What exactly is psychology?

Many of us have probably been to a psychologist.

But

Where do they get their knowledge from?
And how did this profession even develop in the first place?
What exactly does a psychologist do, and why?
What kind of results do they work with?
What is the difference between a psychologist and a psychiatrist? What can you expect from each?

We will now review these questions, and by the end, you will be able to answer them yourself.

Let’s get started!

Psychology definition

First of all, we need to know what psychology is?
What does the word psychology actually mean?

The word “psychology” comes from two Greek roots. The first part, psychē, means “soul” or “spirit,” which derives from psychein, meaning “to breathe” or “to blow.” This traces back even further to the Sanskrit word bhasa, also meaning “to breathe.” The ancient connection between breath and soul reflects the belief that breathing was the essence of life and consciousness itself.

The second part, -logy, comes from the Greek word logos, meaning “reason,” “word,” or “thought.” It’s used to indicate the study or science of something.

So psychology literally means “the study of the soul” or “the science of the psyche”—though as we’ll explore, modern psychology has moved far from its original meaning.

How did this all happen?

If you ask AI, it might say something like:
“Psychology began as a scientific discipline in the late 19th century with pioneers like Wilhelm Wundt, whose laboratory marked the official birth of experimental psychology. Over time, psychology has expanded into a broad field involving many approaches and practical applications, all rooted in evolving scientific research and clinical practice. This background helps understand what a psychologist does and how their methods and knowledge have developed through history.”

This reflects the general opinion that doesn’t get us any further, so let’s look at a brief history of psychology all the way from the ancient Greeks to the present day.

The history of psychology

We will go back roughly to 600 BCE. Of course, there was already science a few thousand years earlier in ancient Egypt, but at that time people did not think about the soul scientifically yet. The dominant religion regarded the soul as belonging to the mystical realm of the gods; they were its rulers, and after a person’s death, one of the gods took the person’s soul “into custody,” or it went to its appointed place…

Scientific thinking about the soul, according to surviving Western records, originates from the Greeks. This does not mean that people elsewhere in the world did not deal with the soul; they just didn’t do so scientifically.

In the Near East, according to the Old Testament, God ruled over the human soul.
In the Far East
Buddha preached that human spiritual happiness comes from complete detachment from the physical world.
Confucius emphasized right human action.

But let’s get back to the Greeks.
At that time, scientific disciplines were not sharply separated. In that society, people we still know by name were mathematicians, physicists, and philosophers all at once. When they thought about the nature of the world, they did not only want to define the material world but also man and the human soul. First of all, they broke away from the idea that the world was created by some god and tried to define the nature of existence purely through thought. They aimed to go back to the most fundamental building blocks of the world. This gave rise to many strange ideas.

At first, it was thought that the basic building block of everything was water (Thales, 624-546 BC).
Then, according to Anaximenes (586-528 BC), it was air.
Heraclitus (535-475 BC) believed that it was fire.
Empedocles (495-435 BC) was the first to mention the fourth element, so earth, water, air, and fire are now mentioned as the four main components of the world.

Perhaps many have seen the movie The Fifth Element directed by Luc Besson.

The fifth element also existed, but it was not Milla Jovovich 🙂 it was the cosmos itself. (Of course, Milla Jovovich’s role represented something like the perfect missing element, like the cosmos.) But let’s get back to science.

Democritus (465–370 BCE), who was the first to suggest that the world is made up of atoms, said regarding the relation between body and soul that the soul is also made of atoms, specifically smooth atoms that are incorporated among the atoms of the body.
(The meaning of atom: indivisible. Of course, today we know that atoms themselves have parts like protons and electrons, but even back then, what a thought and discovery this was coming from that ancient time!)
Let’s stay on the path of discovering psychology.

So before the Greeks, the soul was considered an immortal immaterial thing. Among the Greeks, the soul began to be thought of as material.

