Psychology Is Like Law

Psychology is like law: it uses names to organize information. When your prof says “Don’t worry about the names,” she’s lying. She means it when she says it but she means something different from what you mean.

Psychology uses people as icons. So your prof means don’t worry about all of the names of the researchers that don’t matter but do know the names of the people who represent major theories. You don’t have to know all of the people who worked to develop the principles of operant conditioning. You just need to know Skinner.

It’s like case law. In law school, you don’t need to know all of the cases that don’t matter. But you do need to know major decisions. Psychology works the same way. Skinner, Freud, Piaget, and Rogers all represent different areas of research and different approaches to psychology. Skinner represents all of the rat, pigeon and animal training. Freud is the icon for psychodynamic thought. Piaget is the representative of developmental stages, and Rogers is the figurehead of counseling.

The trick is knowing which are the big names you need to remember. It will come with time. The more time you spend in psychology, the easier it will be to make distinctions. As a head start, check out the people listed in Great Minds.

The Simple Life

Are you the kind of person who loves the fast pace of city life? Or would you prefer to a quiet, simple life?

How do people decide what to do with their lives? What is thinking? And how does emotion actually work?

General Psychology is an overview of psychology’s answers to these questions. You’ll learn about the brain, development, learning, thinking, emotion and memory. You’ll also learn about personality, social psych, abnormal psych and perception.

Think of it as a 10-day tour of psychology. Each “day” is a different area of psych. This is a survey course: you get an overview of the whole field.

Everything you’d find in a university-level course is there. You’ll find lectures, illustrations, notes and vocabulary. The only thing you won’t find is university credit. We give no college credit because we don’t charge anything.

Great Minds, Great Ideas

Theories come out of people’s lives. You can’t separate the theory from the person. To understand the theories of psychology, you have to look closely at the those who generated those theories, and the people who infludenced them. The more you know about the person behind the theory, the better you’ll understand the theory. [Read more]

One Page Summaries Of Psychology

Sometimes a picture captures summarizes an entire sequence of events. It can act as a quick reminder of a setting, those present, and feelings you experienced.

Similarly, with a subject as broad and complex as psychology, it’s nice to take a quick look at it’s subfields. Each nutshell is a one-page description of a major area of psychology. The idea is to give you a head start. Think of it a quick guide to the who, what and why of each major area of psychology.

Julian Rotter

Like other social learning theorists, Julian Rotter (1916-present) combines behaviorism plus cognition. What we know about the environment impacts what we do. And the best way to predict what people will do is to understand how they think. [Read more]

Carl Rogers

More than anyone else, Carl Rogers (1902-1987) invented counseling. The vast numbers of counseling psychologists, marriage-family therapist and other mental health professionals are the product of his humanistic approach to therapy. [Read more]

Abraham Maslow

 

Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) helped shift psychology from behaviorism to humanism. He is the “father” of the Third Force of Psychology. The first force was Freud’s psychoanalytic approach. The second force or wave was Pavlov’s behaviorism. And the third major force in American psychology was humanism. [Read more]

Melanie Klein

 

Melanie Klein (1892-1960) was one of the founders of object relations theory. Although she believed aggression is an important and common force in children, Klein modified Freud’s drive theory. She maintained that drives are psychological forces (not biological) that seek people as their objects. That is, we are driven to interact with people, and to use those interactions to fulfill our needs. [Read more]

Anna Freud

 

Anna Freud (1895-1982) was the youngest of Sigmund’s six children, and the only one to show an interest in his work. She began reading his books when she was 15 but didn’t decide to become an analyst until later. In her early twenties, Anna wanted to be analyzed but who could you go to when there’s no one better than your Dad? So, when she was 23, Sigmund (then in his early sixties) psychoanalyzed Anna. [Read more]

Karen Horney

Karen Horney (1885-1952) was born in Hamburg, Germany on September 18, 1885. She did not study directly with Freud but was greatly influenced by his work. She received her MD from the University of Berlin in 1913, and moved to the US in 1932. [Read more]

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