The founder of structuralism is E. Titchener (1867-1928). Titchener believed that the content of psychology should be the content of consciousness, ordered in a certain structure. The main tasks of psychology are the extremely accurate determination of the content of the psyche, the selection of the initial elements and the laws by which they are combined into a structure.
Titchener identified the psyche with consciousness, and everything that is outside of consciousness, ranked as physiology. At the same time, "consciousness" in Titchener's concept and ordinary human self-observation are not the same thing. A person is inclined to make a "stimulus error" - to mix the object of perception and the perception of the object: when describing his mental experience, talk about the object.
Titchener rejected the concept that special formations in the form of mental images or meanings devoid of sensory character should be attached to the elements of consciousness identified by Wundt. This position contradicted the foundations of structuralism, since sensory elements (sensations, images) cannot create non-sensory, purely intellectual structures.
Titchener considered psychology to be fundamental, not applied science. He opposed his school to other trends, did not enter the American Psychological Association and created a group of "Experimentalists", publishing the "Journal of Experimental Psychology".
Rejecting the view of consciousness as a device "made of bricks and cement", scientists who developed a new direction in psychology - functionalism, came to the conclusion that it was necessary to study the dynamics of mental processes and factors that determine their orientation towards a specific goal.
Almost simultaneously with the provisions of Wundt, the idea that each mental act has a certain focus on the objects of the external world was expressed by the Austrian scientist F. Brentano (1838-1917). Having started his career as a Catholic priest, he left it because of disagreement with the dogma of the infallibility of the pope and moved to the University of Vienna, where he became a professor of philosophy (1873). Brentano proposed his own concept of psychology, opposing it to the program of Wundt that was dominant at that time (“Studies in the Psychology of the Sense Organs” (1907) and “On the Classification of Psychic Phenomena” (1911)).
home for new psychology he considered the problem of consciousness, the need to determine how consciousness differs from all other phenomena of being. He argued that Wundt's position ignores the activity of consciousness, its constant focus on the object. To designate this indispensable sign of consciousness, Brentano proposed the term intention. It is inherent in every psychic phenomenon from the very beginning and thanks to this it allows to distinguish between psychic phenomena and physical ones.
Considering that with ordinary self-observation, as well as with the use of those types of experiment proposed by Wundt, one can study only the result, but not the mental act itself, Brentano resolutely rejected the analysis procedure adopted in the laboratories of experimental psychology, believing that it distorts real mental processes and phenomena that should be studied through careful internal observation of their natural course. He was also skeptical about the possibility of objective observation, only to a limited extent admitting this method to psychology, and, of course, he considered obvious only mental phenomena given in internal experience. He emphasized that knowledge about the outside world is probable Trusov V.P. Modern psychological theories of personality. - L .: Nauka, 1990 ..
Periodization: end XIX - beginning of the 20th century
Glossary :
Analytical introspection- Mental analysis, requiring extremely highly organized introspection, with the help of which the structuralists tried to determine the smallest (not amenable to further fragmentation) fundamental units - elementary sensations, or "mental molecules" of perception. (National Psychological Encyclopedia)
Stimulus error - an answer about introspective experiences, expressed in terms of external sensations, and not in terms of one's own sensations and their qualities. A well-known term of introspective psychology, reflecting its atomistic orientation. (Dictionary of a practical psychologist. - M .: AST, Harvest. S. Yu. Golovin. 1998.)
Vasomotor reactions - the body's defenses when, under the influence of some factors, the vessels change their diameter. (Medical reference book of terms).
Mindflow- A concept that reflects the movement of consciousness and its continuous change. ( Dictionary of practical psychologist. - M.: AST, Harvest. S. Yu. Golovin. 1998. )
Pragmatism- a philosophical doctrine that considers action, expedient activity as the central, defining properties of human essence. ( History of Philosophy: Encyclopedia. - Minsk: Book House. A. A. Gritsanov, T. G. Rumyantseva, M. A. Mozheiko. 2002. )
Positivism- philosophy direction of the 19th-20th centuries, emphasizing the reliability and value of positive scientific knowledge in comparison with philosophy and other forms of spiritual activity, giving preference to empirical methods of cognition and pointing to the unreliability and precariousness of all theoretical constructions. ( Philosophy: Encyclopedic Dictionary. - M.: Gardariki. Edited by A.A. Ivin. 2004.)
Persons:
Titchener E. (1867-1927)
Anglo-American experimental psychologist.
Titchener first coined the term "structuralism" to refer to Wundt's exploratory approach, as opposed to the functionalism of William James. He himself continued to develop this approach, although he adopted introspectionism from the Würzburg school as a method of studying mental processes. He tried to decompose the psyche into some constituent elements, which he numbered up to 30,000, and which he compared with chemical elements. However, one cannot underestimate detailed descriptions mental processes and sensations, compiled thanks to such research by Titchener. The “Titchener illusion” is also named after him: a circle surrounded by other circles seems to be smaller, the larger the diameter of the circles surrounding it. (T. Leahy. History of Modern Psychology, 3rd ed. St. Petersburg: Peter, 2003. - 448 from.)
James W. (1842-1910)
American philosopher and psychologist, one of the founders and leading exponent of pragmatism and functionalism.
