Reference: SC: Psychology

Holistic Systems and Cognitive Therapies

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Indian Medical Psychology (1st Century Onward):
The Ayurvedic Framework

Ancient Indian medicine developed sophisticated understandings of mental illness centuries before the Common Era, but the classical texts were composed and systematized during the early centuries CE. The Charaka Samhita and Sushruta Samhita (composed in their current forms during the 1st-2nd centuries CE, though based on much earlier oral traditions) contain detailed expositions of mental disorders.

The primary Ayurvedic category for major mental disorders was unmada, literally meaning “frenzy, madness, or mental derangement”. The Charaka Samhita defined unmada as “the excessive wandering of the intellect, mind, and memory,” a condition that encompassed what modern psychiatry would classify across multiple diagnostic categories including various forms of psychosis, severe mood disorders, and organic mental syndromes. The text specified that unmada was “brought on by the consumption of impure food, blasphemy, and mental shock”, reflecting a biopsychosocial understanding that integrated dietary, spiritual, and traumatic etiologies.

Ayurvedic medicine classified unmada into five subtypes based on which of the three fundamental physiological principles (doshas) were vitiated. Vataja unmada resulted from vitiation of the vata humor (associated with movement and the nervous system), pittaja unmada from vitiation of pitta (associated with metabolism and transformation), kaphaja unmada from vitiation of kapha (associated with structure and lubrication), sannipataja unmada from simultaneous vitiation of all three doshas, and agantuja unmada from exogenous causes including possession by supernatural entities. This classification system demonstrated remarkable sophistication, recognizing that similar behavioral presentations could arise from fundamentally different pathophysiological processes.

The Ayurvedic understanding of mental illness was deeply integrated with its model of personality and consciousness. Mental health was understood to depend upon the balance of the trigunas—three fundamental qualities of mind: sattva (harmony, goodness, clarity), rajas (passion, activity, restlessness), and tamas (inertia, darkness, ignorance). “Improving Sattva and achieving a balance between Rajas and Tamas are necessary for mental well-being”. The hrdaya (emotional heart and seat of intellect) was identified as the origin point where aggravated doshas would travel into the mental channels, “subsequently causing an imbalance within the mind”.

Treatment approaches combined pharmacological, psychological, and spiritual interventions. The Charaka Samhita prescribed that “the mind should be treated with knowledge, specific knowledge, restraint, memory, and concentration”. Therapeutic methods included herbal medicines, dietary modifications, massage (abhyanga), fumigation (dhuma), music therapy, and psychotherapeutic interventions. For unmada caused by loss of something the patient loved, “he is made to regain a similar object. Simultaneously, he is consoled with pleasing assurances of friends as a result of which he becomes free from the ailment”. For unmada caused by emotions—“passion, grief, fear, anger, exhilaration, jealousy and greed”—physicians employed “exposure of the patient to mutually contradictory psychic factors” to restore equilibrium.

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Buddhist Psychology (1st-5th Centuries):
Cognitive Approaches to Mental Suffering

Buddhism developed a comprehensive psychological system that distinguished between general human suffering (dukkha) and specific mental illnesses. The Buddha himself “distinguished between two kinds of illness (rogo): physical illness (kāyiko rogo) and mental illness (cetasiko rogo)”. The Buddha attributed mental illness to “the arising of mental defilements (Kleshas) which are ultimately based on the unwholesome roots (three poisons) of greed, hatred, and confusion”.

From the Buddhist perspective, “everyone who is not an awakened being is in some sense mentally ill”—as the Buddha stated in the Pali canon, “those beings are hard to find in the world who can admit freedom from mental disease even for one moment, save only those in whom the asavas mental fermentations are destroyed”. This radical claim did not pathologize normal human experience but rather established enlightenment as the standard of perfect mental health. The Buddhist approach to mental suffering was fundamentally therapeutic and pragmatic—rather than metaphysical speculation, Buddhism offered “a method of cleansing the stream of consciousness from ‘contaminations’ and ‘defilements’”.

Buddhist texts identified five major hindrances (nivarana) that prevent mental cultivation and contribute to psychological distress: sense desire, hostility, sloth-torpor, restlessness-worry, and doubt. The therapeutic methodology for removing negative or intrusive thoughts, detailed in the Vitakkasanthana Sutta (MN 20, “The Removal of Distracting Thoughts”), prescribed five cognitive techniques that strikingly anticipate modern cognitive-behavioral therapy:

1. Focus on an opposite or incompatible thought or object
2. Ponder the perils and disadvantages of the thought and its harmful consequences
3. Ignore the thought and distract oneself through another activity
4. Reflect on the removal or stopping of the causes of the target thought
5. Make a forceful mental effort to suppress the thought

Nagarjuna (c. 150-250 CE), founder of the Madhyamaka school of Mahayana Buddhism, revolutionized Buddhist philosophy and psychology through his concept of sunyata (emptiness). Nagarjuna’s philosophy functioned as “linguistic therapy: it uses language to reveal how language deceives us”. He argued that mental and emotional turmoil arises from clinging to conceptual elaborations (prapancha)—fixed ideas about the nature of reality, self, and phenomena. These conceptualizations “do not accurately reflect how the world actually is” and generate suffering because we mistake linguistic constructs for reality.

Nagarjuna demonstrated through rigorous dialectical analysis that all phenomena, including mental states and the self, lack intrinsic existence (svabhava). This “cognitive default” of projecting substantial existence onto things reflects “our tendency to become attached to things, reflecting a need for solidity and permanence, forever frustrated by the certainty of death”. The therapeutic goal was not to replace deluded thinking with a correct philosophical view but rather to let go of all fixed conceptual positions. “Our emotional and mental turmoil is replaced by a beatitude or serenity (shiva) that cannot be grasped but can be lived”.

