The American Psychological Association defines Psychology as ‘the scientific study of the mind and behaviour’.
Yes, I know exactly how ambiguous that sounds. I may as well have said ‘Psychology is the study of all that is, has and will be’ in a wisened, mystic voice whilst stroking my beard… But in a sense, it is.
The word Psychology is derived from the Greek word ‘psyche’ (meaning spirit or soul) and suffix ‘-logia’ (study of). So breaking that down, Psychology literally means ‘the study of the soul’. As a massive sceptic who does not subscribe to the idea of a soul, I am now questioning my life choices… But what if we strip back the literal notion of a ‘soul’ and look at what the soul represents?
The soul is the fundamental ‘essence’ of all living things. It is the ‘living’ entity of an organism. Regardless of beliefs pertaining to life after death, almost every notion of the soul universally regards ‘death’ as the point at which the soul leaves the body. It is an amalgamation of all mental facets of a living being; their character, their experience, their reasoning, consciousness, memory, perception, thinking, feeling, behaviour, desires, fears.
And by and large, this is what psychology aims to understand. This mish-mash of what it means to be alive and to experience life. As such, it is no big surprise that Psychology an exceptionally broad discipline.
So, I am aware I have very successfully not cleared anything up at all by this point; but bear with me. However, hopefully by now I have demonstrated to you exactly why I am struggling to narrow down and explicitly define what psychology is.
In order to try and define Psychology, it helps to consider the disciplines and approaches within the field of Psychology. Once again, I am going to reiterate that Psychology is such a broad topic, I couldn’t possibly cover every approach or sub-discipline. Wikipedia‘s ‘non-exhaustive’ list of Psychology disciplines is currently 93 lines long. Over the next few posts, I will look at some of the approaches and disciplines within Psychology. But for now, I will discuss what ‘approaches’ and ‘disciplines’ are in the context of Psychology.
An approach is a perspective from which a behaviour, concept or phenomenon is viewed. These perspectives are based on sets of assumptions about human behaviour. So for example, the biological approach assumes behaviour is influenced by the individual’s biology (ie. brain structure, brain chemistry, genetics, hormones, nervous system etc.) and hence studies these factors, and how variations in biology leads to variations in the psychological ‘make up’ of the individual. Within these approaches there are various different theories (eg. the serotonin theory of depression), but they all work on the same assumptions.
Disciplines are the smaller areas or domains within Psychology. They are often associated with particular psychological vocations. Some disciplines lend themselves heavily to one particular approach, whereas others take multiple approaches. For example, Neuropsychology is often concerned with neurological disorders, and how they affect thoughts and behaviours. As such, it often lends itself heavily to the biological and cognitive approaches. On the other hand, Forensic Psychology is concerned with psychology within the criminal and legal systems. It’s applications range from understanding the validity and reliability of eyewitness testimony, understanding why people commit crimes, evaluating the criminal justice system and assessing competency to stand trial. As such, this discipline takes input from the biological, social, developmental, biological, cognitive, psychodynamic and behaviourist approaches to name a few.
In some of my future posts, I will explore some of the main approaches and disciplines in psychology in more depth. But for now, the take home message is that psychology is immensely broad, and covers the study of every living organism and their psyche. Psychology concerns itself with the experience of everything and everyone. Except maybe psychologists themselves, as we have already sold our souls to the devil!