Not easy to define or characterise, its etymological root (psyche) means that it has been portrayed with the throw-away phrase ‚’the study or the science of the mind’. If we could be clear enough as to what the mind means, then this phrase might be a suitable starting point. The alternative, ‘the science of behavior’, is not much more helpful. Perhaps something in between gets closer to an appropriate meaning: the scientific study of mental processes and their functions that are directly or indirectly expressed in behavior. However, this attempt does not cover the enormous diversity of contemporary psychology in which, for example, mental processes are dismissed (i.e., in ecological psychology), cast into engineering-like models of information processing (i.e., in cognitive psychology), or sought in the activity of the brain (i.e., in cognitive neuropsychology or just plain neuropsychology). Nor does it capture the ways in which various forms of experience exert their effects on such processes (i.e., in developmental and social psychology). Apparently the term ‘psychology’ first appeared in English in a medical text written by Stephanus Blancardus or Steven Blankaart (1650-1702) entitled The Physical Dictionary (1693), although it was hinted at earlier in the Doctrine of the Soul (1672) written by Thomas Willis (1621-1675). Up to the end of the 19th century, psychology was considered to be a branch of philosophy and was released from this marriage, according to historians of psychology, by Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) when he established the first laboratory for experimental psychology at Leipzig in 1879 (although Wundt himself pursued his psychology as a means of testing philosophically-based issues). From here on, psychology experienced a couple of upheavals or ‘revolutions’: first with the stranglehold imposed by behaviorism, and then with the cognitive revolution that really took off in the 1960s. The effects of the latter still continue to define much of the work of academic psychologists, although the link to biology (previously destroyed by behaviorism and its fixation with aping physics) is growing increasingly stronger as witnessed, for example, in the achievements of psychobiology and physiological psychology.
See Anthropology, Behaviorism, Bridge law (or principle), Cognitive neuroscience, Cognitive psychology, Developmental psychology, Discipline, Ecological psychology, Hixon symposium, Introspective method, Life sciences, Social psychology