Early psychology.

Essay by torismom27 September 2003

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There are many different perspectives in early psychology. The different perspectives are behavioral, psychodynamic, humanistic, physiological, evolutionary, cognitive, and cultural and diversity.

First, I'll start with the behavioral perspective. The behavioral perspective focuses on the importance of learning in understanding how various behaviors occur. In other words, it acknowledges observable behavior and emphasizes the learned nature of behavior. The way this perspective came about was with a Russian physiologist named Ivan Pavlov. He started to notice the different types of behavior in dogs, when they started to salivate at the sight of food or heard the keys when the door was about to be unlocked where the dogs were at. This brought us to observe the development of how living things relate to the events in they're environment.

Now, on to the psychodynamic perspective. Psychodynamic perspective suggests that both normal and abnormal behaviors are determined primarily by unconscious forces. A man named Sigmund Freud developed this perspective.

Freud had many experiences in which he learned that the unconscious mind exerted enormous control over a person's behavior. With knowing this, he started to practice hypnosis until he realized that not everyone responded to it. Eventually he came up with a treatment called psychoanalytic therapy which attempts to bring unconscious causes of agony to the conscious level.

Second is about humanistic perspective. Humanistic perspective is the approach to psychology, which emphasizes free will and individuals' control of their own behavior. Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow were the psychologist that came upon this perspective. They thought that they should focus on each person to understand them as distinctive individuals.

Third is the physiological perspective which focuses on behaviors and mental processes that can be understood and explained by studying the fundamentals of physiology. Physiological psychiatrists are more interested in how the brain works.