Here we must mention an essential point that will be important later. Hippocrates (460–377 BCE) and later Galen (129–216 CE) created a treatment method based on bodily fluids. According to this, a person’s health depends on the proper balance of four bodily fluids. These are blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. If their normal balance is disrupted, the person becomes ill. From this, a person’s temperament is derived—the change in the proportions of these four fluids determines temperament, and the following character types arise:
– Sanguine
– Choleric
– Melancholic
– Phlegmatic

Based on this, British psychologist H. J. Eysenck (1916–1997) developed the following theory:
According to his observations, people can be stable, unstable, introverted (inward-turning), or extroverted (outward-turning). Combining these traits, four groups arise:

stable-extroverted: sanguine
unstable-extroverted: choleric
unstable-introverted: melancholic
stable-introverted: phlegmatic

On this basis, he created a complete personality model (which we still encounter today in personality tests, for example in the DISC assessment) and made significant contributions to the development of behavioral therapy. By the way, he was of German descent, and his statements regarding intelligence and race sparked serious controversies.

Now we can see on what foundations his developed works were based, and from this, infer the foundations on which modern psychology stands.

But let’s not rush ahead so much.

Let’s return again to the Greeks, but now to the end of that era, which was 529 CE.
At this time, Justinian (483–565) ordered the closure of the philosophical schools in Athens.
Incidentally, his name might also be familiar because he codified the existing Roman law, which later became the foundation of European legal systems.

Interestingly, in the same year, Saint Benedict founded his monastery, marking the beginning of the Benedictine order. This essentially marked the end of the Greek-Hellenic tradition (though not suddenly), in which intervention of God(s) in nature was not accepted, and the soul was seen as material.
The then-dominant Christianity regarded the soul as completely separate from matter and the body, attributing both to God’s creation.
Later, in the 12th century, two more monastic orders were founded: the Dominicans and the Franciscans. The scholastic movement of that era aimed to reconcile faith and science, and the prevailing theory was that the immortal soul is detached from matter.

Nevertheless, in the Canticle of the Sun by Saint Francis of Assisi (Saint Francis of Assisi (1181 – 1226), originally named Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone, founder of the Franciscan Order), the four classical elements appear again.

“Praised be my Lord, through Brother Wind,
and through the air, cloudy and serene,
and every kind of weather through which You give sustenance to Your creatures.
Praised be my Lord, through Sister Water,
which is very useful and humble and precious and chaste.
Praised be my Lord, through Brother Fire,
through whom You light the night;
and he is beautiful and playful and robust and strong.
Praised be my Lord, through Sister Mother Earth,
who sustains us and governs us and who produces
varied fruits with colored flowers and herbs.”

Benen Fahy, O.F.M. (Ordo Fratrum Minorum)

In medieval science, the study of the physical world became separated from the study of the soul.
The soul was considered from the perspective that it had to be saved for God, and the most straightforward way for this was the destruction or demise of the bodily shell, because then the soul escapes from it and goes to its destined place—either heaven or hell.
There are two outstanding figures in this topic:

Saint Augustine (345–430)

In Saint Augustine’s Confessions we read:
“I searched for what evil is. I found that it is not some separate thing, but the depraved, low perversion of the human will twisted away from you, the highest being, turning away from itself and turning outward.” He quotes the Bible in one place: “The flesh that is perishable burdens the soul, and the earthly dwelling weighs down the thoughtful mind” (Wisdom 9:15).
In other words, he did not consider the human soul originally evil, but corrupted.
His entire search and elaboration of opinion were based on Scripture. He derived everything from this, and disregarded anything not starting here.

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274)

According to Thomas Aquinas, the soul is incorruptible and there is no reincarnation: “the soul that unites with one body can never unite with another body.” At the resurrection, the soul receives the same body.
According to the Catholic Church’s understanding, we can begin with the soul that “immediately after death enters either heaven, purgatory, or hell” (S.Th. I-IIae q. 45c). Therefore, only purgatory can cleanse the soul.

This Catholic view prevailed throughout the Middle Ages until the 1600s.
Then a new era dawned.

The continuation will be in the next part