Psychology is an academic and applied discipline involving the phenomenological and scientific study of mental processes and behavior. Psychologists study such concepts as perception, cognition, emotion, personality, behavior, interpersonal relationships, and the individual and collective unconscious. Psychology also refers to the application of such knowledge to various spheres of human activity including issues related to daily lifee.g. family, education, and workand the treatment of mental health problems. Psychology attempts to understand the role these functions play in social behavior and in social dynamics, while incorporating the underlying physiological and neurological processes into its conceptions of mental functioning. Psychology includes many sub-fields of study and application concerned with such areas as human development, sports, health, industry, media, law, and transpersonal psychology.

The word counseling (or counselling) comes from the Middle English counseil, from Old French conseil, from Latin cnsilium; akin to cnsulere, to take counsel, consult. Counseling can be defined as a relatively short-term, interpersonal, theory-based process of helping persons who are fundamentally psychologically healthy resolve developmental and situational issues.

There are probably as many definitions of counseling as there are practitioners to describe it. The term was originally used by Frank Parsons in 1908. It was adopted by Carl Rogers in response to widespread prejudice in the U.S. against lay therapists and also because he was not then permitted by the psychiatry profession to call himself a psychotherapist. The difference between definitions of counseling and psychotherapy is less significant than the practitioners' perceptions of their raison d'tre.