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Table of contents

1. Development of psychological knowledge within the framework of the doctrine of the soul (The idea of ​​the soul of the philosophers of the Milesian school. Heraclitus. The idea of ​​development as a law (Logos). The soul ("psyche") as a special state of the fiery principle. Alcmaeon. The principle of nervism. Neuropsychism. The principle of similarity. Empedocles. The doctrine of the four "roots". Biopsychism . The principle of similarity and the theory of outflows. The atomistic philosophical and psychological concept of Democritus. Hippocrates and the doctrine of temperaments. The philosophical and ethical system of Socrates. The purpose of philosophy. The method of Socratic conversation. Plato: true being and the world of ideas. The sensory world and non-existence. The highest idea of ​​the Good and world soul of Evil. Immortality of the soul. Aristotle's doctrine of the soul. Psychological views of the Stoics. Epicurus and Lucretius Carus on the soul. Alexandria School of Physicians. Psychophysiology of Claudius Galen)
2. Philosophical doctrine of consciousness (Plotinus: psychology as a science of consciousness. Augustine: Christian early medieval worldview)
3. Development of natural science (The heyday of natural science in the Arab East. Psychological ideas of medieval Europe. The development of psychology in the Renaissance)
4. Psychology of modern times in the 17th century (The main trends in the development of philosophy and psychology in the 17th century. Materialism and idealism. The philosophical and psychological system of R. Descartes. The materialist theory of T. Hobbes. The doctrine of B. Spinoza about the psyche. The sensationalism of D. Locke. G. Leibniz: the idealistic tradition in German philosophy and psychology)
5. Development of psychology in the era of enlightenment (England. Development of associative psychology. French materialism. Germany. Development of German psychology in the 18th-19th centuries. Philosophical stage in the development of psychology)
6. The formation of psychology as an independent science (Natural scientific prerequisites for the formation of psychology. The emergence of the first experimental branches of psychology
7. Main psychological schools (Crisis of psychology. Behaviorism. Psychoanalysis. Gestaltism)
8. Evolution of schools and directions (Neo-behaviorism. Theory of intelligence development. Empirical foundation of the theory. Neo-Freudianism. Cognitive psychology. Computers. Cybernetics and psychology. Humanistic psychology)
9. Psychology in Russia (M. V. Lomonosov: materialistic direction in psychology. A. N. Radishchev. Man as a part of nature. Philosophical and psychological views of A. I. Herzen, V. G. Belinsky, N. A Dobrolyubov. N. G. Chernyshevsky. Subject, tasks and method of psychology. P. D. Yurkevich about the soul and internal experience. I. V. Sechenov: a mental act is like a reflex. Development of experimental psychology. Reflexology. P. P. Blonsky - psychology of child development. Unity of consciousness and activity)

LECTURE No. 1. The development of psychological knowledge in the framework of the doctrine of the soul

1. The idea of ​​the soul of the philosophers of the Milesian school

XNUMXth-XNUMXth centuries BC represent the period of decomposition of primitive society and the transition to the slave system. Fundamental changes in the social way of life (colonization, the development of trade relations, the formation of cities, etc.) created the conditions for the flourishing of ancient Greek culture, led to significant changes in the field of thinking. These changes consisted in the transition from religious and mythological ideas about the world to the emergence of scientific knowledge.

The first leading centers of ancient Greek culture and science, along with others, were the cities of Miletus and Ephesus. The first philosophical schools that arose also bore the names of these cities. The beginning of the scientific worldview is associated with the Miletus school, which existed in the XNUMXth-XNUMXth centuries. BC e. Its representatives were Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes. They are the first to be credited with isolating the psyche, or soul, from material phenomena. Common to the philosophers of the Milesian school is the position that all things and phenomena of the surrounding world are characterized by the unity of their origin, and the diversity of the world is only different states of a single material principle, fundamental principle or primary matter.

This position was extended by ancient thinkers to the area of ​​the mental that they singled out. They believed that the material and the spiritual, the corporeal and the psychic are fundamentally one; the difference between them is only phenomenal, and not substantial, that is, according to the state, manifestation and expression of this first principle.

The difference between the views of the scientists of this school consisted in what kind of concrete matter each of these philosophers accepted as the fundamental principle of the universe.

Thales (624-547 BC) indicated water as the fundamental principle of the omnipresent. Proving that it is water that is the real beginning of the whole world, Thales referred to the fact that the Earth floats on water, is surrounded by it, and itself comes from water. Water is mobile and changeable, it can go into different states. When water evaporates, it turns into a gaseous state, and when it freezes, it turns into a solid state.

The soul is also a special state of water. The essential characteristic of the soul is the ability to give bodies movement; it is that which makes them move. This ability to give things movement is inherent in everything.

Extending the mental to the whole of nature, Thales was the first to express that point of view on the boundaries of the mental, which is commonly called hylozoism. This philosophical doctrine was a great step towards understanding the nature of the psychic. It opposed animism. Hylozoism for the first time placed the soul (psyche) under the general laws of nature, asserting the postulate, which is immutable for modern science, about the initial involvement of mental phenomena in the cycle of nature.

Considering the soul in connection with the bodily organization, Thales made mental states dependent on the physical health of the body. Those who have a healthy body also have the best spiritual abilities and gifts, and therefore have more opportunities to find happiness in our day. The modern psychologist cannot but be attracted by Thales' subtle observations in the field of human moral behavior. A person, he believed, should strive to live according to the law of justice. And justice consists in not doing yourself what a person reproaches other people.

If Thales associated the entire universe with special transformations and forms of water and moisture, then his fellow city dweller Anaximander (610-547 BC) takes "apeiron" as the source of all things - a state of matter that does not have a qualitative certainty, but which, thanks to its internal development and combination, gives rise to the diversity of the world. Anaximander, denying the qualitative certainty of the fundamental principle, believed that it could not be the fundamental principle if it coincided with its manifestations. Like Thales, the soul was interpreted by Anaximander as one of the states of the apeiron.

Anaximander was the first of the ancient philosophers who made an attempt to explain the origin and origin of man and living beings. He was the first to come up with the idea of ​​the origin of the living from the inanimate. The emergence of the organic world seemed to Anaximander as follows. Under the influence of sunlight, moisture evaporates from the earth, from a clot of which plants arise. Animals develop from plants, and humans develop from animals. According to the philosopher, man descended from fish. The main feature that distinguishes man from animals is the longer period of breastfeeding and longer extraneous care for him.

Unlike Thales and Anaximander, another philosopher of the Milesian school Anaximenes (588-522 BC) took air as the fundamental principle. The soul also has an airy nature. She connected them with the breath. The idea of ​​the closeness of the soul and breath was quite widespread among ancient thinkers.

2. Heraclitus. The idea of ​​development as a law (Logos). Soul ("psyche") as a special state of the fiery principle

Representatives of the Milesian school, pointing to the material nature of the mental, did not give a relatively detailed picture of the spiritual life of man. The first step in this direction belongs to the largest ancient Greek philosopher from Ephesus, Heraclitus (530-470 BC). Heraclitus is connected with the representatives of the Milesian school by the idea of ​​the beginning, but only for the fundamental principle he took not water, not apeiron and not air, but fire in its eternal movement and change caused by the struggle of opposites.

The development of fire occurs out of necessity, or according to the Logos, which creates everything that exists from the opposite movement. This term "logos", introduced by Heraclitus, but still used today, has acquired a great variety of meanings. But for himself, it meant the law according to which "everything flows" and phenomena pass into each other. The small world (microcosm) of an individual soul is identical to the macrocosm of the entire world order. Therefore, to comprehend oneself (one's "psyche") means to delve into the law (Logos), which gives the universal course of things dynamic harmony woven from contradictions and cataclysms.

Everything arises and disappears through struggle. "War," Heraclitus pointed out, "is the father of everything." Fire transformations occur in two directions: "the way up" and "the way down". The "way up" as a way of transforming fire is its transition from earth to water, from water to air, from air to fire. "Way down" is the reverse transition from fire to air - water - earth. These two oppositely directed transitions of fire from one state to another can proceed simultaneously, causing the eternal movement and development of the world in all its diversity. Just as a commodity is exchanged for gold and gold for a commodity, so fire, according to Heraclitus, is transformed into everything, and everything passes into fire.

The soul is a special transitional state of the fiery principle in the body, to which Heraclitus gave the name "psyche". The name introduced by Heraclitus for the designation of psychic reality was the first psychological term. "Psyche" as special states of fire arise from water and pass into it. The best state of "psyche" is its dryness. "Psyche death - to become water." Heraclitus made the activity of the soul dependent both on the external world and on the body. He believed that the fiery element penetrates the body from the external environment and any violation of the connection of the soul with the external world can lead to coarsening of the "psyche".

Heraclitus noticed that people often do not remember their dreams. This memory loss occurs because the connection with the outside world is weakened during sleep. A complete break with the external environment leads to the death of the organism, just as coals go out far from a fire. The soul is in the same close contact with the body. On the question of the external bodily determination of the psyche in what would later be called the psychophysical and psychophysiological problem, Heraclitus acted as a consistent materialist.

He also tried to isolate and characterize certain aspects of the soul. The philosopher devoted much attention to cognitive acts. He attached great importance to the senses, and among them especially to sight and hearing.

Mind was recognized as leading in man, since the sense organs allow only the external harmony of nature to be established, while the mind, relying on feelings, reveals its internal laws. "Psyche" and thoughts have a self-growing Logos. A person's thought develops itself, passing from one truth to another. The main purpose of knowledge is to discover the truth, listen to the voice of nature and act in accordance with its laws.

Heraclitus examines in some detail the motive forces, inclinations, needs. Touching on this side of mental life, Heraclitus expresses a number of important provisions that reveal the correlation of motive forces and reason, the influence of previous states on subsequent ones, the relative nature of the motives and needs of various living beings. Pointing to the dependence of the experienced states of the organism on the previous ones, the philosopher emphasizes that the feelings of pleasure and displeasure associated with the needs are recognized through their opposite.

Hunger makes satiety pleasant, tiredness makes rest, illness makes health. Revealing the connection between motivating forces and reason, Heraclitus noted that every desire is bought at the price of "psyche", that is, the abuse of desires and lower needs weakens the "psyche". But, on the other hand, moderation in meeting needs contributes to the development and improvement of human intellectual abilities.

The happiness of a person does not consist in a passion for bodily pleasures, but in proceeding from the voice of reason, which allows a person to manifest natural behavior associated with an understanding of the laws of necessity (Logos). The main thing in a person is the character, understood by Heraclitus as fate, as the dominant psychological factor that determines the fate of a person throughout his life.

The views of Heraclitus had a great influence on the development of the philosophical and psychological systems of subsequent ancient thinkers, in whom the ideas put forward by Heraclitus would receive further concretization. Among the most important provisions of the teachings of Heraclitus, it is necessary to highlight:

1) the idea of ​​the material (fiery) nature of the soul and the dependence of the mental on the general laws of nature (Logos);

2) the provision on the external and bodily determination of the mental;

3) preservation of vital activity (sleep, wakefulness) and psyche (cognitive and motivating forces);

4) internal dependence and correlation of cognitive and motivating forces, the relative nature of the latter;

5) variability of mental states, their transition from one to another;

6) the procedural nature of the mental and its development (self-growth);

7) the introduction of the first psychological term "psyche" to denote mental phenomena.

3. Alcmaeon. The principle of nervosa. Neuropsychism. Similarity principle

Questions about the nature of the soul, its external conditioning and bodily foundations were raised in ancient times not only by philosophers, but also by representatives of medicine. The appeal of ancient doctors to these questions was prompted by their medical practice, their personal experience and their own observations of the work of various body systems, the behavior of animals and humans. Among the ancients, the greatest doctor and philosopher of the ancient era Alcmaeon (VI-V centuries BC), known in the history of psychology as the founder of the principle of nervism, stands out. He was the first to connect the psyche with the work of the brain and the nervous system as a whole.

The practice of dissecting corpses for scientific purposes allowed Alcmaeon to provide the first systematic description of the general structure of the body and the supposed functions of the body. When studying individual systems of the body, including the brain and nervous system, Alcmaeon discovered the presence of conductors going from the brain to the sense organs. He found that the brain, the sense organs and the conductors opened by him are available both in humans and in animals, and therefore, experiences, sensations and perceptions should be characteristic of both. Alcmaeon's assumption about the presence of the psyche in humans and animals as creatures with a nervous system and a brain expressed a new look at the boundaries of the mental, which is currently called neuropsychism.

Endowing animals with a soul, Alcmaeon was not inclined to identify the psyche of animals and humans. Man differs from animals in mind, and the anatomical basis for the difference between them is the overall volume and structure of the brain, as well as the sense organs. Although the mind distinguishes man from animals, it takes its origin in the sensations that arise in the senses. Considering sensations as the initial form of cognitive activity, Alcmaeon for the first time tries to describe the conditions for the emergence of sensations and formulates in this regard the similarity rule as an explanatory principle of sensitivity. For the occurrence of any sensation, the homogeneity of the physical nature of the external stimulus and the sense organs is necessary.

The principle of similarity was extended by Alcmaeon not only to sensations and perceptions, but also to emotional experiences. Levels of vital activity were associated by Alcmaeon with the peculiarities of the dynamics and movement of blood in the body. The rush of blood into the veins causes awakening, the ebb of blood from the veins leads to sleep, and the complete outflow of blood leads to the death of the body. The general condition of the body is determined by the ratio of the four elements - water, earth, air and fire, which are the building material of the body. Proper coordination, balance, harmony of these four elements ensure the physical health of the body and the cheerfulness of the human spirit. An imbalance leads to various diseases and, in the worst case, to death. The balance and harmony of the elements in the body and the health of a person depend on the food he eats, on the climatic and geographical conditions in which a person lives, and finally, on the characteristics of the organism itself.

The provisions put forward by Alcmaeon on the connection of the psyche with the brain, the principle of nervism, the principle of similarity in explaining the emergence of sensations and perceptions, the idea of ​​​​external and internal factors that determine the overall activity and vital activity of the body, left a noticeable mark on the further development of ancient medicine, philosophy and psychology. The whole medicine of Hippocrates and, in particular, his doctrine of the four types of temperament will be based on the ideas of Alcmaeon. The principle of nervism will become the basis for the development of a brain-centric point of view on the localization of the soul. The principle of similarity in explaining the mechanism of sensations and perceptions will be followed by Empedocles, the atomists.

4. Empedocles. The doctrine of the four "roots". Biopsychism. The principle of similarity and the theory of outflows

Alcmaeon already shows a transition from the recognition of a single material principle and an appeal to the four elements as the main elements that determine the general structure of the organism and its physical condition. The philosophical scheme of the structure of man and the world as a whole based on the four elements, or "roots" (earth, water, air, fire), was developed by the great philosopher and physician of antiquity Empedocles (490-430 BC).

Empedocles continued to develop the materialistic line in philosophy and psychology, but, unlike his predecessors, he replaces the theory of a single principle with the doctrine of four "roots". The primary elements of the universe are not one element, but four - earth, water, air, fire.

The organism of plants and animals, like the world as a whole, consists of four elements, and the difference between plants and animals lies in the unequal proportion and degree of expression in both of the original elements. The most perfect in their proportions are in plants - juice, in animals and humans - blood. Thus, blood is represented by one part fire, one part earth, and two parts water. Plant juice and blood in animals and humans are the leading structure of the body, and it was blood and juice, due to the most perfect combination of elements in them, that Empedocles considered as carriers of spiritual, mental functions. Since the "psychic" was attributed by the philosopher not only to animals and humans, but also to plants, therefore, Empedocles expressed a different point of view from Thales and Alcmaeon on the boundaries of the mental, called biopsychism. Subsequently, the principle of biopsychism will be followed by Aristotle, Avicenna and other philosophers.

In humans, the heart is the center of blood flow, therefore it, and not the brain, as Alcmaeon suggested, is the organ of the soul. Blood determines sensations, feelings, and thoughts. Features of the general activity and mobility of a person are also associated with blood. The extent to which one or another organ of the body is supplied with blood determines the capabilities of these parts of the body.

Empedocles expresses thoughts similar to Alcmaeon when considering the mechanism of perception.

For Empedocles, the principle of similarity acquires a universal meaning. It extends to sensations, and to motivating forces, and even to world-forming forces - Love and Enmity. The nature of incentive states is such that all living things strive for the lacking like. Love, Friendship, Happiness arise when like meets like. Compared with Alcmaeon, Empedocles introduces a new position in the theory of the mechanisms of perception, putting forward the theory of outflows, with the help of which he first tries to answer the question of how external objects act on the sense organs and how sensations and perceptions arise in them. Empedocles presented the process of perception as a mechanism of outflows. This mechanism of outflows is most fully described by the philosopher in relation to vision. Outflows of small particles come from external objects, which, penetrating into the pores of the sense organs, evoke the image of an external object.

Outflows come not only from external objects, but also from the sense organs themselves. The outflows coming from the eyes testify to the active participation of the sense organs themselves in the act of perception. The principle of similarity and the mechanism of outflows were the basis for explanation and color vision. Empedocles was the first to be credited with building the theory of color vision. The perception of colors, according to the philosopher, is determined both by the properties of objects affecting the eye, and by the characteristics of the perceiving organ itself. Empedocles is also the first to suggest that it is possible to reduce the entire color gamut to four primary colors. In sensations and perceptions, the philosopher saw the initial form of knowledge, from which the mind grows. He did not doubt the reality of visible objects and the adequacy of their perception by the senses. However, sensory knowledge, according to the scientist, should be controlled by reason, which allows us to better use our feelings.

In the development of ancient psychology, the views of Empedocles occupy a prominent place, both in their novelty and in relation to their influence on the formation of later ideas about man and his psyche. The views of Empedocles contributed to the strengthening of the evolutionary approach in explaining the emergence and development of animals, the assertion of the idea of ​​the material nature of the soul, its external and bodily determination. Empedocles redefined the boundaries of the psychic. The heart-centric point of view of Empedocles on the problem of localization of the soul will be one of the most widespread hypotheses regarding the substratum of the psychic. The principle of similarity and the theory of outflows, put forward by the ancient scientist to explain the mechanism of perception, will later be adhered to by Democritus and all supporters of the atomistic doctrine. The humoral theory of the general activity and mobility of a person, based on the principle of the ratio of various elements of blood, will become a prerequisite for the construction by Hippocrates of the doctrine of the four types of temperament.

5. Atomistic philosophical and psychological concept of Democritus. Hippocrates and Temperaments

Among the contemporaries of Anaxagoras and Hippocrates, Democritus (460-370 BC) stands out among the most prominent philosophers of the ancient era. Democritus is considered to be the true founder of the atomistic trend, since it was he who gave a systematic exposition of the atomic picture of the world. The starting position in the philosophical system of Democritus is that he takes not the elements as the fundamental principle of the world, for they themselves are already complex formations in their composition, but atoms.

The nature of atoms was interpreted by Democritus differently than Anaxagoras described the properties of homeomerism. Unlike homeomerism, atoms are smaller, lighter, indivisible and not identical to visible objects.

Democritus believed that the fundamental principle should be fundamentally different from its specific manifestations. There is an infinite variety of atoms, the collision and separation of which give rise to their various combinations, which eventually form various bodies and things. The main and necessary condition for the movement of atoms, their connection and separation is emptiness. Without it, the world would be motionless, it would take on a statically dead character.

As a result of the mechanical processes of combining atoms, everything that surrounds a person, including himself, arises. Life is not the product of a divine act, it is generated by the cohesion of wet and warm atoms, animals originated from water and silt. Man originated from animals. All living beings are constantly changing.

The soul of animals and man is what makes them move. It is of a bodily nature and consists of atoms of a special kind, distinguished by their shape and extreme mobility. The atoms of the soul are round, smooth and akin to the atoms of fire. Fire atoms penetrate into the body when inhaled. With the help of breathing, they are replenished in the body.

Penetrating into the body, soul atoms are dispersed throughout the body, but at the same time they accumulate in separate parts of it. These areas of congestion are the area of ​​the head, heart and liver. In the region of the head, the fiery and most mobile atoms linger, the movement of which determines the course of cognitive processes - sensations, perceptions and thinking. Round-shaped atoms are concentrated in the region of the heart, but less mobile. This kind of atoms is associated with emotional and affective states. The atoms accumulated in the region of the liver determine the sphere of inclinations, aspirations and needs. Thus, Democritus, regarding the localization of the soul, does not accept either the brain-centric point of view of Alcmaeon, or the heart-centric position of Empedocles. Outlining different levels of mental activity, he tries to correlate them with different parts of the body.

Delimiting the individual aspects of the soul, Democritus tries to more fully reveal the nature, conditions and mechanisms of the emergence of the cognitive and motivating forces of a person, to determine their place in the overall picture of his mental life.

The cognitive sphere of the soul included sensations, perceptions and thinking. Democritus considered sensations and perceptions to be the initial form of cognitive activity. Thinking is based on them. Without sensations and perceptions, thoughts do not arise. Considering sensations and perceptions as the initial link in the cognitive process, he clearly imagined that feelings cannot reflect the essence of things. Sensations and perceptions skim over the surface and grasp only the external. Only thinking, which performs a function similar to a microscope, allows you to see what remains beyond the senses.

The starting points in explaining the emergence of sensations and perceptions are the principle of similarity and the mechanism of outflows. Democritus noticed that there are only atoms in bodies, and such qualities as taste, color, smell, warmth, etc., are not characteristic of the atoms themselves and the bodies consisting of them. They arise only during the interaction of atoms with the sense organs, which gives rise in our mind to sensations of salty, sweet, red, yellow, warm, cold, etc. The listed qualities are, as it were, secondary, derivative, not entirely dependent on the physical nature of atoms. Those colors and sensations that a person experiences are subjective experiences, the objective basis of which is the external world, composed only of atoms and emptiness. Thus, in the teaching of Democritus on sensations, for the first time, attention is drawn to the objective and subjective aspects of sensitivity. The mechanism of perception of integral objects was described by the philosopher from the standpoint of the theory of outflows. The outflows, called idols by Democritus, are a combination of thin atoms that reproduces the shape of a perceived object.

Emotions and affects are determined by the various properties of the atoms that penetrate the body. In addition to the physical properties of atoms, emotional states depend on needs. Positive emotions are caused by the smooth flow of round, spherical atoms, provided that needs are met. Negative emotions arise as a result of the action of unevenly moving angular and hooked atoms in case of unfulfilled needs.

Democritus attached great importance to human needs. They were considered by him as the main driving forces that actuate not only emotional experiences. Without needs, man could never get out of the wild state.

Much of what a person has learned happened, according to the scientist, as a result of imitation. Imitating the sounds of animals, a person begins to designate them with these sounds. After that, people agree on the general use of sounds and their combinations.

Of particular interest is the ethics of Democritus, which is addressed to an individual and is of a psychological nature. Subtle observations of people and their actions and behavior are reflected in a number of teachings and instructions.

The doctrine of Democritus marked the beginning of a causal explanation of mental processes: sensations, perceptions and motive forces. Democritus' indication of the connection of thinking as the highest level of cognitive activity with sensations and perceptions and its growth from them was an important guess.

The teaching of Heraclitus that the course of things depends on the law (and not on the arbitrariness of the gods - the rulers of heaven and earth) passed to Democritus. The gods themselves in his image are nothing but spherical clusters of fiery atoms. Man is also created from various kinds of atoms, the most mobile of which are the atoms of fire. They form the soul. He recognized as one for the soul and for the cosmos not the law itself, but the law according to which there are no causeless phenomena, but all of them are the inevitable result of the collision of atoms. Random events seem to be the cause of which we do not know. Subsequently, the principle of causality was called determinism. Thanks to him, scientific knowledge about the psyche was mined bit by bit.

Democritus was friends with the famous physician Hippocrates. For a physician, it was important to know the structure of a living organism, the causes on which health and disease depend. Hippocrates considered the determining cause to be the proportion in which various "juices" (blood, bile, mucus) are mixed in the body. The proportion in the mixture was called temperament. The names of four temperaments that have survived to this day are associated with the name of Hippocrates: sanguine (blood predominates), choleric (yellow bile), melancholic (black bile), phlegmatic (mucus). For future psychology, this explanatory principle, for all its naivety, was of great importance. No wonder the names of temperaments have survived to this day.

First, the hypothesis was brought to the fore, according to which the countless differences between people fit into a few general patterns of behavior. Thus, Hippocrates laid the foundation for scientific typology, without which modern teachings about individual differences between people (primarily differential psychophysiology) would not have arisen.

Secondly, Hippocrates looked for the source and cause of differences within the organism. Mental qualities were made dependent on bodily ones.

The role of the nervous system in that era was not yet known. Therefore, the typology was, in today's language, humoral. From now on, both doctors and psychologists talk about a single neurohumoral regulation of behavior.

6. Philosophical and ethical system of Socrates. The purpose of philosophy. Socratic conversation method

The whole ethical concept of Socrates is built on the desire to understand the true purpose of a person, expressed in the acquisition of goodness, virtues, beauty, happiness and wealth. The true meaning of human life lies in how a person understands, appreciates and uses all this. The main principle of Socrates is the principle of moderation. Passion for bodily pleasures destroys the body and suppresses mental activity. A person should strive to have minimal needs, and they need to be satisfied only when they reach their highest tension. All this would bring a person closer to a god-like state, in which he, the main effort of the will and mind, would be directed to the search for truth and the meaning of life.

The psychological part of the teachings of Socrates is abstract and idealistic in nature. Man and his soul are given by God. Compared to animals, God gave man a more perfect structure and spiritual abilities. From the Divine, man was given upright posture, which freed his hands and expanded the horizon of vision, language with its ability to pronounce articulate sounds, sense organs with their desire to see, hear, touch, etc. The basis of mental activity is not sensations and perceptions imposed on a person from outside but understanding, which is a purely spiritual act, expressed in the awakening, revitalization and recall of knowledge that was originally embedded in the soul itself. In expanding the field of awakened innate knowledge and ideas with the help of leading questions, or the method of Socratic conversation, Socrates saw the intellectual development of man. For the successful acquisition of knowledge, a person must have certain abilities, among which he attributed the speed of grasping, the strength of memorization and interest in or attitude to the acquired knowledge. In the history of philosophy and psychology, Socrates acted as the initiator of the idealistic direction. His ideas became the starting point in subsequent systems of idealistic psychology.

The idealistic system of Socrates also contained important, from the point of view of psychology, provisions. One of them consists in the transfer of scientific interest from the question of nature in general and the fundamental principles of the universe to the problem of man himself. Addressing a person, his inner, spiritual world, Socrates for the first time emphasized the leading importance of the activity of the subject himself, his ability to manage himself in accordance with social and ethical concepts and principles that act as regulators of human actions and behavior. Some essential features distinguishing man from animals are indicated. Among them, the philosopher attributed upright posture, the presence of a freed hand, mind, language and articulate speech. Although the origin of these distinctive features was interpreted by Socrates in an idealistic form, the very indication of the listed properties, inherent only in man and distinguishing him from the animal world, was of fundamental importance for subsequent materialistic interpretations of the problem of anthropogenesis.

7. Plato: true being and the world of ideas. Sensual world and non-existence. The highest idea of ​​the Good and the world soul of Evil. Soul Immortality

In a more detailed form, the ideas of Socrates were presented by his closest student and follower - Plato. Since then, the development of ancient philosophy and psychology, as well as the philosophy and psychology of all subsequent centuries, has been going on in the ongoing struggle of two opposite currents - materialism and idealism.

