History
Although modern, scientific psychology is often dated at the 1879 opening of the first psychological laboratory by Wilhelm Wundt, attempts to create methods for assessing and treating mental distress existed long before. The earliest recorded approaches were a combination of religious, magical and/or medical perspectives. Early examples of such physicians included Patañjali, Padmasambhava, Rhazes, Avicenna, and Rumi.
In the early 19th century, one could have his or her head examined, literally, using phrenology, the study of personality by the shape of the skull. Other popular treatments included physiognomy—the study of the shape of the face—and mesmerism, Mesmer's treatment by the use of magnets. Spiritualism and Phineas Quimby's "mental healing" were also popular.
While the scientific community eventually came to reject all of these methods, academic psychologists also were not concerned with serious forms of mental illness. That area was already being addressed by the developing fields of psychiatry and neurology within the asylum movement. It was not until the end of the 19th century, around the time when Sigmund Freud was first developing the recent idea of a "talking cure" in Vienna, that the first scientifically clinical application of psychology began.
Read more about this topic: Clinical Psychology
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it.”
—Lytton Strachey (1880–1932)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)