The field of Psychology has a long and interesting past. Psychology was derived from a past of philosophy. The great men of the past have changed the theories and laws of this field until psychology came to be the way we know it today. There are many areas of psychology and many different men that made psychology their life. This page provides a brief overview of how psychology came about and developed to what it is today

Museum of the History of Psychological Instrumentation:  This museum is dedicated to the preservation of historical psychological lore and instrumentation. It consists of an on-line cyber-museum with downloadable illustrations showing collections of early psychological laboratory research. A bibliography from the University of Toronto Internet museum is included which gives relevant publications and other Internet links.
 

The  Father of Psychology Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920): German Philosopher & Psychologist

    A child of a Lutheran minister, he was born in 1832 in Neckarau, a suburb of Mannhiem, located in the southwest part of Germany. Education, not friendship and play, dominated his early years. At the age of thirteen he attended a Gymnasium, a German secondary school, that rigorously prepared a student for a university education. Although many of the ideas of Wundt are disregarded today, he is held in the minds of most psychologists as the Father of Psychology, because he had the first real laboratory.

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A Timeline of Psychology:  The main events of the history of psychology are represented in a timeline that extends from the year 600 B.C. until the present time. In the descriptions of these events, one can follow some hypertexts links that refer to information available on the Internet regarding the subject.

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The Different Areas of Psychology
and Their Great Contributors

Sigmund Freud  Austrian psychiatrist (1856-1939), founder of  Psychoanalysis, born in Vienna, awarded the M.D. degree in 1881 from the University of  Vienna.  With the Nazi occupation of Austria, Freud fled in 1938 to England, where he died in 1939. His theory has had enormous impact, influencing anthropology, education, art, and literature.

Ivan Pavlov  Born to a Russian minister on September 14, 1849, Pavlov grew up in the town of Ryazan. Due to a childhood accident, Ivan was unable to attend school as early as other children, but did get started at age 11. After finishing school he was sent to theological seminary to follow in his father's footsteps, but dropped out in 1870 to enroll at the University of St. Petersburg. It was there that Pavlov became interested in and started his career in physiology

B. F. Skinner  Burrhus Frederic Skinner was born in the small Pennsylvania town of Susquehanna on March 20, 1904. He became interested in psychology while at Harvard  University and was inspired by Bertrand Russell's articles on behaviorism. In 1931 he received a Ph.D. from Harvard and then continued to do research there until 1936. While there he developed the Skinner box, a controlled environment for studying the behavior of organisms.
 

John B. Watson  Psychologist, born in Greenville, SC. He studied at Chicago, and became professor of psychology at Johns Hopkins University  (1908-20), where he established an animal research laboratory. He became known for his behaviorist approach, which he later applied to human behavior. In 1921 he entered advertising and wrote several general books on psychology.

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