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Direct experience as a subject of psychology. Man as an object and subject of psychology

So, in the history of psychology, different ideas about its subject have developed.

1) The soul as a subject of study. The soul as a subject of psychology was recognized by all researchers until the beginning of the 18th century, before the basic ideas and then the first system of psychology were formed. modern type. Ideas about the soul were both idealistic and materialistic.

2) Phenomena of consciousness as a subject of psychology. In the 18th century, the place of the soul was taken by phenomena of consciousness, that is, phenomena that a person actually observes and finds in “himself”, turning to his “inner mental activity.” These are thoughts, desires, feelings, memories known to everyone personal experience. In the middle of the 18th century, the first scientific form of psychology emerged - English empirical associationist psychology, which reached a special peak in mid-19th century.

3) Direct experience as a subject of psychology. The greatest success in building psychology as an independent experimental science was originally the program developed by W. Wundt. The unique subject of psychology according to Wundt is the direct experience of the subject, comprehended through introspection and introspection. This idea underlay his plan to create experimental (physiological) psychology. Wundt's ideas laid the foundation for the structural school in psychology.

4) Intentional acts of consciousness as a subject of psychology. F. Brentano bases his teaching on such qualities of consciousness as activity and objectivity. Brentano stood at the origins of the movement later called functionalism.

5) The origin of mental activities as a subject of psychology. THEM. Sechenov accepted the postulate about the relatedness of the mental and physiological “according to the method of origin,” that is, according to the mechanism of completion. The subject of psychological research as such should be a process that unfolds not in consciousness (or in the sphere of the unconscious), but in an objective system of relations, the process of behavior.

6) Behavior as a subject of psychology. The beginning of the 20th century was marked by the emergence and development of behaviorism as a reaction to unsuccessful experimental studies"physiological psychology". The subject of behaviorism, or “behavioral psychology,” is behavior. Watson and his associates proposed a theory of learning through trial and error. Subsequently, it became obvious that in the interval between the action of the stimulus and the behavioral reactions, some kind of active processing of incoming information occurs, that these are processes without taking into account which it is impossible to explain the reaction of an animal or a person to available stimuli. This is how neo-behaviorism arises with its most important concept of “additional, or intermediate, variables.”

7) The unconscious as a subject of psychology. According to the teachings of S. Freud, human actions are controlled by deep motivations that elude clear consciousness. These deep motivations should be the subject of psychological science. The roots of human behavior are in his childhood. A fundamental role in the process of human formation and development is given to sexual instincts and drives.

8) Information processing processes and the results of these processes as a subject of psychology. Theories of the cognitive direction focus on the fact that human knowledge is not reduced to a simple sum of information received by the brain from the external environment or available to it from the moment of birth. Gestalt psychology emphasizes the initial programming of certain internal structures and their influence on perceptual and cognitive processes.

9) Personal experience of a person as a subject of psychology. Humanistic psychology departs from scientific psychology, taking away main role person's personal experience. A person, according to humanistic psychologists, is capable of self-esteem and can independently find a path to the development of his personality (self-actualization). The subjectivity of this approach makes it difficult to establish the difference between a person's opinion of himself and what he really is. The ideas of this approach turned out to be useful for psychological practice, but did not contribute anything to the theory of psychology. Moreover, the subject of research within this direction has almost disappeared.

10) Development of views on the subject of psychology of domestic authors. According to P.Ya. Galperin, the subject of psychology is orientation activity. Moreover, this concept includes not only cognitive forms of mental activity, but also needs, feelings, and will. K.K. Platonov considers mental phenomena to be the subject of psychology. This is very general definition the subject of psychology, when specified, does not contradict the above approach.

Analyzing the development of views on the subject of psychology, we can draw the following conclusions:

1) In each of the emerging directions, one of the necessary aspects of the study was emphasized. Therefore, it can be argued that all schools and areas of psychology contributed to the formation of its subject;

2) At present, it seems appropriate to eclecticly combine the “rational grains” contained in different theoretical directions and generalize them;

An essential point in this regard is the consideration of the generation of consciousness, its functioning, development and connection with behavior and activity.

In the development of psychology, three main stages can be distinguished:

1) pre-scientific, or everyday, psychology;

2) philosophical psychology: psychology of ancient times; Psychology of the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Modern times (VI century BC - early 19th century AD);

3) scientific psychology (second half of the 19th century - our time).

