At least once in our life, we have heard of the term psychologist or psychology, and the great mistake of most is that we often associate it with a mental illness. Such an erroneous perception can lead to the creation of an impression as true as the premise by the people who frequent these types of medical offices. So, to better understand it, we should know several notions.
The word-for-word translation of the Greek term "psychology" is the science of the soul (psyché = soul; logos = science) and human behavior. From this, we can conclude that psychology is the study of mental functions and processes, inner and subjective experiences, such as be thoughts, emotions, and personality. Like any science, several subdomains of psychic activity can be distinguished:
1. The psychic functions represent the result of the activities of the mind;
2. The psychic content is the element that is the object of a psychic function;
3. Psychic mechanisms are the processes that describe the specific causes of the activities of the mind;
4. The spheres, respectively the psychic layers consist of the set of common psychic functions and mechanisms (active sphere, cognitive sphere)
5. Psychological type: the set of individual characteristics that can be outlined abstractly, resulting in personality.
Having this series of predetermined terms, we are going to discover the origins of psychology.
From Antiquity to modern psychology
To our surprise, psychology did not appear with technology and everyday problems but has its roots deep in the past, respectively in Antiquity. For years, geniuses "squeezed the brain" trying to properly define the human mind, but how we move forward from a temporal point of view, the explanations contradict each other.
The first to write about this topic was the sage Aristotle's work "On the Soul." He defined the soul as a principle of life and movement of living beings, considering it the principle of intelligence. In opposition to Platon, who described the soul as an "Autonomous reality, separated from the body and accidentally united with it", Aristotle writes about "the soul as the essential component of this indissoluble whole which is the living being". Both, however, concluded that the soul is "something" of the body, which gives the individual the particular quality of being alive. According to Aristotle, if the ax has a soul, this would be the "ax", which is the ability to cut; if the eye had a soul, it would be the ability to see. The ax as the ax and the eye as the eye is their perfection, for the soul, this perfection represents life.
Theophrastus tried to follow another way of relating to psychology and the soul. When we cannot define a concrete thing or it is too complex to be included in a single explanation, we try to categorize it. Somehow, he did not try to establish a division of psychology but defined 30 human characters, representing the first attempt at the typology of people. The term itself was first used in the late Middle Ages (1540) by Philipp Melanchthon in the work "Considerations on the soul ". English empiricism in the 17th century limited “ psychic functions to predictable phenomena with their laws”. In 1704 it was first mentioned the existence of subconscious processes. In the work "Philosophical considerations on human nature and its development" a brief description of all psychic functions and processes, which has preserved validity until now. Throughout this time, from Antiquity to almost the end of the 19th century, psychology was considered a component of philosophy. It was not until the 19th century that it became an independent science.
Wilhelm Wundt and William James were the authors of the works on which experimental psychology was formed, focusing on aspects such as behavior, mood, and pathological conditions. Wilhelm founded the first laboratory of experimental psychology in Leipzig in 1879.
Like literature and painting, psychology has, in turn, psychological currents.
1. BEHAVIORISM was formed as a consequence of the introspections current. The founder of this current considers consciousness as a fabrication of philosophers and that the only psychological reality is behavior (between stimulus and response a serious relationship is established).
2. ASSOCIATIONISM supports the primacy of the party over the whole so that the psychic life is reduced to the sum of sensations, perceptions, and thoughts that are based on the laws of association (coincidence in time and space of some sensations).
3. INTROSPECTIONISM considers that the object of psychology is knowledge, defined as an internal world, closed, without connection with the external world, which can be investigated only by the method of introspection.
The problem that all philosophers who wanted to know the secrets of psychology and to solve are the discovery of the self and the attempt to know another, with the role of being efficient activity and adaptation to social and environmental conditions. In these moments, some of us agree with the great philosophers, another theory, or, perhaps, a much more "biological" definition of psychology, but we all agree that this desire to know what we each have will never cease. more precious: the mind and the soul.
Source: Wikipedia
Editor- Elena Alexia Neagu
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