LECTURE No. 7. Main psychological schools

1. Crisis of psychology

The more successful the experimental work in psychology was, the wider the field of phenomena studied by it became, the more rapidly grew dissatisfaction with the versions that consciousness was the unique subject of this science, and introspection was the method. This was exacerbated by the advances of the new biology. It changed the view of all vital functions, including mental ones. Perception and memory, skills and thinking, attitudes and feelings are henceforth interpreted as "tools" that work to solve the problems the body faces in life situations.

The view of consciousness as a self-contained inner world collapsed. The influence of Darwinian biology was also reflected in the fact that mental processes began to be studied from the point of view of development.

At the dawn of psychology, the main source of information about these processes was the adult individual, who was able in the laboratory, following the experimenter's instructions, to focus his "inner eye" on the facts of "direct experience." The expansion of the zone of cognition introduced special objects into psychology. It was impossible to apply the method of introspective analysis to them. These were the facts of the behavior of animals, children, and the mentally ill.

New objects required new objective methods. Only they could reveal those levels of development of the psyche that preceded the processes studied in laboratories. Henceforth it was no longer possible to attribute these processes to the category of primary facts of consciousness. Behind them branched a great tree of successive psychic forms. Scientific information about them allowed psychologists to move from a university laboratory to a kindergarten, school, and psychiatric clinic.

The practice of real research work to the foundation shook the view of psychology as a science of consciousness. A new understanding of its subject was maturing.

In any field of knowledge there are competing concepts and schools. This situation is normal for the growth of science. However, with all the disagreements, these directions are held together by common views on the subject under study. In psychology, at the beginning of the XNUMXth century, the divergence and clash of positions was determined by the fact that each of the schools defended its own subject that was different from the others. The apparent disintegration was followed by processes of more in-depth assimilation of real mental life, various aspects of which were reflected in new theoretical constructs. Revolutionary shifts along the entire front of psychological research are associated with their development.

At the beginning of the XX century. the former image of the subject of psychology, as it was formed during the period of its self-affirmation in the family of other sciences, has become very dim. Although most psychologists still believed that they were studying consciousness and its phenomena, these phenomena were increasingly correlated with the vital activity of the organism, with its motor activity. Only a very few continued to believe that they were called to search for the building material of direct experience and its structures.

Structuralism was opposed to functionalism. This direction considered the main business of psychology to find out how these structures work when they solve problems related to the actual needs of people. Thus, the subject area of ​​psychology expanded, covering mental functions that are produced not by an incorporeal subject, but by an organism in order to satisfy its need for adaptation to the environment.

At the origins of functionalism in the United States was William James (1842-1910). He is also known as the leader of the philosophy of pragmatism, which evaluates ideas and theories on the basis of how they work in practice, benefiting the individual.

In his Fundamentals of Psychology (1890), James wrote that a person's inner experience is not a "chain of elements" but a "stream of consciousness." It is distinguished by personal selectivity.

Discussing the problem of emotions, James proposed the concept that changes in the muscular and vascular systems of the body (i.e., changes in autonomic functions) are primary, and the emotional states caused by them are secondary.

Although James did not create either an integral system or a school, his views on the auxiliary role of consciousness in the interaction of the organism with the environment, calling for practical decisions and actions, have firmly entered the ideological fabric of American psychology. Until recently, according to the brilliantly written at the end of the XNUMXth century. James's book was studied in American colleges.

2. Behaviorism

At the beginning of the XX century. a powerful direction arises that has approved behavior as a subject of psychology, understood as a set of reactions of the body, due to its communication with the stimuli of the environment to which it adapts. The credo of the direction captured the term "behavior", and it itself was called behaviorism.

His "father" is considered to be J. Watson, whose article "Psychology as the Behaviorist Sees It" (1913) outlined the manifesto of the new school. It required "to throw overboard as a relic of alchemy and astrology all the concepts of the subjective psychology of consciousness and translate them into the language of objectively observed reactions of living beings to stimuli." Behaviorism began to be called "psychology without the psyche." This turnover suggested that the psyche is identical to consciousness. Meanwhile, by demanding the elimination of consciousness, the behaviorists did not at all turn the body into a device devoid of mental qualities. They changed the idea of ​​these qualities. The real contribution of the new direction was a sharp expansion of the area studied by psychology. From now on, it included a stimulus, accessible to external objective observation, independent of consciousness - reactive relations.

The schemes of psychological experiments have changed. They were placed mainly on animals - white rats. Various types of labyrinths were invented as experimental devices, in which animals learned to find a way out of them.

The theme of learning, acquiring skills through trial and error, has become central to this school.

By excluding consciousness, behaviorism inevitably turned out to be a one-sided direction. At the same time, he introduced the category of action into the scientific apparatus of psychology as not only an internal, spiritual, but also an external, bodily reality. Behaviorism has changed the general structure of psychological knowledge, its subject now covered the construction and change of real bodily actions in response to a wide range of external challenges.

Supporters of this direction expected that, based on experimental data, it would be possible to explain any natural forms of human behavior. The basis of everything is the laws of learning.

3. Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis undermined the psychology of consciousness to the ground. He exposed behind the cover of consciousness powerful layers of psychic forces, processes and mechanisms that are not realized by the subject. Psychoanalysis turned the area of ​​the unconscious into the subject of science. This is how the Austrian doctor 3. Freud (1856-1939) called his teaching. For many years he studied the central nervous system, gaining a solid reputation as a specialist in this field.

Becoming a doctor and taking up the treatment of patients with mental disorders, at first he tried to explain their symptoms by the dynamics of nervous processes.

The more he delved into this area, the more he felt dissatisfaction. In search of a way out, he turned from the analysis of consciousness to the analysis of the hidden, deep layers of the mental activity of the individual. Before Freud, they were not the subject of psychology, after him they became an integral part of it.

The first impulse to their study was given by the use of hypnosis. The true reasons are hidden from consciousness, but it is they that govern behavior. It was Freud and his followers who began to analyze these forces. They created one of the most powerful and influential trends in modern human science. Using various methods of interpreting mental manifestations, they developed a complex and ramified network of concepts, using which they caught the deep "volcanic" processes hidden behind conscious phenomena in the "mirror" of self-observation.

Chief among these processes was recognized as having a sexual nature of the energy of attraction. It was called the word "libido". Experiencing various transformations, it is suppressed, forced out and, nevertheless, breaks through the "censorship" of consciousness along detours, discharging into various symptoms, including pathological ones (disorders of movement, perception, memory, etc.).

This view led to a revision of the previous interpretation of consciousness. Its active role in behavior was not rejected, but it seemed to be essentially different from that in traditional psychology.

Only through understanding the causes of repressed desires and hidden complexes is it possible (with the help of psychoanalysis techniques) to get rid of the emotional trauma that they inflicted on the individual. Having discovered the objective psychodynamics and psychoenergetics of the motives of a person's behavior, hidden "behind the scenes" of his consciousness, Freud transformed the previous understanding of the subject of psychology. The psychotherapeutic work done by him and many of his followers revealed the most important role of motivational factors as objective regulators of behavior and, therefore, independent of what the "voice of self-consciousness" whispers.

Freud was surrounded by many students. The most original of them, who created their own directions, were K. Jung (1875-1961) and A. Adler (1870-1937).

The first called his psychology analytical, the second - individual. Jung's first innovation was the concept of the "collective unconscious". If, according to Freud, phenomena repressed from consciousness can enter the unconscious psyche of an individual, Jung considered it saturated with forms that can never be individually acquired, but are a gift from distant ancestors. Analysis allows us to determine the structure of this gift, formed by several archetypes.

Archetypes are found in dreams, fantasies, hallucinations, and cultural creations. Jung's division of human types into extroverted (outward-facing, carried away by social activity) and introverted (inward-facing, focused on one's own drives, which Jung, following Freud, gave the name "libido", but considered it unlawful to identify with sexual instinct), gained great popularity.

Adler, modifying the original doctrine of psychoanalysis, singled out the feeling of inferiority generated by bodily defects as a factor in the development of the personality. As a reaction to this feeling, a desire arises for its compensation and overcompensation in order to achieve superiority over others. The source of neuroses is hidden in the "inferiority complex".

The psychoanalytic movement has spread widely in various countries. There were new options for explaining and treating neuroses by the dynamics of unconscious drives, complexes, and mental trauma. Freud's own ideas about the structure and dynamics of personality also changed. Her organization acted as a model, the components of which are: "it" (blind irrational drives), "I" (ego) and "super-I" (the level of moral norms and prohibitions).

From the tension under which the “I” finds itself due to pressure on it, on the one hand, blind inclinations, on the other hand, moral prohibitions, a person is saved by protective mechanisms: repression (elimination of thoughts and feelings into the unconscious), sublimation (switching sexual energy for creativity), etc.

4. Gestaltism

Psychoanalysis was built on the postulate that man and his social world are in a state of secret, eternal enmity. A different understanding of the relationship between the individual and the social environment was established in French psychology. The personality, its actions and functions were explained by the context that created them, the interaction of people. In this "crucible" the inner world of the subject is melted with all its unique features, which the former psychology of consciousness took as initially given.

This line of thought, popular among French researchers, was most consistently developed by P. Janet (1859-1947). His first work as a psychiatrist dealt with personality disorders that occur when, due to a drop in "mental tension" (Janet suggested calling this phenomenon "psychosthenia"), ideas and tendencies dissociate and break the ties between them. The fabric of mental life is splitting. Several personalities begin to live in one organism. In the future, Janet takes communication as cooperation as a key explanatory principle of human behavior. In its depths, various mental functions are born: will, memory, thinking, etc.

In the integral process of cooperation, there is a division of acts: one individual performs the first part of the action, the second - the other part. One commands, the other obeys. Then the subject performs in relation to himself the action to which he previously forced the other.

He learns to cooperate with himself, to obey his own commands, acting as the author of the action, as a person with his own will.

