German physician and philosopher Wilhelm Wundt established the first laboratory to study psychology and is credited with treating the study of the mind as a separate discipline from biology and philosophy.

      What did the ancient Greeks have to say about psychology?

      Twenty-five hundred years ago, ancient Greek philosophers turned their remarkably sophisticated inquiries away from the whims of the gods and toward questions of the natural world. Questions about humanity’s place in the world naturally followed. What is knowledge and how do we gain it? What is our relationship with emotions? While some of their answers to these questions appear bizarre by modern standards, much of their knowledge remains strikingly current.

      What is the Greek root of the word “psychology”?

      The word psychology derives from the Greek words psyche, meaning soul, and logos, meaning a reasoned account in words. It is important to note, though, that the Greeks’ conception of the mind was quite different from ours. In general, the Greeks understood the mind in more concrete ways with less emphasis on the complexity of subjective experience.

      Did Homer have a concept of the mind?

      Homer’s legendary epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, date back to the eighth century B.C.E. Although Homer’s epics are timeless stories of passion and drama, his understanding of human psychology is radically different from our view today. There is no real concept of consciousness in Homer, no sense of the characters’ behaviors being motivated by their own internal feelings or thoughts. Instead characters’ motivations are imposed on them through the whims of the gods. For instance, the goddess Athena makes Odysseus do whatever he does. Abstract ideas of mental life, of consciousness, do not exist and awareness is understood in concrete, bodily terms. For example, the Greek word noos (later spelled nous), which later came to mean consciousness, was more concretely understood as vision or sight. The word psyche, which in later years referred to the soul or the mind, in Homer’s day meant only blood or breath, the physical markers of life.

      When did the Greeks turn to questions of psychology?

      The pre-Socratic philosophers—i.e., those who predated Socrates—lived in the early fifth century and sixth centuries B.C.E. Philosophers such as Alcmaeon, Protagoras, Democritus, and Hippocrates introduced concepts remarkably relevant to modern ideas. Shifting focus from the gods to the natural world, they attributed mental activity to nous (the later spelling of noos), which some even located in the brain. Several of these philosophers believed that our knowledge of the world is only learned through the sense organs. As we can only know what we see, hear, smell or touch, all human knowledge is necessarily subjective and will differ from individual to individual. This belief in the relativism of human knowledge was a radical idea that remains pertinent to modern psychology.

      Do all the ancient Greeks’ ideas hold up in the light of modern science?

      Not all of the ancient Greeks’ ideas make sense from a contemporary point of view. Hippocrates, for example, believed that mental illness is caused by imbalances between bile, phlegm, and blood, and Alcmaeon believed that perceptions reached the brain through channels of air. Nonetheless, the attempt to find biological explanations of psychological processes is extraordinarily similar to modern views.

      What are the four bodily humors?

      Hippocrates (460–377 B.C.E.) was a brilliant physician who introduced the notion of the four bodily humors, a concept that would influence medical theories for almost 2,000 years. Hippocrates based his physiological theory on the ideas of another pre-Socratic philosopher, Empedocles (c. 492–c. 432 B.C.E.), who believed the entire world to be composed of earth, air, fire, and water. The bodily elements of black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm corresponded with each of Empedocles’s four elements. Although Hippocrates attributed all mental processes (such as joy, grief, etc.) to the brain, he believed that both mental and physical health rested on a harmonious balance of the four bodily humors. Over five centuries later, the Roman physician Galen (130–201 C.E.) expanded Hippocrates’s ideas to create a typology of personality. The melancholic personality (from black bile) tended toward the depressed; the choleric (from yellow bile) tended toward anger; the sanguine (from blood) tended toward the vigorous, courageous, and amorous; and the phlegmatic (from phlegm) tended to be calm and not easily perturbed. Each personality type resulted from an excess of its respective bodily humor. Although modern science has disproved this theory, Galen’s terms are still used to describe personality traits.

      What did Plato and Aristotle have to say about psychology?

      Plato (428–347 B.C.E.) and Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.), the two most famous Greek philosophers, have had far-reaching influence on Western thought. While neither is best known for his psychological ideas, both have had impact on Western conceptions of the mind. Plato believed that the truth lay in abstract concepts, or forms, that could be grasped through reason alone. The data we get from our senses is impermanent and therefore illusory. The notion of an inborn mental ability to grasp concepts and categories is consistent with modern cognitive psychology and neuro-science, although the dismissal of “sense data” is not. Aristotle was much more enamored of the natural world and believed knowledge to come from systematic logical reasoning about our observations of nature. He maintained that the capacity for logical reasoning is innate but the content of our knowledge