I’m still working on the links.

A

Adler, Alfred

Angell, James

Aristotle

Aquinas, Thomas

Augustine

B

         Bain,  Alexander
         Bandura, Albert

  Brentano, Franz

  Buhler, Karl

  Bell, Sir Charles

  Broca, Paul

 

  Berkeler, George

  Brown, Thomas

  Binet, Alfred

  Binswanger, Ludwig

  Bechterev, Vladimire M

C

  Chomsky, Noam

  Carr, Harvey A

  Cattell, James McKeen

  Confucius

D

  Darwin, Charles

  Dewey, John

  Democritus

  Descartes, Rene

E

  Ebbinghaus, Hermann

  Erikson, Erik

  Epicurus

F

  Freud, Sigmund

  Flourens, Pierre

  Fritsch & Hitzig

  Fechner, Gustav

  Fromm, Erich

G

  Galen

  Gall, Franz

  Galton, Sir Francis

  Galvani, Luigi

  Gassendi, Pierre

  Gorgius

  Guthrie, Edwin R

H

  Hippocrates

  Hartley, David

  Heidegger, Martin

  Hobbes, Thomas

  Hume, David

  Herbart, Johann

  Hall, Marshall

  Humboldt, Alexander

  Holt, Edwin B

  Horney, Karen

  Hull, Clark Leonard

  Helmholtz, Hermann

  Hering, Ewald

I

J

  James, William

  Jesus

  Jung, Carl Gustav

K

  Kant, Immanuel

  Kulpe, Oswald

  Koffka, Kurt

  Kohler, Wolfgang

  Kierkegaard, Soren

L

  Lashley, Karl

  Lewin, Kurt

  La Mettrie, Julien de

  Locke, John

  Leibnitz, Gottfried

M

  Mohammed

  Mill, James

  Mill, John Stuart

  Marbe, Karl

  Muller, Johannes

  Maslow, Abraham

  May, Rollo

  Mead, George Herbert

  McDougall, William

N

O

P

  Pythagaras

  Plato

  Pyrrho of Ellis

  Plotinus

  Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich

  Piaget, Jean

Q

R

  Reid,Thomas

  Rogers, Carl Ramsom

S

  Socrates

  Stewart, Douglad

  Spencer, Herbert

  Stumpf, Carl

  Spinoza, Baruch

  Skinner, B.F.

  Sullivan, Harry Stack

  Satre, Jean-Paul

T

  Terman, Lewis

  Thales

  Thorndike, Edward Lee

  Titchener, Edward B

  Tolman, Edward Chace

U

V

  Volta, Alessandro

W

  Watson, John Broadus

  Watt, Henry

  Weber, Ernest H

  Wertheimer, Max

  Woodworth, Robert S.

  Wundt, Wilhelm

X

Y

Z

   Zeno

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Ever feel like psychology is a hill or giant mountain you have to climb?

There is a lot to learn but it’s not that bad.

Psychology is the study of people. And we already know what that feels like. We have the experience. The step is to be objective and look at what we do.

Let’s start at the beginning.

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Adler, Alfred (1870-1937) Born in Vienna, the 2nd of six kids, Alfred Adler has an unhappy childhood. Suffering from rickets, and having been injured in two accidents, Adler was frail and unathletic. Although he was pampered by his parents (a wealthy grain merchant), he resented Alfred resented his older brother (his mother’s favorite).

Adler stressed the inherently social nature of man, and the importance of future goals. Like Freud, Adler stressed the importance of birth order, and a child’s early environment. He did not stress the unconscious but maintained that it was not a problem until thoughts became conscious. Adler thought Freud overemphasized sex as a motivating force, so he stressed compensation, individuality, masculine protest, the striving for power, superiority, and social interest.

Adler suggested that people compensate for their feelings of inferiority. He believed that a person’s style of life was set by the age of 5, and that early childhood memories are the best indicators of which style has been selected.

For more on the subject, here is video I made about Adler.

