Psychology And Its Techniques

Strip the word down to its roots and psychology means the study of the psyche, and psyche means the soul. The awkward part is that the people doing the studying mostly can't say what the psyche is, or whether it exists at all. Plenty of them won't grant the soul any reality beyond their own private religious beliefs. Every other science has a thing it looks at. Psychology is the odd one out: it names its central subject and then shrugs at whether that subject is even there.

Walk through almost any branch of the field and you keep tripping over slippery abstract words. It is a discipline stuffed with puzzles that refuse to resolve. The psyche is only the beginning. Consciousness, character, ego, mind, and a whole cluster of related terms all point at things you can show in some rough way but can never pin to a specific spot in physical space and time.

Sigmund Freud, who worked as a consultant and trained as a neurologist, poured fresh energy into all of this. He brought new claims about sexuality and a new way of working, psychoanalysis. His determinism gave the field a bit more weight, a sense that it was anchored in physical fact. What he did not do was clear away the basic confusion at the center of psychology. If anything he introduced fresh puzzles of the very same kind, and his heavy emphasis on sex struck many people as distasteful.

The life sciences carry their own stubborn, inconvenient problems, the sort they would rather bury or wave away, and the burying never quite works. Some of those problems probably touch psychology too. What strikes me is how thoroughly science, psychology included, has stopped valuing the psyche. Useful observations about it get dropped or quietly ignored, even inside the one discipline that was supposed to keep its eyes on it.