What is psychology?

Introduction

Psychology is recognized to be a hugely successful field. It is the largest social science in virtually any country in the world, as demonstrated by such indicators as the number of professionals, students, dollars invested, and publications, and its impact on society. Given this success, it is surprising that the simple question “What is psychology?” has yet to be clearly answered. Attempts to resolve this question have a long and frustrating history and have proceeded from a variety of starting points, each leading to its own particular search path. For example, the position that psychology is a word leads to searching for its definition through its etymological history. If psychology is taken to be the study of the psychological, then the nature of its subject matter becomes the key focus of the inquiry. Likewise, the assertion that psychology is what psychologists do leads to an examination of its practices and methods. Whereas the position that psychology is a discipline directs the search to examine its institutionalization. For a definition that has proven as elusive as psychology’s, all these paths are worthy pursuits, each offering valuable insights toward that needed clarification.

A Definition by Etymology

The word psychology can be broken down into two parts, “psych” and “ology,” both of which are of Greek origin, though the Greeks did not combine them into one word. In Greek mythology, stories describe a young mortal woman named Psyche (a name that is usually translated as “soul”). The god Eros falls in love with her, and following a long series of separations and tribulations, they marry and give birth to an offspring, named Pleasure.

Exactly what the Greeks meant by “soul,” however, is not clear. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the etymology of the Greek word psyche back to psukhe, originally Greek for “breath.” Psychologist George Kunz, in The Paradox of Power and Weakness (1998), points out that it was most likely in that sense that Homer originally used this term to refer to life, or soul. Kunz’s thesis is that psyche, as the soul, is generated by others breathing life into the self. He draws this insight from the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, author of Autrement qu’être: Ou, Au-delà de l’essence (1974; Otherwise Than Being: Or, Beyond Essence, 1998), whose thesis was that psyche as one’s soul is the other in one’s self, an intersubjective relationship and ground of ethical responsibility. In other words, for the original Greek root, psyche is not a thing one possesses, but rather a capacity for relatedness.

In Judaism, a similar parallel can be found. The Hebrew word for breath is ruah, which means the spirit of God that infuses creation. Likewise, there are fascinating parallels between Greek thought and that of India at the time. In old Sanskrit, the word for “breath” is prana, which is considered to be the vehicle of the mind because prana is taken to be that which makes the mind move, as described in Sogyal Rinpoche’s The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (1992). In both the older Vedic tradition and the later Buddhist practice, a form of mediation that centered on the breath became a key to enlightened understanding. Through meditation on the breath, one becomes aware of the interdependent interconnectedness of all.

The origin of the other part of the term “psychology,” logos is perhaps the most central term in early Greek philosophy. It is usually translated simply as “the study of” or sometimes the more arcane “the wording of.” This correlation with “wording” is both intriguing and misleading, both of which are exemplified by the translation of logos as “word” in the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word.” This connection comes from the derivation of logos from its antecedent, leigen, which meant something like “to speak.” By Aristotle’s time, this was its general sense. However, for the pre-Socratic philosophers, this term, and from it logos, meant not just putting something into words, but a laying forth, a gathering meaningfully together into wholeness. Martin Heidegger in Early Greek Thinking (1975) masterfully recovers this deeper sense of logos by returning to the early philosopher Heraclitus, who said, “According to the logos, all is one.” Heraclitus also spoke of the logos of psyche, but acknowledged that one would not be able to discover the limits of psyche “so deep a logos does it have.” Here also, the early Greek thinking emphasized this relational sense of the psychological. However, by the latter period of Greek thought, dominated by Aristotle, author of the major tritise De anima (On the Soul, 1812), the soul became a more material or biological concept and thus a more separate kind of entity.

During the medieval period, thinking about psyche as relation was lost altogether since the concept of the soul acquired a connotation of something fundamentally separate from this world. With this duality, no further talk of psyche ensued for a thousand years, until it was reawakened by the Renaissance humanists. In refocusing attention on it, they also provided the first use of the compound term “psychology” (usually in its Latin form psichologia) and formulated this word as the name of an intellectual discipline. The first to do so was the Croatian humanist scholar Marko Marulić in 1520, followed over the next several decades by the German Johannes Thomas Freig, the French Noël Taillepied, and the Germans Rudolf Göckel and Otto Casmann. This burst of interest in the concept of psychology rose with the tide of a humanistic vision. As an antidote to the medieval dualism, Renaissance thinkers proceeded with a “determined decompartmentalization,” described in Richard Tarnas’s The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View (1991), seeking to again reconnect psyche and world, in a web of interrelationships.

Defining the Subject of Psychology

Psychology can be defined by its subject matter: the study of the psychological, or, more precisely, the psychological dimension of human existence. Pointing to a dimension of existence as psychological distinguishes it from the more clearly defined physical and biological orders, and so the question of whether it is independent of them, reducible to their level, or integrates them into something more comprehensive becomes critical to the definition.

