10524 History of Psychology 1

Credits: 6 advanced credits in Psychology

Prerequisites: 36 credits, including Introduction to Psychology, Social Psychology, Personality: Theory and Research, Cognitive Psychology or a BA in Psychology. Students must also fulfill all English requirements and take bibliographic instruction in the Library.

Recommended: Introduction to Statistics for Students of Social Sciences I, Introduction to Statistics for Students of Social Sciences II, Research Methods in Social Sciences

The course is based on 15 recorded lectures by Arie Nadler and a reader edited by Arie Nadler and Gal Gorodeisky.

Psychology is a multi-faceted, dynamic and developing science and therefore most courses in the field describe its contemporary contents. However, the questions with which psychology is engaged have been studied by thinkers throughout the ages. Contemporary psychology is only the most recent, albeit highly developed, link in a long chain of approaches to understanding human behavior and existence. A thorough understanding of contemporary psychological knowledge requires an examination of the historical context in which it developed, providing the student with the important opportunity to better grasp contemporary ideas and findings and to integrate the complex mosaic of psychology into a single, multi-faceted image.

Topics: Part I: Developments up to the early 20th century – Introduction, The ancient world, The beginnings: Descartes and the British empiricists, The physiological roots of psychology, The beginnings of experimental psychology: Wilhelm Wundt, American functionalism: William James; Part II: Central streams in psychology – Psychoanalysis, Behaviorism, Gestalt, Humanism; Part III: Fields in psychology – Social psychology, Measuring individual differences: Measuring intelligence, Cognitive psychology; Part IV: Summary – Central dilemmas.

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1Students may not write a seminar paper in this course.