Actively engaged in parapsychological experiments and spiritualism. From 1878 to 1890 James writes his "Principles of Psychology", in which he rejects the atomism of German psychology and puts forward the task of studying concrete facts and states of consciousness, and not data that are "in" consciousness. James considered consciousness as an individual stream in which the same sensations or thoughts never appear twice. James considered selectivity to be one of the important characteristics of consciousness. For James, consciousness is a function that "in all probability, like other biological functions, evolved because it is useful." Proceeding from such an adaptive nature of consciousness, he assigned an important role to instincts and emotions, as well as individual physiological characteristics of a person. The theory of emotions put forward in 1884 by James was widely adopted. The theory of personality, developed by him in one of the chapters of "Psychology", had a significant impact on the formation of personology in the United States. Along with Stanley Hall, James is the only psychologist who twice became president of the American Psychological Association - in 1894 and in 1904. 79-91)
Lange K.(1834-1900)
Danish physician, physiologist, psychiatrist, psychologist, philosopher, professor of pathology at the University of Copenhagen (1885), honorary doctor of Lund University (1893).
In 1868, K. Lange carried out research on bulbar syndrome, and in 1874 on chronic poliomyelitis.
K. Lange was especially famous for his peripheral theory of the origin of emotions - the vascular-motor theory of emotions, in which he assigned the leading role to the somato-vegetative component. In it, emotions are interpreted as subjective formations that arise in response to nervous excitation, due to the state of innervation and the width of the blood vessels of the visceral organs. Lange put forward this theory, not being familiar with the theory of W. James (1884), so it was called the James-Lange theory.
From the entire spectrum of mental movements, he singled out and studied in detail what he called “the most pronounced and characteristic emotions”: joy, sadness, fear, anger, and also with some assumptions: embarrassment, impatience, disappointment. K. Lange described the main features of the "physiology" and "physiognomy" of emotions, their physiological and behavioral components.
In addition, K. Lange discovered and was the first to describe the psychotropic properties of lithium. ( Psychological dictionary. THEM. Kondakov. 2000.)
Dewey J. (1859- 1952)
American philosopher and educator, representative of the philosophical direction of pragmatism.
Dewey developed a new version of pragmatism - instrumentalism, developed a pragmatist methodology in the field of logic and theory of knowledge.
Three ways to improve experience according to Dewey: 1. Social reconstruction, 2. Application of deeply developed scientific methods of “high technologies” to experience, 3. Improvement of thinking.
Social reconstruction - the improvement of society itself - is a condition for the improvement of experience, since a significant proportion of experience accumulates within society. Dewey developed the theory of the scientific method as a tool for successful human activity, achieving goals. The discovery made by Dewey when developing the theory of the scientific method and teaching about the problematic situation is that reliable knowledge and the correct use of the scientific method lead to the transformation of a problematic situation into a solved one - the situation acquires a different quality - “hence, knowledge leads to a qualitative change in the object of knowledge - knowledge changes the very existence of the object of knowledge.
The purpose of education, according to Dewey, is the education of a person who can "adapt to various situations" in a free enterprise. D. Dewey's experimental method suggested that we know only when and when we can actually make changes in things by our activity that will confirm or refute our knowledge. Without this knowledge, only guesswork remains. Dewey considered education as a process of accumulation and reconstruction of experience in order to deepen its social content (Gureeva A.V. Critical analysis of the pragmatic aesthetics of D. Dewey. - Moscow: Moscow State University, 1983.)
Woodward R. (1869-1962)
American psychologist, "father of American psychology", a representative of one of the areas of functional psychology, called dynamic psychology.
Woodworth's first influential study on "transfer" in learning was carried out in collaboration with E.L. Thorndike in 1901 and published in the journal "Psychological Review" No. 8. The work proved that the training of one function has little effect on another. This helped to refute the "doctrine of formal disciplines in education."
Another important work of Woodworth was a study based on anthropometric studies of 1100 people belonging to various races (1904, St. Louis International Exhibition). Woodworth showed that differences within a population are much greater than differences between races. For that time it was a revolutionary statement. In 1918, Mr.. V. publishes the book "Dynamic Psychology" ("Dynamic Psychology"), which develops ideas about the fundamental importance of the dynamics of motives in the organization of behavior and popularizes the term "dynamic psychology" he introduced.
Considering the original "stimulus-response" formula of behaviorism incomplete, Woodworth includes in it as a mediating link such a determinant as an organism, with its inherent motivational parameters ("stimulus - organism - reaction"). He put forward a hypothesis that emerging skills themselves can acquire motivation, regardless of the instincts that led to their formation.This position was later adopted by Gordon Allport in his theory of motives.
The result of Woodworth's teaching activities was the textbook "Psychology" ("Psychology", 1921), which went through five reprints (the last in 1947), and "Experimental Psychology" ("Experimental Psychology", jointly with H. Schlosberg, 1938, 1954), which became for several generations of students the main textbook on experimental psychology. One of the first historical reviews of psychology was Woodworth's Contemporary Schools of Psychology (1931, 1948, 1964). In it, in particular, he sets out his methodological position of moderation and eclecticism and criticizes the "narrow and rigid" methods of E.B. Titchener and J.B. Watson. A generalization of Woodworth's ideas was given in the last major edition of "Dynamics of Behavior" (1958).
