I am looking for a time-line on the beginnings of psychology to include how we moved from the supernatural to the scientific.

-- Eric Brooks (lnebrks@aol.com), February 12, 2005

Answers

You can find a timeline of the history of psychology at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/6061/en_linha.htm

Like others of its genre, it necessarily oversimplifies, especially theoretical points, forcing gradual and complicated developments into a single sentence attached to a single year.

For instance, it says: "1020 - Avicenna suggests that the three ventricles of the brain perform five distinct cognitives processes: common sense, imagination, cogitation, estimation and memory." Actually, Avicenna was only one point in a very complex story that spans over a couple of millennia. For a fuller version, see:

Green, C. D. (2003). Where did the ventricular localization of mental faculties come from? Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 39, 131-142

at http://www.yorku.ca/christo/papers/ventricles.pdf

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), February 12, 2005.