Did you know that the word psychology literally means the study of the soul? I find that fascinating to this day and at the same time a little paradoxical. Because for a long time, the soul had barely any place in modern science. Which is why I am all the more glad that science is increasingly opening up to what cannot be measured, because emotional hunger often stands for exactly that: for what is not tangible, but still cries out deep within us for nourishment.

Psychology and the soul: a complicated relationship

I remember very clearly sitting in my first lecture. It was called Philosophy of Science and we began our studies with exactly this question: the body-soul problem. What is the soul? And how does it relate to the body? I found it fascinating even then that a discipline calls itself the study of the soul without really knowing what the soul is and without giving it a real place in its scientific work.

But it was not always this way. Long before psychology became a science, philosophers and theologians had been thinking about the soul. René Descartes in the 17th century explored intensively how body and soul are connected. He called the soul res cogitans, the thinking, non-material principle in the human being and contrasted it with the body as res extensa, the measurable, extended matter. The problem he himself could not solve: how do the two influence each other?

When Wilhelm Wundt founded the first psychological laboratory in Leipzig in 1879 and established psychology as an independent science, the soul was still a natural part of the understanding of what it means to be human. But with the increasing scientification of the 20th century, it was more and more excluded, because it cannot be measured, operationalized or represented in a study.

The soul was not disproven, but quietly and gradually pushed out of scientific discourse.

The name of psychology remained, but its contents moved further and further away from the core of what makes us human.

The body-soul problem

Modern neuroscience has since tried to reduce everything to the measurable: feelings as neurotransmitters, experience as brain activity, or consciousness as electrical signals in the nervous system. And yes, research has made impressive progress. We know today that almost all mental processes are closely linked to the activity of our brains.

But this is exactly where the truly interesting question begins. Because even leading neuroscientists acknowledge that the so-called hard problem of consciousness remains unsolved: how does subjective experience arise from electrical impulses and biochemical reactions? Why does thinking feel like so much more than mere biochemistry? This cannot be captured in a study. And that is precisely the point, one that has always made me stop and think.

Reducing the human being to their brain leaves out what people experience as themselves: the inner subjective experience or what I would call perceived depth. And when we talk about emotional hunger, we are almost always talking about exactly this level.

The waves of psychology: a brief history

To understand how the image of the human being within psychology has evolved, it is worth looking at the history of behavioural therapy, one of the most influential schools in psychology.

The first wave emerged in the 1920s and focused exclusively on observable behaviour. Shaped by researchers like John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner, the basic assumption was: behaviour can be changed through learning and conditioning. What happens on the inside, thoughts, feelings, experience, played no role because it could not be directly observed. The human being as a stimulus-response machine.

The second wave came in the 1960s and 70s with the cognitive turn. Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis recognised that not only behaviour but also thoughts and beliefs shape psychological experience. Cognitive restructuring, the questioning of automatic thought patterns, became the central tool. The human being got their mind back.

The third wave developed from the 1990s onwards and brought something fundamentally new: mindfulness and acceptance. Approaches like ACT, DBT and MBCT integrated Eastern wisdom traditions into Western psychotherapy. Not only change, but also the conscious acceptance of what is, came into focus. The human being gained the right to feel what they feel. Did that also mean getting the soul back? Not quite yet.

Is there a fourth wave?

Yes, and I believe it is already well underway. Some see it as a physical wave, as embodiment, which does not mean behaviour observed from the outside as in the first wave, but the inner experience of the body: how emotions, trauma and experience show up in the body and become perceptible from within. In this context, the nervous system has also become a real buzzword, and not without reason. Research increasingly shows that our autonomic nervous system plays a decisive role in how we respond to stress, emotions and uncertainty, often long before we can consciously think about it. Learning to regulate the body means learning to relate to oneself differently.

I see the fourth wave as both: a physical and a spiritual wave. Because when the body begins to be heard again, the question of what lies behind it almost inevitably opens up. What am I beyond my thoughts? What holds me when my strategies fail? These are not esoteric questions. These are the deepest questions a human being can ask. And I believe psychology is on its way to reclaiming them as its own.

When psychology alone is not enough: the psychospiritual approach

It views the human being not only as a biological or psychological entity, but as a unity of body, mind and soul. This does not mean that scientific insights are ignored, quite the opposite. The psychospiritual approach builds on what psychology has achieved and adds a dimension that has long had no place in the academic world: the spiritual dimension of human experience.

Spirituality in this context does not necessarily mean religion or esotericism. It is about the question of deeper meaning, of connection with oneself, with one’s own body, with life. And very concretely about a question that classical psychology rarely asks: who am I really, beyond my patterns and my history? It is about the fact that symptoms like emotional eating are not seen only as behavioural or cognitive problems, but as an expression of a deeper imbalance on multiple levels at once, and that the answer to this question is often the real key to change.

The question that changed everything

And that is exactly what I was allowed to experience on my own healing journey. What truly set me free was the answer to a much deeper question: who am I really, beyond my thoughts, my learned patterns and the story I tell myself every day?

The realisation that I am not what I think was my real turning point.

And that is precisely why the psychospiritual approach is one that can help many people affected by emotional hunger. Because it finds answers to questions that classical psychology, as it is applied today, has not yet been able to answer.

At emotionalerhunger.de I work with the Kosha model from yogic philosophy, a model that has described the human being in their wholeness for thousands of years and offers a language for what many people intuitively sense but find difficult to put into words using classical concepts. Not as a replacement for psychological work, but as an extension, to meet the human being in their full depth.

Because in the end, that was exactly the original idea behind psychology: the science of the soul. The psychospiritual approach gives it that place back, and with it, gives emotional hunger the framework it deserves.