Ibn Sina (981 – 1037 CE) was the major influence upon the history of Islamic psychology, taking the ideas of the Greek philosophers and adapting them to fit Islamic doctrine. He began with Aristotle’s idea that humans possessed three types of soul, the vegetative, animal and rational psyches. The first two bind humans to the earth, and the rational psyche connects them to God.In the same way, Ibn Sina’s Islamic psychology proposed that the five senses, shared with animals, were bound to earth. He believed that the ability to reason gave humanity a unique connection to the divine. Ibn Sina attempted to ascribe certain mental abilities to specific parts of the brain, but the Islamic prohibition of dissection prevented him from gathering observational evidence to support his theories.
Avicenna also proposed that humans have seven inner senses to complement the outer senses. In the long history of psychology, this was one of the first attempts to try to understand the way that the mind and reasoning operate.
- Common Sense: This sense collates the information gathered by the external senses.
- Retentive Imagination: This sense remembers the information gathered by the common sense.
- Compositive Animal Imagination: This sense allows all animals to learn what they should avoid and what they should actively seek in their natural environment.
- Compositive Human Imagination: This sense helps humans to learn what to avoid and what to seek in the world around them.
- Estimative Power: This is the ability to make innate judgments about the surrounding environment and determine what is dangerous and what is beneficial. For example, an innate and instinctual fear of predators would fall under this sense.
- Memory: The memory is responsible for remembering all of the information developed by the other senses.
- Processing: This is the ability to use all of the information and is the highest of the seven internal senses.
The Islamic scholar also understood the importance of the link between mind and body, proposing that a person could overcome physical ailments through believing that they could become well. Conversely, Ibn Sina believed that a healthy person could become physically sick if they believed that they were ill, adding psychosomatic illness to the vocabulary of the history of psychology.This mental and physical linkage formed the basis of his approach to mental disorders and he meticulously documented many conditions, including delirium, memory disorders, hallucinations, fear paralysis and a host of other conditions.
Certainly, Avicenna stands in the history of psychology as the scholar who first used an approach recognizable to modern clinical psychologists. However, the methodology was still shackled to the idea of a soul and higher human consciousness.
Ibn e Sina was a pioneer of neuro-psychiatry. He first described numerous neuro-psychiatric conditions, including hallucination, insomnia, mania, nightmare, melancholia, dementia, epilepsy, paralysis, stroke, vertigo and tremor.
Ibn e Sina was also a pioneer in psycho-physiology and psychosomatic medicine. He recognized 'physiological psychology' in the treatment of illnesses involving emotions, and developed a system for associating changes in the pulse rate with inner feelings, which is seen as an anticipation of the word association test attributed to Carl Jung. Ibn e Sina is reported to have treated a very ill patient by "feeling the patient's pulse and reciting aloud to him the names of provinces, districts, towns, streets, and people." He noticed how the patient's pulse increased when certain names were mentioned, from which Avicenna deduced that the patient was in love with a girl whose home Ibn e Sina was "able to locate by the digital examination." Ibn e Sina advised the patient to marry the girl he is in love with, and the patient soon recovered from his illness after his marriage.
Ibn Sina noted the close relationship between emotions and the physical condition and felt that music had a definite physical and psychological effect on patients. Of the many psychological disorders that he described in the Qanun, one is of unusual interest: love sickness! Ibn Sina is reputed to have diagnosed this condition in a Prince in Jurjan who lay sick and whose malady had baffled local doctors. Ibn Sina noted a fluttering in the Prince's pulse when the address and name of his beloved were mentioned. The great doctor had a simple remedy: unite the sufferer with the beloved.