Mental Health Awareness Month: History of Psychology

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather guide
1846 E H Weber reports on his pioneering quantitative investigations of touch in On Touch and Common Sensibility...

From Handy Answer: The Handy Psychology Answer Book
The study of mental processes as a science is relatively new because it is dependent on the scientific revolution. Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) is credited with first establishing psychology as an independent science.

From Curriculum Connections Psychology: History of Psychology
As a result of changing attitudes to mental illness, madhouses were renamed asylums during the early 1800s. The idea was emerging that mental illness originated within the person, possibly in the brain.

From Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
Originally, a lunatic asylum or madhouse, and hence a place of hubbub and confusion. The priory of St Mary of Bethlehem outside Bishopsgate, London, was founded in 1247 and began to receive lunatics in 1377.

In psychology, a disorder commonly known today as conversion disorder, in which a psychological conflict is converted into a bodily disturbance.

From Chamber's Dictionary of the Unexplained
A form of insanity once thought to come with the changes in the moon.

From Encyclopedia of Special Education
Idiot is an archaic term used from the turn of the century through the 1950s to denote an individual with mental retardation whose measured IQ fell below 25 or 30. It (...) was used comparatively with lesser degrees of retardation (i.e., imbecile and moron).

From Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760-1850
Madness was a highly topical subject in Britain during the earlier years of the Romantic era.

From The Edinburgh International Encyclopaedia of Psychoanalysis
In his very first works between 1895 and 1897, Freud understood melancholia as a form of depression of variable intensity, linked to a loss of mental energy – he mainly drew on the popular theory of neurasthenia.

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
Condition characterized by general lassitude, irritability, lack of concentration, worry, and hypochondria. The term was introduced into psychiatry in 1869 by George M. Beard, an American neurologist; he believed it to be a neurosis with a fatigue component.

In psychology, a disorder commonly known today as conversion disorder, in which a psychological conflict is converted into a bodily disturbance.

From Chamber's Dictionary of the Unexplained
A form of insanity once thought to come with the changes in the moon.

From Encyclopedia of Special Education
Idiot is an archaic term used from the turn of the century through the 1950s to denote an individual with mental retardation whose measured IQ fell below 25 or 30. It (...) was used comparatively with lesser degrees of retardation (i.e., imbecile and moron).

From Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760-1850
Madness was a highly topical subject in Britain during the earlier years of the Romantic era.

From The Edinburgh International Encyclopaedia of Psychoanalysis
In his very first works between 1895 and 1897, Freud understood melancholia as a form of depression of variable intensity, linked to a loss of mental energy – he mainly drew on the popular theory of neurasthenia.

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
Condition characterized by general lassitude, irritability, lack of concentration, worry, and hypochondria. The term was introduced into psychiatry in 1869 by George M. Beard, an American neurologist; he believed it to be a neurosis with a fatigue component.

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
According to ancient theory, any of four bodily fluids that determined human health and temperament. Hippocrates postulated that an imbalance among the humors (blood, phlegm.

From The Edinburgh International Encyclopaedia of Psychoanalysis
As a scientific term, this was used by Jung to describe the core concept of his psychological theory.

From Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760-1850
The physician Franz Anton Mesmer developed his theory of animal magnetism to account for his therapeutic successes in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Vienna and the agitated culture of prerevolutionary Paris (1778-84).

From The Concise Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology and Behavioral Science
Phrenology, now an outmoded theory of personality, originated with the speculations of the physician-anatomist Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828).