Spencer g. (1820-1903)
Spencer was one of the founders positivism, in line with which he sought to transform the methodology of associative psychology. Spencer, like Ben, makes the theory of evolution the basis of positive psychology. Thus, influences of positivism, evolutionary approach and associationism are intertwined in his theory.
He revised the subject of psychology, defining it as the ratio of external forms to internal ones, associations between them. Thus, he expanded the area of the mental, including in it not only associations between internal factors, that is, associations in the field of consciousness, but also the connection of consciousness with the external world. Exploring the role of the psyche in human evolution, in his generalizing book on psychology "Fundamentals of Psychology" (1870-1872), Spencer wrote that the psyche is a mechanism for adapting to the environment. So in science appeared new approach to the determination of the psyche - biological, which replaced the mechanistic explanation. It follows from this approach that the psyche arises naturally at a certain stage of evolution, at the moment when the living conditions of living beings become so complicated that it is impossible to adapt to them without their adequate reflection. Spencer extended the laws of evolution not only to the psyche, but also to social life, formulating the organic theory of society. He said that a person needs to adapt not only to nature, but also to the social environment, so his psyche develops along with society. He was one of the first psychologists to compare the psychology of a savage and modern man and concluded that modern man, in comparison with savages, has a more developed thinking, while primitive people perception was more developed. These conclusions at that time were quite unconventional and fundamental, they allowed scientists to develop comparative methods of mental research, which were widely used. Analyzing the difference in the mental development of people belonging to different nations and living at different times, Spencer abandoned the old views of associationism on the lifetime of the formation of knowledge. He wrote that the most frequently repeated associations do not disappear, but are fixed in the human brain and are inherited, thus, "consciousness is not a blank slate, it is full of pre-prepared associations." These innate associations determine the difference between the brains of a European and a native, the difference between the consciousness of different peoples. Spencer's theory was recognized among psychologists, had a huge impact on the further development of psychology, primarily on strengthening its connection with natural science and the search for an objective method, and contributed to the creation of experimental psychology. (Martsinkovskaya T. History of psychology)
Page 21 of 30
Structuralism and functionalismin American psychology
Structuralism is a trend in American psychology, its goal is to find the mental pervoelecop And structure, which are the primary elements in a certain mental process. This direction continued the development of psychology within the framework of the Wundtian concept of the mental, its leader was the only faithful student of Wundt Edward Titchener(1867-1927). An Englishman by nationality, he received a philological education at Oxford, but could not continue his education in the field of psychology, which interested him, because in English universities experimental studies of the "soul" were banned by religious university figures. For 2 years he studied with Bundt, then moved to the USA, where he worked at Cornell University for 35 years.
In 1896 and 1905 Titchener published two of the most significant works - "Essays in Psychology" and "Experimental Psychology", in which he substantiated his scientific views. He believed that psychology faces 3 eternal questions (“what?”, “how?” and “why?”): 1 - what elements consciousness is built from; 2 - how these elements are combined and what are the stable regular connections between them; 3 - how the nervous tissue and physiological processes in it give rise to mental processes. Titchener believed that psychology is the science of the experience experienced by the subject, which means that the subject of psychology isconsciousness, as the sum of the experiences of the subject at a given moment in time, method - introspection. The content of consciousness is not those banal self-reports that naive subjects give, consciousness has its own structure and material, hidden from the subject in the same way as the processes studied in chemistry and physics are hidden. In order to obtain in the experiment the material of pure consciousness, the subject must be specially prepared. He must learn to separate in experience those components that come from the object (observed object) from his own states at the moment of observation. It is the subject's own states that are the subject of research in the structural school of psychology. Description of experience in terms of the object Titchener called stimulus error. If the subject, observing an apple, describes it as an apple, then he makes a stimulus error, he must describe his experience in terms of current perception (describe color, shape, surface brilliance, light transitions, shadows, etc.) - It is worth mentioning what Titchener called their subjects with reagents (chemical term); a reagent is a substance that is added to the base so that the properties of the base substance appear. The result of the work of Titchener and his collaborators was the description of approximately 44,000 elementary sensations, of which 32,820 are visual and 11,600 are auditory. Each element could combine with others to form more complex mental phenomena. These elements (like chemical ones) are basic and are characterized by properties: quality (sensation modality - “red”, “hot”, etc.), intensity (strength, brightness, loudness), duration (duration in time), distinctness (attention involvement) (Schultz D., Schultz S., 1998).
Structuralism actually ceased to exist with the death of its leader in 1927. The main reason for the failure of this direction was the chosen method - the method of introspection.
The results obtained with its help are not reproducible in the same person with individual samples and are extremely variable in different people. Functionalism originated in American psychology at the beginning of the 20th century. in parallel with structuralism, but existed for a longer time. Theoretical basis functionalism was the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin, the meaning of which was expanded beyond the descriptions of the laws of life of living nature and extended to the area of human social life. Such a generalization belongs to the English philosopher, a contemporary of Darwin Herbert Spencer(1820-1903); his theory is called socialDarwinism. According to it, not only biological species, man, social institutions and systems, but the entire Universe is subject to the law of survival of the strongest. If the action of this law is not interfered with, then the best individuals and social systems will survive, and the consistent improvement of man and the types of social communities will be carried out. Accordingly, education subsidies and government support programs for socially vulnerable groups are a vicious practice that nullifies the natural processes in the human community (“Those who cannot survive should be allowed to leave the stage”), Social Darwinism corresponded to the values of Protestantism, the spirit of individualism and free enterprise that reigned in the United States at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, and was adopted as a national idea (Shultz D., Shultz S., 1998).
