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PSYCHOLOGY: Some ancient ideas of psychology —Humair Hashmi

The ancient man thought that when a person was asleep his soul escaped and did things. Certain methods were therefore developed to restrain the soul from indulging in vicious or sinful acts. In some regions pins and fishhooks would be priced through the nostrils, lips or ears, to plug the escape routes

The long summer, followed by rainstorms has practically restricted one to the home. This forced confinement brought the opportunity to revert to an old love — looking at some of the interesting parts of the history of psychology. The permanence of some of the ideas of the ancient man about psychology is striking. Today psychology is generally regarded as a “science”. It became one when that great pioneer of the scientific method, Wilhelm Wundt, established the first experimental laboratory at the University of Leipzig in Germany in 1875. Many textbooks and other sources report that this laboratory was established in 1879, which is wrong. Incidentally this was also the year that another great psychologist, an American by the name of William James, set up an experimental psychological laboratory at Harvard University. Prior to these groundbreaking initiatives, psychology had been an anecdotal body of knowledge, whose main source of information was introspection rather than empirical observation. The early armchair psychologists were quite content with formulating their views based on speculative introspection. Some of the ideas belonging to this anecdotal psychology were later rejected or modified in the light of experimental evidence coming out of the psychological laboratories. Yet some of the ideas have persisted. It is interesting to look at those that still operate in some of our psychological literature and in our lives.

The first of these is the idea of “soul”. The ancient man, thousands of years before Christ, regarded soul as an entity that entered a person’s body at birth and left it permanently at death. It was like another being that remained in the body throughout one’s life. Sometimes however the soul left the body while one was asleep. This concept was quite different from various religious teachings about soul. The ancient man thought that when a person was asleep his soul escaped and did things. Certain methods were therefore developed to restrain the soul from indulging in vicious or sinful acts. In some regions pins and fishhooks would be priced through the nostrils, lips or ears, to plug the escape routes. In other regions, certain postures and physical and mental exercises were developed to presumably help restrain, control or direct the soul.

Soul, in view of the ancient man, was also responsible for such manifestations as epileptic fits, nightmares, sleep-terror disorder and sleepwalking etc. It was also thought to be involved in mental and physical diseases. The ancient man also considered human blood, one’s breathing and the body’s shadow as expressions of his soul, and therefore developed various techniques of exercising control over the soul by these routes. Breath control and bloodletting were ways of exercising control over the soul. Note that when modern healers trying to alleviate symptoms like stress, anxiety, headaches etc by teaching breathing exercises their method is not too far removed from the ancients’. In many small towns and villages, even in cities like Lahore and Karachi, we have “healers” of mental and physical diseases, who adopt bloodletting as one of the techniques of “treatment” of mental disorders. Many “healers” that one personally knows and whose “healing” regimens are preserved on film and videos by NGOs, still inflict small, shallow cuts on the skull of a patient and the forehead to let the blood flow, believing that the practice would allow the patient to heal. We may be in the 21st century chronologically, but some of us are cognitively still in the ancient times and practice techniques that were in vogue in those times.

Another interesting ancient belief was what is called “animism” — attributing human characteristics and qualities to inanimate objects. Thus the moon, the sun, a stone, a pond, a river or a stream was perceived to be alive and possessing human qualities. They may have a ‘cool’ or ‘hot’ temperament; be quiet or stoic; roaring and raging or silent; and thinking deep or be mischievous (chanchal). Giving human characteristics to inanimate objects “humanised” those objects, making it easy to ‘understand’ them, thus enabling the primitive man to feel that he could exercise control over them. We still do that, do we not?

Another peculiarity of the ancient man’s psyche was his belief in magic. If he learnt and mastered certain verbal and behavioural regimens, he thought, he could exercise control over objects and people. He therefore spent a great amount of effort and resource on learning and mastering those regimens. Later 19th and 20th century psychologists particularly psychotherapists, found this belief to be still operative. They also pointed out the harm that it caused to a person. For instance Sigmund Freud considered his patient’s belief in magic one of the basic variables in his neurosis. Akhtar Ahsan, a Pakistani psychotherapist, settled in New York, USA, has coined the term “fantasmoreal” to describe this function of man’s thinking. Ahsan had done his master’s in psychology from Lahore. After graduation he joined the Pakistan Army as a psychologist. After having served in the forces he acquired his PhD in psychology from Punjab University. Unfortunately for the academic circles of Pakistan, he decided to migrate to the USA after marrying an American woman who was also engaged with health sciences. He is now settled in New York where he practices psychotherapy. Ahsan developed his own system of treatment of mental disorders that he calls Eidetic Psychotherapy. In one of his books, Eidetic Psychotherapy, he elaborates at some length man’s belief in magic. He labels it “fantasmoreal”, meaning thoughts that actually belong in the realm of fantasy but are seen as belonging to the real world. Man’s belief in magic is one of those. It may have been a more operative variable in ancient times but the modern man too believes in magic, and many modern day practitioners have reported evidence of this.

The ancient man also distinguished between mental and physical labour. He regarded mental labour to be superior to physical labour, and thus regarded teachers, thinkers, and others who practiced mental work, superior to the farmhand, the carpenter, the blacksmith and the baker. This distinction, as is obvious, still exists. The modern intellectual looks down upon the carpenter; the poet and the novelist still regard themselves superior to the blacksmith, the gardener, the cobbler and the carpenter. It seems that mankind has not progressed so much after all, at least cognitively, has it?

Humair Hashmi is a consulting psychologist who teaches at Imperial College Lahore

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