Although Plato's creative heritage is great (in total, he wrote 36 works that have almost completely survived to this day), he does not have any special works on psychology. Psychological issues are touched upon by Plato in a number of works. The Meno expounds on the theory of recollection. In the work "Phaedrus" a religious description of the soul is given, "Theaetetus" is devoted to criticism of the teachings of Heraclitus about the soul. The treatise "Phaedo" presents the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The work "The State" contains the teachings of Plato about the structure of the soul, dividing it into parts.

The main position of Plato is to recognize as true being not the material world, but the world of ideas. According to Plato, we are surrounded by many beautiful and beautiful individual concrete things. Each of them loses its beauty over time, and they are replaced by other beautiful phenomena, things, objects. But what makes all these beautiful separate things beautiful? There must be something that embraces the beauty and beauty of everything individual, concrete and transient, that is, there must be something common to everything visible. This common, which is the source of beauty and a model for all manifestations of the material world, was called by Plato the idea, which is a universally valid ideal form.

All that exists, according to Plato, consists of three sides: being, the sensual world and non-being. Being constitutes the world of ideas. Non-existence is the material world created by God from four elements - water, earth, air and fire. The world of sensible things is the result of the penetration of being into non-being, since all concrete things, on the one hand, are involved in the idea, because they are distorted similarities, or shadows, of ideas, on the other hand, things are involved in non-being, or matter, because they are filled with it. .

The idea of ​​beauty is only one of the highest ideas. The highest idea is the idea of ​​the Good. The highest idea of ​​the Good constitutes the world soul. Since everything in the world is contradictory and opposite, Plato introduces the second world soul of Evil. These two supreme souls give rise to everything. In addition to them, according to Plato, there are souls of stars, planets, people, animals, etc. The world soul gives movement and activity to the Cosmos. A similar role is played by the souls of individual bodies, living beings, including humans. Each of these souls is called upon to dominate and control the body. Plato attributed an active function to souls. The sensuously comprehended is the union of the corporeal with its standard, which are ideas. Everything visible is changeable, fleeting, impermanent, while ideas exist eternally, they are unchanging and constant. The world around us is a world of dim, distorted, ghostly images or shadows of immortal and unchanging ideas.

The human soul does not depend on the body. It exists before birth, and after the death of an individual bodily organism, it can move from one body to another. In an effort to justify the immortality of the soul, Plato gives four proofs.

The first of these is based on the principle of opposites. The world is full of contradictions: beautiful - ugly; good evil; sleep - wakefulness, etc. Through a series of intermediate states, one opposite arises from another. Thus, during the transition from the highest pure soul, semi-spiritual states take place, which gradually, becoming more and more closely connected with the body, lead to such qualities that, together with the body, can be destroyed.

The change of death to revival occurs with the help of the soul. In order for such a change from the living to the mortal and vice versa to take place, it is necessary that the souls of the dead exist, always ready to move into other emerging bodies. In this case, the soul must exist, both after death and before the birth of the body, that is, it must be eternal and immortal.

The second proof of the immortality of the soul is built on the basis of the theory of recollection. Man establishes the similarity and difference in things without any teaching and learning. A person acquires knowledge thanks to the innate ability of the soul to remember. But the human soul can only remember what it could already know in the past. To do this, the soul must have knowledge before it settles in the body. However, this would be impossible if the soul did not exist before its settlement in the nascent body. But if the soul exists before the birth of the body, then it can and must exist after the death of the body, and therefore, it is by its nature eternal and immortal.

The third proof is based on the proposition about the identity of the idea and the soul, about its belonging and proximity to everything divine. All composite, complex disintegrates and perishes; only the simple and the incomposable cannot be destroyed. From this point of view, the human body is always something visible, composite, changeable, and therefore it tends to collapse and die. In contrast to the body, the human soul and ideas are invisible, incomposable and indecomposable, and therefore they are not subject to destruction and are eternal. If the soul uses bodily organs during cognition, it goes astray from the true path, it becomes as if drunk. When she learns on her own, then she leads to the divine world of ideas, where everything is simple, indivisible, invisible and eternal. Therefore, the soul is related to the divine and similar to it. And what is from God and like him must be eternal and immortal.

The world is arranged in such a way that everything bodily obeys the divine. When the soul settles in the body, the latter begins to obey it. And what is created for power and control is of divine origin. Everything divine is eternal. Therefore, the human soul is immortal.

The fourth proof follows from the statement that the soul is the source of life. The soul, plunging into any body, always gives it life, but that which brings life does not itself accept death, i.e., it cannot be mortal. Hence the human soul must be indestructible and immortal.

It can be seen from the above arguments that all of them are aimed at substantiating the independence of the soul from the body. The human body is only a temporary shelter for the soul. But her main place of stay is in divine heights, where she finds peace and rest from bodily passions and joins the world of ideas, not all human souls are destined to reach divine heights. The souls of those who were slaves to bodily lusts, who indulged in gluttony or other bodily excesses, through a number of generations degenerate into the souls of animals. Only the souls of philosophers approach the heights of the divine world of ideas, since only they are characterized by almost complete liberation from bodily slavery.

In man, Plato distinguished two levels of the soul - the highest and the lowest. The highest level is represented by the rational part of the soul. It is immortal, incorporeal, is the basis of wisdom and has a controlling function in relation to the lower soul and to the whole body. The temporary home of the rational soul is the brain.

The lower soul is represented by two parts or levels: the lower noble part of the soul and the lower lusty soul. The noble or ardent soul includes the area of ​​affective states and aspirations. Associated with it: will, courage, courage, fearlessness, etc.

It acts entirely at the behest of the rational part of the soul.

Plato distinguished three levels of the structure of the soul. Figuratively, this threefold division of the soul is called the "chariot of the soul", where an ardent horse pulls the charioteer to the Divine; lustful - to the earth, but both of them are controlled by the mind.

Based on the division of the soul into three parts, Plato gives a classification of individual characters, the characters of various peoples, forms of government, and the division of society into estates. People were distinguished by Plato on the basis of the predominance of one or another part of the soul. Sages and philosophers are characterized by the predominance of the rational soul. In brave and courageous people, the noble soul dominates, and in people who indulge in bodily excesses, the lustful part of the soul is leading. In a similar way, individual peoples also differed.

The predominance of the rational soul is characteristic, according to Plato, of the Greeks; the dominance of a noble soul - to the peoples of the north, and a lustful soul - to the Egyptians and other peoples of the East.

The estate hierarchy was also built on a psychological principle. A great mind is inherent in aristocrats, courage - in warriors, passions and inclinations - in artisans and slaves. From this conclusions were drawn regarding the forms of government.

The ideal state was considered to be ruled by aristocrats, guards in it are warriors, and artisans and slaves work and obey.

The political meaning of Plato's psychology was entirely aimed at protecting the interests of the ruling class and the aristocracy.

Based on the experience of Socrates, who proved the inseparability of thinking and communication (dialogue), Plato took the next step. He assessed the process of thinking from a new angle, which did not receive expression in the Socratic external dialogue. Plato opened the internal dialogue.

This phenomenon is known to modern psychology as inner speech.

8. Aristotle's doctrine of the soul

The existing difficulties and contradictions in understanding the nature of the mental, which arose, on the one hand, from the ideas about the soul of Democritus, on the other hand, from Plato's doctrine of the soul, required their resolution. An attempt to remove the opposite of two polar points of view was carried out by the closest student of Plato, Aristotle (384-324 BC), one of the greatest philosophers of antiquity. According to Aristotle, the ideological wealth of the world is hidden in sensually perceived earthly things and is revealed in their research based on experience.

The decisive result of Aristotle's reflections: "The soul cannot be separated from the body," made all the questions that were at the center of Plato's teaching about the past and future of the soul meaningless. His views are a generalization, the result and the pinnacle of all ancient Greek science.

Giving psychological knowledge the enormous importance that they have for the study of nature as a whole was for Aristotle the basis for separating knowledge about the soul into an independent section of philosophy. Aristotle was the first to write a special treatise on the soul. Since in this work Aristotle's own views are preceded by a review of the ideas about the soul of his predecessors, the mentioned work of the philosopher can also be considered as the first historiographic study in the field of philosophy and psychology.

The psychological concept of Aristotle was closely connected and followed from his general philosophical doctrine of matter and form. The world and its development were understood by Aristotle as the result of the constant interpenetration of two principles - a passive (matter) and an active principle, called by Aristotle a form. Matter is everything that surrounds a person, and the person himself. All concrete material things arise due to the form, which, due to its organizing function, gives them a qualitative certainty. Matter and form are beginnings mutually presupposed and inseparable from each other. The soul as a form is the essence of all living things. Aristotle's doctrine of matter and form and of the soul as a living form had a number of important consequences.

The soul, in his opinion, cannot be considered either as one of the states of the primary matter, or as an independent entity torn off from the body. The soul is an active, active principle in the material body, its form, but not the substance or body itself.

Performing an organizing, active function in relation to the body, the soul cannot exist without the latter, just as the existence of the organism itself is impossible without a form or soul.

Soul and body are inextricably linked, and "the soul cannot be separated from the body."

Thinking, according to Aristotle, is impossible without sensory experience. It is always addressed to him and arises on his basis. "The soul," the philosopher asserted, "never thinks without images." At the same time, thinking penetrates into the essence of things inaccessible to the senses. This essence of things is given in the senses only in the form of possibilities. Thinking is a form of sensory forms or simply a form of forms in which everything sensible and visual disappears and what remains is generalized and universally valid. Growing out of sensual forms, thinking cannot proceed in isolation from the body. And what is the cause that kindles the individual mind and actualizes the generalized forms contained in sensory images in the form of potency into concepts?

Aristotle considers this reason to be supra-individual, generic thinking, or the supreme mind, which is built up in a person over the cognitive forms of the soul already known to him and completes their hierarchy. It is under the influence of the supreme mind that the formation or realization of ideal generalized forms, given in sensual forms in the form of possibilities, takes place.

Inseparable from the cognitive abilities of the soul are its other specific properties - aspirations and affective experiences. The emergence of emotions and aspirations is caused by natural causes: the needs of the body and external objects that lead to their satisfaction. Any volitional movement, any emotional state, as the leading driving forces of the soul, determining the activity of the organism, have natural foundations.

Aristotle associated the general motor activity of a person with blood, in which he saw the main source of the body's vital activity. Blood was considered by Aristotle as the material carrier of all mental functions from the lowest to the highest. Spreading throughout the body, it gives life to his senses and muscles. Through it, they are connected with the heart, which acted as the central organ of the soul.

As for the brain, it was considered by Aristotle as a reservoir for cooling the blood.

The most important section in the general system of Aristotle's ideas about the soul is his doctrine of the abilities of the soul. It expresses a new look at the structure of the soul and the ratio of its main properties.

The novelty in Aristotle's views on the structure of the soul lies in two essential points.

First, a holistic approach found expression in them, in which the soul was conceived as something unified and indivisible into parts.

Secondly, the Aristotelian scheme of the structure of the soul is imbued with the idea of ​​development, which was implemented by the philosopher, both in phylogenetic and ontogenetic aspects. On the one hand, the individual abilities of the soul act as successive stages of its evolution, and on the other hand, the development of the individual human soul as a repetition of these stages of evolution. The development of the soul in ontogenesis is a gradual transition and transformation of lower abilities into higher ones. From the doctrine of the three basic abilities of the soul, pedagogical tasks also followed, which were reduced by Aristotle to the development of these three abilities. The development of plant abilities forms in a person body dexterity, muscle strength, normal activity of various organs, and general physical health.

Due to the development of feeling abilities, a person develops observation, emotionality, courage, will, etc.

The development of reasonable abilities leads to the formation of a person's system of knowledge, mind and intellect as a whole.

9. Psychological views of the Stoics

The Stoic school arose in the XNUMXth century. BC e. The history of Stoicism covers three periods: ancient, middle and late. The birthplace of the ancient standing is Athens, and the middle and late standing developed in Rome. The founders of the ancient stand were Zeno, Chrysippus and their followers Ariston and Perseus. The first and major representatives of the Roman standing were Seneca and Epictetus.

There are significant differences between the ancient and late stands. All representatives of this philosophical school are united by the ideas of the universal inevitability of events, fatal inevitability, predestination, both in relation to natural phenomena and in relation to the fate and life of every person.

According to this teaching, the world pneuma is identical with the world soul, the divine fire, which is the Logos, or destiny. The happiness of man was seen in living according to the Logos.

All phenomena of the Cosmos are connected by the unity of their origin. The Stoics believed that the emergence of all things occurs as a result of the interaction of two world-forming principles - passive and active. The active world-forming force is the air-fire element, called by the Stoics pneuma, or "creative fire." The passive principle is matter, which is a semi-liquid cold mass consisting of water and earth. The diversity of the material world is the result of the diverse linkages and splittings of the passive elements, i.e., water and earth, under the influence of the active activity of the pneuma.

Depending on the degree of manifestation and activity of pneuma, the entire cosmos was presented to the Stoics, consisting of four levels. The first level of inanimate nature, in which there is a weak manifestation of pneuma. At the second level - the level of plants - pneuma reaches a certain development, it is more mobile and active, as a result of which it is able to provide the functions of growth, nutrition and reproduction in plant organisms. Pneuma becomes even more developed and active at the third level - the level of animals, at which it can be expressed not only in the functions of growth, nutrition and reproduction, but also manifest itself in sensuality, urges and instincts. Pneuma receives its highest expression at the level of man. Pneuma in its most perfect manifestations is what makes up the human soul.

From the foregoing, it can be seen that the human soul is material in nature. It is like warm breath. At its core, the soul is one, indivisible into parts, but it can manifest itself in various abilities, each of which is determined by a different degree of development and intensity of pneuma.

In total, the Stoics distinguished eight abilities of the soul. Inherent in man, as in all living things, the ability to reproduce and grow, the ability to speak, the five main types of sensitivity and hegemonicon, acting as the carrier of the highest and leading ability associated with the processing of all incoming impressions into general ideas, concepts, volitional and incentive acts.

10. Epicurus and Lucretius Car on the soul

After Aristotle and the Stoics in ancient psychology, noticeable changes are outlined in the understanding of the essence of the soul. The new point of view was most clearly expressed in the views of Epicurus (341-271 BC) and Lucretius Cara (99-45 BC).

Epicurus assumed that the living body, like the soul, consists of atoms moving in the void. With death they disperse according to the general laws of the same eternal Cosmos. "Death has nothing to do with us; when we exist, then there is no death yet; when death comes, then we are no more."

The picture of nature presented in the teachings of Epicurus and the place of man in it served to achieve serenity of the spirit, freedom from fears and, above all, before death and the gods (who, living between the worlds, do not interfere in the affairs of people, because this would violate their serene existence) .

The Epicureans thought about the ways of independence of the individual from everything external. They saw the best way in self-withdrawal from all public affairs. It is this behavior that will allow you to avoid grief, anxiety, negative emotions and thereby experience pleasure, because it is nothing but the absence of suffering.

The material world, according to Lucretius, is not dependent on man, it existed before him, exists with him, will exist after him.

A single substance of all things are atoms, which exist regardless of whether we see them or not. Atoms are in constant motion, they are eternal, indivisible and indestructible. Things arise from the collision of atoms moving in the void in various directions. The development of the world occurs according to the laws inherent in nature itself, according to the laws of necessity and reason.

All living things arise from non-living matter. Complex organisms come from simple ones. Humans originated from animals. At first they led an animal way of life, then the need forced them to use tools.

The philosopher also approached the field of mental phenomena from a materialistic position. Animation is inherent only in highly organized matter. The soul does not exist either before birth or after death. The soul arises along with the birth of a bodily organism, develops and becomes more complex along with its growth, and perishes along with its death. The soul is inseparable from the body and is limited by the limits of the life of the organism. The soul has a bodily nature. Its material carrier is the air-fiery atoms. Atoms by themselves do not form a soul unless they are associated with a body. Only by connecting with each other and clinging to the body, these atoms form sensitivity, or soul. The ratio of fiery and air atoms in the soul determines its general activity.

The human soul is fundamentally heterogeneous. One of its sides is formed by anima, that is, such a part of it that is scattered throughout the body, is responsible for the plant functions of the body and is controlled by a more perfect part of the soul, called animus by Lucretius - "spirit". The spirit is the thinnest atoms concentrated in the chest area and acting as the material basis of mental functions - sensitivity and reason.

The sphere of stimulation of feelings and affects was considered by him as the leading driving forces of the soul. He saw the ideal of a happy life in eliminating the causes of suffering, anxiety and fear. Fear of the elements of nature and of death made people "create gods for themselves." Only through overcoming fears and superstition can a person ensure peace and spiritual comfort.

Lucretius considered his teaching to be an instruction in the art of living in a whirlpool of disasters, so that people would forever get rid of fears of the afterlife punishment and otherworldly forces, for there is nothing in the world but atoms and emptiness.

The principle of pleasure, militant atheism, with which Epicurus, and after him Lucretius, came forward, became the subject of fierce criticism and general indignation on the part of the clergy. Lucretius was declared mad by theologians, and the books of Epicurus are subject to almost complete destruction.

11. Alexandria Medical School

Noticeable shifts in the experimental study of the anatomy and functions of the body were outlined in the III century. BC e. They are associated with the names of two major doctors from Alexandria - Herophilus and Erazistrat. In the period when the Alexandrian doctors lived and worked, there was still no ban on dissecting the corpses of dead people. The free dissection of human bodies opened up the possibility of more carefully examining the structure of various parts of the body. Doctors were most interested in the nervous system and the brain.

All these studies led the Alexandrian physicians to the firm conviction that the real organ of the soul is the brain. Moreover, they established some specialization in the localization of mental functions. Herophilus associated the functions of the animal or sentient soul, i.e. sensations and perceptions, with the cerebral ventricles. Erazistrat correlated sensations and perceptions with the membranes and convolutions of the brain, and attributed motor functions to the medulla itself. In addition, he discovered that different nerve fibers emanate from these two named brain structures. The established connection of each of the nerve pathways with different parts of the brain that carry out different functions made it possible to make an assumption that these two types of nerves should also perform different functions.

Having established the anatomical basis of the psyche and connected mental phenomena with the brain, the Alexandrian physicians attempted to reveal the mechanisms of those changes in the nervous system and brain that lie behind the numerous functions of the soul. Here they were forced to turn to the concept of pneuma introduced by the Stoics. Pneuma was considered as a material carrier of life and psyche. When inhaled, air from the lungs enters the heart. Mixing with blood in it, the air forms a vital pneuma, which spreads throughout the body, filling all its parts, including the brain. In the brain, plant pneuma is transformed into animal (psychic) ​​pneuma, which is sent to the nerves, and through them to the sense organs and muscles, bringing both into action.

12. Psychophysiology of Claudius Galen

The experience of Alexandrian doctors in studying the structure and functioning of nerves, the brain, other parts of the body and the organism as a whole did not remain without a trace and forgotten. It was generalized, expanded and deepened by a prominent representative of ancient medicine, Galen (130-200 BC). Galen is a famous ancient Roman thinker who worked for a number of years as a doctor for gladiators, later at the court of the Roman emperor. He systematically engaged in the dissection of corpses, thanks to which he was able to describe the structure of the respiratory, circulatory, muscular and nervous systems.

According to Galen, life arose as a result of the gradual development of nature, and the mental is the product of organic life. He took blood as the initial basis of activity and all manifestations of the soul.

Galen believed that blood is formed in the liver as a result of the combination of digested food with air. Further, through the veins, it enters the heart, and from it it spreads through the arteries throughout the body. On the way to the brain, the blood, evaporating and purifying, turns into psychic pneuma. Galen singled out two types of pneuma: vital (blood) and mental (brain), arising from vital pneuma by purification. The organs of the psyche were considered the liver, heart and brain.

Galen accepted the Platonic scheme of localization of the soul and rejected both the brain-centric point of view of Alcmaeon and the heart-centric concept of Empedocles and Aristotle. Each of the three named organs of the soul is responsible for certain of its functions. The liver, as an organ filled with unpurified, cold, venous blood, is the bearer of the lower manifestations of the soul - impulses, inclinations, needs. In the heart, where the blood is purified and warm, emotions, affects, passions are localized. The brain, in which cerebral blood circulates, psychic pneuma is produced and stored, acts as the bearer of the mind.

Galen's ideas about emotions and affects are connected with the doctrine of movements. Affects were understood by him as such mental states that are caused by changes in the blood. Anger, for example, arises as a result of an increase in the warmth of the blood, its boiling. In a person, Galen believed, affects should not go beyond the boundaries established by nature, because this leads both to the suffering of the body and to the suffering of the soul. Therefore, strong emotions should be moderated and removed by the mind, which returns the state of balance to the soul.

The state and dynamics of blood determine not only the emotional side of the soul, but also the general activity of a person, his temperament and even character. The type of temperament depends on the proportion or predominance of arterial or venous blood. People with a predominance of arterial blood are more mobile, energetic, courageous, etc. Those who dominate in the mixture of venous blood are slow and inactive. So, all the functions of the soul, starting from sensations and ending with the individual mind, temperament and character, are based on humoral-brain processes.

Since all these manifestations of the soul are dependent on the body, they disappear with the death of the latter. However, Galen could not remain a consistent supporter of the materialistic line to the end. Like Aristotle, in addition to the individual rational soul, he also attributed to man the divine mind, making a concession to idealism.

In general, the teachings of Galen occupied at that time leading positions in the field of natural science and philosophy. Moreover, the anatomy, physiology, psychophysiology of Galen remained the last word in science until the New Age.

LECTURE No. 2. Philosophical doctrine of consciousness

1. Plotinus: psychology as a science of consciousness

The principle of the absolute immateriality of the soul was approved by Plotinus (XNUMXrd century AD), an ancient Greek philosopher, the founder of the school of Neoplatonism in Rome. In everything bodily, an emanation (outflow) of the divine, spiritual principle was seen.

For Plotinus, for the first time in its history, psychology becomes the science of consciousness, understood as "self-consciousness."

Plotinus taught that the individual soul comes from the world soul, to which it aspires. Another vector of activity of the individual soul is directed towards the sensory world.

In the individual soul, Plotinus singled out one more direction - the focus on oneself, on one's own, invisible actions and content. She, as it were, follows her work, is her "mirror".

After many centuries, this ability of the subject not only to feel, feel, remember or think, but also to have an internal idea of ​​these functions was called reflection.

This ability is not fiction. It serves as an integral "mechanism" of the activity of a person's consciousness, connecting his orientation in the external world with the orientation in the inner world, in "himself".

Plotinus distinguished this "mechanism" from other mental processes.

No matter how wide the range of these explanations, it ultimately boiled down to the search for the dependence of mental phenomena on physical causes, processes in the body, and communication with other people.

The reflection discovered by Plotinus could not be explained by any of these factors. She looked like a self-sufficient, non-derivable entity.

It remained that way for centuries, becoming the initial concept of the introspective psychology of consciousness.

Singling out reflection as one of the directions of the activity of the soul, Plotinus in that distant era could not, of course, imagine the individual soul as a self-sufficient source of its internal images and actions. For him, she is an emanation of the super-beautiful sphere of the highest principle of all things.

2. Augustine: early medieval Christian worldview

The teachings of Plotinus influenced Augustine (XNUMXth-XNUMXth centuries AD), whose work marked the transition from the ancient tradition to the medieval Christian worldview. Augustine gave the interpretation of the soul a special character, arguing that its basis is formed by the will (and not the mind). Thus, he became the initiator of the doctrine called voluntarism. The will of the individual, depending on the divine, acts in two directions: it controls the actions of the soul and turns it towards itself. All changes that occur with the body become mental due to the volitional activity of the subject. Thus, from the imprints that the sense organs retain, the will creates memories. All knowledge is in the soul, which lives and moves in God. It is not acquired, but extracted from the soul through the direction of the will. The basis of the truth of this knowledge is inner experience. The idea of ​​an inner experience with supreme truth had theological meaning for Augustine, since it was preached that this truth was bestowed by God.

Subsequently, the interpretation of inner experience, being freed from religious overtones, merged with the idea of ​​introspection as a special method of studying consciousness, which psychology, unlike other sciences, owns.

LECTURE No. 3. Development of natural science

1. The heyday of natural science in the Arab East

The reorientation of philosophical thinking in the direction of rapprochement with empiricism, with positive knowledge of nature, took place during this period in the depths of the Arabic-speaking culture that flourished in the East in the XNUMXth-XNUMXth centuries.

After unification in the XNUMXth century. Arab tribes arose a state that had as its ideological stronghold a new religion - Islam. Under the auspices of this religion, the aggressive movement of the Arabs began, which led to the formation of the caliphate, in the territories of which lived peoples who had an ancient culture. Arabic became the state language of the caliphate, but the culture that developed in the vast state included the achievements of many peoples inhabiting it, as well as the Hellenes, the peoples of India. The cultural centers of the Caliphate were visited by caravans of camels laden with books in almost all languages ​​known at that time. In the Arab East, intellectual life began to boil. The writings of Plato and Aristotle have disappeared in the West. In the East, their works are translated into Arabic, copied and distributed throughout the vast Arab state. This stimulated the development of science, primarily physical, mathematical and medical. There are many astronomers, mathematicians, chemists, geographers, botanists, doctors. They created a powerful cultural and scientific layer in which the greatest minds were born. They enriched the achievements of their ancient predecessors and created the prerequisites for the subsequent rise of philosophical and scientific thought in the West, including psychological thought. Among them, one should single out the Central Asian scientist of the XNUMXth century. Abu Ali ibn Sinu (in Latin transcription - Avicenna). The "Canon of Medical Science" created by him provided "autocratic power in all medical schools of the Middle Ages."

From the point of view of the development of natural science knowledge about the soul, medical psychology is of particular interest. In it, an important place was given to the doctrine of the role of affects in the regulation of the behavior of the organism and even the development of this behavior. Avicenna was one of the first researchers in the field of developmental psychology. He studied the relationship between the physical development of the body and its psychological characteristics in different age periods. Education was of great importance.

It is through education that the mental impact on the stable structure of the body is carried out. Causing in the child these or those affects, adults form his nature.

The physiological psychology of Avicenna included assumptions about the possibility of controlling the processes in the body and further giving the body a certain stable warehouse by influencing its sensual, affective life, which depends on the behavior of other people. The idea of ​​the relationship between the mental and the physiological - not only the dependence of the psyche on bodily states, but also its ability (with affects, mental trauma, imagination) to deeply influence them - was developed by Avicenna based on his extensive medical experience. He made an attempt to study this question experimentally. This gives reason to see in the teachings of Avicenna the beginnings of an experimental psychophysiology of emotional states.

Avicenna, like Galen, attributed plant abilities to the liver, linking them with the movement of venous blood. Emotional states that enliven the activity of the soul were localized in the region of the heart, and they were associated with the movement of purer arterial blood. Mental processes: sensations, perceptions, memory, imagination and reason, are localized in the brain. Their material carriers are vaporous elements formed from arterial blood as a result of its purification and evaporation. Almost all functions of the soul, including the mind of the sensory level, or imaginative thinking, have an anatomical and physiological basis and bodily dependence. But in addition to figurative thinking, a person is characterized by pure rational acts that have independence and independence from the body. The following facts that drew Avicenna's attention served as the reason for the selection of the supra-individual mind.

