Concept
Psyche (psychology)
Overview
The psyche is currently used to describe the totality of the human mind, conscious and unconscious. Especially in older texts, the English word soul is sometimes used synonymously.
Psychology is the scientific or objective study of the psyche. The word has a long history of use in psychology and philosophy, dating back to ancient times, and represents one of the fundamental concepts for understanding human nature from a scientific point of view.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
The development of the idea of a soul in philosophy is in essentials a repetition of this mythological development. The ancient philosophy, in whose footsteps mediæval philosophy follows, still holds fast to the idea of a body-soul. The soul is the driving force of all, even physical processes of life, e.g.
Wilhelm Max Wundt, An Introduction to Psychology Translated from the Second German Edition
Names Psyche.
The task of explaining the community of the soul with the body does not properly belong to the psychology of which we are here speaking; because it proposes to prove the personality of the soul apart from this communion (after death), and is therefore transcendent in the proper sense of the word, although occupying itself with an object of experience—only in so far, however, as it ceases to be an object of…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
Close in meaning to Psyche; the term itself is not named.
The development therefore of a more adequate science of human nature is a matter of first-rate importance. The present revolt against the notion that psychology is a science of consciousness may well turn out in the future to be the beginning of a definitive turn in thought and action. Historically there are good reasons for the isolation and exaggeration of the conscious phase of human action, an isolation which…
John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct
Close in meaning to Psyche; the term itself is not named.
Philosophers who discussed Psyche (psychology)
- Heraclitus
- Murray Bookchin
- Plotinus
- Arthur Schopenhauer
- Constantin Rădulescu-Motru
- Aeon (magazine)
- Nikolay Lossky
- Theodor Litt
- D. H. Th. Vollenhoven
Related ideas
- Cognition
- Galen
- Phaedo
- Philosophy
- On the Soul
- Latin
- Life
- Pneuma
- Mind
- Thomas Aquinas
- Psychology
- Plato
- Psychoanalysis
- Socrates
- Theory of forms
- Science
- Sigmund Freud
- Soul
- Aristotle
- Carl Jung
- Unconscious mind
- Human nature
- Behavior
- Consciousness
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Gnosticism.