Main directions of psychology of the twentieth century

tags:

Psychology, Method, Psyche, Methodology, Behavior, School, Cultural, Neo-Freudianism Main directions and schools in psychology. The idea of a person in cognitive psychology.

Schools of Psychology

Psychoanalysis. Structuralism. Functionalism. Behaviorism. Freudianism. Gestalt psychology. Domestic psychology. Analytical psychology. Individual psychology. Cognitive psychology. Humanistic psychology. Transpersonal psychology.

 Analytical psychology The direction of neo-Freudianism, the founder of which is the Swiss psychologist and cultural scientist K.G. Jung. This teaching is based on the concept of the collective unconscious, which reflects the data of anthropology, ethnography, the history of culture and religion, analyzed by Jung in the aspect of biological evolution and cultural-historical development, and which manifests itself in the psyche of the individual. Jung proposed the concept of archetype as a unit of analysis of the psyche.

 Behaviorism A direction in psychology that considers a person as a reacting, learning being, programmed for certain reactions, actions, and behavior.

 Gestalt psychology A direction in psychology that arose in Germany in the early 10s and existed until the mid-30s. XX century, based on the study of the characteristics of perception and gestalt, the intellectual phenomenon of “insight”.

 Humanistic psychology A direction in psychology in which the main subjects of analysis are: highest values, self-actualization of the individual, creativity, love, freedom, responsibility, autonomy, mental health, interpersonal communication.

 Individual psychology A branch of psychology, the main subject of research of which is the methods and features of realizing the goals inherent in the depths of the personality, individual life style.

 Cognitive psychology One of the areas of predominantly American psychology that emerged in the early 60s as an alternative to behaviorism. K.p. rehabilitated the concept of the psyche as a subject of scientific research, considering all mental as mediated by cognitive factors. Modern cognitive psychology consists of 10 main sections: perception, pattern recognition, attention, memory, imagination, speech, developmental psychology, thinking and problem solving, human and artificial intelligence. Models of cognitive processes allow us to take a new look at the essence of human mental life. “Cognitive, or otherwise cognitive, activity is activity associated with the acquisition, organization and use of knowledge. This activity is characteristic of all living beings, and especially of humans. For this reason, the study of cognitive activity is part of psychology." Research in cognitive psychology

cover both conscious and unconscious processes of the psyche, while both are interpreted as different ways of processing information.
10 pages, 4762 words

Classification of types of memory. Main directions and results of research

... is what exists outside the focus of consciousness. Main directions and results of research. 1. Research of various modalities and levels of memory (in the general logic of Blonsky and ... with the activity of the entire motivational sphere of the subject. Now the most common approach in psychology in memory research is the cognitive approach (generally more focused on cognitive processes, ...

 Domestic psychology In Russian psychology, the principle of development is firmly established: the psyche of animals and human consciousness can receive an adequate explanation only if they are considered in development.

 Psychoanalysis A set of methods for identifying, for psychotherapeutic purposes, the characteristics of a person’s experiences and actions caused by unconscious motives; direction in psychology created by S. Freud and his followers.

 Psychodrama A therapeutic group process that uses the tool of dramatic improvisation.

 Sociocultural psychodynamic approach An approach in psychology and psychotherapy, the focus of which is the perception of the problem on the part of the patient and the doctor.

 Psychology specializations: General psychology, personality psychology, history of psychology. Psychophysiology. Psychology of work. Engineering psychology, ergonomics. Medical psychology. Social Psychology. Legal psychology. And others…

 Structuralism Experimental study of the structure of consciousness.

 Transactional analysis E. Berne identifies the following three components of a person’s personality, which determine the nature of communication between people: parental, adult, child.

 Transpersonal psychology A number of near-psychological disciplines, the subject of which are phenomena of consciousness that go beyond ordinary experience.

 Freudianism In a broader sense, it means classical (orthodox) psychoanalysis, in contrast to neo-Freudianism, Jung's analytical psychology and Adler's individual psychology. In a more strict and precise sense, this term denotes the teaching of S. Freud in the form in which it was created by him in the period from 1900 to 1938. Freudianism thus acts as the theoretical basis of psychoanalysis as a psychotherapeutic method, as well as as a theoretical source of modern psychoanalytic concepts. Representatives of classical psychoanalysis still remain committed to the basic tenets of Freudianism, in contrast to representatives of neo-Freudianism, who partially rejected and partially rethought many of them.

 Functionalism A direction in psychology in which the main subject of research is through what mental functions and how an individual adapts to a changing environment, as well as the search for ways to increase the effectiveness of such adaptation.

 Economic psychology A branch of psychology that studies psychological phenomena related to people's industrial relations.

4 pp., 1731 words

Development of mental functions in preschool age

... a game in which children reproduce various social roles and relationships between people. Development of mental functions in preschool age Preschool age is the period of flourishing of children's cognitive ... is that a new system of mental functions is formed here, in the center - memory, thinking, imagination. An essential indicator of the development of a child is the mastery of knowledge, ideas about ...

 Ethnic psychology A branch of social psychology that studies psychological differences and characteristics of different ethnic groups of people.

Behaviorism

Behaviorism is the science of behavior and how to influence it.

This direction of psychological science as behaviorism appeared in 1913 after the publication of an article by psychologist John Watson in a famous psychological journal. He expressed an idea unthinkable for that time, which gave rise to a completely new direction in the study of man, as well as new research methods, and followers, among whom were Burres Skinner, Edward Thorndike, Edward Tolman.

Behaviorism: J. Watson, E. Thorndike, B. Skinner, E. Tolman

Behaviorists believed that consciousness does not exist, and various mental phenomena cannot be studied, i.e. subjected to objective research methods, since either it cannot be proven that these phenomena really exist, or these phenomena are simply not available for study.

Representatives of this direction believed that behavior arises due to some environmental factors, and not due to internal factors. They derived a formula called “stimulus-response” (S → R) . It means that any reaction (R) of the human or animal body was caused by a certain stimulus (S). Behaviorists also believed that behavior could be controlled. To do this, you need to select the right stimuli to evoke a certain behavior corresponding to a given stimulus.

Behaviorists conducted many interesting, but sometimes not entirely ethical, experiments and studies. For example, J. Watson conducted an experiment with little Albert, during which he instilled a fear reaction in the boy to prove the validity of his theory.

E. Thorndike conducted experiments on animals. For this purpose, he specially invented “problem boxes” in which animals were placed to overcome various obstacles. Through his research, Thorndike determined that animals learn by trial and error and developed the laws of learning. Neobehaviorist B. Skinner developed the concept of operant conditioning, which includes a system of rewards and punishments.

E. Tolman (also a neobehaviorist) proposed a cognitive theory of learning, conducted several experiments on rats, as a result of which he formulated the “cognitive maps” hypothesis. He also supplemented the formula S →R with an additional intermediate variable (O - organism). As a result, its formula looks like this: SOR.

Development in different periods

Throughout history, psychology has developed in many countries, new schools, theories, and directions have emerged. There are several main historical stages, without which it is impossible to imagine this science in the form in which it exists.