In the physical order, the relations between one feature and another are mechanistic; they are governed by cause and effect. For example, modern physical science began when Isaac Newton could specify the laws of planetary motion that accounted for the rotation of the planets around the sun. He could express this relationship entirely in mathematical laws because the mechanical force of gravity was entirely sufficient to account for this relationship: The sun does not keep its planets in orbit because of any desire to do so, nor do the planets remain in rotation out of preference or a sense of compulsion. The “laws” are about merely extrinsic relations because Newton was able to demonstrate that these were entirely sufficient to explain the phenomenon of planetary motion, and with them, he could predict where any planet would be at any time in the future.

In contrast to such causal, extrinsic relations, the experienced meanings characteristic of human relationships open a different dimension, one beyond the mechanism of cause and effect. For example, although such categories of intrinsic meaning as desire and preference have no place in a mechanistic analysis of extrinsic relations, they are crucial to any understanding of the relationships toward which human action is directed. For example, the question “Why does Jill cut herself?” asks for a quite different type of answer than “Why do planets rotate around stars?” The former seeks reasons, whereas the latter seeks causes. This distinction harkens back to a very old argument that has taken many different forms over the centuries. This form of it is credited to German philosopher and historian Wilhelm Dilthey, author of “Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedende Psychologie” (1894; “Ideas Concerning a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology,” 1977).

During the last third of the nineteenth century, however, leaders in psychology persuaded the field to follow the prevailing model of extrinsic relations borrowed from the physical sciences, leading Wilhelm Dilthey to note that psychology had sought to become a science of the soul by leaving out the soul. Their model of science had been founded during the seventeenth century, especially by the French philosopher René Descartes and the English mathematician Isaac Newton. Neither of them, nor the other promoters of this new science, such as John Locke or Gottfried Leibniz, even mentioned the word psychology. In its place came talk of physiology and anatomy, as dissection and surgery become the new paradigm by which to understand the person. (Descartes even considered the pineal gland in the brain to be the seat of the soul.)

By the nineteenth century, the natural sciences were generally and even popularly seen as having delivered the goods via technological change, as the Industrial Revolution instantiated the scientific vision of the world as a storehouse of resources to exploit for productive gain. Giant steam engines, factories, steamships, railroads, and telegraphs yielded a great power and changed ways of life. So the natural sciences—physics, mechanics, chemistry, and biology—enjoyed a high-level reputation as arbiters of reality. However, the disciplines that focused on human affairs had lagged behind, because although they had imported a scientific conception of persons, their methodologies were still largely philosophical, in contrast to the experimental methodology of the natural sciences.

In 1879, Wilhelm Wundt, a German psychologist, sought to remedy this gap by establishing a psychological laboratory in which to conduct experiments, strictly along the lines of the experimental method used by the physical sciences. He studied sensation and called his work “physiological psychology.” In doing so, he deliberately and with great fanfare sought to establish psychology as a true natural science. The rhetorical success of his endeavor resulted in the widespread adoption by the end of the nineteenth century of this view that psychology must follow the scientific method, and it emerged in its present self-definition as a science. Astute philosophers have noted that psychology’s commitment to be a science preceded deep contact with its subject matter, thus causing it to lose touch with its origin and meaning—as in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophische Untersuchungen/Philosophical Investigations (1953), P. D. Ouspensky’s The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution (1950), and Edmund Husserl’s Die Krisis europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Ein Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie (1954; The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, 1970).

With respect to the question of what particular contents it takes its subject to be, psychology since the nineteenth century has looked to the mind (also called consciousness), then looked to behavior, then to the mind again (this time also using the terms cognition and consciousness). Later definitions emphasize both behavior and mind. For example, psychology’s own scientific and professional organization, the American Psychological Association, defines psychology as “the study of the mind and behavior.” However, simply pointing to either “behavior” or “mind” is insufficient as a definition. First, behavior is unduly too broad a term, since all the social sciences study behavior. Sociology, criminal justice, anthropology, history, economics, political science, and the like all take behavior as a key. “Behavior” is not therefore synonymous with “the psychological”; rather, behavior somehow provides a portal to the psychological. However, what can be glimpsed of the psychological through that portal must still be defined.

Two very different ways of doing so are available in psychology, basically mirroring the distinction Dilthey had introduced. The former was crystallized by John B. Watson’s Behaviorism (1925; rev. ed., 1930), founding a narrowly behavioristic approach to psychology with the argument that such reductionism was the only way psychology could achieve scientific status. He specifically eschewed the study of the soul, mind, or consciousness. Indeed, he ridiculed the notion there was any such thing and labeled it a “superstition” akin to witchcraft, to be driven from psychology. For him, behavior was nothing but a reflex, conditioned by reinforcement, but ultimately just as reflexive as those unconditioned reflexes that are genetically hardwired.

