Psychology is an academic discipline and applied profession concerned with the study of mental states, processes, and related behavioral patterns of humans and, to an extent, of animals (though the study of animal behavior, ethology, is more often regarded a branch of biology than of psychology). Psychologists also study the psychological influences on interactions between individuals and groups of individuals, and on interactions with the environment. Disciplines that intersect with psychology are sociology, anthropology, biology, and philosophy.
The root of the word psychology (psyche) means "soul" in Greek, and psychology was sometimes considered a study of the soul (in a religious sense of this term), though its emergence as a medical discipline can be seen in Thomas Willis's reference to psychology (the "Doctrine of the Soul") in terms of brain function, as part of his 1672 anatomical treatise "De Anima Brutorum" ("Two Discourses on the Souls of Brutes").
Experimental psychology, as introduced by Wilhelm Wundt in 1879 at Leipzig University in Germany, eliminated religious implications from psychology entirely. Today, experimental psychology focuses on observable behavior and the evidence it gives about mental processes. It therefore has little specific to say about such notions as an immaterial, immortal soul. Modern psychology is often called the scientific study of behavior, though (as in cognitive psychology) its purported object is often not behavior but various mental events.
Until about the beginning of the twentieth century, psychology was regarded as a branch of philosophy. With the work of Wundt and of his contemporary experimental psychologist William James (who, himself, questioned the veracity of materialistic psychology in his later work), the field of psychology was slowly but steadily established as a science independent of philosophy. Of course, like all sciences which have broken off from philosophy, purely philosophical questions about the mind are still studied by philosophers; the name of the philosophical subdiscipline which studies those questions is philosophy of mind. Most universities, journals, and researchers today treat psychology as among the experimental sciences and not as a branch of philosophy.
Both psychology and its sister psychiatry (whose practitioners are medical doctors with a specialty in psychiatry) are criticized by a vocal and well-credentialed (if small) minority in medical and academic circles as pseudo-sciences. Some argue that their theories, diagnoses and treatments don't hold up under the rigor of the scientific method and that they are not falsifiable; others question the appropriateness of applying the scientific method to the study of the human mind and human behavior. A related view is promulgated by some philosophers under the label eliminative materialism. These challenges to the discipline are, in large part, legitimate and needed, especially when one considers the discipline's growing influence in Western culture and how easy it can be to construct psychological models that are entirely untestable (e.g., Freud's model of the psyche). These concerns seek not to subvert psychology but to strengthen it by the same rigorous inquiry present in other sciences.
Additionally, psychology has been criticized for its dogged refusal to investigate the political, or ideological, dimension of the psyche. Since its beginnings, "mainstream" psychology has tended to be a function of the status quo, accepting without question whatever the dominant culture of the moment held to be "truth," "reality," and "normal" as the foundation of its "objective" study. Critics who perceive psychological and political significance in psychology's denial of the political argue that the discipline evades ideological subject matter - or more importantly, appears to evade it - by turning it into questions of scientific fact and individual well-being. Along with other modernist (Modernism) institutions, psychology encourages us to conceive of the world in terms of individual subjectivity on the one hand and scientific objectivity on the other, and thereby serves to blind us to the larger social structures such as discourses and ideologies that also condition who we are.
Topics in Psychology
Major Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Schools of Thought
Famous Psychologists and Contributors to Psychology
Divisions and Approaches in Psychology (these might be overlapping, of course)
(N.B. There are many more approaches to psychology in existence today than listed above, and many more will likely be fashioned. The psychological dimension is now so well-established and universally acknowledged (in the industrialized world, at least) to pervade human experience that virtually an infinite number of terms might serve as adjectives before "psychology" to delineate new specialties or approaches in the field. Perhaps this Fill-in-the-Blank Psychology phenomenom suggests a dramatic expansion in psychology's scope towards an endpoint of total societal saturation, to be accompanied by a competition among specialties for authoritative predominance, or else an incurable fragmenting of psychology occasioned by the loss of concentrated focus within the discipline that concludes with a sea change in psychology's conception and particularly the emergence of a new paradigm of its essentials.)
Some related disciplines:
External links:
What are our priorities for writing in this area? To help develop a list of the most basic topics in Psychology, please see Psychology basic topics.
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