Ancient times

The first information about the new emerging science appeared in the 7th century BC. Then the new teachings belonged to natural philosophy, which studied the laws of all things in the world. People of that time believed that everything around had a soul - both living organisms and inanimate objects. The teachings of Heraclitus played a major role in the development of science.

In later periods of antiquity, researchers argued that the soul is the source of morality and reason. The main factor is culture. Gradually the psychology of consciousness appeared. It was developed by Aristotle and Plato. Scientists have identified two directions:

Rationalism - its minions said that it is possible to obtain universal knowledge only with the development of reason.
Sensualism is knowledge that is based on sensations.

Only by the Hellenistic period did researchers get to the point of studying the relationship between the individual and society.

Middle Ages

During the Middle Ages, any science was closely connected with religion. Psychology is no exception. In the period from the 3rd to the 4th centuries, ancient concepts were banned in the territory of the Christian world. They were considered pagan and anyone who resorted to studying them was excommunicated from the church, became an outcast or was executed. Philosophy schools were first closed and then driven out of Europe. Philosophical and psychological teachings returned only to the 9th century.

Starting from the 12th century, the first universities began to appear in Europe. In the 13th century, psychologists began to study the physical soul of a person, without affecting the spiritual soul, which was protected by the church. By the 15th century, the works of ancient authors received publicity and became available to ordinary peasants.

New time

In the modern period, the development of psychological science was greatly influenced by new scientific approaches - rationality, evidence-based theories. Psychologists stop studying the external manifestations of human activity and are interested in issues of the development of consciousness. An active struggle began between rationalistic and sensualistic approaches.

The scientist R. Descartes created a special theory of reflex, in which he described involuntary movements performed by humans and the behavior of animals. He later introduced the concept of the light of reason or rational intuition.

XVIII century

The development of psychological science in the 18th century was strongly influenced by the ideas of progress. In 1750, the first direction of psychology appeared - associationism. This was an autonomous direction of psychological science, which remained the only one until the 20th century. D. Berkeley, D. Yuma, C. Bonnet actively developed this direction.

The German psychologist H. Wolf published works - “Empirical Psychology”, “Rational Psychology”. J. J. Rousseau wrote that any person is kind from birth, but society over time instills in him many negative aspects that affect his behavior and future life.

XIX - early XX centuries.

The scientist O. Comte compiled a classification of various sciences, which did not include psychology. This was due to the fact that it does not have a scientific paradigm. Because of this, psychological science faced the abyss of losing the status of a separate direction. The second option concerned the merger of this science with sociology or biology. To maintain its autonomous status, it was necessary to develop a methodology. Several practical methods were quickly proposed:

experimental approach;
genetic surveillance;
logical method;
mastering, trial-error analysis.

When Darwin's theory appeared, there was a complete rejection of mechanistic determinism. New branches began to appear in psychological science:

zoopsychology;
genetic research;
differential studies.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, psychological science consisted of many schools, whose representatives pursued individual goals and used their own methods for obtaining new information.

XX - beginning of XXI centuries.

The period from 1910 to 1930 is a crisis for psychology. At this time, many inconsistencies appeared in the theoretical framework accumulated over time. Because of this, new directions began to emerge that distributed the accumulated knowledge among themselves:

sociologically oriented psychology;
psychoanalysis, created by Freud;
Jung's analytical psychology;
Gestalt psychology;
behaviorism.

In the middle of the twentieth century, several more directions appeared:

cognitive psychology;
logotherapy;
humanistic psychology.

Each of the presented areas developed independently of each other. Their followers developed new methods, collected information of interest, and conducted experiments.

Present tense

There are a huge number of psychological teachings, each of which has certain characteristics and studies certain aspects of human life and behavior.

Psychology became a separate science only in the second half of the 19th century, but the doctrine first appeared in Ancient Greece. Over time, a lot of theoretical knowledge accumulated, which needed to be distributed into separate areas and systematized. After this, psychological schools appeared that studied various aspects of human life.

Reflexology direction

Reflexology (reflexological direction in psychology) is a natural science direction in psychology that considers mental activity as a set of reflexes formed as a result of the influence of the external environment on animals or humans. This direction is part of domestic psychology.

Reflexology: I.M. Sechenov, I.P. Pavlov, V.M. Bekhterev

This direction arose at the beginning of the 20th century. THEM. Sechenov is considered the founder of reflexology. He substantiated the reflex nature of the psyche, discovered brain reflexes and central inhibition. Sechenov’s entire theory was built on the concept of “reflex”.

I.P. Pavlov created the doctrine of conditioned reflexes. They arise throughout life and can change and disappear. Conditioned reflexes are individual, they also contribute to adaptation. Pavlov introduced the concept of “first signal system ,” which forms the basis of higher nervous activity (HNA) and is reduced to a set of different conditioned and unconditioned reflexes to immediate stimuli or their traces. The second signaling system, in his opinion, is speech.

V.M. Bekhterev proposed the doctrine of combination reflexes. According to his views, the influence of two stimuli must occur adjacently in time for the formation of a combination reflex. In his opinion, the human psyche is built on the principle of combining new experiences with traces of the old. Bekhterev also studied issues of the individual and the collective.

Functionalism

Functionalism is a branch of psychology, the main topic of study of which is the role of the mind in the adaptation of the organism to the environment.

Researchers in this area focused not on the elements of the psyche, but on its functions and the meaning of mental processes.

The emergence of functionalism is associated with a protest against Wundt's psychology and structuralism. Supporters of functionalism did not seek to create a scientific school, however, over time, this system acquired its features.

The study of the behavior of an organism in the process of interaction with the external environment led to the formation of the idea of using psychology in solving everyday problems.

Gestalt psychology

Gestalt psychology is a branch of Western psychology of the twentieth century that studied the psyche from the point of view of holistic structures (gestalts).

Among the founders of this direction are Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Keller and Kurt Koffka. Kurt Lewin also made a significant contribution to the development of Gestalt theory. Based on Gestalt psychology, Friedrich Perls created a new direction of psychotherapy - Gestalt therapy.

Gestalt psychology: M. Wertheimer, K. Koffka, W. Keller, K. Levin

Representatives of this direction believed that the principles of the division of consciousness are incorrect, just as perception is not a simple set of feelings. Gestalt psychologists focused their attention not on individual parts of phenomena, but on their integrity. Thus, they came to the conclusion that consciousness connects all components into a single whole, forming a gestalt.

Gestalt is the basic concept of Gestalt psychology; translated from German it means “structure”, “integral configuration”, i.e. a certain organized whole, the properties of which are not reducible to the properties of its parts.

Research by Gestalt psychologists made it possible to discover the laws of perception, as well as the principles of Gestalt : proximity, continuity, similarity, simplicity, figure-ground, etc.

Gestalt psychology originates from the discovery by M. Wertheimer of the phi phenomenon (the illusion of moving two alternately switched on light sources), which proved that perception is not reduced to the sum of individual sensations.

Further contributions were made by K. Koffka, who studied the development of perception in children and the perception of color by children. He came to the conclusion that the combination of figure and background against which an object is shown plays an important role in the development of perception. He also formulated the law of “transduction ,” which proved that children do not perceive the colors themselves, but their relationships.

V. Keller discovered the phenomenon of insight (inner illumination), proving that it is inherent not only in animals, but also in people. He also introduced the principle of isomorphism.

