Developed by Vygotsky in the 20-30s. XX century - proposes to consider the social environment not as one of the factors, but as main source personality development.

The development of thinking and other mental functions occurs through the child's mastery of a system of signs-symbols, such as language, writing, counting system.

The higher mental function goes through two stages in its development. Initially, it exists as a form of interaction between people, and only later - as a completely internal process. He believes that learning should "lead" development. It is cooperation with other people that is the main source of development of the child's personality, and the most important feature of consciousness is dialogue (Consciousness develops through dialogue).

Another aspect of L.S. Vygotsky's idea of ​​development is not as an evenly gradual, but as a staged, stepwise process, where periods of even accumulation of new opportunities are replaced by stages of crisis. A crisis, for Vygotsky, is a turbulent stage in the demolition (or rethinking) of old baggage and the formation of a new way of life. Crises are inevitable.

Psychological doctrines (behaviorism, gestaltism, psychoanalysis, humanistic psychology, cognitivism).

Description of the gestalt approach

The main advantage is a holistic approach to a person, which takes into account his mental, physical, spiritual and social aspects. Gestalt therapy instead of focusing on the question "Why is this happening to a person?" replaces it with the following: “What is the person feeling now and how can this be changed?”. Therapists working in this direction try to focus people's attention on the awareness of the processes that are happening to them "here and now".

The Gestalt approach is based on such principles and concepts as integrity, responsibility, the emergence and destruction of structures, incomplete forms, contact, awareness, "here and now"

A holistic gestalt consists of a personality and the space surrounding it, while mutually influencing each other.

Using the principle of the emergence and destruction of gestalt structures, one can easily explain the behavior of a person. Each person arranges his life depending on his own needs, to which he gives priority. His actions are aimed at meeting needs and achieving existing goals. After the desired is achieved (the need is satisfied), the gestalt is completed and destroyed.

However, not every gestalt reaches its completion (and further - destruction). This phenomenon is called the incomplete gestalt. For example, a person, despite the fact that he does not like to be exploited, constantly finds himself in precisely such situations, and someone who does not have a personal life comes into contact with people he does not need again and again. That is, a person who has an incomplete "structure", on a subconscious level, constantly strives to create a negative incomplete situation only in order to resolve it, and finally close this issue. The Gestalt therapist artificially creates a similar situation for his client and helps to find a way out of it.

Another basic concept of Gestalt therapy is awareness. Gestalt psychology associates awareness with being in the so-called "here and now" state. It is characterized by the fact that a person performs all actions guided by consciousness - responsibility is born. The level of responsibility for one's life directly depends on the level of clarity of the person's awareness of the surrounding reality. It is human nature to always shift the responsibility for one's failures and mistakes onto others or even higher powers, but everyone who manages to take responsibility for himself makes a big leap on the path of individual development.

The principle of "here and now" According to him, everything really important happens at the moment.

Types of Gestalt Techniques and Contracting All Gestalt therapy techniques are conditionally divided into "projective" and "dialogue". The former are used to work with dreams, images, imaginary dialogues, etc.

The second is painstaking work that is carried out by the therapist at the border of contact with the client.

Description of behaviorism (Pavlov)

Behaviorism is the science of the behavioral responses of humans and animals in response to environmental influences. The most important category of this flow is the stimulus.

A stimulus is any effect of the environment on an organism or life situation. Reaction - the actions of a person taken in order to avoid or adapt to a particular stimulus.

The connection between stimulus and response is strengthened if there is reinforcement between them. It can be positive (praise, material reward, getting a result), then the person remembers the strategy for achieving the goal and then repeats it in practice. Or it can be negative (criticism, pain, failure, punishment), then such a strategy of behavior is rejected and a new, more effective one is sought. You can influence his behavior by changing incentives and reinforcements.

Description of psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis is a methodology based on the study, identification, analysis of the anxieties of the individual repressed from consciousness, hidden or suppressed, which obviously traumatized his psyche - Freud.

Human behavior is primarily regulated by his consciousness. Freud found out that behind the signboard of consciousness there is a certain layer of it, which is unconscious of the individual, but induces him to many lusts and inclinations. In many cases, it was they who became the source of nervous and mental illnesses.
Three Key Components , named: "It", "I", "Super-I". The object of gravity of each individual is "It", and all the processes occurring in it are completely unconscious. "It" is the germ of "I", which is molded from it under the influence of the environment surrounding the individual. At the same time, the “I” is a very difficult combination, playing the role of psychological protection.

