The world has come a long way in terms of understanding psychology. The history of psychology itself is fascinating and goes back a long time. Psychology has taken several forms over the centuries, each time with spirit and its own distinct personality. During the medieval times, for instance, what would come to be known as psychology was mostly based around superstition and the fear of evil spirits. This was not a world like the one we have today, with its gmat accommodations, act accomdations, lsat accommodations, ADD testing, dyslexia testing and other forms of quality mental health evaluation. The idea of mental health barely existed back then and what did exist was an idea of how healthy minds work combined with local spiritual beliefs and ideas for a little bit of flavor. Each culture had it’s own version of this combination as well and all of them were slightly different variations on psychosomatic and spiritual themes. This is how it was for many intervening centuries until the historical period known as the Enlightenment in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This period was marked by a radical and free thinking exchange that saw thinkers and intellectuals and artists reevaluate their relationship to religion and academia in general. The men and women of this time were focused heavily on sciences and naturalism and tried to find the presence of a maker or makers in their quest for understanding nature as it pertained to the functions of humanity. This is all a very large way of saying that there was a bold move in this historical period to try and understand how people and society behaved as individual units and as a whole, which was an effort that had been hitherto unknown since the time of the time of the ancient Chinese, Greeks and Romans. With this new ways of understanding the world come a whole host of new disciplines, from botany to zoology to astronomy to, yes, psychology which was a specific discipline that continues to strive today to understand how the human mind works. Let’s take a look at where this field has been and where it is now.
The Beginning of Psychology
At the beginning of psychology, there was very little understanding of how an overall healthy human was supposed to behave. There still is a lot of debate in this area but, back then, there was little to no idea where to start in this endeavor. The only place that early researchers could look was into history to see how countries and the populations of countries acted in accordance with the world around them. There were no act accommodations or anything of the sort back then. Act accomodations, and things like act accomodations, did not come along until much much later. Freud, for example, pioneered a lot of early ideas about how people are raised and how the way they are raised affects the way they act later in life. He was famously known for sitting people down and talking to them about their families in an attempt to understand the problems they were having. While things today like act accomodations are meant to nurture and help people who might have problems such as autism, back then there were no such strict rules and regulations for helping those in need. There was only the personal history of your clients and what it might mean for you.
Act Accomodations and Today’s Psychology
Psychology has come a very long way today from its superstitious and humble beginnings. Today, we have a sharp and clear understanding of how emotions affect the brain, the effects of trauma, the signs of autism, ADD and other neuropsychological conditions. There is still a lot to learn, however. We still have little to no idea how consciousness arises in the brains of humans, or, more specifically, how electrical impulses in the brain translate to direct conscious experience. There are several theories but no concrete evidence in any direction of why it should be that electricity passing through cells makes us feel or see or hear something. The deeper we get into the mind, the more mysteries we unlock. Who knows what we’ll find next?