The most famous exponent of functionalism was William James(1842-1910), a scientist who had a deep vision of human nature, but was not entirely consistent both in scientific interests and in human relations. He received his initial education as a physician, for a short time he studied psychology in Leipzig under Wundt; in general, he did not have a systematic psychological education. The first lecture course, which he gave at Harvard in 1875-1876, was called: "On the relationship between physiology and psychology." The philosophical basis of the concept of James was the pragmatism of C. Pierce: h ... true is what gives result". The main work is The Foundations of Psychology in 2 volumes (1890), where James criticized the structural psychology of Wundt and Titchener and formulated a new concept of consciousness and a new understanding of the goals of psychology. He believed that the goal of psychology is not to identify elements and structure, but to answer the question of how consciousness contributes to the growth of human adaptive capabilities. Consciousness, as James believed, is a vital function of highly organized beings living in a complex environment. Thus, both consciousness and all other mental processes are generated by evolution and their significance is to increase the adaptive functions of organisms, including humans. James believed that it is pointless to artificially decompose consciousness into elements and look for structure in them, the mental life of a person is integral, continuous, changeable, exists in the form flow consciousness, has an irreversible directional character and has the cumulative property. James's two most poetic metaphors are: “... consciousness represents a stream, dividing which is as pointless as cutting with scissors drive", "... consciousness is like the flight of a bird." Usually in psychology, only “stops in flight” are noted (Yaroshevsky M. G., 1985). Such an understanding of consciousness as a directly current subjective experience brings James closer to existential philosophers and psychologists. Naturally, with this approach, the most acceptable method of psychology can only be introspection, the experiment can be used only in the study of sensitivity thresholds, processes of perception and memory. Interest in the subjective led James to attempt to analyze the structure of personality. He proposed four "forms of I": material I (body, clothes, property of the subject); social I (everything that relates to claims to prestige, friendship, to the need for a positive assessment from others); spiritual Self (processes of consciousness, mental abilities); pure I, or personal identity, which is based on organic (visceral and muscular) sensations. The ideas regarding the social and pure I have received the greatest recognition in psychology. social groups, he has several social I. Personal self-esteem is a kind of summary result of a person's social experience. According to James, self-esteem (self-esteem, self-esteem, satisfaction with life) can be represented as a fraction, the numerator of which is success, and the denominator is the claims of the individual. Therefore, the level of self-esteem can be increased either by increasing success (the numerator of the fraction) or by lowering the claims (the denominator). James preferred the second way, believing that “any expansion of our Self is an extra burden and an extra claim” (Yaroshevsky M. G., 1976). James' ideas about identity influenced E. Erickson's concept of ego-ideality. B last years of his life, James turned to studies of the religious experience of a person - "The variety of religious experience" (1902) and the philosophical justification of pragmatism - "Pragmatism" (1907) (Yaroshevsky M. G., 1976).
Further development of functionalism is associated with the work of the Chicago School of John Dewey (1859-1952), James Engel (1869-1949) and Columbia School scholar Robert Woodworth (1873-1954).
1. Structuralism, functionalism. introspective psychology.
2. Behaviorism.
3. Psychoanalytic approach.
4. Gestalt psychology
5. Cognitive psychology
6. Humanistic psychology.
7. Active approach.
Structuralism, functionalism. introspective psychology.
Crisis of introspective psychology of consciousness. The more successful the experimental work in psychology was, the wider the field of phenomena studied by it became, the more rapidly the dissatisfaction with the versions that unique the subject of this science is consciousness, and the method is introspection. This was exacerbated by the advances of the new biology. She changed the view of all vital functions, including mental ones. Perception and memory, skills and thinking, attitudes and feelings are now interpreted as a kind of "tools" that work to solve the problems that the body faces in life situations.
The view of consciousness as a self-contained inner world collapsed. The influence of Darwinian biology was also reflected in the fact that mental processes began to be studied from the point of view of development.
At the dawn of psychology, the main source of information about these processes was the adult individual, who was able in the laboratory, following the experimenter's instructions, to focus his "inner eye" on the facts of "direct experience." But the expansion of the zone of cognition, stimulated by the idea of development, introduced special objects into psychology. It was impossible to apply the method of introspective analysis to them. These were facts of behavior of animals, children, mentally ill.
New objects required new objective methods. Only they could reveal those levels of development of the psyche that preceded the processes studied in laboratories. Henceforth it was no longer possible to attribute these processes to the category of primary facts of consciousness. Behind them branched a great tree of successive psychic forms. Scientific information about them allowed psychologists to move from the university laboratory to Kindergarten, school, psychiatric clinic.
Practice real research work shook the view of psychology as a science of consciousness to its foundations. A new understanding of its subject was maturing. It was refracted in different ways in theoretical views and systems.
In any field of knowledge there are competing concepts and schools. This situation is normal for the growth of science. However, with all the disagreements, these directions are held together by common views on the subject under study. In psychology, at the beginning of the 20th century, the divergence and clash of positions was determined by the fact that each of the schools defended its own subject that was different from the others. Psychologists, according to one of them, felt "in the position of Priam on the ruins of Troy." Meanwhile, the apparent disintegration was followed by processes of a more in-depth assimilation of real mental life than in previous times, various parties which are reflected in new theoretical constructs. Revolutionary shifts along the entire front of psychological research are associated with their development.
