They Took the Psyche out of Psychology

            It is so silly, so incredibly silly, that psychology still calls itself psychology.  The word comes from the Greek root, psyche, which originally meant mind or spirit.  We’re talking about a very religious concept here.  It isn’t a coincidence that the original formal study of the mind was a religious study called faculty psychology.

            You possibly think that psychology is still very much a study of the mind.  In this you would unfortunately be completely wrong.  They haven’t studied the mind for nearly 100 years.  Oh, here and there some obscure psychologist undoubtedly attempted to find out something about the mind, his mind, the minds of others, the minds of his patients.  It would have been rather unavoidable if some psychologist somewhere hadn’t stumbled on a few facts.

            But the mainstream of psychology abandoned the mind nearly 100 years ago.  Now they study brains and behavior and rats and anything else except the mind.

            Just so we don’t go too far astray, let me assert right now that there is a thing called a mind.  It isn’t something mystical or imaginary.  If you close your eyes and think of an elephant – and actually see it, that’s your mind.  If you remember a time you kissed another person with passion, that memory is your mind.  If you decide to have a salad for lunch rather than a sandwich, that’s your mind.

            By the way, if you are a psychologist or psychiatrist, you were probably unable to think of an elephant or remember anything before this morning’s breakfast.  Take my advice.  Close this book and go back to sleep.

            I feel like an idiot explaining this.  It’s so painfully obvious.  But in this psychology-dominated world, you have been inculcated one way or another into various false notions:

·        that you think with your brain;

·        that your mind or its contents are somehow imaginary, not real;

·        that your thoughts are not your own.  They were somehow created for you by the physical universe or by some stimulus-response mechanism or by something over which you have no ultimate control;

·        that there are no new thoughts under the sun.  Everything has been thought before.