Modern-day Western psychology has its roots in philosophy, medicine, theology, and the natural sciences. However, Western historians often fail to acknowledge that psychology has actually been “studied and practiced” around the world in different ways for centuries. Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Indian, Hebrew, Tibetan, and Chinese texts show us how ancient civilizations across the globe theorized about the mind and behavior. Many texts claim that Freud was the “father of psychoanalysis”, but we know that ancient Egyptians interpreted dreams and practiced hypnotherapy to relieve psychological distress more than two thousand years before Freud was born. Similarly, indigenous and folk practices to ensure physical, mental, and spiritual well-being have passed from generation to generation via word of mouth and through hands-on teaching in many cultures. However, psychology as an academic discipline—a subject studied in a college or university—is relatively new.

European (especially German) psychologists dominated the academic discipline of psychology when it emerged during the 19^th century. In 1879, Wilhelm Wundt established the first “modern” psychology research lab in Leipzig, Germany. Wundt was particularly influential because he trained nearly 200 students in psychology; most were from Germany and other European countries, but a few (like Stanley Hall and Edward Titchener) worked in the United States after studying with Wundt (Walsh et al., 2014). White men dominated both in society and in psychology at this time; among Wundt’s many doctoral students, only one, Anna Berliner, was a woman!

Wundt focused on understanding the structure of mental processes by breaking them down into small components, thus, creating the school of structuralism in psychology. Wundt tried to use the scientific method to study basic psychological functions, like vision, and so was one of the first experimental psychologists in the West. Wundt trained his graduate students to be participants in his studies. He asked them to introspect (look inside themselves) to describe their experiences of a stimulus (e.g., a ticking clock). Wundt’s students also went on to train many other influential psychologists. Wundt was influenced by two earlier scientists, Gustav Fechner (a physicist) and Ernst Weber (a physiologist), who established the field of psychophysics. Psychophysical experiments investigate how changing the physical properties of a stimulus (like the brightness of a light) affected people’s perception. Psychophysics is very important in the field of Sensation and Perception, which focuses on understanding how our five senses work. However, it was probably King Psamtik I of Egypt in the 7^th century BCE, who conducted one of the first known psychology experiments. Psamtik believed that everyone’s natural language was Egyptian, so to test his hypothesis, he arranged for two newborn babies to be taken from their mother and raised without hearing anyone speak. This cruel study did not support his prediction. The children’s first words were not Egyptian. In fact they only ever babbled in meaningless sounds, which is not surprising given we now know that children need to hear language in order to speak actual words.

Wundt also formally established the field of cultural psychology—since he believed that complex psychological functions like language, traditions, and beliefs needed to be studied within the context of culture. Despite this, critics of Wundt’s cultural work suggest that it is highly ethnocentric, in other words, Wundt was unaware that his own worldview dominated his theories, he apparently believed that his own culture and beliefs were the norm (Walsh et al., 2014). This problem has plagued mainstream psychology for decades.

Early psychologists, both in Europe and in the United States, focused on the study of the mind, rather than behavior. William James taught the first psychology course in the USA in 1875 at Harvard; he taught students about experimental psychology focusing predominantly on sensation and perception. James also found the phenomena of consciousness and metaphysics intriguing, and he acknowledged they were difficult to study within the constraints of the scientific method. His thoughts and theories were published in a very influential two-volume book on psychology in 1890, and helped to establish the school of functionalism. Functionalist psychologists focused on understanding the meaning (or function) of people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and how they helped a person to adapt to their environment. One of William James’s doctoral students, G. Stanley Hall (who had studied briefly in Germany with Wundt), was the first person in the US to receive a PhD in psychology from Harvard. Hall set up the first psychology research lab in the United States in 1892 at Johns Hopkins University and was a strong proponent of using the scientific method. In contrast, in 1895, Sigmund Freud (an Austrian neurologist) wrote an influential text about using psychoanalysis for the treatment of mental illness. Psychoanalytic theory relates mental health problems to unconscious thoughts (of which people are unaware) and their early childhood experiences. This was a popular perspective in clinical psychology for several decades (Thorne & Henley, 2005).

