Introduction

This lesson was created using material from General Psychology 20, Student Module Booklet, Alberta Distance Learning Centre.

What is Psychology?

One hundred years ago, psychology was a strange new word to the average person. Today people use it frequently to describe events in their everyday lives. Books on psychology line the shelves of many bookstores. Drugstores display magazines with many articles on psychology-related subjects. Even comics deal with psychoanalysis, IQs, and hypnosis.

The reason psychology has gained such popularity is fairly simple. The study of psychology is the study of ourselves. From earliest times, people have been curious about their own nature. For example, they wondered what actually happened in their dreams when they would be visiting faraway places or doing impossible things such as flying through the air. When they awoke, they were in the same place where they had lain to sleep. How could that be explained? Was there an invisible person inside who took these journeys while the body remained behind? What left the body when people died and ceased to breathe, to talk, to laugh, and to touch?

Gradually, from these questions the idea of a soul developed. Later, the Greeks named it the psyche, which is the mind or the soul. The Greek word logia means a study of something. Therefore, psychology is the study of the mind or soul. Today psychologists no longer use the word soul when speaking of the study of this science. Watch for a modern definition of psychology in the following paragraph.

Psychology became the study of the mind and its various faculties. The mind was thought to exist separately from the body. As the study of psychology developed, psychologists limited their investigations to the study of consciousness. The consciousness is what a person feels, thinks, or is aware of in some way such as colours, shape, smell, pain, or other sensations. But even the definition of psychology as the study of consciousness soon proved to be inadequate. A good deal of behaviour and even a certain amount of thinking was discovered to occur beneath the conscious level in the realm we now call the unconscious. Therefore, today the meaning of psychology has been broadened to include the study of all behaviour, whether conscious or unconscious. We may now define psychology as the science of human behaviour.