An important point in the application of this technique is the joint purposeful activity of the psychologist and the client in the direction of combating the latter's feelings of psychological discomfort.
The technique is based on the patient voicing the thoughts that come into his head, even if these thoughts border on complete absurdity and obscenity. It is based on the phenomenon of transfer, which consists in the unconscious transfer of the qualities of the patient's parents to the therapist. That is, in relation to the psychologist, the feelings that the client experienced at an early age to the subjects who were in his immediate environment are transferred, the projection of early childhood desires onto the substitute person is performed. The course of understanding the existing cause-and-effect relationships, the fruitful transformation of the accumulated personal views and principles with the rejection of the old and the formation of new behavioral norms, is usually accompanied by significant internal opposition from the patient. Resistance is an actual phenomenon that accompanies any psychotherapeutic intervention, regardless of its form. The essence of such a confrontation is that there is a strong desire for unwillingness to touch the unconscious internal conflict with the parallel emergence of significant obstacles to identifying the real causes of personal problems.

Description of the humanistic approach.

A. Maslow. From birth, seven classes of needs consistently appear in a person and accompany his growing up:

1) physiological needs such as hunger, thirst, sexual desire, etc.;

2) security needs - the need to feel protected, to get rid of fear and failure, from aggressiveness;

3) the need for belonging and love - the need to belong to a community, to be close to people, to be recognized and accepted by them;

4) the need for respect - the need to achieve success, approval, recognition, authority;

5) cognitive needs - the need to know, be able, understand, explore;

6) aesthetic needs - the need for harmony, symmetry, order, beauty;

7) the needs of self-actualization - the need to realize one's goals, abilities, development of one's own personality.

The needs of higher levels can only be satisfied if the needs of lower levels are first satisfied. Therefore, only a small number of people (about 1%) achieve self-actualization.

The therapeutic factors in the work of a humanistic psychologist and psychotherapist are, first of all, unconditional acceptance of the client, support, empathy, attention to inner experiences, stimulation of choice and decision-making, authenticity.

Description of cognitivism

The cognitive direction emphasizes the influence of intellectual or thought processes on human behavior. George Kelly believed that people perceive their world through clear systems or models called constructs.

A personality construct is an idea or thought that a person uses to make sense of or interpret, explain or predict their experience. All constructs have two opposite poles: the similarity pole reflects how two objects are similar, and the contrast pole shows how these objects are opposite to the third element. Examples of personality constructs can be “smart-stupid”, “good-bad”, “male-female”, "friendly-hostile", etc.

If a construct helps predict events accurately, a person is likely to keep it. Conversely, if the prediction fails, the construct may be excluded. Two people, even if they are identical twins or have similar views, refer to an event and interpret it differently. A person tries to explain reality in order to learn to anticipate events that affect his life.

if a person changes his constructs, he will change his behavior and his life. A structural system changes if it cannot correctly predict the sequence of events.

If two people share their views of the world, are similar in the interpretation of personal experience, then they are likely to behave similarly. Kelly explained the emergence of a number of emotional states through the concept of "constructs", for example, a state of anxiety, uncertainty, helplessness arises in a person if he realizes that his inherent constructs are not applicable to predict the events that he encounters. Kelly used the fixed role therapy method, which consists of several steps:

1. the patient writes a self-characteristic in the third person (describes his character as if from the outside), on the basis of which the constructs that he uses to interpret himself and his relationships with other people are revealed;

2. The psychotherapist develops a model, a constructive system that is useful to the patient and describes it as a "fixed role of a certain person";

3. The patient is asked to play this role for a certain time, trying to think, behave as this "fixed role" requires, so that he can discover new facets of his personality, make adjustments to his constructs, change his real behavior.

*6. Activity approach in psychology. Activity structure. (Leontiev, Rubenstein)

The principle of the unity of consciousness and activity captures the fact that consciousness (or, more broadly, mental) does not control activity from the outside, but forms an organic unity with it, being both a prerequisite (motives, goals) and a result (images, states, skills, etc.). e) activities. The psyche and consciousness are formed in activity, in activity they manifest themselves.

The principle of the unity of consciousness and activity made it possible to single out activity as:

an independent subject of psychological research (learning activity, we discover the mental world of a person);

as an explanatory principle.

The activity is described as consisting of three structural units:

Activity (determined by motive) - Action (determined by purpose) - Operation (determined by the conditions of its course)

For example, the educational activity carried out by a student can be guided by the motive of preparation for professional work or the motive of joining the intellectual elite, or the motive of communication with peers, or the motive of self-improvement, etc. in reality, each activity usually corresponds to several motives (not or/or, but and/and), therefore, one speaks of a multi-motivated activity.

