Consider the statement "Psychology has a long past but a short history."?

Question

Consider the statement "Psychology has a long past but a short history." What do you think this means? In your opinion, which person or perspective has had the most influence on the growth of psychology?

Answer 1

In my opinion, BF Skinner. Prior to Skinner, psychoanalytic theories, like Freud's, dominated psychology. In its early stages psychology was much more "art" than science. Skinner focused on observable behaviors, things that could be seen and scored and evaluated scientifically. This gave psychology more of a scientific focus which I think has helped psychology become a respectable field in social science.

Answer 2

Hermann Ebbinghaus said “Psychology has a long past, but a short history”. He meant that the subject matter of psychology has been around since the beginning, but that psychology as we know it today — scientific psychology, that is — is a fairly new development.

Modern, scientific psychology began in 1879 when the German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt established the first laboratory specifically devoted to experimental psychology. The first experimental psychology laboratory in the United States opened at Johns Hopkins University in 1883. By the turn of the century, more than 40 such labs had been set up at universities in North America.
http://www.tulsa.oklahoma.net/~jnichols/History.html

This statement, expressed by German experimentalist Hermann Ebbinghaus, suggests a key idea about the history of psychology: though psychology is relatively new as a formal academic discipline, scholars have pondered the questions that psychologists ask for thousands of years. According to psychology historian Morton Hunt, an experiment performed by the King of Egypt, as far back as the seventh century B.C., can be considered the first psychology experiment (Hunt, 1993, p. 1). The king wanted to test whether or not Egyptian was the oldest civilization on earth. His idea was that, if children were raised in isolation from infancy and were given no instruction in language of any kind, then the language they spontaneously spoke would be of the original civilization of man -- hopefully, Egyptian. The experiment, itself, was flawed, but the king deserves credit for his idea that thoughts and language come from the mind and his ambition to test such an idea.
http://library.thinkquest.org/C005870/history/index.php?id=historyP1

Psychology has its roots in mythology, religion and philosophy. People believe that the chronology of psychology goes as far back as the age of the sage Greeks. In particular, many believe that several hundred years B.C., it was Plato and Socrates that started the academic pursuit of understanding the human mind and behavior. But it was not until the 1870's that psychology had become ready to set itself as an independent academic field. This statement reflects the fact that psychological ideas have been considered for millenia, but the field of psychology has existed for less than 150 years.

Answer 3

Psychology has existed since humans existed.

Only recently have we started exploring it.

Answer 4

it means the psyche has been around a lot longer than the realization of itself.