Chapter 16 Volume 3 Introduction to Pioneers and Experts: The Fission of Psychology

We've come a long way. We have seen philosophers progress step by step, from metaphysical speculations and fanciful theories of consciousness, to quasi-scientific understandings of certain areas of thought processes.Thankfully, with the help of physiology, we have finally extracted psychology from philosophy and established it as a science of its own. We have also seen that, like other immature sciences, psychology as an independent field of knowledge did not develop a truly unified theory in its first decades, but only a few special theories, each theory Each explains a particular phenomenon.These theories are the work of great sages—such as Wundt, James, Freud, Watson, and Wertheimer—yet none of them, for all their greatness, have played a role in psychology. Newton's role in physics.

However, their followers did not see it that way.The first few decades of scientific psychology were "the age of school disputes"—there were at least seven schools in the 1930s—and the disciples of each school claimed that their theory was a coherent science, and since Helm What has been accumulating since Hotz's day is nothing more than a rambling of discoveries and side theories.However, by the middle of the century, many psychologists were slowly realizing that none of the existing theories had and could not serve as a unified psychological paradigm.Neither Wundt's theory, nor, say, the behaviorist theory, has anything useful to say about things like problem solving or decision making.Freud's theory offered little new insight into things like perceptual processes or cognition; Gestalt theory offered little insight into issues like memory and child development.As Leavitt Sanford, then at Stanford, put it in 1963: "The greatest difficulty with general psychology is that some of the 'common' rules so touted and coveted are not common at all. .In turn, they are often very specific and specialized.” The implication here is that psychology is simply not advanced enough for anyone to figure out a high-level theory that governs everything.However, it can also have a quite different meaning, that is, psychology itself is not a science in the sense of physics, chemistry, or biology, it is just a series of scientific fields, although they are related to each other. After all, there are differences and unevenness, and it is simply impossible to force them into a single theoretical framework.In a recent summary of the current state of psychology, the eminent developmental psychologist William Kerson and his co-author Emily D. Kahn wrote in American Scientist:

In the deepest part of our consciousness there is a firm conviction (and, for some of us, no more than a skepticism at best) that psychology is susceptible to unified ontological and epistemological premises, but It is easier to define according to a specific content, a special method or a prominent functional method and so on.According to the most extreme of these views, psychology has no central problem; rather than raising perception or cognition or problem-solving to a model that encompasses all Just like the human brain, its richness is exactly the same. After the era of sectarian strife, the history of psychology seems to vindicate this belief (or suspicion).Several new theories have emerged, but they are only suitable for a specific field of psychology, rather than psychology in the overall sense.No single sect dominated the entire territory, and instead, the field of psychology was in fact disintegrated, and the feudal lords divided themselves into autonomous regions.The American Psychological Association now recognizes 58 fields of psychology represented by 42 of the society's 45 "divisions" (membership divisions), or, one might say, fission products of psychology.

Accordingly, from now on, instead of following a single story, we will look at what is happening in each of the eight fields of psychology.The last chapter of this book briefly touches on other areas which cannot be dealt with here—without exhausting both the reader and the author himself, it would be a thankless effort to do so.