Vasubandhu (fl. 4th-5th century CE), philosopher and co-founder of the Yogacara school, developed a sophisticated psychological system centered on consciousness and its transformations. Vasubandhu elaborated the theory of eight types of consciousness: the five sense consciousnesses, empirical consciousness (mano-vijnana), a self-aggrandizing mentality (manas), and the alaya-vijnana (storehouse consciousness). The storehouse consciousness explained psychological continuity and the mechanisms of karmic conditioning—the “seed” (bija) of each experience is “stored subliminally and released into a new experience,” providing “a quasi-causal explanation for the functioning of karmic retribution”.

Vasubandhu’s analysis revealed that what we take to be an external objective world is actually constructed within consciousness itself. “We are fooled by consciousness into believing that those things which we perceive and appropriate within consciousness are actually outside our cognitive sphere”. This insight—that “cognition takes place only in consciousness and nowhere else”—anticipated by over a millennium Western philosophical idealism and phenomenology. The therapeutic implications were profound: suffering could be addressed by transforming the very basis of consciousness. “Buddhism is a method of cleansing the stream of consciousness from ‘contaminations’ and ‘defilements’”, achieved through ashraya-paravritti (overturning the basis) whereby consciousness (vijnana) is gradually transformed into unmediated cognition (jnana).

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Chinese Medical Psychology (1st-10th Centuries):
The Integration of Emotion and Physiology

Traditional Chinese Medicine developed during the Han Dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE) and flourished through the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE), creating a comprehensive system for understanding the relationship between emotional states and physiological processes. The foundational text, the Huang Di Nei Jing (Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic), described the Shen (spirit or consciousness) as residing in the Heart and governing consciousness. The Shen concept evolved from a mystical force into “a clinical entity in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), influencing diagnostics and treatments for emotional and mental imbalances”.

Zhang Zhongjing’s Shang Han Lun (Treatise on Cold Damage, c. 200 CE) built upon this foundation, addressing “how external pathogens can disrupt the Shen, leading to symptoms like delirium or restlessness”. The text emphasized that “the Heart is the sovereign of all organs and represents the consciousness of one’s being. It is responsible for intelligence, wisdom, and spiritual transformation”.

Chinese medicine conceptualized mental disorders as arising from disruptions in the flow of qi (vital energy) and imbalances among the internal organ systems. “According to Chinese medicine theory, MDD major depressive disorder is mostly characterized by emotional disorders and stagnation of qi, which leads to a loss of regulation of the liver, a loss of function of the spleen, and a loss of nourishment of the heart”. The system recognized both external emotional factors (worry, fear, anger) and internal factors (the qi of the organs being easily disturbed) as contributing to mental illness.

Treatment modalities integrated herbal pharmacology with emotional and spiritual interventions. Classical formulas like Xiao Yao San (Free and Easy Wanderer Powder), first recorded during the Song Dynasty (960-1127 CE) but based on earlier traditions, have been “used in the treatment of psychiatric disorders for thousands of years”. The formula’s eight herbs were designed to address liver qi stagnation, a fundamental pattern underlying many emotional disorders. Chinese physicians documented successful treatments of hysteria, insomnia, and depression using these formulas, with detailed case records surviving from the medieval period.

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Reference: SC: Psychology

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20th century

1900s

• 1900 – Sigmund Freud published The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.
• 1903 – John B. Watson graduated from the University of Chicago; his dissertation on rat behavior has been described as a “classic of developmental psychobiology” by historian of psychology Donald Dewsbury.
• 1903 – Helen Thompson Woolley published her doctoral dissertation, The Mental Traits of Sex, for which she had conducted the first experimental test of sex differences.
• 1904 – Ivan Pavlov won the Nobel Prize for his studies of conditioning. This was the first Prize given for research adopted by psychologists.
• 1904 – Charles Spearman published the article General Intelligence in the American Journal of Psychology, introducing the g factor theory of intelligence.
• 1905- Mary Calkins was the first woman elected president of the American Psychological Association.
• 1905 – Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon created the Binet-Simon scale to identify students needing extra help, marking the beginning of standardized psychological testing.
• 1905 – Edward Thorndike published the law of effect.
• 1905 – Sigmund Freud published Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.
• 1906 – The Journal of Abnormal Psychology was founded by Morton Prince, for which Boris Sidis was an associate editor and significant contributor.
• 1908 – Sigmund Freud published the paper On the Sexual Theories of Children, introducing the concept of penis envy; he also published the paper ‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness.
• 1908 – Wilfred Trotter published the first paper explaining the herd instinct.
• 1909 – Sigmund Freud lectured at Clark University, winning over the U.S. establishment.