The first of them is connected with the presence of some incompatibility of sensual and rational manifestations of the soul. The second argument in favor of the independence of thinking from the body was the position that the body, after prolonged work and the sense organs, after prolonged perception, get tired and weary, and when thinking, we do not notice such fatigue and fatigue.

The third proposition is that those mental functions that are closely connected with the body, as the body ages, are gradually destroyed and by the age of 40 noticeably decrease and weaken.

The mind at this age is not only preserved, but more than that - it unfolds in its entirety and is in the prime of life. Based on the above facts, Avicenna came to an idealistic interpretation of conceptual thinking.

Pure or generic reason deals with universals, that is, with the most general concepts that can be revealed if their tripartite nature is comprehended. The pure mind has no bodily admixture. He is not localized anywhere and exists before man in God.

Universals are not only the mind of God, but they are the true deep fundamental principle and essence of all visible things and natural phenomena. Universals can become ideas of the individual mind. Illuminating the individual mind with its divine part, pure reason, or universals, allow a person to see the world as a whole, to understand its fundamental principle.

The core of Avicenna's teachings is his psychophysiology. It has two features.

The first is that almost all vital acts, from vegetative to imaginative thinking, are made dependent on bodily changes occurring in various systems of the body.

The peculiarity of another important feature, arising from the first, lies in the fact that Avicenna tried to consider as inherent in the body itself not only the plant functions of the body, but also animal-like ones, which included sensations, perceptions, affects, impulses and movements. This means that the area of ​​sensuality got out of dependence of a special spiritual principle or form, and the general laws of nature extended to these mental phenomena. Since the named mental phenomena acted as partial modifications of natural forces, then, like other natural phenomena, they can be studied by objective methods similar to those used in the natural sciences, that is, by experience. It is with Avicenna that we first meet with the beginning of an experimental, experimental penetration into the world of mental phenomena.

In the most developed form, Avicenna presents the psychophysiology of sensitivity and emotions. There were five main types of sensations: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch.

All sensations are characterized by three main features: sensual tone, intensity and duration.

The duration of mental acts was first determined experimentally. Avicenna's experiments were connected with the study of the effect of mixing colors, for which he specially created a disc painted in different colors.

From sensations as "forces that comprehend outside," Avicenna proceeds to an analysis of forces that "comprehend within," which he called inner feeling. These internal forces included generalized feelings, or ideas, and imagination, memory as a preserving and reproducing force, and sensual reason, or imaginative thinking. Memory, imagination, representations and sensual reason - all of them are mental acts of the animal level. This level also includes motivating and affective states, which are in close connection with sensory images.

Avicenna attached special importance to affects, considering them as forces that enliven the spiritual life of a person and determine his real actions and deeds. Avicenna considered it possible, through the impact on the affective sphere, to control the actions and activities of a person as a whole, to form his "nature".

A special role in the development of a person's "nature" belongs to the social environment, since the nature of a person's relationship with other people leaves an imprint on the content and general structure of his feelings. A set of feelings and their correlation ultimately determine the behavior of a person, his general mental and physical condition.

The significance of the psychophysiological teachings of Avicenna was the most significant teaching after Galen, which, on the one hand, reflected the successes in the development of natural science of that period, on the other hand, a decisive influence on the development of psychological and natural science thought in Europe of the New Age.

A characterization of Arab medieval psychology would be far from complete without mentioning two other prominent Arab scientists of the Middle Ages - Ibn al-Haytham, or Alhazen (965-1038), and Ibn Rushd, known as Averroes (1126-1198). Alhazen is credited with putting forward a new point of view on the mechanism of sensations and perceptions, the mechanism of constructing a visual image. Alhazen for the first time, relying on experiment, showed that the eye is the most accurate optical device and that the cause of the appearance of a sensual image is the laws of reflection and refraction of light. Alhazen studied such important phenomena as binocular vision, color mixing, contrast, etc.

Alhazen's scheme destroyed the previous imperfect theories of vision and introduced a new explanatory principle. The initial sensory structure of visual perception was considered as derived from the laws of optics, which have an experimental and mathematical basis, and from the properties of the nervous system.

Another scientist of that era, Averroes, also studied the functions of the eye. He established that the sensory part of the organ of vision is not the lens, but the retina.

Behind the work on the study of the optical functions of the eye were decisive shifts of a theoretical and methodological nature. The consideration of the eye as an optical instrument brought with it a new understanding of the nature of mental processes in general. The explanation of the process of constructing a mental image in terms of optics meant the extension of physical laws to mental phenomena, which contributed to overcoming the teleological interpretation of the psyche.

Experiments carried out by Arab scientists showed that there is no need to explain the work of the eye with the participation of the soul as a force or ability that controls it. Vision is a natural process of refraction of light in the physical environment. This was the first turning point in order to subordinate the physical laws of nature and other mental phenomena.

2. Psychological ideas of medieval Europe

During the Middle Ages, scholasticism reigned in the intellectual life of Europe. This special type of philosophizing from the XNUMXth to the XNUMXth centuries. was reduced to a rational substantiation of Christian dogma. There were various currents in scholasticism. But what they had in common was the attitude toward commenting on texts. Positive study of the subject and discussion of real problems were replaced by verbal tricks.

In fear of Aristotle, who appeared on the intellectual horizon of Europe, the Catholic Church at first forbade his teaching, but then, changing tactics, began to "master", adapt it according to their needs.

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) most subtly coped with this task, whose teaching, according to the papal encyclical of 1879, was canonized as a truly Catholic philosophy (and psychology), called Thomism. In order to eliminate the contradiction between the natural scientific views of Aristotle and the religious worldview, Aquinas turns to the idea of ​​the dual nature of truth. The essence of this theory is that there are two kinds of truths related to two non-intersecting worlds - material and supernatural (divine). The first truths are comprehended by reason on the basis of experience. Truths of the second kind are not accessible to reason and can only be comprehended through faith and revelation. The truths of reason should become the subject of philosophy, and the truths of the second kind (truths of revelation) - theology.

Averroists also believed that incompatibility with the official dogma of ideas about the eternity (and not creation) of the world, about the annihilation (and not immortality) of the individual soul leads to the conclusion that each of the truths has its own area. True for one area may be false for another, and vice versa. It followed from this that philosophy should be concerned with the study of the laws of nature and deduce its truths, without caring whether or not they are in agreement with the truths of revelation. Aquinas, defending one truth - religious, "descending from above", believed that the mind should serve it as earnestly as the religious feeling. Aquinas and his supporters succeeded in cracking down on the Averroists at the University of Paris. But in England, at Oxford University, the Averroist concept subsequently triumphed, becoming the ideological prerequisite for the success of philosophy and the natural sciences.

Aquinas extended the hierarchical pattern to the description of mental life, the various forms of which were placed in the form of a kind of ladder in a stepped row - from the lowest to the highest. Every phenomenon has its place. Boundaries are laid between everything that exists and it is unambiguously determined what where to be. Souls (plant, animal, human) are located in a stepped row. Within the soul itself, abilities and their products (sensation, representation, concept) are hierarchically arranged.

The concept of introspection acted as a pillar of modernized and theological psychology.

The work of the soul is drawn by Aquinas in the form of the following scheme: first, it performs an act of cognition - it is the image of an object (sensation or concept), then it realizes that this act itself has been performed by it, and, finally, having done both operations, it "returns" to itself cognizing no longer an image or an act, but itself as a unique entity.

Before us is a closed consciousness, from which there is no way out either to the body or to the outside world.

It is easy to see how little Aquinas' initial positions coincided with the fundamental principles of Aristotle's teaching about the soul.

Thomism turned the great ancient Greek philosopher into a pillar of theology, into "Aristotle with tonsure."

The teaching of Aquinas accepted by the church as the last word of theology began to gradually provoke criticism from the theologians themselves. The first to advocate the removal of "tonsura" from Aristotle was the English scholastic D. Scott (1270-1308). Scott pointed out that there is no basis for harmonizing the truths of reason and revelation. On the contrary, they should be separated, since the truths of faith are associated with the search for paradise and asceticism, while the truths of reason are turned to the real world and reality. Matter is not just an amorphous, inert mass, it is a condition for all creation, both the physical world and the mental one. The form cannot be recognized as the beginning of everything that exists. It gives reality to matter, but this does not mean that matter cannot exist independently of form, the possibility is not ruled out, Scott suggested that the ability to think is in the foundation of matter itself.

This means that the psychic is inherent in matter itself and there is no need to resort to the idea of ​​the existence of a special spiritual substance, which the theologians and pillars of the church planted. Evaluating Scott's views, we can say that the English scholastic forced theology itself to preach materialism.

Another English thinker of the Middle Ages, R. Bacon (1214-1292), also spoke out for the liberation of Aristotle's ideas from theology, with criticism of scholasticism and Thomism.

R. Bacon called for the release of science from religious prejudices and the transition from speculative constructions to a truthful and experimental study of nature and man. Only by eliminating ignorance, he believed, can the true development of the sciences and the general well-being of the world be ensured. Bacon assigned the first place not to theology, but to the natural sciences, which would be based on experiment and mathematics.

In "Opus mayus" he wrote that above all speculative knowledge and arts, is the ability to make experiments and this science is the queen of sciences. In a number of natural sciences, the leading place was given to physics, or rather physical optics. The leading role that R. Bacon attributed to optics, he explained by the fact that only through vision does a person establish the difference between objects, and the ability to see the difference in things underlies all our knowledge of the world.

The structure and function of the eye were for Bacon the central question to be studied. Visual sensations and perceptions are not products of intentional acts of spiritual substance, but they are only the result of the action, refraction and reflection of light.

In this regard, Bacon contributed to the further strengthening and dissemination of a new physical-optical view of the nature of sensory images, which paved the way for a materialistic explanation of the psyche as a whole.

In England, nominalism opposed the Thomist conception of the soul. It arose in connection with a dispute about the nature of general concepts (universals). Proponents of the first trend, called realism, believed that concepts are the only realities of being.

They have an original nature and exist independently of specific things and phenomena.

The nominalists, on the contrary, argued that things and phenomena themselves are real, and general concepts in relation to them are only names, signs, labels.

Professor of Oxford University W. Ockham (1300-1350) preached nominalism most vigorously. Rejecting Thomism and defending the doctrine of "dual truth", he called for relying on sensory experience, for orientation in which there are only terms, names, signs.

It is not difficult to see that already in the depths of scholasticism itself, materialistic tendencies gradually made their way, which paved the way for the subsequent replacement of scholastic psychology by experimental and natural science psychology.

3. The development of psychology in the Renaissance

The transitional period from feudal to bourgeois culture was called the Renaissance.

Renaissance thinkers believed that they were clearing the ancient picture of the world from "medieval barbarians".

The Renaissance is often called the period of humanism, since it is associated with the awakening of a comprehensive interest in man. The essential aspects of psychological knowledge during this period are the desire to return a person from divine heights to earthly soil, the rejection of religious scholastic ideas about the soul, the call for a truthful and experimental description of the spiritual world of people.

In the main center of the Renaissance - Italy - disputes flared up between the supporters of Averroes (Averroists) who had escaped the Inquisition there and even more radical Alexandrians.

The fundamental difference concerned the question of the immortality of the soul, on which the Church's doctrine rested. Averroes, dividing the mind (mind) and the soul, considered it, as the highest part of the soul, immortal. Alexander insisted that all the abilities of the soul completely disappear with the body.

Both directions played an important role in creating a new ideological atmosphere, paving the way for the natural scientific study of the human body and its mental functions. Many philosophers, naturalists, doctors, who were distinguished by an interest in the study of nature, suppressed by theology, went along this path. Their work was permeated by belief in the omnipotence of experience, in the advantage of observations, direct contacts with reality, in the independence of genuine knowledge from scholastic wisdom.

Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457) occupies a prominent place among the first major thinkers who tried to oppose the traditions of medieval scholasticism. Walla outlined his main views in the treatise "On pleasure as a true good." He argued that nature is the basis of everything, and man is part of it. Since man is a part of nature, then his soul is not an otherworldly, supranatural entity, but only a manifestation of nature. Valla considered needs and aspirations to be the leading feature that distinguishes all living nature.

Another major representative of Italian thought of the 1462th century, P. Pomponazzi (1524-XNUMX), spoke with the statement of the natural determination of the human soul. In the book On the Immortality of the Soul, Pomponazzi, criticizing scholasticism, pointed out that God does not take part in the affairs of nature. The immortality of God and the eternity of the soul cannot be established experimentally. The soul is an earthly, natural property associated with the vital activity of the organism.

Psychic phenomena are the product of the work of the nervous system and the brain. With the destruction and death of the body, all the abilities of the soul also disappear. The same applies to thinking. It is a function of the brain, it arises and dies along with the death and death of a person. The mental develops from sensations through memory and ideas to thinking. Thinking is intended for the cognition of general truths, established on the basis of particular ones, which, in turn, are given in sensory forms of cognition, sensations, perceptions and ideas.

The opposition to the church and theology manifested itself not only in critical treatises, but also in the institutions of scientific and educational centers, or academies, which were called upon to radically change the approach to the study of man. The first such center was created in Naples by the famous Italian thinker B. Telesio (1508-1588). He developed his own system of views, focusing on the teachings of the Stoics. In his opinion, the basis of the world is matter. Matter itself is passive. In order for it to manifest itself in the diversity of its qualities, it is necessary to interact with it heat and cold, dryness and humidity. Man is the result of the development of nature, and in him, like in all living things, a mental, spiritual, called the Lucretian term "spirit" appears. The spirit is the most perfect, discharged, not visible material substance captured from the environment, which is in the brain, pulsating and moving from the brain to the periphery and back. In the transition from sensation to thought, great importance, according to Telesio, belongs to memory and associations by similarity.

Carrying out generally advanced views for that time and asserting a natural-scientific and experimental approach to the study of man and his psyche, Telesio, nevertheless, made some concessions to idealism and theology. They formally recognized the existence of God and a higher immortal soul.

One of the titans of the Renaissance was Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). He represented a new science that did not exist in universities, but in the workshops of artists and builders, engineers and inventors. Their experience radically changed the culture and way of thinking.

In their industrial practice, they were the transformers of the world. The highest value was attached not to the divine mind, but to the "divine science of painting." Painting was understood not only as the art of depicting the world in artistic images.

However, Leonardo is known not only as a brilliant painter, but also as a brilliant anatomist. In anatomical studies, he saw a way to penetrate the secrets of human passions, feelings and behavior. A large place in the anatomical experiments of Leonardo was occupied by questions of biomechanics, that is, the structure and operation of the body's motor systems. The movements of all bodies, including living ones, he believed, are carried out according to the laws of mechanics, therefore, in principle there should be no obstacles to reproducing the work of a living body in a mechanical structure. Thus, he acted as a forerunner of modern bionics.

He discovered that muscle responses are determined by the nervous system and that different parts of it are responsible for different functions.

Leonardo's ideas about the work of the eye are of great interest. Leonardo showed that the work of the eye is not controlled by a special ability of the soul, but is a response to light exposure. In his description of the mechanism of vision, a diagram of the pupillary reflex was given. Leonardo came pretty close to discovering the reflex principle.

The revival of new humanistic views on individual mental life has reached a high level in other countries, where the foundations of the old socio-economic relations were undermined. In Spain, doctrines arose directed against scholasticism, striving to search for real knowledge about the psyche. So, L. Vives (1492-1540) in his book "On the Soul and Life" argued that human nature is known not from books, but through observation and experience. The main way in which individual manifestations of his soul are revealed to a person is internal experience, or self-observation. He deduced some basic characteristics of urges and emotional states:

1) different degrees of intensity: light, medium and strong;

2) the duration of emotional states;

3) the qualitative content of emotional reactions (their division into pleasant and unpleasant, positive and negative).

Vives's views paved the way for the emergence in Europe of empirical introspective associative psychology.

Another doctor, X. Huarte (XVI century), also rejecting speculation and scholasticism, demanded the use of the inductive method in cognition, which he outlined in the book "Investigations of the abilities for the sciences." This was the first work in the history of psychology in which the task was to study the individual differences between people in order to determine their suitability for various professions.

Another Spanish doctor, Pereira (1500-1560), anticipating Descartes by a century, showed that animal behavior is controlled not by the soul, but by environmental influences and intra-corporeal changes, and proposed that the animal organism be considered a kind of machine that does not need to work in participation of the soul.

Somewhat aside from the general trend in the development of psychology in the Renaissance are the works of the German thinkers Melanchthon and Goklenius.

Melanchthon is best known for his book Commentaries on the Soul.

In it, the German neo-scholastic tries to modernize the teachings of Aristotle based on the level of contemporary knowledge.

Melanchthon distinguished three types of abilities in the soul:

1) vegetable;

2) animals;

3) reasonable.

The activities of the soul in understanding perceptions and establishing similarities and differences in them were referred by Melanchthon to the level of rational abilities, or the rational soul, which is introduced into the body by God and which is only temporarily associated with animal abilities.

The rational soul is eternal and immortal.

Another German scientist, Goklenius, also commented on the ideas of Aristotle. The appearance of the term "psychology" is associated with his name, which was the name of his main work "Psychology", published in 1590.

Almost none of the Renaissance thinkers managed to completely overcome the traditions of medieval scholasticism and theology.

But most scientists have a need to turn to nature itself, to the real world, to experimental study.

This requirement extended to the realm of the psychic as well. Opposing scholasticism and theology, the thinkers of the era of humanism tried to find out the real bodily foundations of various manifestations of the soul.

LECTURE No. 4. Psychology of modern times in the XNUMXth century

1. The main trends in the development of philosophy and psychology in the XNUMXth century

Discoveries of N. Copernicus, D. Bruno, G. Galileo, W. Harvey, R. Descartes

Intensive development of capitalist relations in the XVI-XVII centuries. led to the rapid flourishing of many sciences, especially natural science, especially those areas that were of practical importance for the production of the manufacturing period. These included "mechanical arts" associated with the creation of various ground mechanisms, equipment, machines, river and sea vessels, the manufacture of astronomical, physical and navigational instruments. The successes and achievements of mechanics had not only practical, but also great scientific and ideological significance. The discoveries of N. Copernicus, D. Bruno, G. Galileo, I. Kepler, I. Newton dealt the first irresistible blows to the religious myths of the Middle Ages. The traditions of medieval alchemists were undermined by Boyle's brilliant experiments. Invincible blows to theological dogmas were dealt by geographical discoveries related to navigation, which made it possible to obtain numerous information in the field of astronomy, geology, biology, etc. With the invention and use of the microscope, ideas in the field of anatomy and physiology of plants and animals have changed significantly. The discovery of the cellular structure of living organisms and sexual differentiation in plants, the discovery by Harvey of a new scheme of blood circulation, and the description by Descartes of the reflex mechanism of animal behavior should be recognized as major achievements.

Successes in the development of natural science contributed to the formation of a new view of nature in general and the place of man in it. In place of scholasticism, the idea of ​​the natural origin of man, of his power and unlimited possibilities in the knowledge and conquest of nature, made its way more and more persistently.

The general opposition to church hegemony, the struggle for the liberation of man, his mind from religious oppression, the struggle for the secular nature of science are one of the distinguishing trends in the development of philosophy and psychology of modern times.

A new era in the development of world psychological thought was opened by concepts inspired by the great triumph of mechanics, which became the "queen of the sciences." Its concepts and explanatory principles created, first, a geometric-mechanical (Galileo), and then a dynamic (Newton) picture of nature. It also included such a physical body as an organism with its mental properties.

The first outline of a psychological theory oriented towards geometry and new mechanics was by the French mathematician, naturalist and philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650). He chose the theoretical model of the organism as an automaton - a system that works mechanically. Thus, the living body, which in the entire previous history of knowledge was considered as animate, was freed from its influence and interference. From now on, the difference between inorganic and organic bodies was explained according to the criterion of the latter being related to objects that act like simple technical devices. In the age when these devices were established in social production, the principle of their operation was captured by scientific thought, far from this production, explaining the functions of the body in their image and likeness. The first great achievement in this regard was the discovery of the circles of blood circulation by Harvey. The heart was presented as a kind of pump that pumps fluid.

The discovery of the reflex, the second achievement of Descartes. He introduced the concept of the reflex, which became fundamental to physiology and psychology. If Harvey eliminated the soul from the category of regulators of internal organs, then Descartes dared to do away with it at the level of the external, environmentally oriented work of the whole organism. Descartes saw the nervous system in the form of "tubes" through which light airlike particles pass (he called them "animal spirits"). He believed that an external impulse sets these "spirits" in motion, bringing them to the brain, from where they are automatically reflected to the muscles. The term “reflex”, which appeared after Descartes, meant “reflection”.

Muscle response is an integral component of behavior. Therefore, the Cartesian scheme belongs to the category of great discoveries. She discovered the reflex nature of behavior, not the effort of the spirit, but the restructuring of the body on the basis of the strictly causal laws of its mechanics will provide a person with power over his own nature, just as these laws can make him the master of external nature.

2. Materialism and idealism

The herald of empiricism was Francis Bacon (XVI century), who made the main emphasis on the creation of an effective method of science, so that it actually contributed to the acquisition of power over nature by man.

In his New Organon, Bacon gave the palm to induction, that is, to such an interpretation of a multitude of empirical data that allows them to be generalized in order to predict future events and thereby master their course.

The idea of ​​methodology, which proceeded from the knowledge of the causes of things with the help of experience and induction, influenced the creation of an anti-scholastic atmosphere in which new scientific thought, including psychological, developed.

The emerging fundamental change in the development of natural science and the numerous grandiose discoveries that accompanied it brought to the fore questions of general principles and methods of cognition, the resolution of which was impossible without referring to the basic mental abilities and functions of a person. When developing problems related to methodology and methods of cognition, scientists were divided into two currents - empirical and rationalistic. Differences between them arose on three cardinal issues. These included questions about the sources and origin of knowledge, about the nature of universal concepts, about the relationship and boundaries of human cognitive capabilities, namely, his sensory experience and logical thinking. The founders of the empirical direction Bacon, Hobbes, Locke and their followers believed that sensory experience is the source of all knowledge.

Representatives of the rationalist current, pioneered by Descartes and Leibniz, believed that the source of knowledge lies in the mind itself, and universal concepts have an a priori origin, that is, they come from the mind itself and innate intellectual abilities. In accordance with these differences, representatives of empiricism considered induction as the leading scientific method, involving the ascent from private and individual facts established in sensory experience to general principles and laws, while representatives of rationalism saw the basis for acquiring reliable knowledge in deduction as a way to derive the desired truths. from principles either previously established or innate (Descartes, Leibniz).

The contradictions that arose between scientists of the XNUMXth century in the field of the general methodology of cognition were aggravated and complicated by disagreements in solving another, no less fundamental question about the nature of the human cognitive abilities themselves, their relationship to the external physical world, on the one hand, to the bodily organism, on the other.

These disputes gave rise to a psychophysical problem, the various ways of solving which divided thinkers into two other irreconcilable camps - materialism and idealism.

This line of struggle became the leading one in strengthening and differentiating ideological positions not only between the aforementioned rationalistic and empirical currents, but also within them. So, Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza, being the founders of rationalism, were opponents in solving the psychophysical problem and spoke from different positions: Descartes - from the positions of dualism; Leibniz - idealism; Spinoza - materialism. Similarly, empiricism was developed both by representatives of the materialist trend (Bacon, Hobbes, French and Russian materialists of the XNUMXth century) and by supporters of idealist currents (Berkeley, Hume, and others).

But they were also united by some common points that were associated with the state and level of science in general.

The most developed section of knowledge was the mechanics of solids, the dominance of which gave rise to a tendency to interpret and explain all other phenomena of inanimate and living nature in terms of mechanics. As a universal methodological approach and a way of explaining and cognizing the surrounding world, mechanism is also fixed in philosophy. From it, mechanistic principles are transferred to psychology, and all mental phenomena, behavior and consciousness of a person begin to be interpreted and described according to the model of mechanical processes.

3. Philosophical and psychological system of R. Descartes

An associate of Bacon in the fight against theology and medieval scholasticism, in an effort to develop a new methodology that would help overcome prejudices, was the greatest thinker of the New Age, R. Descartes (1596-1650).

For Descartes, experience is not a source of reliable knowledge, such is the power of reason. Downplaying the importance of empirical knowledge in comprehending the truth, Descartes, however, did not completely deny its role. The methodological principles of cognition, set forth by Descartes initially in the "Rules for the Guidance of the Mind" (1628-1629), then in the metaphysical "Discourses on Method" (1637), "Principles of Philosophy" (1644), "Reflections on the First Philosophy" (1641), acted as an introduction to the entire system of philosophical and psychological views, presented in a systematic and complete form in the treatise Passions of the Soul (1649).

An integral part of Descartes' doctrine of extended bodily substance are questions of physics and physiology, the structure and activity of animals and humans. In the field of natural sciences, Descartes was interested not only in problems of mechanics, physics, optics, geometry, but also in questions of embryology, anatomy and physiology of animals, and psychophysiology. He expressed the idea of ​​repeating in the individual life of an individual the stages of development of the animal world, which in the 19th century. was reflected in the biogenetic law - “ontogenesis is a brief repetition of phylogeny.” Descartes supported the new blood circulation scheme proposed by Harvey, by analogy with which he tried to consider the work of the nervous system of animals and humans. This allowed him to lay down the idea, give the first description of the unconditioned reflex scheme and formulate the principle of determinism, which was extended not only to the field of organic processes, but also to a wide range of mental phenomena. The leading and initial thesis in explaining the life activity of animals was the position about the machine-like nature of their behavior. This served as the basis for the transfer of physical and mechanical principles to all vital functions of the animal organism.

The principle of automatism was extended by Descartes to the actions of the human body. Such bodily functions as digestion, heartbeat, nutrition, growth, respiration, as well as a number of psychophysiological functions - sensations, perceptions, passions and affects, memory and ideas, external movements of the body's organs - all of them occur exactly as a clock or other mechanisms work. .

Descartes is rightly regarded as the discoverer of experimental psychophysiology and as the first physiological psychologist.

Such mental acts as sensations, perception, memory, representations, imagination, affects, were treated by Descartes as purely bodily manifestations and were excluded from the sphere of the mental. Imagination, ideas, memory, feelings and affects are nothing more than simple bodily movements, "unenlightened" by thinking, which alone constitutes the essence of spiritual substance. Descartes considered mental only that which is permeated by the mind or is realized by the thinking substance. For the first time in the history of psychological thought, the psychic began to be limited to the sphere of only conscious phenomena. The psychic began to be reduced to self-consciousness. This concept was destined to become the leading point of view, which became widespread in Europe and determined the formation of many philosophical and psychological systems of the next two centuries.

Starting with Descartes, psychology ceased to exist as a science of the soul, and began to act as a science of consciousness. And from the point of view of the method of cognition, the definition of the mental as directly experienced and realized meant that the phenomena of consciousness are available only to the subject himself and there can be only one way to detect them - self-observation, introspection. The recognition by Descartes of the existence of two different independent substances also determined the difference in the methods of their knowledge: the experimental method for analyzing the mechanics of the body, introspection for the knowledge of the soul. Consciousness did not find in Descartes its expression and manifestation in activity through which it could be studied experimentally.