K. Lewin created the psychological field theory . He believed that the reason for human activity is intention, i.e. need. The objects that surround us create the psychological field in which a person finds himself and develops. By influencing a person, objects that have certain charges cause needs in him, and these, in turn, cause tension. Lewin called this tension quasi-need . In such a situation, a person strives for relaxation, i.e. satisfying this need.

Structuralism

The founder of structuralism is the English scientist E.B. Titchener, who was a supporter of Wundt's psychology. However, after moving to the USA, he created his own theory, which he called structuralism. This theory became widespread in the United States and played an important role in the development of psychology.

The main task of Titchener's research was to search for the elements of consciousness that form its structure. The subject of psychology was the study of conscious experience, since, according to Titchener, it depends on the subject being tested.

In his works, Titchener used methods of observation, experiment, measurement, and self-observation.

Psychoanalytic direction

Psychoanalysis

No psychological movement has become as widely known outside of this science as Freudianism. 3. Freud called his teaching psychoanalysis - after the method he developed for diagnosing and treating neuroses. The second name is depth psychology - this direction was named after its subject of research, because concentrated its attention on the study of deep structures of the psyche.

Freud brought to the fore vital questions that will never cease to worry people, for example, about the complexity of a person’s inner world, about the mental conflicts he experiences, about the consequences of unsatisfied instincts, about the contradictions between “desired” and “ought.”

Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud

Experiments with hypnosis have shown that feelings and aspirations can direct the behavior of the subject, even when they are not conscious of them. Further, Freud abandoned hypnosis as a method of psychotherapy in favor of the method of “free association” . He used “free association” to follow the train of thought of his patients, hidden not only from the doctor, but also from themselves.

Thus, Sigmund Freud came to some conclusions. From a structural point of view, the psyche contains, according to Freud, three formations: “I”, “Super-ego” and “It” . “I” is a secondary, superficial layer of the mental apparatus, usually called consciousness.

The last two systems are localized in the layer of the primary mental process - in the unconscious . “It” is the place where two groups of drives are concentrated: a) the drive to life, or eros, which includes sexual drives and the drive to self-preservation of the “I”; b) the attraction to death, to destruction - thanatos.

Jung's Analytical Psychology

S. Freud had a decisive influence on the scientific views of C. Jung. Jung, unlike Freud, argued that “not only the lowest, but also the highest in personality can be unconscious.” Disagreeing with Freud, Jung considered libido to be a generalized psychic energy that can take various forms.

Analytical psychology of Carl Jung

No less significant were the differences in the interpretation of dreams and associations. Freud believed that symbols are substitutes for other, repressed objects and drives. In contrast, Jung was sure that only a sign, consciously used by a person, replaces something else, and a symbol is an independent, living, dynamic unit. The symbol does not replace anything, but reflects the psychological state that a person is experiencing at the moment.

Therefore, Jung was against the symbolic interpretation of dreams or associations developed by Freud, believing that it was necessary to follow a person’s symbolism into the depths of his unconscious. In short, there was a lot of disagreement.

Jung expanded on Freud's model of the psyche. Along with the individual unconscious, he postulates the presence of a collective unconscious . In the collective unconscious, all human experience is recorded in the form of archetypes . Archetypes are inherited and are universal for all representatives of the human race.

Jung identified two types of psychological orientation of the individual: introverted (toward the inner world) and extroverted (toward the outer world) and created a doctrine of eight psychological types.

Adler's individual psychology

Alfred Adler became the founder of a new, socio-psychological direction. It was in the development of these new ideas that he diverged from Freud. His theory has very little connection with classical psychoanalysis and represents a holistic system of personality development.

Psychoanalytic direction: Z. Freud, K. G. Jung, A. Adler

Adler denied the positions of Freud and Jung about the dominance of individual unconscious instincts in a person’s personality and behavior, instincts that contrast a person with society and separate him from it. Not innate instincts, not innate archetypes, but a sense of community with people, stimulating social contacts and orientation toward other people, is the main force that determines human behavior and life, Adler believed.

A. Adler, generally accepting the structural model of the psyche developed by Z. Freud, replaces the extremely abstract driving forces of personality Eros and Thanatos with more concrete ones. He proposed that human life is determined by the struggle between two basic needs: the need for power and superiority and the need for affection and belonging to a social group . “compensation” became central to Adler’s concept .

Psychoanalysis

The emergence of the term “psychoanalysis” is associated with the name of the Austrian doctor Sigmund Freud.

The main object of study of psychoanalysis was the unconscious, and the subject was abnormal behavior. Laboratory experiments have been replaced by clinical observation.

In his works, S. Freud distinguished the conscious and unconscious mental life of a person. He later reformulated the theory and proposed three components of personality: the id, the ego, and the superego.

Although psychoanalysis has been subject to severe criticism and is not strong in terms of methodology, it is still one of the leading areas in modern psychology.

Humanistic psychology

Humanistic psychology is a direction in psychology that arose in the 20th century, the subject of study of which was a healthy creative personality, the goal of which is self-realization, self-actualization and growth. A. Maslow and C. Rogers are considered the founders of humanistic psychology.

From Abraham Maslow's point of view, every person has an innate desire for self-actualization . Moreover, such an active desire to discover one’s abilities and inclinations, to develop one’s personality and hidden potential in a person is the highest human need.

True, in order for this need to manifest itself, a person must satisfy the entire hierarchy of underlying needs. Before the need of each higher level begins to “work,” the needs of the lower levels must already be satisfied.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs: 1) physiological needs (need for food, drink, breathing, etc.); 2) the need for security (feelings of stability, order, security, lack of fear and anxiety); 3) the need for love and a sense of community, belonging to a certain group; 4) the need for respect from others and self-esteem; 5) the need for self-actualization.

Carl Rogers is best known for his popular method of psychotherapy called person-centered therapy (client-centered psychotherapy).

Rogers had his own special approach to psychocorrection. He proceeded from the fact that the psychotherapist should not impose his opinion on the patient, but lead him to the right decision, which the latter makes independently. In the process of therapy, the patient learns to trust himself more, his intuition, his feelings and impulses, and begins to better understand himself, and therefore those around him.

Placing the main responsibility for the changes that occur during treatment not on the therapist, but on the client, Rogers points out that a person, thanks to his mind, is able to independently change the nature of his behavior, replacing undesirable actions and behaviors with more desirable ones.

In his opinion, we are not at all doomed to forever be under the rule of the unconscious or our own childhood experiences. A person’s personality is determined by the present, it is formed under the influence of our conscious assessments of what is happening.

Rogers also shared Maslow's position on the inherent need for self-actualization , believing that the main cause of neuroses is the discrepancy between who a person thinks he is and who he wants to be. The desire for self-actualization, according to Rogers, is the main motive of human activity. Although this desire is innate, its development can be facilitated (or, conversely, hindered) by childhood experiences and learning.

Another prominent representative of humanistic psychology is Gordon Allport. Allport's most important merits include the fact that he was one of the first to talk about the uniqueness of each person. He argued that each person is unique and individual, since he is the bearer of a unique combination of qualities and needs, which Allport called traits.

