Pioneers Of Psychology - Raymond E. Fancher

Pioneers of Psychology by Raymond E. Fancher (from York University) - 3rd Edition

I was recommended to buy this book by one of my lecturers... I’m sure you don’t have to guess what subject I am taking at university... yes Psychology! And one thing I must make clear is... I can’t read what you are thinking... When anybody asks me what I am studying and I tell them... this is always the response I get...”Ooo I bet you are reading what I am thinking...” and I have to laugh and pretend like it is the first time I’ve heard someone ask that...”haha no I have not been taught how to read people’s minds just yet” (And somehow I don’t think this is going to crop up in my degree at all!).

So yes this book is based on Psychology...It is a book that I would have found extremely interesting if I didn’t have such a short time in which to revise and makes notes of it. For some reason my university has seemed to act like it is the first year they have taken on Psychology as a subject... they are so slow at setting our essays and workloads and even slower at marking them and giving us feedback. This book was recommended for a subject within Psychology called CHIP- Conceptual and Historical Issues in Psychology. Basically this means that it is about the understanding of all key Psychologists like Freud and Darwin. Secondly the subject looks at the key years when specific findings were established within the field of Psychology like Behaviourism or Intelligence testing. The book goes back over three centuries of research to show how Psychology has evolved over the years.

Unfortunately the things I was told I needed to revise meant that I did not have any enjoyment from this book at all... I had over 30 psychologists to remember including remembering the years of their life, who they married, their children, where they studied, what they studied at university, what they established, how this changed the progression of Psychology, who else influenced this psychologist, how they died and many other facts. Majority of which I found pointless... There were about five psychologists who had very similar lives who confused me to no end... like they studied to be a priest, then gave this up, then studied medicine, then biology, then a lecturer influenced them into psychology etc. I mean how is knowing how each person died whether it was from TB or just old age going to help my Psychological understanding. Similarly what specific area they were born in and what specific university they went to is really not what I was expecting to learn about in my Psychology degree. It was as if a group of random people with no psychological background got together and thought “Ooo what can we make this year’s group of Psychology students learn for the year”. If we had just been asked to read the book and home in on a couple of psychologists we thought played a particularly huge part in Psychology and look specifically into those areas of psychology then I would have found this a much more informative task. But due to having to learn these facts parrot fashion if you asked me about a specific psychologist now I would have no idea now my exam is over because I seem to have tried to repress all memories of them! I know that Freud came up with repression though! At least I learnt something!

***Which Psychologists and areas of Psychology this book covers***

1. The philosophy of the mind – Dualism and religious beliefs

a. Rene Descarte
b. John Locke
c. Gottfried Leibniz

2. Psychologists of the mind

a. Franz Josef Gall
b. Thomas Willis
c. Johann Kaspar Lavater
d. Jean Baptiste Bouillaud
e. Ernest Aubertin
f. David Ferrier

3. The Sensing and perceiving of the mind

a. Immanuel Kant
b. Hermann Helmholtz
c. Gustav Fechner

4. Experimental psychology – how laboratories started

a. Wilhelm Wundt

5. The theory of Evolution by Natural Selection

a. Charles Darwin

6. Intelligence testing – Galton’s intelligence test

a. Francis Galton

7. Psychology in America – the findings of pragmatism

a. William James

8. Science of behaviour – Operant and classical conditioning

a. Ivan Pavlov
b. John B. Watson
c. B.F. Skinner

9. Early hypnosis

a. Johann Joseph Gassner

10. Psychoanalysis – how Freud’s life panned out to him finding psychoanalysis

a. Sigmund Freud

11. The developing mind- how human intelligence testing occured

a. Alfred Binet
b. Jean Piaget

12. Minds and machines – about how artificial intelligence occurred like the computer

a. Blaise Pascal
b. Alan Turing

13. The end of the book is just notes

***My opinion of this book***

It is not a book that just state facts about psychologists and nothing else. It is actually extremely interesting because it takes you through the whole life of each Psychologist and the areas of Psychology. It looks at how different psychologist’s views are similar or contrast. It also at the end of each section gives a selection of additional reading that you can find and look over if you wanted to extend your knowledge of a particular area. It is well set out so you can find what you are looking for if you did not want to read the entire book for example, if you wanted to know about the theory of Evolution with Charles Darwin there are many small subheadings that can help you find a specific section under this like:

• Darwin’s early life
• The voyage of the Beagle
• The theory of Evolution by Natural Selection
• Darwin and psychology
• Darwin’s influence
• Suggested reading

The book also puts important words in italics which are unusual words like ‘volkerpsychologie’ and I kept a dictionary next to me so I could look up these words... ‘volkerpsychologie’ means ‘folk psychology’ which is a German term which combines comparative psychology and historical psychology together.
This book also gives very quick summaries of key essays that psychologists have written. This is a really nice quality of the book because it saved me a lot of time and effort in finding the essays and writings of psychologists and summarising them myself.

This book covers these subjects with a vast amount of information, but it has a very different take than many other books that purely state facts. It explains facts by incorporating them into each Psychologist’s life story and it explains many things about areas of Psychology that many books would leave out and which often gets forgotten. These parts I find particularly interesting because it pieces together the facts increasing your understanding.

***My verdict***

I would definitely recommend this book for those interested in Psychology and for those who would just like to read something educational and learn something new. It is a great book for picking up and reading about one area of psychology and then putting it down again for some time. It only needs to be read in small chunks and I am looking forward to reading this book again but not for the purpose of remembering each and every fact, so I think I will find it a lot more enjoyable.

***Other points***

This book's RRP = £18.99

Published - 07/11/1996
Publisher - WW Norton & Co
ISBN - 9780393969948
Paperback - 450 pages

This book definitely deserves 5 out of 5 stars for its thorough content and layout.