Functionalism. At the beginning of the 20th century, the former image of the subject of psychology, as it developed during the period of its self-assertion in the family of other sciences, became very dim. Although most psychologists still believed that they were studying consciousness and its phenomena, these phenomena were increasingly correlated with the vital activity of the organism, with its motor activity. Only a very few continued, following Wundt, to believe that they were called upon to search for the building material of direct experience and its structures.
This approach, called structuralism, resisted functionalism. This direction, rejecting the analysis of internal experience and its structures, considered the main business of psychology to clarify how these structures work when they solve problems related to the actual needs of people. Thus, the subject area of psychology expanded, covering mental functions (rather than elements) as internal operations that are performed not by an incorporeal subject, but by an organism in order to satisfy its need for adaptation to the environment.
At the origins of functionalism in the United States was William James (1842-1910 ). He is also known as leader of the philosophy of pragmatism(from the Greek "pragma" - action), which evaluates ideas and theories based on how they work in practice, benefiting the individual.
In his Fundamentals of Psychology (1890), James wrote that the inner experience of a person is not a "chain of elements", but a "stream of consciousness". It is distinguished by personal (in the sense of expressing the interests of the individual) selectivity (the ability to constantly make a choice).
Discussing the problem of emotions, James (simultaneously with the Danish physician Karl Lange) proposed a paradoxical, controversial concept, according to which are primary changes in the muscular and vascular systems of the body (i.e. changes in vegetative functions), secondary - caused by them emotional states . “We are sad because we cry, we are enraged because we hit another.”
Although James did not create either an integral system or a school, his views on the auxiliary role of consciousness in the interaction of the organism with the environment, calling for practical decisions and actions, have firmly entered the ideological fabric of American psychology. Until recently, according to James's brilliantly written book at the end of the 19th century, students studied in American colleges.
Behaviorism.
Founder of behaviorism J. Watson (1913) saw the task of psychology in the study of the behavior of a living being, adapting to its environment. Moreover, in the first place in the conduct of research in this area is the solution of practical problems caused by social and economic development. Therefore, in just one decade, behaviorism has spread throughout the world and has become one of the most influential areas of psychological science.
The emergence and spread of behaviorism was marked by the fact that completely new facts were introduced into psychology - the facts of behavior, which differ from the facts of consciousness in introspective psychology.
In psychology, behavior is understood as the external manifestations of mental
human activity. And in this regard, behavior is opposed to consciousness as a set of internal, subjectively experienced processes, and thus the facts of behavior in behaviorism and the facts of consciousness in introspective psychology are separated according to the method of their detection. Some are revealed by external observation, and others - by self-observation.
In fairness, it should be noted that in addition to the practical orientation due to rapid economic growth, the rapid development of behaviorism was determined by other reasons, the first of which can be called common sense. Watson believed that the most important thing in a person for the people around him is the actions and behavior of this person. And he was right, because ultimately our experiences, the features of our consciousness and thinking, that is, our mental individuality, as an external manifestation is reflected in our actions and behavior. But what we cannot agree with Watson is that, while arguing for the need to study behavior, he denied the need to study consciousness. Thus, Watson separated the mental and its external manifestation - behavior.
The second reason lies in the fact that, according to Watson, psychology should become a natural science discipline and introduce an objective scientific method. The desire to make psychology an objective and natural science discipline led to the rapid development of an experiment based on principles different from introspective methodology, which brought practical results in the form of economic interest in the development of psychological science.
As you know, the main idea of behaviorism was based on the assertion of the significance of behavior and the complete denial of the existence of consciousness and the need to study it. Watson wrote: "The behaviorist ... finds no evidence for the existence of the stream of consciousness, so convincingly described by James, he considers proven only the presence of an ever-expanding stream of behavior." From Watson's point of view, behavior is a system of reactions. Reaction is another new concept that was introduced into psychology in connection with the development of behaviorism. Since Watson sought to make psychology a natural science, it was necessary to explain the causes of human behavior from a natural scientific position.
Thus, all human actions, according to Watson, are complex chains, or complexes, of reactions. It should be emphasized that at first glance, Watson's conclusions seem to be correct and not questionable. A certain external influence causes a certain unconditioned (innate) response or a complex of unconditioned (innate) reactions in a person, but this is only at first glance. In life, we encounter phenomena that cannot be explained from this point of view. For example, how to explain a bear riding a bicycle in a circus? No unconditioned or conditioned stimulus can cause such a reaction or a set of reactions, since cycling cannot be classified as unconditioned.
(innate) reactions. Unconditional reactions to light can be blinking, to sound - startle, to food irritant - salivation. But no combination of these unconditioned responses will cause a bear to ride a bicycle.
