History Of Psychology - A Sketch And An Interpretation

by James Mark Baldwin

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Genres: Psychology

236 pages, Paperback

Published December 9, 2009

About the author

1861-1934

Reviews

[Tommy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Especially interesting how he positions St. Augustine historically in the development of Western recognition of self-consciousness.

....The biologist finds the processes contributing to endowment to end at birth, that is, when the child is physically separated from its mother; and the psychologist generally calls this the beginning of independent mental life also. But if there be factors of mental life which appear only in social conditions, as social psychologists assert, and if these conditions become effective, as they do, only after physical birth, then the mental endowment of individuality must be said to complete itself only much later. Even for biologists, physical birth is an unsatisfactory place at which to locate the beginning of "nurture," as distinguished from "nature"; for pre-natal life is in many respects subject to influences from the external as well as from the uterine environment.
A purely physiological criterion in biology would have its counterpart in a purely psychical one in psychology; and this would place the mental birth, the beginning of the mental individual, defined as the social unit, at the epoch at which the individual achieves consciousness of his individuality, that is, at the rise of self-consciousness.
Putting the matter more generally, we may say that if the independent physical life is properly said to begin at physical birth, because then the formative influences necessary to physical independence cease to operate, we should say that independent psychic life begins only when there is a similar release of the mind from essentially formative social influences. Only then does the person take on his full mental character, becoming a fellow among fellows, as the body does when it becomes physically independent. The person begins to know himself to be a self among selves.

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