At the level of action within the educational activity, the student can prepare for the exam, i.e. to realize a specific conscious goal - to get a high mark.

The goal is an image of the required future, to achieve which it is required to carry out an action, which in turn includes a number of operations.

An activity within an exam preparation activity could be reading a textbook, reviewing notes, and so on.

Thing: psyche transformed by culture

Representatives: E. Durkheim, Lucien Levy-Bruhl, Pierre Janet, Vygotsky, Lev Semenovich

For the first time, the question of sociality as a system-forming factor of the psyche was raised by the French sociological school. Its founder E. Durkheim (1858-1917), using the term "social fact" or "collective representation", illustrated such concepts as "marriage", "childhood", "suicide". Social facts are different from their individual embodiments (there is no "family" at all, but there is an infinite number of specific families) and have an ideal character that affects all members of society.

Lucien Levy-Bruhl, using ethnographic material, developed the thesis about a special type of "primitive" thinking, which is different from the thinking of a civilized person.

Pierre Janet further deepened the principle of social determination, suggesting that external relations between people gradually turn into features of the structure of the individual psyche. So, he showed that the phenomenon of memory consists in the assignment of external actions of the execution of instructions and retelling.

The principle of the cultural-historical psyche was revealed most fully in the works of L.S. Vygotsky, who developed the doctrine of higher mental functions. L.S. Vygotsky suggested the existence of two lines of development of the psyche:

• natural,
• culturally mediated.

In accordance with these two lines of development, "lower" and "higher" mental functions are distinguished.

Examples of lower, or natural, mental functions are the involuntary or involuntary child. The child cannot control them: he pays attention to what is brightly unexpected; remembers what is accidentally remembered. Lower mental functions are a kind of rudiments from which higher mental functions grow in the process of education (in this example, voluntary attention and voluntary memory).

The transformation of lower mental functions into higher ones occurs through the mastery of special tools of the psyche - signs and is of a cultural nature. The role of sign systems in the formation and functioning of the human psyche is, of course, fundamental - it defines a qualitatively new stage and a qualitatively different form of existence of the psyche. Imagine that a savage who does not own an account has to memorize a herd of cows in a meadow. How will he cope with this task? He needs to create an accurate visual image of what he saw, and then try to resurrect it before his eyes. Most likely, he will fail, miss something. You just need to count the cows and then say: "I saw seven cows."

Many facts testify that the assimilation of sign systems by a child does not happen by itself. This is where the role of the adult comes into play. An adult, communicating with a child and teaching him, first "takes possession" of his psyche. For example, an adult shows him something, in his opinion, interesting, and the child, at the behest of an adult, pays attention to one or another object. Then the child begins to regulate his own mental functions with the help of the means that the adult used to apply to him. Also, as adults, we, tired, can say to ourselves: “Come on, look here!” and really “master” our elusive attention or activate the process of imagination. We create and analyze the rehearsals of a conversation that is important for us in advance, as if playing the acts of our thinking in the speech plan. Then there is the so-called rotation, or "interiorization" - the transformation of an external tool into an internal one. As a result, from immediate, natural, involuntary mental functions become mediated sign systems, social and arbitrary.

The cultural-historical approach in psychology continues to fruitfully develop even now, both in our country and abroad. This approach proved to be especially effective in solving the problems of pedagogy and defectology.

It is not news to anyone that research methods, techniques, scientific disputes have their own historical origins and explanations. But it is often worth looking for them not in the history of a given science, be it linguistics, psychology, philosophy of knowledge, or even physics or chemistry, but in general - as they would say before - spiritual history. Spiritual history can be likened not to a planar projection of the "pure" history of science, but to the three-dimensional space of the stage, in which the multi-figured "drama of ideas" (Einstein) unfolds.

The conflicts of their carriers are not reducible to clashes of theories or points of view: it is always also the interaction of individuals. And the personality is somehow determined by time and place: existing in historical time and space, it has the appropriate mentality - it shares not only specific ideas, but also the ways of thinking and feeling that dominate in its environment, understand the world and evaluate people. In this sense, it is customary to speak, for example, about the mentality of medieval chivalry or the mentality of a man of the Renaissance. But the specific ideas and representations that make up the content of mentality are not those ideas that are generated by individual consciousness, and not reflected spiritual constructions.