1910s

• 1910 – Sigmund Freud founded the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), with Carl Jung as the first president, and Otto Rank as the first secretary.
• 1910 – Grace Helen Kent and J. Rosanoff published the Kent-Rosanoff Free Association Test
• 1910 – Boris Sidis opened the private Sidis Psychotherapeutic Institute at Maplewood Farms in Portsmouth, New Hampshire for the treatment of nervous patients using the latest scientific methods.
• 1911 – Alfred Adler left Freud’s Psychoanalytic Group to form his own school of thought, accusing Freud of overemphasizing sexuality and basing his theory on his own childhood.
• 1911 – The American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA) was founded.
• 1911 – William McDougall, founder of Hormic Psychology published Body and Mind: A History and Defence of Animism, claiming that there is an animating principle in Nature and that the mind guides evolution.
• 1912 – Max Wertheimer published Experimental Studies of the Perception of Movement, helping found Gestalt Psychology
• 1913 – Carl Jung developed his own theories, which became known as Analytical Psychology.
• 1913 – Jacob L. Moreno pioneered group psychotherapy methods in Vienna, which emphasized spontaneity and interaction; they later became known as psychodrama and sociometry.
• 1913 – John B. Watson published Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It, sometimes known as “The Behaviorist Manifesto”.
• 1913 – Hugo Münsterberg published Psychology and Industrial Efficiency, considered today as the first book on Industrial and Organizational Psychology.
• 1914 – Boris Sidis published The Foundations of Normal and Abnormal Psychology, where he provided the scientific foundation for the field of psychology, and detailed his theory of the moment consciousness.
• 1917 – Sigmund Freud published Introduction to Psychoanalysis.

1920s

• 1920 – John B. Watson and his assistant Rosalie Rayner conducted the Little Albert experiment, using classical conditioning to make a young boy afraid of white rats.
• 1921 – Sigmund Freud published Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.
• 1921 – Jacob L. Moreno conducted the first large scale public psychodrama session at the Komedienhaus in Vienna; he moved to New York in 1925.
• 1921 – Melanie Klein began to develop her technique of analyzing children.
• 1922 – Karen Horney began publishing a series of 14 papers (last in 1937) questioning Freud’s theories on women, founding feminist psychology.
• 1922 – Boris Sidis published Nervous Ills: Their Cause and a Cure, a popularization of his work concerning the subconscious and the treatment of psychopathic disease.
• 1923 – Sigmund Freud published The Ego and the Id.
• 1924 – Jacob Robert Kantor founded interbehavioral psychology based on John Dewey’s psychology and Albert Einstein’s relativity theory.
• 1924 – Otto Rank published The Trauma of Birth, coining the term “pre-Oedipal”. Freud had originally praised him for such, but changed his stance and as such caused their falling out.
• 1926 – Otto Rank gave the lecture “The Genesis of the Object Relation”, founding object relations theory.
• 1927 – Ivan Pavlov published Conditioned Reflexes, containing his theory of classical conditioning.
• 1928 – Jean Piaget published Judgment and Reasoning in the Child.
• 1928 – Shoma Morita published Morita Therapy: The True Nature of Shinkeishitsu (Anxiety-based Disorders), which contains his peripheral theory of consciousness, while noting Freud’s theory of the unconscious. (Translation by A. Kondo, Edited by P. LeVine in 1998, SUNY Press)
• 1929 – Edwin Boring published A History of Experimental Psychology, pioneering the history of psychology.
• 1929 – Lev Vygotsky founded cultural-historical psychology.

1930s

• 1930 – Edwin Boring discussed the Boring figure.
• 1931 – Gordon Allport et al. published the Allport-Vernon-Lindzey Study of Values, which defines six major value types.
• 1932 – Journal of Personality founded as first personality psychology research periodical originally titled Character and Personality.
• 1933 – Pyotr Gannushkin published Manifestations of Psychopathies.
• 1933 – Clark L. Hull published Hypnosis and Suggestibility, proving that hypnosis is not sleep and founding the modern study of hypnosis.
• 1933 – Wilhelm Reich published Character Analysis and The Mass Psychology of Fascism.
• 1934 – Lev Vygotsky published Thought and Language (Thinking and Speech).
• 1934 – Ruth Winifred Howard became the first African American woman to earn a PhD in psychology.
• 1935 – John Ridley Stroop developed a color-word task to demonstrate the interference of attention, the Stroop effect
• 1935 – Helen Flanders Dunbar published Emotions and Bodily Changes: A Survey of Literature on Psychosomatic Interrelationships; in 1942 she founded the American Psychosomatic Society (American Society for Research in Psychosomatic Problems),^[36] and was the first editor of the society’s journal Psychosomatic Medicine: Experimental and Clinical Studies, founded in 1939.
• 1935 – Henry Murray and Christiana Morgan of Harvard University published the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT).
• 1935 – Theodore Newcomb began the Bennington College Study, which ended in 1939, documenting liberalization of women students’ political beliefs, along with the effects of proximity on acquaintance and attraction.
• 1936 – Kurt Lewin published Principles of Topological Psychology, containing Lewin’s Equation B = f (P, E), meaning that behavior is a function of a person in their environment.
• 1936 – Wilhelm Reich published The Sexual Revolution.
• 1936 – Kenneth Spence published an analysis of discrimination learning in terms of gradients of excitation and inhibition, showing that mathematical deductions from a quantitative theory could generate interesting and empirically testable predictions.
• 1936 – The Psychometric Society was founded by Louis Leon Thurstone, who proposed dividing general intelligence into seven primary mental abilities (PMAs).
• 1938 – B.F. Skinner published his first major work The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental Analysis, introducing behavior analysis.
• 1939 – Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley published a classic report in the journal Nature of the first recording of an action potential.
• 1939 – Neal E. Miller et al. published the frustration-aggression theory, which claims that aggression is the result of frustration of efforts to attain a goal.
• 1939 – David Wechsler developed the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale.
• 1939 – On 1 September World War II began with the German invasion of Poland; on 20 September Adolf Hitler signed the Euthanasia Decree, written by psychologist Max de Crinis, resulting in the Aktion T4 euthanasia program; on 23 September Sigmund Freud committed physician-assisted suicide in London on the Jewish Day of Atonement; on 31 October his archrival Otto Rank died of a kidney infection in New York City after uttering the word “comical”; Wilhelm Reich fled to New York, coining the word orgone and building “orgone accumulators”, which got him in trouble with the psychiatric establishment and the federal government.

