A word that appeared in the 16th century, a laboratory founded in Leipzig in 1879, dogs, children, and hysterics... This is how psychology left philosophy to enter the realm of sciences.
A word that appeared in the 16th century, a laboratory founded in Leipzig in 1879, dogs, children, and hysterics... This is how psychology left philosophy to enter the realm of sciences.
The word psychology is much older than the discipline it designates. It first appears as early as the 16th century, then circulates in the 17th and 18th centuries, notably under the pen of the German philosopher Christian von Wolf (1679-1754).
At that time, be careful: there is no talk of laboratories, tests, or patients lying on a couch. Psychology is a branch of philosophy, a reflection on the soul, on what thinks within us. The term exists, the object is named, but the method to study it does not yet exist.
This is an important point to understand the whole subsequent development: for nearly three centuries, psychology will be a word in search of science.
The word reemerges in 1807, in a work by Maine de Biran (1766-1824) titled Mémoires sur les perceptions obscures. Just from the title, one can guess the program: to focus on what is poorly perceived within us, half-perceived, without clarity.
This reappearance matters because it firmly establishes the term in the French scholarly vocabulary. But once again, we remain in the philosophical register: we reflect on inner life, we observe it from within, we do not measure it.
It will take until the end of the 19th century for psychology to be structured as a fully-fledged science. Almost a century of difference. One might say that the birth of this discipline was a very long gestation.
What was concretely missing to move from word to science? Three things, and they will arrive in a disorderly manner during the 19th century: a place (the laboratory), a method (experimentation, measurement, regulated observation), and a defined object (perception, memory, intelligence, behavior).
The underlying movement is a gradual abandonment of philosophical and religious references in favor of those of empiricism and experimentation. In other words: stop deducing what the mind should be, and start observing what it does.
And once this first step is taken, there is no more downtime. The decades from 1880 to 1930 see laboratories, tests, schools, and theories unfold at a pace that violently contrasts with the centuries of patience that preceded them.
Nota Bene: empiricism is the position that knowledge comes from experience, not from innate ideas or principles established in advance. For psychology, this very concretely means: starting from observable facts rather than a definition of the soul.
The date to remember, if you remember only one: 1879. That year, Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) established the first laboratory dedicated to the study of psychology in Leipzig.
The effect is immediate and cascading: this laboratory leads to the opening of many others. It marks a true institutional shift, one that gives the discipline walls, instruments, students, and protocols.
What are they working on in Leipzig? Wundt's early studies focus on vision and perception. This choice is not trivial: perception is the most measurable aspect of mental life. One can vary a light, a sound, a duration, and ask the subject what they observe. Finally, we have a piece of the psyche that can be experimentally manipulated.
Wundt is the first to employ the experimental method of introspection. The expression may seem contradictory, and that is precisely its interest.
Introspection is the examination of one's own inner life: I describe what I feel, what I perceive, what I experience. Until now, nothing new; philosophers have been doing this forever. Wundt's novelty is to place this introspection within an experimental framework: the subject does not freely recount their soul; they report what they perceive under controlled, provoked, and repeatable conditions set by the experimenter.
The inner testimony thus becomes data, provided it is collected under specific conditions. It is this combination—the subject's experience plus laboratory control—that brings psychology into the realm of science.
But the true transition from philosophy to psychology occurs with another German: Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911). In Introduction to the Study of Human Sciences (1883), he directly confronts positivist thought.
His criticism is precise. By trying to explain everything in the manner of the natural sciences, positivism leads to an abstract reality. Elegant laws are produced, but the concrete human being, the one who lives in a society, at a time, with a history, is lost along the way.
This is an internal critique, articulated at the very moment when laboratories are multiplying. In other words: Dilthey does not say that measurement is useless; he says that it is not enough.
Nota Bene: positivism is the approach that admits as valid knowledge only that which arises from the observation of real facts and their relationships, modeled after the exact sciences.
What does Dilthey propose instead? He demonstrates that the essential task is to reconstruct human reality, and this on two inseparable levels: the social level and the historical level.
In concrete terms, this means that one cannot understand a behavior, a belief, or a suffering by isolating it in a mental test tube. It must be placed back within the social fabric where it makes sense, and in the time that produced it. Man is a dated and situated being.
This position has a considerable consequence: it establishes the human sciences as a cohesive whole, where psychology, history, and the study of societies respond to each other instead of ignoring one another. Psychology emerges from philosophy without becoming merely an annex of physiology.
We must now go back a bit to 1859, the year of publication of The Origin of Species. Charles Darwin (1809-1882) introduces an idea that will reconfigure psychology as much as biology: that of a evolutionary continuity between monkeys and humans.
A theory based, it should be noted, on bio-psychological conditions. This detail changes everything for our subject. If humans are connected by lineage to the animal world, then the human psyche is no longer a metaphysical exception: it is the extension of functions that are found, in simpler forms, in animals.
Practical translation for researchers: we can now study psychic mechanisms in animals and draw lessons about humans. All of animal psychology, and a good part of psychophysiology, stem from this opened door.
