The History of Psychology

                  
   Psychology is a relatively new field in the realm of the sciences,only about 125 years old.It's not that no one though about what makes people tick before then; on the contrary, there were philosophers,medical dotors, and psysiologists. who thought about little else. Aristotle,who lived from 384-322 B.C , wrote about the relationship of the soul to the body (with the two being aspects of the same underlying structure) in De Anima as well as other works (Durran,1993;Everson,1995).Plato (427-347 B.C),Aristotle's teacher felt the soul could exist separately from the body, a view that has becme known as dualism (Jackson,2001).
   Rene Descartes,a seventeeth century French philosopher and mathematician,agreed with Plato and believed that the pinel gland (a small organ at the base of the brain) was the seat of the soul (Kenny,1968,1994).Philosophers tried to understandor explain the human mind and it's connection to the Physical Body,while medical doctors and Physiologists wondered about the physical connection between the body and the brain. For Example,physician and physicist Gustav Fechner is often credited with performing some of the first scientific experiments that would form a basis for experimentation in psychology with his studies of perception (Fechner,1860),and physician Hermann von Helmholtz (von Helmholtz,1852,1863) performed groundbreaking experiments in visual and auditory perception