Ancient Psychological Thought

History & Systems of Psychology, Lecture 3

Mark Berg

Early Chinese Psychologies

• Early psychological thought was anchored to a larger worldview surrounding the number five.
• Accepted five basic elements (wood, fire, metal, earth, and water) as well as five senses, five colors, five emotions, five basic human relationships, and so on.
• Confucius was a great humanistic philosopher who investigated human relationships among other topics.

Hsün Tzu

• Compared with Aristotle as a naturalist who emphasized the regularity and orderliness of nature

Yin & Yang

• Yin and Yang are both opposite and complementary forces.
• Yang is associated with force, hardness, heat, dryness, and masculinity.
• Yin is associated with weakness, softness, cold, moistness, and femininity.
• Equilibrium between Yin and Yang is essential to physical and psychological health.

Physiological Psychology

• China opened the door to physiological psychology with their belief that mental processes are central and are associated with the physical body.

Eastern Thinking

• Babylonia influenced the intellectual traditions of the Greeks, Egyptians, Jews, and Arabs.
• The Babylonians recognized many Gods and devils, and they emphasized demonological methods as a diagnosis and a treatment of physical and mental illnesses.

More Eastern Thinking

• Egyptian psychology was deeply intertwined with the polytheistic Egyptian religions and the emphasis on immortality and life after death.
• Although the Egyptians appear to be the first to describe the brain, they most often viewed the heart as the seat of mental life.
• Women attained greater status among Egyptians than among most other ancient peoples.

India

• Other Eastern philosophies existed. Thinkers in India, as reflected in the Vedas and the Upanishads, investigated knowledge and desire, among many other topics.

Hebrew philosophy

• Hebrew philosophy and psychology must be understood in light of radical monotheism.
• Humans have two sides, a biological, self-serving side and a spiritual side capable of serving the larger community.
• The Hebrews had well-developed notions of mental disorders that were attributed to the anger of God or human disobedience.

Persia

• Persia was the birthplace of the Zoroastrian religion based on the teachings of Zarathustra and the holy book Avesta.
• Human beings were the testing grounds of good and evil, and mental and physical disorders were viewed as the work of the devil; demonological diagnoses and treatments were common.

Greece

• Greece emerged on the Island of Crete as well as the Southern European mainland, and intellectual inquiry thrived in Greek society.
• The Cosmologists were interested in the nature of the universe (Cosmology) and the origin of the universe (Cosmogeny).

Cosmologists

• Thales argued that water in a variety of forms is the primal substance of the world.
• Anaximander, a student of Thales, suggested that the basic material of the universe was apeiron, meaning “without boundary.”
• Anaximander argued that a succession of developing and failing worlds and the interaction of opposites led to the slow development and diversification of life on earth; in doing so, he was an early evolutionary theorist.
• Anaximenes, who was also a student of Thales, believed the primal substance of the world to be air.

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Cosmologists 2

• Pythagoras first coined the term philosophy, literally meaning “love of wisdom.”
• Pythagoras led the Pythagorean school in a life centered on the eternal and unchanging aspects of number.
• His wife Theana played a critical role in the educational activities of the society, despite the devaluing of women in ancient Greek culture, and his daughter Myia provided early advice on moderation and balance in the care of infants.
• Xenophanes was an active skeptic concerned with questions of epistemology, and he argued for monotheism.
• Xenophanes was one of the first to distinguish between knowledge and opinion.

Cosmologists 3

• Parmenides was a rationalist who argued for a thorough monism in his poem On Nature. He emphasized reason over experience in his philosophy of being.
• Zeno was a student of Parmenides who used his famous paradoxes to argue that motion is incompatible with reason and is therefore illusory.
• Heraclitus empirically argued that only change was fundamental. His empirical approach led him to a world of becoming and a staunch pluralism.
• Leucippus and Democritus accepted a reductionistic and materialistic atomism.

Early Greeks and Mental Illness

• Aesculapius
• Alcmaeon
• Empedocles
• Hippocrates

Relativism

• Relativism was a theory of truth argued by Protagoras, a sophist.

The Golden Age, Socrates, Plato Aristotle

• Socrates
• Socrates argued against relativism; he claimed that through reason we can discern objective truths.
• Knowledge is virtue for Socrates, and ignorance results from evil. We may all have limited knowledge, but Socrates claimed to be somewhat wiser than some in that he was aware of his own ignorance.

Plato

• Plato argued that senses provide only illusion and that reason can provide true knowledge.
• Plato discusses psyche, usually translated as “soul” or “mind” in numerous works that extend over years of his life. He speaks of a tripartite mind including the appetitive soul, the affective soul, and the rational soul.
• For Plato, learning is the remembering of the true knowledge of forms from before our birth into a human body.
• Plato discussed sensory function and perception and emphasized pleasure and pain in the motivations of humans.
• Plato argued that mental illnesses may be associated with irrational drives, discord among parts of the soul, or ignorance.
• Love can take several forms for Plato, ranging in a hierarchy from erotic love to love of knowledge through philosophy.

Aristotle & The Lyceum

• Aristotle argued for hylomorphism in his description of the mind and the body as interdependent. “Hylo” is from “hule” meaning matter and “morphe” meaning form.
• In De Anima, Aristotle’s classic work on the soul, Aristotle attributes to the soul nutritive function, sensitive and movement functions, and, in humans, reason.
• Memory, for Aristotle, is a passive process while recollection is active. He provided an associationist view of memory emphasizing the roles of similarity, contrast, contiguity, and frequency in memory.
• Thinking, for Aristotle, is rooted in perception and in objects of the world, but thinking may be flawed. Imagination does not have the corrective influence of the external world and allows greater freedom in thought. Additionally, Aristotle advocated a naturalistic approach to dreams.
• While he recognized the importance of pleasure and pain in human motivation, Aristotle advocated a “golden mean” between the extremes of human activity.
• He recognized four factors that affected human ability to achieve the good: individual differences, habit, social supports, and freedom of choice.

Following

• Psychological thought following Aristotle moved from a pursuit of knowledge to a pursuit of gratification and the determination of what constitutes a good life.