The term psychology derives from two Greek words: “psyche,” which means “soul,” and “logos,” which means "study."
Psychology started as the study of the soul and later transformed into a science about the mind and behavior. It explores various components of the mind, such as sensations, emotions, and others, but most importantly, it studies how and why humans behave in different conditions. Depending on these conditions, psychological science can be further divided into several subfields. For example, medical psychology studies how people behave when they are ill and what psychological factors contribute to faster recovery. Developmental psychology studies how our mind and behavior change throughout our lives - from childhood to old age. Social psychology explores how various social factors, such as level of income or education, may influence our behavior and how we interact with other people. There are also other subfields, such as industrial psychology, family psychology, cognitive psychology, and many others, each focusing on different aspects of our lives.
The history of psychology spans centuries. From very ancient times, we have wanted to better understand ourselves. For example, Chinese texts from 2500 years ago describe stages of psychological development and suggest that impairment of this development may lead to mental disorders like mania and psychosis.
The mind was also extensively examined in ancient India. Modern psychological practices, such as yoga, meditation, and mindfulness, originate from these ancient Eastern spiritual practices. Interestingly, from the very beginning, early scholars suspected that mental activity resides within the brain. For instance, an ancient Egyptian medical manuscript written around 1600 BC contains a description of brain anatomy and some speculations on mental disorders associated with damage to certain brain regions.
In Europe, ancient Greek philosophers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle also paid a lot of attention to questions about the mind, consciousness, and human behavior. The famous saying “Know thyself” - broadly meaning that to understand nature, one should first understand one’s own mind - comes from ancient Greece.
During medieval times in Europe, psychology was largely influenced by religious beliefs, but even then, some philosophers understood that mental activity is produced by the brain and that mental disorders are caused by brain dysfunction rather than supernatural forces.
Until the middle of the 19th century, psychology was considered a branch of philosophy. However, significant discoveries in neurophysiology and the development of new experimental methods that could be used to study psychological phenomena contributed to psychology's evolution into an independent field of science. The first person to call himself a psychologist was Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt - a German physiologist who first separated psychology from philosophy and established the first experimental laboratory for psychological research at the University of Leipzig.
One of Wundt’s students was the English scientist Edward Titchener, who attempted to study the mind in a similar way to how chemists study matter - by identifying its basic elements. Titchener, for example, suggested that every conscious experience can be broken down into three basic mental elements: sensations, images or ideas, and emotions. His theory, called structuralism, is considered the first psychological theory of the human mind. The main concepts and principles of structuralism are still used in the modern field of cognitive psychology.
According to Titchener, the only way to understand the mind is through introspection, which literally means “looking inward.” Introspection is the examination of one’s own experiences, thoughts, and feelings. It is widely applied in many psychological interventions, including cognitive-behavioral therapy, which is one of the most effective methods of psychological treatment.
Mastering introspection is very important because often, when we feel depressed or anxious, we do not analyze the experience itself. Instead, we tend to focus on the external situation that, in our opinion, caused it. But to change a negative experience more effectively, we need to examine it in more detail from the inside. We need to break it down into pieces and understand how and why the experience appeared.
In the following articles, we will use Titchener’s approach and start exploring the elements of our mind - sensations, perceptions, attention, memory, thoughts, needs, emotions, and consciousness. I will also briefly explain how they can be impaired in various mental disorders.