Should Sigmund Freud be considered a pioneer in modern psychology?
No. While Freud is a name associated with psychology, he’s certainly not representative of modern psychology. Modern psychology is defined by the scientific pursuit of knowledge of behavior. As Freud mostly speculated from case studies, it would be a stretch to call him scientific. People like B. F. Skinner, John Watson, Aaron Beck, Jean Piaget, Leonid Vygotsky, and Anton Bandura, as well as doctors such as Freud’s teacher Charcot, and his students Tourette and Babinski, could be considered pioneers in modern psychology. These are individuals who started entire schools of testable, scientific thought. They quantitatively documented their findings, and tried not to overgeneralize them. These individuals are taught in psychology courses everywhere, and their influence is far more palpable in modern psychology than any of Freud’s psychoanalytic hypotheses.