Key Words: birth order, compensation, individualtiy, social interest, masculine protest, superiority, inferiority, style of life

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Gordon Allport (1897-1967). The first modern personality trait theorist was Gordon Allport. In the 1930’s, Allport and his students searched through dictionaries to find words that described personality. They started with 17,953 adjectives but settled on 4504 of them.

Allport suggested that most of these traits were “common traits” (traits we all hold in common). Some might have a lot of a common trait but others might have only a smidge. But Allport also proposed that people can have individual traits unique to them.

His morphogenic approach combined individual uniqueness (idiographic traits) and group comparison traits (nomothetic traits). You can compare yourself to others on “agreeable,” “friendly,” and “caring.” Plus you can have your own special nobody-in-the-world-is-like-me traits. Allport bridged the “lots of traits” and the “only a few traits” debate by combining them.

Allport proposed there is a core to personality: a proprium. This central core is our sens of self. It is the “me” we know and feel ourselves to be. This proprium develops in stages. First, we begin early infancy with no sense of self. Second, we become able to tell the difference between our body and external things. This occurs in the second half of the first year.

The third stage of proprium development occurs in year 3. This is when we develop self-identify. We begin to take pride in our accomplishments. Of course, some negativism develops too. Allport’s use of the word “negativity” was sometimes reported as “reverse psychology,” and may have been the origins of that phrase.

The fourth stages of proprium development is the extension of self. In years 4-6, you develop an egocentric self. From your point of view, others are there for you. Santa, God, parents; everyone exists for your benefit. In this stage, self is extended to possessions; everything is “mine.” Self-image also emerges during this period. You begin to have hopes, aspirations, and expectations of others.

The fifth stage is the rational coper. During the period from 6 to 12, you learn to cope rationally. Like Freud’s ego and Piaget’s formal operations, you learn to think things through in your head.

The sixth and last stage is proprium striving. As a teen, you learn how to be an adult and yet remain yourself. You might rebel with the hope that your parents will stop you from doing stupid things. You want to be an adult and develop long-range plans. But you don’t want to leave your “self” behind or take total responsibility for your life.

For more on the subject, check out this video on Modern Trait Theories.

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Angell, James Rowland (1867-1949). Having studied with both Dewey and James, Angell developed the laboratory at the Univerisy of Chicago into a major training program. Coming from a long line of college presidents, Angell studied with Dewey (at Michigan) and James (at Harvard). After chairing the psychology department at the University of Chicago for 25 years, Angell became the president of Yale (1921).

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He was born in the family castle, Roccasecea, and later imprisoned there by his family for abandoning their career plans for him. His family wanted him to be abbot like his uncle but Aquinas (then 18) chose to enter the Dominican order and a lead a life of poverty. After a year or so of imprisonment, Aquinas complemented his education at the University of Naples by moving to Paris to become a student of Albertus Magnus. Completing his doctorate at 31, Aquinas taught for 3 years at the University of Paris before moving to Rome as a papal advisor. Nine years later, Thomas returned to Paris to teach and write. It was there he made his greatest contribution to philosophy. 

Thomas Aquinas is the great synthesizer of faith and philosophy. He combined the best ideas of Aristotle, Augustine, Averroes and Maimonides. From the jumble of Gree, Christian, Islamic and Jewish thought, Aquinas sought to bring clarity. Aquinas sought a middle ground between Augustine’s dependence on revelation and Aristotle’s emphasis on empirical knowledge. He noted that sensory information is processed by the mind According to Aquinas the mind and body work together; man is both animal and spiritual (soul). Made in the image of God, man is capable of thinking and willing. Although nothing in the world is accidental, man has the psychological freedom to be the primary mover of his psychological universe. Man may be a highly specialized animal, but he possesses a soul.

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Aristotle (384-323 BC) was born in Macedonia (northern Greece). He learned medicine from his father and philosophy from Plato. He wrote the constitution of Athens, served as counselor to Hermias, tutored Alexander the Great, and is sometimes called the first psychologist..