In the 20^th century, the United States expanded its economic power and became the largest producer of psychological research in the world. Mainstream psychologists in the USA believed that psychology needed to be more objective for it to become a “serious discipline”, and so embraced a reductionist approach focusing on using the scientific method. They largely redefined psychology as Behaviorism–“the scientific study of observable behavior”. Their philosophy stemmed from Russian physiologist’s Ivan Pavlov’s work on learning in animals. Leading behaviorists in the USA, like John Watson and BF Skinner believed that children (and animals) were “blank slates” who could be taught almost anything through a program of rewards and punishments. In contrast, most of European psychology took a different direction during this time. In Europe, psychoanalytical theory continued to be popular and other psychological perspectives emerged. During the 1920s, Lev Vygotsky, a highly influential developmental psychologist in Russia, studied development in children using a new sociocultural framework. This framework hinged on cultural-historical influences on the biological roots of the mind and behavior. In particular, Vygotsky stressed that learning strongly depended on the environment, especially social interactions among peers. He also warned against studying psychology in an overly simplistic way, urging psychologists to consider behavior and the mind as systems, rather than reducing them to individual functions. Somewhat similarly, in the 1940s, Russian-American psychologist, Urie Bronfenbrenner, also emphasized the importance of societal influences, social interactions, and environment on child development.

With the advance of computers and the advent of new technologies to study the brain, US psychologists in the 1960s finally turned their attention again to study the mind. Cognitive psychology, linguistics, and cognitive neuroscience became popular areas of study and this turning point became known as the cognitive revolution, championed in part by psychologists, such as Noam Chomsky. German Gestalt psychologists, such as Wertheimer, Koffka, and Köhler, who immigrated to the United States in the 1930s to escape persecution in Nazi Germany, also contributed to this renewed study of the mind-brain connection. Gestalt psychologists believed that structuralism oversimplified the study of the mind. In contrast, Gestalt psychologists emphasize that the brain interprets information received from the senses in a holistic way, rather than simply adding together the bits of information it receives. For example, if we focus on structure – we could describe a jigsaw puzzle as being composed of multiple different shaped pieces, but our general perception (also known as the gestalt) is the overall “big picture” that we see when the puzzle is completed, such as an animal, or a landscape. Other US critics of behaviorism, like Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers formed a new school of thought in Psychology in the 1960s, known as Humanism. Humanists emphasized human potential and the capacity to change, with a focus on the “good” in human behavior and often used qualitative methods (rather than the scientific method) in their studies.

Psychology and Eugenics

During the 20^th century, Western Psychology placed an emphasis on empirical or experimental psychology. Theories based on studies of participants from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich Democracies, swept through the world’s universities and became the hegemonic norm, with little regard for individual differences among people. During this time, White upper class men dominated Western Psychology, and members of the discipline often espoused sexist, racist, and homophobic views about humans, condoning the oppression of women and non-White people, as well as other groups traditionally pushed to the margins of society. During the first half of the 20^th century, many Western psychologists embraced evolutionary theories promoted by two British scientists, Charles Darwin and Francis Galton. Darwin and Galton believed that genes determined certain traits, such as intelligence, and that environment had little influence on their development. Galton went on to create the very ugly field of Eugenics—promoting the idea that people with “superior” genes should be encouraged to reproduce, while advocating for the sterilization of others with “inferior” genes. Others in this context, referred to people of color, people with mental illness, and people in poverty.

The eugenics movement, championed by highly influential people (including American President, Theodore Roosevelt), spread like a virus  throughout the world. It was taught in schools and colleges. Notably, between 1842 and 1947, 31 presidents of the American Psychological Association were members of eugenics movements. For decades, US and UK psychologists including Terman, Yerkes, Spearman (among many others), actively promoted the idea that non-Whites, Jews, and Eastern and Southern European immigrants were intellectually inferior to Whites. Similarly, eugenicists expected women of all races and ethnicities to engage in traditional gender roles, such as housework and child rearing, because they believed that women lacked the capacity for more intellectual pursuits. Chapter 8’s section on Intelligence delves deeper into these issues.