Descartes' doctrine of two substances, the reduction of the mental to self-consciousness led to significant contradictions and difficulties in resolving a number of other fundamental issues. One of them concerned the presence of the psyche in animals. Animals are devoid of spiritual thinking substance, and this is precisely what God distinguished them from man. As a result of the dilution of the mental and the bodily, Descartes was forced to cut off the connection between the psyche of animals and humans.

Recognizing that the machine of the body and the consciousness occupied with its own thoughts (ideas) and desires are two entities independent of each other, Descartes was faced with the need to explain how they coexist in a holistic person. The solution he proposed was called psychophysical interaction. The body affects the soul, awakening "passive states" (passions) in it in the form of sensory perceptions, emotions, etc. The soul, having thinking and will, affects the body, forcing this "machine" to work and change its course. Descartes was looking for an organ in the body where these two incompatible substances could still communicate. He suggested that such an organ be one of the endocrine glands - the "pineal" (pineal gland). Nobody took this empirical discovery seriously. However, the theoretical question of the interaction of the soul and the body in its formulation absorbed the intellectual energy of many minds for centuries.

Understanding the subject of psychology depends on such explanatory principles as causality (determinism), systemicity and development that guide the research mind. All of them have undergone fundamental changes in modern times. In this, the decisive role was played by the introduction into psychological thinking of the image of a structure created by human hands - a machine.

It is, firstly, a system device, secondly, it works inevitably according to the rigid scheme laid down in it, and thirdly, the effect of its work is the final link in the chain, the components of which replace each other with an iron sequence.

The creation of artificial objects introduced a special form of determinism into theoretical thinking - a mechanical (automaton-like) scheme of causality, or mechano-determinism.

The liberation of the living body from the soul was a turning point in the scientific search for the real causes of everything that happens in living systems, including the mental affects that arise in them (sensations, perceptions, emotions). But with this, Descartes had a different turn: not only the body was liberated from the soul, but the soul (psyche) in its highest manifestations was liberated from the body. The body can only move, the soul can only think.

The principle of the body is a reflex. The principle of the soul is reflection. In the first case, the brain reflects external shocks. In the second - consciousness reflects its own thoughts, ideas, sensations. Descartes created a new form of dualism. Both members of the relationship - both the body and the soul - acquired a content unknown to previous eras.

4. Materialistic theory of T. Hobbes

A worthy place among the creators of the new methodology and fighters against the prevailing scholasticism and biblical mythology belongs to the largest English thinker of the 1588th century, the closest student and follower of Bacon, Thomas Hobbes (1679-XNUMX).

There is nothing in the world, Hobbes believed, except for material bodies that move according to the laws of mechanics. Accordingly, all mental phenomena were brought under these global laws. Material things, acting on the body, cause sensations. According to the law of inertia, representations appear from sensations in the form of their weakened trace. They form chains of thoughts following each other in the same order in which the sensations were replaced.

For Hobbes, a determinist of the Galilean temper, only one law operates in the structure of a person - the mechanical coupling of mental elements by contiguity. Associations were taken as one of the main mental phenomena by Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. But Hobbes was the first to give association the force of the universal law of psychology, where both abstract rational cognition and arbitrary action are subordinated.

Arbitrariness is an illusion that is generated by ignorance of the causes of an act. The strictest causality reigns in everything. In Hobbes, mechano-determinism received an extremely complete expression in relation to the explanation of the psyche.

Important for future psychology was Hobbes's ruthless criticism of Descartes' version of the "innate ideas" with which the human soul is endowed before any experience and independently of it.

Hobbes outlined his views in the field of philosophy and psychology in a number of works, the most significant of which are On the Citizen (1642), Leviathan (1651), On the Body (1655) and On Man (1658).

One of the merits of Hobbes was to establish the unity of empirical and rational knowledge. Hobbes argued that there can be only one truth, and that is the one that is achieved and acquired on the basis of experience and reason. According to Hobbes, knowledge should begin with sensibility as the initial stage on the way to generalizations. The universal properties of things are established with the help of induction, which is the path from the knowledge of actions to the knowledge of causes. After determining the universal causes, a return path, or deduction, is necessary, which ensures the transition from the known causes to the knowledge of new diverse actions and phenomena. In Hobbes' methodology, induction and deduction, sensory and rational cognition are mutually offered and mutually dependent stages of a single cognitive process.

Mental is a special internal state of moving matter. It consists in a specific form of movement that occurs in a living body as a result of external influences. The psychic begins with external pressures on the sense organs. External influences, spreading through the nervous system to the brain and heart, cause countermovements in the latter. Everything - from sensations to thoughts - is nothing but an internal countermovement.

Hobbes called the sensual effects of internal countermovements "ghosts" or "images." Ghosts are of two types. The first type includes those internal movements that occur in the brain and are associated with the emergence of images of things and ideas.

The second kind of phantoms consists of those internal movements which, being transmitted to the activity of the heart, intensify or inhibit it, thus causing states of pleasure or displeasure.

The primary and most universal form of the transition of external movements into internal ones are sensations. There is nothing in the soul or in the thoughts that has not passed in whole or in part through sensations. Sensations differ in quality, and these differences are due to the different physical nature of the external bodies. The indications of our sensations and perceptions are quite reliable, although there can be no complete identity, a mirror resemblance between an object and its image. The degree of adequacy or distortion of the image depends on the conditions of perception.

After direct exposure to external objects, traces remain in the brain, weakened internal movements. These residual movements, according to Hobbes, are representations. They are divided into two large classes: simple and complex. Simple are those in which images of one object are stored. Complex representations include either collective images or generalized representations.

Revealing the nature of representations, Hobbes puts forward a conjecture about the associative mechanism, although the very term "association" has not yet been introduced by Hobbes. Clutches of images of consciousness can be random and active. The passive flow of associations is characteristic of dreams.

The highest level of associations is characterized by the fact that here the flow of images and ideas is controlled by the person himself. Purposeful operation of images and ideas is the essence of thinking.

The mechanism of mental activity was interpreted by Hobbes on the model of arithmetic operations. The two main mental operations were "addition" and "subtraction". The operation of addition corresponded to the connection of representations, and the operation of subtraction corresponded to the dismemberment and separation of representations and images. It is in the operations of addition and subtraction that the activity of the subject is manifested.

Thus, thoughts are not innate, they are the result of addition and subtraction.

According to Hobbes, speech plays an important role in the cognitive process, acting in two functions - as an instrument of thought and as a means of communication. Hobbes was the first to single out the denoting and expressive function of speech most clearly. Taken in relation to the subject, speech acts as a mental process in which words act as a label, label of some thing or phenomenon. They become tools of thought, a means of preserving and reproducing experience.

Speech addressed to another person is not only a mark for oneself, but is a sign for others. Without operating with signs and marks, knowledge is impossible, and from this point of view, Hobbes assessed the emergence of language as the greatest conquest.

In their origin, all words are the product of an agreement between people to use them to denote things and communication.

Hobbes points out that misunderstanding between people and the conflicts that arise between them are caused by two main reasons: either people intentionally or out of ignorance use words that actually denote other thoughts, feelings, actions; or in the hearer the words used do not evoke the ideas that stand behind them.

With the will, incentive and cognitive processes, Hobbes linked the genesis of voluntary movements and the regulation by a person of his behavior in general. Arbitrary, he considered only those actions that are preceded by images or ghosts of movement. Arbitrary movements can contain both one and several representations that precede the action. In his practical life, a person builds his behavior based on different levels of reflection. Common sense behavior is usually limited by the limits of personal judgment and experience. But for the highest achievements, a person needs wisdom, which involves the regulation of his actions and behavior not only on the basis of personal experience, but also on the basis of scientific data. Scientific knowledge is always a force that increases the potential of a person in his practical life.

It is impossible not to recognize the enormous influence that Hobbes's views had on the further development of philosophy and psychology. The empirical line begun by Bacon received its new materialistic substantiation in the teachings of Hobbes. His ideas accelerated the transformation of psychology from the science of the soul into the science of mental phenomena.

Considering the psyche in terms of Galilean mechanics, Hobbes, even more than Descartes, contributed to the establishment of a natural-scientific and experimental approach to the study of mental phenomena. Hobbes made the first sketch of the associative mechanism, which in the writings of Hartley and Hume will be given universal significance. In this regard, Hobbes can be considered a harbinger of the future associative psychology, which had a direct impact on the formation of the theoretical foundations of experimental psychology in the period of its emergence.

5. The teaching of B. Spinoza on the psyche

Criticism of Cartesian dualism of Hobbes was supported by the great Dutch thinker Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza. However, unlike Hobbes, Spinoza took the path of a materialistic interpretation of rationalism. Spinoza took the deductive-geometric scheme of Euclid as an ideal and model for constructing and presenting his teaching. Spinoza is united with Hobbes by his recognition of nature as the only substance. Hobbes saw the world as a system of interacting finite individual bodies. Spinoza opposed this point of view with his idea of ​​matter as a substance that cannot be reduced to its specific states and properties.

Spinoza's new point of view was not inspired by the Cartesian doctrine of two substances. With the intention of overcoming the dualism of Descartes, Spinoza puts forward the doctrine of a single substance, its attributes and modes, which is the core of his entire philosophical and psychological system. It is based on the desire to explain nature from itself. He argues that the root cause of everything that exists and of itself is a substance that exists objectively, regardless of any external stimulus and creator. It is uncreated and indestructible, infinite in its temporal and spatial existence. Substance is one in the sense that the same laws always and everywhere operate in nature. Two substances of the same nature cannot exist.

The essence of a single substance is expressed and revealed in its root and fundamental properties, which were called attributes by Spinoza. Attributes are such essential and universal aspects of a substance that are not identical to it and in relation to which they are derivative and secondary. Substance has many attributes, of which only two are available to man - the attribute of thinking and the attribute of extension. Since extension and thinking are only attributive properties of a substance, which, according to the philosopher, is earlier than all its states, then as such they can no longer act as independent entities.

All the surrounding diversity of the world, various phenomena and events are particular states and modifications of a substance or its attributes. In relation to the attribute of extension, each individual mode expresses certain specific extensions, durations of existence and movement of bodies.

Each thing or phenomenon must be considered in two attributes - in the attribute of thinking and in the attribute of extension.

On the one hand, Spinoza understood the untenability of the assumption that each thing can experience its own ideas, i.e., think; on the other hand, not accepting dualism and seeing in thinking a universal property of nature, he was inclined to believe that, to varying degrees, all individual bodies are animated.

A person is a special complex modification of the unity of the attributes of thinking and extension, the modes of the soul and body. The essence of a person can be revealed in two dimensions, or modes. In one case, a person acts as a mode of body, in the other - as a mode of thinking.

Each of the attributes cannot determine each other, not because they are of a different substantial nature, but because both of them have at their basis a single source and beginning, common laws and causes. The new point of view put forward by Spinoza, according to which the corporeal and the spiritual are considered as two sides of the same thing (substance), is usually called psychophysical monism. The principle of psychophysical monism received a materialistic interpretation in the teachings of Spinoza, since the mental was derived from substance and interpreted as a natural property.

The process of cognition consists in a progressive movement from the modal level of knowledge about everything finite, temporal and random to the general logical foundations of natural laws and necessity, from the multiplicity of modes to substance. Spinoza distinguishes three levels of knowledge: sensual, demonstrative and intuitive.

Spinoza's doctrine of knowledge had one of its goals to resolve a number of ethical problems associated with the search for ways that indicate to man his possibilities in acquiring freedom and happiness. Spinoza sees these paths in man's understanding and awareness of external necessity and accepting it as the basis for voluntary decisions and actions.

The path of transforming external necessity into internal necessity or freedom is presented by Spinoza in the doctrine of passions and affects, the analysis of which occupies almost two-thirds of his main work, Ethics. The starting point in the theory of affects is the position of self-preservation, according to which all living beings strive to preserve and affirm their existence. For its preservation, the human body needs many substances, through which it could be continuously reborn. In order to possess these substances, the human body must be endowed with the ability to act. These states that impel the body to activity were called affects by Spinoza. The root motive force that ensures the self-preservation of the human body is attraction or aspiration. Along with attraction and desire as the main motives, Spinoza also distinguishes two more types of affects: pleasure or joy and displeasure or sadness. Man is full of passions, different in sign and intensity. Affects cannot be destroyed, since they are the manifestation of the laws of nature, and the laws of nature cannot be eliminated. But it is also dangerous to go on about emotions. People subject to strong affects cease to control themselves. According to Spinoza, there is not a single affect about which it would not be possible to form a clear idea, which means that affects will be in the power of a person, and his soul will suffer the less, the more they are known by a person.

Knowledge itself is the highest affect, from which all other lower passions differ in a lesser degree of inclusion of rational components in them. Since affects differ from each other in that rational elements are represented in them to varying degrees, this made it possible to consider the struggle of impulses as a clash of ideas. For Spinoza, "will and reason are one and the same." Will is the highest affect, leading to the rejection of some ideas and the affirmation of others. The will is determined by the degree of a person's awareness of his passions and states, the measure of the completeness of knowledge of the laws of nature.

6. D. Locke's sensationalism

Traditions opposite to rationalism in the study of human cognitive abilities were laid down by the greatest English thinker of the 1632th century. D. Locke (1704-XNUMX). The starting point in Locke's philosophical and psychological concept was his criticism of the theory of innate ideas, put forward in ancient times by Socrates and Plato and supported in modern times by Descartes and Leibniz. Locke's main idea was that knowledge cannot arise by itself. There are no innate ideas and principles. All ideas and concepts come from experience. Based on the data of medicine, child psychology, ethnography, the philosopher points out that if ideas were innate, then they would be available to children, idiots and savages. The available facts and observations of children, mentally ill people indicate that in reality such ideas as the concept of God and the soul, the ideas of good, evil and justice, are not realized by them, and therefore, they are not given to a person from birth. Locke illustrates the inconsistency of the theory of innate ideas in a particularly revealing way with the example of dreams. Dreams, according to Locke, are composed of the ideas of a waking person, interconnected in a bizarre way. Ideas themselves cannot arise until the senses supply them with them.

By experience, Locke understood everything that fills the soul of a person throughout his entire individual life. The content of experience and its structure are made up of elementary components, designated by the philosopher as the general term "ideas". Locke called ideas and sensations, and images of perception and memory, general concepts and affective-volitional states. Initially, a person is born with a soul, similar to a blank sheet of paper on which, only during life, the outside world inflicts patterns with its influences. It is the external world that is the first source of ideas. From external experience, a person can only have what nature imposes on him.

Sensible ideas acquired in external experience act as the starting material for a special inner activity of the soul, thanks to which ideas of a different kind are born, essentially different from sensual ideas. This special activity of the soul, called reflection by Locke, is the ability of the soul to turn its gaze on its own states, while generating new mental products in the form of ideas about ideas. Although reflection is not related to the external world, it is similar in its function to external senses and therefore can be called "inner sense" or inner experience.

According to Locke, reflection and external experience are interconnected. Reflection is a derivative formation that arises on the basis of external experience. Reflection is, as it were, experience about experience. But since reflexive activity generates its own ideas, it was considered by Locke as another relatively independent source of knowledge.

Locke's doctrine of external and internal experience resulted in two important points. By affirming the connection between external and internal experience, he tried to restore the unity of various forms of cognition. The products of reflection are general concepts and complex ideas, and the latter can only be the result of mental activity. From this point of view, reflection acts as a form of rational knowledge, which in turn is based on sensory experience. By dividing experience into external and internal, Locke sought to emphasize the obvious differences in the patterns of rational and sensory cognition.

An important section of Locke's empirical concept is connected with the doctrine of simple and complex ideas. He called simple ideas the indecomposable elements of consciousness. They can be obtained both from external experience and from reflection, and simultaneously from both sources.

Once the soul has acquired simple ideas, it moves from passive contemplation to active transformation and processing of simple ideas into complex ones. Locke saw the formation of complex ideas as a simple mechanical combination of the initial elements of experience. The combination of simple ideas is carried out in various ways. They are associations, connection, relation and separation.

In Locke, associations are not the main mechanism of the internal activity of consciousness. He considered them as incorrect, unreliable combinations of ideas, as random and passive connections, characteristic mainly of the mental life of the mentally ill and only partly healthy people, for example, during dreams. Locke is credited with introducing the term "association of ideas".

Unlike associations, more reliable ways of forming complex ideas, for which reflection is responsible, are summation or connection; collation or comparison and generalization or isolation. Addition, or summation, is based on the direct connection of ideas on the basis of similarity or contiguity. The second way of forming complex ideas is connected with the establishment of similarities and differences through the comparison and comparison of ideas, as a result of which ideas of relations arise. An example of such ideas can be the concepts of "father", "friend", "motherhood", etc. The last and highest way of forming complex ideas is abstraction (distraction, isolation), through which the most general concepts are formed, similar to such as the concepts of "soul" , "God", etc. With his detailed description of the technology of thinking, Locke advanced the long-standing problem of the origin of general concepts far ahead. However, when analyzing the laws of mental activity, he encountered a number of fundamental difficulties, many of which were caused by a general mechanistic approach to the structure of consciousness. The principle of reducing consciousness to a mechanical sum and combination of initial mental elements will dominate English associative psychology for two centuries.

A special role in the formation of ideas of external and internal experience, and in the transformation of simple ideas into complex ones, Locke assigned speech. The philosopher ascribes two functions to speech: the function of expression and the function of designation. But words and speech are not only tools of thinking, but also a means of exchanging ideas and thoughts. The main purpose of any communication is to be understood. Words denote both specific and general ideas, and since people do not always give the same label to different ideas, they often fail to reach an understanding. Locke points out that the main abuses committed by people are expressed in the use of words without any ideas, in the use of the same word to express different ideas, in the use of old words in a new meaning, in the designation by words of what people themselves do not understand. Getting rid of possible shortcomings and abuses in speech, awakening ideas that are adequate to their speech forms - these are the main ways by which you can master the art of communication.

Locke defined cognition as establishing the correspondence or inconsistency of two ideas, and the adequacy of cognition depends on the way the soul perceives its ideas. There are three of them: intuitive, demonstrative and sensual. The lowest and least reliable is sensory knowledge, in which things are known through images of perception. The highest and most reliable source is intuitive knowledge, when the correspondence or inconsistency of two ideas is established through these ideas themselves. When it is not possible to reveal the similarity or difference in ideas with the help of them themselves, a person has to attract other ideas, resort to additional evidence and reasoning. This kind of knowledge, deduced by means of a series of intermediate inferences, is called demonstrative knowledge by Locke. In its character, role and reliability, it occupies a place between sensory and intuitive knowledge.

Cognitive forces do not exhaust all the richness of a person's spiritual life. Along with them, there is another series of psychic phenomena in the soul, closely connected with the cognitive forces and called by Locke the forces of desire or striving. Within the framework of motive forces, he singled out the will and the emotional state - pleasure and suffering. Thus, motivating forces are the active side of all cognitive and practical human activity.

7. G. Leibniz: the idealistic tradition in German philosophy and psychology

G. Leibniz (1646-1716) - a contemporary of all the main geniuses of the XNUMXth century - begins the idealistic tradition. and their ideological opponent. The ideas of Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke were critically revised and synthesized by Leibniz into his own original system of principles and concepts. Leibniz could not fail to notice that Spinoza failed to completely overcome the dualism of Descartes, since in the teachings of the Dutch philosopher the Cartesian division of the world into two substances left its traces in the form of a bifurcation and isolation of the attributes of extension and thinking. Leibniz was not satisfied with the preserved opposition of spirit and matter, mental and physical, and in order to restore their unity, he puts forward a doctrine that makes it possible to explain the infinite diversity of the world on the basis of a substantive basis that is uniform in nature and origin, but of different quality in its states. Fatalism was also unacceptable to Leibniz in Spinoza's teaching. At the same time, Leibniz takes the side of Spinoza in his polemic with Locke regarding the role of experience and reason in cognition. Leibniz tries to establish a connection between the sensual and the rational. But since rational knowledge does not grow out of experience, the unity of experience and reason appears in Leibniz's teaching not as an ascent from sensory forms to ideas, but as an imposition of the rational on sensory experience. Therefore, in a significant part, cognitive errors arise not so much due to the fault of the senses, but due to the weakness of the mind and attention itself, as the desire for clarity and memory.

The core that forms the philosophical and psychological system of Leibniz and connects all its sections and parts is a number of initial methodological principles, or laws. The main ones in terms of their significance include the principle of universal differences, the principle of the identity of indistinguishable things, the laws of continuity and discreteness. Using the principle of universal differences, Leibniz tried to affirm universal variability in the world of physical phenomena and consciousness, to deny both the absolute similarity of existing things with each other and the repetition of states of the same thing in time, and thereby point to the qualitative diversity of the world. The principle of universal difference is supplemented and provided by another principle - the principle of the identity of indistinguishable things. Its meaning lies in the fact that one should not distinguish between things if in fact they are one and the same thing, and vice versa, to identify things that are different in their qualities. The differences between things are derived by Leibniz on the basis of the third principle - the law of continuity. This law indicates that everywhere in the world there are imperceptible transitions in the ascent of things in degrees of perfection.

Leibniz believed that in the continuum of things and their qualities there is no lower or upper limit. Other consequences followed from the principle of continuity. One of them pointed to the succession of different states in one and the same thing. The same principle of continuity also assumed the interconnection of various properties of one and the same thing.

Opposite in its meaning to the principle of continuity is the law of discreteness, according to which gradualness and continuity itself is composed of small jumps and breaks that give rise to individual objects, their autonomy and qualitative originality. It is with the help of the principle of discreteness that Leibniz manages to explain the qualitative diversity and uniqueness of various things and states of consciousness.

Leibniz deploys a system of views built on the model and through analogy with the psychological characteristics of a person and representing a kind of idealistic reincarnation of the atomistic picture of the world.

The "true atoms of nature" are soul-like units - monads, of which the universe consists of countless multitude. Monads are simple, indivisible and eternal. They are autonomous, and the influence of one monad on another is excluded. The leading and root properties of each monad are activity and representations.

Leibniz believed that in the historical perspective, the development of monads goes through several stages, each of which corresponds to a certain form of the monad. The most primary form is pure monads. They are characterized by the presence of activity, but the absence of any ideas. This state of the monad is like a dreamless sleep. Pure monads appear as inanimate, but active and ever-moving matter. The pure monads are followed by the soul monads, which have vague ideas as a result of a low degree of striving for clarity. This form of monads appears at the level of plants and animals. More perfect monads, called spirit monads, are peculiar to man. Their perfection is expressed in the greatest clarity and distinctness of representations. The monads of the angel and God complete the hierarchy, completely free from the material shell and possessing the absolute completeness of knowledge and extremely clear self-consciousness.

A similar system of levels also takes place in human ontogeny. In a certain sense, with his hierarchical system of monads, Leibniz gives a new interpretation of the Aristotelian doctrine of the three levels of the soul, according to which its higher forms arise and are realized on the basis of the lower ones.

Leibniz's teaching introduced many ideas and trends that would have a significant impact on the subsequent development of psychology. Leibniz was the first to show the active nature of consciousness, its dynamism and its constant variability. Leibniz's doctrine of perceptions and apperceptions will become the initial foundation on which subsequent concepts of the soul in German psychology will be built. It has also been influential in a number of other ways. First of all, the inclusion in the sphere of the mental, in addition to the conscious phenomena of preconscious perceptions, expanded the boundaries of the mental. The logical consequence of this new approach was the rehabilitation of the psyche of animals. Leibniz becomes a harbinger of the doctrine of the thresholds of consciousness, with which he will speak in the XNUMXth century. Herbart and which will become the starting point in Fechner's psychophysical measurements and experiments. From Leibniz, German psychology learned the principle of psychophysical parallelism, on the basis of which experimental psychology in Germany would be built.

LECTURE No. 5. The development of psychology in the era of enlightenment

1. England. Development of associative psychology

David Hartley (1705-1757) and Joseph Priestley are among the remarkable and brilliant figures in the history of philosophical and psychological thought in England in the XNUMXth century.

Gartley, with his views, begins the associative direction in English empirical psychology. He expresses his credo with sufficient clarity: "Everything is explained by primary sensations and the laws of association." Hartley elevated association into a universal mechanical law of all forms of mental activity, into something similar to the great Newtonian law of universal gravitation.

This means that he extended it to all spheres and levels of mental life.

Associations are established between sensations, between ideas, between movements, and also between all of the mental manifestations listed above. All these associations correspond to associated tremors of nerve fibers or associated vibrations of the medulla. The main conditions for the formation of associations are contiguity in time or space and repetition.

In his work Reflections on Man, His Structure, His Duty and Hopes, Gartley argued that the mental world of a person develops gradually as a result of the complication of primary sensory elements through their associations due to the contiguity of these elements in time and the frequency of repetition of their combinations. As for general concepts, they arise when everything accidental and insignificant falls away from a strong association, which remains unchanged under various conditions. The totality of these permanent connections is held together as a whole thanks to the word, which acts as a factor of generalization.

The installation on a strictly causal explanation of how the mental mechanism arises and works, as well as the subordination of this doctrine to the solution of social and moral problems - all this gave Gartley's scheme wide popularity. Its influence both in England itself and on the continent was exceptionally great, and it extended to various branches of humanitarian knowledge: ethics, aesthetics, logic, and pedagogy.

Joseph Priestley was a follower of Gartley's ideas. Priestley opposed the view that matter is something dead, inert and passive. In addition to extension, matter has such an inalienable property as attraction and repulsion.

Consideration of the properties of attraction and repulsion as a form of matter activity gave Priestley reason to believe that there is no need to resort to God as the source of matter motion. As for mental or spiritual phenomena, they, like repulsion and attraction, are properties of matter, but not of any kind, as was the case with Spinoza, but organized in a special way. Such an organized system of matter, the property of which is psychic abilities, Priestley considers "the nervous system, or rather the brain." Spiritual phenomena are placed by Priestley not only in dependence on the body, but also on the external world.

The instrument of communication of a person with the outside world are the sense organs, nerves and brain. Without them, neither sensations nor ideas can take place. All phenomena of the human spirit are derived by Priestley from sensations. He believed that external senses alone were enough to explain the whole variety of mental phenomena. The manifestations of the spirit are reduced by Priestley to the abilities of memory, judgment, emotions and will. All of them are different types of associations of sensations and ideas. The same goes for the most general concepts. The anatomical and physiological basis of sensations, ideas and their associations are the vibrations of the nervous and brain matter. Strong vibrations are characteristic of sensual images, weakened vibrations are characteristic of ideas. Priestley was alien to the vulgar idea of ​​the psyche, which took place in Toland. He pointed out that in no case should one consider that brain vibrations are the very sensation or idea. The vibration of brain particles is only the cause of sensations and ideas, because vibrations can occur without being accompanied by perceptions.

The complex nature of the phenomena of the spirit was put by Priestley in dependence on the volume of the vibrating system of the brain.

Priestley took an objective position on the question of the will. According to Priestley, the will cannot be understood as a voluntary decision of the spirit to act, one way or another, outside of any real external reason. Will has the same necessity as other manifestations of the spirit. The origins of "free will" must be sought outside of the will itself.

The most difficult question for all the philosophers of the described period was the question of whether animals have a soul, and if so, how does it differ from the human soul. Priestley believed that "animals possess the rudiments of all our abilities without exception, and in such a way that they differ from us only in degree, and not in kind." He attributed to them memory, emotions, will, reason, and even the ability to abstract. By endowing animals with the traits of the human psyche, Priestley took the wrong step towards anthropomorphism.