Aristotle proposed a tri-level hierarchy of faculties: nutrition, perception and intellect. Nutrition applies to all living things, perception to all animals, and intellect to all people. Intellect is like a sixth sense, a “common sense,” that synthesizes input from the five perceptual senses. In his book On The Soul, he proposes that the general distinction of form and matter also describes what makes us human. The soul (psyche) and the body are aspects of the same entity; they are the form and matter (respectively) of human existence. 

For Aristotle, form is active and life itself is active. The psyche is the active part of intellect; consequently, psychology is the study of the principle of life, how a person acts intellectually and morally. According to Aristotle, thinking and knowing are different. Thinking uses images but knowing is more like active intuition. So intellect is not a collection of facts but the capacity to find knowledge.

Language is distinctively human, the product of a rational animal. Man alone has language because man alone has the ability to reason. By man, Aristotle meant males from the upper class of society, not women or non-Greeks. By reasoning, he meant the ability to tell right from wrong. Right is not based on moral absolutes but by balancing opposite poles. By this reasoning, courage is not a separate virtue; it’s the midpoint between rashness and cowardice. 

Although the Greek culture was polytheistic, Aristotle argued for the existence of a divine principle above all the rest. Since the world had always existed, God was not thought of as a creator but as the Prime Mover (first cause) of the chain of events we call history. For Aristotle, God was pure intellect; perfect unity and unchangeable but not personal or interested in our lives. 

Aristotle didn’t coin the term “logic” but he defined it and founded it as a science. Indeed, into the 20th century, all logic was Aristotelian logic. His syllogisms were chains of reasoning that began with a proposition and ended with a conclusion. This proposition-proposition-conclusion format tests the logical consistency of ideas and the validity of logic. Building on Plato’s deductive method, Aristotle’s analytic approach was both inductive and deductive. Plato believed that the world we perceive is but an imperfect copy of the real world. Aristotle held that the world perceived is the real world and there is no need to assume perceptions are imperfect copies of a separate world of ideas. Consequently, careful observation of the world perceived can lead to principles which can be applied to specific circumstances.

Ironically, it is careful observations that showed the errors of Aristotle’s scientific conclusions. Like Hippocrates, Aristotle noted four basic elements, each with its own “specific gravity.” But in addition to earth, air, fire and water, Aristotle added a fifth: ether (to describe the content of the heavens). Similarly, his geocentric cosmology, his fixed species model of zoology and his assumptions about falling objects were all overturned by careful observations and the application of Aristotelian logic.

But consider how enduring his idea were. Aristotle’s belief that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones lasted until Galileo dropped weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. With minor exceptions, Aristotle’s view that earth is the center of the universe went unchallenged until Capernicus. And is wasn’t until Charles Darwi’s careful observations that evolution replaced the belief in a fixed set of species. As for ether being a fundamental element of physics, it was completely discounted until Albert Einstien’s 1905 special theory of relativity. And in psychology, Aristotle’s 3 laws of association (i.e., similarity, contiguity, and opposites) are still thought to impact encoding processes.

As a Macedonian, not an Athenian, Aristotle had to deal with the stigma of being an outsider (from a different city-state). Perhaps this is why he was not selected to succeed Plato (the job went Plato’s nephew). In any case, he left Athens after the death of Plato. About the same time, Aristotle married (at age 38). He had a daughter by his first wife, remarried after her death and had a son by his second wife. He was 42 when he began tutoring 13 year old Alexander the Great. And 50 when he returned to Athens opened his school. Officially Aristotle’s school was named the Lyceum but informally it was called the “walking school.” His students learned by strolling around the grounds with their teacher and became known as peripatetics. After death of Alexander, anti-Macedonian sentiment again arose in Athens and Aristotle moved to his mother’s estate on the island of Euboea, where he died the following year.

For more on the subject, check out this video on Hippocrates, Democritus and Aristotle.

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