1940s

• 1940 – Edwin Boring discussed the moon illusion.
• 1941 – Erich Fromm published Escape from Freedom, founding political psychology.
• 1941 – B.F. Skinner and William Kaye Estes introduced the conditioned emotional response (CER)/conditioned fear response (CFR) paradigm via electric shocks given to rats.
• 1942 – Ludwig Binswanger founded existential therapy.
• 1942 – Carl Rogers published Counseling and Psychotherapy, suggesting that respect and a nonjudgmental approach to therapy is the foundation for effective treatment of mental health issues.
• 1943 – J. P. Guilford developed the Stanine (Standard Nine) test for the U.S. Air Force to evaluate pilots.
• 1943 – Clark L. Hull published Principles of Behavior, establishing animal-based learning and conditioning as the dominant learning theory.
• 1943 – Leo Kanner published Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact, the first systematic description of autistic children.
• 1943 – Abraham Maslow published the paper A Theory of Human Motivation, describing Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
• 1944 – Zach Andrew and Cameron Peter published Myer’s Psychology Second Edition where they revolutionized the approach of learned Psychology
• 1945 – The Journal of Clinical Psychology was founded.
• 1946 – Kurt Lewin founded action research.
• 1946 – Stanley Smith Stevens published his levels of measurement theory.
• 1947 – Jerome Bruner published Value and Need as Organizing Factors in Perception, founding New Look Psychology, which challenges psychologists to study not just an organism’s response to a stimulus but also its internal interpretation.
• 1947 – Kurt Lewin coined the term “group dynamics“.
• 1947 Nikolai Bernstein summarized his research on the measurement of actions using his original devices that became a beginning of a new discipline of kinesiology.
• 1948 – Alfred Kinsey of Indiana University published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.
• 1949 – The Boulder Conference outlined the scientist-practitioner model of clinical psychology.
• 1949 – Donald Hebb published The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory, in which he provided a detailed, testable theory of how the brain could support cognitive processes, revolutionizing neuropsychology and making McGill University a center of research.
• 1949 – David Wechsler published the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC).

1950s

• 1950 – Karen Horney summarized her ideas in her magnum opus Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization.
• 1950 – Erik Erikson published Childhood and Society, in which he introduced his theory on the stages of psycho-social development and the concept of an identity crisis.
• 1950 – Rollo May published The Meaning of Anxiety.
• 1951 – Solomon Asch published the Asch conformity experiments, demonstrating the power of conformity in groups.
• 1951 – Morton Deutsch published Interracial Housing: A Psychological Evaluation of a Social Experiment, producing scientific evidence of the bad effects of segregated housing, helping to end it in the U.S.
• 1951 – Carl Rogers published his magnum opus Client-Centered Therapy.
• 1951 – Lee Cronbach published his measure of reliability, now known as Cronbach’s alpha.
• 1952 – The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) was published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), marking the beginning of modern mental illness classification; it was revised in 1968, 1980–7, 1994, 2000 and 2013.
• 1952 – Hans Eysenck started a debate on psychotherapy with his critical review, claiming that psychotherapy had no documented effect, and psychoanalysis had negative effects.
• 1953 – Alfred Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Female.
• 1953 – Nathaniel Kleitman of the U. of Chicago discovered rapid eye movement sleep (REM), founding modern sleep research.
• 1953 – David McClelland proposed need theory.
• 1953 – B.F. Skinner outlined behavioral therapy, lending support for behavioral psychology via research in the literature.
• 1953 – The Code of Ethics for Psychologists was developed by the American Psychological Association (APA).
• 1953 – Harry Stack Sullivan published The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry, which holds that an individual’s personality is formed by relationships.
• 1954 – Abraham Maslow helped to found humanistic psychology, later developing Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
• 1954 – Paul E. Meehl published a paper claiming that mechanical (formal algorithmic) methods of data combination outperform clinical (subjective informal) methods when used to arrive at a prediction of behavior.
• 1954 – James Olds and Peter Milner of McGill University discovered the brain reward system, involving the brain’s pleasure center.
• 1954 – Julian Rotter published Social Learning and Clinical Psychology, founding social learning theory.
• 1954 – Herman Witkin published Personality Through Perception, which claims that personality can be revealed through differences in how people perceive their environment; he went on to develop the Rod and Frame Test (RFT).
• 1954 – Bronisław Malinowski publishes Magic, Science and Religion on magical thinking and the psychology of religion. Earlier, he studied sets of rituals he referred to as magic, and distinguished these from purely religious rituals, with the latter’s purpose being the coping with one’s fundamental human crisis of apparent finiteness/mortality.
• 1955 – Lee Cronbach published Construct Validity in Psychological Tests, popularizing the concept of construct validity.
• 1955 – J. P. Guilford developed the Structure of Intellect (SOI) theory, which divides human intelligence into 150 abilities along three dimensions, operations, content, and products; it is discredited by the 1990s.
• 1955 – George Kelly founded personal construct psychology.
• 1956 – George Armitage Miller published the paper The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two, in which he showed that there is a limit on the amount of information that can be memorized at one time.
• 1956 – Rollo May published Existence, promoting existential psychology.
• 1957 – Leon Festinger published his theory of cognitive dissonance.
• 1957 – Stanley Smith Stevens published Stevens’ power law.
• 1957 – Eric Berne developed Transactional analysis (TA), in which psychiatry patients can be treated for emotional distresses by analyzing and altering their social transactions.
• 1958 – John Cohen published Humanistic Psychology, the first book on the subject.
• 1958 – Harry Harlow gave the speech The Nature of Love, summarizing his isolation studies on infant monkeys and rejecting behavioristic and psychoanalytic theories of attachment.
• 1958 – Joseph Wolpe published his theory of reciprocal inhibition, leading to his theory of systematic desensitization for anxieties and phobias.
• 1959 – Viktor Frankl published the first English edition of Man’s Search for Meaning [with a preface by Gordon Allport], which provided an existential account of his Holocaust experience and an overview of his system of existential analysis called Logotherapy.
• 1959 – Noam Chomsky published his review of B.F. Skinner‘s Verbal Behavior, an event seen as by many as the start of the cognitive revolution.
• 1959 – George Mandler and William Kessen published The Language of Psychology.
• 1959 – Lawrence Kohlberg wrote his doctoral dissertation, outlining Kohlberg’s stages of moral development.