A qualitative identification of the psyche of animals and humans was allowed by many advanced naturalists and materialist philosophers of the XNUMXth-XNUMXth centuries. (Priestley, La Mettrie, Darwin, Chernyshevsky, Romanee and others). Anthropomorphism played a progressive role at that time, for it was a form of affirmation of the materialistic view of the nature and origin of the psyche of animals and humans.

With all the misconceptions, Priestley played a significant role in strengthening the natural-scientific and objective approach to the phenomena of the spirit. By putting into practice the ideas of Gartley, he contributed to the spread of the basic principle of the English associative school.

As a materialist philosopher, naturalist and brilliant experimenter in the field of chemistry, Priestley considered it possible to apply the experiment to the field of mental phenomena.

The principle of association was interpreted differently by two other English thinkers of this era - D. Berkeley (1685-1753) and D. Hume (1711-1776). Both took for the primary not the physical reality, not the vital activity of the organism, but the phenomena of consciousness. Their main argument was empiricism - the doctrine that the source of knowledge is sensory experience (formed by associations). According to Berkeley, experience is the sensations directly experienced by the subject: visual, muscular, tactile, etc.

In his work "The Experience of a New Theory of Vision" Berkeley analyzed in detail the sensory elements that make up the image of geometric space as a receptacle for all natural bodies.

Physics assumes that this Newtonian space is given objectively. According to Berkeley, it is the product of the interaction of sensations. Some sensations (for example, visual) are connected with others (for example, tactile), and people consider this whole complex of sensations to be a thing given to them independently of consciousness, while "to be means to be in perception."

This conclusion inevitably led to solipsism - to the denial of any being, except for one's own consciousness. To get out of this trap and explain why different subjects have perceptions of the same external objects, Berkeley appealed to a special divine consciousness that all people are endowed with.

In his psychological analysis of visual perception, Berkeley expressed several valuable ideas, pointing out the participation of tactile sensations in the construction of an image of three-dimensional space (with a two-dimensional image on the retina).

As for Hume, he took a different position. The question of whether physical objects exist or do not exist independently of us, he considered theoretically insoluble (such a view is called agnosticism). Meanwhile, the doctrine of causality is nothing more than a product of the belief that one impression (acknowledged as a cause) will be followed by another (accepted as an effect). In fact, there is nothing more than a strong association of representations that has arisen in the experience of the subject. And the subject himself and his soul are just successive bundles or bundles of impressions.

Hume's skepticism awakened many thinkers from their "dogmatic sleep", made them think about their beliefs concerning the soul, causality, etc. After all, these beliefs were accepted by them on faith, without critical analysis.

Hume's opinion that the concept of the subject can be reduced to a bunch of associations was directed by its critical edge against the idea of ​​the soul as a special entity granted by the Almighty, which generates and connects individual mental phenomena.

The assumption of such a spiritual, incorporeal substance was defended, in particular, by Berkeley, who rejected the material substance. According to Hume, what is called the soul is something like a stage, where sensations and ideas intertwined pass in succession.

Hume divides the variety of impressions or perceptions into two categories: perceptions (sensations) and ideas. Their differences are based on the strength and liveliness of the impression. Hume refers to the reflective impressions passions, effects, emotions. Sensations arise from unknown causes, and reflective impressions are associated with bodily pain or pleasure.

In addition to dividing impressions into perceptions and ideas, Hume divides both into simple and complex. Simple perceptions and simple ideas necessarily match, while complex ideas may not always be similar to complex perceptions. Ideas are divided into ideas of memory and ideas of imagination.

Hume saw associations as the only mechanism for linking ideas. He was far from thinking that perceptions and their connections have anything to do with the external world and the body. He openly admits that he has no idea either about the place where the change of some associations by others takes place, or about the material of which the spiritual world consists.

There is not only an object of perception, there is no subject itself, the bearer of them. Personality for Hume is nothing more than "a bundle or bundle of various perceptions, following one after another with incomprehensible speed and being in constant flux, in constant motion."

The presentation of Hume's philosophical and psychological system shows that it is permeated with the spirit of extreme subjectivism.

Having transformed Locke's external experience entirely into internal, he did not find a place in it either for the object or for the subject. Outside the kaleidoscopically changing states of consciousness, it is impossible to reach either God or matter.

Necessarily, the question arose of a way out of the impasse created by Hume. The first attempts were made by E. Condillac; in England itself, the subjective line of Berkeley-Hume is further developed in the writings of James Mill (1773-1836) and his son John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). Their views were a classic example of mechanistic introspective associative psychology.

Mill believed that sensations are the first states of consciousness; derivatives of them - ideas. The nature of consciousness is such that sensory data and the associative mechanism of their connection are already embedded in it.

Associations are not a force or a cause, as Hume understood it, but simply a way of coincidence or contact of ideas. They apply only to ideas, and do not affect sense data.

Complex ideas are formed from simple ideas through associations. If Hume put forward three laws of associations, then J. Mill has one: adjacency or closeness in time or space. Simultaneous and successive associations differ in strength, which depends on two conditions - clarity and repetition of ideas.

The result of diverse contacts (associations) of ideas is the essence of a person's mental life. There is no access to it, except for internal observation.

The mechanical view of J. Mill on the structure of consciousness was criticized by his son D. St. Mill. He opposed the position on the atomic composition of the soul and the mechanical connection of the initial elements.

Instead of a mechanical model, as not reflecting the true structure of consciousness, D. St. Mill proposed a chemical one, that is, now consciousness began to be built on the model of chemical processes.

Properties of the soul, D. St. believed. Mill, it is impossible to deduce from the properties of the elements, just as water is characterized by properties that are not inherent in either oxygen or hydrogen separately.

The new chemical approach did not in the least interfere with D. St. Mill to leave in force the basic associative principle of the connection of the elements of consciousness.

For him, the laws of association have the same force in psychology as the law of gravity has in astronomy.

The initial phenomena of consciousness, being associated, give a new mental state, the qualities of which have no similarity among the primary elements.

D. St. Mill singled out the following laws of associations: similarity, contiguity, frequency and intensity.

Subsequently, the law of intensity was replaced by the law of inseparability. All these laws were attracted by D. St. Mill to substantiate the subjective-idealistic theory, according to which matter was understood as "a constant possibility of sensation". It seemed to him that along with a limited part of the available sensations (transitory and changeable), there is always an extensive area of ​​possible (permanent) sensations, which constitute the external world for us.

Associative laws underlie the mutual transitions of available sensations into possible ones, and vice versa.

The dynamics of the states of consciousness in the phenomenological concepts of both Mills occurs out of touch with the objective world and those physiological processes that form the material basis for all mental phenomena.

English associationism of the XNUMXth century, both in its materialistic and idealistic variants, guided the search of many Western psychologists in the next two centuries.

No matter how speculative Gartley's views on the activity of the nervous system, she, in essence, was conceived by him as an organ that transmits external impulses from the sense organs through the brain to the muscles, as a reflex mechanism.

In this regard, Gartley became the recipient of Descartes' discovery of the reflex nature of behavior.

But Descartes, along with the reflex, introduced a second explanatory principle - reflection as a special activity of consciousness.

Hartley, on the other hand, outlined the prospect of an uncompromising explanation based on a single principle and those higher manifestations of mental life, which the dualist Descartes explained by the activity of an immaterial substance.

This Hartlian line later became a resource for the scientific explanation of the psyche in a new era, when the reflex principle was perceived and transformed by Sechenov and his followers.

Found its followers at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. and the line drawn by Berkeley and Hume.

Its successors were not only positivist philosophers, but also psychologists (Wundt, Titchener), who concentrated on the analysis of the elements of the subject's experience as special mental realities that cannot be deduced from anything.

2. French materialism

Philosophically, the decisive step in the orientation of psychology towards objective and experimental study was made by the French materialists of the eighteenth century. French materialism combined two lines of theoretical thought: the objective direction of Descartes in the field of physics and physiology and the sensationalist ideas of Locke.

As for Locke's empiricism and sensationalism, the works of E. Condillac (1715-1780) contributed to their transfer to French soil. These include: "Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge" (1746), which was a summary of Locke's book "An Essay on the Human Mind", and Condillac's independent work "Treatise on Sensations" (1754). Condillac proceeded from the experimental origin of knowledge; he eliminated the reflexive source of knowledge. Condillac took advantage of the image of the statue, which gradually endowed him with various sensations.

With the introduction of each new type of sensation, the mental life of the statue becomes more complicated. Touch is the most important of all senses. It acts as the teacher of all other senses.

The dominant position of touch is determined by the fact that only it teaches the other senses to relate sensations to external objects.

The human soul is a collection of modifications of sensations. Memory, imagination, judgment are varieties of different combinations of sensations. Feelings are the only source of a person's inner world.

The general concept of Condillac was ambivalent. He did not deny, as, for example, Berkeley, the existence of an objective world.

At the same time, Condillac criticized Spinoza for his doctrine of substance, tried to prove that no substance could be seen behind sensations.

Adhering to this point of view, Condillac practically remained on the introspective positions of Berkeley and Hume. The phenomenological tendencies of Condillac provoked well-deserved criticism from Diderot.

The ideas of Descartes and Condillac were further developed by the materialists of the 1709th century. J. Lametrie (1751-1713), D. Diderot (1784-1723), P. Holbach (1789-1715), C. Helvetius (1771-1757) and P. Cabanis (1808-XNUMX). They are characterized by overcoming the dualism of Descartes, Locke and Condillac both in understanding the entire universe and in understanding the inner world of man.

A significant step towards an objective analysis of the psyche of man and animals from the standpoint of mechanics was made by the founder of French materialism, the physician and naturalist J. La Mettrie. His views were formed under the influence of Descartes' physics and Locke's sensationalism.

Accepting the completely Cartesian thesis about the machine-like nature of the work of a bodily organism, La Mettrie extends the mechanical principle to the field of mental phenomena. He firmly states that man is a complex, vertically crawling machine towards enlightenment, "a living personification of incessant movement."

The driving principle of the animal and human machine is the soul, understood as the ability to feel. La Mettrie was a passionate advocate of the objective method. He begins his work "Man-Machine" by pointing out that his leaders were always only experience and observation.

An objective indicator of the course of mental processes are those bodily changes and the consequences that they cause. He believed that the sole cause of all our representations are impressions from external bodies. Perceptions, judgments, all intellectual abilities grow out of them, which are "modifications of a kind of brain screen, on which, as from a magic lantern, objects imprinted in the eye are reflected." In the doctrine of sensations, La Mettrie draws attention to the relationship between the objective and subjective aspects of the image. To emphasize the critical role of mental components in the formation of the image, La Mettrie called perception "intellectual".

Despite the mechanistic approach in explaining the psyche of animals and humans, anthropomorphic errors, La Mettrie played a prominent role in establishing a materialistic, natural-science view of the nature of mental phenomena, and therefore in determining the scientific method of the future experimental psychology.

One of the most original French thinkers was D. Diderot.

His main ideas in the field of psychology are set forth in three works: "Letter on the blind for the edification of the sighted" (1749), "Thoughts to explain nature" (1754) and "Conversation of d'Alembert and Diderot" (1769) .

In these works, Diderot argues that matter is the only substance in the universe, in man and in the animal. Dividing matter into living and non-living, he believed that the organic form of matter comes from inorganic. All matter has the ability to reflect.

At the level of organic life, this faculty appears in the form of active sensitivity.

At the level of dead matter, the property of reflection is represented as a potential sensitivity.

The whole set of mental phenomena, starting from various kinds of sensations and ending with will and self-consciousness, depends on the activity of the sense organs, nerves and brain.

The problem of sensations is the most developed part of Diderot's psychological views. In his Letter on the Blind for the Edification of the Seeing, he gives a consistently materialistic solution to the question of the nature of sensations and their interaction, rejecting the entire phenomenological "extravagant system" of Berkeley.

Another representative of French materialism, Paul Holbach, pursues the idea of ​​the natural origin of the psyche no less consistently. In his "System of Nature" there is no place for spiritual substance. Man is declared to be the most perfect part of nature. As for the spiritual principle in man, Holbach considers it as the same physical, but "considered only from a certain point of view." Due to the high bodily organization, a person is endowed with the ability to feel, think and act. The first human ability is sensation. All others flow from them. To feel means to experience the effects of external objects on the senses. Any impact of an external agent is accompanied by changes in the sense organs. These changes in the form of concussions are transmitted through the nerves to the brain.

Holbach emphasizes a certain role of needs in human life. Needs are the driving factor of our passions, will, bodily and mental needs. Holbach's position on needs as the main source of human activity is of great importance. Holbach, in his doctrine of needs, argued that external causes alone are sufficient to explain the activity of a person and his consciousness (cognitive, emotional and volitional activity). He completely rejected the traditional idea of ​​idealism about the spontaneous activity of consciousness.

For the knowledge of mental phenomena, Holbach called for turning to nature and searching for truth in it itself, attracting experience as its guide.

The idea of ​​the possibility of an objective study of psychic phenomena opened up a real path to scientific experimentation in the field of mental processes.

In addition to the assertion of natural determinism, when considering the inner world of a person, his consciousness and behavior, the French materialists took the first step towards the idea of ​​social determinism. Special merit here belongs to K. Helvetius, who showed that man is not only a product of nature, but also a product of the social environment and education. Circumstances create a person - this is the general conclusion of the philosophy and psychology of Helvetius. Both books by Helvetius "On the Mind" and "On Man" are devoted to the development and substantiation of the original thesis, which proclaimed that man is a product of education. Helvetius saw the main task in proving that the difference in mental abilities, the spiritual appearance of people is due not so much to the natural properties of a person as to upbringing. It includes the subject environment, and the circumstances of life, and social phenomena.

Helvetius came to underestimate the role of a person's physical potentials in the development of his mental abilities.

The first form of mental activity, according to Helvetius, are sensations. The faculty of sensation is considered by the philosopher to be the same natural property as density, extension, and others, but only it refers only to the "organized bodies of animals." Everything in Helvetius comes down to sensation: memory, judgment, mind, imagination, passions, desires. At the same time, the extreme sensationalism of Helvetius played a positive role in the struggle against Descartes' reduction of the mental to consciousness and thinking. Helvetius pointed out that the human soul is not only the mind, it is something more than the mind, because, in addition to the mind, there is the ability to sense. The mind is formed mainly during life; in life it can be lost. But the soul as the faculty of sensation remains. It is born and dies along with the birth and death of the organism. Therefore, thinking alone cannot express the essence of the soul. The sphere of the psychic is not limited to the area of ​​thought and consciousness, since outside it there is a large number of weak sensations that "without attracting attention to themselves, cannot evoke either consciousness or memories in us," but behind which there are physical causes.

Man in Helvetius is not a passive being, but, on the contrary, an active one. The source of his activity are passions. They enliven the spiritual world of a person and set it in motion. Passions are divided into two kinds, some of which are given by nature, others are acquired during life. They are known by external expressions and bodily changes.

As a true materialist, Helvetius, in relation to the method of cognition of the human psyche, could not but stand on the positions of an objective and experimental approach. The science of the spiritual world of man, in his opinion, should be interpreted and created in the same way as experimental physics is interpreted and created.

3. Germany. The development of German psychology in the XVIII-XIX centuries

After Leibniz, empirical tendencies began to penetrate German psychology. They became especially noticeable in the works of X. Wolf (1679-1754). In psychology, Wolf is known for dividing psychology into empirical and rational parts, which is reflected in the titles of his books: Empirical Psychology (1732) and Rational Psychology (1734). In addition, Wolf assigned the name "psychology" to science. According to Wolf, real science is ideally designed to solve three main problems:

1) derivation of facts and phenomena from essential foundations;

2) description of these facts and phenomena;

3) establishment of quantitative relations.

Since psychology cannot realize the third task, it remains to solve the first two, one of which must become the subject of rational psychology, the other - the subject of empirical psychology.

The basis of all mental manifestations is, according to Wolff, the soul. Its essence lies in the ability to represent. This leading force manifests itself in the form of cognitive and anesthetic abilities. Anetative faculties, or desire faculties, are dependent on cognitive ones. With Wolf, it all comes down to a fundamental cognitive essence, which is the cause of various manifestations, which empirical psychology should deal with. Wolf's advocacy of empiricism in psychology, for the creation of psychometry as a science similar to experimental physics, is the positive side of Wolf's teaching in psychology. But, solving the psychophysical problem in the form of psychophysiological parallelism, Wolf still separated, instead of linking, mental and physiological processes into two independent series of phenomena.

A strong tilt of German psychology towards empiricism was carried out by I. Kant (1724-1804). Kant's psychological views stemmed from his general theory of knowledge. He admitted that outside of us there are real objects - "things in themselves." However, nothing can be said about them, since "things in themselves" are unknowable. We are given only the phenomena of consciousness, which are produced by "things in themselves", but do not express their essence. What is presented to us in consciousness is a world of phenomena, completely different from the world of things. By itself, sensory experience does not carry any knowledge of objects. Reasonable categories are not derived from sensory data, they are given initially. Since the essence of things is incomprehensible, and the world can be given to man only in phenomena (“things for us”), then all sciences deal only with phenomena, and therefore can only be empirical sciences. The exceptions are mathematics and mechanics.

According to this provision, for psychology, the object of study of which is the inner world of a person, the essence of the soul is inaccessible. The subject of psychology can only be the phenomena of consciousness that are revealed through the inner sense. Thus, psychology is the science of the phenomena of consciousness, to which he attributed cognitive, emotional and volitional acts. Kant replaced the dichotomous principle of dividing the soul with a three-term classification of mental phenomena. The main method by which these types of phenomena are detected is internal observation. According to Kant, the phenomena received from the inner sense proceed in one dimension - a temporal sequence. Spatial measurement is not characteristic of the phenomena of consciousness. Therefore, psychology is deprived of the ability to apply mathematics, the use of which requires a minimum of two dimensions. Experimental techniques are completely inapplicable to a thinking subject. Hence the conclusion is drawn that psychology is never destined to become an "experimental doctrine".

Meanwhile, they believe that with his critical attitude to psychology, I. Kant stimulated the search for new approaches and means in the field of psychology at subsequent stages of its development (Yaroshevsky, Boring, Murphy, and others).

Among other provisions of Kant that influenced psychology, one should point out his doctrine of transcendental apperception as a special ability of the mind to generalize, synthesize and integrate sensory intuitions.

Kant's general doctrine of a priori conditions, or forms of sensory experience, will form the basis of Müller's theory of the specific energy of feelings, which had a significant impact on foreign psychophysiology.

Along with the ideas of Kant at the beginning of the XIX century. in Germany, the views of J. Herbart (1776-1841) are widely known and disseminated.

The influence of his philosophical and psychological-pedagogical ideas affected in different directions.

One of them concerns the definition of psychology as a special explanatory science, in which he saw the basis for the construction of scientific pedagogy.

Another position of Herbart is connected with the assertion of psychology as a field of empirical empirical knowledge.

The call for the transformation of psychology into an experimental science had no real prerequisites for Herbart, because it deprived mental processes of a physiological basis. He did not allow that the physiological approach could in any way contribute to the acquisition of scientific knowledge about the mental.

The experiment, according to Herbart, cannot take place in psychology due to its analytical nature.

All the richness of mental life is made up of static and dynamic representations endowed with spontaneous activity. All representations have temporal and power characteristics.

Changes in representations in intensity constitute the statics of the soul.

The change of ideas in time constitutes the dynamics of the soul. Any representation that does not change in quality can change in strength (or intensity), which is experienced by the subject as the clarity of representations. Each representation has a desire for self-preservation. When there is a difference in intensity, weak representations are suppressed, while strong ones remain.

The sum of all delayed, or inhibited, representations was Herbart's subject of careful calculations. Suppressed ideas take on the character of motivating forces.

From this struggle of different ideas for a place in consciousness follows Herbart's position on the thresholds of consciousness. Those ideas were considered conscious, which in their strength and tendency to self-preservation are above the threshold. Weak representations below the threshold do not give the subjective experience of clarity.

Representations that have fallen into the sphere of consciousness have the opportunity to assimilate into the general mass of clear representations, which Herbart called "apperceptive".

Of the most valuable propositions put forward by Herbart for the fate of experimental psychology are:

1) the idea of ​​using mathematics in psychology;

2) the idea of ​​the thresholds of consciousness.

Herbart's laws of representations (fusions, complications, apperceptions, etc.) will become working concepts used by psychologists in the early stages of the development of experimental psychology.

As for philosophical methodology, here he discarded the most valuable and living thing and adopted the original principles of Leibniz and Wolff.

This is what prevented him from accomplishing the task that he set himself - to build an "experimental physics of the soul."

4. Philosophical stage in the development of psychology

The philosophical stage in the development of psychology in the XNUMXth-XNUMXth centuries is the most important period in the formation of the theoretical prerequisites for the transformation of psychology into an independent science. There are two main factors contributing to the emergence and formation of psychology as a science. One of them is the penetration into psychology of the empirical approach.

The essence of the empirical principle proclaimed by Bacon was a single requirement for all specific sciences in the knowledge of the laws of nature, the study of individual facts and phenomena obtained through observation and experiment.

The transition of psychology from reasoning about the essence of the soul to the analysis of specific mental phenomena obtained on the basis of experience was the positive result of the implementation of Bacon's ideas in the field of psychology.

However, empiricism itself, which replaced the idea of ​​the soul as a special indivisible entity with the idea of ​​it as a set of mental phenomena, did not unambiguously resolve the question of the method and ways of their knowledge. The concept of experience in empirical psychology was interpreted in close connection with the question of the relationship of mental phenomena with the physical world and the material substratum. Hence, in determining the method of psychology, this or that solution of a psychophysical, and psychophysiological, problem acquired cardinal significance.

The psychophysical and psychophysiological problem was solved in the history of psychology either in the spirit of dualism (Descartes' theory of external interaction, Leibniz's theory of parallelism), or in the spirit of monism in its materialistic (Spinoza, French and Russian materialists) or in a subjective-idealistic form (Berkeley, Hume). All varieties of idealism in solving psychophysical and psychophysiological problems are characterized by the separation of the mental from the physical and physiological, by reducing the world of mental phenomena to a closed system of facts of consciousness that are not accessible to objective observation. Only internal experience, introspection, self-observation were proclaimed to be the only method of penetrating into consciousness.

In the XNUMXth century in Western European philosophy and psychology, the most common form of resolving the issue of the relationship between soul and body was the theory of parallelism, according to which the mental and physiological were considered as two independent series of phenomena, but which had a functional correspondence with each other. This way of considering the psychophysiological problem made it possible to judge mental states by the accompanying bodily changes and acted as a theoretical prerequisite for the introduction of natural science methods into psychology within the framework of idealism. It was the concept of psychophysiological parallelism that became the philosophical basis for the construction of experimental psychology in the West, the initiator of which was W. Wundt. Remaining on the positions of subjective psychology, Wundt and his followers could not recognize the objective method of decisive importance in the knowledge of the psyche. The leading role was still assigned to introspection, and the use of physiological methods was considered by them only as a means of its control. For many centuries, introspective theories of consciousness were opposed by the materialistic line in psychology, which in the XVIII-XIX centuries. were represented in England by Toland, Priestley, in France by La Mettrie, Diderot, Holbach, Helvetius, in Russia by Lomonosov, Radishchev, Herzen, Belinsky, Dobrolyubov, Chernyshevsky. Considering the mental as a natural property, materialist philosophers argued that mental phenomena can and should be studied by the same means and methods used by the natural sciences, that is, by observation and experiment. These ideas of philosophical materialism found their expression in the materialist program for the transfer of psychology to natural scientific foundations and methods, which was developed from the standpoint of reflex teaching by the great Russian scientist I. M. Sechenov.

LECTURE No. 6. The formation of psychology as an independent science

1. Natural science prerequisites for the formation of psychology

The position put forward by materialist philosophers about the possibility and necessity of studying the psyche of man and animals, relying on the methods of the natural sciences, could not be realized before production, technology, and, in connection with them, natural science had reached a certain level of development.

B. F. Lomov writes in this regard: “It is known that psychology as an independent field of science began to form later than other (if not all, then many) fundamental sciences. And this fact is not accidental. It is quite natural. Its formation could not begin before than other sciences have not reached a certain level of development, that is, before the necessary scientific base has been created, which would make it possible to single out psychological problems proper and outline ways to solve them.

The most important natural scientific basis of psychology is physiology. The fate of psychology depended on her condition.

The development of physiology was determined by the successes of physics, chemistry, mechanics, biology, the rise and flourishing of which was determined by the growing needs of production in scientific knowledge, as well as the triumph of the ideas of philosophical materialism, the victory of materialistic trends in the sciences of nature.

By the middle of the XIX century. certain special areas of physiology have developed so much that they come close to the experimental development of problems that have long been the province of psychology. Such disciplines in which the spread of the experimental method to the field of mental phenomena began include neuromuscular physiology, physiology of the sense organs, anatomy and physiology of the brain. Along with them, astronomy, physical optics and acoustics, biology, and psychiatry contributed to the penetration of the experimental method into psychology. These branches of natural science and medicine constituted the main sources from which psychology grew as an experimental and independent field of knowledge.

On the threshold of the XIX century. general physiology in developing its problems relied on experimental methods. The new facts obtained with their help concerning the work of various body systems put on the agenda the question of the functions of the nervous system, since its participation in various physiological acts was increasingly revealed. Especially rapidly began to develop neuromuscular physiology - the area in which the reflex principle put forward by Descartes, for the first time, begins to be subjected to experimental verification and the test of time.

The development of the problem of neuromuscular connections began with a critique of ideas about the presence of "animal spirits" in the nervous system and muscles. Back in the XNUMXth century, the English scientist J. Swammerdam, who was engaged in comparative anatomy and physiology, experimentally established that the volume of a muscle does not change during its contraction.

This fact called into question the existence of "animal spirits". Since that time, the old concept of "animal spirits" has been replaced by the concept of nervous excitability.

Many of Swammerdam's experiments concerned the study of a number of vital functions of the body in connection with the removal of the brain. He found that many of the organic functions, including motor ones, remain intact for a certain time after removal of the brain. This gave reason to believe that organic functions and involuntary movements are not connected with the activity of the brain. Such a view of the nature of involuntary movements meant the birth of reflex atomism. He was opposed by another point of view, according to which all voluntary and involuntary acts have a single anatomical and physiological basis. The Dutch physician G. Burgav, on the basis of numerous experiments, found that voluntary and involuntary movements are carried out by the same muscles and the nature of their contraction is also the same. In this regard, Boerhave objected to the strict division of motor acts into voluntary and involuntary. He was the first to describe the process of transition of voluntary movements into involuntary ones.

Important for the development of the reflex theory was the confirmation by Boerhaave of the guesses of the Alexandrian doctors and Galen about the sensory and motor nerves as the anatomical basis of movements, the reflex mechanism.

Until the 1736th century the principle of machine-likeness put forward by Descartes remained without a name. Only in XNUMX Astruch Montpellier introduces the term "reflex", understanding it in the physical sense as a mirror image. Since that time, the concept of a reflex has become generally accepted.

In the XVIII century. A. Haller played an important role in the development of the physiology of the reflex. Continuing the line of Swammerdam, Galler again comes to the conclusion that the participation of the brain is not necessary for muscle contraction.

