Describe the historical development of psychoanalysis relative to the other schools of thought in psychology.
Psychoanalysis is known to overlap other schools of thought of psychology chronologically. In the year 1895, Sigmund Freud published his first book that marks the beginning of his own new movement formally.
In that very year, Wilhelm Wundt was 63 years old. Titchener was then 28 years old, and had been at Cornell University for just two years. He just initiated developing his structural psychology. In the meantime, in the United States, the spirit of functionalism has started to flourish.
At the time, neither Gestalt psychology nor behaviorism had been proposed yet. Wertheimer was then just 15 years old and Watson was 17. In 1939, by the time of the death of Freud, the entire world of psychology had changed radically. Functional psychology, Wundtian psychology, and Titchenerian structuralism became a history.
The United States was being transplanted with the Gestalt psychology from Germany. Then, the dominant form of American psychology was behaviorism. The school of psychological thought shared an academic heritage and it owed much of their form and inspiration to Wilhelm Wundt.
The scientific methods and the concepts were refined in libraries, lecture halls, and laboratories. It all dealt with topics like perception, learning, and sensation. On the other hand, psychoanalysis was neither a product of pure science nor the universities.
It, however, rose within the traditions of psychiatry and medicine, from the attempts made to treat persons labeled as mentally ill by the society. Hence, psychoanalysis was never and is still not a school of thought, that can be directly compared with others.