1960s

• 1960 – John L. Fuller and W. Robert Thompson published the seminal text Behavior Genetics.
• 1960 – Thomas Szasz inaugurated the anti-psychiatry movement with the publication of his book, The Myth of Mental Illness.
• 1961 – Albert Bandura published the Bobo doll experiment, a study of behavioral patterns of aggression.
• 1961 – Neal E. Miller proposed the use of biofeedback to control involuntary functions.
• 1962 – Wilfred Bion presented his unconventional theory of thinking.
• 1962 – Albert Ellis published Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy, describing the theoretical foundations of his therapeutic system known as Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy.
• 1962 – George Armitage Miller published Psychology, the Science of Mental Life, rejecting the idea that psychology should study only behavior.
• 1962 – Abraham Maslow published Toward a Psychology of Being, presenting his ideas of self-actualization and the hierarchy of human needs.
• 1962 – Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer proposed the two-factor theory of emotion, which considers emotion to be a function of both cognitive factors and physiological arousal; “People search the immediate environment for emotionally relevant cues to label and interpret unexplained physiological arousal.”
• 1962 – Silvan Tomkins published volume one (of two) of Affect Imagery Consciousness, presenting his affect theory
• 1963 – Stanley Milgram published his study of obedience to authority, now known as the Milgram experiment.
• 1964 – Jean M. Mandler and George Mandler published Thinking: From Association to Gestalt.
• 1964 – Virginia Satir published Conjoint Family Therapy, the first of several books on family therapy, causing her to become known as the “Mother of Family Therapy”
• 1965 – Anna Freud published Normality and Pathology in Childhood: Assessments of Development, presenting the concept of developmental lines.
• 1965 – William Glasser published Reality Therapy, describing his psycho-therapeutic model and introducing his concept of control theory [later renamed to Choice Theory].
• 1965 – Donald Winnicott published The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment, which became a main text in clinical psychodynamic developmental psychology.
• 1966 – Nancy Bayley became the first woman to receive the APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award for her contribution in developmental psychology.
• 1966 – Konrad Lorenz published On Aggression, which discusses his hydraulic model of instinctive pressures.
• 1966 – Masters and Johnson published Human Sexual Response.
• 1966 – Julian Rotter published a paper proposing the Internal-External Locus of Control Scale (I-E Scale).
• 1967 – Aaron Beck published a psychological model of clinical depression, suggesting that thoughts play a significant role in the development and maintenance of depression.
• 1967 – Edward E. Jones and Victor Harris published a paper defining fundamental attribution error, underestimating the effect of the situation in explaining social behavior.
• 1967 – Ulric Neisser founded cognitive psychology.
• 1968 – George Cotzias developed the L-Dopa treatment for Parkinson’s disease.
• 1968 – Mary Main published her hypothesis of a fourth attachment style in children, the insecure disorganized attachment style.
• 1968 – Walter Mischel published the paper “Personality and Assessment”, criticizing Gordon Allport‘s works on trait assessment with the observation that a patient’s behavior is not consistent across diverse situations but dependent on situational cues.
• 1968 – DSM-II was published by the American Psychiatric Association.
• 1968 – The first Doctor of Psychology (Psy. D.) professional degree program in Clinical Psychology was established in the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
• 1969 – The California School of Professional Psychology was established as the first freestanding school of professional psychology.
• 1969 – The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology was founded by Abraham Maslow, Stanislav Grof, and Anthony Sutich.
• 1969 – John Bowlby published his attachment theory in the classic book Attachment and Loss (vol. 1 of 3).
• 1969 – Harry Harlow published his experiment on affection development in rhesus monkeys.
• 1969 – Joseph Wolpe published the Subjective Units of Distress (Disturbance) Scale (SUDS).
• 1969 – Elisabeth Kübler-Ross published On Death and Dying, presenting the Kübler-Ross model, commonly referred to as the five stages of grief.
• 1969 – The Association for Women in Psychology (AWP) was founded, with Joann Evansgardner as the first (temporary) president.

