What is psychology?
Psychology is the study of the mind. In Greek, the word psyche means mind or soul. It is related to the Sanskrit word atma. The word is based on the ancient Greek story of Cupid and Psyche (Cupid is often shown on Valentine's Day cards as being a little fat baby with wings, holding a bow and arrow). In the story, the goddess Venus became jealous of the beautiful young Psyche and sent her son Cupid to make her fall in love with an ugly man. Instead, Cupid fell in love with her. They married but Psyche was not allowed to see his face (because he was a god).
To the Greeks, the human mind was a lot like the girl in the story. They believed that it was the part of a human that was most like a god. Certainly, the mind is indeed the most complex part of a human. But these days, people do not agree about what exactly the mind is. Most scientists see it as being entirely physical (just our brains at work) whereas most religious people see it as being something non-physical (a soul that lives on after death). One thing for certain is that we cannot study how the mind works simply by examining the physical parts of the brain (although that is useful). Therefore, psychology is often called a "soft" science. It relies heavily on theories and complicated studies of human behaviour rather than on direct observations.
The most famous psychologist
Today we are going to focus on just one psychologist and his theory about the mind. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) is probably the most well-known name in the field of psychology. He was born to Jewish parents in the Czech Republic but became very anti-religious as an adult. He developed a type of psychology called psychoanalysis. He was also the first therapist to have people lie down on a couch and talk about their problems.
Freud believed that the mind has two parts: the conscious and the unconscious. The conscious is the part that we are aware of. When we are actively thinking about something, those thoughts are in our conscious mind (e.g. - think of an elephant; that image of an elephant is now in your conscious mind). However, Freud believed that a lot is also happening in our unconscious mind, even though we are not always aware of it. He believed that dreams often provided clues about what is going on in our unconscious.
Have you ever had an experience where something slipped off your tongue by accident? For example, you were talking to your girlfriend and by mistake, you called her by your old girlfriend's name? These are called Freudian slips. Freud believed that these occur when something in the unconscious pops up into the conscious. Perhaps you were wishing that you were still with your old girlfriend and this is why you made the mistake. Freud believed that our conscious mind is often in conflict with our unconscious mind and that this is the cause of many of our problems.
Freud called the part of ourselves that lives in the conscious mind "the ego" (Latin for "I"). Our ego is what tells us that we are an individual person, separate from other people in the world.
Freud called the part of us that lives in the unconscious mind "the id" (Latin for "it"). He believed that the id was driven by animal desires such as the desire to eat and the desire to have sex. Babies are born with an id but the ego take several years to develop. The ego develops because we eventually have to learn to deal with society. Just because we are hungry, we cannot steal food from a shop. Our ego makes our id behave properly. It knows that if it wants to satisfy the id, it must pay money for food.
Freud also spoke about a superego, which maintains our sense of morals (ideas about right and wrong) and lives in both the conscious and the unconscious.
Many of Freud's other ideas were quite strange. For example, he had a famous theory about something called the Oedipus Complex. Oedipus was a character from another famous Greek story, this time about a king who, without knowing it, killed his own father and married his own mother. Freud believed that children unconsciously compete with their same-sex parent for the affection of their opposite sex parent and because of this, they learn how to be a boy or girl.
Another idea was that we go through various stages based on parts of our body. The first two stages are oral (mouth) and anal (opposite end). Freud believed that if some problem occurred during one of these stages, it would affect a person's personality later in life. For example, he believed that people who had trouble learning to use the toilet as babies ended up being overly neat and strict. Even today, people use the word anal as an adjective to describe people who are overly neat and strict.
Although most of Freud's ideas are not accepted as fact today, he was a very influential thinker. His greatest contribution was his stress on the importance of the unconscious mind.