The research that was conducted by eugenicist psychologists was used to advocate for, and justify social and economic inequalities in the USA, the UK, and the countries they colonized. In the USA, eugenics contributed to the ban on interracial marriages, racial segregation, and increased wealth and resources for Whites. The government passed laws that restricted who could immigrate to the USA, dramatically limiting the admittance of Jews, Eastern and Southern Europeans, and people who were mentally ill. From 1907 to 1932, 30 states in the USA passed laws allowing forced sterilization of people deemed to be “defective” in some way. In many states, this included people living in institutions for the mentally ill, those accused of crimes, and those with disabilities or chronic illnesses, such as epilepsy. By 1944, 40,000 people were subjected to eugenic sterilizations across these 30 US states. Poor Black women and those born in foreign countries were the most likely targets. During the pre-Nazi period, Adolf Hitler and German eugenicists publicly admired the USA for its success in perpetuating white superiority, and its immigration and sterilization laws, which they used as models for their own laws. Germany took eugenics to even greater extremes by mandating the murders of young children with physical or mental disabilities. Eugenics was also the basis for the persecution and mass murders of six million Jews in Nazi Germany during the holocaust. Subsequently, eugenics lost much of its popularity. Over time, psychologists and scientists from other fields discredited the field of eugenics by conclusively demonstrating that it has no scientific basis. DNA studies show us that there is no genetic basis to race, and that the environment strongly influences intelligence and psychological functioning. However, despite public outcry against the inhumanity of the holocaust in Nazi Germany, the USA still carried out about 22,000 forced sterilizations across 27 states between 1943 and 1963. It was not until the 60s and 70s, that USA sterilization laws were largely repealed (Sofair and Kaldjian, 2000; Miller, 2020).

Psychology and Social Justice

The biases of the White Christian men who dominated the early years of psychology in the USA barred other groups from becoming psychologists. Women could not apply to most graduate psychology programs and those who earned a PhD had difficulty securing an academic job. Even by 1970, women accounted for only 20% of psychology PhDs. Similarly, in the 1940s, there were only four Black colleges offering psychology majors and Black students at predominantly White institutions faced exclusion and racism at every step of their studies. Jews were also generally unwelcome in the field of psychology. In the 1920s, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton all had tight quotas to restrict the entry of Jews into their psychology programs. Similarly, psychologists with “Jewish-sounding” names (regardless of faith) were frequently unsuccessful in securing academic positions until they changed their names. Harry Harlow, a well-known psychologist who studied attachment was a protestant, but he changed his name from Harry Israel because he was concerned that people would assume he was Jewish and would discriminate against him.

Very gradually, however, women and members of other marginalized groups began to make inroads into society, and, in turn, the discipline of psychology. The earliest pioneers in particular, fought hard to counter prejudice and discrimination as they struggled to gain admission into the field. Increased diversity among psychologists has forced modern-day psychology to evolve from its early roots, which focused on the study of White men by White men, into a far richer discipline where studies of gender, sexuality, and multiculturalism in general, are not only subfields in their own rights, but are also becoming infused more regularly throughout the discipline of psychology. Please note, there are relatively few copyright-free images of the social justice champions that we are showcasing in the next section. However, if you click on the link on their names you will see a picture of the psychologist.

Mary Whiton Calkins was the first woman in the United States to complete her doctoral studies in psychology. She worked under William James at Harvard University in the 1890s and passed all the requirements for the Ph.D. with distinction. Although she had permission to attend classes, she could not formally enroll in the PhD program because Harvard was an all-male institution. Harvard offered her a degree from Radcliffe College (a women’s college affiliated with Harvard) but, Calkins, a strong advocate for women’s rights, refused it as a form of protest against Harvard’s sexist policies. Even without a Ph.D., Calkins went on to be a professor at Wellesley College and was the first to set up a psychology laboratory in a women’s college in the United States. In 1904, she became the first woman president of the American Psychological Association (APA). Calkins had a distinguished career and published over 100 papers and 4 books on dream analysis, memory, and “self-psychology”—the study of the conscious self (Young, 2010).

