Edmund Burke once said “those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it”. The breakthroughs of many well-known psychologists throughout the years have shaped history and the way we view the human mind today. Great men such as Darwin, Watson, James and Wunt have all had major influences, but women like Mary Whiton Calkins and Leta Stetter Hollingworth have also played important roles in the development of psychology. Psychology can be viewed as one of the oldest disciplines and also one of the newest as mentioned in (Schultz & Schultz, 2011, pg.3). Psychology as a discipline is very old. The study of human nature can be dated back to Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, …show more content…
Women psychologists in the nineteenth and twentieth century found it hard to be taken seriously. Prejudice and discrimination meant it was hard for them to get degrees and become professionals as argued by Shultz & Shultz (2011, pg.140). However Mary Whiton Calkins overcame all the barriers in the way of her education. She was the first women president of the APA and was ranked 12th among the 50 most important psychologists in the U.S. in 1903. But despite all this, she was refused her degree by Harvard because she was a woman as stated by (Shultz & Shultz, 2011, pg.142). Calkins was especially interested in the study of memory, and also developed her own system of introspective personalistic psychology “the study of conscious, functioning, experiencing selves that exist in relationship to others” as seen in (Pickren & Rutherford, 2010, …show more content…
These women are often overlooked due to the fact that they struggled to gain degrees and respect at the time. Psychology has come a long way from its beginnings as a theory, speculated on by the great philosophers more than 2,000 years ago. It has been a long road filled with many theories and speculations to the cognitive neuroscience we know today. From Wunts first experimental laboratory and structuralist theories, to John B. Watson’s behaviourism, there were many different views on what aspects of the mind psychologists should have been focusing on. Each school of psychology had its own unique way of looking at the human mind, and each one helped us to understand ourselves in a new way. Each breakthrough shaped history as we know it, by changing people’s perceptions of their mind and also their sense of selves. It is amazing to think of what breakthrough could be