When it comes to magic, it's always important to remember that people throughout history had very different ways of looking at the world and different ways of reckoning how it worked.
It's not that there are never any similarities between old practices and modern ones, but magic is continually reinvented as people's understanding of the world changes. Many ideas people have today are particular to the modern era, and would have been extremely counterintuitive someone living hundreds or thousands of years ago.
For example, a lot of people today think that spells are all about your personal energy and intention. And I don't think there's anything inherently bad in that perception. But it's not one that would've been shared by people who believed acts we might term magic were brought about by spirits you built relationships with. They understood that the power came from something outside of themselves.
Could we speculate that both practices might somehow be working by the same mechanism, regardless of the practitioner's beliefs? Sure, we could. I tend to think that most of what we consider magic works by focusing our minds toward particular goals. But that doesn't mean someone who was working with spirits (or believed they were working with spirits) in the past was actually doing psychology under a different name, and claiming such would be a complete misrepresentation of what the practitioner believed and what they intended to do.
It's easy to get caught up in claims that modern practices totally existed in the past under different names, because it feels validating to think that the things we believe and do were approved by people in the past. But we have to remember that the past was a different world, and it's genuinely unrealistic to expect ourselves to see and do things the same way they did all the time, especially with something as subjective as magic.
