PSYCHOLOGY - PASSAGE OF HER HISTORY

Only in the second half of century XIX there began appearing Schools with defined characteristics:

1. Structuralism - Wilhelm Wundt (1.832 - 1.920). Titchener (1.867 - 1.927).

This was the first line of the Psychology that stood out of the Philosophy.

It uses the process of the introspection for analysis of the psychological reactions. The true task of the Psychology would be to understand the structure and the content of the adult human mind, whose elements components are: sensations, images sustained by the elements of the memory and feelings or affections. It is the group of this context that lends significance to any experience. The systemization and the explanation happen through the nervous system. They are the processes in the nervous system that provide unit and coherence to the study of the psychological processes.

2. Functionalism - John Dewey (1.859 - 1.952). Thorndike (1.874 - 1.949). Woodworth (1.869 - 1.962).

The concern of the Functionalism is the mind as process adaptable; little introspection and more observation of the processes of adaptation of the organism. It is exempted of dogmatism. It was a bridge to Behaviorism, giving prominence to the learning.

3. Reflexology - Ivã Sechenov (1.829 - 1.905); Ivã Petrovich Pavlov (1.849 1.936); Vladimir Bechterev (1.857 - 1.927).

Bechterev was the legitimate initiator of the psychology Reflexology.  The communism waited of the Psychologists that they formed the "New Soviet Man." There begin the intelligence tests for workers' selection, for training and education of students. As some tests badly performed accused little intelligence in children of members of the party, it was prohibited in 1.936. The psychology Soviet turn to bloom in 1.955 and we can say that is a school, because she has own object - the study of the conscience; a method, established by decree, the pavlovian; it has philosophical bases, also by decree - the Marxism and Leninism.

They accomplished experiences with reflexes and they sustained that the appropriate way of studying the psychological processes was through the physiologic investigation of the reflexes. The psychology, to be objective, should avoid all the introspection and to just formulate statements and observations relative to the other people's behaviors.

4. Behaviorism - John Watson (1.878 - 1.958). Walter Hunter (1.889 - 1.954).

To this school, the conditioning would be the key for the understanding of the behavior. They are words of Watson: "Give me a dozen of healthy babies, well formed, and my own world to create them, and I guarantee to take any one of them at random and to train him to turn any type of specialist that I choose - doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant, as well as beggar and thief, independently of their talents, tendencies, aptitudes, vocations and race of their ancestral ones".

The behavior demonstrates a purpose, an intention; it means that the behavior doesn't happen in a random way, but it always longs for an end, a specific objective. The purpose of the Psychology is the one of foreseeing the behavior, of formulating laws on the same and to control and to present forms of controlling it. The conscience is not a legitimate subject for scientific study. The units of behavior are reflexes or connections Incentive-Answer (E - R), so much innate, as conditioned. The habits are obvious or explicit, visible in the behavior, or they are hidden, implicit.

Fundamentally, all of the answers can be classified as glandular or muscular; ultimately, everything that we can do is to segregate and to contract.

The reflexes can be classified in emotions, instincts and habits. The fundamental unit, the connection Incentive-answer, or arch reflex, combines with others and it results in one of those three categories of behavior. The emotions involve flat muscles; the instincts are connected to the grooved muscles.

About 1.930, the radical Behaviorism already had diluted and Neo-behaviorism appears, whose main figure is Skinner (1.904). He institutes the action of the reinforcement whose definition is: "Everything is reinforcement if increases the probabilities of a precedent answer." His approach provoked impact in numerous areas, among them in the programmed learning. It is opposed to the psychoanalysis and to the conceptions humanists, when defending that every behavior is determined not inwardly, but from out to inside. Behaviorism also affirms: “The faith in an "interior" man is a superstition that had origin, as the faith in God, in the man's incapacity to understand his world." All of the actions are determined by the environment. The behavior is modeled and maintained by their consequences.

5. Gestalt psychology - Max Wertheimer (1.880 - 1.943). Kurt Koffka (1.886 - 1.941). Wolfgang Kohler (1.887 - 1.967).

In 1.910, Wertheimer noticed the fact that the stimulation visual, although discontinuous, generates the perception of the continuous movement. The noticed, as it seems, doesn't correspond point for point to the physical incentive, but it is organized as a whole - a whole that is not, merely, the total sum of the elements that compose it.

He studies the organization of the perception defending that the perceptions result of the activity punctuated of the neural elements in the receptor surface. Those parts of the perceptive field are organized together; they are noticed as if they belonged to a whole or if they formed a unit.

In 1920, Kohler publishes a book that consists of a description of the "gestalten" physical in the chemistry, electricity and biology, and argues that the Gestalt fields that occur in physical phenomena also occur in brain processes. Wertheimer argues that the psychological phenomena and the brain processes underlying the psychological phenomena have a similar functional form, they manifest properties similar to gestalt. The whole is more than the sum of its parts, and even presents itself as something different. Most acts are organized from the inside to outside, and they make sense, they are significant. The similarity between the formulations of the field by Einstein, physics, and some ideas gestalt is not a mere accident; can be attributed to long conversations between Einstein and Wertheimer.

6. Psychoanalysis - Sigmund Freud (1.856 - 1.939). Born in Vienna. It is a theory of the personality, a philosophy of the man's nature and a specialized procedure of psychotherapy. Every action, even of thought, is always motivated. The force motivating of the actions is the libido, a pulse selfish, aggressive and sexual that constitutes the "id", archaic and unconscious component. We all possess a force creative, sexual, responsible for the pleasure and for the auto-preservation - Eros; as well as a force destructive, aggressive, that impels us for the death - Tanatos. The man should harmonize those pulses with the world and to maneuver them in way to satisfy our desires without violating the laws of the society. In that harmonization search there grows the "ego." That which is received from the environment, forms the "superego."

Jung (1.875 - 1.961). He separates from Freud and found the analytical psychology. He introduces the idea of the archetypes and of the collective unconscious. He gives emphasis to the introversion and the extroversion.

Adler (1.870 - 1.937). He also separates and found the individual psychology. For Adler, the child, feeling fragile before the adult, brings as consequence, along her life, an inferiority feeling, generated, mainly, by the first and frustrated experiences of the childhood. As compensation, appears the will of power.

Otto Rank (1.884 - 1.939). He creates a line all peculiar with base in the trauma of the birth.

After the Second World War, there began appearing several lines inside of the psychology, all divulging the power of the thought. Psycho-cybernetics, that considers the man's unconscious just as a computer, is the one that gives scientific sustentation for all of them. Some of those lines are: Autogenous training of Schultz, Autosuggestion, Mental Control, Psycho-synthesis, analysis Transactional whose technique presents with a lot of property the intricate game of the human soul.

And, on these last decades there appeared lines that look for the transcendent of the human person, such as:

Maslow, Sutich, and Rogers, with the Humanistic Psychology;

Assagioli, with Psycho-synthesis;

Stanislaw Grof, in 1985, with Transpersonal.