ABSTRACT
While the history of psychology as a distinct academic discipline in Europe is relatively short, its origins can be traced to a matrix that was formed by religion and philosophy. Accounts of the beginnings of modern psychological inquiry usually begin with developments that occurred in the seventeenth century, when a change occurred in the dominant discursive practice, from a focus on the moral and the religious to the epistemological (that is, how we know). This shift made the psychological, rather than the theological, central.
