... born when the introspective theory (observing and analysing the structure of conscious mental processes) validity and usefulness was being seriously questioned. The main person doing this questioning was an American psychologist, John B. Watson. Watson (1913) proposed that psychologists should only study behaviour because it is the only thing that is measurable and observable by more than one person. Watson knew that for psychology to be accepted as scientific that it would have to imitate the natural sciences and adopt its own objective methods. Watson's own definition of psychology was: '... that division of Natural Science which takes human behaviour - the doings and sayings, both learned and unlearned - as its subject matter' (Watson, 1919 in Gross, R & McIlveen, R 1998). Therefore the study of inaccessible, private and mental processes was to have no place in a truly scientific psychology. Watson was waiting to totally transform the very ...

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