Thymology v. Psychology

I don't want to get into economics here, but rather psychology.  And as Rory Sutherland has pointed out, psychology and perspective is fairly important.  Furthermore, one of the things to ponder about is what _is_ psychology?  As opposed to the usual classification of psychology, there is another term called 'thymology' that might be useful (you're going to see "Mises" come up, I'm not going to go into his economics here, I just think the definitional distinction is useful; so if you hate Austrian Economics, hold onto your pants, I'm not going down that road), the following is the only solid written definition I've seen given by Bettina Bien Greaves:

'Psychology is concerned with the minds of men. It has two major meanings. The sciences of human action are not primarily concerned with the physiological meaning, sometimes known as natural or experimental psychology. Whenever Mises refers to psychology in economic studies, he has in mind what some call "literary psychology" and which he has called Thymology in Theory and History and The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Sciences. In this sense, psychology "is on the one hand an offshoot of introspection and on the other a precipitate of historical experience. It is what everybody learns from intercourse with his fellows. It is what a man knows about the way in which people value different conditions, about their wishes and desires and their plans to realize these wishes and desires. It is the knowledge of the social environment in which a man lives and acts."

It signifies the cognition of human ideas, emotions, volition, motivations and value judgments which are an indispensable faculty of everyone. It is the specific understanding of the past which gives men an insight into the minds of other men. Psychology, like economics, starts with the individual. It concerns the internal invisible and intangible events of the mind which determine man's value scales which result or can result in action. Economics begins at the point psychology leaves off."' [http://mises.org/easier/P.asp#61]

For the most part, when I talk about psychology here, I think of it as a thymological enterprise.