Even as a science of the mind, psychology occupies an exceptional position.
The Development of Personality
Psychology can also claim to be one of the humane sciences, or, as they are called in German, the Geisteswissenschaften, sciences of the mind.
All these sciences of the mind move and have their being within the sphere of the psychic, if we use this term in its limited sense, as defined by natural science.
From that point of view “mind” is a psychic phenomenon.
But, even as a science of the mind, psychology occupies an exceptional position.
The sciences of law, history, philosophy, theology, etc., are all characterized and limited by their subject-matter.
This constitutes a clearly defined mental field, which is itself, phenomenologically regarded, a psychic product.
Psychology, on the other hand, though formerly counted a discipline of philosophy, is today a natural science and its subject-matter is not a mental product but a natural phenomenon, i.e., the psyche.
As such it is among the elementary manifestations of organic nature, which in turn forms one half of our world, the other half being the inorganic.
Like all natural formations, the psyche is an irrational datum.
It appears to be a special manifestation of life and to have this much in common with living organisms that, like them, it produces meaningful and purposeful structures with the help of which it propagates and continually develops itself.
And just as life fills the whole earth with plant and animal forms, so the psyche creates an even vaster world, namely consciousness, which is the self-cognition of the universe. ~Carl Jung, CW 17, Para 165