In 1894, Margaret Floy Washburn was the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in psychology in the United States. After her undergraduate studies at Vassar College (an all-women’s college at the time), Washburn began her doctoral studies under James Cattell at Columbia University. Like Calkins, Washburn’s educational journey was hampered because she was a woman. At the time, Columbia was an all-male university and although they allowed Calkins to audit classes, she could not enroll in the doctoral program. Instead, Cattell persuaded Calkins to enroll at Cornell University where she studied under Titchener and was awarded a Ph.D. Washburn became a professor at Vassar College and many of undergraduates worked in her lab. Washburn studied consciousness in humans and animals. In 1921, Washburn became the second woman president of the APA (Rodkey, 2010).

Helen Thompson Woolley was awarded a PhD in psychology (with the highest distinction) from the University of Chicago. Woolley’s PhD dissertation research provided evidence that went against the sexist views that were prevalent in society at that time. Woolley found that men and women performed similarly on sensory, motor, and intelligence tasks, and that there were greater differences within each sex than between the sexes. Her research went against the popular idea of the time that women were less logical than men. Her later work showed the environment and education strongly influenced intelligence scores in adolescents, and that children who left school to go to work were at an intellectual disadvantage. Her work helped to influence labor laws to protect children. Woolley’s work was in direct opposition to the views of the eugenicists, who believed that intelligence was innate, that is, fixed from birth (Helen Thompson Woolley, 2022; Rodkey, 2010).

Leta S. Hollingworth also helped to counteract negative stereotypes about women with her doctoral dissertation (PhD awarded in 1916) from Columbia University in Educational Psychology. Her dissertation showed that menstruation had no effect on women’s decision making abilities, interestingly, her advisor Edward Thorndike, was one of the very psychologists who had helped to popularize the opposite view. Hollingworth taught at Teacher’s College, Columbia University and also worked on intelligence testing and with gifted children for much of her career (Benjamin 1990; Leta Stetter Hollingworth, 2023).

.In 1920, Francis Sumner (click on link for photo) became the first African American to be awarded a Ph.D. in Psychology in the United States. Sumner did not attend high school because in Virginia, where he lived, the schools that were available to Black students were of a very low quality. Recognizing this, his father homeschooled him and when he was 15, he passed the entrance exam to Lincoln University. Four years later, he graduated with a degree in English and was awarded a Masters’ degree two years later. His doctoral studies at Clark University were interrupted when he was drafted into the US Army, but he completed his Ph.D. after finishing his service. After working as a professor at two other colleges, Sumner became a professor and Chair of Psychology at Howard University (a historically Black University) where he helped to start and build the reputation of the psychology department. Sumner was no stranger to discrimination, when he was a PhD student at Clark University, he was given his own separate table in the dining hall, with the expectation that no one would want to eat with him. Perhaps, not surprisingly his research focused on trying to reduce racism and bias toward African Americans. Kenneth Clark, another psychologist who fought for social justice, was one of his most well-known students.

In 1933, Inez Beverly Prosser was the first African American woman to be awarded a doctorate in psychology in the United States. In 1912, Prosser attained a teaching certificate from the Prairie View A&M University in Texas, and then taught at various schools for Black children. However, at that time, Texas did not award graduate degrees to Black students and so Prosser had to apply out of state to continue her studies. She completed a Masters’ in Education at the University of Colorado, and then a doctorate in Educational Psychology at the University of Cincinnati. Prosser’s work highlighted the psychological difficulties that Black children experienced in desegregated schools, were they were predominantly taught by White teachers. Prosser taught in small colleges in both Austin, Texas and Jacksonville, Mississippi. Tragically, Prosser died in a car accident, a year after she was awarded her doctorate.

In 1940, Kenneth Clark was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University. After graduating from Columbia, Clark became a professor at City College (CUNY) and worked there for many years. In 1960, he was the first Black person in New York City to be promoted to the rank of tenured full professor, and he later became a distinguished professor at the college. He was also the first African American president of APA.