Theoretical approaches in psychology

Abstract

As outlined in the introduction, for the first 50 years or so of its existence as a separate discipline, psychology was organized around separate schools, each with its own distinct ideas of what psychology should be about and how it should be studied. Psychologists tended to identify themselves as structuralists, functionalists, behaviourists, psychoanalysts or Gestaltists. Today, with the realization that the problems psychologists have set themselves will not be solved by one particular set of ideas and methods, it is accepted that many different routes must be taken if a full understanding is to be reached about psychological functioning. Psychologists are now often classified according to their professional commitments — clinical psychologist or educational psychologist, for example — or to their specific fields of study, such as social, developmental or cognitive psychology. (The section headed ‘What do psychologists do?’ at the end of this chapter gives a brief overview of some of the main fields of study in psychology and some of the practical situations in which psychologists work).

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