So, whatever in complicated ways No matter how psychological thought progressed, mastering its subject, no matter what terms it was meant (soul, consciousness, psyche, activity), it is possible to identify features that characterize the subject of psychology, distinguishing it from other sciences. The subject of psychology is the natural connections of the subject with the natural and sociocultural world, imprinted in the system of sensory and mental images of this world, motives prompting action, as well as in the actions themselves, experiences of their relationships to other people and to themselves, in the properties of the individual as the core of this system .

Thus, psychological knowledge form a kind of middle center, to which both knowledge about the nervous mechanisms of the psyche and knowledge about the determinants of its content and structure are concentrated external conditions. The synthesis of all this knowledge must necessarily occur and is already happening today before our eyes, and the central system-forming science here is psychology, and not any other specific science that studies the mental activity of the brain. In this sense, the subject of psychology should and will become increasingly closer to its object, and psychology itself will have to remain not only a specific private science, but become a vast area of complex systemic experimental and theoretical research. However, the basis of such psychology in a broad philosophical sense The word should always remain psychology as a specific science about one of the resulting manifestations of the functioning of the most complex object of nature and society - the mental activity of the brain. In the future, psychology will not be absorbed by neuroscience, sociology, or philosophy, but will assimilate all their discoveries and achievements. It may very well be that it is really destined to become one of the most important sciences in human society

In psychology, a person acts simultaneously as an object, a subject, and a subject of knowledge.

There are different points of view on what exactly psychology studies. Literally: psychology is the science of the soul. But the positivist tradition of the development of science requires the objectification of the phenomena being studied. The soul is difficult to objectify, to study by any empirical or experimental method. And therefore, the formation of psychology as a science is associated with the development of ideas about its object and subject. Psychology seeks answers to questions about the facts and reasons for the behavior and consciousness of a person (or another carrier of the psyche). In the broadest sense, the object of psychology is the psyche and its manifestation (behavior, activity, activity) in interaction with the surrounding reality.

Object (from lat. objectum - literally “thrown before something”) that which is perceived, thought, discussed and processed, as opposed to the subject (the one who perceives, thinks, discusses and processes it).

Subject of study Psychology has historically undergone changes with the development of psychological knowledge and psychology as a science.

Subject - any object that appears as limited or complete; something to which properties can belong and which can stand in certain relationships with other objects.

Man as a subject of psychology is included in different areas human existence: psychosphere (area of mental phenomena), ethnosphere (area of ethnic culture), noosphere (area of human knowledge), biosphere (the shell of the Earth populated by living organisms). This determines the complexity and multidimensionality of the subject of psychology, its paradigms, approaches and methods (Fig. 1.2).

The development of the subject of research in line with psychological knowledge in the history of psychology is contradictory. Since Antiquity, within the framework of philosophical and psychological views, the subject of psychology can be considered soul in relationship with the body , and in the Middle Ages, within the framework of theological teachings - the immortal soul (rather in contrast to the body).

O - ontogeny; S - socialization; AND - life path; L - personality; I - individual, In - individuality

With the formation scientific knowledge from the XVII-XVIII centuries. psychological teachings were still within the framework of the subject “soul,” but the problem of consciousness stood out. Consciousness was seen as the soul's knowledge of itself.

The formation of psychology as a science is associated not only with the identification of consciousness as a subject of research, but also with the emergence empirical method. The first such method in psychology is introspection. The essence of introspection is that consciousness studies the manifestation of consciousness, arbitrarily referring to various manifestations of the psyche.

Introspection (lat. introspecto - I look inside, I peer) - a method for a person to study acts of his own activity; thoughts, images, feelings, experiences, acts of thinking as the activity of the mind that structures consciousness, etc. The method of introspection as a scientific method was also used with the advent of experimental psychology by Wilhelm Wundt.

