The Handy Psychology Answer Book. Lisa J. Cohen

to the history of psychology?

      Fundamentally, Descartes’s contribution to psychology was to make the concept of mind front and center of his philosophy. His famous phrase Cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am.”) links the mental function of thinking to the proof of his very existence. A naturalist who carefully observed the natural world and even dissected animals, Descartes was extremely interested in the relationships between mental and bodily processes. In fact, Cartesian dualism, the notion that the mind and the body are separate entities, continues to inspire debate to this day.

      How did Descartes understand the workings of the brain and the nervous system?

      Influenced both by his knowledge of physiology and the hydraulic (i.e., water-based) mechanics of the day, Descartes proposed a complex mechanical understanding of mental and physical processes that anticipated Freud’s own hydraulic model. Descartes wrote that impressions of the outside world are made on our sensory organs (i.e., eyes, ears, nose) causing animal spirits (a life-giving fluid filled with purified blood) to press on our brain. The brain then sends the fluid down to our body through our nerves, causing muscles to expand and move. In this way critical functions like digestion, respiration, and even psychological processes such as sensation, the appetites, and passions, take place. He also identified the pineal gland, which lies at the base of the brain, as the site where the non-physical mind and the physical body interact.

      How did Spinoza contribute to the history of psychology?

      Benedict de Spinoza (1632–1677) was a Sephardic Jew living in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. Now regarded as one of the first modern philosophers, he was excommunicated in 1656 from the Jewish community for what were then considered heretical writings. Spinoza believed our primary psychological drive to be the promotion and protection of our own wellbeing and survival, an idea that anticipated evolutionary psychology. He also believed our three primary emotions to be pleasure, pain, and desire, all of which signal the state of our wellbeing. This anticipated Freud’s pleasure principle. Finally, Spinoza taught that our cognitive appraisal of any situation will determine our emotional response. In other words, how we think about an event will shape how we feel about it. Therefore, we can change our emotions by changing our thoughts. This is the basic principle behind cognitive therapy, pioneered in the mid-twentieth century by Aaron Beck (1921-) and Albert Ellis (1913-2007).

      What is folk psychology and how does it deal with the issues of everyday life?

      It was not only the philosophers who grappled with the questions of psychology. As the issues of psychology are so relevant to everyday life, we would expect many people to come up with ideas about psychological principles. Folk psychology, often expressed in aphorisms or proverbs, captures some of these ideas as they have been passed down through the generations. Below are just some of the common sense sayings that people have used over the years to communicate the wisdom of folk psychology.

       Let sleeping dogs lie

       Old dogs can’t learn new tricks

       Look before you leap

       A stitch in time saves nine

       A penny saved is a penny earned

       Penny wise, pound foolish

       A fool and his money are soon parted

       Spare the rod, spoil the child

       When the cat’s away, the mice will play

       The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree

       If wishes were horses, beggars would ride

       Pride goeth before a fall

       Nothing ventured, nothing gained

       Shallow brooks are noisy

       Loose lips sink ships

       If you love someone, set them free

       Absence makes the heart grow fonder

       Hunger is the best sauce

       Out of sight, out of mind

       Every cloud has a silver lining

       Three’s a crowd

       Never go to bed mad

       He who laughs last, laughs best

       One man’s meat is another man’s poison

       God helps those who help themselves

      Known best for his work on political philosophy (in particular his book Leviathan), Thomas Hobbes also claimed that all our knowledge comes from sense impressions.

      What were Thomas Hobbes’s views about the relationships between ideas?

      Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was most famous for his political philosophy and for his view of life in “the state of nature” as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” But he also had ideas about cognition and memory. Hobbes believed that all our knowledge comes from our sense impressions. Memories are the residues of initial sense impressions, somewhat like waves that continue even after the wind ceases. He noted that ideas get linked together in memory when the sense impressions first occur close in time. This concept of associative memory became the basis of behaviorism, a psychological movement that arose in the twentieth century.

      How did John Locke build on earlier ideas?

      John Locke (1632–1704), who was also mostly known as a political philosopher, divided ideas into two classes: sensation, our initial sense impressions; and reflection, the mind’s actions on the initial sense impressions. Thus he distinguished between perception and cognition. Further, he considered our complex ideas (abstract concepts such as justice, love, whiteness) to derive from combinations of simple ideas. The notion that cognition develops from the simple to the complex anticipates the ideas of Jean Piaget (1896-1980) and other twentieth-century cognitive psychologists.

      How is the scientific revolution relevant to psychology?

      The early modern philosophers addressed many of the same concepts that we still focus on in modern psychology. Nonetheless, the modern discipline of psychology is a science and as such has to be understood in the context of the larger history of science.

      What was the scientific revolution?

      By the late Middle Ages, the growth of towns started a slow but profound change in the social and economic order across Europe. Trade became more important and the source of wealth and power began to switch from feudalism, in which wealth was based on the ownership of land and the ability to raise armies from the peasants who worked the land, to commerce. Along with this emphasis on trade and commerce, came a new interest in technical know-how, particularly with regard to mining and navigation. In the sixteenth century, there were revolutionary discoveries in mathematics, astronomy, and optics but the scientific revolution did not really get rolling until the seventeenth century. This was the era of Isaac Newton (1642–1747) who, among other things, discovered gravity and calculus. Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) invented a powerful telescope and championed the heliocentric world view that the earth orbits around the sun. William Harvey (1578–1657) described the circulation of the blood, and Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) proposed the wave theory of light. These revolutionary discoveries set the stage for the emergence of the science of psychology in the late nineteenth century.

      PSYCHOLOGY IN OTHER CULTURES

      How have other cultures addressed psychological issues?