Through numerous experiments, he established the autonomous nature of muscle contraction, which testified to the complete indifference of the central brain structures in the simplest elementary neuromuscular reactions. Under the influence of Haller's experiments and views, the positions of reflex atomism were further strengthened.

The English scientist R. Witt spoke out against Haller's reflex atomism. Many specific facts that Witt had at his disposal convinced him that, on the one hand, it was impossible to "squeeze the mind" into every neuromuscular act, but there was no reason to reduce movements only to machine-like ones, on the other. To resolve this contradiction, Witt introduces a new "sensory principle", as if reconciling the principle of machine-likeness with the principle of participation of the soul in neuromuscular reactions. In his opinion, all motor acts, including involuntary ones, contain sensory components. Valuable in the views of Witt, as P. K. Anokhin believed, is an attempt to "combine the whole variety of machine, automatic and voluntary reactions in one neurological principle." Witt was one of the first to pay special attention to the possibility of evoking a series of organic reflexes from one type of external object. The name of Witt is associated with the completion of the first period in the history of the reflex, since he managed to give the reflex principle "such clarity and such a physiological meaning that it had not changed until the classics of the reflex of the XNUMXth century."

In the second half of the XVIII century. the tendency to limit the action of the reflex mechanism to the level of the spinal cord becomes more and more noticeable. It was especially pronounced in P. Cabanis and F. Elein. The latter openly called on physiologists to remove the problem of volitional, conscious acts from the circle of questions that physiology should deal with. After Blaine, the official distinction between spinal physiology and psychology begins, to which the brain was completely entrusted as an organ of a thinking substance, its conscious and arbitrary acts.

Blaine's view was not shared by everyone. She was opposed by another tendency, which expressed the desire to extend the reflex mechanism to all levels of neuro-cerebral activity, which meant the transfer of its action to the field of mental phenomena. Of the philosophers with such views, La Mettrie spoke, and of the naturalists, the Czech physiologist I. Prochazka. Both of them developed the idea of ​​the suitability of the reflex principle for the analysis of mental phenomena. Prochazka believed that sensory elements, whether they are conscious or not, are necessarily included in the structure of the reflex act. They are the "compass of life" for the body, allowing it to allocate beneficial and harmful effects for it. Thus, the reflex mechanism has a biological meaning for the organism, since it serves as an instrument of adaptation to the environment. Prochazka is the author of the classical formulation of the reflex, which was accepted by all physiologists of the XNUMXth century. The anatomical basis for the reflex scheme of Prochazka was independently established by the English physiologist C. Belli and the French scientist F. Magendie. Experimentally, they managed to determine which of the nerves has a sensitive function, and which - motor. The discovery of sensory and motor nerves gave a powerful impetus to the further development of reflex teaching. What was new for the reflex theory was Bell's discovery of the regulatory function of muscular sensation in the construction of various movements. This new discovery is expounded by Bell in his "neural circle" theory.

The problem of the relationship between consciousness and matter, mental and physical, soul and body has been of interest to philosophers, psychologists and natural scientists since ancient times. When solving it, the question of the organ of the soul or its substrate and carrier acquired particular importance, since the discovery of such a substrate would inevitably lead to the recognition of the dependence of mental phenomena on a bodily foundation.

On the border of the XVIII-XIX centuries. F. Gall's phrenological system is gaining particular popularity, according to which each psychological ability corresponds to a certain part of the brain, which is an independent organ of this ability. Gall singled out 37 abilities of the soul, each of which has its own place in the "brain map". Affective abilities, and there are 21 of them, were placed in different parts of the hindbrain, and intellectual abilities (there are 16 of them) - in different areas of the forebrain. The level of development of each ability is determined by the volume of the medulla of the area that is responsible for this or that ability. This is reflected in the cranial topology, in the ratio of protrusions and depressions on the skull of the brain, according to which it was proposed to determine the individual structure of mental abilities and the measure of their development.

In a number of respects, Gall's phrenology did not stand up to scrutiny. Gall's mistake was that he tried to mechanically impose a system of mental abilities on the morphological structure of the brain. For all its inconsistency, phrenology also played a positive role in the sense that it established the belonging of mental functions to a material organ, namely, the brain, and also formed and affirmed the idea of ​​a specific cerebral localization. This is all the more important to note that at that time this idea was opposed by the point of view, preserved from ancient times, according to which individual mental abilities are localized in different parts of the body. So, the question of the connection between mental abilities and the brain remained open and required its scientific, or rather, experimental, resolution.

The first step towards experimental substantiation of the problem of localization of mental functions was carried out by the French anatomist and physiologist J. Flourens, known in the history of physiology as the father of the extirpation method. Having carried out numerous experiments on the removal and disruption of individual brain sections in birds and chickens, he came to the conclusion that with respect to various mental abilities, the brain is equipotential, that is, all its sections are equally involved in any of the mental functions. Flourance experimentally confirmed what was put forward in the second half of the XNUMXth century. Haller the position that the brain is not a collection of autonomous organs responsible for any one of the many mental abilities, but a single homogeneous whole that does not have a clearly defined specialization.

At that time, scientists did not yet know that in the lower vertebrates with which J. Flurance dealt, the cerebral cortex is almost not differentiated, and mental abilities are not all represented in the cortex. That is why, with the destruction of various parts of the brain in lower vertebrates, approximately the same restoration of disturbed mental functions occurs.

Flourance's general conclusions were based on the fact that when various parts of the brain were removed, any impaired mental functions were restored over time.

Flourance's experimental work forced us to look at the brain as a single dynamic system, drew the attention of scientists to the compensatory and vicarious functions of the brain. For psychology, the significance of Flurence's research lies in the fact that for the first time they experimentally revealed the dependent connection of mental phenomena with the brain. Modern neuropsychology should be very grateful to Flurence as the founder of the experimental direction in this area.

Subsequent clinical and experimental studies again bring to the fore the idea of ​​brain differentiation and specialization.

In 1861, P. Brokaya, on the basis of clinical observations, discovered the speech center in the brain. He found that damage to the posterior third of the inferior frontal gyrus of the brain is associated with impaired articulated speech. This fact served as the basis for Brock's generalizing conclusion, the meaning of which was that each of the intellectual functions has a strictly limited place in the brain. In support of this point of view, in a short time after Broca's discovery, "visual memory centers" (A. Bastian, 1869), "writing centers" (3. Exner, 1861), "concept centers" (J. Charcot 1887) were found in the brain and etc.

Soon the positions of the localization theory of the brain were strengthened thanks to the experimental studies of Fritsch and Gitzig in 1870. Using the method of electrical stimulation of certain parts of the brain in rabbits and dogs, they managed to establish the presence of motor centers in the cerebral cortex. Their subsequent research and the experiments of other physiologists made it possible to draw up a whole map of the motor centers.

With the invention of the microscope, histological studies of brain structures were widely developed, thanks to which it became known about the cellular structure of the brain substrate. T. Meinert (1867, 1868) showed that the cortical layer of the brain consists of a huge variety of cells, each of which, in his opinion, has its own mental function.

In the same period, K. Golgi put forward a hypothesis about the network-like structure of the nervous system. The brain began to be presented as a complex aggregate, consisting of a large mass of cells connected by nerve fibers.

The new idea of ​​the structure of the brain coincided with the traditional scheme of the structure and work of consciousness from the point of view of associative psychology.

The discovered similarity in the structure of the brain and consciousness contributed to the assertion of the idea of ​​a direct relation of the mental elements of consciousness with the morphological structures of the brain.

But along with studies confirming the high differentiation of the brain in relation to various mental functions, there were other studies, the resulting conclusions from which were directly opposite and spoke in favor of brain equipotentiality.

We are talking about Goltz's experiments, which confirmed the originally put forward ideas of Flurence. At the beginning of the XNUMXth century, K. Lashley came to similar results and conclusions when he studied the characteristics of changes in skills in rats depending on the destruction of certain parts of the brain.

These conclusions were that the degree of skill impairment depends mainly on the mass of the removed brain and that different parts of it are equally relevant to the formation and restoration of various skills as complex forms of behavior.

Representatives of a holistic approach to the brain also found an analogy, but in other psychological ideas about the soul as a single and indecomposable entity.

There are again attempts to directly correlate the psychological and anatomical picture of the work of consciousness, on the one hand, and the brain, on the other.

In solving the problem of localization of mental functions, two opposite directions are distinguished - analytical and synthetic.

Representatives of the first advocated attributing individual mental functions to certain brain structures, supporters of the other, on the contrary, considered various mental phenomena as a function of the entire brain.

The common mistake of both directions was that mental functions were projected directly onto the brain, bypassing the functional level of analysis of its work, while the connection between the mental and the structure of the brain is always mediated by physiological activity.

Psychomorphologism in solving the problem of the brain mechanisms of mental activity was overcome only after the work of our Russian scientists Sechenov, Bekhterev and Pavlov.

After Sechenov, Bekhterev advanced knowledge in the field of anatomy and physiology of the brain to such an extent that his contemporaries in Russia and abroad spoke of him as a scientist, more and better than whom no one knew the structure and functions of the brain.

A similar assessment can be equally attributed to Pavlov, whose teaching on the dynamic localization of brain centers played a decisive role in understanding the anatomical and physiological mechanisms of mental phenomena.

Thanks to Sechenov, Bekhterev, Pavlov and their predecessors in Europe, it was firmly established that the brain is an organ of the psyche, and therefore all reasoning about mental phenomena without connection with the brain, of which they are a function, became fruitless mysticism.

Anatomical and physiological studies of the brain, as well as experiments in neuromuscular and sensory physiology, were an important condition for the transfer of speculative psychology to the natural sciences, a prerequisite for an objective study of the psyche of animals and humans.

The teachings of the English naturalist Charles Darwin (1800-1882) revolutionized the entire system of biological and psychological thinking. His work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859) is called one of the most important in the history of Western civilization. The book outlined a new theory of the development of the animal world. The principle of development itself has guided reflections on nature, society and man (including the soul) since ancient times. With Darwin, this principle was embodied in a majestic teaching, rooted in the Mont Blanc of Facts.

This teaching refuted the biblical dogma that all kinds of living beings were once and for all created by God. Church attacks on Darwin reached their peak after the publication of his work The Descent of Man (1870), from which it followed that man was not created in the image and likeness of God, but comes from a herd of monkeys.

Darwin's teaching marked a sharp turn from one form of determinism to another. The new determinism was biological (mechano-determinism and biodeterminism).

Darwin pointed to natural selection as a factor in the survival of organisms in a constantly threatening environment. In the course of evolution, only those who were able to adapt most effectively survive.

The basic factor in this explanatory scheme is the factor of heredity. Darwin gave an accurate scientific explanation of expediency without resorting to the concept of innate purpose. All these innovations revolutionized not only biology, but also psychology.

Since natural selection cuts off everything that is not necessary for life, it would also destroy mental functions if they did not contribute to adaptation. This prompted us to consider the psyche as an element of the organism's adaptation to the environment. The psyche could no longer be seen as an isolated "island of the spirit." Instead of a separate organism, the relationship "organism - environment" becomes decisive for psychology. This gave rise to a new systemic style of thinking, which later led to the conclusion that the subject of psychology should not be the consciousness of the individual, but his behavior in the external environment that changes the organism and the mental makeup of the individual.

The concept of individual variation is an indispensable part of Darwin's evolutionary theory. These include variations in the field of the psyche. This gave a powerful impetus to the development of a new direction in psychology, the subject of which was the study of individual differences between people, due to the laws of heredity.

This direction, initiated by Darwin's cousin Francis Galton, has become a branch of differential psychology.

Darwinism stimulated the study of the psyche in the animal world, becoming the basis of another new direction in science - zoopsychology.

Along with Darwin and simultaneously with him, the ideas of a new evolutionary biology were developed by the English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903).

Following the tradition that dominated England, he was an adherent of associationism. But he underwent a significant transformation in Spencer's Fundamentals of Psychology (1855). In it, life was defined as "the continuous adaptation of internal relations to external ones." What happens inside the organism can be understood only in the system of its relations to the external environment. Relationships are nothing but adjustments. From this point of view, associations must also be understood as links between the elements of mental life.

Various assumptions were made about the processes inside the body, the projection of which is the connection between mental phenomena. The principle of adaptation demanded to “leave” the isolated organism and look for the “root” of associations in what is happening in the external world, to which the organism adapts every day.

Adaptation means not only adapting to new situations of the sense organs as sources of information about what is happening outside. A new type of associations was asserted - between internal mental images and muscular actions realizing the adaptation of the whole organism.

Here a sharp turn took place in the movement of psychological thought. From the "field of consciousness" she rushed into the "field of behavior."

From now on, not physics and chemistry, as before, but biology becomes the guiding star in the development of the associative doctrine, which takes on a new look in behaviorism and reflexology.

The main achievements in the development of these methods in relation to psychology are associated with the work of F. Galton (1822-1911).

Deeply impressed by the ideas of his cousin Darwin, he gave decisive importance not to the factor of adaptation of an individual organism to the environment, but to the factor of heredity, according to which the adaptation of a species is achieved through genetically determined variations in the individual forms that form this species. Based on this postulate, Galton became a pioneer in the development of behavioral genetics.

The study of individual differences has been widely developed. These differences constantly made themselves felt in experiments to determine the thresholds of sensitivity, reaction time, the dynamics of associations and other mental phenomena. In the book "Hereditary Genius" (1869), he argued that outstanding abilities are inherited. Using available experimental psychological methods, adding to them those invented by himself, he put them at the service of the study of individual variations. This applied to both bodily and mental signs. The latter were considered no less dependent on genetic determinants than, say, eye color.

In his laboratory, anyone could, for a small fee, determine their physical and mental abilities, between which, according to Galton, there are correlations. About 9000 people passed through this anthropological laboratory. But Galton had a bigger plan in mind. He expected to cover the entire population of England in order to determine the level of the country's mental resources.

He designated his tests with the word "test", which is widely included in the psychological lexicon. Galton pioneered the transformation of experimental psychology into a differential psychology that studies the differences between individuals and groups of people. The merit of Galton was the in-depth development of variational statistics, which changed the face of psychology as a science that makes extensive use of quantitative methods.

Galton was the first to make individual differences between people a special subject of study; created measurement procedures and an initial statistical apparatus for evaluating differences; collected a large amount of experimental material concerning different levels in the structure of individuality - somatic, physiological, psychological; he even raised the question of the origin of individual characteristics and tried to solve it.

In 1900, in the book "On the Psychology of Individual Differences (Ideas for Differential Psychology)," V. Stern first introduced the term "differential psychology" to designate a new field that had spun off from the mother science - general psychology. The methodological and experimental methodological approaches formulated by Stern, the basic concepts, and many statistical techniques, despite the past 100 years, are still true today.

In 1869 Galton's book Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into its Laws and Consequences was published. In this book, he tried to solve the problem of the heritability of giftedness by analyzing the pedigrees of prominent figures in science, jurisprudence, sports, military affairs, art, "statesmen" using the genealogical method of psychogenetics.

Having singled out three degrees of talent and at the same time using the examination marks received by those entering the Royal Military College, he applied to this material the then-existing law of Quetelet (1796-1874) - "the law of deviation from averages." By analogy with the distribution of people's height, he suggested "the existence of some constant average level of mental abilities, the deviation from which, both towards genius and towards idiocy, must follow the law that governs the deviation from all kinds of averages." A Gaussian distribution of people according to "intellectual talents" is outlined.

In the same decades, psychological diagnostics appeared and began to develop. It was started, again, by Galton, who, studying the heredity of talent, naturally came to the need to measure the mental qualities of people - from sensory functions to types of mental activity and character.

The development of knowledge about mental illness and their causes also played an important role in the formation of psychology as a science. The first scientific attempts to explain mental illness are noted in the VI century. BC e. The most common during this period was the brain theory of mental illness. Such curative indications as hunger, beating, brutal violence, chains, etc. were proposed as measures of cure. The listed forms of therapy would become generally accepted norms for treating the mentally ill in Western Europe until the XNUMXth century.

In the medieval period, the natural scientific explanation of mental illness is completely replaced by a mystical idea of ​​their causes. Mental illnesses are beginning to be seen as the result of a settlement in the soul of the devil, as a result of malicious witchcraft. To isolate the mentally ill, special institutions began to be established, similar to prisons, where the sick were flogged with rods, stabbed with needles, swords in order to expel the settled devil from the soul and free the person from witchcraft. From the XV-XVI centuries. The Church is at the head of mass reprisals against those who gave their souls to the devil. Special bulls were published indicating the methods for recognizing and exterminating the possessed.

But even when the fires of the Inquisition were burning all over Europe, there were sound voices of protest. Suffice it to mention the name of the German physician of the XNUMXth century I. Weier, who called for replacing the tribunal of the Inquisition with the treatment of the sick, firmly believing in the ancient precepts: in a healthy body there is a healthy spirit, and, therefore, by strengthening the body, one can also heal the soul. Even then, Plater argued that the brain is an instrument of thought and any damage to it leads to mental perversions. By healing the brain, mental disorders can also be eliminated.

In the XNUMXth century psychiatry is strongly influenced by the materialistic tendencies of Descartes and Bacon. Lapua associated mental illness with a disorder of the nervous system, believing that hysterical seizures are based on the processes of mechanical compression and expansion of the meninges.

In the XVIII century. France becomes the center of advanced and scientific psychiatry. Philippe Pinel is a reformer of French psychiatry. Pinel's worldview took shape under the direct influence of the French materialists of the XNUMXth century. The basic principles of clinical psychiatry put forward by him boiled down to the following: the destruction of prison regimes, the humanization of measures to calm and pacify patients, the removal of iron chains and handcuffs from them, the creation of comfortable hospitals, the transformation of psychiatry into an experimental science modeled on other areas of natural science, the introduction of objective methods for studying the causes of mental diseases.

He undertook the first mass examination of 200 patients, which gave him the opportunity to build a new classification of mental illness. This classification included five main types of mental disorders: mania, mania without delirium, melancholy, dementia and idiocy. The classification was based on the psychological principle. Among the main causes of mental disorders, he indicated two types of them - these are predisposing causes, to which Pinel attributed hereditary factors and individual predispositions to psychoses, and producing causes, including physical injuries and organic disorders of the brain, on the one hand, and moral upheavals - with another. The business started by Pinel found its successors, both in France itself and abroad. In England, Conolly becomes a true reformer of psychiatry. In the field of practical psychiatry, he went even further than Pinel. The name of D. Konolzh is associated with the beginning of a widespread movement against any constraint of the mentally ill. If Pinel, having removed the chains and handcuffs from the mentally ill, left straitjackets on them, then Conolly destroyed them too. In Belgium, during the same period, J. Ghislain occupied the leading positions in the organization of psychiatric affairs.

Unlike France, England and Belgium, the development of psychiatry in Germany at the end of the XNUMXth and the first half of the XNUMXth centuries. characterized by opposite tendencies. Psychiatry in this country acted as an appendage of philosophy. Theoretical psychiatry was developed by philosophers who were far from practical psychiatry, and therefore it was of a speculative nature. The dominant position was occupied by views according to which mental illnesses were understood as the own creations of the spirit, as a result of an evil inclination in the soul. To tame evil will, supporters of the idealistic wing in the science of mental illness (Heinroth, Ideler, Beneke, and others) proposed the use of mechanical, pain, nausea, and water therapy, which was the most sophisticated methods of torturing mentally ill people.

In Germany, representatives of the somatic direction in German psychiatry opposed such a tremendous therapy. Among them, the famous German physician G. Griesinger stood out. He is credited with translating national psychiatry from the realm of speculative schemes into the natural sciences. He believed that pathological processes in the brain lie at the basis of any mental illness. His work On Psychic Reflex Acts (1843) anticipated Sechenov's reflex teaching and laid the first foundations for the reflex trend in psychiatry.

In the second half of the XNUMXth century, under the influence of Darwin's evolutionary ideas within the somatic direction in European psychiatry, the role of the hereditary factor in psychopathogenesis began to be unjustifiably overestimated.

The most powerful influence on European psychiatry was the theory of degeneration by the French psychiatrist B. Morel. In his "Treatise on Degeneracy" (1857) he developed the position of a constant increase in morbid properties when they are passed from one generation to another.

The concept of degeneration received support in other countries, especially in Germany (Schüle, Ebing, and others).

In French psychiatry of the second half of the XNUMXth century. more advanced positions were occupied by the Nancy school and the school of J. Charcot, known as the "School of the Salpêtrière". In both of them, a somatic approach to mental illness was developed, the practice of humane treatment of patients was actively introduced, and the problems of hypnosis and suggestion were intensively developed. It is with these two scientific schools that the emergence of experimental psychology in France is connected.

The first experiments on suggestion were carried out at the end of the XNUMXth century. Mesmer, who later came up with the theory of animal magnetism. Somewhat later it was discovered that artificial sleep can be induced by magnetic passes. The English physician D. Brad, on the basis of numerous experiments, came to the conclusion that the leading role in the emergence of artificial or hypnotic sleep is played not by magnetic passes per se, but by fatigue of the sense organs during prolonged exposure to them.

French psychiatrists adhered to a different understanding of hypnosis. The representative of the Nancy school, P. Liebeault, who wrote the book The Treatment by Suggestion and Its Mechanism (1891), associated the phenomenon of hypnosis with the property of suggestibility, which characterizes all people without exception, only to varying degrees. Susceptibility to hypnosis began to be regarded in the Charcot school as a sign of a predisposition to hysterical illness. Charcot has priority in identifying the main forms of neurosis - hysteria, neurasthenia and psychasthenia, the occurrence of which was associated with organic and functional disorders of the nervous system and brain. In general, the scientific face of Charcot's psychiatric school was determined by comparative studies of the mental norm and pathology, natural science orientation in the theory and methods of research and treatment of patients, systematic development of the problems of hypnosis and suggestion, which acted both as a method of treatment and as a subject of scientific analysis. The traditions of the Salpêtrière school determined the nature and direction of the first experimental research in psychology. The closest students and followers of Charcot - Ribot, Dumas, Binet, Janet, and others - were the initiators and organizers of experimental psychology in France.

The fate of experimental psychology in France turned out to be similar to the history of the emergence of experimental psychology in Russia. As in France, the pioneers of Russian experimental psychology were mainly neuropathologists and psychiatrists.

The beginning of the formation of scientific psychiatry in Russia dates back to the second half of the 1827th century. I. M. Balinsky (1902-1857) was the founder of Russian psychiatry. His merit lies in the fact that by his tireless activity he created the organizational prerequisites for the construction of scientific psychiatry in Russia. Balinsky opened the first department in Russia (1867) and a psychiatric clinic (XNUMX) in St. Petersburg. In their foundation, Balinsky saw a real foundation for the development of a new science. He retired early, leaving a wide field of activity for young scientists. Therefore, scientific work in the psychiatric centers he created is developed in its entirety by his students, headed by IP Merzheevsky.

The main cycle of research conducted by Merzheevsky was devoted to the study of mental illness in connection with pathological changes in the brain and in the body as a whole. Under the leadership of Merzheevsky, studies were carried out in a psychiatric clinic to study the effect of various harmful effects on the nervous system. The specific scope of the research included studying the effect of starvation, phosphorus poisoning, removal of the thyroid gland and other factors that cause disturbances in the activity of the nervous system. Experimental anatomical and physiological studies of the brain were carried out. As a result of research work in the Merzheevsky clinic, about 30 dissertations were prepared, more than 150 scientific papers were published. More than 50 qualified psychiatrists have graduated from the walls of the first psychiatric center in Russia. All this was a great initial contribution to the development of domestic psychiatry.

The experience of Balinsky and Merzheevsky served as a model and example for the development of psychiatric science in other cities of Russia.

New psychiatric centers are opening in Kazan, Moscow, Kharkov, Kyiv. The first psychological laboratories were also organized at these centers. The Department of Psychiatry was opened at Kazan University, which was headed by V. M. Bekhterev from the end of 1885. In 1886, he organized the first psychophysiological laboratory here. Having moved to St. Petersburg and replacing Merzheevsky, who had retired there, Bekhterev opened a second psychological laboratory at the Department of Psychiatry of the Military Medical Academy (1894). The scientific activity of V. M. Bekhterev was distinguished by its versatility. His contribution to various fields - anatomy and physiology of the brain, neuropathology, psychiatry, psychology - can hardly be overestimated. In all these areas, Bekhterev was an exponent of advanced ideas, a follower of the teachings of Sechenov, and a supporter of an objective approach to the study of neuropsychic activity. Bekhterev’s emergence as a world-famous scientist took place after he opened his own laboratory, and especially Wundt’s laboratory in Leipzig (1879), therefore, a more complete description of his scientific views and their assessment should be attributed chronologically to the period associated with the development of psychology as an independent science. Bekhterev, as a representative of medicine and natural science, acted after Sechenov not only as the ideological inspirer of natural science and experimental psychology, but also as its direct organizer in Russia.

The foundation of the Moscow Psychiatric School was laid by A. Kozhevnikov, who in 1837 organized a psychiatric clinic with private donations. S. S. Korsakov, whose name is associated with many important milestones in both psychiatry and psychology, became its leader. Korsakov is the leader of the national movement against any constraint on the mentally ill. His scientific work on polyneurotic psychosis, which he reported on in 1889 at the International Medical Congress, brought Korsakov worldwide recognition. The significance of this work was to substantiate the dependence of pathopsychological phenomena on damage to the brain and nervous system in general. Korsakov, like Bekhterev, is credited with establishing materialistic positions in psychiatry and psychology, an objective approach to the study of the psyche and deviations in it, and in the practical implementation of measures to transform psychology into an experimental science. On his initiative, in 1895, another psychological laboratory in Russia was created in Moscow.

A significant contribution to the development of Russian psychiatry, as well as to the preparation and foundation of Russian experimental psychology, was made by the formed psychiatric centers in Kyiv, Kharkov, Yuriev, headed by P. I. Kovalevsky, I. A. Sikorsky, V. F. Chizh - prominent Russian scientists , neurologists and psychiatrists.

From a brief review of the history of psychiatry, it can be seen that its development took place in a long confrontation between somatic and spiritualistic directions, a development that, according to Yu. V. Kannabikh, was a form of struggle between two worldviews - materialism and idealism, a struggle between two approaches to understanding the causes of mental illness , two orientations in the methods of their study and treatment. All the best achievements in the field of psychiatry were associated with the natural science direction, which asserted deterministic knowledge about the nature of mental disorders. It was the psychosomatic, psychoneurological line in psychiatry that contributed to the transfer of the idea of ​​natural determinism to the field of psychology, the establishment in it of an objective approach to the study of the psyche in its normal and diseased state. The merit of leading natural scientists, neuropathologists and psychiatrists is determined not only by their formation of the theoretical prerequisites for the natural-scientific transformation of psychology, but also by their direct participation in its renewal, especially in Russia and France.

2. The emergence of the first experimental sections of psychology

Before objective methods for studying holistic behavior were invented, scientific psychological thought achieved great success in the experimental analysis of the activity of the sense organs.

These successes were associated with the discovery of a regular, mathematically calculable relationship between objective physical stimuli and the mental effects they produce - sensations. It was this direction that played a decisive role in the transformation of psychology into an independent experimental science.