He divided these needs, or personality traits, into basic and instrumental. Basic traits stimulate behavior and are innate, genotypic formations, while instrumental traits shape behavior and are formed during a person’s life, i.e., they are phenotypic formations. The set of these traits constitutes the core of the personality, giving it uniqueness and originality.

One of the main postulates of Allport's theory was that the individual is an open and self-developing system. He proceeded from the fact that man is primarily a social, not a biological, being and therefore cannot develop without contacts with the people around him, with society.

He argued that the basis for the development of the human personality is precisely the need to explode the balance, to reach new heights, i.e. the need for constant development and improvement.

Existential psychology

Existential psychology is a direction in psychology that emerged in the 20th century and studies the problems of life and death, freedom and responsibility, communication and loneliness, as well as the problem of the meaning of life.

Existentialists believed that these problems perform a dynamic function in relation to a person - they stimulate the development of his personality. But encountering them is painful, so people tend to defend themselves against them, which often leads to an illusory solution to the problem.

Representatives of existentialism argued that people should begin to reassess values, try not to commit trivial, typical, devoid of originality, meaningless actions, better understand the meaning of life in the present, and become free from external and internal circumstances.

Existential psychology takes the view that people bear a significant amount of responsibility for who they are. Existence is given precedence over essence, growth and change are considered more important than stable and immobile characteristics, process takes precedence over results.

A prominent representative of this direction is Viktor Frankl, the author of logotherapy and existential analysis, united under the common name of the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy.

Frankl considers the main driving force of personality not the need to reveal oneself (self-actualization), but the need to go beyond one’s limitations, to “self-transcend.” This human desire can be called the will to meaning . Frankl pays special attention to the situation of loss of meaning ( “existential vacuum” ) and the search for meaning in hopeless situations.

Another prominent representative of existential therapy is James Bugental, who called his therapy life-changing .

Bugental's central position can be formulated as follows: under certain conditions, almost any action can lead the client to intensify work with subjectivity; The art of the therapist lies precisely in the ability to adequately apply the entire rich arsenal without resorting to manipulation.

It was for the development of this art of psychotherapist that Bugental described 13 main parameters of therapeutic work and developed a methodology for the development of each of them.

The outstanding American psychologist and psychotherapist Rollo May is considered to be the theoretical and ideological leader of existential psychotherapy. Following K. Rogers, he made a decisive theoretical and practical contribution to the development of psychological counseling as a full-fledged specialty.

May paid special attention to the study of the phenomena of fear and anxiety, being the first to point out that high anxiety is not necessarily a sign of neurosis. He divided anxiety into normal and neurotic.

Moreover, normal anxiety is necessary for a person, as it keeps him in a state of vigilance and responsibility. May believes that a person’s awareness of freedom of choice increases his sense of responsibility, which, in turn, inevitably causes anxiety - concern for this responsibility of choice.

Neurotic anxiety is an inadequate reaction to an objective threat; such anxiety implies repression and is more destructive than constructive. If normal anxiety is always felt when values are threatened, then neurotic anxiety visits us if the values questioned are in fact dogmas, the rejection of which would deprive our existence of meaning.

May identifies three types of ontological guilt , corresponding to the hypostases of being-in-the-world. 1. Umwelt, or “environment,” corresponds to the guilt of separation prevalent in “advanced” societies, caused by the separation of man and nature. 2. The second type of guilt comes from our inability to correctly understand the world of other people (Mitwelt). 3. The third type is based on relationships with one’s own “I” (Eigenwelt) and is associated with our denial of our capabilities, as well as with failures on the path to their implementation.

Thus, May believed that the task of a psychotherapist is to help a person understand the causes of his anxiety and addictions that interfere with free development and self-improvement. Freedom is associated with flexibility, openness, and readiness for change, which helps a person to understand himself and build a lifestyle that is adequate to his individuality.

Cognitive psychology

In the mid-1960s. In the USA, another direction emerged, called “cognitive psychology”. It emerged as an alternative to behaviorism. The origins of cognitive psychology were D. Miller, J. Bruner, G. Simon, P. Lindsay, D. Norman and others.

The cognitive direction in psychology is a movement that focuses on cognition and the activity of consciousness. In cognitivism, a person is considered primarily as a conscious being. Thus, cognitive psychology has restored the role of consciousness at both the human and animal levels.

George Miller worked on problems of speech communication. He completely immersed himself in the study of problems of psycholinguistics and in 1951 published a book entitled “Language and Communication”. Further, his interests began to shift towards a more cognitively oriented psychology.

Together with his colleague, he creates a research center at Harvard University for the study of thinking processes. Miller and Bruner chose the term “cognitive” to refer to the subject of their research. That's what they called the new research center - the Center for Cognitive Research.

The new Center for Cognitive Research developed a wide range of diverse topics: language, memory, perception and concept formation, thinking and developmental psychology - most of which have completely disappeared from the vocabulary of behaviorists.

Ulrik Neisser took a course on the psychology of communication from Miller and became familiar with the basics of information theory. Its development was also influenced by Koffka’s book “Principles of Gestalt Psychology.”

In 1967, Neisser published a book called Cognitive Psychology. This book was destined to “open a new field of research.” This means that cognitive psychology deals with sensations, perception, imagination, memory, thinking and all other types of mental activity. Created a scheme for processing information (attention model) .

The most significant contribution to the formation of the approach was made by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, who studied child psychology, focusing on the stages of cognitive development.

J. Piaget considers the development of intelligence as a form of adaptation to the environment by balancing assimilation and accommodation , assimilating information and improving schemes and methods of processing it. This allows humans to survive as a biological species.

The development of intelligence , according to J. Piaget, goes through four stages.

I. Sensorimotor intelligence (from 0 to 2 years) is manifested in actions: patterns of looking, grasping, circular reactions are learned when the baby repeats the action, expecting that its effect will be repeated (throws a toy and waits for a sound);

II. Pre-operational stage (2-7 years) - children acquire speech, but use words to combine both essential and external features of objects. Therefore, their analogies and judgments seem unexpected and illogical: the wind blows because the trees sway; the boat floats because it is small and light, and the ship floats because it is large and strong;

III. Stage of concrete operations (7-11 years old) - children begin to reason logically, can classify concepts and give definitions, but all this is based on specific concepts and visual examples;

IV. Stage of formal operations (from 12 years old) - children operate with abstract concepts, categories “what will happen if ...”, understand metaphors, can take into account the thoughts of other people, their roles and ideals. This is the intelligence of an adult.

To illustrate the cognitive theory of development, J. Piaget proposed a famous experiment to understand the phenomenon of conservation. Only 7-8 year old children noticed the same volume in glasses of different shapes. And this was repeated in different countries and cultures.

the theory of cognitive dissonance in 1957 . Cognitive dissonance is a mismatch of cognitions, an inconsistency of conscious structures. Cognitions are any meaningful elements of consciousness (topics, ideas, facts, images, etc.).

People strive for internal consistency as a desirable internal state. If a contradiction arises between what a person knows, or between what he knows and what he does, the person experiences a state of cognitive dissonance, which is subjectively experienced as discomfort. It causes behavior aimed at changing it - a person strives to again achieve internal consistency.

