Freud’s contribution to the development of mental health in my opinion is one of the most significant breakthroughs in mental health care. Freud was the first person to argue that mental health patients should not be locked up and medicated, but could be cured merely by talking to them. This argument did not find much favours when Freud first put it forward, but over the years, Freud’s theory gained credibility.
Today, over 400 therapies that help cure or alleviate mental health difficulties can be directly or indirectly attributed to Freud’s pioneering theory in this area.
Dr. Colin Crampton wrote an excellent article that looked at the history of metal health care in the last hundred years; titled: A Hundred years of talking cure . Dr. Crampton has kindly granted Haabaa permission to use this article, it can be found at Haabaa InfoPool

Being tasked with starting a Psychology Blog on Haabaa blogs, my first though was; where the heck do I start and what topic do I start with? The answer came to me after the first wave of panic subsided, ‘why not start from the beginning’ so I will start at the very beginning of Psychology (At least that is where most institution seem to started teaching Psychology) the definition of Psychology.

Defining Psychology is a huge task, there is no agreement among Psychologist about a single universal definition of Psychology, and there are almost as many definitions for Psychology as there are Psychologist. Though most Psychologists seem to agree on a rough definition that goes like this: Psychology is the science of mental processes and behavior. But when other Psychologist start to scrutinize that definitions it starts to fall apart, some Social Psychologists for example do not agree that Psychology is a science hence the will love to hack off the part of the definitions that mention the word ‘Science’ by the time other schools of thoughts in Psychology hack off the bit they do not like about the above description there won’t be much left.

This lack of agreed definition of Psychology makes it necessary for most Psychologists to fashion their own definition. My favorite definition of Psychology used to be ‘The study of the blindingly obvious’ because most people see Psychological theories and finding achieving only a very modest advance on common sense; this allegation both from within and outside Psychology keeps Psychologist on the defensive most of the time.

Eysench (1998) countering the above attack on Psychology argued that the above argument does not stand up to scrutiny, he argued further that commonsense does not include a coherent body of knowledge about human behavior.

I find Eysench’s argument a powerful one, this and my observing of friends and relative wrestling with various human challenges which I think a little knowledge of Psychology could have alleviated made me arrive at a new definition for Psychology; ‘The Human Experience Users Guide’

Haven defined Psychology my way, I will now list some definition of Psychology by real Psychologists and not wannabe like me, and here we go:

Definition of Psychology

Are you a Psychologist, how would you define Psychology? please define Psychology your way in the comment box, if you like I can add it to the definitions on the body of this blog.

Some well know definition of Psychology: