Common Psychological Problems- A History

Before we tackle how to deal with the most common psychological problems we might as well figure out where this all began. Many people believe psychology to be a young science, however this is extremely wrong. As a matter of fact experimental science within university life is a recent pursuit across the board. So where did psychology as a science first appear? It first came about at the University of Lipzig in 1879. Yes, this was not so long ago, but bear in mind that this is not long after the onset of other university experimental sciences such as chemistry. But psychology really is very old. Of course it is. Psychology is the study of the mind and as humans we have been pondering our emotions and thoughts almost since the dawn of man. Officially, it goes way back to Hellenistic thought. This was the age of philosophy and the Platonic dialogues. This was when a bunch of clever guys had the time to sit around and talk things out. They also had the time to write about and ponder human behavior extensively and thus they are credited as the founders of modern thought, Indeed modern Psychology would be nothing without philosophy. Psychology owes it all to the big players of those times. They shaped the way we think and thus shaped the way we experience angst, turmoil and stress in the world. Very concretely they determined how we make decisions and deal with problems. One correction. Yes, they were the first philosophers but they were not the first men to ponder the human condition. They were only the first men to write about it. For example, can you realistically conceive that Thales was the first man to realize that "it is hard to be good?" This underlines a key aspect of why the study of history is so vital to the understanding current psychological practice. As the zeitgeist of a time slips away and morphs into something else so do the attitudes regarding human behavior. Perhaps psychology's greatest mistake was to ground itself as a natural science. It was thereby that some knob heads mistook the passing conditions of a current age for the permanent conditions of all human life. Currently ours is a society that regards psychology as a concrete science and more than that has fragmented psychology into a shattered outlay of sub-sciences, each unique in practice and methodology. We are thus left with a much greater experimental field than we could have possibly imagined. Hence we begin with history (and I promise I will drop the academic droll in blogs to come). But yes, history is the first lens that we will use to approach the most common psychological problems of our time.