Dissonance may arise:

from logical inconsistency;

from the discrepancy between cognitive elements and cultural patterns;

from the inconsistency of a given cognitive element with some broader system of ideas (a communist votes for Putin);
from the inconsistency of this cognitive element with past experience (I always violated traffic rules - and nothing; now I was fined).

The way out of the state of cognitive dissonance is possible in the following way:

through changing the behavioral elements of the cognitive structure;

through changes in cognitive elements related to the environment;
through the expansion of the cognitive structure so that previously excluded elements are included.

George Kelly is the author of personality construct theory . According to this concept, the organization of a person’s mental processes is determined by how he anticipates (“constructs”) future events.

A person, studying the behavior of others, trying to understand its essence and make predictions, builds his own system of personal constructs. The concept of “construct” is central to Kelly’s theory. The construct consists of the characteristics of perception, memory, thinking and speech and is a classifier of how a person perceives himself and the world around him.

Kelly interpreted a person as a researcher who constantly builds his own image of reality through personal constructs and, based on this image, puts forward hypotheses about future events. Disconfirmation of these hypotheses leads to a greater or lesser restructuring of the construct system, which makes it possible to increase the adequacy of subsequent predictions.

Kelly developed the methodological principle of “repertory lattices ,” with the help of which methods for diagnosing the characteristics of the individual construction of reality were created.

The beginning of cognitive therapy is associated with J. Kelly. As a psychotherapist, Kelly worked in line with cognitive therapy , essentially being its founder. In general terms, therapy can be defined as a comparative analysis of the characteristics of people’s perception and interpretation of external information.

Domestic psychology

Significant contribution to the development of Russian psychology in the 20th century. contributed by L.S. Vygotsky, A.N. Leontyev, A.R. Luria, S.L. Rubinstein and P.Ya. Galperin. All discoveries made within the framework of the reflexological direction (Sechenov, Bekhterev, Pavlov) are also important, but they were discussed at the beginning of this article.

Cultural-historical concept of the development of the human psyche: L.S. Vygotsky, W. Bronfenbrenner

Lev Semenovich Vygotsky is one of the founders of Soviet psychology. He created a cultural-historical concept of the socio-historical development of the human psyche , which was further developed in the general psychological theory of activity.

Vygotsky sought to determine the qualitative specificity of the human mental world, to resolve the problem of the genesis of human consciousness and the mechanisms of its formation.

He distinguishes two levels of the human psyche : lower natural and higher social mental functions. Natural functions are given to man as a natural being and are of a psychophysiological nature - these are sensory, motor, pneumonic (involuntary memorization) functions.

Vygotsky also introduced the concept of higher mental functions (thinking in concepts, rational speech, logical memory, voluntary attention, etc.) as a specifically human form of the psyche and developed the doctrine of the development of higher mental functions . HMFs are social in nature and constitute the second level of the human psyche.

Uri Bronfenbrenner is an American psychologist, specialist in the field of child psychology. Author of the theory of ecological systems (theory of socialization and child development).

According to Bronfenbrenner, the ecological environment of a child’s development consists of four systems, seemingly nested within one another, which are usually graphically depicted in the form of concentric rings:

microsystem - the child’s family;

mesosystem - kindergarten, school, yard, residential area;

exosystem - adult social organizations;
macrosystem - a country's cultural practices, values, customs and resources.

Psychological theory of activity: S.L. Rubinstein, A.N. Leontyev, B.G. Ananyev

Activity theory or activity approach is a school of Soviet psychology founded by A.N. Leontyev and S.L. Rubinstein on the cultural-historical approach of L.S. Vygotsky.

Alexey Nikolaevich Leontyev emphasized that activity is a special integrity. It includes various components: motives, goals, actions . They cannot be considered separately from each other; they form a system.

Leontiev's fundamental contribution to child and developmental psychology was the development of the problem of leading activity . This outstanding scientist not only characterized the change in leading activities in the process of child development, but also laid the foundation for studying the mechanisms of transformation of one leading activity into another.

A.N. Leontiev proposed his classification of the stages of development of the psyche in phylogenesis (elementary sensory psyche, perceptual psyche and stage of intelligence). Also the special contribution of A.N. Leontiev contributed to the theory of personality.

Sergei Leonidovich Rubinstein substantiated the principle of the unity of consciousness and activity , which made it possible to give an innovative interpretation of consciousness not as an internal world cognizable by the subject only through introspection, but as the highest level of organization of mental activity, presupposing the inclusion of the individual in the context of his life connections with the objective world.

Based on the principle of the unity of consciousness and activity, Rubinstein conducted a large series of experimental studies of key problems in psychology, primarily related to cognitive processes (perception and memory, speech and thinking).

Boris Gerasimovich Ananyev identified four basic concepts in the system of human knowledge: the individual, the subject of activity, personality and individuality.

An individual is a person as a single natural being, a representative of the species Homo sapiens (emphasis on the biological essence of man). Personality is an individual as a subject of social relations and conscious activity.

The subject of activity, in its content, occupies an intermediate position between the concepts of “individual” and “personality”. The subject of activity combines the biological principle and the social essence of a person into a single whole.

Individuality is a set of mental, physiological and social characteristics of a particular person from the point of view of his uniqueness, originality and originality.

Concept of A.R. Luria about the main structural and functional blocks of the brain

Alexander Romanovich Luria is a famous Soviet psychologist, founder of Russian neuropsychology, student of L. S. Vygotsky. Luria paid special attention to the problems of cerebral localization of higher mental functions and their disorders.

The model of the functional structure of the brain proposed by A.R. Luria, characterizes the most general patterns of the functioning of the brain as a whole and is the basis for explaining its integrative activity. According to this model, the entire brain can be divided into 3 main structural and functional blocks.

The first block is the energy block, or the block that regulates the level of brain activity;

Block II – receiving, processing and storing exteroceptive (i.e. coming from outside) information;
III block – programming, regulation and control over the course of mental activity.

Contribution to psychology P.Ya. Galperin

Petr Yakovlevich Galperin considered mental processes (from perception to thinking inclusive) as the orienting activity of the subject in problem situations. The psyche itself, in historical terms, arises only in a situation of mobile life for orientation on the basis of an image and is carried out with the help of actions in terms of this image.

P.Ya. Galperin is the author of the concept of the gradual formation of mental actions (images, concepts). The practical implementation of this concept can significantly increase the effectiveness of training.

PSYCHOLOGICAL SCHOOLS AND DIRECTIONS

A variety of sources were used in preparing the collection.

Analytical psychology

- a direction of neo-Freudianism, the founder of which is the Swiss psychologist and cultural scientist C. G. Jung. This teaching is based on the concept of the collective unconscious, which reflects the data of anthropology, ethnography, the history of culture and religion, analyzed by Jung in the aspect of biological evolution and cultural-historical development, and which manifests itself in the psyche of the individual. As a unit of analysis of the psyche, Jung proposed the concept of an archetype as an innate pattern of behavior corresponding to various layers of the human psyche: animal, universal, generic, family and individual. The energy of the archetype is due to the fact that it is a manifestation of libido. In addition to the concept of the collective unconscious, Jung gave a description of extroverted (directed primarily at the external world) and introverted (directed at the internal, subjective world) attitudes.

