ABSTRACT
Discipline boundaries are somewhat arbitrary and artificial, especially in the human sciences, and the essential core of psychology is particularly difficult to identify. Not only is the essence of psychology difficult to define, but its relationship with the world to which it might be expected to relate is also particularly problematic. Ironically, a further degree of prejudice actually arises from the confusion of psychology with psychiatry, so that the former is tainted with the stigma of mental illness in the lay mind. A basic premise in psychology is that an appreciation of the wide variation in ‘normality’ is fundamental to the understanding of abnormal functioning. B. A. Farrell has observed that it is its psychological subject matter which makes psychiatry important and distinctive in medicine, even though, ‘as a psychological enquiry, psychiatry is in a very primitive stage’. Psychology is both a social and a behavioural science and hence basic to both epidemiology and social medicine.
