3 August 2016
Ankita Sharma
This article is to put forward some of the questions I always had as a student of Psychology and to answer one question specifically.
My few questions and submissions are: (1) the definitions for psychology we have accepted does not account for all the components of human being we study in Psychology. (2) I feel that meaning assigned to mind and psyche is not correct (3) Human, in totality is made up of body + psyche + soul, so how do we understand what psyche is?
The most agreed upon definition of psychology is "Psychology is the scientific study of human behavior and mental processes." This definition takes its form from the word 'psyche' + 'logos.' Psyche originates from the Greek word 'psukhe' to Latin 'psyche' meaning the human soul and mind1, and therefore, taking it from there the scientific exploration about the human being started with the questions of the soul to mind and then to behavior. Now we have again gone back to mind combining it with behavior.
This mysterious inner space of the human mind has intrigued philosophers and scientist from the starting of time. Mind, the word originating from old English term 'gemynd' meaning memory and thought and later used to denote 'the element of a person that enables them to be aware of the world and their experiences, to think, to feel, the faculty of consciousness and thoughts'1. So, mostly it denotes to the mental processes and/or state of consciousness from the Theory of Mind by Sigmund Freud.
The confusion over the meaning of word psyche and mind prevails in other languages also. For example in Hindi, psyche means मानस, आत्मा (soul), रूह (spirit), मन, or चित्त (nous). Similarly, mind means मन, बुद्धि, मानस, रूह, or चित्त1. So it seems that the psyche and mind are used interchangeably to denote to a similar thing. But, we intuitively accept that mind is something different that soul, spirit or मन, similarly, psyche is something more than the mind.If we accept that psyche is more than mind and Human, in totality is made up of body + psyche + soul then the question is how do we understand what psyche is? We can combine psyche and soul as per the definition, but I would like to list soul separately because we don't have any mechanism till now to study it scientifically. Whereas, the other two are under scientific scrutiny, body, in biology and psyche, in psychology. So the way biology gives us a list of organ/systems, components of human anatomy, can we come up with an anatomy of human psyche also. The main systems of the human body are as follows2 :
1. Cardiovascular / Circulatory system
2. Digestive system / Excretory system
3. Endocrine system
4. Integumentary system/ Exocrine system
5. Lymphatic system / Immune system
6. Muscular system/Skeletal system
7. Nervous system
8. Renal system / Urinary system
9. Reproductive system
10. Respiratory system
To the best of my knowledge, no such anatomy, organization or classification of the psyche is available. So, as per my understanding, the main component of human Psyche could be as follows:
· Psychological tendencies: Personality, Temperament, Character, Coping Mechanism
· Psychological forces: Motivation, Emotion
· Psychological states: Conscious, Sub-Conscious, Unconscious
· Mental process: Sensation, Attention Perception, Learning, Memory, Forgetting, Language, Reasoning, Decision making, Concept formation
· Psychological products: Interest, Abilities (e.g., intelligence), Aptitude, Belief, Strength
The above list is not complete and not exhaustive for sure, but it does give us an initial sketch to what we are talking about when we say that we study psyche in Psychology.
References:
1. https://www.google.co.in/search, retrieved on 2.8.16.
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_systems_of_the_human_body, retrieved on 2.8.16.