In this second half of the 19th century, psychology experiences significant development, and this movement is dated: it runs from Claude Bernard (1813-1878).
The contribution of this period is simple to formulate and heavy with consequences: the psyche is based on an organism. There are bio-psychological conditions for mental life, a body, a brain, physiological functions that make sensation, emotion, and memory possible.
We therefore definitively leave the realm of a soul separate from the body for that of an embodied spirit. And from then on, a question becomes legitimate, almost obvious: by what precise physiological mechanisms does behavior occur? This is exactly where the Russians will delve in.
Ivan Setchenov (1825-1905), predecessor of Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936), creates psychophysiology. His research program is focused and clear: he centers all his interest on the study of reflexes and brain mechanisms.
The intellectual gamble is bold. Rather than commenting on consciousness, one takes the most elementary observable unit of behavior, the reflex, and examines how the brain organizes it. The reflex becomes the building block of mental life.
Pavlov takes up this work in his own research, which then leads him to explore personality disorders. At the same time, the first studies on the effect of chemical drugs applied to brain functions help reinforce the development of emerging psychiatric concepts. Chemistry, physiology, and psychiatry begin to speak the same language.
Pavlov's most famous contribution is the method of the conditioned reflex. The principle is strikingly simple: a neutral stimulus is regularly associated with a stimulus that naturally triggers a reaction, and after a while, the neutral stimulus alone is enough to provoke the reaction. The reflex is no longer just innate; it is acquired, constructed, and learned.
But Pavlov does not stop at the mechanism. According to the principles dear to Hippocrates, he identifies four nervous and characterological types:
the excitablethe inhibitedthe calmthe lively
The logic is clear: starting from nervous functioning, one traces back to character. And this is timely, as between 1900 and 1930, it is precisely the importance of characterology in all fields that best characterizes the period.
In France, Alfred Binet (1857-1911) takes a decidedly counter-current direction. While the dominant trend confines psychology to statistics and laboratory measurements, he focuses on the analysis of mental development and, more specifically, on the observation of children.
His work remains famous, linked to the first intelligence test in 1905, which gained great renown in the United States. What interests Binet is not the measurement of sensations and "elementary functions," which he neglects: it is how the mental machine operates.
Hence his famous metric scale of intelligence. The process is concrete: the system applies to children aged 3 to 16 years, and distinct tests correspond to each age. By administering a certain series of tests, one highlights the age beyond which a child cannot progress. This way, mental development is assessed, and, above all, the mental age of the patient, which may differ from their actual age, is evaluated.
Binet's decisive contribution is not the instrument itself, but what he does with it. For he provides an answer to school failures.
His reasoning is as follows: if a child shows a delayed mental age, the inadequacy is not only on their side; it is also on the side of a uniform teaching that does not take this discrepancy into account. He therefore wishes to see a "tailor-made school" adapted to these types of problems.
The expression deserves attention, as it contains the seeds of entire areas of later pedagogy: differentiation, early identification of difficulties, adaptation of rhythms. A test is only valuable if it triggers an adjustment, not if it merely classifies.
This transition from diagnosis to action is probably the first major example of psychology applied to an institution.
In 1919, an article changed the trajectory of the discipline: "Psychology from the Behaviorist Perspective," signed by John B. Watson (1878-1958), professor of animal psychology.
Watson explicitly aligns himself with Pavlov's method of conditioned reflex, and he draws a radical consequence from it. He gives psychology a new direction by limiting it to external observation only, just as other natural sciences do.
Measure the reversal. Wundt, forty years earlier, brought introspection into the laboratory. Watson puts it outside: what the subject claims to feel is not an acceptable datum; only observable behaviors and the conditions that provoke them matter.
Nota Bene: "behaviorist" comes from the English behavior. Behaviorism studies what the organism does, in response to what, and not what it feels.
There remained one last frontier, that of care. **Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893)**, primarily known for his work in neurology, was one of the first to use **hypnosis** to treat **hysteria**.
In **1882**, **Hippolyte Bernheim (1840-1919)** also became interested in hypnotic phenomena and conducted a demonstration that shifted the entire issue: these phenomena are states induced by **suggestion**. Moreover, or worse, hysteria itself is created by suggestion. He therefore uses hypnosis in **psychotherapy**, with a specific goal: the sleep thus induced can allow for the resurgence of **old memories**, obscured by the conscious mind.
In one sentence, we have the intuition that will nourish everything that follows: there are active contents within us that are inaccessible to consciousness, and a modified state can bring them to light.
Ultimately, keep the thread in mind: a word from Wolf, a book by Maine de Biran in 1807, a laboratory in Leipzig in 1879, a method with experimental introspection, a salutary critique with Dilthey, a biological foundation with Darwin and Claude Bernard, mechanisms with Setchenov and Pavlov, an instrument and pedagogy with Binet, a behavioral turn with Watson, and a therapeutic approach with Charcot and Bernheim. If you want to explore further, take these dates as entry points: each corresponds to an ever-open question, measuring intelligence, observing behavior, understanding what escapes consciousness.
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