A remote ancestor of modern Western psychology

"While the history of psychology as a scholarly study of the mind and behaviour dates back to the ancient Greek philosophers, who developed elaborate theories of the soul, in antiquity there was no clear-cut discussion of the peculiarity of the individual person, nor were ancient philosophers interested in the individual's inner life.  As will be shown, demonology enabled monastic writers to pursue new lines of psychological investigation of which modern Western psychology is the remote heir.
"scholars investigating the history of Western psychology have tended to focus on the nineteenth-century roots of scientific psychology.  The present book, however, shows that early monastic discussions of the inner processes of the self and how they are manipulated by demons offer an important source of evidence for the history of psychological knowledge and the ways in which it is produced, articulated, and applied in psychological praxis.  In this way it demonstrates the need to broaden the scholarly investigation of the history of the discipline of psychology to include the history of psychological knowledge."

     Inbar Graiver, Asceticism of the mind:  forms of attention and self-transformation in late antique monasticism (Toronto:  Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2018), 28-29.