is more than the sum of the components of the perception. In other words, what we experience is more than the inputs received from our environment. When, for example, light from a series of flashing bulbs falls on our retina, we actually experience movement of light. When we see a movie, we actually have a series of rapidly moving images of still pictures falling on our retina.
Thus, our perceptual experience is more than the elements. Experience is holistic; it is a Gestalt. We will learn more about the Gestalt psychology when we discuss about the nature of perception in Chapter . Yet another reaction to structuralism came in the form of behaviourism .
Around , John Watson rejected the ideas of mind and consciousness as subject matters of psychology. He was greatly influenced by the work of physiologists like Ivan Pavlov on classical conditioning. For Watson, mind is not observable and introspection is subjective because it cannot be verified by another observer. According to him, scientific psychology must focus on what is observable and verifiable.
He defined psychology as a study of behaviour or responses (to stimuli) which can be measured and studied objectively. Behaviourism of Watson was further developed by many influential psychologists who are known as behaviourists. Most prominent among them was Skinner who applied behaviourism to a wide range of situations and popularised the approach. We will discuss Skinner’s work later in this textbook.
Although behaviourists dominated the field of psychology for several decades after Watson, a number of other approaches and views about psychology and its subject matter were developing around the same time. One person who shook the world with his radical view of human nature was Sigmund Freud. Freud viewed human behaviour as a dynamic manifestation of unconscious desires and conflicts. He founded psychoanalysis as a system to understand and cure psychological disorders.
While Freudian psychoanalysis viewed human beings as motivated by unconscious desire for gratification of pleasure seeking (and often, sexual) desires, the humanistic perspective in psychology took a more positive view of human nature. Humanists, such as Carl Rogers and