The precise origins of psychology are unknown, but somehow it just emerged as its need surfaced. When it was known that something mind-boggling was going on was contributory, the experts carefully labeled it as primordial’, a less known, but safe word meaning the same thing.
In this case, primordial was used when describing the unusual way something was going on in the minds of people that leaned toward what later would be called psychology.
The above is the simplistic new but leave it to the analyst, of the thinking process, not to only take note of this unusual way of thought, but to wonder why it came into being. They , whomever first noted this process, was not content to observe, to interact within in it, and leave it alone, they wanted to classify it, and pin it down.
Thus associationism came into being. It is credited to Plato, but Socrates probably started it, and Aristotle examined it, listed it and founded a school upon it. Each of the three was of course reacting to their own ideas and according to their own mental abilities.
All three, in other words, took the same thoughts but reacted to them and explained them differently. A fascinating phenomenon just as thrilling today as it was then. It’s the unmentionable something that keeps writers writing and scientists dissecting and psychologists wondering.
Aristotle’s four laws of association brought about when he analyzed the process of memory and recall: the law of contiguity, i.e., events close to each other are linked together. Thus, remembering one brings the other to mind; the law of frequency, i.e., how often used may make it easier to remember; the law of similarity, i.e., how much alike the events are may make it easier to recall; the law of contrast, i.e., opposites may evoke remembrance.
Aristotle called association common sense. He did so not because of common sense as opposed to stupidity, but commonly held senses. Those senses common to others. The sense of taste, the taste of smell, etc. For two thousand years these laws were accepted. Even Saint Thomas Aquinas, accepted them, “lock, stock, and barrel”.
Well, not so fast. Thomas Aquinas, a Roman Church father who interpreted Platonism in his writings, may have had some later doubts about some of it. Months before he died during Mass something happened to him. It was clear to the attendants that he was having some type of other-worldly experience. From that time on, he stopped writing. In explanation he would only say, “all that I have written is nothing but straw”.
Then came enlightenment, and philosophy and thoughts once held was critically examined. The philosophers Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, John Stuart Mill and on and on the psychological ball game went, but yet not named that.
Then in 1818, Alexander Bain, a friend of John Stuart Mills, came along and connected what the three Greek philosophers had been talking about to psychology. The Bain Principle, “the frequency or probability of a behavior rises as it is followed by a pleasurable event, and therefore decreases as it is followed by a painful event.” Only later it would be called conditioning”. It’s what we do to do to pups that bite, we whack them gently on the nose with our forefinger”. They do not like this and they, in time, and with repetition, get the message.
Much credit is given to Bains to getting the psychology ball rolling. His early textbooks, “The Senses and the Intellect” (1859); and ” Emotions and the Will”(1855) and his Psychological Journal “Mind” (1876) were well received.
Although all the above were actually philosophers, it was the gradual shading from one to another. The works of Bains were lighter if we consider all that came before, form the time of the three Greek thinkers as being a lighter shade of black than previous thought. And then ever so gradually getting lighter with each succeeding dawn of thought.
And by the time Associationism and its march with time and its meeting with Bains it was a very light gray. Then his though blanched it further and when Hermann Ebbinghaus, in 1850, a German psychologist who published his book “On Memory” in 1855, an investigation into in experimental psychology, the psychological canvas was bleached white.
The above example of black and white has no other association than that I made of it to show how psychology rather than have an abrupt beginning, just kind of one day dawned. Perhaps, an accurate picture would have been better to have uses that of the process of photography. What happens there is a negative is developed to showing the real picture by a series of chemical washes. Why didn’t I use that? I did not think of it.