Rather, it is the life of such ideas and constructions in a certain social environment. Despite the fact that for the carriers of ideas themselves they remain unconscious. In order to enter into the mentality of wide circles - those whom historians, following the medieval intellectuals, call "simple" - these ideas must be simplified. And sometimes profanity. Otherwise, they are doomed to remain the intellectual property of a highly educated minority.

One way or another, the collective mentality includes a set of certain ideas in an unconscious or incompletely conscious form. A scientist can be ahead of his time precisely as a researcher, but whatever the depth of his personal reflection, in the core aspects of his personality, the scientist inevitably shares the mentality of his time. And new ideas, born on historically changing soil, to one degree or another feed on the already formed common mentality. This means that cultural innovation does not appear out of nowhere. They are always a response to the spiritual challenge of an era, and an era is a set of deeds and thoughts of many, and by no means only the elite. Therefore, the history of ideas, as studied by philosophy and sociology, does not coincide with the "social" history of ideas - i.e. the history of the reception of ideas in the mind. It is useful to think about how the history of the development of certain scientific theories and schools correlates with the general atmosphere of the life of society in certain historical periods. The key mediating link here is precisely the types of mentality that dominate in society - the recognition of this fact distinguishes serious intellectual history from various versions of the so often vilified "vulgar sociologism". There are periods when the state of science and the state of society develop into a very special configuration. This configuration is characterized by explicit or relatively hidden philosophical and social throwing; erosion of the usual structures of social and cultural life, including the structures of science itself. An important feature of this configuration is also that sharply contrasting cultural stereotypes coexist within a relatively narrow circle of "leaders", "generators of ideas", people whom we call "cult figures", "iconic characters". These contrasts, already in a reduced, vulgarized form, are transmitted "down", becoming the property of the "simple". Then there are cultural disputes and conflicts, the essence of which is vague for the next generation. Their analysis is instructive for understanding further ways of emergence and development of scientific trends and clashes of minds.

An amazing example of such a configuration of ideas and social demands is the scientific and intellectual life of Soviet Russia in the 1920s and 1930s. It was during these years that the flowering (and defeat) of the "formal method" in the science of literature, the flowering (and defeat) of attempts to create a historical psychology, the flowering - and again the defeat - of the Russian psychoanalytic school. The biographies of scientists of this period are striking inconsistencies: it seems that many people from relatively close academic circles, from practically the same cultural environment, lived in parallel worlds. I do not mean the social exclusion and poverty of some compared to the well-being of others. More productive is the analysis of not so catchy, but at the same time typical cases, revealing the types of mentalities of that era as an important factor in the history of science. Why is this especially important for the cognitive cycle sciences?

Perhaps, in sciences that are completely established, well-established, and it is possible without great loss to neglect the history of the formation of basic ideas and ideas. On the contrary, for sciences that are in a state of paradigm shift, experiencing serious intrascientific conflicts, it is extremely important to understand the genesis of ideas, methods, and assessments. And then much of what seems to us illogical or, conversely, taken for granted, will appear in a different light. In this perspective, we will consider some of the ideological and personal conflicts associated with the fate of L.S. Vygotsky and A.R. Luria, who considered himself a student of Vygotsky. For Soviet psychology, Vygotsky's name is still significant, although Vygotsky died in 1934. However, between 1936 and 1956 little was said about Vygotsky; he, unlike many, did not even try to "expose". It was simply not published and seemed not to be remembered. The situation changed dramatically during the heyday of structural linguistics and semiotics in the USSR, i.e. since the beginning of the 60s.

It was then that Vygotsky finally entered a number of major cultural figures. Let us note that in the short term this "sign set" includes completely different characters: Propp with a structural-functional analysis and "Morphology of a Fairy Tale"; Tynyanov and other "senior" formalists with their motto "How is it done?"; Bakhtin with his dialogue and carnivalization; the mystic Florensky - at first mainly with the "Iconostasis"; Eisenstein, in whom from now on one should see not so much a major film director as an original theoretician of the humanities, and Vygotsky with his completely Marxist-oriented historical psychology. Looking at this "carousel" from today, the generation of beginners in the humanities cannot understand where the juxtaposition of researchers with such different and often opposite positions came from.

