Activity . E VOLUTION OF P SYCHOLOGY Psychology as a modern discipline, which is influenced to a large extent by Western developments, has a short history. It grew out of ancient philosophy concerned with questions of psychological significance. We mentioned earlier that the formal beginning of modern psychology is traced back to when the first experimental laboratory was established in Leipzig, Germany by Wilhelm Wundt.
Wundt was interested in the study of conscious experience and wanted to analyse the constituents or the building blocks of the mind. Psychologists during Wundt’s time analysed the structure of the mind through introspection and therefore were called structuralists. Introspection was a procedure in which individuals or subjects in psychological experiments were asked to describe in detail, their own mental processes or experiences. However, introspection as a method did not satisfy many other psychologists.
It was considered less scientific because the introspective reports could not be verified by outside observers. This led to the development of new perspectives in psychology. An American psychologist, William James, who had set up a psychological laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts soon after the setting up of the Leipzig laboratory, developed what was called a functionalist approach to the study of the human mind. William James believed that instead of focusing on the structure of the mind, psychology should instead study what the mind does and how behaviour functions in making people deal with their environment.
For example, functionalists focused on how behaviour enabled people to satisfy their needs. According to William James, consciousness as an ongoing stream of mental process interacting with the environment formed the core of psychology. A very influential educational thinker of the time, John Dewey, used functionalism to argue that human beings seek to function effectively by adapting to their environment. In the early 20th century, a new perspective called Gestalt psychology emerged in Germany as a reaction to the structuralism of Wundt.
It focused on the organisation of perceptual experiences. Instead of looking at the components of the mind, the Gestalt psychologists argued that when we look at the world our perceptual experience