English Anthropological School

- a scientific direction in ethnography and cultural anthropology that introduced the idea of evolution into the study of culture (E.B. Taylor, J.J. Fraser, etc.). Based on the analysis of customs, beliefs, art, morality, etc. so-called. primitive peoples, a parallel was drawn with the development of mental processes (mental operations) in modern man. Because of this, animistic ideas in primitive society were explained by the incorrect use of mental techniques characteristic of modern man (association of ideas, the principle of causality, analogy, etc.), in conditions of insufficient experience.

Austrian School of Psychology

- a direction of psychological researchers developed by a group of psychologists (H. Ehrenfels, S. Vitasek, V. Benussi, etc.) who have been working since the 80s. XIX century to the 10s of the twentieth century. mainly at the University of Graz under the leadership of A. Meinong. The focus was on the theoretical and experimental development of the problem of the integrity of consciousness. The starting points were the ideas of H. Ehrenfels, who introduced the term Gestalt quality to denote the integrity of a mental image and the irreducibility of its properties to the sum of the properties of its constituent elements. These settings were implemented on experimental material concerning optical-geometric illusions and perceptual disturbances in pathology. At the same time, Gestalt quality was recognized as another element of perception, which was added to other sensations.

Associative psychology

- psychological directions in which association is recognized as the unit of analysis of the psyche. Associationism in its development went through a number of stages:

· Identification of association as an explanatory principle for individual mental phenomena, primarily the processes of recall.

· The stage of classical associationism, when holistic concepts of the psyche were created, which were understood as a system of mechanical connections (associations) between mental elements, which were considered sensations and ideas.

· The stage of experimental and practical associationism, which is characterized by an attempt to introduce the factor of the subject’s activity into the basic concept.

Behaviorism

(from the English
behavior
- behavior) - a psychological direction, which began with the publication in 1913 of an article by the American psychologist J. Watson Psychology from the point of view of a behaviorist. As a subject of psychology, it does not include the subjective world of a person, but objectively recorded characteristics of behavior caused by any external influences. In this case, the connection between stimulus (S) and response (R) is postulated as a unit of behavior analysis. All responses can be divided into hereditary (reflexes, physiological reactions and elementary emotions) and acquired (habits, thinking, speech, complex emotions, social behavior), which are formed by linking (conditioning) hereditary reactions triggered by unconditioned stimuli with new (conditioned ) incentives. In particular, Watson's research shows that if you combine unconditioned stimuli that evoke the emotion of fear in an infant (a sharp sound, loss of support) with others that are initially neutral (for example, showing a white rabbit), then after some time a fear reaction can be evoked. just by showing the rabbit. But later it was shown that conditioning itself is a rather complex process that has psychological content. Changes gradually arose in the conceptual apparatus of behaviorism, which led to talk about its transformation into neobehaviorism. Intermediate variables (image, goal, need) appeared in the S-R scheme. Another version of the revision of classical behaviorism was the concept of operant behaviorism by B. Skinner, developed in the 30s. XX century, where the concept of reaction was modified. In general, behaviorism had a great influence on the development of psychotherapy and programmed training methods.

Voluntarism

(from Latin
voluntas
- will) - a direction in philosophy and psychology. It is characterized by placing the processes of the will at the basis of the worldview, which can be opposed to reason and the objective laws of nature and society. Voluntarism in psychology manifests itself as the affirmation of will as a primary ability, conditioned only by the subject and determining all other mental processes and phenomena (W. Wundt, W. James, N. Lossky).

Wurzburg school

- a direction in German psychology that arose at the beginning of the twentieth century, which was headed by O. Külpe. This school included: A. Mayer, I. Orth, K. Marbe, K. Bühler, H. Watt, N. Ah, A. Messer. The philosophical basis was the ideas of positivism, critical realism, and the phenomenology of E. Husserl. Innovative studies of thinking were carried out (N. Akh), which used a regulated methodology for presenting problems and a method of systematic experimental self-observation. On their basis, in contrast to the associative theory, the position was put forward that the main role in thinking is played not by sensations and ideas, but by ugly thoughts, which are knowledge of an unobservable type (consciousness of rules, consciousness of relationships, thoughts-intentions), which guide the flow of thoughts when solving problems. Thus, thinking began to be understood as an active process, controlled either by a special psychological attitude (G. Watt), or by a determining tendency (N. Akh), or an anticipatory scheme (O. Seltz). The conclusions about the lack of connection between thinking and speech, the sensory basis and practice, which were reached in the Würzburg school, caused sharp criticism by W. Wundt, E. Titchener, G. E. Muller.

Gestalt psychology

- a psychological movement that arose in Germany in the early 10s and existed until the mid-30s. XX century (before the Nazis came to power, when most of its representatives emigrated) and continued to develop the problem of integrity posed by the Austrian school. First of all, M. Wertheimer, V. Koehler, K. Koffka belong to this direction. The methodological basis of Gestalt psychology was the philosophical ideas of critical realism and the positions developed by E. Hering, E. Mach, E. Husserl, I. Muller, according to which the physiological reality of processes in the brain and the mental, or phenomenal, are related to each other by isomorphism. Because of this, the study of brain activity and phenomenological introspection, focused on different contents of consciousness, can be considered as complementary methods that study the same thing, but use different conceptual languages. Subjective experiences are merely the phenomenal expression of various electrical processes in the brain. By analogy with electromagnetic fields in physics, consciousness in Gestalt psychology was understood as a dynamic whole, a field in which each point interacts with all the others. For the experimental study of this field, a unit of analysis was introduced, which began to act as a gestalt. Gestalts were discovered in the perception of shape, apparent movement, and optical-geometric illusions. As the basic law of grouping individual elements, the law of pregnancy was postulated as the desire of the psychological field to form the most stable, simple and economical configuration. At the same time, factors were identified that contribute to the grouping of elements into integral gestalts, such as the factor of proximity, the factor of similarity, the factor of good continuation, and the factor of common fate. In the field of psychology of thinking, Gestalt psychologists developed a method for experimental research of thinking - the method of reasoning out loud and introduced such concepts as problem situation, insight (M. Wertheimer, K. Duncker). At the same time, the emergence of one or another solution in the productive thinking of animals and humans was interpreted as a result of the formation of good gestalts in the psychological field. In the 20s XX century K. Lewin expanded the scope of Gestalt psychology by introducing the personal dimension. Gestalt psychology had a significant influence on neobehaviourism, cognitive psychology, and the New Look school.

Depth psychology

- a number of directions in psychology and psychiatry, which postulate the leading role of unconscious (irrational, affective-emotional, instinctive and intuitive processes) in the activity of an individual, in the formation of his personality. Includes: hormic psychology, psychoanalysis, neo-Freudianism, analytical psychology and individual psychology.

Humanistic psychology

- a number of directions in modern psychology that are focused primarily on the study of human semantic structures. In humanistic psychology, the main subjects of analysis are: highest values, self-actualization of the individual, creativity, love, freedom, responsibility, autonomy, mental health, interpersonal communication. Humanistic psychology emerged as an independent movement in the early 60s. gg. XX century as a protest against behaviorism and psychoanalysis, receiving the name of the third force. A. Maslow, K. Rogers, W. Frankl, S. Bühler can be included in this direction. F. Barron, R. May, S. Jurard and others. The methodological positions of humanistic psychology are formulated in the following premises:

· Man is whole;

· Not only general, but also individual cases are valuable;

· The main psychological reality is a person’s experiences;

· Human life is a single process;

· A person is open to self-realization;

· A person is not determined only by external situations.

