Q.Psychology is sometimes called a 'young science with an old past.' Explain this statement with reference to the discipline's philosophical roots and its formal beginning as an experimental science.

Modern psychology, though it grew out of a much older tradition of philosophical inquiry into questions of real psychological significance, has a comparatively short formal history as a science, usually dated from 1879, when Wilhelm Wundt founded the first experimental psychology laboratory in Leipzig, Germany, to analyse the basic building blocks of conscious experience through introspection -- trained subjects describing their own mental processes in careful detail. Because introspective reports could not be independently verified by an outside observer, this structuralist approach (so called because it studied the structure of the mind) was eventually judged too subjective, and this dissatisfaction opened the way for a series of competing schools of thought.

William James's functionalism, developed at almost the same time in the United States, asked instead what the mind does -- how mental processes help a person adapt to their environment -- treating consciousness as an ongoing stream of activity. In the early twentieth century, Gestalt psychology arose in Germany as a direct reaction against structuralism, arguing that perceptual experience is always more than the sum of its individual components (a rapid sequence of still film images, for instance, is perceived as one continuous moving scene). Around 1910, behaviourism, led by John Watson and drawing on Ivan Pavlov's work on classical conditioning, rejected mind and consciousness altogether as unscientific, insisting that psychology study only observable, measurable stimulus-response behaviour; B.F. Skinner later extended and popularised this approach, and behaviourists dominated the field for several decades.

Alongside behaviourism, Sigmund Freud developed psychoanalysis around 1900, portraying behaviour as driven by unconscious desires and conflicts and building it into a system for treating psychological disorders. Reacting against both Freud's view and behaviourism's mechanistic picture of human beings, humanistic psychologists such as Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow took a more positive view of human nature, emphasising free will and a natural striving toward growth. Finally, elements of the Gestalt and structuralist traditions combined into the cognitive perspective, which studies cognition (thinking, perceiving, remembering, problem-solving), sometimes modelling the mind as an information-processing system like a computer; Piaget's constructivism and Vygotsky's socio-cultural theory of mind both belong to this broader cognitive tradition.