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Psychology simply cannot be defined; indeed, it cannot even be easily characterized. Even if one were to frame a definition or characterization today, tomorrow would render the effort inadequate. Psychology is what scientists and philosophers of varius persuasions have created to try to fulfil the need to understand the minds and behaviours of varius organisms, from the most primitive to the most complex. Hence, it really isn't a thing at all: it is about a thing, or about many things. It has few boundaries, and aside from the canons of science and the ethical standards of free society it should not have any imposed upon it either by its practitioners or by its critics. It is an attempt to understand what has so far pretty much escaped understanding, and any effort to circumscribe it or box it in is to imply that something is known about the edges of our knowledge, and that must be wrong.

As a distinct discipline psychology finds its roots a mere century and  a half or so back in the faculties of medicine and philsophy. From medicine it took the orientation that explication of that which is done, thought and felt must ultimately be couched in biology and physiology; from philosophy it took a class of deep problems concerning mind, will and knowledge. Since then, it has been variously defined as 'the science of mind', 'the science of mental life', 'the science of behaviour', etc. All such definitions, of course, reflect the prejudices of the definer more than the actual nature of this field. In the course of writing this volume, a rather strange metaphor has emerged that somehow seems to capture the essential quality of our discipline. It is like an amoeba, relatively unstructured but very much indentifiable as a distinct entity with a peculiar mode of action by means of which it sends out a projection of it self towards some new technique, some novel problem area, some theoretical model, or even some other distinct field of science, incorporating it and slowly pulling itself clumsily into another shape. Not very flattering perhaps, but accurate.  -- Reber & Reber: The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology.

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