A researcher of the sense organs, the physiologist Ernst Weber (1795-1878), came to new discoveries. He wondered how much to change the strength of stimulation, so that the subject catches a subtle difference in sensation. So the emphasis has been shifted. Experiments and mathematical calculations became the source of a current that has flowed into modern science under the name of psychophysics. Psychophysics began with ideas about local mental phenomena. But it received a huge methodological and methodological resonance in the entire corpus of psychological knowledge. An experiment, a number, a measure were introduced into it. The table of logarithms turned out to be applicable to the phenomena of mental life, the behavior of the subject.

The breakthrough from psychophysiology to psychophysics was also significant in that it separated the principle of causality from the principle of regularity. Psychophysics has proved that in psychology, even in the absence of knowledge about the bodily substratum, the laws that govern its phenomena can be strictly empirically discovered.

In the second half of the XIX century. individual questions and problems lying on the border of physiology and psychology become the subject of special and systematic research, which are then isolated and formalized into relatively independent scientific areas. One of the first such areas was psychophysics, created by the German physicist, physiologist and philosopher G. Fechner (1801-1887).

Psychophysics was conceived by Fechner as the science of the universal connection between the physical and spiritual worlds. Based on the philosophy of Schilling, Fechner came up with the doctrine of the identity of the mental and physical, put forward the principle of the universal animation of nature. According to Fechner, a special science should be created, which, with the help of experiment and mathematics, could prove the philosophical concept put forward by him. Such a science was psychophysics, which he defined as an exact doctrine of the functional relationship between the body and the soul.

According to Fechner, psychophysics should be engaged in an experimental mathematical study of various mental processes (sensations, perceptions, feelings, attention, etc.) in their relation, on the one hand, to physical factors, which should be the subject of external psychophysics, on the other hand, in relation to the anatomical and physiological foundations, which should have been the subject of internal psychophysics.

But Fechner had to limit his own research only to the field of external psychophysics, since at that time the most accessible for experimental and mathematical substantiation were questions related to the relationship of mental phenomena with external physical conditions. A special role here was played by E. Weber's research on the study of touch and sensitivity thresholds. It was Weber's experiments that showed that there is a certain relationship between the physical and the mental, in particular between irritation and sensation, and that the discovered relationships between them are amenable to experimental measurement. Of considerable importance for determining the specifics of the new science were the ideas of Herbart, in particular his doctrine of the thresholds of consciousness and the rationale for the possibility of using mathematics in psychology.

In contrast to Herbart, in whom the concept of intensity was attributed to a spiritual entity torn off from the external world, Fechner applied this concept to sensations, placing the latter in connection with external stimuli.

Psychophysics became the science of the connection between stimuli and sensations. The provisions established by Fechner on the measurability of psychophysical relations and on the possibility of applying a mathematical law to them brought to the fore the problem of developing special methods of psychophysical measurement and methods of mathematical analysis and description of psychophysical relations. The general program for the construction of psychophysics included three main tasks:

1) to establish what law the relations of the mental and physical world obey, using the example of the connection of irritations and sensations;

2) give a mathematical formulation of this law;

3) to develop psychophysical measurement methods.

For the first time, Fechner came up with the idea of ​​creating a new experimental mathematical science - psychophysics - in 1851. In the following years, he was busy with the practical implementation of his psychophysical program. In 1860, G. Fechner's main work "Elements of Psychophysics" was published. The results of numerous experiments and measurements related to the study of elementary aesthetic feelings were summarized and summarized by him in the book "Introduction to Aesthetics" (1876). The appearance of this work by Fechner marked the discovery of another precise field of knowledge - experimental aesthetics. The methods he developed for studying aesthetic feelings turned out to be suitable for psychology and were soon used by W. Wundt to study elementary emotions.

One of his essential merits is the establishment by him of the basic psychophysical law. The starting material for its derivation was Weber's experiments on the determination of thresholds.

Fechner was convinced that he had found an unshakable law expressing the relationship between the physical and spiritual worlds.

Another line of criticism has been related to the question of the boundaries and limits of the Weber-Fechner law. G. Aubert (1865) and G. Helmholtz (1867) found that deviations from the basic psychophysical law occur in the field of vision, and the ratio of the difference is preserved only at medium degrees of light intensity, while at low and strong brightnesses this ratio increases. Similar deviations from the basic psychophysical law were found in other types of sensitivity. Most of all, Fechner's formula was opposed by Delbeuf, who wrote in 1873 the book "Etudes of Psychophysics", where he proposed either a complete replacement of the formula, or its other interpretation.

But, as subsequent events showed, this criticism did not so much undermine psychophysics as stimulated its subsequent development. Despite the most diverse approaches that take place in modern psychophysics, it remains one of the most fundamental and developed areas in general and experimental psychology.

In close connection with the basic psychophysical law is Fechner's doctrine of thresholds. Unlike Herbart, Fechner applied the concept of the threshold not to consciousness as a whole, but only to sensations. The concept of "threshold of consciousness" was replaced by the concept of "threshold of sensations".

Along with the thresholds of sensations, Fechner introduces the concept of extensive thresholds, to which he attributed the thresholds of time and space. In his experiments, Fechner used three main methods: the method of minimal changes, the method of average errors, and the method of true and false cases. Using this principle, Weber designed his famous compass (1830), with the help of which experiments were carried out to measure skin spatial thresholds. The method of astronomers, tested by Weber, was brought to a greater perfection in procedural and mathematical terms by Fechner. He also called it "the method of minimal changes."

The method of minimal changes is the simplest and most accurate in determining the absolute and difference thresholds. It is sometimes called direct, because in its use one passes directly from one intensity to another and determines the amount at which there is a subtle sensation or a subtle difference between two of them. The method of minimal changes is also convenient in the sense that it does not require too many experiments to determine the threshold value with a certain accuracy. Along with the advantages of the method of minimal changes, certain disadvantages are also inherent, which were discovered during the very first measurements. These initial experiments showed that the threshold values ​​obtained using this method are subject to large fluctuations both in different subjects and in the same subject, depending on various uncontrolled external and internal factors. The threshold value has, as it were, a certain "extensibility", or a certain range within which the threshold fluctuates. G. Fechner believed that the thresholds themselves are constant values, and all deviations from their absolute value were evaluated as observation errors. To eliminate these errors and remove the influence of various factors on the threshold value, G. Fechner develops two other methods - the method of average errors, as well as the method of true and false cases.

The method of mean errors was transferred to psychophysics from astronomy and physics to study the eye and skin thresholds. Fechner gave this method a mathematically and methodologically complete form. The same was done by him with respect to the method of true and false cases.

With the development of psychophysical methods, Fechner made a huge contribution to the history of psychology, which lies in the fact that he laid the foundation for mathematical and experimental psychology.

G. Helmholtz (1821-1894) was the central figure in creating the foundations on which psychology was built as a science with its own subject. His versatile genius transformed many natural sciences, including the nature of the psyche. They discovered the law of conservation of energy.

Having taken up such a bodily device as a sense organ, Helmholtz took as an explanatory principle not an energy (molecular), but anatomical principle. Experimental work confronted Helmholtz with the need to introduce new causal factors.

The source of the mental (visual) image was an external object, in the most distinct vision of which, the problem solved by the eye consisted.

It turned out that the cause of the psychic effect was hidden not in the structure of the organism, but outside it.

In the zone of scientific analysis, phenomena appeared that spoke of a special form of causality: not physical and not physiological-anatomical, but mental. There was a separation of the psyche and consciousness. At a time when Fechner was completely absorbed in psychophysical measurements, a large group of physiologists came close to the experimental development of problems in the psychophysiology of the sense organs. His influence in the development of psychophysiology was decisive.

Helmholtz directs his main efforts to the experimental study of mental phenomena in their connection with the anatomy and physiology of the sense organs.

The central place in Helmholtz's experimental studies is occupied by questions of the psychophysiology of vision and hearing. Helmholtz began studying the physiology of vision almost immediately after his well-known experiments on measuring the speed of nerve excitation conduction (1851). As early as 1856, the first volume of his "Physiological Optics" was published. The subsequent second and third volumes appear in 1860 and 1866, respectively. From the point of view of psychology, the last two volumes are of greatest interest, since the second volume sets out in great detail his three-component theory of color vision, and the third contains the well-known general empirical theory of vision, the doctrine of "unconscious output" and the theory of "sensations of innervation." Since 1856, Helmholtz also began to study physiological acoustics. In 1863, he published a generalizing work, in which he gives extensive material on the experimental study of the tonal composition of vowels, timbre, combination tones, puts forward the doctrine of dissonance and consonance, and sets out the resonant theory of hearing.

Based on numerous experiments on the study of simple and complex tones, Helmholtz comes to the conclusion about the resonant nature of the sound and auditory apparatus in humans.

The results of his research not only fixed a new level of knowledge, but also gave a strong impetus to the development of many new theoretical and experimental studies in the field of hearing psychophysiology.

Helmholtz's experiments in the field of psychophysiology of vision have an even greater scientific contribution and effect of stimulating further research work. He put forward a number of general theories - a three-component theory of color vision, a genetic theory of visual perception of space and the associated doctrine of "unconscious inference", the doctrine of "sensations of innervation". In these theories, the philosophical and methodological positions of Helmholtz were most clearly manifested.

A significant part of Helmholtz's research was related to the study of color vision.

An experimental study of the phenomena of contrast, the eye, illusions, the mechanisms of binocular vision, the perception of direction and depth led Helmholtz to the conclusion that all of the above visual functions are not innate properties of the eye, but products of experience and exercises, the effects of repeated repetition of sensorimotor connections and associations formed under various subjective and objective conditions of spatial vision.

Helmholtz's doctrine of "unconscious inference" also followed from the general empirical theory of vision.

His scientific contribution to the field of experimental psychophysiology is great and multifaceted.

He stands at the origins of modern experimental psychology. He considered psychology as a science that should be built entirely on the basis of experimental and mathematical methods.

He was inclined to reduce psychology entirely to physiology. His attempts to dissolve psychology in physiology should be considered erroneous and mechanistic.

But for the era in which his scientific activity proceeded, they also had a positive side, since they were aimed at giving psychology a natural scientific orientation.

Helmholtz, with his scientific views and achievements, significantly brought closer and accelerated the time for the practical restructuring of psychology on natural scientific foundations and took a direct part in this progressive movement.

The introduction of the mental factor as a regulator of the behavior of the organism also occurred in the works of the physiologist E. Pfluger.

He subjected to experimental criticism the scheme of the reflex as an arc, in which the centripetal nerves produce the same standard muscular response.

Pfluger's experiments revealed a special causality - mental.

At the same time, these experiments undermined the accepted view that the psyche and consciousness are one and the same.

The studies begun by astronomers on the measurement of the personal equation were continued by many physiologists, including F. Donders and Z. Exner, who began to measure the time of the actual mental components of the reaction.

3. Exner measured the simplest mental reactions as separate auditory, visual and skin reactions. He studied the features of changes in a simple reaction depending on various conditions, which included the age of the subjects, the modality and intensity of stimuli, the effect of training, fatigue, the effect of alcohol, etc. its propagation from the senses to the center and back. As a result of measuring the individual components that make up the total reaction time, 3. Exner found that the longest time in the duration of psychophysiological processes is observed at the level of the higher parts of the central nervous system, while in the peripheral parts the speed of the course of nervous processes is subject to lesser changes under the influence of one or more another influencing factor. These data allowed 3. Exner to conclude that the time for the transformation of centro-rapid excitation into centrifugal is one of the decisive reasons for which individual fluctuations in the total reaction time are associated. In the works of Z. Exner, the problem of personal equation more and more appeared as a physiological and even as a psychophysiological one. Its old name no longer corresponded to new ideas, and therefore the term "personal equation" is replaced by Z. Exner.

At this time, Donders was engaged in measuring the mental link of the general reaction. His first studies were connected with the determination of the duration of reactions to stimuli of different modalities. Donders began to complicate a simple reaction by introducing new additional components into it: the act of discrimination and the act of choice. The experiment allowed Donders to measure the total time for both mental acts - choice and discrimination. Thanks to this modification in the experimental procedure, Donders was able to measure both the discrimination time and the selection time separately. Donders called this simple reaction the A-reaction. The reaction, which includes both the process of discrimination and the act of choice, he called the B-reaction. The reaction associated only with the choice function was called the C-reaction.

Donders viewed his research as purely physiological. In fact, they had a direct psychological orientation and contributed to the formation of another new section of the future experimental psychology. The work of Exner and Donders in many respects determined the nature of future research in the field of measuring mental reactions. Their research practically completes the experimental analysis of human reactions within the framework of physiology.

The formation of psychophysics, psychophysiology, psychometry created the prerequisites for their subsequent separation from physiology and their unification into a separate independent discipline, which Wundt would call initially physiological, and later simply experimental psychology.

In parallel with the development of experimental psychology, responding to the versatile demands of practical life, a new branch of psychology began to develop actively - psychodiagnostics. Psychodiagnostics as a special scientific discipline has come a long way of development and formation.

Psychological diagnostics emerged from psychology and began to take shape at the turn of the XNUMXth century. influenced by practical requirements. Its emergence was prepared by several directions in the development of psychology.

Its first source was experimental psychology, since the experimental method underlies psychodiagnostic techniques, the development of which is the essence of psychodiagnostics. Psychodiagnostics grew out of experimental psychology. And its emergence in the 1850-1870s. associated with the increased influence of natural science on the field of mental phenomena, with the process of “physiologization” of psychology, which consisted in transferring the study of the characteristics of the human psyche into the mainstream of experiment and the exact methods of the natural sciences. The first experimental methods were provided to psychology by other sciences, mainly physiology.

1878 is conditionally considered the beginning of the emergence of experimental psychology, since it was in this year that Wundt founded the first laboratory of experimental psychology in Germany. Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), outlining the prospects for building psychology as an integral science, assumed the development of two non-overlapping areas in it: natural science, based on experiment, and cultural-historical, in which psychological methods of studying culture are called upon to play the main role ("psychology of peoples" ). According to his theory, natural scientific experimental methods could only be applied to the elementary, lowest level of the psyche. It is not the soul itself that is subject to experimental research, but only its external manifestations. Therefore, sensations and the motor acts caused by them - reactions - were studied in his laboratory. Following the model of Wundt's laboratory, similar experimental laboratories and offices are being created not only in Germany, but also in other countries (France, Holland, England, Sweden, America).

Developing experimental psychology came close to the study of more complex mental processes, such as speech associations. Immediately after the publication of Galton in 1897, Wundt used the associative technique in his laboratory. The individual differences in reaction time obtained in the experiments were explained by the nature of the associations, and not by the individual characteristics of the subjects.

However, the author who created the first psychological experimental method was Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909), who studied the laws of memory using sets of meaningless syllables. He believed that the results he obtained did not depend on the consciousness of the subject, and, therefore, to a greater extent met the requirement of objectivity. With this method, Ebbinghaus opened the way for the experimental study of habits.

American psychologist James Cattell (1860-1944) explored attention span and reading skills. With the help of a tachistoscope, he determined the time needed to perceive and name various objects - shapes, letters, words, and so on.

Cattell recorded the phenomenon of anticipation. So at the turn of the XNUMXth century. in psychology, an objective experimental method was established, which began to determine the nature of psychological science as a whole. With the introduction of experiments into psychology and the emergence of new criteria for the scientific nature of its ideas, prerequisites were created for the emergence of knowledge about individual differences between people.

But practice required information about higher functions in order to diagnose individual differences between people regarding the acquisition of knowledge and the performance of complex forms of activity.

Differential psychology has become another source of psychodiagnostics. Without ideas about individual psychological characteristics, which are the subject of differential psychology, it would be impossible for the emergence of psychodiagnostics as a science of methods for measuring them.

The differential psychological study of man took shape under the influence of the demands of practice, first medical and pedagogical, and then industrial. One of the main reasons for the emergence of psychodiagnostics should be considered the need for diagnosis and treatment of mentally retarded and mentally ill people.

One of the earliest publications on the issues of mental retardation belongs to the French doctor J. E. D. Esquirol, who sought to differentiate different degrees of mental retardation. Another French doctor - E. Seguin - was the first to pay attention to teaching mentally retarded children using special techniques. Their work made a certain contribution to the development of methods that helped determine mental retardation. An essential step in solving this problem belonged to the French psychologist Henri Wiene (1857-1911). He began with experimental studies of thinking. Soon, on instructions from the government, he began to look for psychological means by which he could separate children who were capable of learning, but lazy, from those who suffered from birth defects. Experiments on the study of attention, memory, thinking were carried out on many subjects of various ages. Binet turned experimental tasks into tests by establishing a scale, each division of which contained tasks that could be performed by normal children of a certain age. This scale has gained popularity in many countries.

In Germany, Stern introduced the concept of "intelligence quotient" (IQ). This direction has become the most important channel for bringing psychology closer to practice. The technique of measuring intelligence made it possible, on the basis of psychological data, to solve issues of training, selection of personnel, professional suitability, etc.

There is a close internal relationship between the theoretical provisions developed within the framework of general psychology and the foundations of psychodiagnostics. Ideas about the patterns of development and functioning of the psyche are the starting point for choosing a psychodiagnostic methodology, designing psychodiagnostic methods, and using them in practice.

The history of psychodiagnostics is both the history of the emergence of the main psychodiagnostic methods and the development of approaches to their creation based on the evolution of views on the nature and functioning of the mental.

In this regard, it is interesting to trace how some important psychodiagnostic methods were formed within the framework of the main schools of psychology.

Test methods are usually associated with behaviorism. The methodological concept of behaviorism was based on the fact that there are deterministic relationships between the organism and the environment. Behaviorism introduced the category of behavior into psychology, understanding it as a set of responses to stimuli accessible to objective observation. Behavior, according to the behaviorist concept, is the only object of study of psychology, and all internal mental processes must be interpreted in terms of objectively observed behavioral reactions. In accordance with this, the purpose of diagnostics was initially reduced to the fixation of behavior.

A special direction in psychological diagnostics is associated with the development of various methods for diagnosing personality. For this purpose, most often not tests are used, but special methods, among which questionnaires and projective techniques stand out. The theoretical basis of this method can be considered introspectionism. The method of questionnaires can be considered as a kind of self-observation.

Another well-known method for diagnosing personality is projective techniques. Their ancestor is traditionally considered the method of verbal associations, which arose on the basis of associationist theories.

Most researchers today tend to consider the associative experiment as a technique for studying the interests and attitudes of the individual. The associative experiment stimulated the emergence of such a group of projective techniques as Sentence Completion.

In addition to associationism, the theoretical origins of projective methods can be found in psychoanalysis, which puts the concept of the unconscious at the forefront.

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.

LECTURE No. 8. The evolution of schools and directions

1. Neobehaviorism

An analysis of the paths of development of the main psychological schools reveals a common trend for them. They changed in the direction of enriching their categorical basis with the theoretical orientations of other schools.

The formula of behaviorism was clear and unambiguous: "stimulus - reaction." The question of the processes that occur in the body, and its mental structure between stimulus and reaction was removed from the agenda.

The link "stimulus - reaction" serves, according to radical behaviorism, as an unshakable support of psychology as an exact science.

Meanwhile, prominent psychologists appeared in the circle of behaviorists who questioned this postulate.

The first of them was the American Edward Tolman (1886-1959), according to which the formula of behavior should not consist of two, but of three members, and therefore look like this: stimulus (independent variable) - intermediate variables - dependent variable (reaction).

The middle link (intermediate variables) is nothing more than mental moments that are not accessible to direct observation: expectations, attitudes, knowledge.

Following the behavioral tradition, Tolman experimented on rats looking for a way out of a maze.

The main conclusion from these experiments came down to the fact that, relying on the behavior of animals, strictly controlled by the experimenter and objectively observed by him, it can be reliably established that this behavior is controlled not by the stimuli that act on them at the moment, but by special internal regulators. Behavior is preceded by a kind of expectations, hypotheses, cognitive (cognitive) "maps".

The animal itself builds these cards. They guide him through the maze. The position that mental images serve as a regulator of action was substantiated by Gestalt theory. Taking into account her lessons, Tolman developed his own theory, called cognitive behaviorism.

Another variant of neobehaviorism was that of Clark Hall (1884-1952) and his school.

He introduced another middle link into the "stimulus - reaction" formula, namely the need of the organism (food, sexual, need for sleep, etc.).

In defense of orthodox behaviorism, rejecting any internal factors, Burhus Skinner (1904-1990) spoke. He called the conditioned reflex an operant reaction.

According to Pavlov, a new reaction was developed in response to a conditioned signal when it was reinforced. According to Skinner, the body first produces movement, then receives (or does not receive) reinforcement.

Skinner drew up many different "reinforcement plans".

The technique of developing "operant reactions" was used by Skinner's followers in the education of children, their upbringing, and in the treatment of neurotics.

During World War II, Skinner worked on a project to use pigeons to control aircraft fire. He hoped, based on the theory of operant reactions, to create a program for "manufacturing" people for a new society.

Skinner's work has enriched knowledge about the general rules of skill development, the role of reinforcement, the dynamics of transition from one form of behavior to another, and so on. But behaviorists were not limited to issues related to learning from animals.

To discover the general laws of construction of any behavior, including that of a person, verified by exact objective science - such was the most important task of the entire behavioral movement. Hoping to give psychology an accuracy of generalizations that is not inferior to physics, the behaviorists believed that, relying on the "stimulus - reaction" formula, it would be possible to breed a new breed of people. The utopian nature of this plan is found in concepts such as Skinner's. Even in relation to animals, Skinner was dealing with an "empty organism" from which nothing remained but operant reactions. After all, neither for the activity of the nervous system, nor for mental functions in Skinner's model there was a place. Removed from the agenda and the problem of development. It was replaced by a description of how others arise from one skill. Huge layers of higher manifestations of life, discovered and studied by many schools, fell out of the subject area of ​​psychology.

2. The theory of the development of intelligence. The empirical foundation of the theory

The Swiss Jean Piaget (1896-1980) became the creator of the most profound and influential theory of the development of intelligence. He transformed the basic concepts of other schools: behaviorism (instead of the concept of reaction, he put forward the concept of operation), gestaltism (gestalt gave way to the concept of structure) and Jean (taking over from him the principle of internalization).

Piaget built his new theoretical ideas on a solid empirical foundation - on the material of the development of thinking and speech in a child. Works in the early 1920s "Speech and thinking of the child", "Judgement and inference in the child", etc. Piaget, using the method of conversation, concluded that if an adult thinks socially, even when he is alone with himself, then the child thinks selfishly, even when he is in the society of others. This speech of his was called egocentric.

The principle of egocentrism reigns over the thought of a preschooler. He is focused on his position and is not able to take the position of another ("de-center"), critically look at his judgments from the outside. These judgments are ruled by the "logic of a dream", which takes away from reality.

Piaget's conclusions were criticized by Vygotsky, who gave his own interpretation of the child's egocentric speech. At the same time, he highly appreciated the works of Piaget, since they did not talk about what the child lacks compared to adults, but about what the child has, what is his internal mental organization.

Piaget identified four stages in the evolution of children's thought. Initially, children's thoughts are contained in objective actions (up to 2 years), then they are internalized (pass from external to internal), become pre-operations (actions) of the mind (from 2 to 7 years), at the third stage (from 7 to 11 years) concrete operations, on the fourth (from 11 to 15 years old) - formal operations, when the child's thought is able to build logically sound hypotheses, from which deductive (for example, from general to particular) conclusions are made.

Operations are not performed in isolation. Being interconnected, they create stable and at the same time mobile structures. The stability of the structure is possible only due to the activity of the organism, its intense struggle with the forces that destroy it.

The development of a system of mental actions from one stage to another - this is how Piaget presented a picture of consciousness.

3. Neo-Freudianism

This direction, having mastered the main schemes and orientations of orthodox psychoanalysis, revised the basic category of motivation for it. The decisive role was given to the influences of the socio-cultural environment and its values.

Already Adler sought to explain the unconscious complexes of the personality by social factors. The approach outlined by him was developed by a group of researchers, who are usually united under the name of neo-Freudians. What Freud attributed to the biology of the organism, the instincts inherent in it, this group explained by the growth of the individual into a historically established culture. Such conclusions were made on the basis of a large anthropological material gleaned from the study of the mores and customs of tribes far from Western civilization.

K. Horney (1885-1953) is considered to be the leader of neo-Freudianism. Having experienced the influence of Marxism, she argued in the theory on which she relied in her psychoanalytic practice that all conflicts that arise in childhood are generated by the relationship of the child with his parents. It is because of the nature of this relationship that he develops a basic sense of anxiety that reflects the child's helplessness in a potentially hostile world. Neurosis is nothing more than a reaction to anxiety. Neurotic motivation takes on three directions: movement towards people as a need for love, movement away from people as a need for independence, and movement against people as a need for power (generating hatred, protest and aggression).

Explaining neuroses, their genesis and mechanisms of development by a specific social context, neo-Freudians criticized capitalist society as a source of alienation of the individual, the loss of her identity, forgetting her "I", etc.

Orientation to socio-cultural factors instead of biological determined the appearance of neo-Freudianism. At the same time, the appeal of its leaders to the Marxist philosophy of man played a significant role in the emergence of this trend. Under the sign of this philosophy, the theoretical foundations of Russian psychology were formed in the Soviet period.

4. Cognitive psychology. Computers. Cybernetics and psychology

In the middle of the XX century. special machines appeared - computers, media and information converters.

Scientific and technological progress has led to the invention of information machines. It was then that science developed, which began to consider all forms of signal regulation from a single point of view as a means of communication and control in any systems - technical, organic, psychological, social.

It has been called cybernetics. She developed special methods that made it possible to create for computers many programs for the perception, memorization and processing of information, as well as its exchange. This led to a real revolution in social production, both material and spiritual.

The emergence of information machines capable of performing operations with great speed and accuracy, which were considered the unique advantage of the human brain, had a significant impact on psychology as well. Discussions arose as to whether the work of a computer is not a semblance of the work of the human brain, and thus its mental organization. The image of the computer has changed the scientific vision of this activity. The result was a fundamental change in American psychology.

A crushing blow to it was dealt by a new direction that arose in the middle of the XNUMXth century, under the impression of the computer revolution, called cognitive psychology.

At the forefront of cognitive psychology is the study of the dependence of the subject's behavior on internal, cognitive issues and structures, through the prism of which he perceives his living space and acts in it. The idea that from the outside invisible cognitive processes are not accessible to objective, strictly scientific research has collapsed.

Various theories of the organization and transformation of knowledge are being developed - from instantly perceived and stored sensory images to a complex multi-level semantic (semantic) structure of human consciousness (Neisser).

5. Humanistic psychology

Another direction came out under the name of humanistic psychology. It arose in the middle of the XNUMXth century, when the general appearance of American psychology was determined by the omnipotence of two directions, behaviorism and psychoanalysis.

Being general psychological, they were also introduced into various areas of practice, especially psychotherapeutic. Among psychotherapists, there were loud voices of protest against the "two forces", which, not without reason, were accused of dehumanizing a person, treating him either as a robot or as a neurotic, whose poor "I" is torn apart by various complexes - sexual, aggressive, inferiority, etc. Neither neither one nor the other, as the initiators of the creation of a special humanistic psychology stated, does not allow revealing the positive, constructive beginning of an integral human personality, its indestructible desire for creativity and independent decision-making, the choice of one's own destiny. Humanistic psychology, speaking out against behaviorism and psychoanalysis, proclaimed itself a "third force".

