor. In addition to his groundbreaking work in the fields of drive theory and hypnosis, he is renowned for his dedication to rigorous scientific techniques.