Many concepts took the will as a special force rooted in the mind of the subject. Now, however, its secondary nature, its derivativeness from an objective process, in which another person is necessarily represented, was proved.

With all the transformations that psychology has experienced, the concept of consciousness has largely retained its former features.

Changed views on his attitude to behavior, unconscious mental phenomena, social influences. But new ideas about how this consciousness itself is organized were first formed with the appearance on the scientific scene of a school whose creed expressed the concept of gestalt (dynamic form, structure). In contrast to the interpretation of consciousness as a "construction of bricks (sensations) and cement (associations)", the priority of an integral structure was asserted, on the general organization of which its individual components depend. According to the system approach, any functioning system acquires properties that are not inherent in its components, the so-called system properties that disappear when the system is decomposed into elements. From the standpoint of a new philosophical doctrine called emergent materialism (Margolis, 1986), consciousness is viewed as an emergent property of brain processes, which is in a complex relationship with these processes.

Arising as an emergent property of brain systems, consciousness acquires a unique ability to perform the function of top-down control over lower-level neural processes, subordinating their work to the tasks of mental activity and behavior.

Important facts concerning the integrity of perception, its irreducibility to sensations, flowed from various laboratories.

The Danish psychologist E. Rubin studied the interesting phenomenon of "figure and ground". The figure of the object is perceived as a closed whole, and the background extends behind.

The idea that a general pattern operates here, requiring a new style of psychological thinking, united a group of young scientists: M. Wertheimer (1880-1943), W. Köhler (1887-1967) and K. Koffka (1886-1941), who became leaders direction called Gestalt psychology. It criticized not only the old introspective psychology, which was engaged in the search for the initial elements of consciousness, but also the young behaviorism. In experiments on animals, Gestaltists showed that, ignoring mental images - Gestalts, it is impossible to explain their motor behavior.

The behaviorist formula of "trial and error" was also criticized by the Gestaltists. In contrast, experiments on great apes revealed that they are able to find a way out of a problem situation not by random trials, but by instantly catching the relationship between things. This perception of relationships was called insight (enlightenment). It arises due to the construction of a new gestalt, which is not the result of learning.

Koehler's work "Investigation of Intelligence in Anthropoids" aroused wide interest.

Studying human thinking, Gestalt psychologists proved that mental operations in solving creative problems are subject to special principles of Gestalt organization ("grouping", "centering", etc.), and not to the rules of formal logic.

Consciousness was presented in Gestalt theory as an integrity created by the dynamics of cognitive structures that are transformed according to psychological laws.

K. Levin (1890-1947) developed a theory close to Gestaltism, but in relation to the motives of behavior, and not to mental images (sensual and mental). He called it "field theory".

The concept of "field" was borrowed by him, like other Gegdtalists, from physics and used as an analogue of Gestalt. Personality was portrayed as a "system of stresses". Lewin conducted many experiments to study the dynamics of motives. As a result of the experiments, he brought out a phenomenon called the Zeigarnik effect. Its essence is that the energy of the motive created by the task, without having exhausted itself (due to the fact that it was interrupted), was preserved and passed into the memory of it.

Another direction was the study of the level of claims. This concept denoted the degree of difficulty of the goal towards which the subject aspires. He was presented with a scale of tasks of varying degrees of difficulty. After he chose and completed (or did not complete) one of them, he was asked: the task of what degree of difficulty will he choose next? This choice, after prior success (or failure), fixed the level of aspiration. Behind the chosen level, there were many life problems that a person faces every day - success or failure experienced by her, hopes, expectations, conflicts, claims, etc.

Within a few decades, the first sprouts of a new discipline, which appeared under the ancient name of psychology, were transformed into a huge field of scientific knowledge. In terms of the richness of theoretical ideas and empirical methods, it has taken its rightful place among other highly developed sciences.

The disintegration into schools, each of which claimed to appear to the world as the only true psychology, became the reason for assessing such an unusual situation for science as a crisis.

The real historical meaning of this collapse was that the focus of the research program of each of the schools was the development of one of the blocks of the categorical apparatus of psychology. Each science operates with its own categories, i.e., the most fundamental generalizations of thought that cannot be derived from others. The concept of categories arose in the depths of philosophy (here, as in many other discoveries, the pioneer was Aristotle, who singled out such categories as essence, quantity, quality, time, etc.). The categories form an internally connected system. It performs a working function in the cognitive process, therefore it can be called an apparatus of thinking, through which a different depth of the studied reality is reflected, each object of which is perceived in its quantitative, qualitative, temporal and similar characteristics.

Along with the named global philosophical categories (and inseparable from them), a specific science operates with its own categories. They do not give the world as a whole, but a subject area "cut out" from this world in order to study in detail its special, unique nature. One of these areas is the psyche, or, in the language of the Russian scientist N.N. Lange, psychosphere. Of course, it is also comprehended by scientific thought in terms of quantity, quality, time, etc. But in order to know the nature of the psyche, the laws to which it is subject, to master it in practice, a special categorical apparatus is needed that gives a vision of mental reality as different from physical reality. , biological, social.

Author: Luchinin A.S.

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