• That dream about the dinosaur in the leotard, those �mes that you said that thing that

at you
know you shouldn't have said, or even that thing you didn't even know you were gonna say.
The litle cogs of your consciousness cranking away, making your life possible, making society
func�on, all of the things that you're so glad you can do and all of the ones that you wish you
could stop doing.

• Excluding other human minds, your mind is the most complicated piece of the universe that
humans currently know about. The rules that govern it are mysterious and elusive. Maybe
our brains just aren't complex enough to understand themselves. But that's not going to stop
us from trying! The word 'psychology' comes from the La�n for the "study of the soul.

• " And while its formal defini�on has evolved over the last several decades, today we can
safely call it the science of behavior and mental processes. The term 'psychology' wasn't
coined un�l around the turn of the sixteenth century, and the prac�ce that we would
actually call science today wasn't established un�l the mid-1800s.

• But of course, humans have always been curious about themselves and what's going on up
here. Aristotle pondered the seed of human consciousness and decided that it was in the
heart, not the head -- being, as we have seen quite a lot here on Crash Course, absolutely
and completely wrong. Two thousand years ago, Chinese rulers conducted the world's first
psychological exams, requiring public officials to take personality and intelligence tests.

• And in the late 800s, Persian doctor Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Rhazes, also known as
Rhazes, was one of the first to describe mental illness, and even treated pa�ents in what was
essen�ally a very early psych ward in his Baghdad hospital. From the efforts of those early
thinkers up un�l today, the field of psychology has been all about tackling some of the big
ques�ons: How can humans do horrible things like commit genocide and torture other
humans, and how come we know those things are horrible? Do we have free will, or are we
simply driven by our environment, biology, and non-conscious

• influences? What is mental illness, and what can we do about it? And what is consciousness?
Or the no�on of self? If I lose my awareness of myself, am I s�ll human? I DON'T KNOW! But
over the next 6 months, these are the ques�ons that we're gonna be exploring together:
how our brains work, how they can break, how they can be healed, why we behave the way
we do, even when we don't want to, and what it means to be thinking and feeling and alive.

• [Intro] When hearing the word psychology, most people probably think of a therapist
listening to a pa�ent unpacking the details of his day while reclining on a couch. Maybe that
therapist is wearing glasses, chewing on a cigar, stroking his whiskered chin. Admit it! If
you're thinking about psychology, you're probably picturing Freud.

• Sigmund Freud was one of the most tremendously influen�al and controversial thinkers of
his �me, maybe of all �me. His theories helped build our views on childhood, personality,
dreams and sexuality. And his work fueled a legacy of both support and opposi�on. His life
was long and spanned an important swath of history from the American Civil War to World
War II.

• But like most great scien�sts, Freud developed his revolu�onary ideas by building on the
work of others, and of course innova�on in the field didn't stop with him. In truth,
psychology is one of the most wildly diverse sciences in terms of the ques�ons it proposes,
the methods it applies, and the different schools of thought and disciplines it contains.
Perhaps more than any other science, psychology is just a big old integrated mel�ng pot.

• For instance, right around Freud's �me, there were a lot of different schools of thought of
about how the study of the human mind should be tackled. Mainly, there were the ideas of
structuralism, func�onalism and psychoanalysis. Scien�fic psychology got its start in 1879 in
Germany when physician Wilhelm Wundt set up the first psychology laboratory at the
University of Leipzig just a few years a�er publishing his Principles of Physiological
Psychology, considered the first true psychology textbook.

• Wundt and his student Edward Bradford Titchener took cues from chemists and physicists
and argued that if those people could break down all mater into simple elements or
structures, why couldn't they do the same for the brain? They tried to understand the
structures of consciousness by ge�ng pa�ents to look inward, asking them how they felt
when they watched the sun set, or smelled a coffee, or licked a kiten, or whatever.

• Titchener named this approach 'structuralism', but despite its rigid sounding name, it really
relied so much on introspec�on that it became too subjec�ve. I mean, you may sense and
feel something different that I do, even if we lick the same kiten. Psychologists, of course,
can't actually observe a pa�ent's inner thoughts or feelings, so ul�mately, the structuralist
school of thought was fairly short-lived.

• By contrast, American physician and philosopher William James proposed a different set of
ques�ons, focusing on why we think and feel and smell and lick, or whatever. Basically, he
focused on the func�on of behavior. This approach, 'func�onalism', was based on Charles
Darwin's idea that adap�ve behaviors are conserved throughout the evolu�onary process.

• James published his seminal book, The Principles of Psychology, in 1890, defining psychology
as the science of mental life, just as Freud was star�ng to flex his big brain. Sigmund Freud
began his medical career at a Viennese hospital, but in 1886, he started his own prac�ce,
specializing in nervous disorders.