Rene Descartes (1596-1650) generally reduced the properties of the soul to the concept " thinking ". His statement “I think, therefore I exist” (Latin - "Cogito, ergo sump; fr. "Je pense, done je suisp - “I think - therefore I am”), formulated in the book “Discourse on Method”. More precisely, the phrase sounds like " Dubito ergo cogito, cogito ergo sum" - “I doubt - that means I think; I think - that means I exist.” Doubt, within the framework of the teachings of R. Descartes, is one of the modes of thinking. And the main subject of psychology, in fact, becomes not even consciousness, but thinking. But in general, within the framework of associationism (one of the central scientific directions in the development of scientific psychology from the 17th century until the beginning of the 20th century), the subject of psychology is consciousness.

Associationism is a direction in psychology in which association is the main explanatory principle of mental life. Associationism is based on the idea that the sequence of ideas that arise in the mind reflects the order of external influences on the body. And that manifestations of mental life, including reason and will, are subject to the law of association. Associations connect various elements mental into the unity and integrity of consciousness.

At the beginning of the 20th century, during the period of active development of experimental and empirical psychology, according to L. S. Vygotsky’s definition, there was a crisis in the methodological foundations of psychology: “psychology as a science, in its practical progress forward in the light of the demands placed on it by practice, has outgrown the possibilities allowed those methodological foundations on which psychology began to be built at the end of the 18th - early XIX century." The result of the "open crisis in psychology" was the emergence of various scientific schools, some of which continued to consider consciousness (for example, Gestalt psychology), while others identified other phenomena as the subject of psychology: behavior (behaviorism), dynamics of consciousness and unconsciousness (psychoanalysis); development of higher mental functions (cultural-historical psychology), etc. Each direction in psychology began to rely on its own methodological foundations, determine its own subject of research, and use its own research method corresponding to the subject. In fact, since the beginning of the 20th century. It is impossible to talk about the unity of the development of subject and method in psychology as a science.

In the structure of the psyche in Russian psychology, three groups of phenomena are usually distinguished:

1) mental processes(cognitive - sensation, perception, ideas, memory, imagination, thinking, speech, attention; emotional - excitement, joy, indignation, anger, etc.; volitional - decision-making, overcoming difficulties, struggle of motives, managing one’s behavior, etc.) ;
2) mental states (excitement, depression, fear, cheerfulness, despondency, etc.);
3) mental properties (direction, temperament, abilities, character).

Psychology, even among other humanities (i.e., those that study man), has important feature. In it, the subject and subject of research are not just one and the same person, and one and the same instrument. In fact, in all other sciences, the subject of research and the research tool are external to the subject of research. In psychology, mental phenomena are studied through mental phenomena. The main problem in this regard is the subjectivity of psychology as a science.

Subject (from lat. subjectus - underlying, underlying, from sub- under and jacio- I throw, I lay the foundation) - a person as a bearer of activity, activity, consciousness and cognition.

Mental phenomena (sensations, images, ideas, thinking, memory, speech, imagination, motives, needs, emotions, feelings, will, etc.) are characteristic of each of us. And we involuntarily reflect on the manifestations of our consciousness, behavior, mental processes. But our everyday knowledge of the psyche is not yet science, since knowledge from our personal experience is specific, not generalized, and is intuitive in nature, and not rationally realized. They are based on everyday observation rather than on experiment or statistically significant empirical experience. According to L. S. Rubinstein, “knowledge represented in the consciousness of an individual is the unity of the objective and the subjective.” Achieving objectivity in psychological knowledge is the path to the development of psychology as a science. "The consciousness of a concrete real individual is unity of experience and knowledge" . "Consciousness - unity of subjective and objective "And in this context, the task of psychology as a science is to overcome the subjectivism of psychological knowledge (which is impossible at extreme points, but the very movement towards the objectification of knowledge about the mental is the development of psychological science).

The beginnings of psychological knowledge. Historically, the first psychological knowledge can be considered with the emergence of various cultural forms of reflection and generalization of knowledge about the psyche, the emergence of the concept of the soul, ideas about the means and methods of communication, emotional regulation, etc. That is, this can be attributed to the birth of human culture. Ancient people, trying to explain such phenomena as dreams, fainting, death, came to the idea that along with the body there is also an immortal body. life force(“soul”), which can be separated from it and exist independently.

The soul is a significant cultural concept that allows a person to simultaneously realize his uniqueness and connection with his family, the world as a whole, which fits a person into the general ethnic picture of the world, consistent with cosmogonic myths. Speaking about the psychological meaning of the concept of the soul in the history of mankind, L. S. Vygotsky wrote: “Man put forward the idea of the soul, trying to master his inner world, it was the first scientific hypothesis ancient man, a huge conquest of thought..." .