Some areas of psychotherapy and humanistic pedagogy are built on the basis of humanistic psychology.

Activity approach in psychology

- a system of methodological and theoretical principles for the study of mental phenomena, according to which the main subject of research is the activity that mediates all mental processes. This approach began to take shape in Russian psychology in the 1920s. XX century In the 30s two interpretations of the activity approach in psychology were proposed, proposed by S.L. Rubinstein, who formulated the principle of the unity of consciousness and activity, and A.N. Leontyev, together with other representatives of the Kharkov activity-based psychological school, developed the problem of the common structure of external and internal activity.

Differential psychology

- a branch of psychology that studies individual psychological differences. The term differential psychology itself was introduced in 1900 by V. Stern. The object of study can be both specific individuals and different social, class, ethnic, and age groups. Most often, the focus of the study is on the personal and intellectual characteristics of the individual, correlated with neurophysiological factors.

Geneva School of Genetic Psychology

- a direction in the study of the mental development of a child, created by J. Piaget. At the center are the problems of the origin and development of intelligence - the formation of fundamental concepts (object, space, time, causality); features of children's logic; similarities and differences between the psyche of a child and an adult; transitions from one form of mental activity to another. To analyze these problems, a special method of psychological research was developed - the method of clinical conversation, in which not the external signs of a phenomenon are studied, but the processes leading to their occurrence. The use of this method made it possible to discover new psychological phenomena, in particular the phenomenon of child egocentrism: at all levels, the development of a child’s intelligence is carried out through a transition from egocentrism through decentration to a more objective mental position. The structures of intelligence are formed through the development of action. In a child under 2 years of age, external material actions that are carried out extensively and consistently become schematized with constant repetition. At preschool age, with the help of symbolic means (imitation, play, mental image, drawing, speech) they are transferred to the internal plane, where they are reduced and coordinated with other actions, and at primary school age they turn into operations. Thus, analogous to operations at the sensorimotor level, concrete and formal operations represent three fundamental structures of intelligence that determine the entire course of mental development. The development of children's thinking reflects the general biological ways of life of the body (assimilation, accommodation, adaptation). The study of learning processes led representatives of the Geneva School to the conclusion that through training it is possible to accelerate the assimilation of concepts, but this always depends on the initial level of development. The order of formation of the fundamental structures of intelligence is constant, but the timing of their achievement may change under the influence of external factors. Genetic psychology is closely related to genetic epistemology, where the laws of the development of intelligence in a child are transferred to the field of scientific knowledge. B. Inelder, E. Sheminsky and others also belong to the Geneva School of Psychology.

Individual psychology

- a direction of depth psychology founded by A. Adler. The name of this movement, derived from the Latin individuum, which means indivisible, expresses its credo - to explore the integrity of the individual without dividing it into the conscious and unconscious. In all manifestations of personality, the leading quality is the realization of a life goal or the meaning of life, which begins in a child already in the first 3 to 5 years and in which a special life style develops. Both the goal and the individual’s lifestyle are closely related to the conditions of family upbringing. In the early stages of the formation of this psychological trend, the desire to compensate for the innate sense of inferiority by achieving the attributes of power and might was considered as the driving forces of personality development. Subsequently, the driving force of development began to be considered social interest as the desire to cooperate with other people to achieve common goals. If it is underdeveloped, manifestations of crime, drug addiction, and psychopathological deviations are possible.

Introspective psychology

- a number of psychological trends that have their origin in the teachings of R. Descartes and J. Locke, based on the postulate that the subjective experience of an individual is not mediated and the impossibility of an objective study of mental processes. In this case, someone else's consciousness is considered as specially reconstructed through the transfer operation: the researcher, knowing about the connection of his own experiences with their external manifestations, builds a hypothesis about the internal experiences of another person based on his externally observable behavior. This direction includes the school of W. Wundt, the structural psychology of E. Titchener, the psychology of the act of F. Brentano, the Würzburg school, as well as L. M. Lopatin, G. I. Chelpanov.

Cognitive psychology

- a direction in psychology that emerged in the early 60s. Characterized by consideration of the psyche as a system of cognitive operations. Modern cognitive psychology works in the following research areas: perception, pattern recognition, attention, memory, imagination, language, developmental psychology, thinking and problem solving, human intelligence and artificial intelligence. The main method is the analysis of the microstructure of a particular psychological process.

Columbia school

- a psychological school that arose within the framework of functional psychology, in which R. Woodworth was the leader.

Critical psychology

- a direction in German psychology based on Marxism that emerged in the late 60s. XX century Its representatives are K. Holzkamp, U. Holzkamp-Osterkamp, G. Ullmann, O. Dreyer, K. H. Brown. It has many things in common with the theory of activity of A.N. Leontiev. One of the basic ones is the concept of ability to act as the ability of an individual to control the conditions of his life through the implementation of a certain social role. At the same time, human development can be either limited, when the individual’s adaptation to existing conditions suppresses his interests, or complete, when the individual fights for the life that corresponds to his essential strengths. These development possibilities are illustrated by particular experimental data - when considering the relationships: illusory and adequate perception, everyday thinking, which is characterized by simplifications and self-deceptions, and true understanding, negative emotions (fears, depression) and normal human emotions.

Leipzig school

- a psychological direction that arose in Germany at the end of the 1910s. XX century and lasted until the mid-30s. This direction included: F. Kruger, H. Volkelt, F. Zander, O. Klemm, A. Wellek. The main focus was on the study of the psyche and consciousness in their integrity. To operationalize this attitude, the concepts of gestalt were used, which are similar in scope to a similar concept developed in Gestalt psychology, but have greater semantic content, and the concept of complex quality, which is related to the concept of gestalt quality in Gestalt psychology. The quality complex exists at the early stages of mental development as the basis for the formation of gestalts and, in comparison with them, has a relative diffuseness and emotional richness. As one of the methods for studying the transition of complex-quality to Gestalt, the method of phenomenological introspection was developed. At this school, problems of ontogenesis, typology of perception, development of visual activity and thinking in children were actively studied. The basis of a person’s mental life was based on feelings that best represent the world of mental existence, which is a system of attitudes, dispositions, and potentials on which the course of actual mental processes depends. Subsequently, the ideas of the researchers of the Leipzig school were continued in German characterology of the 50s. (A. Wellek), as well as in humanistic psychology (G. Allport).

Neo-Freudianism

- a direction in psychology that emerged in the 20-30s, in which the key concepts of Freud’s psychoanalysis were reworked based on the postulate of the social determinism of the human psyche. At the same time, the basis of all theoretical constructions of this direction are the concepts of the unconscious and the fundamental conflict of relations between the individual and society. The most influential representatives of neo-Freudianism are American psychologists K. Horney, G. S. Sullivan and E. Fromm.