• During this �me, Freud witnessed his colleague Josef Breuer treat a pa�ent called Anna O
with a new talking cure. Basically, he just let her talk about her symptoms. The more she
talked and pulled up trauma�c memories, the more her symptoms were reduced. It was a
breakthrough, and it changed Freud forever. From then on, Freud encouraged his pa�ents to
talk freely about whatever came to mind, to free associate.

• This technique provided the basis for his career, and an en�re branch of psychology. In 1900
he published his book The Interpreta�on of Dreams, where he introduced his theory of
psychoanalysis. Now, you probably think of psychoanalysis as a treatment -- the whole
pa�ent on the couch scenario. And that's definitely part of it. But Freud's concept was
actually a lot more complex than that, and it was revolu�onary.

• A radical kernel of psychoanalysis was the theory that our personali�es are shaped by
unconscious mo�ves. Basically Freud suggested that we're all profoundly affected by mental
processes that we're not even aware of. Now that sounds almost obvious to us now, but part
of the genius of Freud's theory was that in 1900, it wasn't obvious at all.

• The idea that our minds could be driven by something that our minds themselves didn't
know about was hard to grasp. As hard as like, uhh, maybe organisms evolving by natural
selec�on. It was abstract, invisible, and there was something about it that seemed irra�onal.
But the other important part of Freud's theory was that the unconscious, literally the thing
below consciousness, was s�ll discoverable.

• Even though you weren't aware of it, you could come to understand it through a therapeu�c
technique that used dreams, projec�ons and free associa�on to root out repressed feelings
and and gain self-insight. So what Freud was really saying was that mental disorders could be
healed through talk therapy and self-discovery. And this was a really big breakthrough.

• Because prior to this, people with mental illnesses would be confined to sanatoriums and at
best given menial labor to do and at worst, shackled to a bed frame. A�er The
Interpreta�ons of Dreams, Freud went on to publish over 20 more books and countless
papers with an iconic cigar in hand all the while. He believed smoking helped him think, but
it also helped him get jaw cancer.

• During the last sixteen years of his life, he underwent at least thirty painful opera�ons while
con�nuing to smoke. By the late 1930s, the Nazis had taken over Austria, and Freud and his
Jewish family narrowly escaped to England. By September 1939, the pain in his cancerous
jaw was too great and a doctor friend assisted him in suicide through morphine injec�on. He
was eighty-three.

• Whether you love him or hate him - and make no mistake, plenty of people vehemently
disagreed with him - there is no ques�on that Freud's impact on psychology was
monumental. While compe�ng theories in the young field of psychology either fell away or
evolved into something else, psychoanalysis remains an important concept and prac�ce
today.

• The next big shake-up rolled in during the first half of the 20th century when behaviorism
gained a higher profile. Heavy hiters like Ivan Pavlov, John B. Watson, and B. F. Skinner were
key players here. They focused on the study of observable behavior. You may remember
Skinner as the dude who put rats and pigeons and babies in boxes and condi�oned them to
perform certain behaviors.

• Right around when Freud escaped to England, Skinner published his Behavior of Organisms,
ushering in the era of behaviorism which remained all the rage well into the 1960s. The
other major force at the �me was, of course, Freud's psychoanalysis, and its many
descendents collec�vely known as the psychodynamic theories. These focused on the
importance of early experiences in shaping the unconsciousness and how that process
affects our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and personali�es.

• By the mid-20th century, other major forces in psychology were also brewing -- schools we'll
explore later in this course including humanist psychology, which focuses on nurturing
personal growth; cogni�ve science and neuroscience, all of which contributed their own
unique takes on the study of mind. Today's formal defini�on of psychology, the study of
behavior and mental processes, is a nice amalgama�on that pulls from all these different
schools of thought.

• It recognizes the need for observing and recording behavior, whether that's screaming,
crying or playing air saxophone to an imaginary audience, but it also gives credit to our
mental processes: what we think and feel and believe while we're tearing it up on our
invisible instruments. Because again, the point I really want you to take home is that
psychology is an integra�ve science.
• Yes, folks s�ll get grumpy and disagree plenty, but the essence of the discipline has
everything to do with crea�ng different ways of asking interes�ng ques�ons and atemp�ng
to answer them through all kinds of data-gathering methods. The human mind is
complicated. There is no single way to effec�vely crack it open; it must be pried at from all
sides. Harvard astronomer Owen Gingerich has gazed into the distant horizon of space, and
even he has acknowledged that the human brain is by far the most complex physical object
known to us in the en�re cosmos. And we all get to have one! Of our very own! Just knocking