No less significant for the behaviorists was the conduct of experiments, with the help of which they sought to prove the correctness of their theoretical conclusions. In this regard, Watson's experiments to study the causes of fear became widely known. He was trying to figure out what stimuli triggered a fear response in a child. For example, Watson observed the reaction of a child upon contact with a mouse and a rabbit. The mouse did not cause a reaction of fear, and in relation to the rabbit, the child showed curiosity, he strove to play with him, to take him in his arms. In the end, it was found that if you hit an iron bar with a hammer very close to a child, then he sobs sharply, and then bursts into a scream. So, it has been established that a sharp blow with a hammer causes a reaction of fear in a child. Then the experiment continues. The experimenter now strikes the iron bar as the child picks up the rabbit. Che-
For some time the child comes into a state of anxiety only at the appearance of a rabbit. According to Watson, a conditioned fear response has emerged. In conclusion, J. Watson shows how a child can be cured of this fear. He puts a hungry child at the table, who is already very afraid of the rabbit, and gives him food. As soon as the child touches the food, a rabbit is shown to him, but only from afar, through an open door from another room, the child continues to eat. The next time the rabbit is shown, also during the meal, a little closer. A few days later, the child is already eating with a rabbit on her lap.
However, the extreme limitations of the scheme were soon discovered.
"S-R" to explain people's behavior. One of the representatives of late behaviorism, E. Tolman, introduced a significant amendment into this scheme. He proposed to place between S and R the middle link, or "intermediate variables" - V, as a result, the scheme took the form: "S-V-R". By "intermediate variables" E. Tolman meant internal processes that mediate the action of the stimulus. These included such formations as "goals", "intentions", "hypotheses", "cognitive maps" (images of situations). And although the intermediate variables were functional equivalents of consciousness, they were deduced as "constructs" that should be judged solely on the characteristics of behavior, and thus the existence of consciousness was still ignored.
Another significant step in the development of behaviorism was the study of a special type of conditioned reactions, which were called instrumental, or operant. The phenomenon of instrumental or operant conditioning is that if you reinforce any action of the individual, then it is fixed and reproduced with greater ease. For example, if a certain action is constantly reinforced, i.e., encouraged or rewarded with a piece of sugar, sausage, meat, etc., then very soon the animal will perform this action at the mere sight of a rewarding stimulus.
According to behaviorist theory, classical (i.e., Pavlovian) and operant conditioning are a universal learning mechanism common to both animals and humans. At the same time, the learning process was presented as completely automatic, not requiring the manifestation of human activity. It is enough to use only one reinforcement in order to “fix” successful reactions in the nervous system, regardless of the will or desires of the person himself. From this, behaviorists concluded that with the help of incentives and reinforcement, one can literally “sculpt” any human behavior, “manipulate” it, that human behavior is rigidly “determined” and depends on external circumstances and one’s own past experience.
As we can see, in this case, too, the existence of consciousness is ignored, i.e., the existence of the inner mental world of a person is ignored, which in itself, from our point of view, is devoid of common sense. Over time, this became clear to representatives of the behavioral direction, and from the end of the 60s. even in the birthplace of behaviorism, in America, there is a gradual return to the study of consciousness - higher form mental reflection of objective reality.
Nevertheless, the merits of behaviorism in the development of psychology are very significant. First, he introduced the spirit of materialism into psychology, thanks to which this science began to develop along the path of the natural sciences. Secondly, he introduced an objective method based on the registration and analysis of external observations.
Psychoanalytic approach
Along with behaviorism and at the same time, psychoanalysis undermined the psychology of consciousness to its foundations. He exposed behind the cover of consciousness powerful layers of psychic forces, processes and mechanisms that are not realized by the subject. The opinion that the realm of the psychic extends beyond the limits of those phenomena experienced by the subject, about which he is able to give an account, was expressed even before psychology acquired the status of an experimental science.
Psychoanalysis turned the area of the unconscious into the subject of science. This is how he called his doctrine Austrian physician Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). Like many other classics of modern psychology, for many years he studied the central nervous system, acquiring a solid reputation as a specialist in this field. Having become a doctor and engaged in the treatment of patients with mental disorders, at first he tried to explain their symptoms by the dynamics of nervous processes (using, in particular, Sechenov's concept of inhibition). However, the more he delved into this area, the more he felt dissatisfaction. Neither in neurophysiology, nor in the psychology of consciousness that prevailed at that time, he saw the means to explain the causes of pathological changes in the psyche of his patients. And not knowing the reasons, one had to act blindly, because only by eliminating them, one could hope for a therapeutic effect.
In search of a way out, he turned from the analysis of consciousness to analysis of the hidden, deep layers of the mental activity of the individual. Before Freud, they were not the subject of psychology, after him they became an integral part of it.
The first impetus to their study was given by the application hypnosis. Having suggested an action to a hypnotized person so that he performs it after waking up, one can observe how, although he performs it being fully conscious, he does not know the true reason and begins to invent motives for him to justify his act. The true reasons are hidden from consciousness, but it is they that govern behavior. It was Freud and his followers who began to analyze these forces. They created one of the most powerful and influential trends in modern science about a human. Using various methods of interpreting mental manifestations (free associative flow of thoughts in patients, images of their dreams, memory errors, reservations, the patient transferring his feelings to the doctor, etc.), they developed a complex and branched network of concepts, using which they caught the deep "volcanic" processes hidden behind conscious phenomena in the "mirror" of self-observation.
Chief among these processes was recognized as having a sexual nature of the energy of attraction. It was called the word "libido". Since childhood in conditions family life it determines the motivational resource of the individual. Experiencing various transformations, it is suppressed, forced out and, nevertheless, breaks through the “censorship” of consciousness along detours, discharging into various symptoms, including pathological ones (disorders of movement, perception, memory, etc.).
