2 | COGNITION, AFFECTIVITY AND BEHAVIOR
These phenomena are not classically psychodynamic but psychological in
general, but they will help understand the psychodynamic phenomena
proper. Therefore, they are presented first.
All psychological phenomena can be classified into two categories:
mental and behavioral phenomena. Mental phenomena are subjective, they
can only be known by those who experience them because they are confined
into the psych of each individual and are not found in the observable
physical world. Behavioral phenomena can be recognized by another
individual in addition to the person who carries them out because they
are expressed in the observable physical world.5 The
thought “I’m reading this article” is a mental phenomenon, since only
the individual who thinks it can know it exists. The act of moving the
arms to turn the page in a book is a behavioral phenomenon because the
person who turns the page as well as any other person who observes this
with attention knows that this behavior, the movement of the arms,
exists in the physical world. Also, mental phenomena can be classified
into two subcategories, cognitive phenomena and phenomena related to
affectivity. In this text, behavioral phenomena will not be
subclassified, although they could be.
The term cognition can be defined as the group of mental phenomena that
correspond to thought and perception6: “I’m hungry”
is a thought, seeing a red colored glass in front of us is a perception.
It is not possible to define the term affectivity in a sufficiently
exact manner. However, I will try to define it, for the purpose of this
text, as the mental phenomenon that accompanies every human experience
and defines it as agreeable or disagreeable.5,7 Love,
hate, and anxiety, for example, are affective phenomena.
Behavior is every body movement.5 Walking, a frown,
and speaking are all behaviors. Behavior, in contrast with cognition and
affectivity, is an objective phenomenon.