1970s

• 1970 – At an APA Town Hall Meeting, with the support of the Association for Women in Psychology, Phyllis Chesler and Nancy Henley prepared a statement on APA’s obligations to women and demanded one million dollars in reparation for the damage psychology had perpetrated against women’s minds and bodies.
• 1970 – APA Division 29 gives its first Distinguished Professional Award in Psychology and Psychotherapy to Eugene Gendlin.
• 1970 – “Critical psychology” became a psychological theoretical field. Klaus Holzkamp, who worked as a professor at the Free University of Berlin, took a central role in defining critical psychology based on the works of Karl Marx and Aleksei N. Leontiev.
• 1970 – Masters and Johnson published Human Sexual Inadequacy.
• 1971 – The Stanford prison experiment, conducted by Philip Zimbardo et al. at Stanford University, studied the human response to captivity; the experiment quickly got out of hand and was ended early.
• 1971 – Martin Shubik performed the dollar auction, illustrating irrational choices.
• 1971 – In Nov. John O’Keefe and Jonathan O. Dostrovsky announced their discovery of place cells in the hippocampus.
• 1971 – The Leibniz Institute for Psychology Information at the University of Trier was founded to publish the PSYNDEX database of references to psychology in the German-speaking world.
• 1972 – The Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study commenced, a longitudinal study began, with 96% retention rate as of 2006, unprecedented for a longitudinal study, comparing to 20–40% dropout rates for other studies.
• 1972 – Robert E. Ornstein published The Psychology of Consciousness, about the use of biofeedback et al. to shift mood and awareness.
• 1972 – Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari published Anti-Oedipus, the first of two-volume work Capitalism and Schizophrenia, criticizing traditional psychoanalysis and its concepts to purpose a new set of theories which they called schizoanalysis.
• 1972 – Endel Tulving first made the distinction between episodic and semantic memory.
• 1973 – Ernest Becker published The Denial of Death, siding with Otto Rank against Sigmund Freud, claiming that knowledge of one’s mortality not sexuality is the basis of character.
• 1973 – Morton Deutsch published The Resolution of Conflict.
• 1973 – Vygotsky Circle neuropsychologist Alexander Luria published The Working Brain, a detailed description with great emphasis on rehabilitation of damage.
• 1973 – The Vail Conference of Graduate Educators in Psychology endorsed the scholar-practitioner training model, and approved the Doctor of Psychology (Psy. D) degree.
• 1973 – Division 35, later the Society for the Psychology of Women of the APA, was formed, with Elizabeth Douvan as the first president.
• 1973 – The Committee on Women in Psychology of the APA was formed, with Martha Mednick as its first chair.
• 1973 – The American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder.
• 1973 – The Caucus of Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Members of the American Psychiatric Association was officially founded to advocate to the APA on LGBT mental health issues; in 1985 it changed its name to the Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists.
• 1973 – Nancy Friday published My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies
• 1973 – Timothy Leary published Neurologic, describing the eight-circuit model of consciousness.
• 1974 – Sandra Bem created the Bem Sex-Role Inventory.
• 1974 – Robert Hinde published Biological Bases of Human Social Behavior, a main text in etological-oriented developmental psychology.
• 1974 – Arnold Sameroff published Reproductive Risk and the Continuum of Caretaking Causality, introducing the transactional model of psychology, which became influential.
• 1974 – Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch of the Univ. of York proposed Baddeley’s model of working memory.
• 1974 – Elizabeth Loftus began publishing papers on the malleability of human memory, the misinformation effect, and false memory syndrome and its relation to recovered memory therapy.
• 1974 – The APA Task Force on Sex Bias and Sex-Role Stereotyping in Psychotherapeutic Practice was appointed.
• 1975 – Georgia Babladelis became the first editor of the Psychology of Women Quarterly.
• 1975 – George Mandler published Mind and Emotion.
• 1975 – Mary Wright became the first chair of the new Task Force on the Status of Women in Canadian Psychology.
• 1975 – Robert Zajonc published the confluence model, showing how birth order and family size affect IQ.
• 1975 – The first APA-sponsored Psychology of Women Conference was held.
• 1975 – The journal Sex Roles was founded.
• 1975 – The first review article on the psychology of women appeared in the women’s studies journal Signs, by Mary Parlee.
• 1975 – The first article on the psychology of women was published in the Annual Review of Psychology.
• 1975 – The council of representatives of the American Psychological Association (APA) declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder.
• 1976 – Stanislav Grof founded the International Transpersonal Association to promote his transpersonal psychology.
• 1976 – Julian Jaynes published The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which coins the term bicameral mind for the brain of humans who lived before about 1,000 B.C.E., whose right side “speaks” in the name of a chieftain or god, and whose left side “listens” and takes orders.
• 1976 – Michael Posner published Chronometric Explorations of Mind, using the subtractive method of Franciscus Donders to study attention and memory.
• 1976 – The Psychology of Women Quarterly was founded.
• 1977 – Ernest Hilgard proposed the divided consciousness theory of hypnosis.
• 1977 – Albert Bandura published the book Social Learning Theory and an article on the concept of self-efficacy, A Unifying Theory of Behavioral Change.
• 1977 – Susan Folstein and Michael Rutter published a study of 21 British twins in Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry that reveals a high genetic component in autism.
• 1977 – Robert Plomin et al. proposed three major ways in which genes and environments act together to shape human behavior, coining the terms passive, active, and evocative gene–environment correlation.
• 1977 – Andrey Lichko published Psychopathies and Accentuations of Character of Teenagers.
• 1978 – Child psychologist Mary Ainsworth published her book Patterns of Attachment about her work on attachment theory and the Strange Situation Experiment (Protocol).
• 1978 – Paul Ekman published the Facial Action Coding System.
• 1978 – David Premack published the book Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind?, about his research on mental abilities of monkeys, introducing the term theory of mind.
• 1978 – The term cognitive neuroscience was coined by Michael Gazzaniga and George Armitage Miller for the effort to understand how the brain represents mental events.
• 1978 – John O’Keefe and Lynn Nadel published The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map.
• 1978 – E.O. Wilson published On Human Nature, considered the first landmark text to deal with what would become evolutionary psychology.
• 1978 – The first Canadian Institute on Women and Psychology pre-convention conference was hosted at the Canadian Psychological Association by IGWAP (Interest Group on Women and Psychology).
• 1978 – The Caucus of Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Members of the American Psychiatric Association, (now known as the Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists) successfully petitioned the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to create a task force on lesbian and gay issues; it was elevated to a full standing committee in the APA in 1988.
• 1979 – Alice Miller published The Drama of the Gifted Child, the first of a series of books criticizing Freud and Jung for blaming the child for the sexual abuse of the parents, which she calls the “poisonous pedagogies”.
• 1979 – Urie Bronfenbrenner published The Ecology of Human Development, founding ecological systems theory.