In different traditional cultures, quite different ideas about the soul have historically developed and to some extent continue to exist, which correlate with the general ethnic picture of the world and set the meaning of human life in the world. In fact, we can, with certain reservations, consider the concept of the soul as an implicit theory of personality embedded in the ethnic picture of the world. Awareness of the soul within oneself is one of the historically first psychological means working with your inner world. But at the same time, man still little autonomates himself from the race and does not oppose himself to the world. The concept of the soul allows a person to realize himself within the world, as part of the surrounding space, in connection with ethnically defined images of time. The culminating meanings of the soul and its essence are most often revealed at moments of transition into and out of this world. But where and where from is determined by the ideological systems that have developed in the ethnic group, held by cosmogonic ideas.

The concept of the soul in the traditional worldview of many ethnic groups is considered as human life activity in the unity of anatomical characteristics, physiological, emotional processes, mentality and is inconceivable outside the clan, ethnic group, and the surrounding world. A number of general meanings of the primary concept of the soul, standing on the threshold of personality, allows a person to:

differentiate ideas about one’s own psychological properties, vitality;

see features mental development in the system of fundamental cultural values, i.e. setting a system of claims.

The greatest success in building psychology as an independent experimental science was initially the program developed by W. Wundt. The unique subject of psychology according to Wundt is the direct experience of the subject, comprehended through introspection and introspection. Wundt sought to streamline the process of introspection. He believed that physiological experience, that is, objective, makes it possible to dissect direct experience, that is, subjective, and thereby reconstruct the architectonics of the individual’s consciousness in scientific terms. This idea underlay his plan to create experimental (physiological) psychology. Wundt's ideas laid the foundation for the structural school in psychology.

Intentional acts of consciousness as a subject of psychology.

F. Brentano bases his teaching on such qualities of consciousness as activity and objectivity. Psychology should study not sensations and ideas themselves, but those acts of “action” that the subject performs (acts of representation, judgment and emotional evaluation) when he turns nothing into an object of awareness. Outside the act, the object does not exist.

The act, in turn, necessarily presupposes “direction toward,” the so-called intention. Brentano stood at the origins of the movement later called functionalism.

The origin of mental activities as a subject of psychology.

I.M. Sechenov accepted the postulate about the relatedness of the mental and physiological “according to the method of origin,” that is, according to the mechanism of completion. Sechenov considered the main idea to be the understanding of a mental act as a process, a movement that has a definite beginning, course and end. The subject of psychological research as such should be a process that unfolds not in consciousness (or in the sphere of the unconscious), but in an objective system of relations, a process of behavior.

Behavior as a subject of psychology.

The beginning of the 20th century was marked by the emergence and development of behaviorism as a reaction to unsuccessful experimental studies of “physiological psychology.” The subject of behaviorism, or “behavioral psychology,” is behavior. According to behaviorists, knowing the strength of the current stimuli and taking into account the past experience of the “subject”, it is possible to study the processes of learning, the formation of new forms of behavior, without delving into its physiological mechanisms.

American psychologist J. Watson, based on the research of I. P. Pavlov, concluded that consciousness does not play any role in learning. It has no place in psychology. New forms of behavior should be considered as conditioned reflexes. They are based on several innate, or unconditioned, reflexes. Watson and his associates proposed a theory of learning through trial and error. Subsequently, it became obvious that in the interval between the action of the stimulus and the behavioral reactions, some kind of active processing of incoming information occurs, that these are processes without taking into account which it is impossible to explain the reaction of an animal or a person to available stimuli. This is how neo-behaviorism arises with its most important concept of “additional, or intermediate, variables.”

The unconscious as a subject of psychology.

According to the teachings of S. Freud, human actions are controlled by deep motivations that elude clear consciousness. These deep motivations should be the subject of psychological science. Freud created a method of psychoanalysis with which one can explore and control a person’s deepest motivations. The basis of the psychoanalytic method is the analysis of free associations, dreams, slips of the tongue, slips of the tongue, etc. The roots of human behavior are in his childhood. A fundamental role in the process of human formation and development is given to sexual instincts and drives.

