Professional psychology can be viewed as beginning with the influence of philosophy. As early as the fifth century B.C., Plato, Aristotle, and other scholars struggled with today's problems such as memory, learning, motivation, perception, dreaming, and abnormal behavior. Until the end of the nineteenth century, philosophers studied human nature through speculation, intuition, and generalization of personal experience. The application of tools and methods from the biological and physical sciences to questions about human nature, separated psychology from its philosophical roots. Between 1880 and 1895, changes occurred in American psychology; laboratories, journals, and the American Psychological Association, were established. Psychology became the science of behavior, to be shaped as a discipline by social, economic, and political forces. Different schools of psychology developed and included analytical, behavioral, and humanistic. Issues facing psychologists today, include the managed care environment; a situation that may lend itself well to the behaviorist, but may imply complication for the humanistic psychologist (Schultz & Schultz, 1992).
The seventeenth century brought the spirit of mechanism. The mechanical clock, referred to as the mother of machines, impacted scientific and philosophical thought. Rene descartes (1596-1650), born in France, applied mechanism to the human body. His theoretical contribution was the mechanistic conception of the body, the notion of reflex action, the theory of mind-body interaction, the localization of the mind's functions in the brain, and the doctrine of innate ideas. This work inspired opposition for empiricists and associationists (Hunt, 1993; Schultz & Schultz, 1992).
The first of the English empirical psychologists was Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). Hobbes concluded that all events are matter in motion, and he applied this to psychology; all mental activities were viewed as ...