Humans, by nature, desire to know.
This short excerpt from the beginning of Wundt’s Outlines of Psychology, 1897, discusses the starting point of the discipline of psychology as an empirical discipline. Wilhelm Wundt opened the Institute...
Humanistic psychology is a psychological perspective that emphasizes the study of the whole person. Humanistic psychologists look at human behavior not only through the eyes of the observer, but through...
by Jurgen Braungardt · Published July 3, 2017 · Last modified July 7, 2017
This is an extract from a short text by Gordon Allport (Becoming, 1955) subtitled: Basic Considerations for a Psychology of Personality. In these passages, the human being is seen as...
by Jurgen Braungardt · Published July 3, 2017 · Last modified July 7, 2017
Abraham Maslow has become famous as a psychologist for his “hierarchy of needs.” He focuses more on the healthy personality, rather than on forms of psychopathology. He belongs to the...
Political Theory / Psychology / Social Sciences
by Jurgen Braungardt · Published July 1, 2017 · Last modified July 10, 2017
During the years 1960-1963 Stanley Milgram carried out some experiments on obedience while working in the Department of Psychology at Yale University. Years later, in 1972-1973, he was granted a...
What happens when a creative and original psychologist like Carl Rogers writes down his ideas about learning? The following two excerpts are from his book: , published in 1969. The...
How do we know what constitutes “normality” or mental illness? Conventional wisdom suggests that specially trained professionals have the ability to make reasonably accurate diagnoses. In the research described below,...
1801 Pinel writes text on Moral Therapy 1804 Immanuel Kant dies 1804 Napoleon crowns himself Emperor of France 1807 Hegel completes The Phenomenology of Spirit 1808 Reil coins term “psychiatry” 1810 Gall publishes the first volume of Anatomie et Physiologie...
WHAT IS GESTALT THEORY? Gestalt psychology (sometimes also “gestaltism”) is a theory of mind created by the Berlin School of Experimental Psychology in the first decades of the 20th century....
The purpose of this paper is to try to set the historical record straight while the history in question is still in the making. lt seeks to clarify the relations between gestalt therapy and Gestalt psychology, from which the therapy claims to derive.
Koffka wrote this book in 1935; I am reproducing the first chapter here. Why Psychology? AN INTRODUCTORY QUESTION When I first conceived the plan of writing this book I guessed,...
by Jurgen Braungardt · Published July 13, 2015 · Last modified July 7, 2017
In talking to younger psychologists, one finds that many of them seem to believe that perception is something at the surface of the mind, a kind of borderline problem, and that preoccupation with it is obsolete. They look with disdain at every psychological problem that does not at least deal with personality, motivation, or social intercourse. But when discussing problems in which simple facts of stimulus and reaction play a role, as for example in behavior therapy, they prove that they would have done well to occupy themselves a little more with the fundamentals of perception.
Wertheimer tried to answer this question in a lecture given before the Kant Society in Berlin, on December 7, 1924. It was first published in German in 1925: “Über Gestalttheorie.” The translation is...
This lecture was first published in American Psychologist, 1, 415-422 Introduction In planning to address this group, I have considered and discarded several possible topics. I was tempted to describe...
20th Century Philosophy / Continental Philosophy / Phenomenology / Philosophers / Philosophy / Psychology
by Jurgen Braungardt · Published November 18, 2013 · Last modified April 18, 2018
Source: The Structure of Behavior, published by Beacon Press, 1967. I am quoting some passages from the introduction and the conclusion. Introduction: The problem of the relations of consciousness and...
by Jurgen Braungardt · Published November 17, 2013 · Last modified July 7, 2017
Source: “Genetic Epistemology” is the title of a series of lectures delivered by Piaget at Columbia University in 1968. I am quoting the first lecture below. 1 GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY attempts...