The problems of a person's experience of his concrete experience, which is not reducible to general rational schemes and ideas, moved to the center of research interests. It was about restoring the authenticity of the personality, restoring the correspondence of its existence to the true nature of the personality. At the same time, it was assumed that the true nature is revealed in a borderline situation, when a person finds himself between existence and non-existence. Freedom of choice and openness to the future - these are the signs that the concept of personality should be guided by.

Only in this case, they will help a person get rid of the feeling of "abandonment in the world" and find the meaning of his being.

Humanistic psychology rejected conformism as "balancing with the environment," adaptation to the existing order of things, and determinism as confidence in the causation of behavior by external biological and social factors.

Conformism was opposed to the independence and responsibility of the subject, while determinism was opposed to self-determination. This is what distinguishes a person from other living beings and is a quality that is not acquired, but is inherent in his biology.

Human biology is distinguished by resistance to balance, the need to maintain a non-equilibrium state, a certain level of tension, rather than eliminate it through adaptive reactions, as follows from the version of the dictates of homeostasis.

The development of the "third force" had a social background. It protested against the deformation of a person in modern Western culture, depriving him of his "personality", imposing the idea of ​​​​behavior regulated either by unconscious drives or by the well-coordinated work of the "social machine".

With regard to the practice of psychotherapy, a new credo was formulated - the patient should be interpreted as capable of independently developing his own value orientations and implementing his own constructed life plan.

The main setting of psychotherapy, according to one of the leaders of humanistic psychology, the American psychologist C. Rogers (1902-1990), should not be focused on the individual symptoms of the patient, but on him as a unique person. "Client-Centered Therapy" (1951) - this was the title of Rogers' book, which stated that the psychotherapist should communicate with the person who turned to him not as a patient, but as a client who came for advice, and the psychologist is called upon to focus not on the problem, disturbing the client, but on him as a person.

The main task is not the solution of a separate problem with which he is concerned, but the transformation of his personality due to the fact that he rebuilds his phenomenal world into a system of needs, among which the most important is the need for self-actualization.

A number of other concepts, in particular the concepts of A. Maslow (1908-1970) and V. Frankl, are usually attributed to the movement called humanistic psychology. Maslow developed a holistic dynamic theory of motivation.

In his book Motivation and Personality (1954), he argued that every person has a special instinct for self-actualization, the highest expression of which is a special experience, like a mystical revelation, ecstasy.

Not from sexual traumas, but from the suppression of this vital need, neuroses and mental disorders arise. Accordingly, the transformation of a flawed personality into a full-fledged one should be considered from the point of view of the restoration and development of higher forms of motivation inherent in human nature.

In Europe, Frankl, who called his concept logotherapy, is close to the supporters of humanistic psychology, but in a special, different version from the American one.

Unlike Maslow, Frankl believes that a person has freedom in relation to his needs and is able to "go beyond himself" in search of meaning.

Not the principle of pleasure (Freud) and not the will to power (Adler), but the will to meaning - such is the truly human principle of behavior.

With the loss of meaning, various forms of neurosis arise.

The reality is that a person is forced not so much to achieve balance with the environment as to constantly respond to the challenge of life, to resist its hardships.

This creates tension, which he can deal with thanks to free will, allowing him to give meaning to the most hopeless and critical situations.

Freedom is the ability to change the meaning of a situation even when "there is nowhere else to go."

Unlike other adherents of humanistic psychology, Frankl interpreted self-actualization not as an end in itself, but as a means of realizing meaning.

This is not self-actualization, but self-transcendence, due to which, having found the meaning of life in feat, suffering, love, performing real deeds associated with the values ​​​​open to her, the personality develops.

Therefore, the installation recommended by Rogers, Maslow and other psychologists for self-expression by the personality of its authentic inner nature of motivations (whether it be independence from other people or in intensive communication with each other) Frankl considered insufficient for a person to understand why to live.

To be a man means to be directed to something other than himself, to be open to the world of meanings (Logos).

This is not self-actualization, but self-transcendence (from the Latin "transcendeys" - "going beyond"), due to which, having found the meaning of life in a feat, suffering, love, performing real deeds associated with the values ​​\uXNUMXb\uXNUMXbopened to it, a person develops.

Frankl developed a special technique of psychotherapy (sometimes referred to as the third - after Freud and Adler - Viennese school of psychoanalysis), focused on ridding the individual of negative states (anxiety, guilt, anger, etc.) that arise when confronted with a psychologically difficult for the individual and even felt by it as an insurmountable barrier.

If a person in such cases loses the will to meaning, a state of "existential vacuum" arises in him (the term "existence" means "existence") in the form of a feeling of a point, apathy, emptiness.

Frankl developed a special psychotherapy technique focused on ridding the individual of negative states (anxiety, guilt, anger, etc.) that arise when confronted with a psychologically difficult for the individual and even felt by her as an insurmountable obstacle.

Various branches of humanistic psychology have developed in order to overcome the limitations of theories that have left without attention the originality of the mental structure of a person as a holistic person capable of self-creation, the realization of his unique potential.

LECTURE No. 9. Psychology in Russia

1. M. V. Lomonosov: materialistic trend in psychology

In terms of its contribution to the development of world psychological thought, Russian psychology occupies one of the leading places. However, Russian psychology was bypassed in foreign historiography. Foreign historiographers (Boring, Flügel, Murphy, and others), and equally representatives of the official philosophy and psychology of pre-revolutionary Russia (Radlov, Odoevsky, Vvedensky, Shpet, and others) tried in every possible way to belittle the role of the philosophical and psychological views of advanced Russian thinkers. However, this does not serve as a basis for considering Russian psychology devoid of originality and considering it as a copy and duplicate of European psychology.

The leading role of Russia in the history of world psychology was determined by the materialistic direction in the development of Russian psychology, within which the foundations of a natural-science understanding of the nature of mental phenomena were laid, and the prerequisites were built for the transition of psychology to precise and objective methods of research.

In Russia, scientific experimental psychology was formed on the basis of the philosophical materialism of the 1711th century, the largest representatives of which were A. I. Herzen and V. G. Belinsky. N. A. Dobrolyubov, N. G. Chernyshevsky. The beginning of the materialistic tradition, which was continued by the Russian revolutionary democrats of the 1765th century, was laid in the XNUMXth century. mainly M. V. Lomonosov A. N. Radishchev. M. V. Lomonosov (XNUMX-XNUMX) became the founder of the materialistic trend in psychology. The starting point in Lomonosov's philosophy is the recognition of the existence of the world independently of man. Nature develops according to its own laws and does not need the participation of spiritual power.

Man, like all living things, is a part of nature and is distinguished by a number of vital properties, the leading of which are the mind and the word. These leading properties of man differs from animals. Since a person is considered a part of nature, the mental features that are characteristic of him are properties that have a material beginning. Mental processes are nothing but a continuation in the human body of that mechanical movement that has affected the body. Proceeding from this, for the knowledge of mental properties, the same methods are suitable that are used to study all other natural phenomena.

Being a naturalist, Lomonosov highly appreciated the role of experiments in scientific knowledge.

In constructing a psychological picture of a person, Lomonosov repelled from Locke.

Mental begins with sensations, the cause of which is the impact of external objects.

Lomonosov believed that all types of sensations (sight, taste, smell, hearing, pain, etc.) are determined by the objective properties of the physical source.

Instead of Locke's primary and secondary qualities, Lomonosov singled out general and particular qualities, equally objective, but differing from each other. Lomonosov categorically denied the theory of innate ideas.

The basis of the "invention of ideas" are sensations and perceptions, and the mechanism for the formation of ideas is associations.

Of particular importance are Lomonosov's studies in the field of psychophysiology, where he established the dependence of sensations on external stimulation, the relationship between the sense organs and the brain, determined a number of specific dependences of perception on various conditions, put forward the wave theory of color vision, etc.

2. A. N. Radishchev. Man as part of nature

In the XVIII century. the materialistic tradition continues in the writings of the original thinker and philosopher A.N. Radishcheva (1749-1802). In the multifaceted scientific system of Radishchev, the problem of man occupies a central place. Man appears to him as the most perfect part of nature. What man has in common with nature lies in the material beginning. At the same time, a person differs from physical bodies in the level of bodily organization.

"Mind" is peculiar only to man. In addition to the common features that united man with the animal world, Radishchev identifies a number of features that distinguish man from animals: upright walking, development of the hand, speech, thinking, a longer period of maturation, the ability to empathize, social life.

A significant place in Radishchev's psychological views is given to the problem of the ontogenetic development of a person's mental abilities. The organs of mental functions, he believes, are the brain, nerves and sense organs. Without them, there is neither thought nor feelings: therefore, the soul is possible only in the presence of these organs. Moreover, the soul appears only under the condition of a developed brain, nerves and sense organs. The development of mental abilities occurs as the physical maturation of a person.

Pointing out a number of stages of mental ontogenesis, Radishchev emphasized the role of education. In his opinion, education does not create qualitatively new mental forces, it teaches only their better use.

The psychic, according to Radishchev, has as its origin sensations. Radishchev objected to the metaphysical view of thinking as the sum of sensations. The genetic connection between sensations and thinking does not imply identity between them. Radishchev noticed the generalizing function of thinking, its relative freedom to act independently of sensory impressions.

Based on the active role of thinking and relying on a number of other facts, he comes to the conclusion about the existence of a special active activity of the soul, as if not dependent on the body, but influencing it.

These considerations formed the basis of the proof of the immortality of the soul.

3. Philosophical and psychological views of A. I. Herzen, V. G. Belinsky, N. A. Dobrolyubov

An important milestone in the history of Russian psychology was the philosophical and psychological views of AI Herzen.

The ideas developed by Herzen in the book "Letters on the Study of Nature" differ primarily in dialectics. Herzen succeeded in establishing the unity of philosophy and particular sciences, the unity of the empirical and the rational in cognition, the unity of being and consciousness, the unity of the natural and the historical, the unity of the sensory and the logical.

Man was considered by Herzen as a part of nature, and his consciousness - a product of historical development. In man, Herzen saw the line from which the transition from natural science to history begins.

Herzen's general views on psychology make it a science, the subject of which should be the relationship between the moral and physical sides in a person.

Psychology, relying on physiology, must move away from it towards history and philosophy. Consciousness, human thinking is a product of the higher development of matter. The material basis of consciousness is the physiological functions of the brain, and the objective content of consciousness is the objective world. The connecting link between thinking and feeling is practical activity, which for him has not yet acted as a criterion of truth.

Herzen was very positive about the empirical, experimental and experimental methods of obtaining knowledge proclaimed by Bacon.

At the same time, Herzen was far from the one-sidedness of Baconian empiricism. He considered it necessary that empiricism must be permeated and preceded by theory and speculation.

The next step forward in the development of scientific psychology is associated with the name of VG Belinsky. When evaluating a person as a whole and his mental properties, he adhered to the anthropological principle. Pointing to the unity of mental processes with physiological ones, Belinsky believed that one physiological basis is enough to explain mental phenomena.

He allowed it to be quite possible, with the help of physiology alone, "to trace the physical process of moral development."

The ideas of N. A. Dobrolyubov (1836-1861) served to strengthen the materialist tradition in scientific psychology, in which the position on the external and intra-corporeal determination of mental phenomena was emphasized with renewed vigor.

His main thoughts in the field of psychology are outlined in his critical articles: “Phrenology”, “Physiological-psychological view of the beginning and end of life”, “Organic development of man in connection with his mental and moral activity”.

When considering various issues related to the problem of man, Dobrolyubov relied on the latest data from natural science. The whole surrounding world is in constant development, in continuous movement from simple to complex, from less perfect to more perfect. The crown of nature is man with his ability to be conscious. Strength is an essential property of matter. For the human brain, that power is sensation. The brain is the only "source of higher life activity" and "mental functions are directly related to it."

Dobrolyubov directs this basic thesis against dualism. The edge of criticism was also directed against vulgar materialism. Dobrolyubov is especially sharp against phrenologists who tried to explain mental processes by the shape and volume of the brain.

So, mental phenomena are entirely based on the activity of the sense organs, nerves and brain, and the only way to detect them is to objectively observe their external bodily manifestations.

Dobrolyubov's provisions on the external determination of all mental processes are of great importance. The external world is the objective content of consciousness. It is reflected through the sense organs. There can be no objectless thought. Feelings and will also arise in us due to impressions received from external objects. Before a feeling appears, the object of this feeling must first be reflected in the brain as a thought, as an awareness of the impression.

The same is true with the will. Dobrolyubov pointed out that "the will as a separate, original ability, independent of other abilities, is impossible to admit. To a greater extent than feeling, it depends on the impressions made on our brain."

4. N. G. Chernyshevsky. Subject, tasks and method of psychology

N. G. Chernyshevsky (1828-1889) was an associate of Dobrolyubov. One of Chernyshevsky's merits is that he was the first among the great materialists of Russia to raise the special question of the subject, tasks, and methods of scientific psychology. He considered psychology to be one of the exact fields of knowledge.

Natural science played an exceptional role in the accumulation of knowledge and in the transition of the moral sciences to exact methods of research. The circumstance that puts psychology among the exact sciences is connected with the fact that in the field of morals, as in the field of natural phenomena, certain regularities and necessary causes operate. From this follows the main task of psychology, which should be reduced to clarifying the causes and laws of the course of mental processes. Chernyshevsky associated the formation of scientific psychology, on the one hand, with the correct definition of the subject of psychology, and, on the other hand, with the acceptance and transition of psychology to exact scientific methods of research.

What are the causes and those psychic regularities that should form the subject of psychology and which are special cases of the universal laws of nature? This is the dependence of the human psyche on the outside world, on the physiological processes occurring in the bodily organs. Another regularity is certain mutual influences within the mental processes themselves, caused by external circumstances. The emergence of all mental phenomena is necessarily associated with the activity of bodily organs. The essence of any activity is the processing of an external object. Any activity presupposes the presence of two objects, one of which acts, the other is subject to action. In this case, the essence of mental activity is the processing of an external object. The content of sensations and ideas are objects of the external world.

Chernyshevsky comes out with a scourging criticism of subjective speculations, in which the adequacy of the reflection of the external world in sensations and ideas is called into question. Thought processes develop on the basis of sensations.

Chernyshevsky assigned an important role in understanding the human psyche to needs. With the development of needs, he linked the genesis of cognitive abilities (memory, imagination, thinking). Primary needs are organic needs, the degree of satisfaction of which affects the emergence and level of moral and aesthetic needs.

Animals are endowed with only physical needs, they only determine and direct the mental life of the animal.

The higher the development of a person, the more weight is given to him by the "private aspirations" of each organ for the independent development of its forces and the enjoyment of its activity.

Chernyshevsky's great achievement in the analysis of the human psyche is the distinction between temperament and character. He pointed out that temperament is due to heredity or natural factors. As for character, it is determined mainly by the conditions of life, upbringing and actions of the person himself. Therefore, the essence of a person, his character and thoughts should be known through his practical deeds. Chernyshevsky, more than any of the Russian materialists, came to an understanding of the social conditioning of mental development. The anthropological principle of Chernyshevsky had a positive meaning in the sense that it provided a natural scientific basis for mental phenomena, asserted their material conditionality.

The derivation of mental phenomena from natural principles and the laying of a physiological basis for them served as a sure guide and indication for the transition of psychology to precise, experimental methods of research.

5. P. D. Yurkevich about the soul and inner experience

Chernyshevsky's first opponent was the idealist philosopher P. D. Yurkevich. The main argument against the idea of ​​the unity of the organism was the doctrine of "two experiments".

Yurkevich defended "experimental psychology, according to which mental phenomena belong to a world devoid of all the definitions inherent in physical bodies, and are cognizable in their essence only by the subject who directly experiences them.

The word "experience" gave reason to say that psychology, using this inner experience, is an empirical field of knowledge and thus acquires the dignity of other strictly experimental sciences, alien to metaphysics.

Chernyshevsky's "anthropological principle" rejected this empiricism, created a philosophical basis for asserting an objective method instead of the subjective one.

The same principle, postulating the unity of human nature in all its manifestations, and therefore also mental ones, rejected the previous concept of the reflex, dating back to Descartes, according to which the body was split into two tiers - automatic bodily movements (reflexes) and actions controlled by consciousness and will.

Chernyshevsky's opponents believed that there was only one alternative to this "two-tier" model of behavior, namely, the view of this behavior as purely reflex. The person thus acquired the image of a neuromuscular drug. Therefore, Yurkevich demanded "to stay on the path that was indicated by Descartes."

Turning to the dispute between Chernyshevsky and Yurkevich, we find ourselves at the origins of the entire subsequent development of Russian psychological thought.

The ideas of the "anthropological principle" led to a new science of behavior. It was based on an objective method as opposed to a subjective one.

She used the deterministic concept of the reflex discovered by physiology in order to transform it in order to explain mental processes on a new basis, which, according to the testament of the anthropological principle, preserved the organism as an integrity, where the bodily and spiritual are inseparable and inseparable.

6. I. V. Sechenov: a mental act is like a reflex

Based on two directions of Russian philosophical and psychological thought, Sechenov proposed his own approach to the development of fundamental problems of psychology. He did not identify a mental act with a reflex one, but pointed out the similarities in their structure. This made it possible to transform previous ideas about the psyche and its determination.

Comparing the psyche with a reflex, Sechenov argued that, just as a reflex begins with the contacts of an organism with an external object, a mental act has such contacts as its first link. Then, during the reflex, the external influence passes to the centers of the brain.

In the same way, the second link of the psychic act unfolds in the centers. And, finally, its third link, as in the reflex, is muscle activity.

A new important point was the discovery by Sechenov in the brain of the reflex inhibition apparatus. This discovery showed that the body not only reflects external influences, but is also capable of delaying them, that is, not reacting to them. This manifests his special activity, his ability not to follow the lead of the environment, but to resist it.

With regard to the psyche, Sechenov explained both the process of thinking and the will with his discovery.

A combative person is distinguished by the ability to resist influences unacceptable to him, no matter how strong they may be, to suppress unwanted inclinations. This is achieved by the braking apparatus. Thanks to this apparatus, invisible acts of thinking also arise. It delays the movement, and then only the first two-thirds of the whole act remain.

Motor operations, due to which the body performs the analysis and synthesis of perceived external signals, however, do not disappear. Thanks to inhibition, they go "from outside to inside."

This process was later called internalization (transition from outside to inside). A person does not get his inner psychic world ready. He builds it with his active actions. It happens objectively. Therefore, psychology must work by an objective method.

7. Development of experimental psychology

The success of psychology was due to the introduction of an experiment into it. The same applies to its development in Russia. Scientific youth sought to master this method. The experiment required the organization of special laboratories, N. N. Lange organized them at the Novorossiysk University. At Moscow University, laboratory work was carried out by A. A. Tokarsky, at Yuriev University by V. V. Chizh, at Kharkov University by P. I. Kovalevsky, and at Kazan University by V. M. Bekhterev.

In 1893, Bekhterev moved from Kazan to St. Petersburg, taking the chair of nervous and mental illnesses at the Military Medical Academy. Having accepted Sechenov's ideas and the concept of advanced Russian philosophers about the integrity of man as a natural and spiritual being, he was looking for ways to comprehensively study the activity of the human brain.

He saw ways to achieve complexity in the union of various sciences (morphology, histology, pathology, embryology of the nervous system, psychophysiology, psychiatry, etc.). He himself conducted research in all these areas.

Being a brilliant organizer, he headed many collectives, created a number of journals, where articles were also published on experimental psychology.

A doctor by education A.F. Lazursky (1874-1917) was in charge of the psychology laboratory. He developed characterology as the study of individual differences.

Explaining them, he singled out two spheres: the endopsyche as the innate basis of the personality and the exosphere, understood as the system of relations of the personality to the surrounding world. On this basis, he built a system for classifying individuals. Dissatisfaction with laboratory experimental methods prompted him to come up with a plan to develop a natural experiment as a method in which deliberate interference with human behavior is combined with a natural and relatively simple environment of experience.

Thanks to this, it becomes possible to study not individual functions, but the personality as a whole.

The Institute of Experimental Psychology, founded in Moscow by Chelpanov, became the main center for the development of problems in experimental psychology.

A research and educational institution was built, which had no equal in terms of working conditions and equipment at that time in other countries.

Chelpanov put a lot of effort into teaching experimental methods to future researchers in the field of psychology. The positive side of the institute's activities was the high experimental culture of research conducted under the guidance of Chelpanov.

When organizing the experiment, Chelpanov continued to defend as the only acceptable kind of experiment in psychology, which deals with evidence of the subject's observations of his own states of consciousness.

The decisive difference between psychology and other sciences was seen in its subjective method.

An important difference between the doctrine that developed in Russia was the assertion of the principle of active behavior. Interest in the question of how, without deviating from the deterministic interpretation of man, to explain his ability to take an active position in the world, and not just to be dependent on external stimuli, sharply escalated interest.

The idea is emerging that the selective nature of reactions to external influences, focus on it, are based not in immaterial willpower, but in special properties of the central nervous system, accessible, like all its other properties, to objective knowledge and experimental analysis.

Three prominent Russian researchers, Pavlov, Bekhterev, and Ukhtomsky independently came to similar ideas about the active installation of the organism in relation to the environment. They were engaged in neurophysiology and proceeded from the reflex concept, but enriched it with important ideas. A special reflex was identified in the functions of the nervous system. Bekhterev called it the concentration reflex. Pavlov called it an indicative, adjusting reflex.

This newly distinguished type of reflexes differed from the conditioned ones in that, being a response to external stimulation, in the form of a complex muscular reaction of the organism, it ensured the concentration of the organism on the object and its better perception.

8. Reflexology

A fundamentally new approach to the subject of psychology was formed under the influence of the works of I. P. Pavlov (1859-1936) and V. M. Bekhterev (1857-1927). Experimental psychology arose from the study of the sense organs. Therefore, in those days, she considered the products of the activity of these organs - sensations - to be her subject.

Pavlov and Bekhterev turned to the higher nerve centers of the brain. Instead of isolated consciousness, they asserted a new object, namely, holistic behavior. Since now instead of feeling, the reflex has become the initial concept, this direction has become known under the name of reflexology.

Pavlov published his program in 1903, calling it "Experimental Psychology and Psychopathology in Animals". To understand the revolutionary meaning of Pavlov's doctrine of behavior, one should bear in mind that he called it the doctrine of higher nervous activity. It was not about replacing some words with others, but about a radical transformation of the entire system of categories in which this activity was explained.

Whereas previously a reflex meant a rigidly fixed, stereotyped reaction, Pavlov introduced the principle of conventionality into this concept. Hence his main term - "conditioned reflex". This meant that the body acquires and changes the program of its actions depending on the conditions - external and internal.

Pavlov's modeling experience consisted in working out the reaction of the salivary gland of a dog to sound, light, etc. Using this ingeniously simple model, Pavlov discovered the laws of higher nervous activity. Behind each simple experiment was a dense network of concepts developed by the Pavlovian school (about a signal, temporal connection, reinforcement, inhibition, differentiation, control, etc.), which made it possible to causally explain, predict and modify behavior.

Ideas similar to Pavlov's were developed in the book "Objective Psychology" (1907) by Bekhterev, who gave conditioned reflexes another name: combinational.

There were differences between the views of the two scientists, but both stimulated psychologists to radically restructure their ideas about the subject of psychology.

9. P. P. Blonsky - psychology of child development

Blonsky considered behavior from the point of view of its development as a special historical process that depends on social influences in a person ("Essays on Scientific Psychology" (1921)). He attached particular importance to the practical orientation of psychology, which allows "the politician, the judge, the moralist" to act effectively. Developing a comparative genetic approach to the psyche, Blonsky analyzed its evolution, which was interpreted as a series of periods with distinctive features, and the difference between the periods was considered due to changes in a large complex of factors related to the biology of the organism, its chemistry, the ratio between the cortex and subcortical centers. The most significant of Blonsky's psychological works is his work Memory and Thinking (1935). Adhering to the genetic approach, he singles out different types of memory that have replaced each other as dominant in different age periods. In ontogenesis, he allocates motor memory, which is replaced by affective, the latter - figurative memory, and at the highest level of development - logical. A new principle in the development of memory is introduced by human speech. Verbal memory is formed.

His work prompted to highlight the role of learning in the mental development of schoolchildren.

Blonsky's research is characterized by an attitude toward correlating the child's mental development with the development of other aspects of his body and personality. He attached particular importance to work as a factor in the formation of positive personal qualities.

Special attention was paid to the problem of sexual education of adolescents. The works of Blonsky played an important role in the scientific explanation of both intellectual and emotional processes, interpreted in the context of the unity of solving psychological and pedagogical problems with an emphasis on fostering love for work.

10. Unity of consciousness and activity

The studies of M. Ya. Basov (1892-1931) were usually attributed to a special science - pedology.

It meant a comprehensive study of the child, covering all aspects of his development - not only psychological, but also anthropological, genetic, physiological, etc.

Prior to Basov, the views on the subject of psychology were sharply opposed to each other by supporters of the long-recognised belief that this subject is consciousness, and supporters of the new belief, who believed that it was behavior. After Basov, the picture changed. It is necessary, he believed, to move to a completely new plane. To rise above what the subject is aware of and above what is manifested in his external actions, not mechanically combine one and the other, but include them in a qualitatively new structure. He called it activity.

Adherents of structuralism believed that the mental structure consists of elements of consciousness, gestaltism - from the dynamics of mental forms (gestalts), functionalism - from the interaction of functions (perception, memory, will, etc.), behaviorism - from stimuli and reactions, reflexology - from reflexes. Basov, on the other hand, suggested that activity be considered a special structure, consisting of separate acts and mechanisms, the links between which are regulated by the task.

The structure can be stable, stable. But it can also be created anew each time. In any case, activity is subjective. Behind all its acts and mechanisms is a subject, "man as an actor in the environment."

Labor is a special form of interaction of its participants with each other and with nature. It is qualitatively different from the behavior of animals. Its primary regulator is the goal to which both the body and the soul of the subjects of the labor process are subject.

Basov, heading the pedological department of the Leningrad Pedagogical Institute. Herzen, invited Rubinstein to the Department of Psychology, where he wrote his main work "Fundamentals of General Psychology" (1940). The leitmotif of labor was the principle of "unity of consciousness and activity."

The idea that a person's communication with the world is not direct and immediate, but is accomplished only through his real actions with the objects of this world, changed the entire system of previous views on consciousness. Its dependence on objective actions, and not on external objects in itself, becomes the most important problem in psychology.

Consciousness, setting goals, projects the activity of the subject and reflects reality in sensory and mental images. It was assumed that the nature of consciousness is initially social, conditioned by social relations.

Since these relations change from epoch to epoch, consciousness is also a historically changeable product.

The position that everything that happens in the mental sphere of a person is rooted in his activity was also developed by A. N. Leontiev (1903-1979).

At first he followed the line outlined by Vygotsky. But then, highly appreciating Basov's ideas about the "morphology" of activity, he proposed his own scheme for its organization and transformation at various levels: in the evolution of the animal world, the history of human society, and also in the individual development of a person - "Problems of the development of the psyche" (1959).

Activity is a special integrity. It includes various components: motives, goals, actions. They cannot be considered separately. They form a system.

Appeal to activity as a form of existence inherent in a person makes it possible to include in a wide social context the study of the main psychological categories (image, action, motive, attitude, personality), which form an internally connected system.

Author: Luchinin A.S.

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