1980s

• 1980 – Transgender people were officially classified by the American Psychiatric Association as having “gender identity disorder.”
• 1980 – DSM-III was published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA).
• 1980 – George Mandler published Recognizing: The Judgment of Previous Occurrence, claiming a dual process basis of recognition, prior occurrence and identification.
• 1980 – Robert Zajonc published the paper “Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences”, arguing that affective and cognitive systems are largely independent, and that affect is more powerful and important, reviving the study of emotion and affective processes.
• 1981 – Alan P. Bell, Martin S. Weinberg, and Sue Kiefer Hammersmith’s Sexual Preference is published. The work later becomes one of the most frequently cited retrospective studies relating to sexual orientation.
• 1982 – Carol Gilligan published In a Different Voice, a work on feminist psychology.
• 1982 – The Caucus of Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Members of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) was recognized as a representative in the APA assembly, speaking directly on matters of special concern to lesbian and gay members.
• 1983 – Howard Gardner published Frames of Mind, introducing his theory of multiple intelligences.
• 1983 – The Caucus of Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Members of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) successfully petitioned the APA to create a task force on psychiatric aspects of AIDS, which ultimately led to the 1984 publication of two important APA volumes Innovations in Psychotherapy with Homosexuals and Psychiatric Implications of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.
• 1983 – W. David Pierce et al. published a paper about activity-based anorexia.
• 1984 – Jerome Kagan published The Nature of the Child, a biological and socially oriented description of the role of temperament in human development.
• 1984 – Peter Saville published the OPQ Pentagon questionnaire, a psychological personality inventory measuring the five factor model.
• 1984 – Florence Denmark, Carolyn R. Payton, and Laurie Eyde received the first American Psychological Association (APA) Committee on Women in Psychology Leadership Awards.
• 1985 – Daniel Stern published The Interpersonal World of the Infant, proposing an extensive mental life in early infancy.
• 1985 – Robert Sternberg proposed his triarchic theory of intelligence
• 1985 – Reuben Baron and David A. Kenny published the article The Moderator-Mediator Variable Distinction in Social Psychological Research: Conceptual, Strategic, and Statistical Considerations in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology proposing a distinction of moderating in mediating variables in psychological research.
• 1985 – Simon Baron-Cohen published Does the Autistic Child Have a ‘Theory of Mind’? with Uta Frith and Alan Leslie, proposing that children with autism show social and communication difficulties as a result of a delay in the development of a theory of mind.
• 1985 – Costa & McRae published the NEO PI_R Five-Factor Personality Inventory, a 240-question measure of the five factor model
• 1986 – Albert Bandura published Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory.
• 1986 – David Rumelhart and James McClelland published Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition.
• 1987 – Erik Erikson published The Life Cycle Completed, expanding on Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development.
• 1987 – Roger Shepard published the universal law of generalization for psychological science.
• 1987 – The diagnostic category of “ego-dystonic homosexuality” was removed from the American Psychiatric Association‘s DSM with the publication of the DSM-III-R, though it still potentially remains in the DSM-IV under the category of “sexual disorder not otherwise specified” including “persistent and marked distress about one’s sexual orientation”.
• 1988 – Michael M. Merzenich et al. showed that sensory and motor maps in the cortex can be modified with experience, a process called neural plasticity.
• 1988 – Claude Steele proposed the theory of self-affirmation.
• 1989 – Psychophysiologist Vladimir Rusalov published first activity-specific model of temperament

1990s

• 1990 – On 17 May the World Health Organization (WHO) declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder, launching the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia.
• 1990 – Leonard Berkowitz published the cognitive neoassociation model of aggressive behavior to cover the cases missed by the frustration-aggression hypothesis.
• 1991 – Steven Pinker proposed his theory on how children acquire language in Science, later popularized in the book The Language Instinct.
• 1991 – The first issue of Feminism & Psychology was published.
• 1991- The American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA) passed a resolution opposing “public or private discrimination” against homosexuals. It stopped short, however, of agreeing to open its training institutes to these individuals.
• 1992 – The American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA) extended the provisions of its 1991 resolution (see above) to training candidates at its affiliated institutes.
• 1992 – Jaak Panksepp coined the term affective neuroscience for the name of the field that studies neural mechanisms of emotion, and in 1998 published the book Affective Neuroscience – The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions
• 1992 – Sandra Scarr published Developmental Theories of the 1990s, proposing that genes control experiences, and search and create environments.
• 1992 – Joseph LeDoux summarized and published his research on brain mechanisms of emotion and emotional learning.
• 1992 – The American Psychological Association (APA) selected behavioral genetics as one of two themes that best represented the past, present, and future of psychology.
• 1994 – DSM-IV was published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA).
• 1994 – Antonio Damasio published Descartes’ Error, presenting the somatic marker hypothesis (SMH) by which emotional processes can guide (or bias) behavior, particularly decision-making.
• 1994 – Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray published The Bell Curve.
• 1994 – Michael Posner and Marcus Raichle published Images of the Mind, using positron emission tomography (PET) to localize brain cognitive functions.
• 1994 – Esther Thelen and Linda B. Smith published A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action, a book on the use of developmental models based on dynamic systems.
• 1994 – A study reports that magical thinking emerges more frequently under high-stress (e.g. immediate death anxiety) conditions.
• 1994 – Harvard University professor of psychiatry John E. Mack interviews dozens of experiencers of the 1994 Ariel School UFO incident, reporting the event to the world, which indicated that the event cannot be dismissed as mass hysteria, after going on television with alien abductees during the spring of 1994
• 1995 – Simon Baron-Cohen coined the term mental blindness to reflect the inability of children with autism to properly represent the mental states of others.
• 1996 – Giacomo Rizzolatti published his discovery of mirror neurons.
• 1996 – Amos Tversky defined ambiguity aversion, the idea that people do not like ambiguous choices, relating it to comparative ignorance.
• 1997 – The American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA) became the first U.S. national mental health organization to support same-sex marriage.
• 1998 – Martin Seligman established Positive Psychology as his main theme when he became President of the American Psychological Association (APA).
• 1999 – George Botterill published The Philosophy of Psychology, about how modern cognitive science challenges our common sense self-image.

