ABSTRACT
With the ascendance of American psychology in the twentieth century, the psychology of adaptation in one form or another has dominated academic psychology. This chapter traces the development of the psychology of adaptation. Gall's phrenology had implied a comparative psychology that looked for species differences in the possession of mental faculties. To a phrenologist, structural differences in the brain meant structural differences in the mind. However, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the sensorimotor concept of the brain had vanquished phrenology among scientists, and associationism was displacing faculty psychology among philosopher-psychologists. The view of the brain as an initially formless, associative machine and the view of the mind as a tabula rasa awaiting associations combined to cause psychologists to focus on the individual question and minimize species differences. The psychology of adaptation, from Spencer to James, remained nevertheless the science of mental life, not the science of behavior. However, much consciousness was tied up with behavior.
