Who rejected the ideas of mind and consciousness as subject matte

SOLUTION

Evolution of Psychology

Introspection:

• Wundt was interested in the study of conscious experience and wanted to analyse the constituents or the building blocks of the mind.
• Psychologists during Wundt’s time analysed the structure of the mind through introspection and therefore were called structuralists.
• Introspection was a procedure in which individuals or subjects in psychological experiments were asked to describe in detail, their own mental processes or experiences.
• However, introspection as a method did not satisfy many other psychologists. It was considered less scientific because the introspective reports could not be verified by outside observers. This led to the development of new perspectives in psychology.

Functionalist:

• An American psychologist, William James, who had set up a psychological laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts soon after the setting up of the Leipzig laboratory, developed a functionalist approach to the study of the human mind.
• William James believed that instead of focusing on the structure of the mind, psychology should instead study what the mind does and how behaviour functions in making people deal with their environment.
• For example, functionalists focused on how behaviour enabled people to satisfy their needs.
• According to William James, consciousness as an ongoing stream of mental process interacting with the environment formed the core of psychology.
• A very influential educational thinker of the time, John Dewey, used functionalism to argue that human beings seek to function effectively by adapting to their environment.

Behaviourist:

• Another reaction to structuralism came in the form of behaviourism.
• Around 1910, John Watson rejected the ideas of mind and consciousness as subject matters of psychology. He was greatly influenced by the work of physiologists like Ivan Pavlov on classical conditioning.
• For Watson, the mind is not observable and introspection is subjective because it cannot be verified by another observer.
• According to him, scientific psychology must focus on what is observable and verifiable.
• He defined psychology as a study of behaviour or responses (to stimuli) which can be measured and studied objectively. 
• Behaviourism of Watson was further developed by many influential psychologists who are known as behaviourists. Most prominent among them was Skinner who applied behaviourism to a wide range of situations and popularised the approach.

Freudian:

• One person who shook the world with his radical view of human nature was Sigmund Freud.
• Freud viewed human behaviour as a dynamic manifestation of unconscious desires and conflicts.
• He founded psychoanalysis as a system to understand and cure psychological disorders.

​Hence, from the given four psychologists, John Watson rejected the ideas of mind and consciousness as subject matters of psychology.