We have to remind you that in the early 60s these were, first of all, "returned names" and carriers of a different mentality. Going into the nuances and specifics then was, as it were, "out of hand." But, indeed, in the 1960s and 1970s, the reception of the ideological richness of the 1920s and 1930s proceeded so hastily that much was assimilated, to use the terms of Levi-Strauss' well-known opposition, rather "raw" than "cooked." When the aforementioned persons (as, indeed, many others) finally became "cult figures", genuine involvement in their theories gradually began to be replaced, first by excessive citation of their works, and later by authoritarian, and even purely ritual references. Therefore, it is worth rethinking some of the details of the life and work of L.S. Vygotsky and A.R. Luria, especially since their biographies are more mythologized than understood.

proposes to consider the social environment not as one of the factors, but as the main source of personality development. In the development of the child, he notes, there are, as it were, two intertwined lines: the first follows the path of natural maturation; the second consists in mastering culture, ways of behaving and thinking.

According to Vygotsky's theory, the development of thinking and other mental functions occurs primarily not through their self-development, but through the use of "psychological tools" by the child, by mastering a system of signs-symbols, such as language, writing, counting system.

Later, this idea of ​​Vygotsky was developed by the Soviet historian and social psychologist B.F. Porshnev in his communicative-influential concept. The key point of Porshnev's concept is the assertion that the worldview built by a human personality in the process of his communication with the world and the people around him is mainly formed on the basis of suggestions. B substantiates the conclusion that the choice of trust in the suggested patterns of language and the concepts of culture (including religious dogmas) has been and remains the only justified behavior for a person.

The development of thinking, perception, memory and other mental functions occurs through the stage of external activity, where cultural means have a completely objective form and mental functions act quite externally, intrapsychically. Only as the process is worked out, the activity of mental functions is curtailed, internalized, rotated, passes from the external plane to the internal, becomes interpsychic.

In the process of their development and turning inward, mental functions acquire automation, awareness and arbitrariness. If there is a difficulty in thinking and other mental processes, exteriorization is always possible - bringing the mental function outside and clarifying its work in external, objective activity. An idea on the inner plane can always be worked out by actions on the outer plane.

As a rule, at this first stage of external activity, everything that the child does, he does together with adults. Exactly cooperation with other people is the main source of development of the child's personality. Hence, according to Vygotsky, the most important feature of consciousness is dialogicity.

L.S. Vygotsky introduces the concept zone of proximal development"- this is the space of actions that the child cannot yet perform on his own, but can carry out together with adults and thanks to them. According to Vygotsky, only that training is good, which forestalls development.

For Vygotsky, personality is a social concept, that which is brought into it by culture. Personality not innate, but arises as a result of cultural development" and " in this sense, the correlate of personality will be the ratio of primitive and higher reactions«.

Another aspect of L.S. Vygotsky - the idea of ​​development not as a uniform and gradual, but as a stage, stepwise process, where periods of even accumulation of new opportunities are replaced by stages of crisis. Crisis, for Vygotsky, is a stormy, sometimes dramatic stage in the breaking (or rethinking) of old baggage and the formation of a new way of life. Crises can be painful, but, according to Vygotsky, they are inevitable. On the other hand, a child's apparent trouble during a crisis is not at all a pattern, but only a consequence of the illiterate behavior of parents and other adults raising a child.

And one more important point, where L.S. Vygotsky turned out to be, it seems, the discoverer, this is the thesis about the activity of the child. What is this about? Usually, the child was considered as some object exposed to suggestions (suggestions), positive or negative reinforcements of his behavior. And even if in the works of B. Skinner operant conditioning seems to speak of the activity of someone whose behavior is reinforced in one way or another, Skinner never considered the child as someone who actively influences the adult, often controlling him to a greater extent than the adult controls the child. .

The cultural-historical approach studies personality as a product of the individual's assimilation of cultural values. The author of the approach L.S. Vygotsky had seen " the key to all psychology”, allowing for an objective analysis of the higher mental functions of the individual, in the meaning of the word. In his opinion, the word is the primary sign both in relation to practical action and in relation to thinking. He even repeated someone's aphorism: " Speech thinks for the person". Operating with these "cultural" signs-words, the individual builds his personality.

The process of internalization (humanization in a word) according to Vygotsky looked like this.

At first, a person was an inseparable part of the surrounding nature, which “polished”, in the author’s words, his “natural” (innate, not requiring conscious volitional efforts) properties, giving him the opportunity to simply survive, adapt to the environment. Then he himself began to influence nature through the tools of labor, developing in himself the highest mental functions ("cultural"), allowing him to carry out conscious actions (for example, consciously remember some situation, sensation, object), useful in terms of creating favorable conditions of its existence. As instruments of influence, this approach considered not those that have a material basis (stone, stick, ax, etc.), but the so-called psychological signs. A stick stuck in the ground and indicating the direction of movement could serve as a sign. These could be notches on trees or stones folded in a certain way, reminiscent of something important, etc.