This view led to a revision of the previous interpretation of consciousness. Its active role in behavior was not rejected, but it seemed to be essentially different from that in traditional psychology. His attitude to the unconscious psyche was thought to be inescapably conflicting. At the same time, only through awareness of the causes of repressed desires and hidden complexes is it possible (with the help of psychoanalysis techniques) to get rid of the emotional trauma that they inflicted on the individual.
Having discovered the objective psychodynamics and psychoenergetics of the motives of a person's behavior, hidden "behind the scenes" of his consciousness, Freud transformed the previous understanding of the subject of psychology. The psychotherapeutic work done by him and many of his followers revealed the most important role of motivational factors as objective regulators of behavior and, therefore, independent of what the “voice of self-consciousness” whispers.
Freud was surrounded by many students. The most original of them, who created their own directions, were Carl Jung (1875-1961) and Alfred Adler (1870-1937).
The first called his psychology analytical, the second - individual. Jung's first innovation was the concept of "collective unconscious". If, according to Freud, phenomena repressed from consciousness can enter the unconscious psyche of an individual, then Jung considered it saturated with forms that can never be individually acquired, but are the gift of distant ancestors. Analysis allows us to determine the structure of this gift, formed by several archetypes.
Being hidden from the consciousness of the organizers personal experience, archetypes are found in dreams, fantasies, hallucinations, as well as cultural creations. Jung's division of human types into extroverted (outward-facing, carried away by social activity) and introverted (inward-facing, focused on one's own drives, to which Jung, following Freud, gave the name "libido", but considered it inappropriate to identify with the sexual instinct), gained great popularity.
Adler, modifying the original doctrine of psychoanalysis, he singled out as a factor in the development of the personality a feeling of inferiority, generated, in particular, by bodily defects. As a reaction to this feeling, a desire arises for its compensation and overcompensation in order to achieve superiority over others. The source of neuroses is hidden in the "inferiority complex".
The psychoanalytic movement has spread widely in various countries. There were new options for explaining and treating neuroses by the dynamics of unconscious drives, complexes, and mental trauma. Freud's own ideas about the structure and dynamics of personality also changed. Her organization acted as a model, the components of which are: It (blind irrational drives), I (ego) and Super-I (the level of moral norms and prohibitions that arise due to the fact that in the very first years of life the child identifies himself with his parents) .
Gestaltism.
With all the transformations that psychology has experienced, the concept of consciousness has largely retained its former features. Changed views on his attitude to behavior, unconscious mental phenomena, social influences. But new ideas about how this consciousness itself is organized were first formed with the appearance on the scientific scene of a school whose creed expressed the concept of gestalt (dynamic form, structure). In contrast to the interpretation of consciousness as “a structure made of bricks (sensations) and cement (associations),” the priority of an integral structure was affirmed, from common organization on which its individual components depend. According to systematic approach, any functioning system acquires properties that are not inherent in its components, the so-called system or emergent properties, which disappear when the system is decomposed into elements. From the standpoint of a new philosophical doctrine, called emergent materialism(Margolis, 1986), consciousness is considered as an emergent property of brain processes, which is in a complex relationship with these processes.
Arising as an emergent property of brain systems, starting from some (still unknown) level of their consolidation, consciousness acquires a unique ability to perform the function of top-down control over neural processes more than low level, subordinating their work to the tasks of mental activity and behavior.
In itself, the idea that the whole is not reducible to its constituent parts was very ancient. It could also be encountered in the work of some experimental psychologists. It was pointed out, in particular, that the same melody, which is played in a different key, is perceived as the same, despite the fact that the sensations in this case are completely different. Therefore, its sound image is a special integrity. Important facts concerning the integrity of perception, its irreducibility to sensations, flowed from various laboratories.
The Danish psychologist E. Rubin studied the interesting phenomenon of "figure and ground". The figure of the object is perceived as a closed whole, and the background extends behind. With the so-called "dual images" in the same drawing, either a vase or two profiles are distinguished. These and many similar facts spoke about the integrity of perception.
The idea that there is a general pattern at work here that requires a new style of psychological thinking united a group of young scientists. It included M. Wertheimer (1880-1943), W. Koehler (1887-1967) and K. Koffka (1886-1941), who became leaders of the direction called gestalt psychology. It criticized not only the old introspective psychology, which was engaged in the search for the initial elements of consciousness, but also the young behaviorism. Criticism of the latter is of particular interest.
In experiments on animals, Gestaltists showed that, ignoring mental images - Gestalts, it is impossible to explain their motor behavior. This was mentioned, for example, by the phenomenon of "transposition". Chickens developed differentiation of two shades of gray. At first, they learned to peck at the grains scattered on the gray square, distinguishing it from the black one next to it. In the control experiment, the square that initially served as a positive stimulus turned out to be even brighter next to the square. The hens chose this last one, and not the one on which they were accustomed to peck, therefore, they reacted not to the stimulus, but to the ratio of stimuli (to “lighter”).
The behavioral formula of "trial and error" was also criticized by the Gestaltists. In contrast, experiments on great apes revealed that they are able to find a way out of problem situation not by random trials, but by instantly grasping the relationship between things. This perception of relationships has been called "insight"(discretion, insight). It arises due to the construction of a new gestalt, which is not the result of learning and cannot be derived from previous experience.