Freud's student A. Adler believed that the basis of the behavior of each individual is not sexual desires, but a very strong feeling of inferiority that arises in childhood, when the child's dependence on his parents and on the environment is strong.

In the neo-Freudian concept of K. Horney, behavior is determined by the “basic anxiety” (or “basic anxiety”) inherent in each person, which underlies intrapersonal conflicts. Horney pays special attention to the contradiction between the needs of an individual and the possibilities of satisfying them in the existing culture.

C. G. Jung believed that the psyche is formed not only under the influence of conflicts in early childhood, but also inherits images of ancestors that came from time immemorial. Therefore, it is necessary to take into account the concept of the “collective unconscious” when studying the psyche.

Subject and methods of psychology

The need to discuss the subject of psychology

Ideas about the subject of psychology are very vague. Often psychologists simply point to mental processes (thinking, memory, feelings etc.) as the subject of your study. In other cases, it is said about a person, about personality as a subject of psychology. But both the first and second approaches to the subject of psychology are clearly unsatisfactory, since all of the above is studied not only by psychology, but also by many other sciences. A clear criterion is needed to clearly distinguish between what is within the scope of psychology and what lies outside its scope. This will allow you to better understand the tasks that a psychologist can and should solve.

Without a clear understanding of the subject, experimental research becomes difficult. For successful practical work psychologists are also needed Understanding subject of psychology. Otherwise, it is impossible to understand that psychologists do something significantly different compared to other specialists: doctors, teachers, etc.

The question of the subject is also important for studying the mechanisms of mental phenomena. Some researchers look for these mechanisms in brain physiology. Others study the laws that govern relationships between objects.

If we assume the correctness of this orientation psychological research, then this will mean that mental phenomena do not have actual psychological mechanisms and that psychology is limited to “phenomena” alone. But then the subject of psychology and its claims to an independent sphere of human knowledge disappears.

In view of the above, it seems extremely important to define the actual subject of psychology.

Traditional ideas about the subject of psychology.

The first theories put forward to explain human behavior involved factors external to the person (for example, the “shadow” that lives in the body and leaves it after death, or the gods). Greek philosophers, especially Aristotle, put forward the idea of the existence of a soul that is in unity with the body and controls thoughts and feelings, which are based on experience accumulated throughout life.

In the history of psychology, various ideas about its subject have developed.

The soul as a subject of study.

The soul as a subject of psychology was recognized by all researchers until the beginning of the 18th century, before the basic ideas and then the first system of psychology of the modern type were formed. The soul was considered the cause of all processes in the body, including the actual “mental movements.” Ideas about the soul were both idealistic and materialistic. The most interesting work of this direction is R. Descartes' treatise "The Passions of the Soul".

Phenomena of consciousness as a subject of psychology.

In the 18th century, the place of the soul was taken by phenomena of consciousness, that is, phenomena that a person actually observes, finds in “himself,” turning to his “inner mental activity.” These are thoughts, desires, feelings, memories known to everyone from personal experience. The founder of this understanding one can consider John Locke, who believed that, unlike the soul, the phenomena of consciousness are not something assumed, but actually given, and in this sense, the same indisputable facts of internal experience as the facts of external experience studied by other sciences are.

At the beginning of the 18th century, the entire mental life, first in the cognitive sphere, and then in the spheres of feelings and will, was presented as a process of formation and change (according to the laws of associations) of increasingly complex images and their combinations with actions.

In the middle of the 18th century, the first scientific form of psychology emerged - English empirical associationist psychology (D. Hartley).

Associative psychology reached its peak in the middle of the 19th century. The works of J. St. date back to this time. Mill, A. Ben, G. Spencer.

According to P.Ya. Galperin, the subject of psychology is orientation activity. Moreover, this concept includes not only cognitive forms of mental activity, but also needs, feelings , will. "The subject of psychology must be strictly limited. Psychology cannot and should not study all mental activity and all aspects of each of its forms. Other sciences, no less than psychology, have the right to study them. The claims of psychology are justified only in the sense that the process of orientation is the main side of each form of mental activity and all mental life as a whole: that it is this function that justifies all its other aspects, which are therefore practically subordinate to this function" .

K.K. Platonov considers mental phenomena to be the subject of psychology. This very general definition of the subject of psychology, when specified, does not contradict the above approach.

Conclusions.