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Reference: SC: Psychology

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Progressive Physicians

Asclepiades of Bithynia (124-40 BCE) represents one of history’s most progressive psychiatric reformers. Practicing in Rome, he rejected Hippocratic humoral theory, instead proposing that disease resulted from blockages in the movement of önkoi (imperceptible atomic particles) through theoretical pores in the body—including the brain. This proto-molecular medicine led him to fundamentally different therapeutic approaches.

Most revolutionary were Asclepiades’ humane treatment methods:

• Fresh air and natural light rather than darkness and dungeons
• Music therapy using soothing sounds to calm agitated patients
• Hydrotherapy with therapeutic baths
• Massage and exercise programs
• Proper diet to support recovery
• Pleasant environments conducive to healing

His therapeutic motto—“cito, tuto, jucunde” (safely, swiftly, pleasantly)—stood in stark contrast to the chains, whipping, bloodletting, and forced emetics commonly employed. Asclepiades advocated releasing mentally ill persons from confinement and treating them with dignity, recognizing that the mind could be healed through gentle, supportive interventions.

Celsus (1st century CE) provided the first systematic taxonomy of mental illnesses (genera insaniae) in his De Medicina. He distinguished three primary types:

1. Phrenitis: acute delirium accompanied by fever, fluctuating pulse rates, and spastic movements—likely organic delirium from physical illness
2. Mania: characterized by chaotic thoughts, frenzy, anger, and delusions occurring without fever—corresponding to what we would call acute psychosis or manic episodes
3. Melancholy: persistent sadness, fear, despair, and withdrawal from external reality into an “impenetrable inner world”—encompassing both depression and paranoid or catatonic states we might now associate with schizophrenia

Soranus of Ephesus (1st-2nd century CE), whose work was translated by Caelius Aurelianus, provided detailed clinical descriptions and developed sophisticated treatment protocols including restoration therapy after acute phases subsided.

Galen of Pergamon (129-216 CE) synthesized and expanded Greek medical knowledge, creating a comprehensive system that dominated Western medicine for 1,500 years. Galen:

• Emphasized the brain’s central role in mental functioning, developing a proto-neurological approach
• Described how imbalanced humors specifically affected brain operations
• Recognized anxiety disorders, noting patients with symptoms resembling generalized anxiety or major depression—sweating, indigestion, palpitations, dizziness, insomnia, weight loss
• Observed that anxiety could “develop into melancholia” when black bile accumulated in the brain, causing delirium, aggression, or suicidal behavior
• Described brain injuries and their cognitive consequences

Aretaeus of Cappadocia (2nd century CE) provided remarkably modern clinical descriptions, noting melancholic patients’ “aversion to food, despondency, sleeplessness, irritability, and restlessness”. His observations of aura, convulsions, and postictal states in epilepsy closely resemble modern clinical understanding.

In ancient Rome, in the centuries just before and after Christ, much progress was made in the understanding of mental illness, which led to its humane treatment.

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Treatment Modalities

Roman therapeutic approaches combined:

1. Environmental interventions: well-lit rooms, moderate temperatures, therapeutic gardens
2. Physical therapies: massage, exercise, hydrotherapy at Roman baths
3. Dietary regimens: carefully calibrated to restore humoral balance
4. Pharmacological treatments: various herbs and compounds
5. Bloodletting, emetics, and purging: to expel excess humors (though now recognized as harmful)
6. Asclepian temple healing: serene sanctuaries providing relaxation, proper diet, dream interpretation, and social support
7. Musical therapy: using soothing music therapeutically

Wealthy Roman families sometimes employed personal physicians specializing in mental conditions, providing individualized care in home settings.

The treatment modalities basically involved getting the mental patient in better touch with the environment besides improving his nutritional intake.

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Persistent Popular Beliefs

Despite medical advances, popular Roman culture maintained traditional supernatural explanations. Cicero (106-43 BCE) distinguished between:

• Insania: a relatively mild condition caused by moral weakness or failure of will
• Furens: serious, total loss of mental reasoning making individuals unable to function—inflicted by the Furies (Erinyes), three bloodthirsty goddesses who drove mortals mad as divine punishment

The rise of Christianity saw a resurgence of demonic possession theories, temporarily eclipsing the naturalistic medical tradition.

This rise of Christianity, however, led to the popularity of demonic possession theories, especially for those mental cases that were difficult to manage.

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