## Abstract



The history of the term *psychology* has often been narrated as a search for its original coinage or earliest use. Rather than presupposing a single point of origin, this article examines how changes in the term’s usage related to shifts in the boundaries of its subject matter and its place in classifications of the sciences from the sixteenth to the first half of the eighteenth century. Using historical-conceptual analysis, it distinguishes four levels: lexical usage, the subject matter or questions designated by the term, its classificatory position, and its degree of epistemic consolidation as a distinct field of knowledge. The study first considers the place of the science of the soul before the term emerged, then examines early evidence, including the known printed uses of 1525, the formulations of Freigius, Goclenius, and Casmann, the diversity of seventeenth-century usages, and Christian Wolff’s empirical and rational psychology. The findings indicate that the emergence of the term did not coincide with the formation of an independent science; lexical stabilization, delimitation of subject matter, and epistemic consolidation did not necessarily proceed in tandem. Early uses could designate the traditional science of the soul within natural philosophy, metaphysics, or theology. In Casmann, psychology’s placement within anthropology narrowed its subject matter to the human soul, reorganizing traditional questions about the soul within the study of human nature. In the seventeenth century, differing classifications of the sciences corresponded to differences in psychology’s scope and its relationship to fields such as anthropology and pneumatology. In Wolff, the distinction between empirical and rational psychology received a more coherent formulation, preserving a common subject matter and linking observation with rational explanation. The article thus distinguishes lexical diffusion, classificatory articulation, and epistemic systematization, situating the history of the term *psychology* within the reorganization of knowledge about the soul and the human being.