History of Psychology

The history of psychology traces how humans have investigated the mind and behavior across millennia. Philosophical inquiry into the mind and human conduct reaches back to ancient societies including Egypt, Persia, Greece, China and India, but psychology emerged as an empirical scientific discipline much more recently: the field entered an experimental phase in 1854 when Gustav Fechner developed early theories of sensory judgment, and it became a formally independent science in 1879 when Wilhelm Wundt founded the first laboratory dedicated entirely to psychological research, in Leipzig. Applied psychology developed rapidly afterward, with educational psychology, industrial psychology, psychological testing and clinical psychology all emerging in the 1890s, while Sigmund Freud independently developed psychoanalysis in Vienna, a theory that went on to profoundly influence psychological thought and Western culture broadly. Across the twentieth century the discipline moved from its early experimental approaches through behaviorism and on to cognitive science and humanistic psychology, a progression that reflects the field's expanding scope and growing methodological sophistication.