What is the true thing called Psychology?
...SOCRATES: But far more dangerous are these, who began when you
were children, and took possession of your minds with their falsehoods,
... What do the slanderers say? They shall be my prosecutors, and I will
sum up their words in an affidavit. "...
The Apology of Socrates by Plato
[Picture: The Death of Socrates by Jacques-Louis David.]
Psychology means
science of the soul or understanding of the mind. Since
its Greek origin, psychological is the
branch of metaphysics that studies the soul, called in English the mind,
and the soul relationships with the functions of the body as the animating
force of life.
This ancient discipline has been thus constructing, over the centuries,
and has been consolidated as a scientific knowledge, a discipline and a
craft, to reach specific understanding of the factors driving - 'behind
the scenes' - one's life and also psychological factors that drive social
life.
As the Greek etymology recalls, Psychology is an analytical discipline
aiming to understand the soul in order to govern one's life creatively (whether
one stands for an individual or for a collective).
This discipline was born , like most contemporary sciences, in classical
Greece some 2500 year ago. Socrates, the wisest teacher of mankind, is the
father of Psychology; his maieutic method remains the clinical
method per excellence if one wants to examine in depth any matter bearing
on our human existence, whether this be a problem, a symptom or any other
subject. Logically, this science or discipline of human life relies on the
soul, namely on its highest faculty, the intellect. That is: in the human
nature as a beings of language, endowed with the ability to speak and to
think, and thus to examines one's life, a critical instance which distinguishes
the human species from all animals or beasts.
Therefore, contrary to the American fashionable beliefs such as Behaviorism (a pseudo science pursuing the totalitarian ideal of a programmable automata or a perfected bio idiotic clone), the real thing psychology operates with the human faculty of understanding, through speaking one's mind truthfully in order to get rid of any suffering or symptoms and to discover one's singular unconscious potential to fulfil your own vocation and to enjoy a good life.
Definition for:
Maieutic: of or pertaining to the method
used by Socrates of eliciting knowledge in the mind of a person by interrogation
and insistence on close and logical reasoning.
Useful links:
Listen
Karen
Armstrong talking on Socrates
in the
BBC
Read Plato's
dialogues on Project Gutemberg : The
Apology of Socrates, etc.
