Is Psychology a Study of the Mind?

            The physical sciences have enjoyed tremendous success in leading mankind’s emergence from the Dark Ages.  This great success has largely been due to their stubborn insistence that the ojbects they study be real and measurable and that their conclusions be practical and repeatable.

            Because the objects they studied were in fact real and their conclusions practical, they have transformed our world from an agrarian, labor-intensive economy to an industrial, mechanized one. 

Those wishing to pursue other -ologies have been justifiably envious of the physical sciences and have sought to emulate them.  This is fine as far as it goes. 

If a student of life (biology) or of the mind (psychology) – to take two central examples – strive to ensure that the objects they study are real, that their conclusions are practical and repeatable, this is great.  Unfortunately they have confused the objects of study with the method of study.    In emulating the physcial sciences, they have attempted to study life and the mind as though they were physical objects, observable with eyes and cameras, measurable with oscilloscopes and brain monitors.

Biology and psychology have thrown out the baby with the bathwater.

The mind is not a physical object.  It is a collection of ideas and memories and all the other amazing (or not so amazing) things you have in your mind.  It’s what you see when you close your eyes.  It is also, by the way, what you see when you open your eyes.   You don’t see the world so much as your mind’s version of the world.  But that leads down a rather long avenue, which we won’t travel at this time …

The proper study of psychology is the contents of the mind, its patterns, the rules that it follows, how those contents are created, and also how those contents influence the actions, inactions, and reactions of people.  Where the phsycial scientist studies the phsycial universe, a mental scientist should study the mental universe.  Instead they have substituted two pieces of the phsyical universe:  the brain and behavior.

To be sure, the brain and behavior are valid objects of study in their own rights.  And yes it is true that there is some interrelation between the mind and the brain, just as there is an interrelation between the mind and behavior.  But the psychologist has glommed onto the brain and behavior as objects of study and thinks, hopes, prays, that he is thereby studying the mind. 

In this they are making a classic phsilosophical error.  A brain is not a mind any more than a piece of flat round metal (a dvd) is a movie.

Because the mind is not physical in nature does not mean that it is not real.  You have a mind and, unless you are a psychiatrist or psychologist, you know that you have a mind.

The other guy has a mind, too, and he knows it.  There is something definitely real there.  It is filled with happiness or pain, with pleasant memories or painful ones, with a million other things that we all know as thought, emotions, attitudes, etc..

The proper study of psychology is those thoughts, emotions, attitudes.  What is their pattern?  How do they influence a person’s actions?  What factors can change those thoughts, emotions, or attitudes?  And so on.

These are the proper questions that psychologists, students of the mind, should be trying to answer.  But instead they distract themselves with brains, behavior, sttimulus-response, mazes.  And they have gone so far afield that in many cases they don’t even study the brains and behaviors of human beings, but of rats and other animals.

Psychology has not made one breakthrough in the field of the mind since Freud.