The other approach to behavior, developed in the nineteenth century contemporaneously with Wundt’s experimental psychology, took it to be action, as described in Franz Brentano’s
Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte (1874; Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, 1973). This view inspired two early twentieth-century developments: Husserl’s formulation of
phenomenological psychology, which took behavior as based on experience as it is lived, and the
Gestalt psychology school of Kurt Koffka, Wolfgang Köhler, and Max Wertheimer, who read in relation to a meaningful world rather than meaningless stimuli. By the 1930s to 1940s, French theorists had synthesized phenomenology and Gestalt to provide a way to understand behavior as improvisational conduct directed to intrinsically meaningful features of the situation, as in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s La Structure de comportement (1942; The Structure of Behavior, 1963) and Aron Gurwitsch’s The Field of Consciousness (1964).

Likewise, for the definition of psychology as “the mind” or “mental life,” a similar pair of approaches—reductionistic and nonreductionistic—are pursued. In the former, characteristic of much of contemporary neuropsychology, the mind is reduced to an effect of brain function, whereas for the latter, the issues of mental life are taken on their own terms. This latter path itself has two very different approaches within it. The contemporary cognitive paradigm, while holding that cognition can be investigated independently of brain function, nevertheless generally assumes that an underlying neurophysiology will someday be determined. The other approach, typically more influenced by phenomenology, usually speaks of consciousness rather than cognition and makes no assumption that consciousness is reducible to brain function.

Methods, Practices, and Institutionalization

Psychology’s self-understanding is greatly tied to its methodology, whether it be in its research or applications. Beginning first with the research side, psychology’s quest to become a science in the same sense as the natural sciences has led it largely to follow the scientific method. This has meant a method built around the central assumption of positivism, namely the goal of measuring relationships between independent and dependent variables to test a hypothesis for its statistical significance. The ultimate method for such a test has been the experimental method, as it has allowed researchers to freely manipulate the presence of the independent variable on the dependent variable. Other methods, such as surveys, tend to also rely on the ability to measure operationally defined variables as the scientific legitimation of the methodology.

A true alternative to this natural-science-based methodology later was formed from Dilthey’s proposed alternative, that a descriptively based method would be more appropriate to the quest to understand the intrinsic relations of the human order. Twentieth century psychologists, especially those in the humanistic tradition, began devising qualitative methods to access people’s actual experience. Early on, these usually took the form of phenomenological investigations, as described in Amedeo Giorgi’s Phenomenology and Psychological Research (1985). However, a wide range of qualitative methods have been developed, as seen in Constance T. Fischer’s Qualitative Research Methods for Psychologists (2005) and Giorgi’s Descriptive Phenomenological Method in Psychology: A Modified Husserlian Approach (2008).

On its applied side, psychology has been practiced largely in clinical and psychotherapeutic contexts, in which the methodological questions to be resolved concern those of treatment rather than research. Four major systems emerged: psychoanalytic, humanistic, behavioral, and cognitive. The former two are oriented to the explication of the lived meanings of the client, and the latter two more toward symptom reduction. Given the effect of health insurance coverage on the practice of psychology, it is not surprising that the latter two approaches came eventually to dominate clinical practice. They are merging in various ways to form a cognitive behavioral approach to therapy.

Beyond the clinical, applied psychologists also work in many other contexts, most of these being industrial, organizational, educational, engineering, military, community, health, and consulting settings. In these, methodological questions are less central, and it has not been in these contexts that definitional issues are typically worked out.

As an institution, psychology’s two forms are “housed” in very different institutional settings. Science, devoted largely to research and teaching, is housed largely in academia and to a lesser extent in independent research foundations. Psychology’s applied profession, dedicated largely to improving individual and organizational welfare, is housed largely in clinical and corporate settings. Ideally, these two wings complement, support, and nourish each other. All too often, however, they are out of touch with each other, exacerbating definitional differences.

Within the research side, the subfields of psychology include such major areas as developmental, social, personality, and neuropsychological. With finer resolution, topics include such processes as perception, learning motivation, emotion, thinking, imagination, and memory. These topics each contribute to defining the basic processes of psychological life. Within the clinical side, neighboring paradigms of medicine on one hand and counseling on the other likewise provide the gist for the definitional work of psychology.

New Directions

The question remains as to why psychology has not been better able to resolve an issue as central as its own self-definition. Its definition is elusive because it is a particularly difficult question to answer. However, that difficulty is compounded by the divisive and fragmentary ways psychology has struggled within itself for a clarified definition, all too often with the result that self-limiting presuppositions have strait-jacketed the development of more comprehensive understandings.

There are some indications that psychology is becoming more open to wider integrations. Four trends are emerging, each offering a promising interdisciplinary cross-fertilization through which psychology is becoming more integral. These trends include psychology’s collaborations with economics, ecology, holistic health, and spirituality.

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