Is the faculty of psychology human or biological?

Hello friends!

A very common doubt about the Faculty of Psychology is the definition of the area of ​​knowledge in which it fits. After all, is the faculty of psychology a faculty in the area of ​​humanities or biological sciences? In this text, I try to answer this question, with my personal opinion, bearing in mind the history of psychology and the definition of Capes.

Psychology: human or biological?

As I have mentioned here on the site on several occasions, psychology is not a univocal science. At the University where I studied (UFSJ), the psychology department was called the department of psychologies. That is, there is not a single psychology. And this basically has two meanings:

– psychology has epistemological approaches that do not agree with each other regarding their assumptions: humanistic psychology, behavioral psychology, analytical psychology, individual psychology, psychoanalysis, positive psychology, transpersonal, among others;

– psychology has areas of activity in which the practices also differ from each other: clinical psychology, organizational psychology, traffic psychology, institutional psychology, social and community psychology, hospital psychology, educational and school psychology, psychopedagogy, neuropsychology, among others.

So that talking about a unity within psychology is impossible. Do we always have to put an addendum, an adjective or noun, to complete and show which psychology concept we are working with? Are we talking about cognitive psychology or are we talking about sport psychology? What place are we talking about?

Epistemology – the part of philosophy that studies how knowledge is founded and constructed – helps us to begin to understand that assumptions are always at play, in theory and in practice.

We have the definition of psychology as the science (logy) that studies the psyche. Psyche, the Greek word for soul, is therefore the object of this science. But how to study the psyche? In a university laboratory or in social movements? In the silence and secrecy of an office or in psychometric tests?

From the beginning, psychologists had to come up with a way of studying and a way of defining the psyche.

A brief history of psychology

Just as it is not so simple to define what psychology is (because it is difficult to define what psyche, soul, behavior, thought, sensation is?) it is not so easy to date the beginning of psychology.

Studies on the psyche (Greek) or anima (soul) date back to the ancient Greek philosophers. However, if we are going to demarcate the foundation of psychology as a science – and not as a philosophy – it is standard to quote Wundt, the creator of the first laboratory of experimental psychology at the end of the 19th century.

But even Wundt (who has not yet been translated into Portuguese) had a view that psychology should include at least two major areas of study:

– Physical psychology or psychophysiology (Psychophysic🇧🇷

– The psychology of peoples (Volkerpsychologie🇧🇷

Interestingly, the two strands can be related, each one, to the two types of science we are dealing with here. While psychophysiology is related to the biological sciences (in German, Naturwissenschaft), the psychology of peoples or cultural psychology (Kulturpsychologie) relates to the human sciences.

At the time, at the end of the 19th century, instruments for measuring sensations were still rudimentary. Much of the knowledge obtained in the laboratory consisted of asking the experimental subject (a person trained by the researcher to answer him) what he saw, felt, heard, associated. Several discoveries in the area now known as ophthalmology were made from these experiments, including the discovery of color blindness.

On the other hand, Wundt soon noticed that such experiments were insufficient to explain other facets of human beings, especially their insertion in a complex social and cultural environment. For this reason, he constructed the psychology of peoples, a forerunner of social and community psychology (as well as sociology and anthropology) and of much of the knowledge used in organizational psychology.

With the development of psychology in the 20th century, the two ways of answering the question – how are we going to study the psyche – were perfected and engendered the currents mentioned above.

At the end of the 20th century, starting in the 1990s, considered the decade of the brain, psychophysiology – now under the name of neurosciences – took an unprecedented quantitative and qualitative leap, due to the possibility of studying the brain directly.

Faculties of humanities or biological psychology

For the creation of a college, the applicant institution has to follow a series of norms and rules established by the MEC (Ministry of Education). That’s why I always say here on the site that looking at a college’s curriculum is not as useful to know the quality of a course as researching other factors such as the quality of facilities, libraries, professors and even the students’ interest in being there studying.

Thus, the psychology curriculum, across the country, is practically the same in all colleges that offer the course. There are differences with regard to electives or electives, but as these do not represent a large proportion, the difference will not be as significant as it could be.

What will really differentiate one institution from another is the training of teachers. Not only in the sense of having more academic titles (specialization postgraduate degrees, masters, doctorates, post-doctorates) but of having a specific theoretical and methodological orientation.

That is, a professor who thinks that psychology is the science that studies behavior (from the behaviorist or behavioral line) will have a look at psychology. A professor, with a Marxist philosophical background, who specializes in social and community psychology will have a completely different look.

As a single professor does not represent the faculty as a whole, it will be in the sum of all the faculty’s conceptions that we will see whether the psychology faculty will call itself a faculty of humanities or a faculty of biology.

From the point of view of the course curriculum, my personal opinion is that it makes more sense to include psychology as a human science. Biological subjects exist, however, they are usually two or three disciplines only (anatomy, neuroanatomy, physiology). It is almost proportional to the number of subjects we have that are exact (statistics).

So, in my opinion, as it makes no sense to classify the faculty of psychology as an exact science because we study statistics, it makes no sense to classify it as a biological science. In practice too, we don’t see psychologists studying the biology and physiology of the human body as often as would be expected from such a general definition of a course.

It is important to note that my opinion is not as subjective as one might assume. Capes itself (Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel) of the Ministry of education also places psychology in the large area of ​​activity as human sciences. look here

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