In particular, W. Köhler's classic work "The Study of Intelligence in Anthropoids" aroused wide interest. One of his experimental chimpanzees (Kohler called him "Aristotle among the apes") coped with the task of getting the bait (banana) by instantly grasping the relationship between scattered objects (boxes, sticks), operating with which he reached the goal. He had something similar to the "enlightenment", called by one psychologist "aha-experience" (similar to Archimedes' exclamation "eureka!" - "found!").
Studying human thinking, Gestalt psychologists proved that mental operations in solving creative problems are subject to special principles of Gestalt organization (“grouping”, “centering”, etc.), and not to the rules of formal logic.
So, consciousness was presented in Gestalt theory as an integrity, created by the dynamics of cognitive (cognitive) structures, which are transformed according to psychological laws.
K. Levin (1890-1947) developed a theory close to Gestaltism, but in relation to the motives of behavior, and not to mental images (sensual and mental).
He called it "field theory". The concept of "field" was borrowed by him, like other Gestaltists, from physics and used as an analogue of Gestalt. Personality was portrayed as a "system of stresses". It moves in the environment (living space), some areas of which attract it, others repel it. Following this model, Levin, together with his students, conducted many experiments to study dynamics of motives. One of them was performed by B.V., who came with her husband from Russia. Zeigarnik. The subjects were given a series of tasks. They completed some tasks, while others were interrupted under various pretexts. Then the subjects were asked to remember what they did during the experiments. It turned out that the memory for an interrupted action is much better than for a completed one. This phenomenon, called the "Zeigarnik effect", said that the energy of the motive created by the task, without exhausting itself (due to the fact that it was interrupted), was preserved and passed into the memory of it. Another direction has been study of the level of claims. This concept denoted the degree of difficulty of the goal towards which the subject aspires. He was presented with a scale of tasks of varying degrees of difficulty. After he chose and completed (or did not complete) one of them, he was asked: the task of what degree of difficulty he would choose next. This choice, after prior success (or failure), fixed the level of aspiration. Behind the chosen level, there were many life problems that a person faces every day - success or failure experienced by her, hopes, expectations, conflicts, claims, etc.
Cognitive psychology.
In the middle of the 20th century, special machines appeared - computers. In the entire previous history of mankind, machines were devices that process either material (substance) or energy. Computers, on the other hand, are carriers and converters of information, in other words, signals that transmit messages about something.
The processes of transmission of information that governs the behavior of living systems have been taking place in various forms since the appearance of these systems on Earth. Genetic information that determines the nature of heredity passes from one organism to another. Animals communicate with the environment and among themselves through the first signal system (according to I.P. Pavlov). With the advent of man in the bowels of the culture created by society, language and other sign systems arise and develop. Scientific and technological progress has led to the invention of information machines. Then science was formed (its "father" - N. Wiener), which began to consider all forms of signal regulation from a single point of view as a means of communication and control in any systems - technical, organic, psychological, social. She was named cybernetics(from the Greek "cybernetics" - the art of management). She developed special methods, which made it possible to create for computers many programs for the perception, memorization and processing of information, as well as its exchange. This led to a real revolution in social production, both material and spiritual.
The emergence of information machines capable of performing operations with great speed and accuracy, which were considered the unique advantage of the human brain, had a significant impact on psychology as well. Discussions arose as to whether the work of a computer is not a semblance of the work of the human brain, and thus its mental organization. After all, information processed by a computer can be considered as knowledge. And in the imprinting, storage and transformation of knowledge is the most important hypostasis of mental activity. The image of the computer ("computer metaphor") has changed the scientific vision of this activity. As a result, fundamental changes took place in American psychology, where behaviorism dominated for decades.
Behaviorism, as noted, claimed strict objectivity in its theories and methods. It was believed that psychology could be exact science like physics, as long as it is limited to the objectively observable external behavior of the organism. Any appeal to the fact that, speaking the language of I.M. Sechenov, “the deceptive voice of self-consciousness whispers” (introspection), any testimony of the subject about his experiences. Only those that can be measured in centimeters, grams and seconds were recognized as facts of science.
A subject worthy of the name of scientific psychology was reduced to the "stimulus-response" relationship. At the same time, neobehaviorism has developed the notion that other variables operate in between these two main variables. Tolman called them "intermediates". One of the intermediate variables was called a "cognitive map", creating and using which the body orients itself in a problem situation. This undermined the main postulate of behaviorism. A crushing blow to it was dealt by a new direction that arose in the middle of the 20th century, under the impression of the computer revolution, called cognitive psychology (from lat. "cognitio" - knowledge, cognition). At the forefront cognitive psychology put the study of the dependence of the subject's behavior on internal, cognitive (informational) issues and structures (schemes; "scenarios"), through the prism of which he perceives his living space and acts in it, something that classical behaviorism denied to a person (perception, memorization, internal transformation of information), turned out to be a matter objectively, regardless of the person operating the computer. In light of this, the idea that invisible cognitive (cognitive) processes are inaccessible to objective, strictly scientific research collapsed.
Various theories of the organization and transformation of knowledge are being developed - from instantly perceived and stored sensory images to a complex multi-level semantic (semantic) structure of human consciousness (W. Neisser).
Similar information.