Objective psychology

- a symbol for psychological schools focused on the use of objective methods of analysis based on conventional rules for recording mental phenomena. It is opposite in its methodological grounds to subjective, or introspective, psychology. In different areas of objective psychology, the following subjects can be distinguished: behavior (behaviourism), reactions (reactology), reflexes (reflexology), etc.

Understanding psychology

- a direction in German psychology of the late 19th - early 20th centuries, in which a special method of analyzing mental content was developed through an intuitive experience of its integrity and correlation with cultural and historical values. The idea itself was put forward by V. Dilthey, and it was later developed in the works of E. Spranger, who introduced the very term of understanding psychology. This direction had a significant influence on many psychologists (A. Pfender, F. Kruger) and existentialist philosophers (K. Jaspers, M. Heidegger).

Psychoanalysis

- a psychological direction founded by the Austrian psychiatrist and psychologist Z. Freud at the end of the 19th century. Developed from a method of studying and treating hysterical neuroses. Subsequently, a general psychological theory was created that placed the driving forces of mental life, motives, drives, and meanings in the center of attention. A structural diagram of the psyche was developed, in which three levels were distinguished: conscious, subconscious, unconscious. To mediate the relationship of the unconscious with other levels, censorship is used, which displaces feelings, thoughts and desires condemned by the individual into the area of the unconscious and does not allow a reverse breakthrough into consciousness of the repressed content. But the unconscious still manifests itself in human behavior and psyche - in slips of the tongue, slips of the tongue, memory errors, dreams, accidents, neuroses. Awareness of this in the process of psychoanalytic therapy leads to the elimination of painful symptoms.

Reactology

- a direction in Russian psychology of the 20s, founded by K.N. Kornilov. It was proposed here to consider a reaction that combines both a physiological reflex and a mental experience as the main unit of analysis of the psyche. Unlike a reflex, the reaction comes not from a separate organ, but from an entire organism, and is characteristic of all organisms capable of movement. In the early 30s. this direction was criticized.

Sensationalism

(from Latin
sensus
- sensation, feeling) - methodological position. It is characterized by the assumption that the entire content of mental life is exhausted by sensory impressions received in the process of life of the subject of cognition. This doctrine has its origins in the philosophical schools of the Epicureans and Stoics, where it was proposed to consider the mind as a blank slate on which experience draws its writings. Subsequently, on the basis of sensationalism, associative psychology arose, in which the task of a psychological experiment was seen to be the identification of primary sensory elements, or sensations, from which all mental life is composed.

Structural psychology

- a direction in psychology developed by E. Titchener on the basis of the ideas of W. Wundt as opposed to functional psychology. The task of psychology, in his opinion, is not to analyze the role played by consciousness in behavior, but to discover elementary structures of consciousness that cannot be further dissected, to clarify the laws of unification of these parts, as well as to reveal the connection between psychological elements and physiological processes. This problem was solved primarily using the method of analytical introspection.

Topological psychology

- Gestalt psychological concept of personality, developed by K. Levin. To build a model of the structure of a person and its interactions with the environment, the language of topology was used, a branch of geometry in which the relative positions of figures and the distances between their elements are studied. At the same time, the personality appears as a dynamic system of cells, each of which contains objects of the external environment that are significant for a person, associated with his needs, which act as the driving force of behavior. Psychic energy is carried out from the personality to surrounding objects, which, due to this, acquire a certain valence and begin to attract or repel it, causing locomotion. When such behavior collides with insurmountable barriers, psychic energy transfers to other personal systems associated with other activities, and replacement occurs. The holistic structure of the human psyche appears as a personality taken with its psychological environment, on the border between which are the perceptual and motor systems.

French sociological school

- sociological direction. It is characterized by a socio-historical approach to the human psyche. Its representatives are E. Durkheim, L. Levy-Bruhl, M. Galbwachs, C. Blondel. According to Durkheim, the introduction of collective ideas developed by society and represented by general, religious, moral, social ideas, rules, norms into individual consciousness is based on a purely spiritual speech process of interaction of consciousnesses. On this basis, L. Levi-Bruhl developed the doctrine of two types of human thinking - logical and prelogical, which coexist at all stages of the development of society, but in primitive society prelogical thinking predominates. The modern French anthropologist C. Lévi-Strauss put forward the position that in the thinking of people at all stages of the development of society one can distinguish constant structures, in particular dyadic, paired, structures represented, for example, by the polar qualities of black - white, good - evil. The postulate about the determination of the individual's psyche by the content of social consciousness was illustrated using various materials: M. Galbvaks studied the processes of memory, S. Blondel - affects. This direction influenced J. Piaget.

Freudianism

- a psychological direction developed by S. Freud, based on the concept of libido, including the technique of psychoanalysis. The main assumption is the statement that the driving forces of personality development are sexual and aggressive drives that are instinctive in nature. When the realization of these drives is prohibited by society, they are repressed into the realm of the unconscious, and their access to consciousness is possible only in symbolic form, in particular in the form of slips of the tongue, works of art, and neurotic symptoms. The procedure for curing neurotic conditions consists of bringing to the patient’s consciousness the true causes of his painful experiences and conditions.

Functional psychology

- a psychological direction that appeared in the USA at the end of the 19th century. It is characterized by a predominant focus on the study of adaptive functions of the psyche, the adaptive role of consciousness in behavior. This direction was based on the evolutionary doctrine developed by Charles Darwin and G. Spencer. The programmatic document of this direction was the article by D. Dewey, The Concept of the Reflex Arc in Psychology (1896), which emphasized the role of the various components of the reflex act in the individual’s adaptation to the environment. The foundations of functional psychology were systematically developed at the Chicago and Columbia schools of psychology. By the beginning of the 20s. this direction collapsed. In Europe, E. Claparède and N. N. Lange were in similar positions.

Kharkov Psychological School

- an informal organization of psychologists who worked in the 30s. in scientific institutions of Kharkov on the development of the ideas of L.S. Vygotsky and on the formulation on this basis of the foundations of the activity approach in psychology. This school belonged to: A.N. Leontyev, A.R. Luria, P.I. Zinchenko, A.V. Zaporozhets, P.Ya. Galperin and others.

Holistic psychology

- a number of directions in psychology, the methodology of which is focused on studying the integrity of the structures of the psyche and consciousness. Holistic psychology includes the Leipzig school, Gestalt psychology, and the school of K. Lewin.

Chicago school

- a psychological school that arose within the framework of functional psychology.
G. Ladd, D. Angell, G. Carr, J. G. Mead belonged to it. ( Note from DoctoRa: I also adhere to the methodology of this school).
Existential psychology

- a psychological direction based on the principles of humanistic psychology and proceeding from the primacy of human existence, with which basic existential problems, stress and anxiety are organically connected. Its representatives are L. Binswanger, M. Boss, E. Minkowski, R. May, W. Frankl, J. Bugenthal. The following series of problems stand out here: life and death; freedom and responsibility; communication and loneliness: the meaning and meaninglessness of existence. At the same time, it is believed that a specific person has a unique personal experience that cannot be reduced to universal rules. Based on these theoretical premises, existential psychotherapy is being developed, aimed at restoring the authenticity of the individual, which is achieved through deep personal reflection.