What is psychology?

Do you know what psychology means? What does a psychologist or psychologist do?

We can start by defining the word psychology. The definition of psychology could be given by its Greek origin: Ψυχολογία = Psyche + logia. Psyche means soul or mind and was also the name of the Goddess “Psyche”, who in Greek mythology was the wife of Eros, our famous cupid. Note that the first letter, Ψ (psi), is the symbol of Psychology, pictured above.

Logia comes from logos, which means: discourse, knowledge, science. Thus Psychology is the science of the soul and mind. It is the science that studies the mind and behavior.

Psychology is both a field of academic study (in universities and colleges) and a field of application of knowledge: offices, hospitals, mental health clinics, in companies and organizations.

In this way, psychology is a science (field of knowledge) and a profession, which was regulated in Brazil in 1962.

The main objective of psychologists is to understand and explain people’s thoughts, emotions and behavior. As for the area of ​​application of psychology, we can say that any place where a person is found, we could have a psychologist working – given the previous definition. Clinics, hospitals, schools, companies, industries, laboratories are areas in which psychologists work. See more below in Psychology and Profession.

Or click Job Market in Psychology

Also Read: What Can Psychology Do For You?

But there is an author who is considered the father of modern psychology: his name is Wundt. He is considered the founder of psychology as a science for having created the first psychology laboratory in Leipiz, Germany in 1879.

Wundt opened two major fields of research for psychology: experimental research (in the laboratory) and social psychology or psychology of people – in German Völkerpsychologie.

Psychology approaches

Up to the present day, contemporary psychologists divide psychology into 3 major approaches: psychoanalysis, behaviorism (behavioralism) and humanism. We will talk in more detail in Lesson 4, about the biography of the most famous psychologists.

Perspectives of Modern Psychology (3 great forces)

There are 3 major approaches within psychology: psychoanalysis, behaviorism (behavioralism) and humanism. Without them, we cannot tell the history of psychology or explain “what psychology is”. In addition to these 3 forces, which will be explained below, there are other approaches to psychology such as transpersonal psychology and NLP, Neuro-Linguistic Programming

Also take our Free NLP Course

the psychoanalysis

The father of psychoanalysis was Sigmund Freud, an Austrian neurologist born in 1859. The central idea of ​​psychoanalysis (analysis of the psyche) is the idea of ​​the unconscious. Although it is a complex concept, we can understand it as a “part” of our mind that the self, the conscience, does not control.

With the idea of ​​the unconscious, Freud explained dreams, symptoms, slips, jokes and psychic illnesses. From his extensive research that sought to address the psyche, the saying “Freud explains” arose.

Other theorists such as Alfred Adler, CJ Jung and Reich disagreed on some points with Freud’s theory and created their own lines of research. But as all of them do not abandon the idea of ​​the unconscious, we can say that they all emerged from psychoanalysis.

behaviorism

The term behaviorism comes from the English behavior, behavior. In Portuguese, we can say both behaviorism and behaviorism.

Behaviorism defines psychology as the science that studies behavior. Authors such as Pavlov, Watson and B. F Skinner made great contributions to the development of this approach to psychology.

Pavlov studied the salivation behavior of dogs. In his research laboratory, he created an experiment that made him world famous: Every time he fed the dog, he rang a bell. After a while, just ringing the bell, the dog salivated. That is, he proved animal conditioning, which explains the cause of certain phobias in humans.

Skinner deepened research in the area, inaugurating what he called radical behaviorism. Also making use of animal experiments, he developed the concept of operant conditioning.

Roughly speaking, we can summarize this concept as follows: the behavior is likely to happen given its relationship with earlier and later phenomena.

In other words: a behavior will be controlled by what happened before and what might happen after. For example, I might love to eat chocolate. But if before eating chocolate, I have eaten a lot of chocolate, if you offer it to me – even though I really like chocolate – I probably won’t accept it.

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