Insofar as psychology entails the study of the behavior and workings of the mind, what psychology has revealed is a deeper complexity of the latter, which, in consequence, has overturned dominant narratives about how the human mind works, and, by extension, what the human being itself is. The advent of psychology does not only demarcate a revolution with regard to how we study the mind, but also with regard to how we conceive or posit the human being. It is equally a philosophical, scientific and anthropological re-shaping of the human being, which is one of the reasons why Freud’s development of psychology is often described as a crucial moment in anthropology. In other words, with the discovery of the unconscious what was displaced was the mythology — left over, arguably, from the Enlightenment — that the human being was a wholly autonomous rational actor, such that psychological pathologies were merely the result of human beings not making the correct rational decisions. The unconscious indicates that our behaviors on the fundamental level of the mental are not merely our own choice.

Accordingly, the development of psychology as a discipline can be said to correlate with an appreciation for the diversity of human beings on the level of what we do, think, and how we behave. Psychology uncovers in a broader sense of the term behaviors of the mind, but simultaneously it also uncovers a diverse set of behaviors of the mind. Some static image of the human being is thus discarded by a plurality of behaviors.

Certainly, this is not to state that psychology itself is a unified discipline. Depending on the psychological position we take, a diversity of approaches emerges. A Lacanian psychoanalyst will be in conflict with the views of a behaviorist, a cognitive scientist will also demonstrate his own views. But the result of the discourse which psychology has inaugurated is an overall enrichment of the human being, allowing for different images of human personality to emerge, which are not bound to traditional models, such as, for example, the religious and its view of the human being. Psychology hence understands, e.g., through the phenomenon of mental disorder, the possibility of different personalities. This is a commitment to a heterogeneous view of human personality, and to the extent that psychology has entered the mainstream discourse, on this popular level, more heterogeneous views of the human being’s personality have also emerged.