Psychology





Psychology is a collection of academic disciplines concerned with how people
work, including their behavior, mental processes, and pathologies.
(Effectively, two related disciplines live under the same name: Experimental
psychology, which focuses on basic science, and Clinical psychology, which
focuses on a specific realm of application.)

Psychology differs from sociology, anthropology, economics, and political
science, in part, by studying the behavior of individuals (alone or in
groups) rather than the behavior of the groups or aggregates themselves.
While psychological questions were asked in antiquity (c.f., Aristotle's De
Memoria et Reminiscentia or "On Memory and Recollection"), psychology
emerged as a separate discipline only recently. The first person to call
himself a "psychologist", Wilhelm Wundt, opened the first psychological
laboratory in 1879.

The root of the word psychology (psyche) means "soul" or "spirit" 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' 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").

Until about the end of the 19th Century, psychology was regarded as a branch
of philosophy. Experimental psychology, as introduced by Wilhelm Wundt in
1879 at Leipzig University in Germany, did not contain any religious
implications. In the 1890s, Sigmund Freud invented and utilized a
therapeutic method of uncovering repressed wishes, known as psychoanalysis.
Since then, psychology has typically considered to be about behavior (e.g.,
the behaviorism of John B. Watson), the mind (i.e., Cognitive psychology),
or both. Today it would be rare to find someone who considered psychology
the study of immaterial minds, let alone souls. However, there are many
psychologists who believe in souls and some who bring this into their
psychological work. Of course, like all sciences that 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. Few universities, journals, or
researchers today treat psychology as a branch of philosophy, but there is
much work which is not strictly experimental (such as survey research)
conducted in psychology...

Experimental psychology, the field founded by Wundt and James, focuses on
general and basic questions concerning behavior, mental states, or both,
including theories of pathology which are also important to clinical psychology.

Clinical psychology focuses on understanding and treatment of behavioral or
mental problems. Psychiatry is the medical field specializing in mental
health issues, thereby overlapping with clinical psychology. Clinical
psychologists often work in co-operation with psychiatrists, social workers,
psychiatric nurses and 'lay' counselors. Services aimed at mental or
behavioral problems also often provided by traditional healers and religious
counselors. Fields such as neuroscience, political science, media studies
and gender studies have also come to be seen as closely related to psychology.

Applied psychology is a more general term, referring not just to clinical
applications but also to education, industry/organizational psychology.